When I told the students that President Obama had not, in fact, been born in Kenya, they looked at me pityingly. “Of course he was!” they chimed in the kind of chorus that cliques of 14-year-old girls tend to speak in the world over. The girl to my right offered evidence: “Have you not see him eating some fish?”
We were sitting on a narrow bench in a corrugated metal schoolhouse in Kibera, East Africa’s largest slum, where my friend Megan’s NGO, ZanaAfrica, runs an after-school program. The fish reference was a politically correct way of pointing out that Obama’s father was Luo, the tribe that hails from the region around Lake Victoria and, not coincidentally, is the dominant ethnic group in Kibera.
Talk of tribe has always required euphemism in Kenya, but does especially since the ethnic violence that followed the 2007 election. Raila Odinga, the Luo opposition leader whose narrow and disputed defeat by President Mwai Kibaki provided the spark for the bloodshed, represented Kibera as part of his district in parliament.
In one illustration of just how deep these scars run, Nick Kristoff reported in 2008 that some Kikuyu, the largest and most prosperous tribe that counts President Kibaki among its members, were rooting for Hillary Clinton over Obama for the American presidency, preferring to see no Kenyan at all as the world’s most powerful person than one from the wrong tribe.
And each euphemism comes with its attendant stereotype. Michela Wrong does not mention President Obama at all in her excellent “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower” (2009), but her rundown of each tribe’s profile in the eyes of the others hits a familiar mark.
“A Luo,” she writes, “is all show and no substance. His date will be wined and dined, but she’ll pick up the tab at the end of the evening. Born with huge egos, the flashiest of dress sense and the gift of the gab, the Luo excel in academia and the media.”
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As it happened, two of the three girls on my bench were Luo, and they were, indeed, eager students. The third, a Muslim, was an almond-eyed beauty with a scar across her mouth who informed me that her special talent was golf. Since the only way to get to the school from the main road was a ten-minute hike over an open sewer, I assumed she is joking (the same way she and her classmates must have assumed I was joking when I insisted the president of the United States was born in Hawaii). But she later explains that someone was sponsoring her lessons at a nearby club, which seemed plausible. Kibera is not that far of a drive from Nairobi’s emerald suburbs. And the whole place, despite, or perhaps because of, its crushing density, seems to vibrate with the promise of economic mobility. There was more commerce per square inch going on on the main street than in midtown Manhattan.
Inside the schoolhouse, this mobility is illustrated with a simple, profound act. The teacher flipped on the light switch to illuminate a bare bulb in the center of the room, unscrewed the it, plugged an extension cord into its empty socket, ran that outside to a wireless modem, handed out laptops to the groups of students and proceeded to teach the rest of the lesson with YouTube.
Though the thrust of the lesson was about female empowerment and the importance of not letting your family marry you off at 14 – universal developing nation topics that used clips from Bangladesh and Ethiopia as illustrations – this week’s lesson also contained a uniquely Kenyan message: You are leaders in your communities, which means not carrying forward the ethnic stereotypes that you hear in unmixed company.
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The previous night, at dinner with Megan’s family and her new Kenyan in-laws, I’d asked whether there had been much healing since the post-election violence. The answer was an unequivocal no.
It was hard to see evidence of this tension driving around Nairobi, which is still in the grips of a major housing boom in its tonier neighborhoods, where signs advertising the iPhone 3G hang amid tropical foliage. One of the most common complaints I heard was how the Somalis, flush with pirate cash, were driving up real estate prices in some neighborhoods by orders of ten.
But back in 2007 the problem was not lack of growth but the distribution of its spoils. And as every one of the new villas goes up behind garden walls topped with electric fencing, there’s little sign – despite that truly hopeful tone of the country — that this fundamental problem is changing.
February 20, 2011
- Beaufort in March