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THE EMERGING NATIONAL CULTURE OF KENYA: KENYAN CULTURE Article by: Olubayi Olubayi, Ph.D. Lecturer, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ., & Associate Professor of Microbiology, Middlesex County College, Edison, NJ., & President, and co-founder, The Global Literacy Project, Inc. (www.glpinc.org)

ABSTRACT: A national culture of Kenya is emerging. It is called Kenyan culture and it is different from the many ethnic cultures in Kenya, and should not be confused with the ancient ethnic cultures that still exist.The evidence indicates that a distinct national culture of Kenya (ALSO known as Kenyan culture) has emerged, and continues to grow stronger as it simultaneously borrows from, and re-organizes, and lends to, the fifty ancient ethnic cultures of Kenya. The emerging national culture of Kenya has several strong dimensions that include the rise of a national language, the full acceptance of Kenyan as an identity, the success of a post-colonial constitutional order, the ascendancy of ecumenical religions, the urban dominance of multi-ethnic cultural productions, increased national cohesion, and the Sheng struggles to decolonize modernity.

Key Words: national culture of Kenya; Kenyan Culture; ethnicity in Kenya; Sheng; modernity

The Emerging National Culture of Kenya: Kenyan Culture A national culture of unity is emerging in Kenya in addition to, not in place of, the   fifty ancient ethnic cultures of Kenya. This emerging national culture (also known as Kenyan culture) acts as the “glue” that holds the fifty ethnic groups together in one nation state. Absent this “glue,” the nation state would either remain “united” only through governmental military and police force, or it would break up into fifty separate ethnic micro-states. It is the role of the emerging national culture to hold the nation together. A national culture promotes a general voluntary acceptance of the legitimacy and sanctity of the multi-ethnic, multicultural nation state. In Kenya, the national culture is just evolving compared with the fifty mature ancient ethnic-cultures of Kenya. This is why I refer to Kenya’s national culture as emerging. Some dimensions of Kenyan culture are already at an advanced stage, while others are just beginning to evolve. For example, the place of Kiswahili as the national language of Kenya is already secure and advanced relative to the much weaker dimensions of national constitutional faith, national consciousness and national ideology.

In discussing the emerging national culture of Kenya, I will highlight only some of the major solutions to the problems of coexistence, and only some of the mechanisms promoting national cohesion in Kenya as a means of illustrating the active emergence of a national culture in Kenya. The highlights will include the acceptance of “Kenyan” as an identity, the rise of a national language, the proliferation of inter-ethnic marriages, the “creation” of a national formal dress code, the entrenchment of harambee, the flowering of the ecumenical religions, the fight for a better constitution, the implementation of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), the rooting in of universal primary education, the rise of a national literature,  the improvement of physical and communications infrastructure, the widening of civil society, the revival of national political history, the increasing celebration of things African, the build-up of resistance to racism, the invention of Sheng, and the beginnings of a national consciousness, of a national ideology, and of national cohesion in Kenya.

The emerging national culture (i.e., Kenyan culture) is one of many cultures within Kenya. And those many cultures are in active collaboration. It is my observation that the emerging national culture of Kenya sits both above, and between the fifty ancient ethnic cultures, deriving strength and ideas from the ethnic cultures and from the rest of our common global human heritage. The fifty Kenyan ethnic cultures continue to exist and to flourish despite the emergence of an overarching supra-ethnic national culture. It is not an either or situation. The growth of the national culture does not mean the death of ethnic cultures. Cultures can and often do coexist. And the identities of a Kenyan do not have to be singular.

To inhabit this overarching supra-ethnic national culture of unity does not preclude a Kenyan from maintaining full ethnic identity. Human beings simultaneously inhabit several identities as so well explained by the Indian economics Nobel laureate and philosopher, Amartya Sen,, in his essay on “Making Sense of identity,” in which he says: We are all individually involved in identities of various kinds in disparate contexts, in our own respective lives, arising from our background, or associations, or social activities….the same person can be for example a British citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stockbroker, a nonvegetarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a body builder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God created Darwin to test the gullible (Sen, 2006, p.24). Amartya Sen is insistent that when we push a person into a singular identity, be it cultural or religious or ethnic, that we miniaturize the person. It is the multiple identities that we all inhabit simultaneously that enable civic life and citizenship. We associate with other citizens because we share some of our multiple identities with them. The emerging overarching supra-ethnic national culture of unity is founded on our multiple identities and borrows freely from all the fifty ethnic identities in the country and from global sources.

To paraphrase Sen, the same person can be, for example, a Kenyan citizen, of Turkana origin, with Masai ethnic characteristics, a teacher, a nyama choma eater, a football player, a dancer, a Christian, an alumnus of Alliance High School, and an in-law to a Kikuyu family. Such a person can associate with thousands of his fellow citizens on each of his different identity dimensions: With fellow Turkana ethnics he will build on shared language, with fellow teachers he will invoke the experience of being a teacher, at the nyama choma bar he will find company, at the football field or at the bar watching football he will be fully at home and in good company, at the dances he will have partners who share not ethnicity but a love of dancing, at church he will enjoy Christian fellowship, among Alliance High School alumni he will revel in their common elitism and mutual concerns, and with his in-laws he will share in the joy of family life as facilitated by the Kiswahili national language, and by the emerging sense of shared membership within the same national culture of Kenya.

The most revolutionary dimension of the emerging national culture of Kenya is the growing voluntary mutual acceptance of the sanctity and legitimacy of one’s neighbor’s ethnic culture, and the accompanying acceptance of multiple mutually reinforcing ceremonies in important cultural human life cycle events such as marriage, birth and death. This means, for example, the now commonplace inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies in Kenya are conducted not as a one day event in the manner of an American wedding, but as a series of mutually reinforcing ceremonies that acknowledge all the key identities that the bride and groom inhabit. If a Luo man is marrying a Kikuyu woman, for example, there will usually be three major public weddings: the Kikuyu traditional-ngurario wedding at the bride’s home, the Luo traditional wedding at the groom’s home, and the Western-style or Islamic wedding at church or mosque.

Kenyan culture exists. It is important for all thinkers and researchers to look beyond the focus on ethnic cultures because most Kenyans are now multi-cultural in the sense of being simultaneously ethnic and Kenyan. One does not have to cease being Kikuyu or Teso in order to be Kenyan. Also it is noteworthy that for the majority of young urban Kenyans, the dominant culture is Kenyan and not the ethnic culture despite belonging to both.

SOURCE: Olubayi Olubayi "The emerging national culture of Kenya: Decolonizing modernity" Journal of Global Initiatives 2(2) 2007. pp.222-237 http://nationalcultureofkenya.blogpost.com Sen, A. (2006). Identity and violence. NY: W.W. Norton.