Soil, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya

Abstract

What does Kenya's crisis say to academic discussion about globalisation and the rise of local claims to ‘belong’, as autochthonous ‘sons of the soil’? The Kenya case supports the view that the changing relations between global pressures and states may exacerbate local conflicts that promote ethnocentric, exclusive concepts of belonging. But this article argues, further, for the importance of local concepts of self-worth and cultural value. Since Kenya's most ‘indigenous’ of peoples are the weakest, and almost all other Kenyans fairly recent immigrants, claims to territory are strategies justified by other arguments – to have improved the land, to have brought civilisation. Such managerial arguments do not help the poor, or women. Claims are evaluated according to an implicit moral hierarchy of ‘work’, and are best understood as expressions of local patriotism. These hold both generous and chauvinistic potential.