Читать книгу It’s Our Turn to Eat - Michela Wrong - Страница 11

‘The shocking rot of Nairobi's main market was exposed yesterday when it was revealed that 6,000 rats were killed in last week's cleanup exercise – and an equal number made good their escape. Wakulima Market, through which a majority of Nairobi's three million residents get their food, had not been cleaned for thirty years. So filthy was it that traders who have been at the market daily for decades were shocked to see that below the muck they have been wading through, there was tarmac. More than 750 tonnes of garbage was removed and more than seventy tonnes of fecal waste sucked out of the horror toilets.’

East African Standard, 4 January 2005

In his youth, John had written a Kafkaesque short story about a man who wakes one morning to discover a giant pile of manure has been dumped outside his house. Puzzled, he sets out to establish where it came from and, more importantly, how to shift it. Oddly prescient, the story was a harbinger of John's future task.

Rather than a pile of manure, corruption in Kenya resembled one of the giant rubbish dumps that form over the decades in Nairobi's slums. Below the top layer of garbage, picked over by goats, marabou storks and families of professional scavengers, lies another layer of detritus. And another. With the passage of time the layers, weighed down from above, become stacked like the pastry sheets of a mille-feuille, a historical record no archaeologist wants to explore. Each stratum has a slightly different consistency – the garbage trucks brought mostly plastics and cardboard that week, perhaps, less household waste and more factory refuse – but it all smells identical, letting off vast methane sighs as it settles and shifts, composting down to something approaching soil. The sharp stink of chicken droppings, the cabbagy reek of vegetable rot, the dull grey stench of human effluvia blend with the smoke from charcoal fires and the haze of burning diesel to form a pungent aroma – ‘Essence of Slum’, a parfumier might call it – that clings to shoes and permeates the hair.

As Kenya has modernised, so its sleaze has mutated, a new layer of graft shaped to match each layer of economic restructuring and political reconfiguration. ‘In Kenya, corruption doesn't go away with reform, it just migrates,’ says Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer and analyst. But under all the layers, at the base of the giant mound, lies the same solid bedrock: Kenyans' dislocated notion of themselves. The various forms of graft cannot be separated from the people's vision of existence as a merciless contest, in which only ethnic preference offers hope of survival.

If, in the West, it is impossible to use the word ‘tribe’ without raising eyebrows, in Kenya much of what takes place becomes incomprehensible if you try stripping ethnicity from the equation. ‘A word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do,’ said Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe of this taboo noun,³ and in Kenya, just as in so many African states, ‘tribe’ is still on active duty. Ask a Kenyan bluntly what tribe he is and he may, briefly, ruffle up and take offence. But the outrage dissolves immediately upon contact with daily life. ‘Typical Mukamba, useless with money,’ a friend mutters when a newspaper vendor fumbles his change. Another, arriving late at a café, explains: ‘I had to straighten up the car because the askari was giving me a hard time. Best not to mess with these Maasai.’ And when another is fined for parking illegally, he explains: ‘I begged with the policeman, but he wouldn't let me off. He was a Kalenjin.’

Any Kenyan can reel off the tags and stereotypes, which capture the categorisation of the country's society. Hard-nosed and thrusting, the Kikuyu are easily identified by their habit of mixing up their ‘r’s and their ‘L’s, the cause of much hilarity amongst their compatriots. When an official warns you, ‘There may be a ploblem,’ a member of civil society denounces ‘ligged erections’ or an urchin tries to sell you a week-old ‘rabradol’ puppy, you know you are dealing with either a Kikuyu or his Meru or Embu cousin. Their entrepreneurialism has won them control of the matatu trade, and they run most of the capital's kiosks, restaurants and hotels. A Luo, on the other hand, 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. Luhyas are said to lack ambition, excelling as lowly shamba boys, watchmen and cooks. Stumpy, loyal, happy to take orders, Kambas are natural office clerks, soldiers and domestic servants; but watch out for potions, freak accidents and charms under the bed – these are the spell-casters of Kenya. Enticing and provocative, their women dress in eye-wateringly bright colours and often work as barmaids. In contrast, the cold, remote Kalenjin care more about their cows than about their homes. Macho and undomesticated, the proud Samburu and Maasai make for perfect recruits to the ranks of watchmen, wildlife rangers and security guards. And so on …

When they speak in this way, Kenyans show, at least, a refreshing honesty. Public discourse is far more hypocritical. In matters ethnic, newspaper and radio station bosses adopt a policy of strict self-censorship. Telling themselves they must play their part in the forging of a young nation state, editors have for decades carefully removed all ethnic identifiers from articles and broadcasts. But it doesn't take long to work out what is really going on, or why one VIP is throwing the taunt of ‘tribalist’ – Kenya's favourite political insult – in another's face. If a surname isn't enough to accurately ‘place’ a Kenyan, laborious verbal codes do the trick. A commentator who coyly refers to ‘a certain community’, or the ‘people of the slopes’, means the Kikuyu and their kinsfolk from the Mount Kenya foothills. ‘People of the milk’ indicates the livestock-rearing Kalenjin or Maasai. If he cites ‘the people of the lake’ or ‘those from the west’, he means the Luo, whose territory runs alongside Lake Victoria and whose failure to practise circumcision – gateway to adulthood amongst Bantu communities – prompts widespread distrust. The sly euphemisms somehow end up conveying more mutual hostility than a franker vocabulary ever could. Like the ruffled skirts which covered the legs of grand pianos in the Victorian age, they actually draw attention to what they are supposed to conceal: an acute sensitivity to ethnic origin.

The fixation shocks other Africans, who privately whisper at how ‘backward’ they find Kenya, with its talk of foreskins and its focus on male appendages. ‘There's no ideological debate here,’ complain incoming diplomats, baffled by a political system in which notions of ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ seem irrelevant: ‘It's all about tribe.’ Directors of foreign NGOs puzzle over the fact that political parties, born and dying with the speed of dragonflies, either don't bother publishing manifestos, or barely know their contents. But who needs a manifesto when a party's only purpose is furthering its tribe's interests? Tribe is the first thing Kenyans need to know about one another, the backdrop against which all subsequent interaction can be interpreted, simultaneously haven, shield and crippling obligation. The obsession is so pervasive, Kenyans struggle to grasp that it may not extend beyond the country's borders. ‘So,’ commented a Kikuyu taxi driver when he overheard me expressing scepticism about the likelihood of an Obama win in the 2008 US election, ‘I see you Westerners have problems with the Luo too.’

Yet, perversely, the strength of these stereotypes is in inverse proportion to their longevity. Rooted in the country's experience as a British colony, Kenya's acute ethnic self-awareness, far from being an expression of ‘atavistic tribal tensions’, is actually a fairly recent development. While no one would claim that colonialism created the country's tribal distinctions, it certainly ensured that ethnic affiliation became the key criterion determining a citizen's life chances.

Some time towards the end of the nineteenth century, the story goes, a great Kikuyu medicine man, Mugo Wa Kibiru, woke up trembling, bruised and unable to speak. When he recovered his voice, he issued a terrible prophecy. There would come a time of great hunger, he said, after which strangers resembling little white frogs, wearing clothes that looked like butterfly wings, would arrive bearing magic sticks that killed as no poisoned arrow could. They would bring a giant iron centipede, breathing fire, which would stretch from the big water in the east to the big water in the west, and they would be intent on stripping his people of all they possessed. His people should not fight these strangers. They must treat them with caution and courtesy, the better to learn their ways. The strangers would only depart once they had passed on the secrets of their power.

His prophecy was an uncannily accurate description of the railway that would eventually stretch more than a thousand kilometres from Mombasa on the coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It would never have existed had it not been for William Mackinnon, a Scottish magnate with an evangelical agenda and a romantic appetite for empire, whose imagination was fired by reports brought back by Livingstone and Stanley. The lush kingdom of Buganda, nestling on the shores of Africa's giant freshwater lake in what is today southern Uganda, was blessed with gum, ivory, copra, cotton and coffee. Opening up the hinterland would not only allow its riches to be tapped, it would also, Mackinnon maintained, mean the eradication of the vile Arab slave trade, saving the region for Christian missionaries.

The magnate and his politician friends applied a broad brush when it came to geopolitics, their rough imaginary strokes stretching across half the globe. The recently opened Suez Canal, they argued, held the key to the British Empire's all-important trade with India. If that waterway were to be guaranteed, then the headwaters of the Nile must be secured, and that meant establishing a link between Lake Victoria – source of the Nile – and the coast, controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar. Above all, a railroad would shore up Britain's position in its long race for regional supremacy with Germany, whose agents lusted after the promised ‘new India’ just as ardently as Mackinnon.

In 1888, Mackinnon won Queen Victoria's permission to set up a chartered company, the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA), to develop regional trade. But constructing the ‘Lunatic Line’, as the railroad's critics dubbed it, proved beyond IBEA's capacities. By 1895 the company was bankrupt, and Mackinnon handed over responsibility to Whitehall, which announced the establishment of the British East Africa protectorate. Government surveyors set to work, importing hundreds of Indian coolies, thousands of donkeys and camels, and the millions of sleepers required for this monstrous engineering project. The colony that would come to be baptised ‘Kenya’ was created almost inadvertently, a geographical access route to somewhere seen as far more important.

The railway also played a role in ensuring that Kenya became a settler colony. As construction costs mounted, London became convinced it could only recoup its losses by developing the land alongside the track. ‘[The railway] is the backbone of the East Africa Protectorate, but a backbone is as useless without a body as a body is without a backbone,’ wrote Sir Charles Eliot, the protectorate's new commissioner, in 1901. ‘Until a greater effort is made to develop our East African territories, I do not see how we can hope that the Uganda line will repay the cost of its construction.’ The proposal seemed uncontroversial, for British officialdom saw few signs of systematic cultivation. Wildlife, in the form of the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, buffalo and antelope, seemed to outnumber human beings. ‘We have in East Africa the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa,’ wrote Eliot, in what must qualify as one of the classic mis-statements of all time, ‘an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country, where we can do as we will.’

Eliot's snap judgement was understandable – a territory the size of France only held around three million Africans at the time, and the activities of both the Kikuyu and the Maasai had recently been curtailed by rinderpest, smallpox and drought. But in fact, much of Kenya's best land was already in use. To the north of the mosquito-plagued stretch of marshy land that would become the city of Nairobi, the well-watered foothills of Mount Kenya were being intensively farmed by the Kikuyu; the nomadic Maasai drove their cattle the length of the Rift Valley; and on the western fringes of this natural cleft Nandi-speaking tribes – later to be rebaptised the Kalenjin – tended crops and livestock. Taming the locals would turn out to require a series of ruthless punitive military expeditions, in which homesteads were set ablaze, herds captured and chiefs assassinated.

But the settlers trickled in nonetheless. Fleeing overcrowded Europe, the new tribe dubbed the wazungu – ‘people on the move’ – headed in the main for the Rift Valley's grasslands, which felt more than a little familiar. On a drizzly day, when the chill mists crept stealthily down from the escarpment, they bore a striking resemblance to the rolling heaths of Scotland, a fact that seemed to confirm the settlers in the correctness of their choice. Much has been written about the antics of the dissolute aristocrats who made up the Happy Valley expatriate set. But most of the land-hungry British arrivals in ‘Keeenya’, as they pronounced it, were from decidedly modest backgrounds, grabbing the chance for a new start. In 1903 there were only around a hundred settlers; by the late 1940s the number had risen to 29,000, boosted by demobilised British soldiers. It would peak at 80,000 in the 1950s. And as the new arrivals marked up their farms, everything began to change for the more than forty local tribes.

Back in Britain, the citizen's right not to have his taxes raised or property confiscated on the whim of a greedy ruler had been recognised since the Magna Carta. But these fundamental principles did not apply to the British Empire's African subjects. A series of regulations passed at the turn of the century decreed that any ‘waste and unoccupied land’ belonged to the Crown, which could then dispose of it as it wished, usually in the form of 99-and 999-year leases to settlers. In order to force Africans to take paid work on white-owned farms, which were desperately short of labour, the colonial authorities levied first a hut tax and then a poll tax. In the new colony of Kenya, formally declared in 1920, the African citizen was also prevented from competing with white farmers, who alone enjoyed the right to grow tea, coffee, pyrethrum and other crops for export.

The fact that many of the communities the British encountered did not have simple hierarchical structures held up implementation of the new laws only temporarily. The British simply appointed their own chiefs from the ranks of the translators, mercenaries and other ‘friendlies’ willing to collaborate. It's surely no coincidence that so much power in Kenya today rests in the hands of seventy-and eighty-year-olds who were impressionable youngsters in the years when the draconian colonial regulations made their traumatic impact on African lifestyles. They absorbed vital lessons in how the legal system, the administration and the security forces could be abused to extract labour and resources from an alien land and its resentful people. The first layer on the rubbish tip of Kenyan graft had been deposited.

Inhabitants of pre-colonial Kenya had certainly been aware of their different ethnic languages and customs. But that awareness was a fluid, shifting concept. While sections of the Kikuyu, Maasai and Kamba frequently fought each other over women and cattle, they also traded with one another, intermarried and exploited the same lands, with the pastoralist Maasai, for example, often relying on the agriculturalist Kikuyu to feed their families when drought killed their herds. All that ended with colonialism. Not only did the boundaries drawn by Western powers in the wake of the Berlin conference of 1884–85 slice across the traditional migration routes of communities straddling what had suddenly been delineated as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the new colonies were themselves subdivided in new, awkward ways. By 1938, Kenya had been partitioned into twenty-four overcrowded native reserves – ‘Kamba’ for the Kamba people, ‘Kikuyu’ for the Kikuyu, and so on – and the fertile ‘White Highlands’ for exclusive European use, where Africans could not own land.

African males were only allowed to travel outside their reserve if they bore the hated kipande, an identity card carried around the neck in a copper casket. Introduced to prevent employees from moving to better-paid jobs, the kipande corralled Africans inside rigidly defined areas. Wary of anything that could mushroom into a national anticolonial movement, the authorities banned most political associations; the few allowed were restricted to their founders' ethnic territories. The settlers wanted Africans to act small, think local. It made them so much more manageable.

Registering that white administrators had pigeonholed them, local communities learnt to play the game. Population levels were soaring, thanks to the advent of Western medicine, and the most important asset in a world offering neither pensions, welfare payments nor health insurance – land – would henceforth, they realised, be distributed on a strictly ethnic basis. To those on the reserves, who increasingly viewed their communities as mini-nations in fierce competition with one another, Kenyans from outside were ‘foreigners’. The missionaries played their part in this process of self-definition, their translations of the Bible standardising local dialects into formal tribal languages. ‘This conversion of negotiable ethnicity into competitive tribalism has been a modern phenomenon,’ writes historian John Lonsdale. ‘Tribe was not so much inherited as invented.’⁴

The Kalenjin, Daniel arap Moi's ethnic group, represents one such invention. ‘Kalenjin’ – literally ‘I say to you’ – was actually the opening line of a series of radio broadcasts used by the colonial administration to muster recruits for the King's African Rifles during the Second World War. It became a label for eight Nilotic communities who shared the Nandi language. Another convenient tag – although this one originated within the community, which saw an overarching tribal identity as lending weight to its dealings with the authorities – was ‘Luhya’ (‘those of the same hearth’), slapped onto twenty subgroups in the 1930s and 1940s. It comes as no surprise to discover that the stereotypes Kenyans apply to one another today, from the fierceness of the Maasai to the supposed domesticity of the Kamba, faithfully reflect the roles the colonial authorities allotted each group: Maasais as mercenaries, Kambas as first porters and then as kitchen workers. Growing up on a white-owned farm in the Rift Valley in the 1940s, the future Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai noticed how the colonial experience reinforced ethnic distinctions. ‘Kikuyus worked in the fields, Luos laboured around the homestead as domestic servants, and Kipsigis took care of the livestock and milking,’ she records in her autobiography. ‘Most of us on the farm rarely met people from other communities, spoke their languages or participated in their cultural practices.’⁵

Two World Wars, in which thousands of Kenyans served, radicalised the colony's African population, challenging this vision of the world. In the muddy trenches of eastern Germany, on the bleak escarpments of Ethiopia and in the jungles of Burma, they saw their white rulers fight and die just like other men. They grasped that the British were mere mortals, their empire beleaguered. The learning experience took place on both sides. ‘The younger settlers who had fought in the war with the African had an entirely different outlook on African political advance and the African himself to those who had remained behind,’ wrote the pre-independence minister of agriculture Michael Blundell, who led Luo troops to fight the Italians in Ethiopia in 1940. ‘The colonial relationship of governing and subject races had been eroded.’⁶ Confronted by a range of increasingly belligerent political associations and trade unions calling for a voice in Kenya's administration, London struggled to justify British policy.

The Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s finally exposed the unsustainability of the colonial carve-up. In the run-up to independence in 1963, the regulations that had shaped a sense of separate identity were scrapped, as Africans were granted the right to grow what crops they pleased, to buy land outside the reserves, and to campaign on national issues. But ethnic straitjackets, once tailored, cannot so easily be unstitched. Like so many black leaders of the 1960s, first president Jomo Kenyatta dedicated his energies not to overturning but to inheriting the system left behind by the colonial powers. Only this time it would be his Kikuyu ethnic group, rather than Kenya's departing white tribe, that would benefit from the ‘matunda ya uhuru’ – the fruits of independence. While generously helping himself – he taunted former Mau Mau veteran Bildad Kaggia for having so little to show for his liberation war – he made sure his Kikuyu kinsmen got served first when it came to constituency funding, procurement contracts and white-collar jobs in the administration. The fact that no single tribe accounted for more than about a fifth of Kenya's population meant marriages of convenience with at least two other large ethnic groups were always necessary. But priorities were clear. ‘My people have the milk in the morning, your tribes the milk in the afternoon,’ the president told non-Kikuyu ministers who complained.

When Moi took over on Kenyatta's death in 1978, the approach was perpetuated. Because his Kalenjin ethnic grouping was a smaller, more diverse and less economically powerful group than the Kikuyu, Moi was forced to draw the magic circle a little wider. But Moi's focus remained his own tribesmen, who suddenly found key jobs in the civil service, the army and state-owned companies that had hitherto been closed to them. Ask middle-aged Kenyans today what they consider the root causes of their generation's ethnic wariness, and most point to the education quotas introduced in 1985, which obliged schools to take 85 per cent of their pupils from the local area. The policy was aimed at improving educational standards amongst the Kalenjin, but its impact was to erect even higher walls between communities. Under Kenyatta, at least the tribes learnt mutual tolerance in the playground and classroom. Under Moi, the first time a member of one tribe rubbed up against another was often at university, by which time prejudices had already taken root.

Bullied by Western donors into introducing multi-party politics in 1992, the leader who had done so much to entrench ethnic rivalry presented himself as a national unifier attempting to keep his population's primitive urges in check. ‘The multi-party system has split the country into tribal groupings. I am surprised that Western countries believe in the Balkanisation of Africa … Tribal roots go much deeper than the shallow flower of democracy.’ But if Moi had wilfully reversed cause and effect, he was correct in predicting that the new politics, built on a foundation of rivalry laid by his predecessor and himself, would take ethnic shape. In competitive political systems, argues Paul Collier, parties look for the easiest way to establish their superiority in voters' eyes. Providing services like health, schools and roads is one way of winning approval, but such things are very hard to deliver. Another way is to play the ethnic identity card: ‘And that,’ says Collier, ‘is incredibly easy.’

Analyst Gerard Prunier has christened Kenya's post-independence system of rule a form of ‘ethno-elitism’.⁷ A pattern of competing ethnic elites, rotating over time, was established which made a mockery of the notion of equal opportunity. This was viewed as a zero-sum game, with one group's gain inevitably entailing another's loss. In Francophone Africa, the approach is captured in one pithy phrase: ‘Ote-toi de la, que je m'y mette’ – ‘Shift yourself, so I can take your place.’ In Anglophone Africa, the expression is cruder, bringing to mind snouts rooting in troughs: ‘It's our turn to eat.’ Given how unfairly resources had been distributed under one ethnically-biased administration after another, starting with the white settlers, each succeeding regime felt justified in being just as partisan – it was only redressing the balance, after all. The new incumbent was expected to behave like some feudal overlord, stuffing the civil service with his tribesmen and sacking those from his predecessor's region. When no one shows magnanimity, generosity dries up across the board.

It's actually possible to quantify the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ approach in terms of parliamentary seats, ministerial positions and jobs in the state sector, as each regime doled out appointments to those deemed in the fold. According to one study, during the Kenyatta era, the Kikuyu, who accounted for 20.8 per cent of the population, claimed between 28.6 and 31.6 per cent of cabinet seats – far more than their fair share – while the Kalenjin, accounting for 11.5 per cent of the population, held only between 4.8 and 9.6 per cent. With Moi's arrival, the Kikuyu share of cabinet posts fell to just 4 per cent, while the Kalenjin's share soared to 22 per cent. It was a similar story with permanent secretaries, where the Kikuyu went from 37.5 per cent under Kenyatta to 8.7 per cent under Moi, while the Kalenjin went from 4.3 per cent to 34.8 per cent.⁸

In theory, of course, a particular ethnic group could hold the lion's share of key government jobs without it distorting national policy. In fact, the entire arrangement was premised on the pork-barrel principle. Hoeing their Central Province plots in bare feet and ragged hand-me-downs, a minister's constituents might feel they had little, individually, to show for their community's pole position. The top men stood at the apex of frustratingly inefficient pyramids of dispersal. But what was the alternative? ‘The grassroots perception is, if we elect a member of our elite, he can at least talk to the elites of the other tribes,’ says Haroun Ndubi, a human rights campaigner. ‘People will say: “This is someone who can speak English with the others.”’ And if a local hero consistently failed to pass at least a fraction of what came his way along the chain, he could expect to be unceremoniously dumped come the next election.

The difference being on the right side made was illustrated when the ministry for roads and public works published estimates for spending on road-building in July 2006. Regions whose MPs formed part of Kibaki's inner circle got far more than was allocated to areas whose leaders were in opposition. Once Nairobi and the tourist hub represented by the Maasai Mara were excluded, allocations to the home constituencies of vocal government critics were nearly 320 times less generous than those to constituencies of trusted presidential aides.⁹ The parliamentarians made some barbed remarks when this extraordinary gap was exposed, but passed the road budget without amendment. This, they knew, was the way the game was played.

Where does each individual draw the limits of his or her compassion, beyond which duties of kindness, generosity and personal obligation no longer apply? I was raised in a household where my parents drew them in totally different places, according to their very different characters and backgrounds.

As an Italian, my mother grew up in a country whose government had given birth to Fascism, formed a discreditable pact with Hitler, and launched itself on a series of unnecessary wars which left Italy occupied and battle-scarred. There then followed a seemingly endless series of short-lived, sleaze-ridden administrations. The experience left her utterly cynical about officialdom. Although she dutifully voted in every election, the malevolence of the system was taken for granted, and she would happily have lied and cheated in any encounter with the state had she believed she could get away with it. But no one worked harder for her fellow man, for in the place of the state she maintained her own support network. An instinctive practitioner of what sociologists call ‘the economics of affection’, my mother had a circle of compassion drawn to include a collection of needy and lonely acquaintances. She visited their council flats bearing cakes, sent amusing press cuttings to their prison cells, queued at the gates of their psychiatric hospitals. Hers was a world of one-on-one interactions, in which obligations, duties, morality itself, took strictly personal form, and were no less onerous for it. The glow she radiated was life-enhancing, but its light only stretched so far, and beyond lay utter darkness. Protecting one's own was vital, for life had taught her that the world outside would show no mercy. She was not alone in her ability to get things done without the state's involvement. ‘Il mio sistema’ Italians call it: ‘my system’. Italy is, after all, the birthplace of the Mafia, the ultimate of personal ‘sisteme’, and my mother's mindset was instinctively mafioso.

My father, in contrast, was typical of a certain sort of law-abiding, diffident Englishman for whom a set of impartial, lucid rules represented civilisation at its most advanced. He was raised in a country which pluckily held out against the Germans during the Second World War and then set up the National Health Service in which he spent his career, and his trust in the essential decency of his duly elected representatives was so profound that he was shocked to the core by British perfidy during the Suez crisis, and believed Tony Blair when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When, as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, I mentioned – with a certain pride – that I usually managed to get home without paying my bus fare, he explained disapprovingly that if everyone behaved that way, London Transport would grind to a halt. Remove the civic ethos, and anarchy descended. A logical man, he saw this as the only practical way of running a complex society. It also, conveniently for an Englishman awkward with personal intimacy, enabled him to engage with his fellow man at a completely impersonal level. Not for him my mother's instinctive charm, the immediate eye contact, the hand on arm. He felt no obligation to provide for nieces and nephews, and had a cousin come up for a job before one of the many appointment boards on which he sat, he would have immediately excused himself. Nothing could be more repugnant to him than asking a friend to bend the rules as a personal favour. What need was there for a rival, alternative sistema, if the existing arrangement of rights and duties already delivered?

My father's world view was typically northern European. My mother's characteristically Mediterranean approach would have made perfect sense to any Kenyan. In an ‘us-against-the-rest’ universe, the put-upon pine to belong to a form of Masonic lodge whose advantages are labelled ‘Members Only’. In the industrialised world, that ‘us’ is usually defined by class, religion, or profession. In Kenya, it was inevitably defined by tribe.

Western analysts have remarked on Africans' ‘astonishing ambivalence’ towards corruption,¹⁰ but it is not so surprising. Under the colonial occupiers and the breed of ‘black wazungus’ who replaced them, the citizen had learnt to expect little from his government but harassment and extortion. ‘Anyone who followed the straight path died a poor man,’ a community worker in Kisumu once told me. ‘So Kenyans had no option but to glorify corruption.’ In a 2001 survey, Transparency International found that the average urbanite Kenyan paid sixteen bribes a month,¹¹ mostly to the police or the ministry of public works, to secure services they should have received for free. Added together, kitu kidogo – supposedly ‘petty’ corruption – accounted for a crippling 31.4 per cent of a household's income. Those paying out no doubt saw themselves as innocent victims of oppressive officialdom. But while chafing at the need to grease palms, ordinary Kenyans were also playing the system with verve. Which of them could put their hand on their heart and swear that they had never relied on a ‘brother’ for a bargain, a professional recommendation or a job? Who had never helped a distant ‘cousin’ from upcountry jump a queue or win special access? Aware of their own complicity, they hesitated to point an accusing finger.

Moral values can become strangely inverted in a harsh environment. ‘In Nairobi, around 50 per cent of the population is either unemployed or underemployed – they're selling shoelaces or picking up rubbish, not earning enough to survive. But this country doesn't have soup kitchens, and you don't see hordes sleeping rough,’ says Professor Terry Ryan, a veteran Kenyan economist. ‘That's because a senior civil servant or CEO typically picks up the school fees and hospital bills of roughly fifty of his kinsmen, while a headmaster or low-ranking civil servant will be supporting twenty-nine members of the extended family in one way or another.’ Propping up such vast networks made bending the rules virtually obligatory. The man who abided by the rules and took home no more than his salary seemed to his relatives a creep; the employee who fiddled the books and paid for his aunt's funeral, his niece's education and his father's hernia operation a hero. In a poor country, ethnic marginalisation does more than blight life chances. It can actually kill. A 1998 survey found that Kalenjin children were 50 per cent less likely to die before the age of five than those of other tribes, despite the fact that most lived in rural areas, where life is generally tougher.¹² The statistic makes perfect sense. Under Moi, Kalenjin areas benefited from better investment in clinics, schools and roads. A worried Kalenjin mother would head for a well-stocked nearby clinic, child in her arms, along a smoothly tarmacked road. Her non-Kalenjin equivalent was likely to be tossed for hours in the back of a matatu struggling along a rutted track, only to eventually reach a clinic with nothing but aspirin on its shelves and watch her child die.

Researching this book, I repeatedly asked Kenyans for examples of how ethnic favouritism had personally affected them. ‘Oh, every Kenyan has a story like that,’ I was always told. Yet few volunteered details. It was easy to guess why. If they had lost out because of tribal patronage, they risked looking like whiners; if they had benefited, they'd be admitting to collaborating in a system that fostered incompetence.

I'd seen one example myself, at a Kenyan newspaper where I briefly worked as a subeditor. The East African Standard was being revamped after many years in the doldrums. The details of its ownership had always been kept deliberately murky, but the fact that the Moi family quietly pulled the levers was widely known, and had alienated readers, while management's habit of giving jobs to barely literate Kalenjins was blamed for a general collapse in standards. Now a new chief executive was poaching talent from rivals, with promises of an imminent takeover by a South African company. After my first few weeks at the paper, I went for lunch with one of the senior writers.

‘So, what do you think of the staff?’ he asked.

I ran through my various colleagues. Some had better training than others, some were more enterprising, but the goodwill was undoubtedly there. With one exception. The man in question, I said, turned up late or not at all, lounged at his desk playing music while the others hammered at their keyboards, and was often rude to his fellow workers. Robert – let us call him – was one of those rare, dangerous subeditors who could take a perfectly decent story and insert fresh mistakes. When I'd pointed one of these out, he'd given me a look of such astonished contempt that I'd realised criticism was something he rarely heard. In a surprisingly short space of time I'd come to detest him, and it was clear to me that many staff felt the same, although they were strangely mute in his presence. The man should obviously be fired.

The journalist gave me a long look, enjoying his moment.

‘You'll be interested to hear that I expect that individual to either take my job very shortly, or be made editor.’

Robert, he explained, was a close relative of one of the newspaper's top executives. Both men were Kalenjins. No matter how incompetent or unpleasant, Robert knew his career was assured – hence his arrogance and his co-workers' resentful silence.

‘Good Lord,’ I said. It was so crude I could barely believe it. ‘You know, where I come from, the boss's son often works twice as hard to make sure people don't accuse him of exactly this form of nepotism.’

He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

‘How about sending him on a training course so that, at the very least, he learns his trade?’

‘Oh, that's been done. Few people at the newspaper have received more training. He's even gone on one of those journalism courses in the UK. He never gets any better. It's a question of attitude.’

Having written about ethnic patronage for years, this was the first time I'd seen up close its insidious impact on a workplace. Since that lunch, many of the people we discussed that day – including my lunch companion and the chief executive who had dangled the hope of a South African takeover – have left the newspaper, which remains in Moi's control. They had been mis-sold the notion of a meritocratic, non-tribal, politically independent company, and with that promise went much of the incentive for staying. Robert, in contrast, has been promoted, just as predicted.

That was my story. But I wanted to hear someone else's.

Eventually I found him. His name was Hussein Were. He was forty-two when we met, and his boyishly unlined face jarred with the methodical manner of a much older man. Deliberate and self-contained, he spoke at perfect dictation speed – no rushing or interruptions permitted – and his sentences, peppered with ‘albeit’s and ‘pertaining to’s, were redolent of the legalistic world of depositions and affidavits, in which people pause before speaking and are careful to say what they mean.

His first job, he told me, had been with a firm of quantity surveyors, where he spent more than ten years. The boss was a Kamba and a Christian, Were a Muslim and a Luhya, but that didn't stop them working well together. So well, in fact, that when Were tendered his resignation, explaining that he had won a scholarship for a Masters at the University of Nairobi, his boss persuaded him to stay on, juggling his day job with his studies. But when Were returned to full-time professional life, he noticed that things were changing. The company was expanding, and every new arrival, he registered with quiet dismay, was a Kamba. ‘The assistant was Kamba, the secretary was Kamba, the receptionist was Kamba. It was becoming a single-ethnic organisation.’ His relations with these staff were cordial. They shared lunches, knew each other's families. But Were began feeling excluded in subtle ways. ‘In those situations, people begin to segregate into groups. They regard you as different and don't want to share certain things. They set up informal networks, channels inside the office.’ He did not understand the language in which the others communicated, and as a Muslim he would not be included in any Friday-evening trip to a local bar.

Were gritted his teeth. He had hoped for better – ‘Maybe I'm naïve’ – but he felt no real surprise. ‘I had come of age learning about the working environment in this country. I knew Kenya was full of one-ethnic companies. I thought, “I'll live with it.”’ His ambitions remained high. After ten years in the job he had every reason to expect to be made partner. Then professional rivalry began to undermine his reputation for efficiency. ‘If I was registering certain successes, my colleagues wouldn't want them to reach the boss. But negative things would immediately be brought to his attention.’ Were, who had once been his boss's second-in-command, noticed that key information was now passing him by. He was being written out of the script. ‘Colleagues would mention things that concerned me directly that they had been discussing separately with my boss, chats which were probably taking place during visits to construction sites.’ At that stage, Were resigned. ‘I saw the whole thing was untenable.’

He didn't bother to explain why he was going. ‘I never raised it directly with my boss, because I realised he was encouraging it. I just said I needed to progress my career.’ Like many Kenyans caught in such circumstances, he expresses not anger, but resignation at what he knows to be a commonplace experience. ‘There are lots of people in this country who have never sat a job interview or even know what one is. They have been whisked by their tribespeople from school to job. I believe in fighting my own way.’ Friends tell him his problem was not being ‘anchored’ by a network of friendships and family relationships that would have made it impossible to ‘detach’ him from his place of work. But he has no intention of developing these limpet-like muscles. At the consultancy he has now set up, he's proud of the fact that not a single one of his current projects comes from a fellow Luhya. ‘There are people who feel like me, who do not subscribe to that kind of thinking,’ he insists. ‘I wouldn't pack a company with my people.’

Were's experience, and that of my colleagues at the Standard, was the most benign manifestation of the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture. Its other forms were much uglier, and their impact far more damaging. So few Kenyans identified with any overarching national project, their leaders felt free to loot state coffers, camouflaging crude personal enrichment in the prettifying colours of tribal solidarity.

Decade by decade, practices that had flourished under the colonial administration – itself no stranger to high-profile corruption scandals – were fine-tuned and pushed to ever more outlandish lengths. What they all shared were a reliance on the political access and inside knowledge enjoyed by either a minister, an MP, a civil servant or a councillor, and their target: the public funds and national assets on which every Kenyan citizen depended for education, health and the other basic necessities for a decent life.

The command economy of the post-independence years made self-enrichment for the well-connected a fairly simple matter. What could be easier for a minister than to slap an import quota on a key commodity, wait for the street price to soar, and then dump tonnes of the stuff, thoughtfully stockpiled ahead of time by one of his companies, on the market? A 1970–71 parliamentary commission helpfully authorised government employees to run their own businesses while holding down civil service jobs (‘straddling’, as it was called), a ruling its chairman later justified on the grounds that there was no point banning an activity that would persist whatever the law decreed.¹³ A post in a state-run utility or corporation, which could hike prices ever upwards thanks to its monopoly position, offered untold profit-taking opportunities. Similarly, who was better placed to benefit from foreign exchange controls which created a yawning gap between black market and official rates than an insider with excellent banking and Treasury contacts?

The structural adjustment programmes pushed on Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which loosened the Kenyan government's stranglehold by making aid conditional on privatising bloated parastatals, dropping currency controls and opening markets to international trade, complicated things, but the ‘eaters’ quickly vaulted that hurdle. The privatisation process itself, it turned out, provided all kinds of openings for the entrepreneurial fraudster, including ruthless asset-stripping. It was funny how often the politically-connected banks in which state corporations chose to deposit their proceeds collapsed, swallowing up public funds as they expired. And so many other routes remained open. Import goods duty-free as famine relief, or claim they are in transit, then sell them locally, undercutting the competition. Take out a state loan you never intend to repay. Bid for a government tender your contacts at the ministry tell you is about to come up, then get them to ensure that your ridiculously inflated offer is the one approved. It doesn't matter if your firm can't deliver: the invoice will join Kenya's huge stock of ‘pending bills’, carried over from one government to another, and eventually settled with the issue of trade-able treasury bonds, no questions asked.¹⁴

By the early 1990s, Western executives flying in with plans to invest in Kenya quickly realised that their companies would never thrive in the country's supposedly free-market environment unless a slice of equity was discreetly handed over to a firm owned by a Moi relative, trusted henchman or favoured minister. Frank Vogl, who runs a communications firm in Washington, caught the flavour when he was approached to set up a presidential press unit. Summoned by Kenya's finance minister to discuss the idea, he flew to Nairobi and went to the minister's offices. ‘It was so full I could barely squeeze in the door. The entire reception area was jammed with about twenty or thirty people, who were all trying to reach the secretary sitting at reception. I finally managed to catch her attention and said: “I have a 10 o'clock appointment with the minister.” “So does everyone else,” she said. “You'll have to wait your turn.” These were all businessmen waiting to have their one-on-ones with the minister – and you can imagine just what was going on during those conversations. It was no longer a secret by then: if you wanted to do business in Kenya, you had to do a deal with the top man concerned.’

And spanning every regime was land-grabbing, which pushed so many African buttons. Swathes of supposedly protected game parks, plots already owned by state-run corporations and municipal bodies, prime sites on the coast, chunks of gazetted virgin forest lusted after by timber merchants, were snatched, fenced off and sold on again. The practice was so widespread that even the leaders of Kenya's churches, mosques and temples – society's supposed moral arbiters – joined in. The grabbers did not hesitate to seize plots set aside for national monuments or already used as cemeteries, simply throwing the bodies onto the street. The phenomenon peaked before every election, as the president of the day thanked his cronies in advance for their support. Inquiries would reveal some 300,000 hectares of prime land to have been seized since independence, with only 1.7 per cent of the original 3 per cent of national territory gazetted as forest remaining – jeopardising a thirsty nation's very water table.

But ‘eating’ surely touched its nadir with the Goldenberg scandal, the Moi presidency's crowning disgrace. Dreamt up by Kamlesh Pattni, a Kenyan Asian with a lick of glossy black hair and the over-confidence of a twenty-six-year-old millionaire, this three-year scheme was once again a reflection of its times.¹⁵ Launched in 1991, it tapped into the government's hunger for foreign exchange, threatened by aid cuts from Western donors determined to see multi-party elections in Kenya. Pattni's firm, Goldenberg International Ltd, started by claiming – under a government compensation scheme meant to encourage trade – for exports of gold and diamonds Kenya did not produce and the firm never actually carried out. Approved by Central Bank staff, Pattni's fraudulent export forms – the infamous ‘CD3’s – only marked the start of this multi-layered scam. Setting up his own bank, he used the leverage granted by his finance ministry contacts to mop up available foreign exchange under a pre-shipment finance scheme. He bought billions of shillings in treasury bills on credit and cashed them in as though they had been paid for, and borrowed money from a range of complicit ‘political banks’ to place on overnight deposit.

The various schemes not only enriched senior officials, they provided slush funds for what the ruling party knew would be fiercely contested elections. Pattni ploughed his profits into the construction of the Grand Regency, a five-star hotel in central Nairobi as gilded and ornate as Cleopatra's boudoir. The ordinary Kenyan, for his part, lost anywhere between $600 million and $4 billion as his country's foreign exchange reserves, rather than being boosted, were systematically hoovered up by the well-connected. Goldenberg pushed the country's inflation into double digits, caused the collapse of the Kenya shilling and a credit squeeze so severe it led to business closures and mass sackings, and left the government unable to pay for oil imports and basic health and education. The resulting recession was still being felt fifteen years later.

Goldenberg captured the very essence of Kenyan corruption. For if only a tiny elite got obscenely rich on the back of it, the sleek Pattni carefully shored up his enterprise with a liberal distribution of gifts: a form of insurance. The astonishing extent of wider Kenyan society's complicity would only be exposed in 2004 when investigators published a list of those alleged to have benefited from Pattni's largesse. Gado, the Nation's brilliant cartoonist, captured the moment with one of his sketches. ‘Anybody who has not received Goldenberg money, please raise your hand,’ runs the caption. Below, a variegated cross-section of Kenyan society stares at the reader, boggle-eyed, uncomfortable, shifty: a bewigged lawyer, a Muslim preacher, a portly mzungu, a stout matron, a notebook-wielding journalist, a uniformed nurse, a scruffy panhandler. No one moves. All, at one point, have benefited from Goldenberg. The ‘list of shame’, as it was dubbed, ran to 1,115 entries.