Like the colours of the rainbow, nobody knows the number of tribes in Kenya!
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
14 August 2016
Your science teacher lied: the rainbow DOES NOT have seven colours! The
popular seven – Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet – were
invented (not discovered) Sir Isaac Newton. He was attempting to make
them consistent with the established seven notes of music – do, re, mi,
fa so, la, and ti.
In fact, a computer screen attains all the colours by mixing only three
colours – red, green and blue – in different proportions. Each colour is
assigned 256 levels of brightness, therefore, a total of 256 x 256 x 256
= 16,777,216 colours can be displayed.
I remembered about the seven colours of the rainbow while thinking about
the tribes of Kenya: “Everybody” knows that Kenya has 42 tribes: but
nobody knows what they are! Well; today, I will solve that mystery.
I have a 1993 McMillan Kenya Travellers Map in my car. The publisher
inserted the names of the predominant tribes in the various regions of
the country. I extracted all of them and counted: they numbered 39. But
something struck me immediately: the largest tribe – the Kikuyu – is not
in the list!
How can one list all the tribes of Kenya and leave out the largest one?
For that reason, I don’t trust the map. Nevertheless, even if we add the
missing one, we only get 40; not 42!
Then I remembered that during the last population census in 2009, there
was a big debate about some tribes missing from the enumeration form.
After the matter was settled and everyone was happy, I downloaded the
final listing.
To my knowledge, this is the only existing official and nationally
agreed listing of all the tribes of Kenya. It has a total of 114
including Arabs, Asians, Europeans, Americans and those who simply
consider themselves Kenyan.
I asked the Nation Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) if they
have a list of tribes and they sent me one, which they said was
extracted from the 2009 Census. However, it doesn’t tally with the one I
have from the same census. In addition, the NCIC has grouped the
sub-tribes together and somehow arrived at the magic number, 42. Still,
they also have Kenyan Arabs, Asians, Europeans and Americans.
My
conclusion is that, not only is the number of tribes unknown; it cannot
be known! The reason is that there is no agreed definition of tribe.
The bureau of statistics is careful to simply accept what people declare
their tribe to be. Thus there may be three siblings living in the same
house, but one will say he is Maragoli, the other Luhya and the third
Kenyan.
But where did the number 42 come from? I think it was invented by former
president Daniel arap Moi, though not intentionally. In the mid-1980s,
he went on a district-creation frenzy and, by the time he reached number
42, people quickly realised that the new regions were based on tribal
groupings. Thus the notion of 42 tribes was born.
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