World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [56]
Meanwhile, the so-called “Kenyan Cowboys,” or “KCs,” try to maintain the legacy of Happy Valley. Fun-loving, decadent, bafflingly immature, these young men and women are stuck in a time warp, somewhere in the heyday of British colonialism. While the great majority of Kenya’s roughly 31 million blacks struggle to survive on less than two dollars a day—45 percent are unemployed—the KCs spend their days sipping tea and playing bridge, polo, or cricket. Weekends, they go on safari. In the summer they jet set to Europe. The rest of the time they frequent anachronistic private clubs like Nairobi’s Muthaiga Country Club, where their predecessors amused themselves in the 1930s by swapping wives, throwing gramophones out the window, or shooting bullets into the stuffed lion still displayed in the hallway. The KCs strive to carry on this tradition, mainly through drinking and such activities as putting “butter pats on the carnations on the dinner table and throw[ing] them up at the ceiling to see if they will stick.” Although discrimination against Africans and Asians officially ended in the 1960s, the Muthaiga Club’s membership remains predominantly white. All the staff are black.
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In addition to wealthy white former colonialists, Africa is also full of successful and in some cases market-dominant African minorities. This often comes as a surprise to Americans, who, because of the reality of our own inner cities, tend to associate “African” and “minority” with “poverty” and “economic backwardness.” But throughout Africa, for usually hotly disputed reasons, some indigenous ethnic groups have consistently prospered more than others.
Kenya’s Kikuyus, who are concentrated in the fertile Central Province and the capital city Nairobi, provide a typically complicated example. The Kikuyus are a minority in the sense that they represent roughly 22 percent of the population. On the other hand, out of Kenya’s approximately forty African ethnic groups, the Kikuyu are numerically the largest. (Kenyans do not use the term “ethnic group,” preferring instead the English word “tribe” or its Swahili equivalent kabila.) Next in size are the Luhya, with around 14 percent of the population, the Luo (13 percent), and the Kalenjin (12 percent).
As is often the case with ethnic statistics, however, these figures are somewhat misleading because there are cross-cutting cleavages within ethnic groups as well as complex, opportunistic relations between members of different ethnic groups. The Kalenjin, for example, comprise several smaller groups; President Moi belongs to one such group, the Tugen. Similarly, the Kikuyu, the powerful group of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, embraces two highly competitive factions: the Kiambu Kikuyu and the Nyeri Kikuyu.
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Despite these important qualifications, it remains the case that the Kikuyu view themselves, and are perceived by other Kenyans, as a distinct and distinctly successful group. Before colonization, Kikuyu territory stretched from Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya. The British expropriated their land in order to produce cash crops (especially tea and arabica coffee), at the same time displacing nomadic groups like the Kalenjin, the Turkana, and the Maasai. Forcefully evicted from their homes, the Kikuyu became laborers and domestic servants on European farms or found employment in the cities. Many Kikuyu believe that as a group they suffered disproportionately under British colonization. Many non-Kikuyu disagree. In any event, as early as the 1920s, while the country was still under British