| The Mijikenda Union: Ethnic Politics on the Kenya Coast, c. 1940-1980 |  Printable version
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Date: Friday 13 May 2011
Time: 15.30-17.00
Place: Room 3A06, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52,
Leiden.
Speaker: Prof. Justin Willis, Durham University
Discussant: Dr Jan-Bart
Gewald, African Studies Centre
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
In many respects, the Mijikenda Union had an inglorious history.
Created in 1944 by a small group of urban workers, it had a fitful and
contested institutional existence, punctuated by financial scandal and
lengthy periods of inactivity. The eventual banning of the Union in 1980
was something of a non-event and was achieved without protest or
resistance. But the Mijikenda Union was successful in the most basic of
ways. When it was founded, the term 'Mijikenda' was a novelty, an
ethnonym created in pursuit of the Union's core aim, namely to promote
unity among the 'nine tribes' of the southern Kenya coast. By the 1960s,
both the ethnonym and the notion that this was a clear political
constituency had become commonplace in the 'high politics' of the
independent Kenyan state and in the 'deep politics' through which
aspiring leaders were mobilizing support at a very local level.
Recent scholarship on ethnicity in twentieth-century Africa has
challenged the 'constructivist' hypothesis, arguing that culture set
limits to colonial projects of ethnic invention initiated by officials,
missionaries and African 'culture brokers'. This reflects a wider trend
in Africanist scholarship, questioning previous arguments on the
overwhelming impact of colonial rule, and emphasizing instead that there
has been a profound continuity from pre-colonial to post-colonial
African societies. This seminar uses the story of the Mijikenda Union to
argue that, while culture clearly did set limits to invention, colonial
rule established a powerful set of imaginary contrasts which had a
profound impact on the way people on Kenya's coast talked about
ethnicity and governance, particularly in the febrile political
atmosphere of the final years before independence.
Justin Willis is Professor of History and Head of Department at Durham
University. He has worked for long periods in Kenya, as Assistant
Director and then Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa,
and has published widely on the history of the region. This seminar
paper is an extension of work first undertaken in the 1980s as part of
his PhD and is supplemented by recent research supported by the British
Academy.
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