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Ethnicity and Leadership in Africa: the ‘Untypical’ Case of Tom Mboya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

David Goldsworthy
David Goldsworthy
Affiliation:
Reader in Politics, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
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Extract

This article seeks to relate a biographical case-study to some ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ ways of thinking about ethnicity. The Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya, who was active in labour and political affairs from 1951 until his death in 1969, was widely regarded as genuinely non-tribalist in his politics. Yet he exercised successful leadership within a political system characterised very strongly, according to a great many observers and participants, by the play of ethnic forces. His would appear to be a strikingly deviant case, and hence may be seen as a useful point of departure for a reconsideration of ideas about ethnic factors in political leadership.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 107 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Because there are no such words as ‘ethnicist’ and ‘ethnicism’ in the lexicon, this discussion will perforce make use of ‘tribalist’ and ‘tribalism’. We are not, however, concerned with ‘tribe’ in its technical sense, i.e. a consanguineous group under a traditional leader such as a chief, having its own territory and political system.

2 An ethnic category is an aggregation of people who share certain basic cultural attributes, notably language, and claim to have a common ancestry and/or region of origin, but who do not engage in corporate political activities. An ethnic group is an aggregation of members of an ethnic category, who are aware of their identity and who actively pursue political, economic, and/or social goals in their presumed collective interest. This usage broadly follows that developed by Cohen, Abner, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: a study of Hausa migrants in Yoruba towns (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Kasfir, Nelson, ‘Explaining Ethnic Political Participation’, in World Politics (Princeton), XXXI, 3, 04 1979, especially pp. 369–78;Google Scholar Cohen, op. cit.; and Enloe, Cynthia H., Ethnic Soldiers: state security in divided societies (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 6Google Scholar.

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4 Ibid. p. 19.

1 Melson and Wolpe, loc. cit. pp. 1122 and 1115.

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1 Mboya, op. cit. pp. 72–3.

2 See e.g. Leys, op. cit. pp. 200–3; Ochieng, loc. cit., and George Bennett, ‘Tribalism in Politics’, in Gulliver (ed.), op. cit. pp. 59–87.

3 Mboya, op. cit. p. 71.

1 The material on which this consideration is based is drawn primarily from Goldsworthy, David, Tom Mboya (London and Nairobi, 1982)Google Scholar.

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1 Choice was still possible in 1951. After the Emergency began, Mboya was moved by the authorities to Bahati, a mainly Kikuyu location, probably to make surveillance easier by grouping him with the other ‘trouble-makers’.

1 Mboya, op. cit. pp. 67–74; also Mboya, Tom, ‘Is African Culture Blocking Progress?’, in East Africa Journal (Nairobi), 1, 10, 03 1965, pp. 26–30Google Scholar.

1 Gertzel, Cherry, The Politics of Independent Kenya, 1963–8 (London, 1970), p. 11Google Scholar.

1 For details, see Goldsworthy, op. cit. especially chs. 14 and 18.

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1 Marx, Karl, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow edn. 1962), p. 225Google Scholar. Any liberal biographer would accept Marx's qualifying clause, and the others which follow it in his text.

3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar, quoted by Smith, Tony, ‘The Underdevelopment of Development Literature: the case of dependency theory’, in World Politics, XXXI, 2, 02 1979, p. 259Google Scholar.

1 Leys, op. cit. p. 60.

2 Furedi, Frank, ‘The African Crowd in Nairobi: popular movements and elite politics’, in The Journal of African History (Cambridge), XIV, 1973, p. 288Google Scholar.

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1 Kasfir, loc. cit. p. 369.

1 Smith, loc. cit. p. 258.

1 Sawer, Marian, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague, 1977)Google Scholar.

2 Hyden, Goran, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: underdevelopment and an uncaptured peasantry (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

3 Kahn, Joel S., Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian peasants and the world economy (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See e.g. Cooksey's, Brian Marxist critique of Hyden, in Review of African Political Economy (London), 19, 09–12 1980, pp. 100–3Google Scholar, and Kenneth R. Young's sympathetic review article on Kahn's book, ‘Non-Capitalist Entrepreneurs in the Modern World System’, in Critique of Anthropology, forthcoming.