Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.

This chapter examines the enumeration of ethnic populations in the census, where ‘the tribe question’ has been included since 1948. I trace its evolution – from its origins as self-evidently important with a self-evident list of groups – through numerous changes up to 2019. The powerful social imaginary of ‘42+ tribes’ comes from the 1969 census, despite the numerous changes since then. I show how changes in classifications over time, as well as the way they have been used and narrated by the state, reveal the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting ethnicity. In the colonial period, this centred on ethnic population distribution to support indirect rule via ethnicity, as well as tax collection and labour control. In the postcolonial period, ethnic demographic posturing for electoral purposes or ‘the tyranny of numbers’ became a major driver of interest in ‘the tribe question’. However, since 2009, the census has also been a site of recognition for minorities and of the painting of a portrait of a nation defined by its diversity. In this chapter, I also show how the quintessentially unambiguous nature of ethnic census codes has been rendered ambiguous in useful ways.

This concluding chapter offers some final reflections on the nature of knowledge about ethnicity in Kenya. I argue that if the nature of this knowledge is purposefully vague and makes ethnic categories polyvalent, then the best way to protect against problematic uses of ethnic knowledge is vigilance. This is far less satisfying and reassuring than law or rights as a framework for governing the risks of diversity, but it is far more appropriate, and I briefly consider what this might look like. Finally, I look forward to the digitisation of Kenya’s population register and aspirations to establish a population knowledge architecture so sophisticated that it could render numerous registers interoperable and ultimately replace even the census. I reflect on the nature of ethnic classification in such an architecture and argue that it would lose all the qualities that have made it amenable to solidaristic and pluralistic purposes thus far, while amplifying all its dangers.