The only form of knowledge about ethnicity that officially and permanently attaches to individuals in Kenya is the register of citizens kept by the National Registration Bureau, which issues ID cards. In this chapter, I briefly trace the history of the ID card in colonial labour control practices (not civil registration), but focus on the deeply ambiguous role of ethnicity in registration over recent years. I show how there is a disconnect between the lack of a place for ethnicity in law or regulation surrounding IDs, yet its continued presence in practice. I then examine several cases of minority ethnic community leaders engaged in what I call ‘code seeking’, where they successfully lobbied for recognition as ‘tribes of Kenya’ as a path to securing ID cards – de facto proof of citizenship for people otherwise stateless. However, I also show that other people, in this example, the Galje’el people, a sub-clan of Somalis, have not been and likely will not be successful with this strategy. This chapter draws our attention to the benefits of both classification and vagueness, while remaining vigilant about their risks.

This chapter examines efforts to list Kenya’s ‘minorities’ and ‘marginalised communities,’ categories in the 2010 constitution entitled to affirmative action in government representation, resource distribution and public service employment. These are the first classifications with allocative consequences since colonial times. I examine how these terms are operationalised in legal cases, by government Commissions, and by civil society. I show the impossibility of arriving at a fixed list and illuminate myriad strategies for responding to competing political demands for status. These are quintessential examples of cultivated vagueness. I show how this enables both generosity in conferring special status and its application in divisive ways. I use three cases of code seeking – Nubian, Wayyu and Sakuye peoples – to further illustrate both how vague codes have become and how politically salient they are. I examine both the limits of classification in this space and explore ways to make them work to benefit marginalised people. I conclude with some alternatives to classification for remedying marginalisation.

This chapter introduces the supposed problem of ethnicity: that it undermines national cohesion, or is a colonial hangover with no appropriate place in political life. In contrast, I argue that ethnicity is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable; its political effects depend on how it is known and used, and our understanding of how it is known remains underdeveloped. I establish that there is no definitive list of Kenya’s ethnic groups, and we must stop taking for granted what we think we know about ethnicity. I offer the concept of cultivated vagueness – a widespread aversion to resolving the ambiguity of lists of Kenya’s ethnic groups – to understand how ethnic knowledge works and to contrast it with legibility and governmentality. Cultivated vagueness is the response from bureaucrats, civil society, citizens and the state to the conundrum that ethnic knowledge is both common sense and impossible to settle. It also explains how ethnic classifications serve both projects of division and of pluralism. I suggest that attention to the benefits of cultivated vagueness may facilitate the advancement of the latter over the former. The chapter outlines the book’s methodology and chapters.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.

Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of political belonging and the making of political communities by looking at how validation but also contestation are framed at the local and regional levels. By tracing the competing definitions of the notion of ‘seniority’ across time and actors in chieftaincy disputes, I evidence that seniority is used as a central notion on which power depends. The competing criteria to establish seniority have been used to construct new political communities with alternative allegiances. The most recurring and enduring principles across time and scales to construct political communities appear to be those related to indigeneity, oral tradition and genealogy. In order to emphasize the scalar logic at play, the chapter emphasizes the similarities in the narratives appearing at the regional level (Ewe-speaking southeast Ghana) and the local level (in the dukɔ of Dzodze), and will trace this logic from the 1910s to the 2010s, based on the Commission of Enquiry chaired by Sir Francis G. Crowther in 1912. This chapter will therefore look at power dynamics and disputes between Anloga, Dzodze and other dukɔwo in southeast Ghana in the first half of the twentieth century.