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Identity, ‘Foreignness’ and the Dilemma of Immigrants at the Coast of Kenya: Interrogating the Myth of ‘Black Arabs’ among Kenyan Africans

Maurice N. Amutabi, Department of Development Studies, Moi University, Kenya
amutabi@fulbrightweb.org

In this paper, I will problematize the way in which race and ethnic identity have been manipulated at the Coast of Kenya. My argument is that the legacy of slave trade and slavery at the coast of Kenya has produced oppositional identities of ‘African-ness’ and ‘Arab-ness’. In the era of slave trade, slave traders and masters, who were mainly Arabs, were privileged and Africans who constituted the underclass and servants were underprivileged. Because of the prestige associated with being Arab, many of those born out of the African and Arab intermarriage held to the latter identity while rejecting the former. Following this, many coastal people, who are by all means Bantu in outlook and appearance deny their Africanness, regarded as an indicator of former slaves, while fixated on Arab ‘ancestry’ that connects them to former masters. My arguments are foregrounded in postcolonial and postmodern theoretical frameworks where heterogeneity, multiculturalism and hybridity are increasingly emerging as forms of identity. I believe that addressing these critical issues of identity in migration history of Kenya is pivotal in a time in which there are deepening patterns of cultural balkanization, race, and ethnicity and what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” (resentment) or the practice in which one defines one’s identity through the negation of the other - a product of the uncertainty precipitated by the proliferation of difference as a consequence of scarce resources and globalization. Thus, I will show how people have manipulated their race and ethnic identity for political and economic survival; and how Arabism and Islam have increasingly become instruments of recuperating past hegemonic relationships, reviving an oppositional binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ between those of Arab ancestry and African ancestry.