Indigenous People in Africa: Contestations, Empowerment and Group Rights

5. Constitutional reform and minority exclusion

85 Indigenous People in Africa: Contestations, Empowerment and Group Rights Constitutional reform and minority exclusion ThecaseoftheBajuniandLamucounty Dr Paul Goldsmith INTRODUCTION Kenya is going through a sustained transition from a highly centralised state to a political order based on a new federal constitution. For the nation’s aggrieved minorities the shift offers hope that devolved governance and the new constitution’s provisions to address historical injustices will lead to political integration and a more equitable stake in the national economy. The process of governance reform, however, is also accompanied by state policies promoting large-scale foreign investment in infrastructure and exploitation of the region’s natural resources, including newly discovered oil and natural gas reserves. The Kenya equation at this point in time is one that pits entrenched interests at the centre against the forces of reform that are critical for social integration on the nation’s periphery. This chapter examines this thesis by presenting a case study of the Bajuni, a subsection of the northern Swahili population,1 by assessing the contest between the constitutional reform process and factors sustaining the inferior status of minority communities and indigenous peoples in post-independence Kenya. The case study subsumes a tale of two colliding vectors – constitutional reform and international human rights protocols versus the power of states and international capital. We begin by contrasting disconnects between historical dynamics on the coast and the modern narrative driving minority exclusion. This establishes the context for documenting issues that threaten the Bajuni and their smaller indigenous neighbours with cultural extinction: land alienation, insecurity, economic malaise, anti-terrorism securitisation policies, and a new port complex in Lamu that is catalysing an avalanche of settlers from outside Kenya’s Coast Province. The new port to be built in Magogoni is the centrepiece of the Lamu-Southern Sudan Transport (LAPSSET) corridor project, which also entails road and rail links to Ethiopia and Sudan, an oil refinery, an international airport and planned settlements in the form of ‘tourist 5 86 Africa Institute for South Africa Constitutional reform and minority exclusion | Dr Paul Goldsmith cities’ in Lamu, Isiolo and Turkana counties. The project is catalysing massive in-migration, threatening to complete the marginalisation of Lamu District’s indigenous inhabitants, and heightening the prospect of these groups’ cultural extinction over the coming years.2 After decades of stasis and political acquiescence, the Bajuni and their neighbours are beginning to fight for their rights. Encouraged by Kenya’s new constitutional dispensation, they are also looking to the UN charter for indigenous peoples and other international protocols to protect their interests in the face of external capital investment and state policy support for extractive industries. Kenya’s shift to a federal system also represents a strategy for buffering the centrifugal influence of identity politics driving conflicts across the greater Horn of Africa region. The resurgent forces of ethnic and sub-regional nationalism are here to stay,3 and the case study will also reflect the relationship between state sovereignty and political legitimacy within the international political order.4 THE REGIONAL HISTORICAL BACKDROP The traditional Bajuni homeland extends from Kismayu in present-day Somalia to the Lamu archipelago in Kenya. The Lamu region, considered by many to be the cradle-land of the Swahili language, is home to a number of diverse communities.5 Like the Miji Kenda and Digo, Bajuni oral traditions trace their origins to the predominantly Bantu settlement of Shungwaya. The first mention of the Bajuni in the historical records appears in a document authored by a scribe who refers to them as an unruly and rambunctious group who entered the Lamu area around the same time as the Portuguese arrived.6 The Swahili are a cosmopolitan society emerging out of centuries of multicultural interaction. The littoral of eastern Africa provided the template for a co-evolutionary process, fusing ethnically and racially diverse communities into a hybridised population sharing a common cultural, linguistic and religious orientation. This resulted in a culturally unified society but highly fragmented polity historically dominated by a number of city states or sultanates ranging from Mogadishu in Somalia to Kilwa in southern Tanzania. Urban settlements prospered through a combination of trade links with other Western Indian Ocean societies and symbiotic relationships with diverse inhabitants of the coastal hinterland.7 Coastal settlements were vulnerable to periodic incursions from the sea, and invaders from the interior also threatened the position of the region’s city states.8 The architecture of towns and their location...