This archive report was first published on 23 September 2019.
On September 23, 2019, a mixed-race couple in Kenya captured the nation's attention with a story that had all the makings of a thriller: a billionaire, a mystery man, and a murder.
When the billionaire went missing, his wife was arrested, and the social media chatter reached a fever pitch. But as the story unfolded, the focus shifted from the crime itself to the ethnic identity of the wife, with the hashtag #Kikuyu woman trending on Twitter.
However, this was not an isolated incident. In Kenya and Nigeria, it's common to blame entire ethnic communities for crimes committed by individuals, without considering the thousands of people from those communities who have been killed in conflicts.
Richard Jenkins, a scholar from Sheffield University, argues that ethnicity does not cause people to do good or bad things. He posits, 'Ethnicity doesn’t always explain what people do, not even when they insist it does.' This is because ethnicity is a historical construct, constructed by social processes, and is 'neither natural or inevitable.'
So, why do we assign criminality or negative attributes to entire communities? Understanding socialization helps. Many people who commented on the story admitted that their parents had taught them negative stereotypes about other communities, often based on hearsay or unmet individuals.
Socialization plays a significant role in shaping our attitudes and behaviors. We learn to classify people based on characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, or religion, and often internalize stereotypes at a young age. These stereotypes can build into actual discrimination and exaggerate the influence of ethnicity on people, while underestimating the influence of people on ethnicity.
Assigning a crime to an entire community or characterizing them as morally suspect is known as 'othering.' This can be helped along by assigning emotions like fear to legitimize injustices. What can help? Early socialization of children to balanced information about different ethnic groups, addressing inequalities and inequities between ethnic groups, and promoting values that emphasize pluralism.
Is it possible to change values, beliefs, and attitudes that are deeply entrenched in society? Researchers have established that disrupting one aspect, such as violent behavior or insulting language, can alter the values held by society. By doing so, we can assign criminal activity to individuals and hashtags will bear individual names, not ethnic communities.
Wairimu Nderitu is the author of Beyond Ethnicism, Mukami Kimathi: Mau Mau Freedom Fighter, and Kenya: Bridging Ethnic Divides.
