Growing Beyond the Pull of the Tribe in Kenya

But when the students graduate, they, their teachers and their parents worry that they won't find well-paid jobs without tribal connections.

Inside the offices of Alliance High, Khaemba, the principal, leaned back into the cushions of a worn sofa. Members of his Luhya tribe routinely burst through his door and request jobs, he said. Sometimes a parent comes in, asking for a child to be admitted to the school and mentioning some distant tribal tie.

"No one knocks in this place," complained Khaemba, a jovial and frank man with neatly trimmed black hair. "If I am their tribe, I'm going to be expected to give them a job. The stress of the old ways of doing business, I tell you!"

Khaemba, a former math teacher, recalled a time under British rule when only whites were allowed to go to school. Later, he said, only Kikuyus received the best slots in schools. Then, he said, showing a visitor a list of students dating back to the 1940s, other tribes started to be admitted, including his own.

"I tell those who ask that I just can't pick them based on a favor my relative owes them," he said. "It has to be on merit."

His office was decorated with the names of students who have gone on to Harvard and Oxford. "The schools are supposed to be this device to bring equality," he said. "If it weren't for schools, I wouldn't have made it."

The Kenyan teachers union is currently scrutinizing teachers and principals with a view to ethnic balance. In recent years, Khaemba has dedicated a few of his Saturday talks with the students to the issue of tribes and hiring.

"It's a problem we are all dealing with," he said as he sipped milky Kenyan tea.

After accusations that she was hiring too many members of her own tribe for the janitorial staff, the principal at State House Girls, Sarah Ndege, stopped talking about her tribe altogether.

In the school magazine, her biography includes the statement: "She does not wish to indicate where she was born, preferring just to say she's a Kenyan."

"How many more generations will it take for this tribalism stuff to go away?" Ndege asked recently. "I think we need to start somewhere so the young generation just puts it away."

Tugged in Two Directions

At State House Girls School during lunch on a recent day, seniors from different tribes discussed their ambitions and anxieties. They said they felt tugged in two directions: toward the desire to succeed at the job of their choice through grades and seemingly endless standardized tests, and toward the pull of their families to honor tribe and tradition, to go back home, marry and work at whatever job they find for the community's benefit.