The Sikh Statue and the Tiger Mother: Uncomfortable Conversations About Minorities

This was a difficult and uncomfortable one to write. Also in the Business Daily on February 18, 2014 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Sikh-statue-controversy-evokes-thorny-debate/-/539548/2210260/-/x3wc4d/-/index.html

The rather unseemly to-do about a statue put up by Sikhs in Kisumu, and which degenerated into near-fracas a week and a half ago, is interesting and illuminating for many reasons. The one that sucked up the most oxygen was the political angle, for the obvious reason that Raila Odinga had an unpleasant experience at the hands of a crowd in his political heartland. There was also a religious angle, and there have been heated debates about what the contours and limits of religious freedom are in a country whose constitution ostensibly protects this right.

But there was an angle that did not feature in the froth and noise about the statue, but that may have the longest-lasting impact. The economic perspective of the statue dispute is an interesting one, especially in a city like Kisumu and a country like Kenya.

There’s a law professor at Yale University named Amy Chua, who has become extremely famous over the last couple of years because of a book she wrote named ‘The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’. In it, she advocates a tough-love upbringing for children, using her own example of how she brought up extremely competitive children. She also wrote a more recent (but perhaps more dubious) tome extolling certain characteristics as leading to particular communities being successful. She is the toast of the pop sociology circuit, but her first book is perhaps her most important, yet is barely remembered.

‘World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability’ makes for particularly uncomfortable reading. The main thesis of Prof Chua’s 2003 book is that, in many countries and societies, is a group she names ‘market dominant minorities’. She relates the story of her own family, which is ethnically Chinese and mostly settled in the Philippines. The market domination of the Chinese in the Philippines is truly breathtaking – they (a decade ago, at the time of the book’s writing) constituted 1 percent of the population, but controlled 60 percent of the country’s private economy. Prof. Chua uses the story of the brutal murder of her aunt in Manila to explore the issue of ‘market dominant minorities’, and goes on a global tour (including to Kenya) to look at the point further.

Which is where the Kisumu statue comes in. Kenyan Asians in Kisumu run a significant chunk of the city’s and the region’s economy, and are so integrated into the society that Shakeel Shabir has been – unremarkably – voted in twice to Parliament from an area constituency. Growing up in Kisumu in the 1980s, I was schoolmates (at Victoria Primary) with dozens of Kenyan Asians. Many local people work for companies owned and run by the community.

A lot of the conversation about the propriety of the statue, and the events of that weekend – even in polite company – came down to a version of ‘how dare they’. There is an undercurrent of limited acceptance of Kenyan Asians, not just in Kisumu, but also nationally. Prof. Chua’s book situates this phenomenon in a global context. Lebanese in West Africa, Jewish oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia, and the Chinese all over Asia are studied with that lens in mind. The African sections of the book, though, are the ones that hit closest to home (in a literal sense as well). She looks at whites in southern Africa, but also at the ‘Kenyan Cowboys’ and Kikuyu in Kenya; the Ibo of Nigeria; Bamiléké in Cameroon; and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi. She justifiably concedes that the analysis of the indigenous ethnic groups is a more complicated exercise, but that certain perceptions and assumptions have taken hold.

So what does all this have to do with economics? The first and most obvious issue is that, for the Sikh community in Kisumu at least, difficult questions about assimilation have come up. Does the community now keep its head down, concentrate on business and perhaps clam up and become more insular? Can a minority (especially an easily identifiable racial and religious one) ever be fully accepted even after more than a century?

A bit wider is the national and regional question. What were perceived to be ‘settler’ communities were often targeted in the 2007-08 post-election violence, and uncomfortable questions had to be considered before the violence abated. Even blue chip companies began to have ethnic considerations as they planned their labour deployment. Thankfully, those days are behind us, but it’s like a skeleton in a closet that sometimes rattles quietly, but ominously. Regionally, the same question comes up when Kenyans settle and do business in neighbouring countries. Even as protocols and treaties stitch East Africa closer together, resentment does bubble up every so often, aimed at ‘unfairly’ successful Kenyans.

Kisumu, and Kenya, is a remarkably resilient community, and one hopes that the statue controversy was a hot-headed aberration. Whatever the case, though, Amy Chua’s book is one worth reading, if only for the purpose of framing questions one would rather not ask.