To count or not to count? Insights from Kenya for global debates about enumerating ethnicity in national censuses

Abstract

There is an impasse on the question of whether or not to enumerate identity groups in national censuses, given their potential to variously facilitate dominance and an emergence from marginalisation. In this paper, we theorise the impasse in Kenya as relating to a colonial history of the strategic use of ethnicity to divide and rule; a demographic makeup with both some large ethnic groups and many small ones; and the local social construction of ethnicity, which allows significant latitude for collapse, disaggregation and change of group identities. This case corrects the dominance of Europe and the Americas in census studies and offers insights for assessing the political stakes of counting, namely, the need to bring past and present into conversation; to consider the varied political effects of demography; and to consider the particular significance and meaning of ethnicity and race in context.