The Country Faced During Independence

It can encourage the development of political parties based on clan, ethnicity or region, which may base their campaigns and policy

According to many researches PR provides better representation for racial and sexual minorities. The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act in USA leaded to increase in number of Black and Latino members in House (Guinier 1994). Due to increase of representation, PR in turn inspires minority communities to activate and win access to authority.

Ethnicity has always been seen as a factor that helped bring people in a certain community together. In earlier years, ethnicity was nothing more than just identity that people were proud of. However times have changed and the silver lining that was in ethnicity has begun to fade and in some areas, it has completed ceased to exist. Today, ethnic ambitions have continuously replaced the patriotism of people to a nation further dividing their loyalties to their nation (Manyasa, 2005:69). Tribal orientations and ethnic labels have taken over in most of African states. In such cases, a person is first loyal to their ethnic group and then second comes the nation. This is a scenario that has been seen to impact on development. That is to say, both negative and positive ethnicity has an effect on development. Unfortunately, negative ethnicity tends to be more pronounced. As it is well known, development is a multi-faceted process that can be hampered by several factors.

The leader is an elected or nominated monarch. Men and women can vote at the age of 18. Kenya is currently led by Uhuru Kenyatta. The population is 45,925,300, that’s over 73 times the population of Vermont. On average, every woman gives birth to three children and the infant mortality rate is 38 for every 1,000 live births. For children who survive into adulthood, they are expected to live for 64 years. Most people in Kenya speak either English or Kiswahili. The majority of the population is Christians but there are also a lot of Muslims that live in Kenya. There is an overwhelmingly high poverty rate in Kenya, as of 2005 it was 45.9%. For people who do have jobs, most of them work in the agriculture industry, working in plantations that grow; tea, coffee, corn, wheat, and sugarcane.

Today Kenya is troubled in a political sense, as was proved by the violent and uncontrolled elections of December 2007, in which somewhere around 1,000 people were killed and over 300,000 made homeless ("Kenya Profile") Targeted ethnic violence directed towards the Kikuyu people, the community that the controversially elected president Kibaki belonged to. Although Kenya has had surprising political stability despite having issues like at one point having only one legal political party, alliances and disagreements begin with tribal loyalties and disagreements. This history implies that tribal identity is more important than creating national identity in a country where the notion of tribal identity is challenged by western government systems. Just as political issues and violence arose from detrimental demarcation of boundaries, the corrupt political leadership during colonial regimes created a weak and dependent economy.

Jomo Kenyatta, son of Muigai and Wambui, was born as Kamau Ngengi in the 1890s into the Kikuyu community that dwelt in an area of cane and pasture for cattle within the central part of Kenya (Kariuki, 2015). His birth date was, however, uncertain because birth records were absent at that time plus his parents were illiterate. His family comprised of farmers who grew crops and bred cattle mainly sheep and goats and that explained their source of wealth. He was brought up by the traditional custom of his community and taught the skills essential for looking after the family cattle. Kenyatta would, later on, become an anti-colonial activist and politician who worked hard to change Kenya via negotiation and change of political arena in spite of being detained because of the Mau Mau rebellion which he was accused of championing and the reason behind his imprisonment.

Kenya is a diverse and multicultural country with over fifty different tribes each with their own distinct language. Kenya consists of three main ethnic groups; the Bantus, Nilotes and Cushites. These three groups all have different religious and cultural practices (“Cultures of The World, Kenya”). Although diverse, Kenya is mainly constituted of Bantus with the majority of them coming from the Kikuyu tribe. Other major groups include the Luo, Maasai and Kalenjin.

The situation became even more complex when the British colonial administration introduced a currency-based income tax system. For centuries, the Kenyan economy had largely rested on the exchange of livestock and other goods. With this in mind, it should come as little surprise that such a drastic shift put native Kenyans in a rather precarious position. Since nearly all “acceptable” currency rested in the hands of colonists, many Kenyans were forced to leave their reserves and work as hired hands on the farms of white settlers, essentially becoming squatters on their own ancestral lands

The Republic of Kenya is a country situated on the coast of Eastern Africa with a last recorded population of 41,070,934 in 2011 (Internet World Stats). Kenya is considered to be a less economically developed country, meaning that it is suffering conditions of extreme poverty, ongoing and widespread conflict, extensive political corruption, and lack of political and social stability.

In the first section of this paper I will discuss the historical background of Kenya, including its early economical success in

In this essay I am going to discuss the Kenyan war that has emerged in 1963 due to long-lasting grievances about bad treatment from British colonial isolation and ethnic Somali in Kenya irredentism drive to unite all other five Somali lands with Kenya into a greater Somalia. The issue of British colony had otherwise been much less to do with this war, the main reason to war was that of irredentism by Somalis. This conflict went on as Somalis resisted from being governed by a dark skinned government of the Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta while at the same time seek unity. Somali seek independence at the expense of Kenya. Somalia wanted to be in power to rule a unified

Ethnicity was a major factor in the colonization of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia and still has a large impact on LDCs today. The different ethnicities or regional, political, economic and cultural factors were often manipulated by the European rulers to contrivance a ‘divide and conquer’ technique and hegemony in the LDCs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of ethnicity in LDCs in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia on contemporary politics. First, a brief overview of the importance of ethnicity is addressed. Second, a brief discussion of the colonial rulers used ethnicity to their advantage is provided. And, in conclusion, this paper will conclude the overall role of ethnicity in the LDCs in Africa, Latin

If there is one thing that African political scholars can agree on is that the nature of African democracy is without a doubt a complex subject to explain and conceptualize, primarily due to the fact that the continent is made up of fifty-four independent countries, each unique in their societies, people, cultures, language, leaders and governing processes. However despite this difference in African states there is a shared fundamental understanding for the need for democracy in order to establish peace and stability within these societies. Another shared sentiment in the African continent is the role of national elections in the process of democratization. Although elections are not always free and fair and at times create an environment for violence and instability, through elections, African nations and their citizens have been able to establish more democracies today. For the African people elections symbolize a period in which they can actively participate in this process and see to establishing democracies through engaging in political pluralism. However, It’s no secret that elitism is homogenous to African societies, elites represent key figures in the democratic process and are deep influencers of policies that bring about inequalities that often result in conflicts with different groups. Furthermore, for many ‘Big Men’ in Africa, elections have become merely a symbolic spectacle for democracy, exercised as a means by which to gain legitimacy and international

The sun never sets on the British Empire,” Great Britain often bragged. By 1914, about 85% of the earth’s surface was colonized by Europe. The following essay will analyze the social, political, cultural and religious impacts of colonisation on Kenya by the British Empire from 1920-1963 during the second wave of colonisation. Colonisation is a term derived from the Latin word colere, which means "to inhabit". It is simply the forming of a colony by a group of individuals who seek to build new territories, usually a country is colonized for their goods but also for the colonizer to gain power.

Although Kenya is a multicultural nation, the fact that the Kikuyu tribe holds a numeric advantage over other groups makes it possible for this people to be able to impose their authority