Githae Githinji on Life in Kenya

Recorded in Tatu City, outside Nairobi, on 12 June 2023, Tyler Cowen questions Githae Githinji — a transport businessman and Kikuyu elder — on running his matatu business, resolving disputes as chairman of the local council of elders, and the economics and customs of daily life in Kenya.

Key ideas

1. Dispute resolution runs on the threat of exclusion, not punishment. As chairman of the local council of elders, Githinji settles property disputes, violence, and domestic disputes by talking them through. The only sanction is removal from the group — no interaction, no business, with anyone in it — until the person returns and apologises.
2. Male initiation still runs at real scale. He describes coordinating the circumcision and initiation of 350 boys in a single intake at Githunguri Primary School, followed by ten days of supervised healing and a parent seminar the following year to check on each boy’s behaviour.
3. Family size has roughly halved within a generation, on economic rather than sentimental grounds. His father had eight children; young Nairobi couples now want two or three, a shift he attributes to what a family can afford to raise today — while still rejecting the extreme of a single child, on grounds of risk.
4. He treats tradition and modern institutions as complementary, not opposed. He welcomed the devolution of government to the counties as bringing government “nearer to the people”; he uses mobile money despite its taxes; community policing under Nyumba Kumi works alongside elders in identifying troublemakers. His own line falls at online shopping, which he leaves to younger people.
5. His move from Mukurweini to Ruiru traces the logic of Kenya’s rural-to-urban drift. He left home for “good pastures” and stayed once he had a job and a plot of land. Asked directly to compare, he is unambiguous that life near Nairobi is more convenient.
6. He names employment as Kenya’s one defining problem, raised repeatedly and unprompted. Asked what the world should know about Kenya, what would fix the slums, and what should change in government, his answer converges each time on jobs — not politics, not culture, not the constitution.
7. He is transactional, not sentimental, about foreign involvement, and unhesitating about who counts as Kenyan. He welcomes Chinese and American investment for the employment it brings, is unequivocal that a child born in Kenya to Indian parents is Kenyan, and remains warm about Barack Obama’s 2015 visit — while declining to characterise the diaspora experience he has no first-hand knowledge of.

Content

Running a transport business

Githinji owns matatus — the shared minibus taxis that carry most of Kenya’s commuters — and other small commercial vehicles, which he hires out rather than drives himself: ‘I don’t. I own… I employ people who do that job. I manage my business.’ His hiring test is narrow and practical: a valid licence and the required government documents, plus sobriety. ‘Sober, I mean, you can’t employ some others who are drunkards, who can cause lot of things. You have to look for somebody who is a little bit educated, who knows responsibility. Or a person who can handle that vehicle itself.’ Rising petrol prices squeeze the business directly, because he cannot pass the cost on to riders who ‘don’t have money’ — he absorbs it instead.

Dispute resolution and the authority of an elder

Githinji’s path to the chairmanship ran through the elders’ own structure: he joined the local grouping of wazees (elders), was initiated into it, and became active enough that the group made him their chairman. What he resolves covers property disputes, violence between men, and domestic violence — ‘we sit down, talk it out.’ Asked what he offers that the courts do not, his answer is respect rather than force: once someone is told ‘you are a man now,’ he owes his elder a hearing. The mechanism that enforces this has no physical component. ‘When I call you, when I tell you “Come and we’ll talk it out,” with my group, you cannot say you cannot come, because if you do, we normally discipline somebody. Not by beating, we just remove you from our group.’ Exclusion is total — ‘any business, anything with the other community’ is closed off — which gives it teeth in a community where business relationships run through the same network.

He draws a firm line around the family, though. A dispute between husband and wife is left to the family first — ‘we don’t interfere so much’ — unless the family itself asks the elders to step in. Even then, the most common trigger, drunkenness escalating into domestic violence or adultery, is something he says the elders would ‘normally leave… to the family.’ Githinji connects his standing as an elder to his Catholic faith rather than treating the two as separate: ‘When you are near to God, you are near to people also’ — a claim he offers as the source of the respect his role depends on.

Initiation, ceremony, and raising boys into the community

Beyond adjudicating disputes, the elders run the coming-of-age structure for Kikuyu boys, alongside the wider Gikuyu-Embu-Meru community (GEMA). Githinji describes the scale directly: ‘last year… in Githunguri, here in Githunguri Primary School… we had 350 boys whom we initiated.’ Qualified doctors perform the circumcision; the elders talk the boys through the rite of passage and then stay with them for ten days until healed. The intervention does not end there — the following year the elders convene a seminar with the parents to follow up on the boy’s behaviour, and step in directly if he starts drinking or otherwise misbehaves. The age is fixed by the school calendar: boys are initiated on finishing Standard 8, just before starting secondary school.

Family size, marriage, and the economics of children

Intermarriage across ethnic lines is unremarkable to Githinji — ‘a Kikuyu is allowed to marry a Kamba’ — and there is no fixed marriage age beyond a firm rule against old men marrying children. The steepest change he reports is in family size: his father had eight children; young families in Nairobi today prefer two or three, which he explains through cost rather than taste — ‘we don’t much get 10 children, which you won’t be able to look at after.’ He rejects the opposite extreme just as directly: a single child leaves a family with nothing if ‘accidents do normally happen,’ so two or three is the safer number. Grandparents still help raise children even in smaller families, and geography does not sever the tie — families separated by distance reunite over the holidays, travelling by bus or by car to spend two or three days together before returning to work.

Funerals follow a similar logic of voluntary contribution rather than fixed obligation. The scale is the family’s choice, but ‘most of the times for the funerals, the communities chip in,’ with no fixed amount and no dispute over who gives what: ‘Nobody decides. You give what you have.’ Asked whether this ever produces disputes he has to judge, Githinji says simply, ‘No… In this country of ours, we don’t do it like that.‘

The cost of living and the shape of the local economy

Githinji attributes Kenya’s rising cost of living to two forces working together: a changing climate reducing rainfall and food for a population that still depends on it, and rising petrol prices that ripple through everything, transport most directly. He is candid about the limits of his own understanding of the causes — ‘I don’t know whether it’s because of the population… I don’t know whether it’s because of the development’ — and locates the remedy outside his own hands, split between prayer for good rains and government action to ‘regularize these prices.’

His own adoption of technology has a clear edge. Mobile money is now routine for him despite the tax on transactions, but online shopping is not: ‘Me, I’m a little bit analog.’ That gap is generational — young people order vehicles, kitchenware, and building materials from abroad, which he leaves entirely to them. Across several separate questions — what ails the slums, what the rest of the world should know about Kenya, what would help most — his answer converges on the same word: employment.

Kenya among its neighbours, and who counts as Kenyan

Githinji welcomed the devolution of power to the counties, because it moved government ‘nearer to the people’ than the national government had been, and he is equally clear that elders do not contest government decisions: ‘We don’t force them to do things, we depend on what they tell us.’ Instability across the border unsettles him without drawing him in — ‘I do worry, but definitely, I can do nothing, because we don’t know why those people are fighting… I prefer to mind my own’ — though he says he would help mediate if he could reach the parties.

He is unsentimental but positive about foreign investment: Chinese-built roads and industries at Tatu City, and American projects, both register with him chiefly through the jobs they create for unemployed young people. On long-settled Indian-Kenyan families, his standard is birthplace, stated without qualification: a child born in Kenya ‘is a Kenyan… You’re not supposed to be chased by anybody.’ Obama’s 2015 visit still registers as genuine warmth — ‘we see our brother who has gone somewhere and become a great person’ — but he declines to generalise about Kenyans living in America or Britain, since he has never travelled and has no relative there to ask.

See also

• Githae Githinji — speaker; transport businessman and Kikuyu elder
• Tyler Cowen — host