Tensions, Confrontations, and Consensus: WhatsApp Use in Kenyan Electoral Politics

Social media has enhanced culturally grounded debates and ethnicity-based exclusionism during Kenya's WhatsApp group deliberations. These practices are often more pronounced during elections when WhatsApp becomes a social media platform of choice for various groups. Exclusionism takes at least two vectors. On the one hand, tensions and confrontations emerge as electoral deliberations proceed. On the other hand, consensus on WhatsApp spaces also emerges during the electoral deliberations as in-groups forge common ground. To analyze the splits in elections-based deliberations on WhatsApp, the article starts with an interrogation of how history and culture inform the Kenyan people's use of WhatsApp space for electoral deliberations. Among others, the people use the platform to resolve perceived and real political injustices perpetrated in the society by previous governments, resulting in tensions and confrontations. The article argues that the origin of the tensions is the fact that most African people have dual "citizenship," whereby they simultaneously belong to their ethnic communities while being part of the broader Kenyan nation. It theoretically engages Ekeh and Langmia to argue that the people concurrently fall into the primordial publics and civic publics, leading to dialectical tensions, confrontation, and consensus between the two categorizations. These tensions, confrontations, and consensuses spill over into the WhatsApp groups, with electoral deliberations registering the peak in these splits. The case of the Bungoma County and its linkage to the broader Kenyan nation serve as the site for empirical data. The method for data collection is qualitative. The article uses participant observation and face-to-face interviews to investigate how the people's historical and cultural values inform their use of WhatsApp space during electoral deliberations. The findings reveal how the people's historical and cultural values shape their use of WhatsApp space. The implication of the research is to explore the African people's cultural adaptation of technology and to invite more Afrocentric theorization on technology adaptation in African societies.