Castro and Vero: Cementing Kenya's Plutocracy in Marriage

Raila Odinga's son Fidel Odhiambo Castro has just married Veronica Wangunyu, a beautiful lass related to the Kenyatta family. It was a source of excitement but equally of supressed 'aahs'. The question asked in whispers was, how could Agwambo's son marry from a family of his political nemesis the Kenyatta's and by extension the Kikuyu? Did I hear one mention Delilah? Well, such suspicions and grunts of disapporoval fail to recognise one thing; that tribal tensions in Kenya are more vertical than horizontal. The Kenyan political elite largely belong to the same class where the source of friction is not tribe but that very class. For Agwambo's son to marry from the Kenyatta family thus does not in any way point to the detribalisation of Kenyan social or political life among the Kenyan youth as Agwambo's statement seemed to suggest. The marriage simply undelined the nature of Kenya's pluctoracy now being expressed in various other institutions such as the family.