C.L.R. James Lecture, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, September 22, 2008.
Let me begin by thanking the African Studies Advisory Board for inviting me to give this year's C.L.R. James Lecture. This is a great honor indeed, mindful as I am of the man after whom the lecture is name, the legendary C.L.R. James, one of the great revolutionary intellectuals of the twentieth century. And I am delighted at the opportunity this has afforded me to reestablish contact with an old colleague, Professor Celia Nyamweru, my former Dean at Kenyatta University. I would also like to thank President Dan Sullivan and his wife Ann for hosting a wonderful dinner and reception for me this evening.
At the beginning of this year Kenya was very much in the international news because of the violence associated with the disputed general elections of December 27, 2007, which left nearly 1,000 people dead and 600,000 displaced, and threatened the very survival this proud nation so painstakingly crafted ever since that day of great euphoria, December 12, 1963, when the British imperial flag was hauled down and the Kenyan independence flag hoisted. As the crisis raged, the political and economic gains the country had made since the ‘first' independence of decolonization and the ‘second' independence of democratization seemed to wither in this violent maelstrom.
Bewildered Kenyans were filled with a sense of shock and shame, as others mustered the will and wisdom to salvage their country's fortunes and future. In the end, having stared into the abyss, the country pulled back, the political class conceded to save the nation through the formation of a coalition government. What happened and why? My argument is very simple: the crisis that erupted following the disputed 2007 elections is rooted in Kenya's colonial and postcolonial histories; it reflects the intertwined challenges of development and democracy; and represents simultaneously the failures of, and the struggles for, the construction of a developmental democratic state from the debilitating burdens of colonial underdevelopment and despotism and postcolonial developmentalism and dictatorship.
Predictably, as a historian, my analysis seeks to map out the trajectory of Kenya's political economy over time that led to the tragic events mentioned above. I begin with a brief outline of the legacies of British colonialism in Kenya, whose structural underpinnings and ideological parameters were inherited by the postcolonial state. Then, I examine, again sketchily, the modes of governance and development during what I would call the period of authoritarian develomentalism in postcolonial Kenyan between 1969 and 1992. Finally, I will focus on the changes and contradictions ushered by neo-liberal developmentalism and democratization since 1992. Throughout, I will try to put Kenya in the context of wider trends in African and global histories for the obvious reason that the country is an integral part of both, notwithstanding of course the specificities of its historical trajectory.
The Political Economy of Colonialism and Its Legacies
Colonialism was, fundamentally, an economic enterprise that required political execution and ideological justification. Thus, any meaningful analysis of colonialism and its legacies in Kenya or elsewhere has to examine the nature and dynamics of colonial capitalism, the colonial state, and colonial ideology. Their construction simultaneously entailed the coercive impositions, countervailing resistances, and subsequent articulations of European and African systems and structures, institutions and ideas, positionalities and practices, demands and dreams, out of which emerged the particularities of colonialism in each territory.
The colonization of Africa, incubated out of the new imperialism of the late 19th century, was broadly driven by the needs of the industrial capitalist countries to find markets for manufactured goods, outlets for investment, and sources of raw materials; and conditioned in different African regions by more specific dynamics, what I have termed in my study, A Modern Economic History of Africa, the imperatives of finance capital in North Africa, merchant capital in West Africa, mining capital in Southern Africa, and speculative capital in Central and Eastern Africa. Typically, colonial economies were extraverted (export-oriented), monocultural (reliant on a narrow range of commodities), disarticulated (their sectors were disconnected and suffered from uneven productivity), and dependent (dominated from outside in terms of markets, technology and capital). They were not designed for the sustainable development of colonial societies. This does not of course mean that they did not transform the economic systems of these societies: new modes of production and social relations were established that were to have a profound effect on subsequent African history.
The colonial state was the midwife of colonial capitalism. It was a conquest state, established through physical violence and maintained through political violence. Created as an appendage of the imperial state, the colonial state was peculiar in that it enjoyed only some of the crucial attributes of the modern state and could not exercise many of its imperatives. As a conquest state its hegemony was excessively coercive so that it enjoyed little legitimacy. Also, its territoriality was ambiguous, its sovereignty disputed, its institutions of rule, legal order, and ideological representation were all extraverted and embedded in metropolitan practices and traditions, and its revenue base was weak. Charged with the onerous tasks of creating or promoting colonial capitalism, linking the colony to the metropole, and consolidating colonial rule, it is not surprising that the colonial state was both very interventionist and fragile, authoritarian and weak, and it exercised domination without hegemony, all of which ensured its eventual downfall much sooner than the colonizers had anticipated. Remember, Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta was born before Kenya was colonized in 1895 and outlived colonial rule by 15 years.
Predictably, to its architects colonialism was not depicted as the violent seizure of other peoples lands and societies. Rather, it was justified in the more noble names of civilization and pacification, and later when such patently racist discourses were discarded in the barbarities of the Nazi holocaust and the Second World War in the seductive terms of development and modernization. Colonial rule gave rise to the racialization and ethnicization of colonial society, divisions between the colonizers and colonized and among the colonized. The colonized were denied the rights of citizenship because of race, and subjected to traditions of so-called ‘tribal' custom often invented by colonialism itself. Thus, colonial despotism sought to create ethnic identities or to give fluid social and spatial identities ethnographic purity that did not exist previously as instruments of divide and rule. As Mahmood Mamdani has noted in his book, Citizen and Subject, the colonial state ordained and enforced so-called customary traditions that had the least historical depth and which were monarchical, authoritarian and patriarchal.
Colonial economies, states, and ideologies were of course diverse because of the differences among the European imperial powers and the African societies they colonized. The dynamics and nature of political, economic, and sociocultural change were determined by each region's precolonial economic, political, social, cultural, religious, and gender systems, as well as the length and extent of its contact with Europe, dynamics of resistance against colonization, and the presence or absence of European settlers. This has led several scholars to place African colonies into different categories. First, there is the tripartite division of Africa developed by Samir Amin: the Africa of the labor reserves where Africans were primarily expected to provide labor for European colonial enterprises; the Africa of trade where African produced the bulk of commodities traded by colonial companies; and the Africa of concession companies where chartered companies enjoyed economic and administrative control over African labor and produce. Second, there is Thandika Mkandawire's typology distinguishing between rentier and merchant economies, in which surpluses were extracted from rents from mining and taxes from agriculture, respectively. Third, there is the distinction often drawn between settler and peasant economies, in which production was dominated by either peasants or European settlers. Under these typologies, colonial Kenya could be considered as a labor reserve economy, a merchant economy, or a settler economy.
Using the latter categorization explains much about colonialism in Kenya and its legacies. Settler colonialism was characterized by several features: the exclusion of competition (settler control of key economic resources including land, allocation of infrastructure, banking, and marketing at the expense of the indigenous people); the predominance of the migrant labor system (which allows the costs of reproducing labor power to be borne in the rural reserves); generalized repression whereby direct and brutal force is used regularly; and the close intersection of race and class, in which as Frantz Fanon stated, ‘you're rich because you're white, you're white because you're rich'.
In most settler societies, the violence of the conquest state and the bifurcations of colonial society were particularly acute. In such societies the colonized people faced onerous exclusions from economic and social opportunities including cash crop agriculture, stabilized wage labor, access to education, and political representation. Consequently, they were forced to wage protracted liberation wars, and after independence they faced the challenges of how to democratize the state and particularly customary power, deracialize civil society, promote African accumulation, and restructure unequal external relations of dependency.
Kenya's history as a settler colony is too long and complex for this presentation. Suffice it to say the colonial political economy can be divided into three phases. First, from the 1890s to World War I when colonial infrastructures, institutions and ideologies were laid in the face of what historians call primary resistance (i.e., resistance against colonization). The period was characterized by the development of settler agrarian capital built on the backs of massive land alienation, coercive proletarianization, varied patterns of peasantization despite efforts at marginalizing peasant production, the growth of Asian and European merchant capital, the construction of new spaces and structures of colonial socialization-the segregated colonial towns and schools, and the creation of racialized social hierarchies.
This was followed by the interwar period characterized by the consolidation of the colonial order and the rise of new challenges against it by the landless squatters, impoverished workers, and restless indigenous elites, which were reinforced by the disasters of the Great Depression and the Second World War, which fatally undermined the promises of colonial capitalism and the supremacy of the colonial powers, respectively. From these disruptions emerged a changed colonial order in which the settlers who had expanded their production and power were pitted against the swelling armies of squatters desperate for land, peasants clamoring for access to lucrative cash crops and marketing opportunities. The expanded and increasingly militant labor force became more differentiated with the introduction of import substitution industrialization and the growth of trade unionism, and elite protest found political muscle in mass nationalism. Kenya, like much of colonial Africa, had entered the final phase of colonial rule-decolonization.
African nationalism had a dual face: it was a struggle against European rule and hegemony and a struggle for African autonomy and reconstruction, a drive to recapture Africa's historical and humanistic agency. It was woven out of many strands. Ignited and refueled by the specific grievances of different classes, genders, and generations against colonial oppression and exploitation, it also drew ideological inspiration from diverse sources, local and transnational, traditional and contemporary. If the nationalist movement constituted the primary institutional vehicle for nationalist expression and struggle, decolonization was the immediate objective. It cannot be overemphasized the nature and dynamics of African nationalism were exceedingly complex. To begin with, the spatial and social locus of the ‘nation' imagined by the nationalists was fluid. It could entail the expansive visions of Pan-African liberation and integration, territorial nation-building, or the invocation of ethnic identities. Secular and religious visions also competed for ascendancy.
Articulated and fought on many fronts-the political, economic, social, cultural, and discursive-the development of nationalism of course varied from colony to colony, even in colonies under the same imperial power, depending on such factors as the way the colony had been acquired and was administered, the presence or absence of settlers, the traditions of resistance, the social composition of the nationalist movement and its type of leadership. The nationalist movements encompassed political parties and civic organizations, trade unions, peasant movements, women's movements, religious and cultural movements, and youth movements each of which waged its struggles using methods, tactics, and spaces that were both separate and interconnected. It is the very plurality of the nationalist movements that often sowed the seeds of postcolonial discord as independence removed the lid of unity for the disparate elements struggling for uhuru.
In Kenya, the nationalist struggle was dominated by the liberation war popularly known as Mau Mau waged from 1952 to the end of the decade by the Land and Freedom Army, although the military phase had peaked by 1955. The war was triggered by colonial state intransigence and refusal to address demands for reform. Failing to stem the rising flames of nationalist rage, as manifested in the Mombasa and Nairobi general strikes of 1947 and 1950, respectively, and growing signs of rural revolt the colonial state declared a state of emergency in October 1952. Concentrated in Central Kenya where the oppressive and exploitative effects of settler colonialism were most concentrated, the Mau Mau struggle was dominated by disposed squatters and poor peasants, found support among radical urban trade unionists, and attracted the active participation of many women and youths.
The emergency was declared in order to preserve colonialism in Kenya, but, ironically, the settlers, the custodians of that very regime, were the first to be sacrificed. Soon, the Mau Mau fighters also found themselves left in the lurch, denied the right to inherit the political kingdom. In other words the emergency generated new social and political processes that destroyed the basis of settler power, restructured the class and institutional bases of the colonial state, and altered the balance of class forces, so that both the settlers and the armed freedom fighters, the protagonists in the political crisis of 1952, became marginalized by the time of Kenya's independence in 1963.
The war was brutal and left behind deep scars that were to haunt postcolonial Kenya. Tens of thousands of workers and squatters were deported en masse from Nairobi and European farms to concentration camps and compulsory villages, where a horrific regime of torture and forced labor led to many deaths, maiming, and even castration and insanity. Caroline Elkins claims in her Pulitzer award winning book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya that tens or even hundreds of thousands died, far more than the 11,000 admitted in official records, and the British sought victory by trying to detain almost the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5. At the height of the war, it became clear to the British government, which deployed more than 50,000 troops, that reform was imperative.
A watershed year in Kenya's tortuous road to independence was 1954. Not only was it the year of the draconian repatriations, it also saw the birth of several programs that in their various ways embodied new state policies, which reflected, and further shaped, the underlying structural changes in Kenya's political economy that would set its postcolonial path. The Swynerton Plan, for example, provided the funding and rationale for a program of capitalist land reform and removed the remaining restrictions against African production of lucrative cash crops. The beneficiaries were the ‘loyalists' who became targets of the Mau Mau fighters. The long-term effect was to entrench capitalist agriculture, intensify rural differentiation, and increase landlessness among the poor peasants. Under the Lyttleton Constitution the process began towards greater African political representation, which only whetted the appetites of the nationalist to demand more power.
In 1960, the principle of African independence was finally accepted, although the next three years were marked by intense political struggles and negotiations over Kenya's political future. It was during this period that political factionalism began to rear its ugly head that would haunt postcolonial Kenya. At the root of this factionalism, which became less ideological and more ethnic and regional, lay the conjuncture of approaching independence in a society suffering from acute uneven development. Uneven development in Kenya, as in other colonies, corresponded to, and was intersected by, regional, ethnic, and class factors. In spite of the emergency-in fact, because of it-the Central Province, populated mostly by the Kikuyu, had continued its relatively fast level of development.
This ensured that the Kikuyu petty bourgeoisie, numerically the largest in the country, would be central to any post-colonial dispensation. But during the emergency, political leadership of the nationalist movement had passed on to a leadership that was predominantly Luo, the second largest nationality in Kenya, inhabiting a region that was also significantly penetrated by colonial capitalism, albeit in different forms. By the time the emergency was lifted and Kikuyu leaders were allowed to reenter politics, Luo leaders such as Mboya and Odinga were sufficiently entrenched not to fear for their positions and influence, although the overall scope of leadership conflict was broadened, thus making it more intense and open.
The same could not be said of the Rift Valley and the coastal regions where colonial capitalism was less developed and their petty-bourgeois classes were much smaller and more vulnerable at the national level. The Kalenjin peoples of the Rift Valley lived in close geographic proximity to the so-called White Highlands bordering their areas. They feared not only the possibility that the Kikuyu would override these claims but also that they might ‘colonize' their areas, especially now that there were tens of thousands of landless Kikuyu agitating for land. The official anti-Kikuyu propaganda of the emergency merely served to inflate these fears. The Kalenjin and other smaller ethnic groups sought to protect their interests by campaigning for regionalism, for federated rather than centralized government.
Underlying the broader regional cleavages, there were local social, economic, and political divisions that provided the basis for local factional and leadership rivalries and future inter-ethnic and inter-regional political realignments. In fact, both KANU and KADU, formed following the Lancaster House Constitutional Conference in 1960, were basically loose coalitions with weak central party machinery, so that almost from the beginning they were given to internal political splits and realignments. The fact that these parties were formed in the midst of the transition to independence meant that there was not enough time to consolidate the party structures and therefore institutionalize the inter-party competition. Hence the relative ease with which KADU dissolved itself into KANU in November 1964.
The Political Economy of Authoritarian Developmentalism
Decolonization was undoubtedly a great achievement for colonized peoples, one of the monumental events of the twentieth century. As in much of Africa, at independence euphoric Kenyans were full of great expectations. They had achieved one of the five of the historic and humanistic tasks of African nationalism: decolonization. With the demise of apartheid in 1994 African nationalism across the continent could claim to have achieved its first agenda. What about the other four agendas-nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration? On these, as the populist saying goes, the struggles continue.
The pursuit of the nationalist agendas of development, democracy, and self-determination were motivated, and simultaneously constrained by, the legacies of colonialism. Reviled as it was, colonial history could not be wished away, its structural and ideological tentacles cast long shadows over the new states. The challenges of independence included the search for political stability and democracy, economic development and self-reliance, and social advancement and equality.
Economically, colonialism left behind underdeveloped economies characterized by high levels of uneven development and external dependency, which fostered regional and ethnic tensions and made them extremely vulnerable to external pressures. Politically, the newly independent countries faced the challenges of nation-building-how to turn the divided multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-racial cartographic contraptions of colonialism into coherent nation states; the democratization of state power and politics-how to wean the state from its deeply entrenched colonial authoritarian propensities; and national development-how to build national economies without colonial despotism. Independent Africa's record of performance in pursuing the dreams of uhuru is extremely complex and uneven across postcolonial periods, countries and regions, social classes, economic sectors, genders and age groups, which fit neither into the unrelenting gloom of the Afro-pessimists or the unyielding hopes of the Afro-optimists. What can be said with certainty is that postcolonial Africa has undergone profound transformations in some areas and not in others. Many of the tentacles of colonialism have been clipped, but others remain as intractable as ever.
Nation building continues to pose challenges. While the majority of African countries have retained the integrity of their colonial boundaries, many have had difficulties in forging nations out of them. Several have even been wracked by conflicts and wars. The project of turning colonial state-nations into independent nation-states exhibits palpable contradictions: both state and ethnic nationalisms are probably both stronger than at independence. These identities and the struggles over them eclipse the Pan-African nationalisms within the continent and with the diaspora, although the latter are experiencing renewal in the thickening circuits of regional mobility and integration schemes, transnational migrations and globalization including the emergence of new African diasporas. Thus the dreams of regional integration have been compromised on the stakes of nation-building, but are currently stirring more vigorously than before.
Development remains elusive amidst the rapid growth of the early post-independence era, the debilitating recessions of the lost structural adjustment decades, and the recoveries of more recent years. The African population is much bigger than at independence, currently stampeding towards a billion despite all the continent's trials and tribulations; it is more educated, more socially differentiated, and more youthful than ever; it is better informed thanks to the recent explosion of the media and the information technologies of the internet and especially mobile phones, a market in which Africa currently boasts the world's fastest growth rates, indeed double that of the rest of the world. And democracy is cautiously emerging on the backs of expanding and energized civil societies and popular struggles for the ‘second independence', notwithstanding the blockages, reversals, and the chicaneries of Africa's wily dictators adorning ill-fitting democratic garbs.
In the 1960s the new independent countries were characterised by statism-the growth of state power-and driven developmentalism the pursuit of development at all costs. The intensification of statism after independence was accentuated by the underdeveloped nature of the indigenous capitalist class and the weak material base of the new rulers. The state became their instrument of accumulation. It is also important to remember that the legitimacy of the postcolonial state lay in meeting the huge developmental backlog of colonialism, in providing more schools, hospitals, jobs and other services and opportunities to the expectant masses. So after independence the postcolonial state was under enormous pressure to mediate between national capital, foreign capital, and the increasingly differentiated populace. It was a juggler's nightmare, and the leviathan often tripped.
State intervention in the organization of the economic, social, cultural, and political process intensified as the contradictions deepened and became more open. The monopolization of politics by the state was justified in the glorious name of development. In Joseph Ki-Zerbo's inimitable phrase African populations were admonished: ‘Silence, Development in Progress!' Economic development became the raison d'etre of the state as well as its Achilles heel. Developmentalism and development planning attained the sanctity of religious rituals. But like many such rituals, the plans increasingly lost touch with reality. As the crisis of growth and accumulation intensified globally from the 1970s, the postcolonial state assumed a progressively more precarious and openly repressive character.
Kenya escaped the fate of many of its neighbours such as Uganda, Ethiopia, and Somalia that underwent coups, civil wars, and in the case of Somalia the complete implosion of the state. Living in such a dangerous neighbourhood, its star shone brighter than it really was, for Kenya became increasingly authoritarian from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. The processes and patterns of political and economic change in postcolonial Kenya show both similarities and variations from the general African trends. After independence the seeds of democracy sown by the nationalist struggles wilted before the stubborn legacies of the despotic colonial state which its authoritarian postcolonial heir inherited virtually unchanged.
The KANU government moved quickly to centralize the state apparatus: regionalism was abolished in 1964; a republican constitution was promulgated, followed by the abolition of the senate two years later. The new ruling class gradually consolidated immense power in the hands of the executive. The civil service bureaucracy on which the post independence administration depended was dominated by personnel drawn from the loyalist elements first recruited into government during the emergency. Besides the civil service many other colonial institutions such as the army, police, and judiciary were left intact, some with Europeans holding key positions. Such continuities signified the political opportunities and restraints provided by Kenya's decolonization.
Clearly, the struggle over state power intensified as the centrifugal forces of nationalism jostled for a share of the fruits of uhuru. KADU's dissolution and absorption into KANU marked the beginning of the slide to the one party state, which was accelerated by the bitter disputes between radicals and conservatives over the direction of the country's political economy. The radicals, organized around Vice-President Odinga, pushed for an aggressive program of distribution of settler lands to the landless, nationalization of the major means of production, especially foreign-owned enterprises, the provision of free social services including education and health, and the adoption of a more progressive non-aligned foreign policy, all measures which the conservatives around President Kenyatta found anathema.
Matters came to a head when Odinga resigned as vice-president in April 1966 and formed a new party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU). In the "Little General Election" of May 1966 the KPU was trounced. Only nine members out of its 29 members of parliament managed to retain their seats. The government used the state machinery to harass the KPU leaders, who were portrayed as unpatriotic, subversive, and ‘tribalistic'. The fact that seven of the nine were Luo certainly did not help matters, nor did the defection of the Mau Mau hero, Bildad Kaggia, from the KPU in August 1969 together with virtually the whole of the rest of the KPU's Kikuyu leadership. Two months later Odinga and all the KPU leaders were arrested. Three days later, at the end of October, the KPU was banned.
The banning of the KPU not only turned Kenya into a de facto one-party state, it also silenced the radicals, and ruptured the Kikuyu-Luo alliance forged in the heady years of decolonization in the late fifties and early sixties. Broadly speaking, the struggles between the various factions of the political class between 1964 and 1970 were indicative of the disintegrating alliance that had been formed between the restive petty bourgeoisie and disaffected masses in the struggle for independence. New alliances were now emerging, primarily between the landed capitalists, many of whom had been loyalists, the expanding bureaucratic and managerial classes, and those peasants who benefited from the land resettlement schemes-in short, all those who stood to gain if the state used its powers to confirm rights to property acquired during and after the emergency or wished to break into areas of accumulation formerly reserved for European settlers and Asians.
No wonder KANU leadership, representing this class alliance, increasingly became basically conservative or moderate in its political orientation and economic policies. By 1970 the dominance of this new ruling class was firmly established, although that did not mark the end of intense factionalism within the political class. As the parameters of national political discourse and parliamentary debate narrowed and lost their ideological edge, ethnic mobilization and contestations assumed greater salience. This is to suggest that authoritarian developmentalism required the suppression of economic and class solidarities and struggles that could threaten the material interests of the political class seeking to accumulate their way into a hegemonic national bourgeoisie.
Despite the drift to authoritarianism, in the first two decades of independence Kenya enjoyed the reputation of a stable country with a rapidly growing economy. The truth was far more complicated. I would argue that since independence the Kenyan economy has undergone four phases in terms of development policy. In the first decade of independence official development policy was termed ‘African socialism', as outlined in Sessional Paper no 10 of 1965, a term used more as a sop to the radicals who were then still influential. The policy called for the development of a mixed economy and its Kenyanization, although the framework was undoubtedly capitalist. The state not only encouraged domestic and foreign private enterprise but also created large public sector corporations and invested heavily in the physical and social infrastructure. The growth rates were high, averaging 6.6% between 1963 and 1973. But by the early 1970s it had become clear that growth by itself was not a panacea for the intricate problems of economic development as evidence mounted that regional and social inequalities, poverty and unemployment persisted and, in fact, were deepening.
Meanwhile, globally an economic crisis erupted bringing to an end the long post-war boom. The struggle between the developed and developing countries for a New International Economic Order intensified. Growth and redistribution on a world scale entered the international political and economic agenda. It was in this context that Kenya adopted the policy of ‘redistribution through growth' in the 1970s, which entailed pursuing rapid growth through increased investments to meet the basic needs of the poor including those in the informal sector. But the basic needs strategy did not survive for long. It was jettisoned in the face of the recessions that hit the world economy and engulfed Kenya in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It once became fashionable to lay more emphasis on growth than redistribution.
The two policy regimes coincided with Jomo Kenyatta's presidency. By the time of Kenyatta's death in 1978 a national bourgeoisie had emerged, even if its hegemony was limited by the deepening crises of development and democracy. The Kenya of 1978 was vastly different in its social character from the Kenya of 1963. Settler influence on social life had all but disappeared. The Africanization of the former White Highlands was unmistakable. The rates of growth and development continued to vary between and within regions along the hierarchies of class, gender, and generation. The Central Province maintained its economic dominance, even as it failed to settle the old landless from colonialism and the new landless generated by the postcolonial expansion of commodity production some of whom found refuge in, or were channeled to, the Rift Valley, thus sowing seeds of later conflicts. The pastoral regions remained peripheral, and the centrality of the coast to the country booming tourism and transportation industries did not mitigate the marginalization of its people.
Thus the Kenya of 1978 was a capitalist Kenya, more extensively so than the Kenya of 1963. Agriculture, commerce, and industry had all expanded, and indigenous capital had become completely dominant in the first sector, was preponderant in the second, and beginning to raise its stakes in the third. The agrarian bourgeoisie had expanded and consolidated itself, just as the class of poor and landless peasants had grown. Manufacturing production had increased, and so had unemployment. In the meantime, the nationalization of the Kenyan economy was accompanied by its internationalization. Thus the dynamics of internal uneven development and integration into the world capitalist system had deepened. It was under the reign of President Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta, that the contradictions of authoritarian dependent capitalist development became more evident and explosive.
Under the Moi presidency authoritarianism scaled to new heights. Following the attempted coup of 1982, a constitutional amendment was passed making Kenya formally a one-party state. The centralization of power intensified as associational space shrunk; KANU was revitalized, the security apparatuses were strengthened, and a personality cult created around the president. Civil society organizations with any oppositional potential were banned outright, muzzled by draconian laws, or tamed by being incorporated into KANU, a fate that befell, respectively, ethnic associations such as the once powerful GEMA (Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru Association), the weakened trade union movement, COTU (Central Organization of Trade Unions), and the women's movement, Maendeleo ya Wanawake. Not even the once vibrant growers associations escaped as the Moi regime banned or reorganized farmers' unions. Only religious groups and a few professional organizations such as the Law Society of Kenya escaped the tightening noose of tyranny.
As social movements were driven underground, KANU was turned into a powerful weapon to discipline members of the political class themselves, and a dreaded mechanism of patron-client dispensations of resources. Enforcing the deteriorating political order were emboldened security organs of the state, especially the dreaded police agency, the GSU (General Service Unit) and intelligence service, the DSI (Directorate of Security Intelligence). The Kenyan state was transformed from what some have called the ‘imperial presidency' under Kenyatta to ‘personal rule' under Moi, whose often incoherent and paranoid utterances were dignified by his intellectual sycophants as a philosophy-‘Nyayo philosophy'.
The Moi presidency coincided with the bleakest period in postcolonial African history, the era of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that created the conditions, unintended by the architects of these programs of course notwithstanding their retrospective claims to the contrary, for the resurgence of struggles for the ‘second independence'-for democratization. The introduction of SAPs reflected the conjunction of interests between fractions of the national bourgeoisie that had outgrown state patronage and global capital that sought to dismantle the post-war fetters of Keynesian capitalist regulation. This is to qualify conventional analyses of SAPs in Africa as conspiracies against the continent: SAPs were welcomed by fractions of the African capitalist class and were applied in the core capitalist countries themselves. The relatively harsher consequences of SAPs for Africa and other countries in the global South reflected the enduring reality that economically weaker countries and the poorer classes always pay the highest prices for capitalist restructuring.
The rise of SAPs reflected the global ascendancy of neo-liberalism and the decline of Keynesian economic policy-making, and was boosted by the rise to power of conservative, ‘free' market-oriented governments in the leading industrial economies from Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in the United States, Kohl in Germany, and Mulroney in Canada. SAPs were pursued with missionary zeal by the international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and imposed on the developing countries experiencing difficulties with their balance of payments. Many African countries found themselves in that situation as their external accounts deteriorated thanks to the oil shocks of the 1970s, declining terms of trade, and mounting internal problems of accumulation. The SAPs called for currency devaluation, interest and exchange rate deregulation, liberalization of trade, privatization of state enterprises, and withdrawal of public subsidies, and retrenchment of the public service; in short for a minimalist state and extension of the market logic to all spheres of economic activity.
The results were disastrous for African economies. Structural adjustment failed to stem the tide of stagnation or even decline, and stabilise and return these economies to the path of growth and transform their structures. If anything, structural adjustment became part and parcel of the dynamic of decline in African economies. Initially, the Fund and the Bank dismissed the difficulties that were evident as temporary. As the problems persisted, the blame was shifted to African governments and the behaviour of their supposedly corrupt, rent-seeking elites who were allegedly reluctant to reform and give up their ‘illicit' privileges accumulated under the old interventionist model of development that encouraged the flowering of growth-retarding patronage and clientelist systems. By the 1990s it had become clear that SAPs were deeply flawed in conception and execution, and they had little to show, that it made little sense to apply the same lethal medicine on countries of vastly different economic experiences and ailments. Kenya's economic growth rate went from 6% in 1973 to 4% in 1990 and 0% in 2000.
Structural adjustment not only failed to deliver economic development, it bolstered authoritarianism in so far it was often imposed with little parliamentary let alone popular participation. The SAPs reinforced the triple crises of legitimation, regulation, and sovereignty for the postcolonial state, on the one hand, and fuelled struggles for fundamental transformation, on the other, culminating in the crusade for the ‘second independence'. Structural adjustment did not introduce state monopolies of production and power; in fact, it sought to tame it, but it could only be implemented by authoritarian states. The miseries of the two lost decades of structural adjustment engendered new struggles for democracy and development, as the increasingly pauperised middle classes and the working masses rose in defiance against the tottering leviathan, as reenergised old and new civil society organizations emerged from underground, as opposition parties resurfaced from the political wilderness.
Towards A Democratic Developmental State?
The road to democracy in Africa has proved long and arduous. In 1990, all but five of Africa's 54 countries were dictatorships, either civilian or military. By 2000, the majority of these countries had introduced political reforms and had become either democratic or were in the process of becoming so. The African transitions to democracy from the late 1980s were quite varied and characterized by progress, blockages, and reversals. The actual mechanisms and modalities of transition from dictatorship to democracy took three broad paths.
First, there were countries in which opposition parties were legalized and multiparty elections authorized through amendments to the existing constitutions by the incumbent regime. This pattern was followed mainly in one-party states in which the opposition forces were too weak or fragmented to force national regime capitulation and the regimes still enjoyed considerable repressive resources and hegemonic capacities. Second, there were countries where the transition to democracy was effected through national conferences in which members of the political class and the elites of civil society came together to forge a new political and constitutional order. Finally, there was the path of managed transition pursued by military regimes, which tried to oversee and tightly control the process and pace of political reform. Kenya fell into the first category.
Debate on Africa's democratization processes and prospects has centered on four interrelated issues, namely, the relative roles of (1) internal and external factors; (2) historical and contemporary dynamics; (3) structural and contingent factors; and (4) economic and political dimensions. Suffice it to say, a comprehensive understanding of democratization in Africa would have to transcend these dichotomous analyses. Clearly, the struggles for democracy in the 1980s and 1990s represented the latest moment of accelerated change in a long history of struggles for freedom, an exceptionally complex moment often driven by unpredictable events and new social movements and visions, anchored in the specific histories, social structures, and conditions of each country, in which national, regional, and international forces converged unevenly and inconsistently, and economic and political crises reinforced each other, altering the terrain of state-civil society relationships, the structures of governance, and the claims of citizenship.
Fundamental to the question of democracy in Africa have been different conceptions and visions of what democracy means and entails. Again, this need not detain us here, except to point out that the views range from minimalist conceptions of liberal democracy, emphasizing competitive electoral processes and respect for civil and political rights, to maximalist notions of social democracy embracing material development, equality and empowerment, and respect for the so-called three generations of rights: civil and political, social and economic, and development or solidarity rights.
Five prescriptive models can be identified in the writings of African political thinkers and leaders, what I call the nativist, liberal, popular democratic, theocratic, and transnational models. The first, seeks to anchor democracy in traditional institutions of governance; the second limits democracy to multiparty politics and periodic electoral contests to promote the trinity of good governance-efficiency, accountability, and transparency; the third, advocates basing both the political and economic domains on democratic principles; the fourth, invokes religious visions and discourses about political transformation and organization; the fifth, offers seeks the reconstitution of African states through their regionalization to meet the challenges of both colonial balkanization and contemporary globalization.
The transition to democracy in Kenya started at the turn of the 1990s with the resurgence of civil society organizations. These included non-governmental organizations, many supported by western donors, that had emerged to address the social crises engendered by structural adjustment; religious movements both old and new encompassing the three major religious traditions in Kenya-Christianity, Islam, and the traditional religions; the women's movement coalesced around new organizations such as the League of Kenya Women Voters and the National Commission on the Status of Women, all formed in 1992, that espoused more radical feminist agendas; and the youth movement that tapped into the frustrations and aspirations of what Mshai Mwangola calls the Uhuru Generation (UG), which was not ‘fixated on the recovery of the lost promises of uhuru,' as was the Lost Generation (LG) that came off age after independence and was marginalized by the Lancaster House Generation (LHG) that brought independence, but looked ‘forward to implementing its unrealized potential.' The youth movement encompassed groups and activities ranging from youth wings to vigilante groups and student activism on university and college campuses.
It was in this climate that the opposition political parties emerged. They were comprised of disaffected renegades from KANU keen to regain their access to the spoils of state power, civil society activists committed to reforming the political system, and underground militants ready to challenge the regime openly. The three groups sought restorative, reformative, and transformative agendas, respectively. As the struggles for democratization intensified, western donors rediscovered the virtues of good governance and minimalist democracy and sought to channel the process by increasing political conditionalities for loans prior to the elections of 1992 ad 1997 and tempering the demands of the opposition during electoral intervals. Although the opposition won the majority in both elections, President Moi was returned to office with 36.3% of the vote in 1992 and 40.1% in 1997 because the splintered opposition had fielded several candidates.
The failure to dislodge KANU from power in the two elections showed the limits of the civil society organizations and opposition parties. But KANU's concession to multiparty politics and revision of key constitutional provisions demonstrated their increasing strength and the crumbling of the authoritarian order. The pro-democracy movement suffered from the lack of clear objectives, failure to articulate a unifying ideology, crisis of leadership, inability to mobilize and retain devoted followers, and dependency on external resources which compromised their autonomy and made them vulnerable to state attacks on their ‘patriotism'. More specifically, the opposition parties were riven by factionalism, ethnocentrism, and the egotistical ambitions of their founders, and debilitated by low levels of institutionalization, internal democracy, shortages of resources, and the inability to define distinctive party policies and programs. This proved perilous in the face continued dominance of the ruling party and its capacity to harass, intimidate, co-opt members of the opposition, and sponsor ethnic clashes to undermine the appeal of multiparty politics and terrorize opposition supporters. In 1992 ethnic clashes ravaged the Rift Valley and in 1997 the coastal province.
In the 2002 general elections, the opposition parties banded together into National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which finally dislodged KANU from office, bringing to an end nearly 40 years of KANU rule. Kenyans were electrified by the possibilities of the new era: by the tantalizing possibilities of constructing a new democratic developmental state. The early signs seemed promising as political and civil freedoms expanded and the economic stagnation of the Moi years receded; the country's economic growth rate jumped from 0.6% in 2002 to 6.1% in 2006. Buoyed by this robust growth, the government unveiled its ambitious Kenya Vision 2030, a development blueprint to turn Kenya into a newly industrializing ‘middle income country providing high quality of life for all its citizens by the year 2030.' This represented the fourth phase of postcolonial Kenya's development strategy that sought to reprise the ambitions of the first two and redress the lessons of the third.
But the euphoria did not last, for the social and structural deformities of the postcolony remained as entrenched as ever. Although the next five years saw the growth of both democracy and the economy, the marriage between democracy and development remained unfulfilled. The chickens came home to roost following the disputed elections of December 2007 and the violent aftermath. When the presidential election results were hurriedly announced the night of December 30, declaring the incumbent President Kibaki the winner over the main opposition leader, Raila Odinga of the ODM (Orange Democratic Movement), election observers expressed surprise, the opposition cried foul, riots erupted, and the country teetered on the brink of an unprecedented crisis. The elections had promised to achieve an extraordinary development: unseating an incumbent president through the ballot box after only five years in power. This would have been unprecedented in Kenyan history, and is rare in Africa where incumbents typically serve the constitutional two terms and some even try to rig their way into illicit third terms.
The contest between the octogerian Mr. Kibaki and the flamboyant Mr. Odinga represented a generational struggle for power. It is one of the ironies of contemporary Africa that countries that have enjoyed political stability since independence such as Kenya, Malawi, and Senegal, are still ruled by the nationalist generation that brought independence, while the countries with more turbulent histories have long made the generational transition. In this sense, the Kenyan election was a referendum between the older and the younger generations, between Mshai's LHG and LG. President Kibaki and his PNU (Party of National Unity) run on this economic record, while the opposition claimed it could achieve even faster growth unadulterated by corruption. One sought continuity, the other promised change. In reality, there was little difference in the programs of the PNU and ODM and their contending presidential candidates.
As is often the case in such contexts, the absence of policy differences was more than made up by the personality and symbolic differences of populism in which Mr. Odinga bested the president. The contestation between continuity and change in the elections partly reflected the glaring mismatch between growth and development, both socially and spatially, and tapped into deep yearnings for a new socioeconomic dispensation, a restless hunger for broad-based development frustrated by neo-liberal growth. Kenya's economic recovery from 2002 largely benefited the middle classes rather than the workers and peasants. Even among the middle classes, the benefits flowed unequally between those in the rapidly expanding private service sectors rather than in the retrenched and decapitalized public sectors, which has been under assault since the days of structural adjustment in the 1980s. For many Kenyans, therefore, the economy may be doing well, but they are not.
If the economic growth after 2002 stoked expectations of development, the unequal distribution of wealth thwarted those expectations and engendered popular frustration, while democracy gave a new vent to express the frustrations. Anti-corruption discourse, the widespread popular distaste against corruption was both real and rhetorical in so far it reflected disgust at actual corruption scandals and invoked deep disaffection among many Kenyans who felt left out of the rapidly growing economy, a critique of rising economic class inequalities. In the authoritarian past there was no political alternative to the one-party state, now the discontented electorate could transfer its hopes for development to the opposition, even if the investment in the opposition did not promise to yield different dividends.
But class is not a reliable predictor of political loyalties and voting behavior even in the so-called developed countries. Often far more powerful are the constructed identities of ethnicity or race. This is not simply because politicians mobilize ethnicity for electoral purposes, which they do and Kenyan politicians are notoriously adept at playing the ethnic card. Rather, general elections are performances played out on two different levels: elections for members of parliament are local or regional political events, elections for the president are national events. The former tend to be characterized by intra-ethnic or intra-regional contestations in which members of the same region or ethnicity compete and lose to each other, while in the latter electoral competition and behavior mutate into inter-ethnic or inter-regional contestations. Thus, while many politicians lost in their own constituencies among their ‘own' people, it was the presidential election that inflamed regional and ethnic passions.
Media reports on the Kenyan elections and post-electoral violence blamed them on the proverbial ‘tribalism' of African politics. The enthnicization of politics in Africa or Kenya is not a reflection of some atavistic reflex, or simply the result of elite political manipulations or primordial cultural affectations among the masses, even if the elites do indeed use ethnicity and the masses are mobilized by it. Imagined ethnic and national histories are of course not about the past, but the present; they are part of the discursive and political arsenal for claim making in the present and for the future. As we have learned from African studies, we need to distinguish between ‘moral ethnicity', that is, ethnicity as a complex web of social obligations and belonging, and ‘political ethnicity', that is, the competitive confrontation of ‘ethnic contenders' for state power and national resources. Both are socially constructed, but one as an identity, the other as an ideology. Ethnicity may serve as a cultural public for the masses estranged from the civic public of the elites, a sanctuary that extends its comforts and protective tentacles to the victims of political disenfranchisement, economic impoverishment, state terror and group rivalry. In other words, it is not the existence of ethnic groups (or racial groups) that is a problem in itself, a predictor of social conviviality or conflict, but their political mobilization.
Ethnicity in Kenya is tied in complex and contradictory ways to the enduring legacies of colonial and postcolonial uneven regional development. The ethnic narrative of Kikuyu-Luo rivalries tends to ignore a simple fact that not all Kikuyus are dominant and not all Luos are disempowered. Colonial, neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalisms have bred class differentiations within communities as much as they have led to uneven development among regions. In other words, Kikuyu and Luo elites have much more in common with each other than they do with their co-ethnics among peasants and workers who also have more in common with each other across ethnic boundaries than with their respective elites. This is a reality that both the elites and the masses strategically ignore during competitive national elections, because the former need to mobilize and manipulate their ethnic constituencies in intra-elite struggles for power, and the latter because elections offer one of the few moments to shake the elites for the crumbs of development for themselves and their areas.
Democratization is a work in progress all over the world, notwithstanding claims of democratic maturity in some countries. The recent Kenyan crisis underscores the severe challenges of democratic transition, never mind the questions it raises about the prospects of democratic consolidation. Examples abound that as the suffocating lid of state tyranny is lifted during moments of democratic transition the suppressed voices and expectations of civil society surge, but the stresses and strains arising from the competitive grind of democracy often find articulation in the entrenched identities, idioms, and institutions of ethnic solidarity. The challenges facing Kenya and Africa's democratic experiments in general are many and complex indeed. They include the reconstruction of the postcolonial state, decentralization and devolution of power, entrenching constitutionalism, safeguarding human rights and the rule of law, instituting structures for the effective management of ethnic and other cultural diversities, promoting sustainable development, reducing uneven development, empowering women, promoting the youth, and managing globalization.
This demands a leadership that is truly up to the challenge, a leadership that pursues a national project of profound social transformation that eschews narrow and shortsighted exclusionary politics and neo-liberal economic growth. Kenya's contenders for power in the recent elections seemed keen to retain or gain power at all costs. The power struggle was as sinister as the differences among the leaders were small. But often it is the very narcissism of minor differences that breeds gratuitous violence and viciousness as histories of genocide demonstrate. The leading politicians engaged in combat whose followers were busy tearing their lovely country apart were members of the same recycled political class committed to neo-liberal growth that offer no real solutions to Kenya's enduring challenges of growth and development, choiceless democracy and transformative democracy.
In conclusion, the political tragedy of Kenya's recent election is part of a much larger story. The absence of articulated and organized institutional and ideological alternatives under neoliberalism is at the heart of the political crisis facing contemporary Africa and much of the world. It has led, thus far, to the ossification of politics, and in some countries, the premature abortion or aging of elections as instruments of transformative change. The specter of choiceless democracies is not confined to countries in the global South, for in many parts of the global North including the United States the ideological divide between the major parties is often indecipherable, the result of which is political apathy as nearly half the population has exited the electoral process. For the more fragile postcolonial societies, the danger is not apathy, but anarchy. Perhaps the ferocity of the reaction to the botched elections will serve as a wakeup call to Kenya's political class and the troubled citizenry to chart a more productive future for their beloved country. Thank you!
Bibliographic Note
This presentation is derived from several papers I have written on Kenya and Africa over the years. The sections on Kenyan history and colonialism are drawn from "The Establishment of Colonial Rule in Kenya: 1905-1920," in W.R. Ochieng', ed., A Modern History of Kenya: 1895-1980: Essays in Honor of B.A. Ogot (Evans Brothers, 1989: 35-70); "Kenya and the Second World War Years: 1939-1952," in W.R. Ochieng', ed., A Modern History of Kenya: 1895-1980: Essays in Honor of B.A. Ogot (Evans Brothers, 1989: 144-172); "Kenya's Road to Independence and After," in P. Gifford and W.R. Louis, eds., Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power, 1960-1980 (Yale University Press, 1988: 401-426, with B.A. Ogot); "Economic Policy and Performance in Kenya since Independence," Journal of Eastern African Research and Development 21: 35-76; "Changing Historiographical Perspectives on Colonialism," in Katsuhiko Kitagawa, ed., Retrospect and Prospect of African Historiography: Colonialism and Nationalism (Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies Occasional Paper No. 26, 2005: 5-21). The analysis on structural adjustment draws from Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Codesria Book Series, 1997, Part III "Encountering Development", and several economic essays in the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Dickson Eyoh). The discussion on nationalism, decolonization, the postcolonial state, and democracy is based on "The Historic and Humanistic Agendas of African Nationalism: A Reassessment," in Toyin Falola and Salah Hassan, eds., Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa: Essays in Honor of the Memory of the Late Professor Don Ohadike (Carolina Academic Press, 2008: 37-53); "Imagining and Inventing the Postcolonial State in Africa," Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora 1, 1: 101-123; "The Struggle for Human Rights in Africa," in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Philip McConnaughay, eds., Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Africa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004: 1-18); "Human Rights and Development in Africa: Current Contexts, Challenges, and Opportunities," in Lennart Wohlgemuth and Ebrima Sall, eds., Human Rights, Regionalism and the Dilemmas of Democracy in Africa (Codesria Book Series and Nordic Africa Institute, 2006: 57-96. "Democracy, Africa," in Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ed., New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Volume 2 (Charles Scribner's Sons: 556-560). For more recent developments in Kenya including the 2007 elections and its violent aftermath I used my blog essay, "The 2007 Kenyan Elections: Holding a Nation Hostage to a Bankrupt Political Class" posted on www.zeleza.com [1]. I also benefited from an excellent text by a new generation of Kenyan historians and social scientists, Godwin Murunga & Shadrack W. Nasong'o, Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy (Codesria Books and Zed Press, 2007