Seeing Like a Citizen

Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980

Kara Moskowitz

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780821423967
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446898
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: History

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya's late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world.


Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Text
• A Note on Currency and Geography
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “Can I Be One of Them?”: The Landscapes of Settlement in Decolonizing Kenya
• Chapter 2 “We Must Return to the Land That We Love”: Local Accounts and Life Histories in Three Settlement Schemes
• Chapter 3 “The Land Was Ours, but It Was Not Mine”: Land Marginalization and the Political Imagination
• Chapter 4 “If I Was Evicted, Where Could I Go?”: Cooperative Development and Contestations over Economic Citizenship
• Chapter 5 “A Hungry Nation Cannot Be Contented”: The Political Economy of Famine
• Chapter 6 “Those Poor People Who Sweated Themselves to Help Themselves”: Self-Help and the Contradictions of Citizenship and Development
• Chapter 7 “Are You Planting Trees or Are You Planting People?”: Local Resistance, International Development, and the Making of Kenya
• Conclusion
• Archival Source Abbreviations and Labels Used in Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index