Kenya

A History Since Independence

Charles Hornsby

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780755627745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

Since independence from Great Britain in 1963, Kenya has survived five decades as a functioning nation-state, holding regular elections; its borders and political system intact and avoiding open war with its neighbours and military rule internally. It has been a favoured site for Western aid, trade, investment and tourism and has remained a close security partner for Western governments. However, Kenya's successive governments have failed to achieve adequate living conditions for most of its citizens; violence, corruption and tribalism have been ever-present, and its politics have failed to transcend its history. The decisions of the early years of independence and the acts of its leaders in the decades since have changed the country's path in unpredictable ways, but key themes of conflicts remain: over land, money, power, economic policy, national autonomy and the distribution of resources between classes and communities.While the country's political institutions have remained stable, the nation has changed, its population increasing nearly five-fold in five decades.
But the economic and political elite's struggle for state resources and the exploitation of ethnicity for political purposes still threaten the country's existence. Today, Kenyans are arguing over many of the issues that divided them 50 years ago. The new constitution promulgated in 2010 provides an opportunity for national renewal, but it must confront a heavy legacy of history. This book reveals that history.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

This book is a history of the state of Kenya since its independence in December 1963. ‘Kenya’ was a colonial invention, and its history has been dominated by the disruptive changes that followed the British conquest at the turn of the twentieth century. However, while many histories of colonial rule and particularly of the Mau Mau conflict of the 1950s have been written, there are few histories of independent Kenya. There have been many edited collections of papers and many scholarly works on Kenya’s economy, but most have focused on the colonial era or on specific post-independence topics. British rule lasted 60 years; Kenya has been a sovereign state for 47. This history assesses Kenya not only as a colonial invention, but also for successes and failures of its own making. It is a history of one country, not a comparative history of Africa. It seeks to explain what has happened in Kenya since independence and to align academic understandings of post-colonial development with the experiences and perceptions of Kenyans about their country. Others will compare this story with those of other states, and I hope, use it to understand Africa better.

Kenya’s history has not been one of war, military rule, mass murder or state collapse; neither has it been one of improving living standards, industrialisation, growing national pride and the establishment of a key role in the world economy. It has been rather a story of endurance: of political and economic structures inherited from colonial days, of unfulfilled promise and weighty historical baggage. It is a story that blends both politics and economics, a struggle to create and consume resources that involved Western powers and Kenyans in a complex web of relationships; a tale of growth stunted by political considerations, of corruption and of money.

It is also a story about people, about a few powerful individuals whose choices have so influenced Kenya’s future. Few of them come out of the story entirely unblemished, though many made great sacrifices in the struggle for what they believed right. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and retrospective assessments of people’s choices seldom take account of the circumstances and perceptions of their world at that time. To lead requires difficult choices and compromises, and the role of a politician in a less-developed society (in which nothing is easy and nothing is safe) is a challenging one. However, the rewards of success are great.

This is also a tale of people as communities and their collective behaviour, in which ethnicity plays a strong role – a topic that often evokes strong responses. Kenyan politics cannot be understood without understanding Kenyan ethnicity. It is not, however (and never was) a primordial constant, but an arena for conflict, based around genuine differences of language, culture and economic interest between the peoples living within the boundaries of the nation state, but always changing. Ethnicity is about shared communities, gradations of us-ness from the nuclear family to the language family, but also about conflict and difference. In Kenya, a certain form of ethnic conflict has been enduring, despite many efforts to build a national identity. It has shaped the political system, and has in turn been shaped by Kenya’s politicians and the institutions they inhabit. Sometimes, it has been associated with violence. The problem of ethnically focused political violence in Kenya has come to world attention in 1969, 1991–3 and 2007–8; each time worse than the last. Its origins lie elsewhere – in land rights, poverty, elite survival strategies and state abuses - but the recourse to violence takes on its own logic, and the risk of further trouble remains real.

Inevitability and Contingency in Kenya’s History

The history of any country is the consequence of a number of elements. Some – population, geography, economic structure and technological level – are the products of the past and are relatively inflexible. Such structural forces place a country in a particular global position, limiting the options available to its leaders. Broad economic, cultural and social forces will drive a gradual evolution across whole continents, changeable by the acts of a few great individuals, but with huge inertia.¹ Other parts of a history are more contingent and may mask, modify or redirect these broader forces. Although the outlines of a country’s history may be predictable, unplanned events and the actions of influential individuals, particularly during periods in which change has already begun, remain critical to the actual outcome. As Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale wrote in 1992, it is essential not to ‘write history backwards’ from outcomes to inevitable antecedents, but to accept contingencies and accidents alongside deeper social and economic forces.²

Kenya’s independence history is no different. As in much of Africa, the new, weak political institutions and externally oriented economic system inherited from colonial rule implied a greater contingency and unpredictability than in more mature states, as the impact of individual actors and accidents was proportionately greater. Nonetheless, the probable trajectory of its future was clear. It was likely at independence that the new states of East Africa would have difficulty in standing alone on the world stage and that they would fall into a dependent economic, political and military relationship with the world powers (at that time the USA and USSR). It was likely that Kenya, with its stronger economy and greater Western investment, would perform better than its neighbours. ‘Tribalism’ and ethnicity (reflecting the existence of at least 42 ethnic groups in Kenya, with different languages, traditions and economic interests, and the country’s fractured history during and after the Mau Mau war) were always going to be challenges. A powerful and coercive bureaucracy, built to maintain order, defend British rule and repress a violent revolt, would inevitably play a major and self-interested role in the country’s future. As Chris Allen has argued, there were only a few ‘basic histories’ in independent Africa, ‘frequently repeated and causally entwined sequential patterns of political development’.³ Most states followed a pattern of one-party rule and clientelism, matched and mitigated by centralised, bureaucratic politics, unless disrupted by war or military coups and a catastrophic descent into ‘spoils politics’. This phase was followed in the 1990s by an externally driven restoration of democratic forms and liberalisation of the state and the economy, if the state had not imploded entirely. Kenya followed this pattern closely, with one difference: it never experienced a period of state failure or overthrow. From the British withdrawal until today, the Kenyan state has endured, its grip looser or tighter, but always present, with great continuity in structure, role and personnel. Events reached a crisis at least a dozen times, but were always settled conservatively. Despite constitutional and economic change, party splits, murder, repression, a coup attempt, politically motivated ethnic clashes and mass civil disobedience, the country’s political and economic system has endured.

Nonetheless, the precise shape of Kenya after 47 years of independence could not have been predicted with confidence. Kenya could easily have ended up under military rule, or could have disintegrated for a decade, as Uganda did. With good luck and better governance, it might have leapfrogged onto a path of sustainable growth as an ‘African tiger’. Prime Minister and then President Jomo Kenyatta’s strategy for rule, with its state capitalist, pro-Western orientation, could have been very different if he had emerged from nine years of false imprisonment with greater bitterness towards the British. The murder of Tom Mboya in 1969 and Daniel arap Moi’s accession to the presidency in 1978 both demonstrated the power of contingency, and the impact of decisions by a few influential men. The first speeded Kenya’s move towards rule by a Kikuyu oligarchy, political and economic decay; the second shifted the country onto a trajectory of ethnic tension and resource redistribution. The failure of the 1982 coup probably diverted a descent into military rule and instead set Kenya on a path of Kalenjin-led authoritarianism. The reintroduction of multi-party democracy under Western pressure a decade later was probably inevitable, but the consequences, including the ethnic clashes and the Goldenberg scheme to loot the Treasury, were not. Ten years later, Moi’s decision to back Jomo’s son Uhuru Kenyatta for the presidency was a catastrophic mistake that destroyed the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and gave victory to an uneasy alliance of its opponents. Little had changed either economically or institutionally since the opposition’s defeat in 1997, but as individual alliances shifted, their supporters followed and the result was entirely different.

More predictably, during 2003–5, an opportunity for national renewal was squandered by bad luck and a legacy of ethnic and personal tensions. Kenya’s primary political cleavage reverted to the same two divisions that had dogged it in the 1960s: epitomised by the relationship between the Luo and Kikuyu communities and – independently – between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin, each representing a different path for Kenya. Raila Odinga’s ability to retain a cross-ethnic alliance even after his party split, and the narrowness of Mwai Kibaki’s disputed electoral victory in 2007, inspired a violent backlash that split the country in two and forced a division of powers that had been demanded and rejected many times before. Kibaki and Odinga were forced into a power-sharing deal that avoided the horror of civil war, but it was an unhappy arrangement, a sticking plaster to allow the wounds of 2007–8 to heal.

Politics and Economics

This book, unusually, is not presented as a sequence of separate essays on economics, political institutions, security, agriculture and foreign policy, but as a historical narrative that draws together these subjects and shows how the relationships between them have evolved over the five decades of independence. It is probably the first attempt at an inclusive political and economic history of independent Kenya. There are two reasons for this approach: first, in Kenya, politics and economics are so deeply entwined that you cannot discuss one without discussing the other; second, policy and practice are not ahistorical, but vary over time. Events must be understood in their historical context. It is no more logical to treat the Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki governments’ policies as constant than it would be to describe British history since 1963 without distinguishing between the policies of Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and the circumstances in which they operated.

Although sometimes appealing, a sharp distinction between the economic and the political sphere has limited value, particularly in Africa. Both are the collective products of individual choices and much (though not all) political conflict is about economic issues. The dependency between the two spheres is deep. A country such as Kenya does not improve its infrastructure and social services, produce more, or become richer independent of its political system, but as a direct consequence of it. To give one example: agricultural productivity is a function not only of farmers’ individual decisions and world prices, but also of land policy, ownership patterns, the degree of state marketing and price support for particular crops, the degree of predation on profits from regulatory and marketing organisations and the disruptive effects of land-related violence. All are political issues. In the same vein, Kenya’s various redistributive and growth-oriented economic policies can only be understood in the context of who was benefiting from them at a particular time. The importance of wealth as a route to power, and of political power as a route to acquire both wealth and access to state resources has also meant that the same elites dominate both politics and economics and fight their battles in both spheres. Through control of the state, political power becomes economic power; through patronage politics, economic power becomes political power. Corruption is simultaneously an economic, political, administrative and social process.

At the macro level, Kenya’s economic performance has also been driven by Western political pressure. Good relations and alignment on international issues encourage investment and tourism. The granting and withholding of foreign aid and budgetary support is a political process, driven by the degree of alignment between the ruling elite and Western interests, and by the behaviour of that elite. As the history of structural adjustment shows, the granting and withholding of aid is only loosely related to the actual reforms introduced by governments. Foreign investment, a key driver of growth, is a fickle, fearful thing that can be frightened away by corruption, violence and nationalism alike. Mass tourism, although it helped Kenya become more prosperous, also tightened the links between politics and economic performance, as political problems hurt tourist bookings and therefore national prosperity. Global communications have similarly amplified the knock-on effects of domestic problems on foreign audiences, and therefore on tourism, aid and investment alike.

A Stable State?

Kenya in 2011 remained recognisable as a natural evolution of the nation created at independence. Unlike most African states, it had avoided military rule, social instability, warlord-ism, mass murder or social collapse. Religious divisions have not led to violence, and attempts at secession have been defeated or deterred. Kenya has never gone to war. In almost every crisis over the years, the outcome was a more gradual shift away from the current course of events than in neighbours such as Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. Why did Kenya show such continuity that the same governing party could run the country for nearly 40 years? The army remained loyal, constitutional process was followed and losers did not (generally) resort to violence. The 2008 coalition government was headed by a president who had been part of the government at independence and a prime minister who was the son of the first vice-president. The economy remained based on the colonial pattern, with an externally oriented cash-crop sector, a large smallholder agricultural sector and modest industrial development. Despite mass urbanisation, education, social change and global communications, the political system was built around the same institutions and with the same focus on ethnicity as in 1963. The command and control system and authoritarian political culture, the ‘guided’ democracy and the huge gulf between rich and poor remained (though the elite itself had changed). The same families appear to run the country, and the same arguments over land, ethnicity, presidential authority, corruption and foreign intervention seem to continue decade after decade.

The answer to the question of why this is the case is a difficult one. Clearly, one reason is simply luck: that the crises of the nation-state were settled with moderation rather than coups and murder was sheer accident. More interesting is the possibility that inherited social and economic structures and direct external influence held Kenya on a more stable course. The command and control system that the British created to maintain order was propagated into the independent state almost unchanged.⁴ Kenyatta and his advisers were concerned from the first about Kenya’s security and the desire for political order was one of their core motivating forces. There was an effective bureaucracy at least for the first two decades of independence, which helped temper political excess. The defeat of Mau Mau left a population fearful of the state and accustomed to obedience. The substantial wealth in the country, originally European and Asian, but later also African, the tight links which emerged between the economic, political and administrative elites and the patron–client structures of political power meant that many had investments in the existing social and economic order, and that truly radical change was supported by few in positions of power. There was something substantial to fight over, and most actors in the drama agreed that any action that would destroy the commercial farming sector, tourism or the foreign support on which the country depended was not worth the price.

The absence of strategic minerals was a blessing in disguise, unlike for example Angola, the Congo, Nigeria and Sudan. The physical and population geography of the country also discouraged ethnic separatism. Kenya had too many ethnic groups, and the misalignment of communities and boundaries left by the Europeans meant no partition of the country was viable, while only the Maasai and Somali could plausibly have seceded to join a neighbour.

Western involvement also played a role. The large foreign investments and number of foreign citizens living in Kenya at independence acted as stabilising forces, both for good and ill. British finance, military support and advice actively contributed to the survival of the Kenyatta government. Foreign advisers have continued to serve in little-noted but influential positions ever since. In the 1970s, the decade of self-reliance, Western intervention was less overt, but thousands of aid workers, teachers and other foreign professionals continued to work in Kenya. Foreign aid sustained the country’s economy from the moment of independence, providing a buffer for the errors of its leadership and a safety net that was guaranteed by Kenya’s pro-Western orientation. In the 1990s, with the fall of communism, attitudes changed. Western governments and international finance institutions placed tighter constraints on what the state could ‘get away with’, and donors drove a reform agenda that unwound most of the economic structures created in the 1960s and 1970s, but aid continued.

Continuity also owed something to the dramatis personae of the early days: Kenyatta himself, Charles Njonjo, Moi and Kibaki. All were conservative figures, patriarchal and authoritarian, but always pragmatists, willing to turn back from the brink at moments of crisis. Although all have been accused of corruption, authoritarianism and self-interest, all subscribed to a paternal vision of the rights and duties of power, which included the preservation of the country they had inherited. They each felt a degree of accountability to the ‘will of the nation’, if not to its electoral expression.

After a brief period of instability in 1963–5, the nation-state was set on its course, driven by both active commitment and growing inertia down a single path. Kenyatta’s age and autocratic inclination created a political system that began to see its perpetuation as its primary reason for existence. The conservative and authoritarian political culture he nurtured was sustained into the twenty-first century under Moi, who truly followed in the footsteps of his patron, though with very different consequences. This state ideology was overlaid, often forcibly, on a more egalitarian, democratic, racist, populist and nationalist public opinion. Many of Kenya’s challenges have been grounded in deep differences between the way the governing elites have seen the interests of the country and the opinions of the electorate.

While Kenya has been one of the most stable states in Africa, this is not necess...