Kenya

For a brief moment, in early 2008, the international media focused its horrified attention on Kenya, before quickly retreating. The cause of their fleeting interest was the inter-ethnic violence that followed a disputed election. Daniel Branch’s book seeks to outline the ‘deeper history’ (p. 19) of this episode. It offers an elegant narrative of the political history of East Africa’s richest country, from independence to the present day, drawing upon the waspish, but astute, observations of British and American diplomats, with the aim of showing how the central elements of Kenyan politics were constructed. Building on the seminal works of Jean-François Bayart and Frederick Cooper, Branch argues that the principal dynamic shaping politics in the independent period has been competition within a ‘ruling class’ (p. 2) for control of the ‘gate’ between Kenya and the outside world. Command of this point of intersection has been the key to the accumulation of wealth through, for example, access to external funding, including foreign aid money, and the ability to control the distribution of resources. In order to maintain control of this gateway, the regimes of Presidents Kenyatta, Moi and Kibaki all relied upon repression (including assassination) and patronage, in varying combinations. The consequences have been formative and pernicious, giving the ruling class close control over institutions which should have been responsible for restraining them, creating a ‘culture of impunity’ (p. 21), and degrading Kenyan political culture

Democracy · Impunity · Independence (probability theory · Kenya · Narrative · Political economy · Political repression · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · History · Law