Kenya: In Between Hope and Despair, 1963–2011 (review)

The historian Daniel Branch opens his compelling story of Kenya’s politics from independence to the present with an account of a 1963 party at the home of Oginga Odinga celebrating independence. All the notables were there including diplomats, and hopes were high despite political uncertainty. What direction would Kenya take: toward the East or West; capitalism or socialism; democracy or authoritarianism; stability or conflict? Nearly fifty years later it is hard to describe exactly where Kenya is—which creates a quandary in terms of how to view Kenyan politics. Branch writes: “The point is not that Kenya is calm or chaotic, peaceful or violent, economically vibrant or destitute, democratic or authoritarian, but rather that it is all those things simultaneously” (297). Branch shows how Kenya’s ambiguous path was chosen, and how political uncertainty at independence became a surface-level certainty, only to turn extremely uncertain in the post-2007 election violence that killed more than thirteen hundred people, displaced over half a million, and threatened the state itself.

The volume is not simply a sweep through multiple secondary sources on the road to synthesis. There is original research. Academic sources are brought to bear, as well as civil society, journalist, and nonacademic work, along with use of U.K. and U.S. (thanks to WikiLeaks) diplomatic traffic to unpack international relations as well as Kenyan domestic politics that sometimes had significant external connections. There is much to applaud in the narrative. Governing ideology is taken seriously, including dominant class rationales, populist ethnicity, and ideologies of growth, self-reliance, and especially order. The volume also goes beyond political history told as the high politics of elite machinations. Branch documents those goings-on, but he also puts the political elite in relation to citizens and their more or less independent politics. He shows that the elite do not write their own ticket, although they usually win.

The volume does not attempt conceptual or theoretical innovation; rather, the conceptual contribution lies in bringing poverty and inequality back into an understanding of Kenyan politics. They were prominent concerns in Kenyan political discourse at independence and soon after, but the idea of redistribution had formidable opponents, including all three presidents and the full array of politicians, donors, and powerful interests that would successfully eliminate or marginalize persons and institutions identified with redistribution ideas. Branch notes that socialist ideology had limited popularity (was capitalist ideology really popular?), but argues that citizens expected returns from independence and that expectation amounted to a popular demand for redistribution that was blocked and all but taken off the national policy table, despite continuing agitation for it, not to return in any vigorous way even after the political opening with four successive multiparty elections beginning in 1992.

Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was presented as the father of the nation and a unifier, but his urge to unite centered on his political base, the Gikuyu population that was divided by district, class, and the Mau Mau war. His regime maintained a modicum of popularity for a while, but mass land transfers did not occur, the economy slowed, and resentment grew against Gikuyu dominance of governing institutions engineered through an all-powerful presidency. In the context of Kenya’s highly unequal society constructed under a colonial and settler political economy with great privileges to protect, the regime and most politicians increasingly turned to ethnicity to divert dissent and amass followers. And with the redistribution option eliminated, ethnic appeals found a firmer popular base. According to Branch, “It is not surprising . . . that the poor and marginalized turn to ethnicity to protect what little they have and to try to gain more land or jobs or whatever it is they need to survive. The politics of recognition have trumped redistribution” (296). Meanwhile, President Kenyatta “. . . abandoned all but the most perfunctory pretence that his was a government for all Kenyans”(102). In addition, the regime muffled civil society, apparently sponsored...