Kenya: Between hope and despair, 1963-2011 (original) (raw)

African Affairs, 2012

Abstract

Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011. By Daniel Branch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. xi, 366; map, photographs, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth.As I sit typing the final words of this review, the constant "pinging" of emails arriving from Nairobi-their contents ranging from friendly exchanges with colleagues, to news bulletins-well represents the state of frenzied excitement and trepidation in Kenya this week. In seven days-on 4 March-Kenyans will visit the ballot boxes to elect a new president, and as in 2007, the election promises to be extraordinarily close. Observers around the world watch-collective breath held-to see whether violence and the resultant displacement of hundreds of thousands of citizens will again be unleashed upon the nation.This morning's press coverage is focused squarely on the fallout from last night's second and final presidential debate. Nation correspondents Alphonce Shiundu and Justus Wanga report that, "Candidates ... asked each other tough questions regarding scandals that rocked governments dating as far back as 20 years ago."1 Shiundu and Wanga's statement is pregnant with meaning for someone who has just finished Daniel Branch's new book. For Branch, a consistent thread of corruption, poor governance, and frequently violence has characterized Kenyan politics stretching back to 1963. And during this period, the perpetrators' identities-the elites of Kenya-have changed little. The author expands: "Kenya's leaders have encouraged political debate to centre on recognition rather than on redistribution.... [They] have encouraged Kenyans to think and act politically in a manner informed first by ethnicity, in order to crush demands for the redistribution of state resources" (p. 16). Demonstrating how little has changed over the past half-century, Branch opens his book with a description of a party hosted by Oginga Odinga, Kenya's future first Vice-President, in June 1963, and ends with one hosted by his son, Raila- currently Prime Minister, for at least another week-in August 2010.Branch has produced nothing less than a masterpiece of political history in this timely work. In fewer than 300 pages of text, he leads the reader through the past fifty years of Kenya's often complex (if not opaque) past, without seeming to force the pace, nor stuff his paragraphs with overwhelming detail. This breadth of approach is rare in writings about independent Kenya: authors like Charles Hornsby, David Throup, and William Ochieng' have addressed relatively thin chronological slices of the period, but their erudite works are unquestionably "academic" in tone, and somewhat inaccessible to those not "in the know."2 (Journalists, too, have written copiously on the black comedy that is Kenyan politics, but their agendas emphasize the here-and-now, and sections of hastily constructed history typically exist only to provide a foil for contemporary events.) Branch's achievement is magnified by the fact that at each and every stage of his narrative, the ordinary Kenyan looms large: the reshufflings of elite power-brokers have always reverberated down to the ever-increasing numbers of watchmen or jua kali (informal) traders trying to get by on minimal funds and maintain a place to call home, amidst government bulldozers, efforts to "redistribute" land, or youthful, "ethnic" militias claiming "tribal" homelands. …

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