6 Economy, Politics and Ideology in Post-Independence Kenya

On 12 December 1963 Kenya was granted independence from British rule. Kenyatta, as Kenya’s first Prime Minister, marked the event with the words:

Our march to freedom has been long and difficult. There have been times of despair, when only the burning conviction of the rightness of our cause has sustained us. Today, the tragedies and misunderstandings of the past are behind us. Today, we start on the great adventure of building the Kenya nation.1

The Freedom for which the forest fighters had been striving, conceived of as independence under an all-African government, had been won. It remained to see what would happen to the Land. To the extent that ‘Mau Mau’ had hastened the arrival of constitutional independence it had been a success; to the extent that it left Britain still able to assume the pose of the magnanimous dispenser of an ‘independence’ for whose elaborately staged entrance metropolitan interests had had several years to set the scene, the revolt had been a failure which would continue to prove costly to its participants.

The impression conveyed by analysts of independent Kenya in the 1970s is that ‘the Kenya nation’ has indeed been built by adventurers. Tamarkin concludes that: ‘The majority of Kenyan peasants live in a state of poverty. . . The life of the urban poor is made worse by appalling housing conditions and poor urban services. The misery of the poor in Kenya is highlighted by the extravagance of the African nouveau riche. . . the socio-economic position of the Kenyan masses is desperate. . .’² J.M. Kariuki attributed this to: ‘A small but powerful group, a greedy self-seeking élite in the form of politicians, civil servants and businessmen, [which] has steadily but very surely monopolised the fruits of independence to the exclusion of the majority of the people.’³ And Brett concludes that colonialism in Kenya left behind an economy ‘characterised by continuing and perhaps intensifying structural imbalances, massive and growing inequalities, apparently irreducible dependence on external sources of technological innovation, and a tendency towards political authoritarianism and instability’.⁴

Kenya since 1963 has exhibited ever more starkly the classical two faces of underdevelopment On the one hand conspicuous consumption by a privileged minority which, as Ngugi puts it, ‘surrounds itself with country houses, cars, washing machines, television sets, and all the consumer durables that are associated with an acquisitive middle-class’;5 on the other hand a stultifying poverty. Kenya’s ‘development’, or lack thereof, in the years since independence has been typical of a neo-colonial African state, where ‘neo-colonial’ is defined, as it was originally defined at the All-African People’s Conference held in Cairo in 1961, as: ‘. . . survival of the colonial system in spite of the formal recognition of political independence in emerging countries which become the victims of an indirect and subtle form of domination by political, economic, social, military or technical means’.⁶ Neo-colonialism means, in essence, the ‘domination of the mass of the population of a country by foreign capital, by means other than direct colonial rule’.⁷

This chapter sets out to sketch in the most important social determinants of the post-independence novels about ‘Mau Mau’. It will be argued that these novels, particularly those by Nwangi, Mangua and Wachira, reveal the ideology within which they were produced as that of the national bourgeoisie in Kenya after independence.⁸ That ideology is obviously in some measure the product of the economic structures bequeathed to the Kenyan government by the colonial government at independence, as summarised in Chapter 3. Here I will discuss those aspects of Kenya’s post-independence economy which are relevant to the discussion of the ideology of the indigenous bourgeoisie and the analysis of the novels. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of those components of the dominant ideology of neo-colonial Kenya which seem to me to have been the most important determinants of the fiction, and particularly of the image of ‘Mau Mau’ in the fiction.

From Colonial to Neo-Colonial Economy

I suggested in Chapter 3 that the colonial view (by which is meant in very general terms the view held by metropolitan capital, the Colonial Office and the colonial government) of the Kenyan economy saw Kenya as a source of colonial primary products which, when sold to metropolitan manufacturers, would create a (captive) market for manufactured exports. The view of the Colonial Office and the colonial government (though not necessarily of all sectors of metropolitan capital) was that white settlement was the best way of bringing about the desired end. This had three main results where the underdevelopment of Kenya under colonial rule and the consequent post-independence economic structures and ideology are concerned. (‘Underdevelopment’ is used here as it is used by Brett where it relates to a condition of dependence ‘in which the activities of a given society are subjected to the overriding control of an external power over which it can exert little direct influence’.9)

Firstly, as Brett puts it, ‘the economic ideology of the period required both that colonial development be confined to forms of production which would not compete with British manufacturers and that colonial consumers prefer British commodities however uncompetitive’.¹⁰ The result was that up to 1940 such industrialisation as there was in Kenya was confined to food and raw-materials processing plants (complementary to settler agriculture) whose products were not intended for export outside East Africa.

Secondly, the colonial economy was characterised by very uneven regional development. The most important cause of this, as identified by Brett, was the taxation system (designed to force peasant producers onto the labour market) which increased poverty and dependence in the reserves by a net transfer of resources out of them, at the same time that the low wages paid to the men from the reserves, and the high taxes paid by them, supplied the European dominated sectors of the economy with surplus used to build up its productive capacity. A perfect example, Brett suggests, of ‘the tendency for development at one point in an economy to create underdevelopment in another’.¹¹

Thirdly, the essence of the colonial economy in Kenya was, as Leys has pointed out that it rested on monopolies:

Monopoly, in the sense of a significant degree of exclusive control over some resource – land, labour, capital, technology (including crops), or markets – generally conferred by the state through a law or through executive action, permeated the entire sphere of operations of European . . . capital in Kenya.¹²

Brett says of the colonial period that while some peasants were able, in spite of the constraints placed upon them, to raise their own level ‘well above that which had existed before’: ‘outside the agricultural sector. . . the expatriate monopoly was virtually complete.’¹³ Its effect was ‘to limit African mobility out of the most menial positions and hence to preclude the evolution of an entrepreneurial class of the classic capitalist kind’.¹⁴

This third result of the decision to rely on white settlement for the ‘development’ of the Kenyan economy had an important corollary in that the development of this structure of monopolies necessitated the establishment of bureaucratic forms of centralised organisation to exercise the required controls over free competition. Brett suggests that these large scale organisations offered virtually the only channels for upward mobility for Africans, that the educational system was evolved to train Africans for bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial roles, depriving them of the practical skills which would have made them less reliant on imported technology and forms of organisation, and that the bureaucracy must accordingly be seen as ‘a primary agent in the creation of the contemporary state of underdevelopment’ in Kenya.¹⁵

Those, then, would seem to be the main features of the colonial economy of Kenya up to the World War II which are important to an understanding of the economy and dominant ideology of Kenya since independence. The war brought significant changes. There was a marked increase in agricultural production and, perhaps more important, the need for Kenya to manufacture its own consumer products resulted in a considerable expansion of industrial activity.16 After the war the dollar shortage resulted in a further need to expand colonial commodity production and it was this, according to Leys, that led the colonial state to begin to dismantle such barriers to indigenous capital accumulation as the ban on Gikuyu-grown coffee, the restrictions on credit for blacks and the refusal of individual land titles.¹⁷ The main feature of the post-war colonial economy, as identified by Swainson,¹⁸ was ‘the massive investment of state financial agencies in African cash-crop agriculture’ under the auspices of the 1954 Swynnerton Plan.¹⁹ The same author suggests that the promotion of African agriculture necessitated the dismantling of the settler monopolies over production and distribution and ‘the encouragement of an African middle class, which would hopefully stabilise the political scene and pre-empt a more radical nationalism’.²⁰

The Swynnerton Plan involved the consolidation of land fragments and the issue of registered freehold titles. The desire to encourage the development of an African middle class was more or less explicit: ‘. . . able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country.’²¹ This notion of the ‘normality’ of landlessness has clearly been retained as a component of the dominant ideology in post-independence Kenya. The land consolidation greatly increased the number of landless Gikuyu – not through the elimination of ‘bad and poor farmers’ but through the confiscation and theft of land belonging to ‘Mau Mau’ members (as indicated in Chapter 2) – and did contribute substantially towards the capital accumulation of an embryonic middle class (i.e. a rich peasantry diversifying into the commercial and comprador – ‘import-export’ – sectors of the economy).

Leys argues that colonialism always had two main effects. The first the extraction of surplus from the periphery to the metropolis, has already been seen in the development of an economic infrastructure massively weighted towards the export of primary products which the independent government inherited, not significantly altered by the post-war industrial development, from the colonial government. The second was the emergence of new relations of production, new social strata and ultimately new social classes, which ‘in the course of time. . . became powerful enough to render direct rule by the metropolitan power unnecessary’.²² In this respect the one factor absolutely central to neo-colonialism is seen by Leys as: ‘. . . the formation of classes, or strata, within a colony, which are closely allied to and dependent on foreign capital, and which form the real basis of support for the regime which succeeds the colonial administration’.23 The account of Kenya’s post-independence economy which follows will hinge largely on the status of the aspirant Kenyan national bourgeoisie.

Recent research has shown that before the colonisation of Kenya the relations of production in Central Kenya had already determined the formation of a class of primitive accumulators of land and livestock, the principal means of production, and that the latter were becoming progressively concentrated in fewer hands.²⁴ Colonialism largely prevented the further accumulation of land but opened up other paths of primitive accumulation by appointing some members of this group as ‘chiefs’ with powers to exact unregulated taxes and fines. The settler monopolies prevented this group from becoming a fully fledged capitalist class but by the time of independence, according to Swainson, ‘it was clear that the African merchant class were poised for a move into large-scale capitalist production. Once the political constraints of colonial rule were removed, the indigenous bourgeoisie were able to move rapidly into agriculture and commerce and by the 1970s into manufacturing as well.’²⁵ Some measure of the scale of accumulation by this group during the colonial period can be obtained from the figure of £7 – £10 million of privately owned capital, mostly from the Central province (in other words mostly Gikuyu), which was invested in the purchase of large farms between 1959 and 1970.²⁶

Leys argues that the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism was a planned one:

. . . aimed at preserving the greater part of the monopolistic colonial economic structure in the interests of large-scale commercial, financial and estate capital by coming to terms with those leaders in the nationalist movement – a majority – who represented the new petty-bourgeois strata which had been formed throughout most of Kenya under colonialism.²⁷

It came about with the blessing of the metropolitan government (and, indeed, the colonial government, which was much more tightly under the control of the metropolitan government after World War II²⁸) once it had become apparent that direct administration of the colony had ceased to be profitable and would add nothing ‘to the automatic machinery of exploitation and “blocking" constituted by the free play of world economic forces and relations of production’.²⁹ The circumstances for such a planned transition could not have been better. The Emergency regulations made successful capital accumulation of any sort, and leadership in the nationalist movement alike, totally dependent on the possession of ‘loyalty’ certificates.

The major post-independence economic strategy was Africanisation, firstly of agriculture and secondly of the civil service, commerce and industry. The ‘Africanisation’ of the land was two-pronged and absolutely central to the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism. The settler owners of the large mixed farms were progressively bought out and many of these farms were bought by members of the African bourgeoisie. It was these farms which had generated the colonial life-style to which the members of the embryonic African middle class aspired, and the myth of their importance to the Kenyan economy justified their being kept intact and transferred to African ownership. At the other end of the social scale, land hunger posed the most serious threat to the new government (farms which had been wound-down and abandoned by settlers as independence loomed were being taken over by the more militant of the landless30) and various settlement schemes, most notably the ‘million-acre scheme, were devised to defuse the situation and thereby ensure that the rest of the colonial economic structure could be preserved intact. In nine years the settlement schemes succeeded in converting one-and-a-half million acres to comparatively productive high density ‘peasant’ agriculture³¹ but, as Leys shows, ‘it was the essence of the scheme that [it] should be paid for by the [African] settlers’.³² The result was a heavy burden of debt for the peasants who were made over the years to pay the high price the Europeans received for their land:

The 30,000 high-density settlers were supposed to be drawn from the country’s most impoverished and underprivileged classes, yet they were being expected to pay the full cost to Kenya of an asset transfer which underwrote the profitability of the rest of the economy. For the next twenty-five to thirty years the surplus which they would generate by their work on the land would go mainly to the former European settlers, not to themselves.³³

The surplus went, in fact, to the Kenyan government who paid it to the British government – the European farmers had already been paid off-but this image of the peasants working on, thirty years after ‘independence’, for the benefit of the ex-colonisers captures the essence of neocolonialism particularly well. Bildad Kaggia’s comment sums up the feeling of those who had fought for their land: ‘We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial government. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land.’³⁴

The upper levels of the civil service had been ‘virtually completely Africanise’ by 1965.³⁵ The Africanisation of commerce followed, and was achieved by giving preferential access to certain areas of the economy to African capital through a system of licensing. Thus, for example, the Trading Licensing Act of 1967 excluded non-citizens from trading in rural areas or non-central urban areas and also restricted the goods that could be sold by non-citizens.³⁶ The result has been ‘the almost total takeover of the small commercial sector by indigenous Kenyans in the 1970s’.³⁷ Where foreign companies were concerned the Kenyan government strongly encouraged the Africanisation of both jobs and shareholding as a measure for controlling the power of foreign capital. Leys, however, argues that the primary effect was, rather, the closer identification of government and civil service with the operations, interests and values of foreign capital. The results were monopoly profits, high rates of surplus transfer, low increases in employment, and a falling share of wages in national income backed by tight control over the trade unions.’38 Foreign companies had very high rates of return and there was considerable repatriation of surplus, but the government’s policy of reliance on foreign capital precluded any effective control measures because they might inhibit the inflow of capital.³⁹

By 1977,95% of the former ‘White Highlands’, a major portion of the expatriate owned ranches and coffee plantations, most’larger and more intricate’ commercial firms (as well as the small commercial firms), and the major portion of urban real estate had been transferred to African capital.⁴⁰ There had also been a significant penetration of the construction, financial services, insurance, mining and manufacturing sectors, though these fields were still to a large extent ‘protected against African entry by a combination of technical and capital barriers’.⁴¹ Swainson’s survey of the ‘top’ African directors of companies in 1974 revealed that two of the top ten directors owned 53 firms between them, and confirmed her conclusion that the African bourgeoisie in Kenya cannot correctly be described as a ‘comprador’ or ‘auxiliary’ class.⁴² Langdon, on the basis of five case studies of ‘the State and Kenyan Capitalism’, comes to the same conclusion: ‘There is a local bourgeoisie emerging in Kenya.’⁴³ And Leys, in criticising his earlier work in which he categorised the Kenyan polity as a form of bonapartism and referred to the Kenyan bourgeoisie as a petty-bourgeoisie or an ‘auxiliary’ bourgeoisie,⁴⁴ argued in 1978 that serious mystification results from the failure to grasp the exercise of state power in Kenya after 1963 as ‘a manifestation of the class power already achieved by the indigenous bourgeoisie’.⁴⁵

The capital accumulated by Africans by the 1960s was concentrated in the economic and political centre of Kenya, and was largely in Gikuyu hands.⁴⁶ As a result of its high investment in education this group had very strong representation in the state apparatus and had been able to establish itself as the dominant hegemonic group. This group has developed into a national bourgeoisie largely through the use it has been able to make of its connections with the state, which has shown itself increasingly capable of supporting the national bourgeoisie’s interests.

Colin Leys’s 1978 summary would seem to be accurate. He argues that the historical dialectics of capital accumulation in Kenya involved:

(a) the subordination of indigenous capital to settler capital, but not its destruction; (b) the assertion by settler capital of claims on labour power and the means of production which greatly limited the scope for international capital to enter into direct relations of exploitation with peasant commodity producers, and undermined much more radically than in most African countries the precapitalist relations of production; and (c) the ability of the indigenous class of capital not only to substitute itself effectively for the settler fraction of capital at independence – i.e. as an internal bourgeois, not a petty-bourgeois, class – but also to set about recovering from international capital a good part of the field of accumulation which it had succeeded in occupying.47

One would obviously need to know a bit more about the conditions in which this ‘recovering’ has been achieved, particularly in respect to inputs and markets, but this is obviously a far cry from Fanon’s: ‘. . . we know today that the bourgeoisie in under-developed countries is non-existent’.⁴⁸

This is not, however, to suggest that Kenya has developed an ‘independent’ industrial sector along the lines suggested by Warren, who argues that Third World countries can become technically independent of advanced capitalism.⁴⁹ Langdons analysis of the relationships between the Kenyan state and MNC sectors bears out his assertion that ‘it is not an independent bourgeoisie emerging in Kenya’.⁵⁰ It is this continued dependence, as opposed to independence, in spite of the existence of a national bourgeoisie, which justifies the use of the term ‘neo-colonial Kenya’ into the 1980s. The mass of the people of Kenya remain dominated to a considerable extent by foreign capital, even if the indigenous bourgeoisie have achieved some control over that capital.

It remains now to characterise and examine the ideology of that bourgeoisie to the extent that a unified set of class representations and concepts, determined by a particular structure of social relations, may be identified – ‘filtered out’ as it were – from the speeches of political leaders and the work of certain types of ‘subaltern intellectual’⁵¹ who operate within various branches of the state/civil institutions it has set up (in collaboration with the metropolitan bourgeoisie) to ensure the intellectual conditions for the reproduction of its material and political dominance. This will assist the process of identifying the modes and sources of contradiction which can emerge between this internally dominant class and certain of the intellectuals it has helped to form.

Key Components of the Dominant Ideology: ‘Unity’, the Kenyatta Myth, and the Rejection of ‘Mau Mau’

The first point to make about the national bourgeoisie whose formation was determined by the economic (as well, of course, as the social, political and ideological) factors outlined in the first part of the chapter, is that it was not monolithic. Indeed Swanson argues that since independence ‘the main concern of the ruling group at the political level has been the integration of different sections of the bourgeoisie’.52 Ngugi, who follows Fanon’s class categorisation in referring to the national bourgeoisie as a petty-bourgeoisie throughout says:

Leadership was in the hands of the petty-bourgeoisie, itself split into three sections representing three tendencies: there was the upper petty-bourgeoisie that saw the future in terms of a compradorial alliance with imperialism; there was the middle petty-bourgeoisie which saw the future in terms of national capitalism; and there was the lower petty-bourgeoisie which saw the future in terms of some kind of socialism.⁵³

The existence of divisions such as these – whether we accept the scheme as accurate in its detail or not – contained the seeds of considerable potential conflict. Swainson concurs with the general point when she says that ‘the struggle between different fractions of the bourgeoisie has been bitter’.⁵⁴ The main manifestation of this conflict was the break away of the Kenya Peoples Union [KPU] from KANU in 1966. Led by Oginga Odinga and Bildad Kaggia, this group, drawing support from landless peasants and workers and from some ‘middle’ peasants and small traders, advocated free education and free land for the landless. Its ideology was, however, according to Leys, essentially petty-bourgeois rather than socialist and KPU was first politically outmanoeuvred and then banned in 1969. This effectively eliminated Ngugi’s ‘lower petty-bourgeoisie’ as a political force.⁵⁵

Leys argues that a number of distinct fractions of African capital (e.g. merchant, agricultural, industrial, financial and rentier) gradually crystallised around various recurrent issues; he cites, as examples, wage controls and the scope and level of protection afforded to manufacturing.⁵⁶ There are, of course, also the incontestably petty-bourgeois strata including adjutant, auxiliary ranks immediately subordinate to and serving the African bourgeoisie: ‘lawyers, accountants. . . as well as a layer of ideologists, including academics and journalists’,⁵⁷ as Leys puts it, not perhaps focusing sufficiently sharply either on the differences or the linkages between technical and ideological functions in the process of cultural reproduction.

In spite of this (somewhat distantly and indistinctly observed) ‘conflict within the bourgeoisie’ (let alone the potential for conflict between the bourgeoisie and other classes) one of the most striking features of Kenyan politics since independence has, in fact, been the effectiveness and cohesion of this ‘ruling-class-in-formation’ in the maintenance of state power. This has been attributed by Tamarkin largely to Gikuyu control over all instruments of coercion in Kenya: the officer corps in the army has been substantially ‘Gikuyuise’; the officer corps of the General Service Unit (GSU), the arm of the repressive apparatus used against internal (e.g. student and peasant) dissent, is almost monopolised by the Gikuyu; and by 1968 Gikuyu were at the head of the police, CID and Special Branch.⁵⁸

Another important factor is that executive power resides in the President. There is no collective decision making by the cabinet, and the President is defacto more powerful than parliament. This enabled Kenyatta to exercise arbitrary and extra-democratic powers to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie; these have included the ban on strikes in 1974,59 the detention of dissenters such as Ngugi and, almost certainly, the assassination of J.M. Kariuki in whose death the commander of the GSU was implicated.⁶⁰ A further significant factor has been the weakness of KANU,⁶¹ a party which typifies in textbook fashion Fanon’s assertion about the party in the neo-colonial state: ‘. . . nothing is left but the shell of a party, the name, the emblem and the motto . . . Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit.’⁶² It was divisions in the nationalist movement at the time of independence which determined, and provided the justification for, Kenyatta’s choice of the provincial administration and civil service rather than the party as his administrative arm, and that choice in turn hastened the atrophy of the party. The 1971 Ndegwa commission’s crucial recommendation that civil servants be allowed to maintain their business interests while holding down official positions in the government contributed massively to the coincidence of interests between the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.⁶³

The relative stability of Kenya’s post-independence political scene has, then, according to Leys, been achieved through the bourgeoisie’s use of state power to provide it with protection, to control the trade unions and to eliminate effective political opposition. He continues:

The result was a structure of social control, based on clientelism, and of ideological domination based on a mixture of tribalism, ‘free enterprise’ ethics and ‘development’ doctrines; reinforced by a restrained but effective system of repression, in which organised opposition was outlawed.⁶⁴

Repression has, in fact, been (at least until July/August 1982) restrained in comparison with the colonial era. What this amounts to is that, in Kenya at least, relatively effective hegemonic controls have been institutionalised, and neo-colonial rule has so far delivered a greater degree of ‘consent’ (or at least acquiescence) than the colonial state in its declining years.

It is the ‘ideological domination’ Leys refers to that is most crucial to the production of the literature about ‘Mau Mau’.⁶⁵ Here one can look, initially, to the leaders who assumed political control at independence. These were educated men (generally fairly young) like Mboya, whose ascent up the political ladder had taken place while, if not because, the older leaders were in detention. Leys characterises them as follows:

. . . few of them were radical in their social or economic outlook. Their education and the whole climate of opinion in which they had moved since school had in most cases been premised on the acceptance of private property and the highly regulated, monopolistic, private enterprise system established under colonialism. They had no thought of effecting any fundamental change in it.66

One could, of course, have deduced this from the outline of the economy of neo-colonial Kenya given above. The majority of these leaders represented themselves as ‘African socialists’ but stressed that their socialism was nationally based and that they were, anyway, pragmatists.⁶⁷ Mutiso sums them up, very appositely, as being ‘committed to values (materialism and the denigration of the African self) which do not lead to innovation, service or even simple commitment to change, whatever beatitudes they state about development. The idea of waiting for cargo most aptly suggests this.’⁶⁸ As an example of the ‘materialism’ one would cite Kenyatta’s attack on Bildad Kaggia in April 1965, 17 months after independence:

We were together with Paul Ngei in jail. If you go to Ngei’s home, he has planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for yourself? If you go to Kubai’s home, he has a big house and a nice shamba. Kaggia, what have you done for yourself? We were together with Kung’u Karumba in jail, now he is running his own buses. What have you done for yourself?⁶⁹

As an example of the denigration of the African self, completely unwitting but typical of the colonial terminology which characterises much of the literature, one finds Mboya saying: ‘Some people assume. . . that whenever anything goes wrong, it must be the African who has done it because he is the only black person in this country. There are many black people among the Europeans in this country.’⁷⁰

Leys argues that ‘a quite elaborate version of the private-enterprise creed, adapted to Kenyan circumstances, had been diffused throughout the higher bureaucracy, and among senior KANU politicians’ by the end of the 1960s, and attributes this to ‘the cumulative impact of the foreign presence in the realm of ideology’.⁷¹ Many of the central tenets and adages of metropolitan bourgeois ideology are to be found, in sometimes surprisingly undisguised form, in the speeches and writings of Kenya’s post-independence leaders. Thus one finds Kenyatta, in the preface to Suffering Without Bitterness (whose very title suggests a moral tract on how the poverty-ridden masses of Kenya should conduct themselves in perpetuity), announcing: ‘Of all the deadly sins, that of sloth seems to me the most contemptible, a flaunting of the very purpose of Creation.’⁷² In similar vein we find: ‘. . . we must safeguard the personal and property rights of all our people as a vital element of our hard-won freedom’.⁷³ The Finance Minister, Kibaki, announced in the mid-1970s: ‘Kenya will not pursue a policy of social justice at the expense of individual freedom.’⁷⁴ Sometimes the adaptation has been fairly striking:

A nationalist movement has no time for arguments about ideology, or for differences in economic and social programmes. Society in Africa – at least north of the Zambezi – is not divided between the capitalists and the workers, the landlords and the landless. The basic differences which create class distinctions in Europe are absent in Africa.75

Kenyatta endorsed Mboya’s vision in 1966 with the bald, and bizarre, assertion that in Kenya ‘there is no discrimination or privilege’;⁷⁶ a position which is a logical continuation of a homily given as early as 1948 in a speech at Meru: ‘If you want to be respected by others, you must behave well and with restraint. You must tell the truth at all times, and avoid idleness. Have nothing to do with thieves, who – not working themselves – live on other people’s property.’⁷⁷ If Kenyatta could have no conception of landlessness or unemployment under the colonial dispensation in 1948 and could have regarded those who had to live on other people’s property and those without work as being, by definition, thieves, it should come as no surprise that he could see no privilege in Kenya twenty years later. His interpellations of ‘his people’ as the ideological subjects of a God of Hard Labour were carried not only in the sermonising style of his public speeches but also in a romanticising of work which conveniently excised the cash nexus: ‘In a life of close association with the soil of Kenya, I have found joy and humility in the seasonal rhythms both of plant and of animal life, and in the crafts of careful husbandry.’⁷⁸

It would obviously not be possible, nor is it necessary to my purposes, to delineate all the various aspects of the ideology of the bourgeoisie in neocolonial Kenya. It is the Kenyan national bourgeoisie’s attitude, or attitudes, to ‘Mau Mau’, and Kenya’s post-independence cultural dependency as it determines literary production, which are my main concerns.

The general attitude of the rulers of Kenya since independence towards those who tried to change their world by means of armed revolt against the colonial government has been equivocal at best, hostile and contemptuously dismissive at worst. Thus Kenyatta on Kenyatta Day, 20 October 1967, could say: ‘. . . without. . . October 20th, 1952, we would still be chained and handcuffed by the colonialists’.⁷⁹ The name of the day makes it clear that it is as the anniversary of Kenyatta’s arrest that this day is intended to have a central ideological importance for the Kenyan people. Indeed Kenyatta was careful to make the following felicitous juxtaposition in the opening sentences of this speech: ‘On this day back in 1952, the whole country was sad. I myself was arrested at night. . .’⁸⁰ And the whole speech has to be taken, and had by Kenyatta’s listeners to be taken, in the context of his 1962 statement: ‘We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.’⁸¹

In 1963 Mboya listed a number of constitutional and other changes aimed at eliminating racial discrimination during the Emergency and concluded: ‘This spate of changes must lead anyone to believe that, had it not been for Mau Mau, perhaps these changes would never have taken place; at any rate, they would never have come as quickly as they did.’82 By 1969 Mboya is saying: ‘It should not be forgotten that during the struggle for independence the women were most active, not so much at the spectacular levels of leadership, but more in the mundane but essential roles of canvassing support, organisation and assistance at public meetings.’⁸³ The ‘struggle for independence’ has been transferred from the forests and the reserves to the sphere of influence of the urban-based petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership of the time, and reduced to a matter of parliamentary election campaigns with door-to-door canvassers and vote-catching tea-parties. A convenient rewriting of history for those who were not in the forests.

Buijtenhuijs has listed four main factors influencing the post-independence attitude to ‘Mau Mau’ in the dominant ideology: the need to foster the Kenyatta myth; the need to retain good relations with the British; the need to achieve national unity; and the need to promote reconciliation between the ‘Mau Mau’ and the Gikuyu ‘Loyalists’.⁸⁴ There are two other important factors he does not list. Firstly, and perhaps most important of all, when indigenous capital accumulation did begin to accelerate in the last years of colonialism, when the middle class the colonial government was encouraging did establish itself, it was largely among the ‘loyalists’. Thus the national bourgeoisie has largely consisted of those who did not take part in the revolt. The whole development of the economy of post-independence Kenya has determined an attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ which has been largely out of sympathy with the forest fighters. Secondly, the provincial administration and civil service which Kenyatta took over were entirely staffed by ‘loyalists’ under colonialism, and the administrative structure was inherited intact at independence. The administration was, therefore, by definition, anti-‘Mau Mau’.

At independence, Kenyatta and those in power around him were faced with the choice of adopting a policy which would lose them the support either of the remaining settlers or of the forest fighters. On the one hand they could have nationalised the land and expropriated the farms in the ‘White Highlands’; this would have resulted in a mass exodus of whites and, more important, would have very severely jeopardised the inflow of foreign, largely British, capital on which their economic policy was based. On the other hand, they could fulfil Kenyatta’s pre-independence promises not to nationalise and expropriate. They chose the latter course because the loss of capital investment posed a more immediately serious class threat than the disaffection of the forest fighters. But that necessitated the repudiation of ‘Mau Mau’. It would have been too obviously contradictory to hold up the forest fighters as the heroes of the struggle against colonialism on the one hand and simultaneously ignore the fact that one of the two ends towards which they were striving was the expulsion of the Europeans and the (free) return of the ‘alienated’ lands.

Two of the other major factors Buijtenhuijs mentions as influencing the Kenyan government’s attitude to ‘Mau Mau’ after independence – the need for national (inter-‘triba’) unity and the need for a reconciliation between ‘Mau Mau’ and ‘loyalists’ – can be conflated. The first would have been impossible without the second, and recognising ‘Mau Mau’ (in an exclusivist sectarian manner) as the bringer of independence would have disaffected those ‘tribes’ not largely involved in the revolt and ‘loyalists’ alike. Kenyatta declares in the preface to Suffering Without Bitterness: ‘The most essential need which I have constantly sought to proclaim and to fulfil in Kenya has been that of national unity; nationhood and familyhood must and can be contrived out of our many tribes and cultures.’ ‘Nation’ and ‘family’ are seen as supra-class concepts. The coerciveness of the rhetoric is carried through to the next sentence: ‘Nationalism rooted in loyalty to Kenya must come first, and be made a living force that can impel and compel all men and women to defend their country against both aggression and subversion.’85 ‘National unity’ was being erected as a defence system, and the accompanying repudiation of ‘Mau Mau’ was couched in terms that contained an implicit threat: ‘I myself would like to see any freedom fighters who claim that only they themselves – and not everybody in Kenya – brought Uhuru.’⁸⁶ In the interests of ‘national unity’ the myth that ‘everybody’ had taken part in the struggle for Uhuru was elaborated:

Freedom came (to us) through AFRICAN UNITY. It was all of us being united: those in prisons and detention camps, in the towns and in the country. We were all seeking freedom (together), and therefore it is not right to discriminate, saying that one man served to bring freedom while another man did something else. All we Africans were in a state of slavery, and all of us (together) brought our freedom.⁸⁷

Ngugi’s comment on this myth is the obvious one, though few could express it so trenchantly: ‘Now all those who had remained “neutral” or had sold out during the years of anti-imperialist struggle, or those who had strenuously opposed independence, were transformed into instant nationalists who had all fought for Uhuru in their different ways, however dubious and treacherous.’⁸⁸

The factor which Buijtenhuijs lists among those that had an important influence on attitudes to ‘Mau Mau’, Kenyatta’s place in history, the Kenyatta myth, is perhaps the most important in relation to the fiction about ‘Mau Mau’. The ‘obviousnesses’ its interpellations are directed towards are those of the importance of hierarchy; the necessity for due recognition to be paid to the role of ‘the leader’; the inability of ‘the masses’ to succeed without ‘the leader; the ‘family’ must have a Father. The dilemma, and the resultant need to denigrate ‘Mau Mau’ is an obvious one. Kenyatta spent the Emergency in detention, having repudiated ‘Mau Mau’ both before and at his trial. To allow ‘Mau Mau’ to have brought Independence would be to destroy Kenyatta’s potential to fill the crucial ideological role of the ‘Father of the Nation’.

The Kenyatta myth had it both ways: on the one hand ‘Kenyatta was an implacable opponent of lawlessness and violence’,89 on the other hand he was, nevertheless, the driving force behind many of the legendary incidents during the Emergency. Thus, for example, it is claimed in Suffering Without Bitterness that: ‘The terrible occurrences at Hola had sprung from attempts to get detainees to stop singing songs about Kenyatta.’⁹⁰ A comparison with other accounts of the Hola incident suggests that it is being used here with a deliberate disregard for history to enrich the Kenyatta myth.⁹¹ Ngugi sums this up as follows:

This deliberate and conscious effort to remove Mau Mau and other patriotic elements from the central stage of Kenyan politics always reached ridiculous heights during the commemorative month of October, in which Kenyatta was usually spoken of as the sole, single-handed fighter for Kenya’s independence.⁹²

So important is the Kenyatta myth to an understanding of the equivocal attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ on the part of Kenya’s post-independence rulers (and writers) that it is worth quoting at some length the passage in Suffering Without Bitterness which describes Kenyatta’s arrest, and attributes the whole revolt to that arrest. The fear of having their words seem ‘precious and melodramatic’ does not stop the writers from employing a vocabulary, use of imagery and rhetoric which are themselves a measure of the distance between the myth and the reality:

Profound shock is too ordinary a phrase. It was as though a cold, soughing wind from the deep blue ice of Arctic despair blew through the city streets and the townships, out into the villages, over the shambas, into the huts of the people. They were numbed by the cold and the cruelty, which tore their roots away, and their shelter, and their hopes of any future, and left them as orphans, bereft.

Kenyatta is gone . . . They have seized Kenyatta . . . Kenyatta is lost to us.

This was the message, carried by the growing gale of anguish. But not just a man had been taken away. Kenyatta was the living symbol, of aspiration, of self-respect, of yearnings, of the dawn of justice, of relief of hopelessness, of expression of all their resentments, of a glimpse of a new life. He had stood amongst them like a mighty tree, their strength and their shelter against all the powers of exploitation, of rejection, patronage, neglect, discrimination. He was their champion, their statesman, their undisputed leader. He was their courage and their confidence, in face of frustrations set afire in virile men who are treated with contempt.

And when Mzee was lost to them, when the Old Man was taken away, the gale was whipped up into a hurricane. Men in their loneliness, and in their anguished fury, robbed of their hope and their inspiration and their discipline, set out to rend and tear. If the bulwark of hope was taken from them; then let there be catastrophe. . . . If constitutional enlightenment was trampled under foot, then let there be steel and fire. If compassion were dead, let there be cruelty. If the light had gone out of the world they knew and hoped for, let all be dragged down into the same darkness.

This in verity was the spark which plunged Kenya into such disaster. Brooding as had been the urge to rebel against repression, against privilege and denial, this one vicious stroke of Kenyatta’s arrest unleashed the flames of unbridled revolution.93

The implications are clear: Kenyatta was more than a man; without their leader (father) the masses are bereft; the masses need a leader to impose discipline and restrain irrational (childish) emotions in them; ‘Mau Mau’ was a manifestation of regression into atavistic cruelty; it was a movement, as the colonials rightly said, ‘into darkness’; had Kenyatta not been arrested there would have been no armed revolt; all those who died for the ‘Mau Mau’ cause were in fact dying for Kenyatta. One of the more striking things about this passage is that it should have been published under the authorship of Kenyatta himself.

Kenyatta’s homecoming is similarly described in ‘. . . descriptive passages, but having positive interpretation rather than pointless attempts at any artistry as their objective’.⁹⁴ The vocabulary here is more specifically messianic:

The area was jammed tight, broad smiles on all the faces, the whole atmosphere and feeling something between carnival and miracle, with those pressed stoically against the wire, unable to move and almost unable to breathe, indifferent to their agony: they were in the front row for a special performance of the beginning of time.⁹⁵

This is no less than an attempt to inscribe Mzee at the centre of a brand new creation myth, cancelling out all previous history in the moment of birth of the ‘New Nation’ (‘New People’).

Tamarkin, writing in 1978, suggested that the widely held Western view ‘that Kenyatta has been universally revered and that his charismatic personality is the key to the understanding of Kenya’s political stability’ reflects ‘a highly cultivated official myth’ rather than a reality.⁹⁶ Suffering Without Bitterness shows the inventiveness lavished on its cultivation. Tamarkin holds, by contrast, that: ‘. . . the misuse of power by the “royal family” in the accumulation of personal wealth has become common knowledge in Kenya, and Kariuki’s murder badly shattered the image of Kenyatta even in his own tribe’.⁹⁷

The function Kenyatta performed in independent Kenya seems to be very close to that attributed by Fanon to the neo-colonial leader, and many of the latter’s formulations seem precisely applicable to Kenyatta. The leader, he says:

. . . acts as a braking-power on the awakening consciousness of the people. He comes to the aid of the bourgeois caste and hides his manoeuvres from the people, thus becoming the most eager worker in the task of mystifying and bewildering the masses. . . . The leader pacifies the people. For years on end. . . we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. . . and three or four times a year [he] asks them to remember the colonial period and to look back on the long way they have come since then.98

In practical terms the effect of the dominant attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ outlined here was that no official recognition was given to the role ‘Mau Mau’ had played in the independence struggle and no rewards were handed out to those who had fought. In particular, there was no free distribution of land. This was justified in various, somewhat dubiously logical, ways. Mboya, for example, said: ‘If land is to be given free to some people, then others must pay for it through higher taxation’.⁹⁹ Kenyatta argued of the advocates of free land: ‘They must mean that I should confiscate the property of one man, just to give it to somebody else. This would mean utter chaos, total injustice, and would lead to the destruction of the State.’¹⁰⁰ Where any priority was given to ex-forest fighters it was given, predictably, to the leaders, not to the rank and file. Thus in 1971 it was declared in parliament that some 600 ex-generals had been settled in Nyandarua District – but even they did not get their land free.¹⁰¹ The resentment felt by ex-forest fighters is well expressed by Mohamed Mathu: ‘I should like to remind those African leaders who now condemn Mau Mau and tell us to forget our past struggles and suffering, that their present positions of power. . . would not have been realised except for our sacrifices.’¹⁰²

I have already, in Chapter 2, said a certain amount about the effect on Kenyan historiography of the determination of the emergent neocolonial bourgeoisie to transform its own record of collaboration into a myth of national struggle by obliterating from memory the social radicalism of the mass movement that was ‘Mau Mau’. Here, bearing in mind the post-independence fiction to be discussed in the next chapter, I will briefly refer to three ‘historical’ accounts of ‘Mau Mau’ whose general attitude towards the movement will be seen to bear a close resemblance to those embodied in the fiction.

The first is a pamphlet titled Comment on Coŗfìeld produced by the Makerere Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Students Association in 1960 whose attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ and general ideological position are signalled by their analogy: ‘Mau Mau was built upon an oath; and it seems possible that its relation with K.A.U. can be compared with the gradual infiltration by communists of a European labour party.’¹⁰³ Written as a refutation of Corfield, this pamphlet nevertheless refers to ‘terrorists’ and accepts, at least in part, the colonial myth of ‘lands previously unoccupied’.104 The reader is told that ‘Mau Mau’ was ‘anti-European – in the sense that it overturned all European values – precisely because it was no longer nationalist but tribal in character’.¹⁰⁵ The writers maintain that ‘the history of the oath is the history of frustration growing into madness’¹⁰⁶ and refer to ‘the batuni oath with all its horrors’,¹⁰⁷ which remain unspecified. The conclusion is reached that Kenyatta ‘was a victim of subordinates whom he could not wholly dominate and of a government which – having too long delayed constructive action – eventually used force too late and too half-hearted’.¹⁰⁸ If the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Students Association at Makerere could conclude in 1960 that the government force exercised against ‘Mau Mau’ was ‘too half-hearted’, it is hardly surprising that the attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ held by the post-independence bourgeoisie (whose functionaries they were being groomed to become) should have been hostile and dismissive.

I refer, secondly, to two of the autobiographies written by the forest fighters: Wamweya’s Freedom Fighter¹⁰⁹ and Muriithi’s War in the Forest. It is clear that these books set out, by means of accounts of the legendary deeds and endurance of the ‘Mau Mau’, to interpellate readers within a moral and conceptual framework very different from that of the colonial writers. Much of the narrative is so clearly unconcerned with details of historical accuracy as to be very evidently an energetic exercise in counter-myth-making. Thus Muriithi describes a single engagement in which the government forces lost 120 men and the forest fighters shot down a ‘heavy bomber’ at ‘a high altitude’¹¹⁰ (later referred to as ‘a light aircraft’¹¹¹), while Wamweya describes how he escaped from detention camp with a group of detainees when four bullets from a sentry’s rifle ‘raised so much dust that the sentry could see us no more’.¹¹² These writers are critical of the brutality of the colonial forces and, particularly Wamweya, of the ‘loyalists’.¹¹³

All this does not, however, manage to free Wamweya and Muriithi from the awesome power of the colonial stereotypes and vocabulary: they read themselves through it. Thus Muriithi says of those attending an oathing ceremony at which his mother was severely beaten for refusing to take the oath: ‘Their eyes glowed with the fire of fanaticism.’¹¹⁴ The word ‘terrorist’ is applied frequently to the forest fighters (Wamweya does use ‘so-called terrorists’ at one point¹¹⁵ but lapses back to ‘terrorists’ thereafter). Muriithi refers to the forest fighters as Mau Mau (without inverted commas) and Wamweya says the first oath made those who swore it members of the ‘Council of the Perpetrators of Crime’¹¹⁶ – a term which does not appear in other accounts. Muriithi alleges that the first oath committed its swearer to killing,¹¹⁷ which runs counter to all the accounts given by other members of the movements, and then contradicts himself ten pages later when he says that ‘the first [oath] meant only that I recognised the Mau Mau as my party’ and that ‘there were more than four other oaths still to take’.118

The key to the ambivalence which one finds throughout both books is to be found, I would suggest, in both the last sentence of War in the Forest: ‘I was appointed to work there [Yatta] as a clerk in January 1958 – a free man in a world soon to be free’,¹¹⁹ and in the dedication of Freedom Fighter: ‘I dedicate this book to my father and mother and all the ordinary people who made our struggle for freedom triumphant.’ Writing in 1971, Muriithi’s and Wamweya’s attempts to write books which would establish a counter-myth to the colonial myth about ‘Mau Mau’ would appear to have been hopelessly compromised from the outset by acquiescence in the notion that Kenya had indeed become ‘free’ after independence.

Before turning to examine the fiction produced by the historical circumstances which determined the ambivalence of the different accounts of ‘Mau Mau’ I have looked at here, it is necessary to be more explicit about the problems raised for fiction by the configurations of Kenya’s cultural dependence.

Leys gives a useful schematic model of the development of bourgeois culture resulting from the formation of the neo-colonial bourgeoisies in Anglophone Africa. He lists its main characteristics as:

. . . increasing resort to private schooling, followed by university education at the family’s expense in Britain or the USA . . .; a distinctive bourgeois life-style in terms of housing, entertainment, etc.; a bourgeois marriage circuit with a manifestly dynastic aspect; the growth of a weekly and monthly magazine culture which reflected these tastes and interests . . .¹²⁰

Ngugi argues that it is the African ruling classes ‘who under neo-colonialism become the missionary agency for the continuation of cultural imperialism as part and parcel of imperialism’s economic and political encirclement of the world’¹²¹ and he cites the following examples of cultural dependency:

Suddenly under neo-colonialism it is the African who is building churches in every village under Harambee self-help schemes; who is rushing for the latest literary trash from America or failing that Africanising the same thrills and escapism by giving them local colour; who will tell you about the latest fashions in clothes, songs and dances from New York; who will import hot combs, ambi, and other skin lightening creams . . .¹²²

There is clearly not the space here for an analysis of the various manifestations of Kenya’s post-independence cultural dependence, which was perhaps best summed up, entirely unwittingly, by James Gichuru, the Minister of Finance, in 1963 when, addressing the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce, he said:

I hear too frequently of the inadequacy of our distribution system, or the cost of reaching much of this potential market, and incidentally stimulating consumer demands and setting in train the urge ‘to keep up with the Joneses which can contribute so much to our productivity.123

It is, precisely, with ‘the Joneses’ that the Kenyan national bourgeoisie tries to keep up, and not specifically in the interests of productivity either.

The relevance of this cultural dependence to the production of fiction in post-independence Kenya has been aptly pointed out by Angus Calder. Calder argues that ‘the reading public in East Africa is a small class of highly-educated people’ which appears to prefer pulp romances and thrillers to novels about local conditions by African writers.¹²⁴ He concludes:

The writer, in short is confined to addressing a small section of the community which is probably, of all sections, least interested in a really radical message or a really subtle criticism of contemporary manners. A writer who saw his novels as blows for the cause of humanity, and who wanted to move a large public, would find no large public to move.¹²⁵

The ‘objective condition’ of the writer in such a society is identified by Mutiso: ‘. . . those involved in intellectual (university, journalism and publishing) as well as literary work have been outside the formal institutions of power, are despised by the bulk of the power holders, and have no formal basis in traditional societies’.¹²⁶ Mutiso’s analysis is weakened by his recourse to the developmentalist opposition between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ society – itself a symptom of the hegemonic power of metropolitan bourgeois sociology – but there can be no doubt that for the ‘progressive’ writer problems of audience and form are not easily solved.

Enough has now been said for me to be able to turn to the fiction about ‘Mau Mau’ written in Kenya after independence and examine the ways in which it has been determined by the complex set of interdependent cultural, economic, and ideological factors outlined, necessarily somewhat sketchily, here.

Notes

1. Jomo Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness (Nairobi, EAPH, 1968), p. 212.

2. M. Tamarkin, The Roots of Political Stability in Kenya’, African Affairs, 11 (1978), pp. 314–5.

3. Quoted by Tamarkin, ibid., p. 312.

4. Brett, p. 305.

5. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Homecoming (London, HEB, 1972), p. 56.

6. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 26.

7. Ibid., p. 271.

8. Meja Mwangi, Carcase for Hounds (London, HEB, 1974); Taste of Death (Nairobi, EAPH, 1975); C. Mangua, A Tail in the Mouth (Nairobi, EAPH, 1972); G. Wachira, Ordeal in the Forest (Nairobi, EAPH, 1968),

9. Brett, p. 18.

10. Ibid., p. 75.

11. Summary and quotation from Brett, p. 191.

12. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 35.

13. Brett, p. 306.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., pp. 304–5.

16. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 41.

17. C. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation, Class Formation and Dependency – The Significance of the Kenyan Case’, The Socialist Register 1978, p. 248.

18. N. Swainson, The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya 1918–1977 (London, HEB, 1980), p. 10.

19. R.J.M. Swynnerton, A Plan to Intensify the Development of African Agriculture in Kenya (Nairobi, Government Printer, 1954).

20. Swainson, Corporate Capitalism, p. 11.

21. Swynnerton, p. 10.

22. Levs, Underdevelopment, p. 9.

23. Ibid., p. 26.

24. Recent research undertaken by M.P. Cowen. I have had no access to this work and have had to rely on Colin Leys’s summary and evaluation in ‘Capital Accumulation, Class Formation and Dependency’, pp. 247–9.

25. Swainson, Corporate Capitalism, p. 286.

26. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 249.

27. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 254.

28. Swainson, Corporate Capitalism, p. 11.

29. Emmanuel, p. 37.

30. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 55.

31. Ibid., p. 76.

32. Ibid., p. 81.

33. Ibid., p. 82.

34. Quoted Buijtenhuijs, Twenty Years After, p. 56.

35. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 122.

36. N. Swainson, ‘The Rise of a National Bourgeoisie in Kenya’, Review of African Political Economy, 8 (1977), p. 41.

37. Ibid., p. 44.

38. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 147.

39. Ibid., pp. 136–8.

40. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 250.

41. Ibid., p. 251.

42. Swainson, ‘National Bourgeoisie’, p. 48.

43. S. Langdon, ‘The State and Capitalism in Kenya’, Review of African Political Economy, 8 (1977), p. 95.

44. Leys, Underdevelopment, pp. 207–12.

45. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 251.

46. Ibid., p. 250.

47. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 260.

48. Fanon, Wretched, p. 143.

49. B. Warren, ‘Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialisation’, New Left Review, 81 (1973), pp. 3–44.

50. Langdon, ‘State and Capitalism’, p. 96.

51. Gramsci, p. 14.

52. Swainson, ‘State and Economy in Post-Colonial Kenya’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, XII, 3 (1978), p. 363.

53. Ngugi, Detained, p. 52.

54. Swainson, ‘National Bourgeoisie’, p. 43.

55. See Leys, Underdevelopment, pp. 224–38, p. 257.

56. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 257.

57. Ibid., p. 258.

58. Tamarkin, ‘Political Stability’, p. 301.

59. Swainson, ‘State and Economy’, p. 365.

60. Tamarkin, ‘Political Stability’, p. 301.

61. Ibid., p. 308; Bienen, pp. 66–72.

62. Fanon, Wretched, p. 136.

63. Swainson, ‘National Bourgeoisie’, p. 43.

64. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 274.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., p. 60.

67. Ibid., p. 221.

68. G.C.M. Mutiso, ‘African Socio-Political Process: A Model from Literature’, Black Aesthetics, ed. P. Zirimu and A. Gurr (Nairobi, EALB, 1973), p. 169.

69. Ngugi, Detained, p. 89; Tamarkin, ‘Political Stability’, p. 312.

70. Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (London, André Deutsch. 1963), p. 46.

71. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 145.

72. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. xiii.

73. Ibid., p. 310.

74. Quoted Tamarkin, ‘Political Stability’, p. 312.

75. Mboya, Freedom and After, p. 88.

76. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. 308.

77. Ibid., p. 44.

78. Ibid., p.vi.

79. Ibid., p. 340.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid., p. 189.

82. Mboya, Freedom and After, p. 51.

83. Tom Mboya, The Challenge of Nationhood (London, André Deutsch, 1970), p. 20.

84. Buijtenhuijs, Twenty Years After, pp. 50–9.

85. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. ix, both quotations.

86. Ibid., p. 343.

87. Ibid., p. 341.

88. Ngugi, Detained, p. 55.

89. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. 46.

90. Ibid., p. 99.

91. See, for example, Rosberg and Nottingham, pp. 342–6.

92. Ngugi, Detained, p. 89.

93. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. 54.

94. Ibid., p. 140.

95. Ibid.

96. Tamarkin, ‘Political Stability’, p. 299, both quotations.

97. Ibid.

98. Fanon, Wretched, pp. 135–6.

99. Mboya, Challenge of Nationhood, p. 80.

100. Kenyatta, Suffering Without Bitterness, p. 310.

101. Buijtenhuijs, Twenty Years After, p. 122.

102. Mathu, p. 87.

103. Makerere Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Students Association, Comment on Corfield, Kampala, 1960, p. 31.

104. Ibid., p. 31, both references.

105. Ibid., p. 28.

106. Ibid., p. 31.

107. Ibid., p. 35.

108. Ibid., p. 46.

109. J. Wamweya, Freedom Fighter (Nairobi, EAPH, 1971).

110. Muriithi, pp. 51–3.

111. Ibid., p. 117.

112. Wamweya, p. 88.

113. E.g. Wamweya, p. 74.

114. Muriithi, p. 6.

115. Wamweya, p. 51.

116. Ibid., p. 54.

117. Muriithi, p. 5.

118. Ibid., p. 15.

119. Ibid., p. 126.

120. Leys, ‘Capital Accumulation’, p. 258.

121. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics (London, HEB, 1981), p. 25.

122. Ibid.

123. Leys, Underdevelopment, p. 61.

124. A. Calder, ‘Some Practical Questions’, Writers in East Africa, ed. A. Gurr and A. Calder (Nairobi, EALB, 1974), p. 83.

125. Ibid.

126. Mutiso, p. 133.