Author: Daniel Branch (Yale University Press)
Reviewer: Warris Vianni

A daily reading of the Kenyan press can induce a feeling not unlike that of being in the thrall of a terrible bodice-ripper. At the end of each installment, one is left wondering whether the plot could get any more disgraceful. It does. A reading of Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011 by British historian Daniel Branch induces a similar feeling. Hope and Despair is a record of Kenya's high (low?) politics since 1963, ending with events in early 2011.  It is a sobering account of political agency since Independence and reads like a report from a scene where an awful lot of politics has been committed, most of it awful.

Branch has produced a largely narrative account, accessible to the general, non-specialist reader, and an excellent primer for students on African Studies courses interested in Kenya.

The writing of histories by foreigners can be discomforting, especially when the gaze is from a former colonial power. It can also be a problem for the writer, burdened with a sense of the past and aware of the risk of writing polite histories. But there are no borders in scholarship, and Kenya continues to be one of the most written about countries in Africa. Hope and Despair is a gloomy and useful addition to the Kenyan library.

The narrative in Hope and Despair is constructed around two ideas: the materiality of nationhood to a properly functioning state, and the choice made by Kenya's rulers since 1963 between two alternatives: 'redistribution' and 'recognition'. According to Branch, Kenya's rulers have chosen to distribute Kenya’s limited resources on the basis not of equity and fairness but by favouring selected groups based on a recognition of their ethnic identity. This, says Branch, has de-legitimised the state in the eyes of its citizens.

A vulgar analysis of politics might suggest that, ultimately, all politics is reducible to the question of who gets what, how and why. But, in Kenya, political discourse appears to define the relationship between state and citizen solely through the idiom of consumption - the consumption of limited resources. Kenya has one of the most unequal societies in the world and the reasons for its inequalities are troubling, but the question of resource distribution is not unique to it. And, as Singapore and Japan, Switzerland and Holland show, people too can be an invaluable resource.

In 1963, the Government embarked on a major programme to redistribute resources and opportunities: political power was transferred and the civil service opened up, education was expanded and the colour-bar ended, the 'White Highlands' were transformed and commerce regulated through the Trades Licensing Act, Nairobi was peacefully transformed from a city with a visibly colonial imprint to a vibrant African city.

The programme of redistribution could have been more vigorous: vacated farmland, as well as industry, could have been nationalised. There are many vexing questions about what happened at that time, but there are also questions usually unasked in the narrative of what might have been: who, for example, would have overseen the more extensive redistribution, and how? Given a mostly rural, largely illiterate, population, in all probability, a small elite in Nairobi would have decided who got what land, as well as specifying the correct quantity of plastic buckets and matchboxes to be manufactured. The civil service, including the provincial administration, would have had greater reach, the embrace of the state tighter. Quite possibly, such a government would also have been short-lived, brought to an abrupt end by an externally inspired coup d'etat.

Whilst reading Hope and Despair, I came across Kenya is My Country, a work published in the early 1980's. It features short photographic essays on Kenyans from different walks of life. What strikes us about the photographs today is the density of people on the streets and the landscape around them, urban and rural. Comparing those images with the country that we see today, one cannot help thinking how the wombs of Kenyan women and the quality of the public realm have both been vandalised with abandon.

Is redistribution more pressing because of the increased population? Or, has the huge population increase exacerbated difficulties today? Complaining about population growth is a favourite middle-class pastime the world over, but the question may be asked: if, instead of chauvinism and neglect, government had given its attention to population growth, would the demand for land and jobs, schools and clinics, water and light be a contest between, say, 23 million (at an annual growth rate of 2% per annum since 1963) instead of over 40 million today?

The debate about redistribution is important; it is also knotty.

The troubled project of the Kenyan nation underlies much of the narrative in Hope and Despair.  A sense of nationhood can buttress the state and legitimise its reach. But, a focus on nationhood can also obscure other factors that go to make states viable. Greece is an example of a state that can be said to be bounded by the idea of nationhood and yet its citizens do not trust it with their taxes; there is no pre-ordained logic to Brazil, but it is not anxious about possible disintegration in the way of, say, Nigeria; most Pakistanis probably believe in the idea of Pakistan and yet questions about its viability persist. There is a complex matrix of reasons that make a nation-state a workable proposition; perhaps even something as dreary as managerial competence has as much utility as political charisma, religion or history.

In Kenya, there is dismay at the weak sense of nationhood, but the idea of the state - that rude imposition of 1895 - is assumed to be a given, as if it is an idea entirely natural and grounded in the soil. It is not unique to Kenya but, for such an existential question, it is rarely asked.

In 1929, the Secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association went to London to petition for the restitution of Kikuyu land and honour. Perhaps the most significant insight he obtained in his 16 years abroad was that, in order to achieve the very specific goal for which he was sent, it was necessary, first, to obtain control of the state - the alien device through which the land had been alienated. What is to be done with the institution of the state thus captured has, in effect, been the bigger question behind much of the commotion since 1963.

At the end of his work, Branch speculates on the prospects of a Kenyan nation. Perhaps an equally pressing question is how to domesticate the state. European pretensions to rule were seen off, but what is to be done with their monstrous import?  A nation cannot be designed, but the state, that killer app imported from Europe, might, at least, be customised to suit local temper. The 'machine state’ is a presumption in a world where, before the arrival of the white tribes, power was not only local, but was earned and exercised in a way that was locally intelligible, and that had local legitimacy. Power was not all-pervasive; it enjoined co-operation, but allowed for agency. Clans would come together at a specific time for a specific purpose; even the Creator was not approached in congregations. The modern state remains indifferent to first principles that shaped a world where people, so recently, ordered their affairs in smaller, looser localities.

An idea at the heart of the unwieldy Lancaster House constitution was that of a weaker state at the centre. But that constitution was vomited out in the first year of Independence by a sovereign legislature that chose to adopt its own version, which served the country until 2010.

The proposed counties under the new Constitution - which arouse the greatest excitement on the ground - are a qualified attempt to go back to a weaker state at the centre. But, in all the talk about a new constitution, there was rarely discussion about how the long past might be a guide for the future. Fine sounding words in the English language might capture universal ideals, but, as Branch points out, functional trust in Kenya largely resides within ethnic communities. There is, however, little interest in looking to the values of the communities that make up modern Kenya to recover something of value from the past. An understanding of how a community was bound together, how authority was controlled and how internal relations were arranged could be useful.

Discussion about useable local moralities remains largely confined to obscure academic writing; wider potential discussion remains hostage to the embarrassment surrounding the idea of tribe, as it does to a defensive reaction against manipulation of tribal identity during (and after) the colonial period. Law and religion, even markets, can check and admonish the state. Tribe - which can do suspicion so well - also has that potential.

With the state in disrepair, and the nation work-in-progress, it is easy to see why the 'ideology of order' predominates: it becomes a necessary substitute for legitimacy.