Suchergebnisse

Introduction : understanding loyalism in Kenya's civil war -- Vomiting the oath : the origins of loyalism in the growth of Mau Mau -- Terror and counter-terror : March 1953-April 1954 -- From Mau Mau to home guard : the defeat of the insurgency -- Loyalism, land, and labour : the path to self-mastery -- Loyalism in the age of decolonisation -- Eating the fruits of uhuru : loyalists, Mau Mau, and the post-colonial state -- Conclusion : loyalism, decolonisation, and civil war

This article explores the experiences of Kenyan students in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and other communist states between 1958 and 1969. Existing studies of student mobility from Kenya in this period have concentrated on the experiences of students in the USA, a theme familiar to many readers because of Barack Obama's family history. By contrast, and by using recently released sources from the British archives and material from Tom Mboya's papers at the Hoover Institute Archives, the article analyses the political debates that centred upon this much larger group of students who travelled East. The article demonstrates how newfound freedoms of movement were tempered by racism, colonial obstruction and domestic political considerations. The global opportunities that seemed to be presented by decolonization proved to be a chimera. The article locates the experiences of the students in a broader context of debates around decolonization and globalization, but emphasizes the importance of the students' experiences at home and abroad to the process of state-building being undertaken in Kenya at this time.

Recent attempts to revive counterinsurgency strategies for use in Afghanistan and Iraq have been marked by a determination to learn lessons from history. Using the case of the campaign against the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya of 1952—60, this article considers the reasons for this engagement with the past and the issues that have emerged as a consequence. The article disputes the lessons from British colonial history that have been learned by military planners, most obviously the characterization of nonmilitary forms of British counterinsurgency as nonviolent. Although it contests some of these supposed precedents for successful counterinsurgency in British military history, the article also identifies more generalizable elements of the Kenyan case. Particular emphasis is given to the effects on the nature of counterinsurgency, a reliance on locally recruited allies, and the decentralization of command.

In order to complement ongoing current empirical research, this article draws wider lessons from the crisis that grew out of the disputed Kenyan presidential election of December 2007. Looking beyond the immediate trigger for the subsequent violence -- namely, the election itself- the paper instead locates the roots of the crisis within three historical trends: elite fragmentation, political liberalization, and state informalization. The origins of each can be traced to the style of rule employed by Daniel arap Moi. Even though his first government of 2002-5 perpetuated these trends, President Mwai Kibaki failed to recognize their implications for national unity and the exercise of power in 2007. The article then addresses the sequencing debate within the literature on democratization, identifying the lessons that can be taken from the Kenyan case for other states. Kenya has shown again that political liberalization is a high-risk activity that can produce unintended side-effects. Drawing on examples from other African states, we argue that the processes of democratization and reform can be undertaken simultaneously, but that this twin-tracked approach requires institutional reforms not yet undertaken by a large number of African polities. Adapted from the source document.

Colonial rule in Kenya witnessed the emergence of a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape. With all capacity resided in a strong prefectural provincial administration, political parties remained underdeveloped. The co-option of sympathetic African elites during the colonial twilight into the bureaucracy, the legislature and the private property-based economy meant that the allies of colonialism and representatives of transnational capital were able to reap the benefits of independence. In the late colonial period these elites not only attained the means of production, they also assumed the political and institutional capacity to reproduce their dominance. The post-colonial state must therefore be seen as a representation of the interests protected and promoted during the latter years of colonial rule. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the post-colonial state represented a 'pact-of-domination' between transnational capital, the elite and the executive. The ability of this coalition to reproduce itself over time lay in its capacity to demobilise popular forces, especially those elements of the nationalist movement that questioned both the social and economic cleavages of the post-colonial state. Whilst Kenya may have experienced changes to both the executive and legislature, the structure of the state itself has demonstrated remarkable continuity.

The wars of decolonization fought by European colonial powers after 1945 had their origins in the fraught history of imperial domination, but were framed and shaped by the emerging politics of the Cold War. Militia recruited from amongst the local population was a common feature in all the counter-insurgencies mounted against armed nationalist risings in this period. Styled here as 'loyalists', these militia fought against nationalists. Loyalist histories have often been obscured by nationalist narratives, but their experience was varied and illuminates the deeper ambiguities of the decolonization story, some loyalists being subjected to vengeful violence at liberation, others actually claiming the victory for themselves and seizing control of the emergent state, while others still maintained a role as fighting units into the Cold War. This introductory essay discusses the categorization of these 'irregular auxiliary' forces that constituted the armed element of loyalism after 1945, and introduces seven case studies from five European colonialisms-Portugal (Angola), the Netherlands (Indonesia), France (Algeria), Belgium (Congo) and Britain (Cyprus, Kenya and southern Arabia).