Orientation for East Africa Program Lewis and Clark College Spring 2006 Richard Peck

KENYA

One Hundred Years of Political History in a Flash

---

V.  The Post-Colonial Settlement

A.Kenyatta becomes President, and after a brief period in which Africans had internal rule but foreign policy was in the hands of the British still, they got independence under Kenyatta’s leadership.

B.Moderates and homeguards got the spoils when independence came; the Land and Freedom Army got sold out.

C.The Kenyan government borrowed from UK money to buy out white farmers in "willing seller, willing buyer" sales, so purchasers are indebted to the Kenyan government, and the Kenyan government is in turn indebted to UK.

D.Myth of productive white farms meant that white farms were largely kept intact, going usually to the new African elite, but sometimes run as cooperatives by small farmers until they were unable to pay their debt, and the elite then purchased them.  Land concentration increased dramatically.

See the book by Colin Leys above; 

Ngugi's Petals of Blood (a novel, rather long and ideological, but fun even so, and a good radical view of Kenyan history presented in the form of a murder mystery).

Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (very nicely done novel, modelled in part on one by Joseph Conrad)

Gary Wasserman,  Politics of decolonization : Kenya Europeans and  the land issue, 1960-1965