In the first week of 2006 the British press reported on two events relating to Africa: one emblazoned on front pages, but of little real significance, and the other tucked away on an inside page, of potentially greater significance. The former was the recruitment of Bob Geldof to the newly branded UK Conservative Party to advise on poverty and Africa. He was appointed for his presumed ‘expertise’ on Africa even though he is strongly non-partisan in a party political sense, implying that the causes and cures for Africa's underdevelopment are agreed upon between the major UK political parties. However, the appointment of a high profile media campaigner disguises the underlying theme of neoliberal consensus across the political spectrum in the UK and indicates that any change of government will bring about little change in policy towards the developing world. Thus, the point is not that there are many better qualified experts in Africa and beyond, but the Conservatives (like New Labour) are happy using concern for Africa as evidence of their ethical credentials. ‘Caring for Africa’ is proof positive of your humanity and respect of human rights, while all the time treating vast swathes of the globe with derision.
The second event was the report from the Africa Union's Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights which expressed for the first time concern over ‘the continuing violations and the deterioration of the human rights situation in Zimbabwe, the lack of respect for the rule of law and the growing culture of impunity’ (quoted in The Guardian, 4 January 2006). The report urged another ‘Bob’, Robert Mugabe, to allow an African Union delegation to go on a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe. At the time of writing this editorial the response of the Zimbabwe government was not known, but whatever the outcome, such criticism from a body under the AU marks an interesting development. Both reports indicate that there is no better time to reaffirm the need for critical, sophisticated and well researched analysis of Africa.
This general issue brings together papers on Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania to argue that questions of state, class, and ethnicity are vital for a full understanding of the continent. On one hand, this is evident in African responses to external intervention, where aid conditionalities and other political pressures are in a direct line of descent from colonial forms of control (with varying degrees of success) which in so many ways have predetermined the characteristics of the post-colonial state and hence the environment in which class dynamics and popular protest evolve. On the other hand, there are many internal sites of struggle for social, economic and human rights, very often related to land (as in Zimbabwe and Kenya) in which the intersecting roles of ethnicity, ‘indigeneity’ and emerging class formations call both for incisive analysis and for the public exposure of exploitation and violation of the rights of the most vulnerable by those bodies most legitimately placed to do so. These are the major themes in the papers which comprise this issue.
Ebenezer Obadare's paper focuses on the boycott of Nigerian mobile phone operators to consider the extent to which mobile telephony can be seen as a likely democratising force in the country. The boycott of September 2003 was directed primarily at the international and national mobile phone providers who were criticised for inefficient and overpriced services. The protest was also directed at the state, which was seen as partly culpable and also weak for not keeping the corporations in check. As such, the demonstration was part of a broader dynamic within Nigeria of popular protest against simultaneously excessive and weak state intervention. The question remains whether the technology enables new forms of democratic practice or if such protest is truly liberatory. While a journal such as ROAPE should welcome protest against usurious corporations, such a demonstration could be seen as simply seeking more efficient capitalism as opposed to an alternative to capitalism. However, that the protest took such a novel form is an interesting development for Nigeria and beyond.
Janet Bujra's paper also seeks to develop a more complex analysis of an aspect of Africa's political economy and society. Focusing on the HIV/AIDS question, she argues that a relational class analysis is absolutely vital for appreciating the differential patterns of the disease. Specifically, she focuses on how class inputs into the incidence of HIV/AIDS and, secondly, how there is a differing class response to the disease, with implications for class relations and how they are developing. Bujra's call for a more nuanced class analysis argues against the inadequate operationalisation of the concept in most surveys work, especially of the official type, leading to a predominance of ‘indexical’ approaches. Nevertheless, even with these drawbacks, much evidence indicates that the early stages of the disease tend to have impacted more on the better off groups, but these are groups which, on learning more about HIV, are able to take private measures to limit and control it within their class grouping. In the meantime, as the epidemic spreads it affects more of the ‘lower classes’ who are less able to delay its effect and limit its further spread. Paradoxically, much of the international donor money to counteract AIDS also becomes part of the class formation process in providing employment in the formal sector for administrative and professional workers. The theoretical discussion is augmented by an illustration of how better off families in Kagera in Tanzania responded to requests for assistance from a small self-help women's group from poorer households, raising questions about the functional nature of charitable donations by an emerging bourgeois class.
The next three papers all focus on Kenya, are drawn from a conference held in Oxford in 2004 and 2005 and share a number of important themes around the colonial legacy on post-independence Kenyan development. Usefully they feed the critique of colonialism as rational and stable, which is used to argue that the post-independence period is characterised by irrational rule and chronic instability. In different ways the papers demonstrate that colonial authority was always a dynamic compromise which left in place institutional legacies that shaped, but did not determine, post-independence politics and policy.
Daniel Branch and Nicholas Cheeseman provide a critical analysis of the state in Kenya. Using the bureaucratic-authoritarian theories originally devised for Latin America they track the evolution and activities of the bureaucratic state in Kenya. However, they point out that the Kenyan situation was very different from Latin America, because the former had nationalist popular support whereas in the latter, military regimes sought to engender such loyalties. The analysis shows that the state structures were based on colonial structures, but these were transformed after independence. What is striking is how the colonial state was temporary, contradictory and chaotic, which are criticisms usually reserved for the postcolonial state. They also reverse another dominant discourse by examining how order is maintained rather than the usual focus on disorder within African polities. They also show that such authority has been strong in both urban and rural areas, rather than being just an urban phenomenon.
Miatta Fahnbulleh's paper picks up on questions of the state and is an historical study of how postcolonial industrial and development policy was shaped by factors inherited from colonialism. In particular were structural constraints in the economy and the policy options deemed legitimate. Together, these generated high unemployment, which has been an enduring problem of the past four decades. The paper shows how there was an element of path dependency as subsequent governments sought to enact policies to alter the situation, although decision-makers must also be held responsible for the enduring problems.
Gabrielle Lynch provides a very detailed local history of the Rift Valley region to examine the dynamism and politicisation of ethnicity. She starts by arguing that contrary to histories claiming that colonial authorities inevitably ‘invented’ and ‘fixed’ ethnic identities these identities were (and are) in fact highly malleable. Also, rather than seeing politicisation of ethnicity as something reserved for factions within the state, her detailed ethnographic history reveals the role of more everyday African agency in mobilising ethnicity for resource claims, most usually land. An interesting contemporary development is how claims to ‘indigeneity’ are no longer simply an intra-state matter but savvy organisations are using international rights discourses and connections to place pressure on the Kenyan state to recognise resource claims.
Kenya: The turning point
Daniel Branch & Nicholas Cheeseman
Dramatic events have been experienced in Kenya in the last few months, events which may with hindsight represent key turning points in the political system, both its formal mechanisms and its actual workings in a classically clientelist model. These key moments are best interpreted in their broader historical context, a context which is admirably sketched in by several of the articles in this Issue. One of the key moments was the Referendum on a draft Constitution, which will certainly mark a turning-point in the long process of revising the colonially-imposed constitution of 1963. The Constitutional Review process and the referendum in November 2005 are treated in a Briefings by Wanjiru Carolyne Kamau and Lionel Cliffe. One central characteristic of the working of the Kenya system has been the high levels of corruption, which the new government was elected in 2002 in the hope of reversing. But in the new year startling revelations gave chapter and verse of how far it is still endemic. Although presented sometimes as a model of peace and stability, another basic characteristic of Kenya politics has been persistent violence. The urban dimension of this were explored by Katumanga in the last Issue. In this one, Mwangi explores the rural dimensions in the peripheral, pastoral areas of the North.
On the morning of 23 January 2006, Kenyans awoke to new but not wholly unexpected revelations into the Anglo-Leasing scandal. The public had known since 2003 of the existence of a fictitious ‘ghost’ company used to redirect public funds into private pockets during the issue of defence contracts. Following this, any lingering doubts as to the extent of corruption under the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government of President Mwai Kibaki were extinguished in February 2005. Then John Githong’o, the Permanent Secretary responsible for investigating corruption, left Kenya in frustration at the obstructions placed in his path during his efforts and in fear of his life. The reports of January 2006 spoke of attempts made in 2004 to cover-up the Anglo-Leasing affair by the then Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister, Kiraitu Murungi, and implicated other leading allies of Kibaki. The Vice President, Moody Awori, and Kibaki were both thought to have full knowledge of the affair. It seems that the purpose of Anglo-Leasing was to raise funds for the defeated ‘Yes’ campaign during the constitutional referendum of November 2005 and the upcoming 2007 general election (‘The Anglo-Leasing Truth’, Sunday Nation, 22 January 2006).
By the afternoon of 23 January 2006, the attention of the Kenyan media had been distracted by a desperate search for survivors and casualties amongst the rubble of an office block in central Nairobi, which had collapsed while under construction. To those who witnessed the aftermath of the 1998 bombing of the US embassy, the coverage of American, Israeli and British rescue teams intermingled with civilians digging with their bare hands was eerily familiar. This time, however, it was not international terrorism to blame, but shoddy design and corruption within the city's planning department.
In 1998, as in 2006, the media were previously engrossed in a major corruption case involving major figures in the incumbent regime. In March 1998, the trial of Kamlesh Pattni and four civil servants finally began five years after the first reports of a significant scandal first broke. The defendants stood accused of defrauding the Kenyan government of over $300 million through the manipulation by a company known as Goldenberg International of the re-export of gold and diamonds. Recent estimates have suggested a figure closer to $600 million may be more accurate. During the investigation and trial, both President Moi and his former Vice President, George Saitoti who is currently the Education minister, were implicated in the case. With the trial unresolved at the time of the NARC election victory in 2002, Kibaki appointed a judicial commission led by Appeal Court Judge Samuel Bosire to investigate and recommend prosecutions. Although the commission's public hearings were completed in November 2004, it was not until January 2006, and in the same week of the collapsed building and reporting of the Anglo-Leasing scandal, that its initial findings were leaked to the press. These initial reports suggest the earlier suspicions of the involvement of Moi and Saitoti were accurate (‘Top State Officials Hatched Scheme’, Daily Nation, 27 January 2006).
With this recent confluence of events, it is difficult to dispute the relevance to Kenya of Alphonse Karr's observation: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ As most African states approach the fiftieth anniversary of independence, increasing numbers of academic studies are adopting the perspective of the longue durée. Few of the events and trends we witness in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa are without precedent. Debates in Kenya regarding constitutional reform, the structures and influence of the state, ethnicity, land policy and economic development have their origins in the earlier post-independence and colonial periods. Taken together, the papers argue the case for a view of the present and recent past in Kenya that stresses continuity and prolonged processes of gradual change rather than a sequence of distinctive periods delineated by ruptures to historical trends. In so doing, an alternative approach is offered to arguments that stress the specificity of post-colonial African states.
Although not a formal collection of conference papers, many of the ideas developed here were raised and discussed at two conferences on Kenyan politics and history organised under the auspices of the African Studies Centre at Oxford in 2004 and 2005. Both these events and the following papers illustrate the necessity for multidisciplinary approaches to questions of historic and contemporary relevance. Furthermore, the papers are testimonies to the virtues of academic collaboration and collegiality, which lend this edition a great degree of coherence. No doubt that is partly due to the unseen influence of Gavin Williams. At one time or another, not least during the preparation of the papers here, several of the authors have benefited from Gavin's advice as a teacher, colleague and friend, for which we are grateful.
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