Brexit Britain’s dismal plan to export its “immigration problem” to Rwanda through the forced deportation of asylum seekers is in some ways redolent of how, more than a century earlier, Kenya Colony dealt with its “native question”. That centred upon how to control the “natives” in a white European colony.

Some of the same buzzwords can be heard again this time around. Morality, betterment, economics, labour, containment, segregation and deterrence. Africans (and migrants of other ethnicities) must be contained in the equivalent of “native” reserves so that states can better control them. Moving them into reserves (aka migrant hostels, barracks, camps or detention centres) is for their own good. They will learn to give up whatever they were doing and labour for the white man (or in Rwanda’s case, industrious black and brown people). They will learn by example to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as if they had never worked hard before. They will be mighty grateful for the opportunities offered – or they damn well ought to be. Saviours, of whatever colour, will save the lazy “natives” from themselves – or in the case of cross-Channel migrants, from people smugglers. Morally, it is the right thing to do. Civilisation will rub off on them. But whether the deported migrants will be treated as citizens or subjects in their new “home” remains unclear.

Writing in The Times in April, the then Home Secretary Priti Patel, chief architect of the UK-Rwanda deportation scheme, said, “We can provide legal, safe, orderly and controlled ways for people to better their lives, flee oppression, persecution or conflict and enjoy new opportunities” (emphasis mine). This ignores the fact that forced deportation is itself oppressive, and a form of trafficking. The “best interests” argument was regularly used by colonial administrators, in Kenya and in other British colonies, to justify forced removals and other oppressive measures against Africans, such as the Maasai removals and the Talai resettlement (discussed below).

Continuities in the colonial treatment of mobile Africans, and the modern-day treatment of refugees and asylum seekers (both African and other non-whites), are plain to see. Scholars Hanna Brankamp and Patricia Daley write of labourers, migrants and refugees, then and now: “Colonial biopolitics dictated that nonwhite bodies only move at the behest of capital, colonial authorities, and certainly never of their own volition”. Discussing both colonial migrant labourers and post-colonial refugees and migrants, and historical trajectories of migration control, their term “racialized subjects in need of spatial fixation” is a useful one. They draw parallels between measures of regulation, control and containment that are still in vogue today.

The role of Brexit

The goal of ending unfettered immigration to Britain lay at the heart of the Brexit vote in 2016, when a slim majority of British people voted to leave the European Union (EU). Those voters, known as Brexiteers, seem to forget that 47.5 million people did not vote to leave. Though this figure includes 13 million people who did not vote at all, those who voted to stay in the EU are called Remainers. The country formally left the EU in January 2020. But Brexiteers are furious that Brexit has not delivered what they expected, or were promised. In particular, they rage at what they see as out-of-control immigration, and the spectre of “hordes” of young men “of fighting age” from Africa and the Middle East arriving on our beaches. The majority are wrongly assumed to be Muslims, who are believed, in the wake of several terrorist attacks by young Muslim men living in Britain, to pose a terror threat. Immigration, especially by cross-Channel dinghy from France, aided by people smugglers, has soared under successive Tory governments; 28,500 migrants crossed the Channel this way in the past year, treble the figure for the previous 12 months. More than 20,000 people have crossed since the start of 2022. Crossings have continued since the Home Office announced its deportation plan, which indicates that it is not a deterrent. Some 1295 people crossed in one day (22 August), a record for 2022 so far. The fact that the migrants are escorted ashore by Border Force officials, housed in hotels, fed and watered, and “paid” £39 a week, all at taxpayers’ expense, only infuriates Brexiteers more.

“Colonial biopolitics dictated that nonwhite bodies only move at the behest of capital, colonial authorities, and certainly never of their own volition”.

Gloating over this fiasco is the divisive figure of Nigel Farage, an éminence grise obsessed with immigration and the EU, who has never managed to get elected to the British parliament, despite seven attempts. He was, nonetheless, the driving force behind Brexit, when leader of the fringe UKIP (UK Independence Party) and Brexit Party. Farage continues to whip up anti-migrant sentiment on right-wing broadcast channels such as GB News, but also in the pages of serious national newspapers. If one person is single-handedly responsible for the anti-migrant rhetoric, it is Farage. Shamefully, the two final candidates who fought to succeed  Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, parroted Farage in their frantic attempt to appeal to Tory Party members who chose the new PM. As predicted, Truss won.  (The British electorate as a whole was not allowed to vote.) At an earlier stage of the contest, all the candidates said they supported the Rwanda deportation plan – despite the fact that several of them are, like Patel and Sunak, the children of immigrants to the UK. (Sunak’s parents were born in Kenya and Tanganyika, Patel’s are from Uganda.)

Fear of a mass invasion by Africans features in much of this rhetoric. Online comments contain hysterical claims that “the whole continent” is headed for Europe. “Most of Africa would prefer to live in Britain”, posted a reader at the Daily Telegraph on 22 June, one example that stands for many. In fact, the top countries of migrants’ origin include non-African countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The deportation plan can be seen as the culmination of the Tories’ hostile environment policy towards immigrants, which was first introduced ten years ago. In 2012, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced a strategy aimed at tackling “illegal” immigration by making life so unbearable for certain migrants they would voluntarily choose to leave. May herself used the words “a really hostile environment”. (Ironically, she now criticises the Rwanda deportation policy.) However, the opposition Labour Party first coined the expression in 2007. The then Labour immigration minister Liam Byrne referred to the desirability of creating a “hostile environment” in a consultation document that year, although the policy was not implemented. He has angrily denied May’s claims that Labour invented it.

Migration within colonial Kenya

Switching my focus to Kenya and the deeper historical context of forced migration, many of the internal relocations that took place in colonial Kenya (and the British protectorate that preceded it, before 1920) involved coercing Africans into leaving home to labour for white settlers. They moved seasonally in large numbers. “Squatters had not looked for work; [Lord Delamere] had sent for them, fetching their families and flocks by train”, writes historian John Lonsdale. However, not all displacement was coerced; this denies African and Asian agency, and overlooks all the other reasons why men, and women (often ignored in migration studies), moved as individuals in search of work.

The deportation plan can be seen as the culmination of the Tories’ hostile environment policy towards immigrants, which was first introduced ten years ago.

Norman Leys (a medical doctor and rights activist) reported how many colonial district officers initially refused to comply with demands from settlers and other private employers to use their influence and procure labourers. “Then an agitation began in Nairobi and in London. As a result of that agitation instructions were sent to district officers that, while no compulsion was to be used, ‘moral suasion’ was to be resorted to, chiefs were to be ‘encouraged’ to persuade their people to leave home to work for Europeans.” Then as now, Anglican bishops issued a statement condemning the plan. “We believe that ideally all labour should be voluntary. We recognise that, at present, this is impossible … [But] we are of the opinion that compulsory labour, so long as it is clearly necessary, should be definitely legalised.”

Under colonial vagrancy laws, it even became impossible for Africans who were not in employment to move around the country. The raising of the hut and poll tax also “encouraged” (Leys’ word, he was being ironic) Africans to seek wage labour outside their home areas. Settler estates depended on African labour to function, but recruitment proved difficult. Some settlers resorted to “exceptional violence” in order to get labour, in the words of scholars Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale. “The ferocity and unpredictability of the settler assault on the African population threatened to undermine the whole apparatus of colonial control”. The state had to step in to control labour supply, and did so after World War I when mass forced conscription into the Carrier Corps was seen to have been a “success”. (Some success; 95,000 African porters died.) It was a matter of carrots but more often sticks, as this appalling statement exemplifies:

I always treat my natives the same as I treat my children, I try to be kind to them, and to advise and direct them, but when kindness has no effect you have to do the same as they do in the public schools at home and throughout the empire – cane them. (Lt. Col. J.G. Kirkwood, Legislative Council member, Legco debate, 28 November 1941).

The language of infantilization persists today in the narratives around migrants.

Although the state, including the railway, was the largest single employer in the country at this point, thousands of men moved seasonally between the settler estates and African reserves, where their families tended to remain on the land. But over time, whole families moved to live on settler estates as squatters, and were initially allowed to bring their cattle with them. They grew subsistence crops, while women and children also provided labour to settlers during peak harvest and planting times. By 1931, the number of squatters in the highlands had risen to 113,176, the majority Kikuyu. They occupied one million acres of settler land, some of it land that the Maasai had formerly occupied. Although this arrangement brought some benefits for squatters (for one, it allowed them to expand beyond crowded Kikuyuland, creating a toe-hold that lasts to this day), harsh new laws forced African compliance with government. One of the most hated was the Registration of Natives Ordinance of 1915, which forced all males over the age of 15 to carry a form of identity called the kipande. 

Over time, settlers became alarmed about the large number of squatter stock on their land, and fearing the diseases that this stock allegedly carried, began forcing squatters and their stock off farms. Resentment at this was among the issues that sowed the seeds of Mau Mau (aka the Land and Freedom Army). “The squatters saw their economic deprivation as linked to their political subordination and it was these two problems that they hoped to eradicate when they took the oath and swore to support the Mau Mau movement,” wrote Tabitha Kanogo in her ground-breaking book Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau.

Maasai and other forced moves

Some communities were forcibly moved in their thousands, to become internally displaced in other parts of colonial Kenya. The most infamous forced migrations were the Maasai moves following two treaties or “agreements” made between Maasai leaders and British protectorate officials in 1904 and 1911. The moves were ordered to make way for white settlement, first in the central Rift Valley, later in the highlands of Laikipia. Maasai from certain socio-territorial sections (not the Maasai as a whole) were initially moved into two reserves, one in the north, the other in the south on the border with German territory (later Tanganyika and Tanzania).  In 1904, the British promised the Maasai they could keep Laikipia for ever. But only seven years later, under pressure from settlers, they broke their pledge and moved the Maasai again, this time at gunpoint, into an enlarged southern reserve in what is now Narok County.

It is estimated that the Maasai lost up to at least 50 per cent of the territory they had once used, but the figure could be nearer 70 per cent. The losses did not just involve land, but included the loss of good grazing, access to water sources and sacred sites, and the fatal exposure of both humans and livestock to diseases like East Coast fever and malaria, which were unknown in Laikipia in those days. The ripple effects of these events continue to the present day, in agitation by Maasai for the return of lost land or compensation. Neither is likely to materialise, for a variety of reasons.

The language of infantilization persists today in the narratives around migrants.

Fears about Maasai warriors and the assumed threat they posed to Europeans in the early years of colonial rule were remarkably similar to the current rhetoric in Britain, centred on the irrational fear of “hordes of young men of fighting age” arriving on our shores. Not only is their potential (but unproven) violence feared, but also their perceived sexuality – “Lock up your daughters!” is the cry of the anti-migrant Tory right. This is obviously part of a larger racist trope, referred to as the “black peril” in the scholarship on settler colonies, but also prevalent in the USA, especially in the formerly segregated Deep South.

British administrators saw the warriors as a dangerous standing army, which could let rip at any moment. In a discussion of the merits of confining the Maasai to reserves, Protectorate Commissioner Sir Charles Eliot (the equivalent of a governor) wrote to the Foreign Office in 1903: “[Maasai] simplicity, loyalty, and soldierlike qualities inspire a sympathy which makes people forget that a race which regards fighting and raiding as the only occupations for a young man of honour can never be anything but a dangerous race.” He also condemned the warriors’ alleged “immorality”.  In fact, as other officials who knew the Maasai better than Eliot were constantly telling him, they had never attacked Europeans and posed no danger. “And they are not likely to,” wrote Deputy Commissioner Frederick Jackson, “so long as they are treated fairly”. On the contrary, several administrators sympathetic to the Maasai feared that racist South African settlers in the Rift Valley might attack the Maasai if they were not physically separated. For these and other reasons, they were forced into reserves.

Today, the Maasai are not alone in their grievance with historical injustices. The Talai clan of Kericho County, part of the Kipsigis community, has for years sought reparations for forced resettlement. The British evicted them in 1934-36 from the Kipsigis Reserve to an allegedly mosquito-infested valley at Gwassi near Lake Victoria, where they stayed, under supervision, until the mid-1950s. They claim to have been moved to make way for tea plantations, some of which are still owned by UK-based multinationals. A group of Talai wrote to Prince William (elder son of King Charles III) in May this year seeking an apology and his support for reparations. The letter says: “We inherited the pain, you inherited the profit.” They hoped for sympathy from Will “because Kenya is special to him”. Earlier appeals to the British government appear to have received no reply.

Some communities were forcibly moved in their thousands, to become internally displaced in other parts of colonial Kenya.

Historians who have researched Talai history, most particularly the role of ritual leaders or orkoiik, say there is in fact no evidence that the Talai were evicted from land that became tea estates. But they were certainly evicted under colonial laws, said one leading scholar, and “unquestionably have a case”. UN human rights rapporteurs investigated the case and found for the Talai in 2021, which the community hailed as a great victory. However, the UN may have “ordered” the British government to apologise and pay compensation, but that does not mean anything will happen. The Tory government has been a tad preoccupied since Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ousted, and a bitter struggle ensued to replace him.  And since Prince William has no political power or influence, all he can say is pole sana.

The Rwanda scheme is becoming more bogged down by the day. It recently emerged that British ministers who backed the plan were warned months ago, by the government’s own advisor, that Rwanda tortures and kills political opponents. The government wants to keep these comments in a Foreign Office report secret, partly in order not to offend Rwanda. Media houses, including the BBC, are challenging this. The doomed flights are postponed until after a judicial review of the policy at the High Court, London, which began on 5 September and is expected to last five days. President Paul Kagame has also thrown a spanner in the works by announcing, after pocketing the £120 million down-payment, that Rwanda will only take 200 migrants – a drop in the ocean. Patel and the Home Office she previously headed (she resigned on Monday 5 September, hours after Truss’s victory) made a major mistake by not specifying, in the MoU with Rwanda, how many migrants Britain planned to deport. Some of us suspect that our government never intended to carry out the policy in the first place. It was simply red meat thrown to Brexit voters.

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This article is part of a series on migration and displacement in and from Africa, co-produced by the Elephant and the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s African Migration Hub, which is housed at its new Horn of Africa Office in Nairobi.

​The period immediately following the 9th August general elections in Kenya was a rude awakening for many. In any contest where there’s only one winner, and so there the contrasting feelings of jubilation and disappointment are no surprise. What would shock a keen observer is the visceral negative reaction shock amongst a section of the supporters of the Azimio la Umoja side. The reaction went beyond disappointment; it was grief that quickly deteriorated into recriminations against any individual or group perceived not to have ‘given their all’ in support of Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga’s candidature.

This is Mr. Odinga’s fifth stab at the presidency, so the spectre of disappointing results is not totally new to his supporters, particularly those over 40 years old. Disappointment and even certain levels of anger have been de rigueur in past elections, but the inexplicable grief and recriminations have been unique to 2022. One unique feature of this year’s elections is that the narrative has portrayed those perceived not to have supported Raila not as competitors or rivals, but as evil saboteurs.

The result was a barrage of vitriolic abuse directed at Kikuyu people on social media, much of it written in Dholuo, which few Kikuyus can read or understand. We certainly hope that the Azimio running mate Martha Karua was somehow shielded from it because a significant proportion of the diatribe is sexist as well. However, those who are shocked and wondering just what happened in 2022 are deluded, because the question is guided by their powers of perception (or lack thereof) rather than by the sequence and consequence of events.

Faith in “The System”

The primitive and flawed history of our electoral structures certainly don’t provide any reason to believe otherwise. However, Kenya is also a nation founded on the dishonesty of colonialists, so we Kenyans still struggle to internalize the truths of political history, including those we have lived through and witnessed. The Luo nation is no exception to this rule, despite boasting several renowned historians and political scientists. The Luo nation has long lived with the well-founded belief that they (through the person of Raila Odinga) have been victims of electoral malpractice in the past.

When the much-vaunted ‘handshake’ between the Rt. Hon Odinga and former President Uhuru Kenyatta took place in 2018, the Luo nation greeted it with unbridled joy at the prospect that ‘one of us’ would finally ascend to the highest office in the land. It was almost comical to see the jubilation that greeted the symbolic launch of Kisumu port where Mr. Odinga was flown to Kisumu in a Kenya Defence Forces aircraft, a very potent (and deliberate) subliminal message, which they tried to actualize through the legally ill-advised “Building Bridges Initiative” (BBI).

In a conversation on the Maisha Kazini YouTube channel, we discussed at length how this project (which failed) was an attempt to entrench feudalism in our formal government structures. In a startling show of cognitive dissonance, the people who had fought so long for democracy and electoral justice mentally crowned Uhuru Kenyatta as a ‘King’ whose reign was ending and had magnanimously designated their leader as the crown prince. ODM leaders, notably Dr. Oburu Odinga crowed about the Uhuru’s endorsement and about the support of “the system” being a sure path to State House for Raila Odinga.

Sadly, this dissonance was so convincing that the people believed them, culminating in a toxic mix of relatively lackluster campaigns, while followers remained inexplicably assured of victory. The people who had steadfastly cast their votes for generations and fought for justice somehow discarded that legacy and internalized the belief that victory would be delivered by a combination of expected injustice and support from the alleged erstwhile perpetrators thereof. A mind-boggling conundrum by any measure.

It would be difficult for any mortal to derive reason from such a bizarre far-flung psychosocial situation, hence the extreme bitterness at the absence of a unanimous support for Mr. Odinga from Kikuyu voters (the decision of other Kenyan voters is not on the table). The Odinga supporters saw the failure of certain areas of Kikuyu land to support Odinga as a betrayal, and rather than recognize the significant number of votes that accrued from the Mt. Kenya region up from virtually nothing in 2017.

How can we explain this avalanche of opprobrium?

This reaction betrays the logic of the whiteness that is rooted in the coloniality of power in Kenya. Underlying the offence was the perception amongst the Luo proletariat that their Kikuyu counterparts had the temerity to reject the Luo liege, even after Odinga’s pact with his Kikuyu peer. Lack of attention to history blinded Odinga’s supporters, both in Luoland and the larger Kenyan intellectual class, to the fact that the Kikuyu proletariat did not view the handshake in the same way as the Luo voters did, nor did they relate to Uhuru the way the Luo did to Raila.

This oversight blinded them to the reality of the Mt. Kenya’s region’s rejection of Uhuru’s political machinations, as opposed to the rejection of Mr. Odinga himself. It was far from automatic that the Kikuyu would blindly follow Uhuru into the handshake. Mt. Kenya has had a fractured relationship with the Kenyattas from the very beginning. At independence, Jomo Kenyatta suppressed Mau Mau history and left Mau Mau veterans landless. Twice before, Uhuru Kenyatta had been rejected at the ballot by the Mt Kenya region: in 1997 when he contested as MP for Gatundu, and in 2002 when he contested to presidency. The rise of Uhuru’s acceptance in Mt Kenya was linked to the trauma of the violence against the Kikuyus in the Rift Valley following the botched elections of 2007, a violence which many Kikuyus attribute to Raila Odinga himself, since the violence stopped when Raila shook hands with Kibaki.

It was this trauma, and Raila’s perceived or actual responsibility in it, that Uhuru exploited in 2013 when he hired a British PR firm which rode on the ICC indictments to present Uhuru as an anti-imperialist freedom fighter. It was not tribal adoration that got Uhuru president, that is if he even won the vote. It was trauma, money and gas lighting by a heavy bureaucratic and intellectual artillery that later included the manipulation of social media by Cambridge Analytica.

The second issue that was overlooked was the anger of the Mt. Kenya region at the collapse of the economy. In his hubris, Uhuru failed to realize that huge infrastructural investments would not pacify ordinary people whose businesses were suffering as the Kenyatta empire grew. The milk industry, for example, is a case in point, where the Kenyatta family dominance in the milk industry was seen as the reason for the drop in the prices ordinary farmers were fetching for their milk. By the time Uhuru and Raila were proposing BBI, people in central Kenya, especially the youth, were saying they did not care for more power-sharing deals when they were not able to earn a living.

Coloniality and ethnicity

The failure to notice the cracks in the deal, due to casual attempt to merge political views of Mt. Kenya and Nyanza region, is linked to the fact that coloniality and whiteness manifested in completely different ways in the two regions. In Kikuyu land, coloniality was imposed through extreme violence, leading to the familiar stories of a society riven between the Mau Mau resistance and colonial collaboration. The Kikuyu have memories in form of living survivors and the trauma of the victims.

By contrast, coloniality in the greater Nyanza region, which included the Luhya regions of the northern Lake Victoria shores, was imposed by co-option through government bureaucracy, colonial education and conversion to Christianity. In Nyanza, there was no conventional rebellion warfare, and the only contact with the rebellion was in the person of the detainees imprisoned at Mageta island. And so coloniality was experienced as psychological more than material. The Africans who became the ‘whites’ were those who became educators, administrators, colonial apparatchiks and clergy. Their descendants still occupy high political offices and are much-admired personalities, such as outgoing governor Cornel Rasanga and Dr. Patrick Amoth of the Chief Amoth Owira family; Prof Peter Anyang Nyongo and the late Prof. Aggrey Nyong’o of the Canon Hesbon Nyong’o family; and the numerous political and business players across both Kenya and Uganda who are descendants of Canon Jeremiah Musungu Awori. Many songs praise men as ‘chal gi mzungu’. Many non-Luos may hear Luos refer to each other as ‘Odiero’ and think it is a very common name, but it is actually an honorific that means ‘white man.’

The only aberration in this historical link was brought about by the fallout between Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi and the consequent odium faced by the Odingas. This brought in the suffering narrative as an additional ingredient into Luo nobility. Up to the elections, the answer to any questions on Odinga’s leadership qualities invariably included references to how much he has suffered or sacrificed. With the passage of time and the monumental legal changes in Kenya, however, individual suffering was becoming a less “accessible” qualification, which placed Mr. Odinga on something of a pedestal. Others therefore could only seek distinction through the competence with which they served him and the conspicuous manner in which they displayed this service or consumed the proceeds thereof.  Philosophy scholar Joe Kobuthi recently identified this as a form of masculinity that is defined by conspicuous consumption, belying the casual humorous term ‘ujaluo’ used by less erudite people to describe it.

By contrast, whiteness in central Kenya was mostly defined by collaboration against the rebellion. The reward in Mt Kenya for collaboration was entry into government, and access to government contracts and title deeds as a way of climbing the social ladder. In central Kenya, people who pursue school education do not enjoy the same clout that is enjoyed by people with access to wealth. A prominent example was Prof Wangari Maathai who won the 2004 Nobel Prize but lost her parliamentary seat in the 2007 elections. Her international accolades did not win her a free pass to parliament.

Within this matrix, it was difficult to notice major forewarnings that the Odinga bargain was likely to collapse. In January 2021, news broke surrounding a leaked letter allegedly from then Murang’a Senator Irungu Kang’ata to president Kenyatta, which warned that BBI was deeply unpopular in Kikuyu areas. During this time, Babu Ayindo prophetically penned this tweet that escaped attention: “@RailaOdinga, I am prepared to believe that Sen. Irungu Kang’ata deliberately misaddressed that letter. Ja’kom, that letter is yours. Please read what the letter is saying and, more importantly, what the letter is saying without saying.”

Many observers will have noticed the lyrical sob stories that were circulating on social media following the initial announcement of the results, treating Mr. Odinga’s apparent loss like some kind of Greek tragedy. Those familiar with the strong African traditions surrounding death will be uncomfortable with the reference to a living person in language and tone more appropriate for mourning at a wake. It is an unexpected manifestation of ethnic chauvinism, because the personal grief stems from the belief that there was some kind of “queue” for leadership and the “white” Luo candidate was the next in line, having been ‘anointed’ by the sitting president. The usurping of this coronation by a ‘black’ candidate with no known lineage is anathema to all feudalists, including the oppressed vassals.

Such hubris was largely facilitated by Kenyan intellectuals in media, education and cultural spaces, who failed to do the work of unpacking political relationships beyond the usual narrative of tribal quirks. Yet underlying these tribal mathematics was the matrix with which the colonialists ascribed certain vocations to certain ethnic groups to protect colonial interests. For instance, because the colonial interests and African resistance in central Kenya centered on land, the British concocted an elaborate scheme called the Swynnerton plan, where the route to social mobility was joining government to help suppress the resistance, and after independence, getting access to government contracts through feudal networks.

This difference would also explain why the British and Americans would look at Jaramogi as a “communist” when Jaromogi’s flirting with the communist block was more about strategic political muscle against the US-supported Jomo Kenyatta, rather than a reflection of Jaramogi’s economic thinking. Jaramogi’s entrance into politics was on the back of the colonial restrictions on African trading and financial credit in Kisumu. He was therefore more of an indigenous capitalist than a communist. With his lack of direct experience with the land conflicts and colonial violence in central Kenya, it is also understandable that Jaramogi was adamant about the release of Jomo Kenyatta as a condition for independence discussions, while other Kikuyu politicians were more willing to negotiate with the British on their own while Jomo was in jail. After independence, it was Jaramogi who joined forces with Bildad Kaggia in advocating for fundamental land reforms that would give land to Mau Mau veterans, while the Kikuyu politicians – led by Jomo Kenyatta himself – enriched themselves in their newfound status as the new black settlers.

However, this collaboration failed to address the economic logic of the colonial Kenyan state, and the way it was intertwined with ethnic stereotypes. As such, the stereotypes of Kikuyu strength as that of business while Luo strength as that of academics, and similar prejudices about other Kenyan ethnic groups, continued to dominate Kenyan political life. In Kikuyu land, the Kenyatta family would stoke ethnic bigotry to claim unique rights of Kikuyus, and would use ritual, such as the cutting of Field Marshal Muthoni’s hair by Uhuru’s mother, Mrs. Ngina Kenyatta, as a spiritual tool to enforce Kikuyu compliance.

Other ethnic groups outside the two main protagonists are relegated to the stereotypes of witchcraft, docility, cultural stagnation and even terrorism, and rarely do Kenyans interrogate what these stereotypes mean politically. Often, the effect is reduced to that of numbers, but nobody questions why prominent national politicians like Kivutha Kibwana and Ekuru Aukot are often ridiculed for aspiring for the presidency. In many areas in Kenya, people cannot aspire for any office because they are denied identity cards in the name of not belonging one of the 45 or 46 tribes.

Watershed Moment

This election has therefore been a watershed moment, where the less obvious and more psychological implications of coloniality have been exposed, now that the legal and administrative hurdles associated with elections are decreasing in importance. This psychological dimension of coloniality was hidden from Kenyan politics through the use of ethnicity as a zero-sum narrative to explain Kenyan political life. The Kenyan intellectual class, especially in the media and the education system, covered up this decadence by rebranding tribal parochialism as the irredeemable nature of Africans, and by making hollow calls for Enlightenment style human rights. They therefore had no conceptual framework with which to understand the dynamic nature of Kenya’s politics and the importance of class and economics, especially since the promulgation of the 2010 constitution.

Hubris got us here. Not only the hubris of our nobles who felt entitled to choose leaders for us from amongst themselves, but also from the scholars who have excelled in law, history and political science, but choose to serve the nobles rather than apply the knowledge to our human conditions in situ. When our elite acquire journalistic and academic expertise which does not address what ails us, then we are stuck with “competents” as opposed to educated people. From now on, let us normalize ignoring any purported “expert” who cannot unpack this watershed moment for us. That failure should suggest to us that the “expert” is either part of the mess, or not courageous enough to help our nation move on from it. That’s the definition of deadwood, which can only slow down the growth of our society.

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This article was first published on Wandia Njoya’s blog.

Dark prologue

Veteran journalist Philip Ochieng Otani exploded onto Kenya’s journalism scene in 1966 as a reporter for the Daily Nation aged 28. The country was just beginning to shed off the baggage of violent colonial rule, ushering in a new decade of political and cultural independence. However, beneath the promise of a glowing future that saw more black Africans take over from the British, the country was also starting to write a prologue to its self-destruction. By 1965 nationalist Pio Gama Pinto was dead. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga angrily resigned from Kanu the following year to form his party, and three years later Economic and Planning Minister Tom Mboya was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in broad daylight. The Kenyan press, though now relatively free and able to finally “concern itself with finding out what goes on in the mind of the African”, as Mboya had earlier put it, later suffered the cascading political events that would have a lasting effect on its editorial policies.

Ochieng published I Accuse the Press: An Insider’s View of the Media and Politics in Africa in 1992, crystallising his wide-ranging thoughts around three central issues: the question of media ownership, self-censorship among editors and the know-how of journalists. He extended the idea of know-how to know-why, whereby the journalist is not just a conveyor belt of information but also has the necessary analytical sensitivity to break down the information for the reader’s benefit.

Born a precocious child in Awendo, Western Kenya, a story is told of how the then Alliance High School principal Carey Francis drove several kilometres to Ochieng’s village to convince him to return to school. Ochieng, as the legend goes, had entangled himself in bad company and was on the verge of dropping out of education, which he eventually did – not from Alliance, but from Roosevelt University in the US, where he had enrolled after benefitting from the Kennedy Airlift programme of 1959. These rather disparate intellectual foundations shine with dazzling brilliance through the pages of his book, illuminating the history of the Kenyan press that has had a profound impact on the current media landscape.

Media ownership and its dangers 

Along Tom Mboya Street, just across the Khoja Mosque roundabout, is a building that used to house the Daily Nation offices. It is now called Old Nation House and only the name remains as a reminder that a media house once stood on the busy street. The building now houses shops, the sidewalk colonised by hawkers, make-shift confectionary stalls, booksellers, fruit sellers, clothes vendors, chemist shops and MPesa outlets. On the surface, the city is booming. A new world order brought about by advancements in digital technology and a liberalised media means that most of these traders don’t really care about media gatekeepers. Should they? Nation Media Group, which owns Daily Nation among other media products, and which is itself owned by Aga Khan IV, later moved to the relatively quiet Kimathi Street. Over the years, it has undergone radical transformations, unlike when Ochieng worked there, especially in the heady 1970s and 1980s, which form the backdrop of his long and intellectually stimulating musings.

Ochieng’s take on media ownership falls into three broad categories: foreign-owned, indigenous-owned and state-owned. These categories often overlap, in that a foreign-owned publication, such as Daily Nation, also has its indigenous Kenyan journalists, and editorial matters (or decisions) are left strictly to those tasked with running the paper – who in this regard include the top editors, led by the editor-in-chief. Indigenous-owned media, on the other hand, is in the hands of Kenyans but can also be susceptible to outside influence, like in the case of Hilary Ng’weno’s string of publications, which urgently needed a bailout after he plunged into financial headwinds. The indigenously-owned media outlet that is most familiar to Kenyans today is S.K. Macharia’s Royal Media Services.

Interestingly, Ochieng makes a compelling argument about the relationship between media ownership and press freedom. For example, he says, in special circumstances, state ownership “has tended to safeguard freedom – not only of the Press but the whole society – from material wants much more genuinely than has private ownership”. He goes on to cite Tanzania, where the state-owned papers in the 1970s played a vanguard role in protecting the gains of independence, while at the same championing Ujamaa – a socialist ideology aimed at self-reliance. While that statement would today sound unpopular, conservative, and be even deemed right-wing, there is a grain of truth to it. Private media ownership on the other hand, as the author vividly illustrates, does not necessarily mean there is press freedom.

Ochieng makes a compelling argument about the relationship between media ownership and press freedom.

A case in point is how the mainstream media handled the 2013 and 2017 general elections. Hiding behind a peace narrative, or what some observers have called “peacocracy”, the media tiptoed around the underlying issues that ignited the flames of electoral violence. The media on this occasion failed in its role, which Ochieng says is to provide “a full analysis of the whole system”. By becoming that which it was supposed to critique, the media lost the trust of a large swathe of the Kenyan audience. And this is why the argument for state-ownership of a newspaper or broadcaster (KBC, for instance) becomes relevant because, at the very least, the audience knows what to expect.

However, the argument about state ownership should not be endorsed wholesale. The case of the Kanu-owned Kenya Times, and its infamous “Kanu Briefs” – which Ochieng has been placed at the centre of, for orchestrating a sustained smear campaign against politicians and intellectuals who were against the ruling party – is a chilling reminder that the state must never have unchecked control of a country’s political and cultural consciousness. In recent years, politicians have been linked to various media houses, and this in itself is not a bad thing; however, vigilance must be maintained at all times to guard the media against direct political interference.

Then came the internet. Then social media. Then Facebook.

When a 20-year-old computer science and psychology student at Harvard University wrote code for a website project that would later become the interactive platform named Facebook, few could imagine the technological dividends the millennials and Generation Z would reap, accustomed as they were to filtered news and omnipresent gatekeeping (particularly the millennials). There was a fundamental shift in media ownership because if you had a social media account, you could now publish, broadcast and counteract news from mainstream sources such as newspapers and television. One could also start a blog,  an online newspaper or magazine, or a YouTube channel, qualifying Ochieng’s statement that “freedom of expression is primarily a technological question”. This means that the question of media ownership and the idea of a free press in the 21st century can no longer be merely about buying shares in a media company and telling news managers and editors what to publish and what to censor.

While there are indeed genuine concerns with the citizen journalism promoted on social media platforms, especially with the rise of misinformation and disinformation that threatens the social fabric of society, the gains made so far cannot be downplayed. But how these platforms can counter narratives of self-censorship by proxy, as Ochieng puts it in his book, matters more.

The question of self-censorship

Ochieng makes a lucid argument that self-censorship affects media independence because readers do not get the value of what they pay for. More importantly, self-censorship is informed by the commercial interests of corporate mass media because “whoever owns the majority of the shares” of a particular media company will definitely affect its overall editorial policy. I want to demonstrate a recent example of what perfectly encapsulates self-censorship on the part of the Kenyan press.

During the 2017 general election, a 41-year-old man wearing a pair of brown trousers, a matching brown coat, a black and white shirt, and clutching a bag of githeri in his left hand, burst onto the media scene and became an instant sensation. Martin Kamotho, for that was his name, became the subject of wild adoration. It was, however, the manner in which the mainstream press glorified Kamotho that later became the subject of intense debate. The country was already in the grip of political tension – as usually happens during a general election – and Kenyans were beginning to question whether the polls would indeed be credible following the murder of Chris Msando, a key IEBC official. Claims that critical IT infrastructure used to transmit the results had been hacked were also of general concern. There was an overall perception that the media as an institution had learned its lessons in the 2013 general election and that it could not trust the state when it comes to setting the agenda in election reporting.

Ochieng makes a lucid argument that self-censorship affects media independence because readers do not get the value of what they pay for.

However, the case of Kamotho, later christened “Githeri Man”, exposed the crass hypocrisy of the mainstream media and its cunning ability to censor itself because it knew it could not muster the courage to answer the tough questions Kenyans were asking. Ochieng is, therefore, right that there are “the kinds of chains with which owners, managers and editors tie their own media in order to make them conform to the total ethos of the ruling class [that] cannot be seen by the majority of the people”. However, Kenyans saw through the game that was being played, and the backlash was immediate. Mainstream media was quickly baptised “Githeri Media” – purveyors of fake news, disinformation and misinformation, state apologists, propagandists who, as the fourth estate, had failed in their role to keep the government accountable.

The media’s fixation with “Githeri Man” was not just about pleasing the political class or protecting its (the media’s) commercial interests. It was also about the glaring absence of know-why among journalists – the ability to ask why a certain narrative is being vigorously promoted and not another, and what effects such an editorial policy has on the health of Kenyan journalism.

Shift towards know-why journalism 

Ochieng writes that “as long as [media] training stresses little more than technique and avoids the whole problem of self-consciousness” then “training can only serve as an instrument for perpetuating the present international economic and intellectual order”. Journalism as an enterprise then becomes what I called earlier a mere conveyor belt of information, which serves no purpose in making us more aware of the immediate problems of the 21st century such as climate change, the dangers of identity politics, pandemics, repressive immigration laws, the rise of far-right ideology and the tyranny of social media companies, among others.

Kenyans saw through the game that was being played, and the backlash was immediate.

Know-why journalism, however, cannot fully bloom without sufficiently addressing the issue of know-how. The latter, which at the most basic level is about technique, is also about understanding the shifts in media operations, and how to adjust to those changes. Know-how then means having the ability to tell stories across varying multimedia platforms that include podcasts, videos, and texts. And because consumer tastes have also evolved over the years, know-why journalism can only succeed when know-how as a skill has been extensively sharpened.

Closing curtain

Ochieng danced to the land of no return on 27 April 2021, aged 83 years. During an interview with the Saturday Nation, when asked if he “would make the same accusations” in I Accuse the Press, he said he was still likely to do just that, but be “more enlightened and thoughtful about it.” However, by standing up to the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and its connivance with the state and Western business interests, Ochieng had set the stage for a new chapter of self-criticism for journalists and media practitioners. Ochieng stood with the audience in demanding that the media play its watchdog role more effectively by delving deeper in its analysis of issues.