In a piece at OpenDemocracy.org, the Africanist historian John Lonsdale, author of ‘… seventy articles or book chapters on Kenyan and African history,’ points to the limitations of some of mainstream commentary on Kenya. In good academic language he argues that much of what appears in the mainstream press and even from those in the West with a good grasp of Kenyan history and politics:
‘… underplay the always slippery relations between ethnicity as a universal human attribute, politicised tribalism as a contingent process, and the state – any state, colonial or otherwise – as a cockpit of variously contested but always unequal power.’
Lonsdale, as ever, is also optimistic (well he is also pessimistic):
‘Kenya faces two possible futures. On the one hand, the normal inter-ethnicity of most daily lives may have been poisoned by the recent violence, forecasting a broken state. On the other, the shock may have persuaded Kenyan elites of the old, Burkean, truth that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’
Full piece here.
