Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011
Daniel Branch
Half a century of Kenyan politics, swinging between hope and despair.
Branch narrates Kenya's history from independence to the period after the 2007 to 2008 post-election violence, examining how successive governments managed ethnicity, land, patronage and dissent. He describes a state that swung repeatedly between reform and repression, hope and disillusion. The book offered a scholarly yet readable synthesis of nearly fifty years of Kenyan politics, and it stands as a key single-volume history of the postcolonial state's promise and its recurring crises.
Its legacy. It stands as a leading single-volume history of independent Kenya.
- Author
- Daniel Branch
- First published
- 2011
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
More from The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
- Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism — Mahmood Mamdani
Colonialism split Africans into citizens and subjects, and independence kept the divide.
- On the Postcolony — Achille Mbembe
Power in the postcolony rules through spectacle, excess and grotesque intimacy.
- The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly — Jean-Francois Bayart
Politics as appetite: power pursued through patronage and the belly.
- The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence — Martin Meredith
Fifty years of independence, from the hopes of 1960 to their unraveling.