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Daniel Branch's political history of Kenya since independence deals with the consequences of choices: paths taken in the mid-1960s could not later be retraced; rejected alternatives mutated to extremes but never entirely disappeared. Branch's economical and lucid account follows the working out of what at times seems an inevitable tragedy of unrealised hopes and angry despair, especially if read against the deeper background of Kenya's colonial past.
The first choice facing Kenya's new rulers was between building a nation and securing the state: Kenya's new rulers chose the latter. In 1963, Kenya needed social stability and economic growth. Both the old masters and the new rulers deemed the centralised state best able to deliver both. A field administration, accustomed to implementing orders, and a central bureaucracy were regarded as far more reliable as instruments of order and development than politicians and ideologues. 'Firm government' of the colonial kind was, in any case, all that most Kenyans had ever known. A majimbo alternative of strong regions and weak centre, created during the transfer of power to assuage 'minority' fears, was jettisoned after independence, only to reappear two decades later in the context of a discourse of autochthony rather than as a constitutional contrivance. The nation, meanwhile, was left to build itself. Kenya's many communities were too fractious and too jealous of their autonomy to be obedient 'nationalists': citizens would always be householders first. Perhaps working for oneself would, in time, create a shared 'Kenyan' identity of freedom, responsibility, and mutual accountability, but the...