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Kenya: A History since Independence. By Charles Hornsby. London and New York: LB. Tauris, 2013. Pp. xviii, 958; maps, figures, photographs, bibliography, index. $30.00 paper.
Historians of independent Kenya are starting to feel a little spoiled. For many years, it seemed that no author was brave enough to take on the complex opacity of the nation's past since the end of colonial rule (though a multitude of studies appeared that were more narrowly focused, either thematically or chronologically). Now, in the space of two years, the field has been transformed, first by Daniel Branch's Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011 (reviewed by this author in 2013),1 and second, Charles Hornsby's opus, Kenya: A History Since Independence.
Any historian of Kenya will be familiar with Hornsby's first book, a coauthored monograph (with David Throup) that focused on the country's first multiparty elections in 1992. The text ran to 660 pages of dense print, making Hornsby's new 2.43 lb offeringcoming in at a shade under 1,000 pages-feel relatively concise, given the breadth of his topic. Hornsby describes the book as the "result of 27 years of research and immersion in Kenya's politics, economy, and society," and the author surely required every piece of his experience to produce this monumentally erudite tome (p. xi).
Hornsby conceives of his book as a political and economic history, though he considers the two subjects inextricably linked in Kenya. He opens by explaining that Kenya is one of a small group of African nations whose history "has not been one of war, military rule, mass murder, or state collapse." But, he continues, "neither has it been...