Conclusion: the decline of the eugenics empire

Abstract

Eugenics was swiftly displaced as the key to racial difference in post-war Kenyan medical discourse. The reasons for the failure of Kenyan eugenics lay beyond the local medical and biological forum that had created it and reveals how haphazard the decline of scientific racism was. A similar process was taking place in Britain, but in reverse, where the role of race and scientific racism in eugenics was downplayed. This chapter discusses these more recent processes in the intellectual history of eugenics and scientific racism to give an account of eugenics and colonial scientific racism in their time and place. It also demonstrates how influences from Britain and the colony interact to create a distinctive and extreme eugenic agenda in the imperial environment. Kenya held a mirror up to British eugenics, revealing how the problem of racial difference was implicitly at the heart of its hereditarian worldview.