Friends or foes? A critique of the development of the media and the evolving relationship between press and politics in Kenya

Abstract

The article focuses on the development of the press in colonial and postcolonial Kenya over the last 100 years. However, it is important to point out that communication systems existed in Africa even before the development of mass media as we know it today. Often, communication scholars, like other social scientists, tended to treat Africa at the onset of colonialism as a tabula rasa (Bourgault 1995: 2), because in early times in African history, the art of communication was conducted through oral means (Magaga 1982). However, because what is often termed ‘systems’ of mass media were introduced during the colonial period, the analyses of these systems, historical or otherwise, tend to reflect only what happened starting from the 20th century (Bourgault 1995). The limited scholarship on contemporary events until the 1990s, and the focus on the state's reluctance to permit historical research, has led to the creation of ‘imagined histories’ in Kenyan discourse and, consequently, the history of independent Kenya is encrusted with myth and little consensus on historical events (Hornsby 2013: 15). The article therefore seeks to detail the history and development of the media, its relationship to politics and the subsequent effect on media freedom in colonial and postcolonial Kenya.