From colonial civil servant to expatriate at the eve of Kenyan independence

Abstract

Chapter 2 discusses the use and contestation of the category expatriate in the archive of Kenyan independence. Specifically, it looks at the transformation of the colonial civil service into a national Kenyan civil service and the associated transformation of colonial civil servants into either ‘local’ or ‘expatriate’ officers. The chapter traces how the term expatriate was used to reproduce white privilege and British influence in the post-colonial period. As such, the expatriate was key to British international development aid, understood to be a tool for retaining global influence in a bipolar world, and indirectly helped entrench inequality in the Kenyan civil service and Kenyan society. Yet, if the category expatriate was used to translate colonial into postcolonial racism, it did so without relying explicitly on ‘race’, as racism was increasingly enunciated through a lexicon of culture and through economistic ‘logic’ and ‘common sense’.