Legitimation and Paternalism: The Colonial State in Kenya

Abstract

Most contemporary historians of the colonial period in Kenya emphasize the importance of the state. The colonial state, it is argued, ensures the conditions of settler capitalism, provides the infrastructure of transport, credit, marketing and agricultural research, creates by administrative action a supply of African labor, and generally ensures the interests of settler capital against those of an emerging African class of landed capital (Brett, 1973; Leys, 1975; Swainson, 1980). Equally, the theme of tension between the colonial and metropolitan states is a classic one in colonial history, and one which in much of the Kenya debate is seen as refracting tensions and conflicts between the interests of settler capital and the interests of international capital (Swainson, 1980; Cowen, 1982). Yet, despite this emphasis on the colonial state, very little discussion of its distinctive political features has occurred. The economic functions of the colonial state are stressed to the exclusion of questions about the basis of its legitimacy, of its citizenship principles and of its authority. Gavin Kitching (1985) recently pointed out that we have no really adequate theory of the post-colonial state. We are constrained instead to making negative statements to the effect that it is not simply the agency of one particular class force in Kenya, nor is it a unified force but the site of contending and fractured forces. The argument could well be extended to the colonial state. It is the contention of this paper that raising questions of colonial political legitimacy and paternalism reveals the political modernity or otherwise of the postcolonial state. A continuity across the moment of independence is frequently stressed for the economic functions of the state, but the argument of continuity can be generalized to include characteristics such as adherence to democratic norms and the strength of the rule of law which generally distinguish modern bourgeois democratic states. In general, Kenya conforms to the model whereby the post-colonial state adheres as little as its colonial predecessor to bourgeois political norms of the rule of law, freedom of the press, and rights to speech and democratic participation. Such norms are obviously of direct interest to progressive groups in post-colonial societies, and are increasingly emerging as the basis of a democratic socialist practice among the western left (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), but their consideration has hardly begun to inform discussion of colonial and postcolonial states.