Structure and Advice: The Case of Kenya

Abstract

THE RECENT INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT in Africa has caught economic development theory largely unprepared. Current studies still tend to focus on the problems of the European colonists' export economy with its existing statistical apparatus, leaving native life and labor largely to the special studies of the anthropologist, focused on tribalism. The nature of the dual economic structure in which the African population actually finds itself and the characteristics of the African's striving for better opportunity remain largely virgin territory.l Such neglect tends, of course, to reinforce pre-existing suppositions concerning development potentials and the means of realizing them. Two recent studies of Kenya illustrate the problem I have in mind. One, the World Bank Mission Report, The Economic Development of Kenya, 1963, in spite of much interesting material, represents pretty much the conventional development approach, differing not widely from that of the outgoing British administration which it sets out to analyze.2 The other, a brief doctoral dissertation by Marion W. Forrester, Kenya Today: Social Prerequisites for Economic Development (Mouton, The Hague, 1962), gives the results of a three-year field study of African savings and spending. To the best of my knowledge, in spite of some confusions in presentation, this study's focus on capital formation among African wage earners, taken in conjunction with their families at home, is unique.3 However, neither work gives an all-round setting for the strange structure, portions of which it sets out to examine. At the risk of some inaccuracy, the main facts of this structure may be summarized as follows. Kenya was inhabited on the eve of independence by some 8.6 million people, 60-odd thousand of them until recently European, primarily British, 200 thousand Asian (chiefly Indian), and 8.5