Tensions in Empowerment: The Experience of the "Harambee" (Self-Help) Movement in Kenya

Abstract

In Kenya, comprehensive national planning was recognized as a means to economic development and social change after independence in 1963. Planning would guide the allocation of scarce resources-land, skilled manpower, capital, and foreign aid-in order to promote rapid growth at every sector of the economy for the benefit of the people of Kenya.' Most traditions by which the local people had managed to sustain themselves were to be set aside. But an indigenous tradition of self-help called Harambee, meaning "let's all pull together," would be used to mobilize local resources and would involve local participation in development. It, too, would be subject to planning and coordination from above.2 In the ensuing years, development in Kenya has served to integrate the country into the world economy and has facilitated the emergence of an African petit bourgeois class. Kenya has become a success story of economic development, but it is also an example of extroverted development3 and of the increasingly illusive success of Harambee. The use of Harambee has become distorted, deviating from its traditional emphasis on basic production to the provision of large, costly social amenity projects.4 Harambee used to provide local mutual assistance and foster cultural values; today, those roles have been abandoned while only the material ends of Harambee are appropriated. Furthermore, local people have taken less and less part in decision making, management, and control of projects. This perversion of Harambee is referred to here as departicipation and reflects disempowerment at the grass-roots level.5 This article argues that Kenya's evolving class structure and at