Chapter 7 examines Kenya’s electoral institutions from the era of the Electoral Commission of Kenya through the post-2007 crisis reforms that created the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. It explores how the breakdown of party consultation, unilateral appointments, ethnic tensions, and administrative failures contributed to the 2007 electoral disaster. The chapter evaluates the post-crisis reforms that sought to strengthen autonomy through constitutional redesign and professionalization, while also documenting persistent challenges related to capacity, trust, and inclusion. Through interviews and secondary reports, the chapter assesses how Kenya’s evolving institutional design influenced the country’s ability to manage contentious elections and highlights the importance of sustained, structured engagement with political actors.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

This chapter explores the implications of a post-transition context and an ongoing violent confrontation for the memory regime, looking at Kenya as our case study. Despite a power-sharing agreement and a concluded transitional justice process following election-related violence in the country (2008–2012), today Kenya is again characterised by public amnesia with regard to the most recent violence committed in the context of a ‘War on Terror’. The chapter shows how memory is securitised, with amnesia presented as resilience and memory as vulnerability in the context of the confrontation. Spaces of violence are reconstructed and fortified, and people invited to reinhabit them as a way to fight terror. The chapter takes a close look at the rectification of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, showing the different ways in which labours of memory erasure have paradoxical effects, acting as triggers of memory, archives of memory discourse, and even markers of insecurity.

This chapter reflects on the core contributions of the book to the study of memory, transitional justice and peacebuilding. First, it highlights conceptual contributions in rethinking the nature of public amnesia as an active form of labour. Following this, it notes the rich empirical findings on the diversity of ways in which the negation of and disengagement with the past operate, and the diverse ways in which this imprints into materiality, affecting sites of violence and those who encounter them. The chapter also highlights contributions to a dynamic understanding of amnesia and the comparative politics of transition, noting how diverse regimes of memory form based on the type of transition, and how these change over time. Finally, the chapter closes by highlighting the contributions to our understanding of the intersection between public amnesia and peacebuilding.

The introductory chapter lays out the core research questions and maps out persistent gaps in knowledge, particularly when it comes to: (1) comparative work on memory and public amnesia; (2) a dynamic understanding of how war-to-peace transitions shape memory regimes differently and over time; and (3) a regional approach to memory/amnesia. In other words, are there different ‘paths to forgetting’? And do memory regimes evolve in line with the changing nature of political regimes? To this effect, three cases are chosen for an in-depth exploration: a context of victor’s peace exemplified by Rwanda; a power-sharing deal exemplified here by Burundi; and finally a non-transition/ongoing confrontation exemplified by Kenya and the War on Terror in East Africa. From a comparative perspective, the book explores three distinct cases of both violence and transition: a genocide coupled with civil war and rebel victory in Rwanda, civil war and power-sharing in Burundi, and a transnational confrontation with a non-state actor in the context in Kenya. The chapter then outlines its methodology and offers a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.

The Starehe Boys’ Centre and School in Nairobi is an undoubted success story of charitable aid and development. It was founded in 1959 by Geoffrey Griffin, a former soldier with the King’s African Rifles who declined to renew his commission so disillusioned was he with the abuses perpetrated by the British forces during the Mau Mau Emergency. It has gone on to become one of Kenya’s most successful schools. Its pupils, who might otherwise have failed to receive anything but the most rudimentary education, have assumed leading positions in business, politics, medicine and higher education. Yet the purpose of charitable humanitarianism was to provide assistance to ultimately self-sustaining initiatives. At Starehe, charity was the ends as well as the means of humanitarian intervention. British charities continued to back it until the 1990s when it set up its own charity to ensure donations kept flowing. Starehe therefore serves as a case study for the more general phenomenon of how charity obtained an unintended permanent presence in development work in Africa.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.