A SERIES OF NOTES ON THE GLOBAL FRONTIER OF DEVELOPMENT NOTES FROM AFRICA 2: Kenya (Part I)
Map of Kenya / Joe Studwell
This publication continues our earlier discussion of Africa as the global frontier of development. This time, following Ethiopia, the focus of Joe Studwell’s research turns to Kenya. We believe that Studwell’s choice of frontier discourse for his research project initiated about four years ago, is far from coincidental.
The frontier perspective aligns perfectly with the increasing nonlinearity and uncertainty of development in the modern world. The ideas of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a pioneer of frontier theory, have since been adapted by various branches of social and humanitarian sciences. The frontier is a «universal» tool for studying transitional states, both in individual societies and humanity at large, as it navigates a global transformational crisis.
Many states today face a «frontier» situation, and Ukraine is among them. Therefore, Studwell’s Kenyan case can reasonably be compared to Ukraine’s experience. It reveals numerous parallels to Ukrainian realities — though not identical — including reliance on the agricultural sector, the role of the IMF, China’s investment ambitions, strong economic dependence on external market dynamics, clan-based governance, and social instability.
Joe Studwell gained fame as the author of the bestseller How Asia Works. We hope that his notes on the global frontier of development will also help us better understand how Ukraine works.
In logistical terms, Kenya is the most important country in East Africa. British colonial investment in the port of Mombasa and the rail line — dubbed the ‘lunatic line’ because of its cost and ambition — from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria and later to Kampala means Kenya has long dominated trade access to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Mombasa also handles a portion of Tanzania’s international trade. This logistical significance, the possibility that Kenya could become a manufacturing centre for the region, and the existence of fertile land along the coast, in the Western Highlands to the north-west of Nairobi, and around Lake Victoria, have long engendered optimism about development prospects.
From independence in 1963 to 1980, Kenyan growth averaged an impressive 7.1 percent. However, the start of a series of fiscal crises and World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs in 1980 saw average growth fall to 2.9 percent from 1980 to 2003. Since 2004, growth has rebounded to an annual average of 5.4 percent.
In each of these periods, Kenya was comfortably ahead of the overall sub-Saharan growth rate. With a nominal GDP per capita of US$2,075 in 2020, Kenyans are the most prosperous citizens in major East African economies. The poverty rate, on the World Bank’s US1.90-per-day measure, fell from 44 percent in 2005 to 37 percent in 2016.
Ostensibly, the most impressive feat in the long run has been educational gains. In 1967, Kenyans had an average of just 1.7 years of education; today, the figure is 10.7 years. Unfortunately, testing suggests that much of the education is of low quality; according to the World Bank, 60 percent of 19-20-year-olds who have been through secondary education still fail to meet basic literacy standards.
DÉJÀ VU: THE RETURN OF COLONIZATION
What stands out most in Kenya is how little government imposed itself on the economic structure inherited from the colonial era. In agriculture, there was a significant redistribution of white settler-owned land.
However, this was a response to the insurgency by landless black farmers that started in 1952 – known popularly as the Mau Mau rebellion – which drew a policy response during the colonial era.
From 1954, the Swynnerton Plan supported ‘loyalist’ and generally well-to-do indigenous farmers to move into cash crops like coffee, from which they were previously barred, on consolidated and privately-owned landholdings.
ETHNIC COCKTAIL AND «WHITE SUPREMACY»
Perhaps the most detailed and compelling account of the British colonial regime in Kenya comes from Caroline Elkins in her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005). Like other territories in East Africa, Kenya fell under European control relatively late. Ultimately, these regions were divided between Germany and Britain.
In the early 20th century, the British actively encouraged white settlers to establish highly productive farms. Among them were many Boers from South Africa, with whom the British had recently fought a brutal war. By the end of World War I, the total number of settler farmers, excluding their families, was around 5,000.
These settlers leased about one-third of Kenya’s most fertile lands for 99 years. Additionally, the British incentivized large-scale Indian migration to Kenya. Even then, racial tensions began to emerge among Africans, Boers, British, and Indians, rooted in economic interests. European settlers justified their privileged status in the colony with the era’s prevailing argument — the alleged superiority of the white race
Editorial Team
From 1962, on the eve of independence, the British government funded the Million Acre Settlement Scheme, which purchased white settler farms and again generally favored better-off black farmers, with typically less fertile areas allocated for ‘high-density’ settlement by poorer and landless farmers.
The post-independence government of Jomo Kenyatta supported this approach, famously dismissing landless Mau Mau rebels as ‘hooligans’. This was despite strong research evidence in the late 1960s that poorer farmers with smaller holdings, who were also given much less agricultural extension support than better-off farmers, performed better.
After Kenyatta defeated and ousted a minority of progressive politicians in the late 1960s, Kenyan agricultural policy showed striking continuity with the colonial era. The major difference was that the elite of large-scale landowners was now black.
The Kenyatta family itself became, and remains, one of the biggest landowners, including a vast tract of thousands of hectares that extends north-east of Nairobi towards Thika and other large farms in what were known as the White Highlands – the region scheduled by the British as a white-only farming area.
The redistribution of land to a black elite, limited redistribution to ordinary Kenyans, and the growth of black cash-crop farming were enough to stabilize the rural situation after independence.
Tea did particularly well and continues to account for one-quarter of Kenya’s export earnings. However, government agricultural policy has been remarkably passive. The great bulk of agricultural exports, including tea, continue to be unprocessed in the absence of investment to add value locally. Only 13 percent of land with the potential for irrigation has been developed and farming remains 98 percent rain fed (without artificial irrigation — Ed.).
And where members of the African Union have been committed for almost 20 years to spending one-tenth of their budgets on agriculture, Kenya’s leading rural research institute, Tegemeo, puts the Kenyan share – including national and local funds – at around five percent. In the past two decades, the estimated contribution of agriculture to overall growth has been higher in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Tanzania than in Kenya.
When significant developments do occur in agricultural markets, they tend – as with so much in Kenya – to be driven by elite political interests or those of particular ethnic voting blocks. Jomo Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, built up the National Cereals and Produce Board, which bought up surplus maize, often at above-market prices.
The vast majority of the maize surplus in Kenya comes from Moi’s ethnic Kalenjin base area in the Rift Valley. Under current president Uhuru Kenyatta, a son of Jomo, the Kenyatta family business Brookside Dairy became Kenya’s dominant milk processor, buying up competitors and acquiring a market share around 45 percent.
In 2020, the Kenyan government banned the importation of cheap Ugandan milk, apparently in breach of East African Community (EAC) trade agreements. According to Kenyan economist David Ndii, under the Kenyatta government since 2013, milk processing margins quadrupled, the cost of processed milk to the consumer doubled, and the price paid to farmers, at its nadir, halved, although it since increased following protests.
WOMEN — YES, AFRICANS — NO
Many Kenyans served in the British Empire’s forces during World War II, actively contributing to the war effort. They were led by British officers who were required to learn Swahili for more effective communication with their subordinates.
Significant changes occurred in the governance of the British colony after the war. A Legislative Council for the colony had been established as early as the 1920s, but it included no Africans. To increase the number of white voters and secure a majority in the Council, the colonial administration even granted European women voting rights.
However, since 1928, the Representation of the People Act has equalized voting rights for women and men throughout the Empire — white women, but not Africans. It wasn’t until 1948 that the Legislative Council included four black Kenyans alongside 11 Europeans and seven Indians. Yet, this compromise satisfied none of the involved parties.
Editorial Team
