You'll have seen Keguro's latest. I don't buy it. I'll be upfront about my prejudices: I think
Kenyatta and Mboya made substantially correct choices at the founding
of the post-colonial state; for brains and influence,
they're the two most important Kenyans ever.
None of Keguro's three final claims follows - or is even
significantly supported, so far as I can see - by the flag episode.
Take the first. It's both true and trite that there was
at independence a clear split between the rulers and the ruled,
and that the rulers strove to create symbols of national unity and to
get us to obey them. Nothing sinister follows from that description of
the way things were. The first is (loosely speaking) a description of the
state, the condition of which is inequality of power. The second
is a description of what any reasonable political class would do
on inheriting a state which ruled over several nations.
Something sinister - and therefore interesting and therefore not trite - would follow if the actions of the political class were
unjustified.
They weren't. State building 101 requires that the state
establish sovereignty and hegemony. Creating national unity - and the promulgation of national symbols, therefore - are obvious
are and reasonable ways of doing so. The political class had broad
and deep legitimacy both personally and as representatives
of an ideology: Mboya was (at least according to his biographer)
the most popular African politician in Kenya for some years in the sixties; Kenyatta was the doyen of African nationalists; their motivating ideology -
African nationalism - had universal support. A legitimate political
class was taking rational steps to achieve a goal that had the support
of its subjects. (Ajume
Wingo's Veil Politics in Liberal
Democratic States has interesting and relevant stuff on liberal justification of state symbols).
Perhaps it's true that the divide between the political
class and its subjects is rooted in economic differentiation. First,
the little fable about the flag doesn't show it. Second, even if it
did, it would be an exercise in missing the point: having a state entails asymmetrically-distributed power; while it's regrettable
that in Kenya the imbalance in power has the form of an imbalance in
money, to concentrate on the imbalance in money is to concentrate on
the symptom, not the disease. Unless one's an anarchist,
imbalances in power are a necessary evil - the job is to ensure they aren't
too large, and that those on the pleasant side of the divide are accountable to those who aren't.
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