First, present political arrangement have brought us as far as they can, and this was obvious some time ago; they survive at least partly because Kenyans haven't produced any compelling alternative. We're better at making the most of what we have than we are at finding new possibilities; we're more inventive than imaginative. Since Kenyans are quite inventive, their imaginative dullness is hidden from themselves and others.

Second, it's worth softening the claims a tiny bit. It's possible that there has been some really powerful imaginative stuff done since Uhuru. I just don't see it; this probably says more about me than it does anything else. Loathing and contempt for the poor -- at least the poor people as a class -- is significantly more fervent in the middle and upper middle classes than it is among the well and truly rich.

It's unclear just why that's so, but here's a guess. There are few seriously rich Kenyans outside politics; reliance on the poor for power must aid respect of the poor as a class. Kenyatta and Moi appear to have lacked contempt for the poor, without sentimentalising poverty.  Alternatively, there's the more obvious explanation -- pressed by several readers of a draft -- that the middle classes are closer to the poor, and many of them only precariously middle-class. Reason enough to seek to distinguish themselves from the poor by sharpening the distinctions.  

I once saw a well-dressed Kenyasian woman of a certain age hand out bread to beggars outside her shop. She had bought it in advance; the beggars knew she would be giving loaves away, which is why there were so many of them.  (It's a powerful image isn't it? I sort of liked the biblical resonance.) Which resonance wasn't spurious. Her gift was neither niggling or demeaning because it was given in love: they were people to her -- dependent, desperate, vulnerable -- but people still. It was hardly the feeding of the 5, 000, but she loved them; and she loved them only because she could see what it was like for them.

Race and class are quite hard boundaries in most places, especially so in Kenya. No sympathy, no love. Her sympathy matters for the boundaries across which it had run. That's a trick you can pull off only if you've an ideology or a powerful imagination (or both). In her case, I'm willing to bet, it was the imaginative stuff that had done the trick. (Kenyans being insusceptible to every form of non-religious or non-ethnic ideology.)

 All this was on Kimathi street, to maintain the love theme. She could sympathise because she could imagine -- and therefore feel -- what it was like to be poor in Nairobi. The middle classes and the poor are divided by ethnicity, language and culture -- and ever more rigidly by location. In a country as anti-ideological as Kenya, only sympathy could make the poor matter. Sympathy is impossible without imagination.  Imagination works subtly: it made the poor possible objects of concern, and it then moved her to act. To see the poor, to make the poor matter, needs work; the death, or anyway dearth, of imagination makes that work impossible.

Precolonial societies offered plans of life. Those life plans could accommodate the poor and the not-poor, because the not-poor had, crudely and anachronistically put, enforceable obligations to the poor. Honourable poverty was possible. Those ways of life -- those plans of life -- are dead; honourable poverty is basically impossible. Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope has powerful things to say about the necessity of imagination when a way of life passes: without it, the death of a culture is just plain death.

It's instructive that Kenyatta had two attempts to imagine a nation, both of which shared a fatal flaw. The invention of the Gikuyu in Facing Mount Kenya and the attempt to invent Kenya are in trouble because they both turned out to be republics of wealthy old men. Then, as now, acquisitiveness filled the imaginative gap; the place to catch the victory of the sheer hunger for cash is in the aspirations of schoolchildren who're old enough to have them - the aim, and the only aim, is to make lots of it, and quickly. Slightly older version of those children -- Mau Mau then, PEV now -- have put paid to both projects. 

The middle classes lack the imagination that would allow sympathy and therefore solidarity with the poor. And they lack the imagination to put together an alternative way of life. Faced, in the fact of the dishonoured poor, with decisive proof of their impotence, middle-class dissonance is resolved by denying that the poor have very much (or any) value at all. Without a place for the poor, their need is experienced as an assault. Hence the hate.

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