Justin Willis

Democracy and its discontents: understanding Kenya's 2013 elections

In the months leading up to Kenyas general election in March 2013, there was much concern – both within Kenya itself and internationally – that political competition would trigger a fresh wave of ethnic violence. However, the 2013 elections passed off largely peacefully, despite an unexpected presidential result and fact that the losing candidate, Raila Odinga, appealed the outcome to the Supreme Court. This article argues that Kenya avoided political unrest as a result of four interconnected processes. A dramatic political realignment brought former rivals together and gave them an incentive to diffuse ethnic tensions; a pervasive ‘peace narrative’ delegitimized political activity likely to lead to political instability; partial democratic reforms conferred new legitimacy on the electoral and political system; and a new constitution meant that many voters who ‘lost’ nationally in the presidential election ‘won’ in local contests. This election thus provides two important lessons for the democratization literature. First, processes of gradual reform may generate more democratic political systems in the long-run, but in the short-run they can empower the political establishment. Second, sacrificing justice on the altar of stability risks a ‘negative peace’ that may be associated with an increased sense of marginalization and exclusion among some communities – raising the prospects for unrest in the future.

Decentralisation in Kenya: the governance of governors

Kenyas March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the countrys biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the newly elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralisation in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnams theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenyas new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of ‘recentralisation’ by the national government, or as one of the capture of sub-national units by ‘local elites’ or ‘notables’. Rather, decentralisation in Kenya has generated a political system with a more robust set of checks and balances, but at the expense of fostering a new set of local controversies that have the potential to exacerbate corruption and fuel local ethnic tensions in some parts of the country.

Tradition, Tribe, and State in Kenya: The Mijikenda Union, 1945–1980

The apparent mobilizing power of ethnic sentiment in recent African history has been the subject of vigorous debate. Studies that emphasize the centrality of colonialism and the instrumental use of ethnicity have been criticized by a scholarship arguing that the affective power of ethnicity is culturally rooted through longstanding experience and practice, and that both manipulation and invention are constrained by this. This paper contributes to that debate through a discussion of the history of the Mijikenda, one of the “super-tribes” of modern Kenyan politics. It suggests that there were indeed “limits to invention,” but that there was nonetheless substantial entrepreneurship and creativity in the politics of Mijikenda identity. This drew heavily on the productive, discursive tension between tradition and modernity that lay at the heart of colonialism and was drawn into vigorous debates over legitimacy and representation in the “critical juncture” of the final years of colonial rule.

Marginalization and political participation on the Kenya coast: the 2013 elections

At the coast, the run-up to Kenyas 2013 elections was dominated by fears of violence and the calls for a boycott by the secessionist Mombasa Republican Council. However, the elections passed off largely peacefully, and coastal turnout was significantly higher than in any previous election. This article argues that the secessionist campaign was internally incoherent, and undermined by divisions within the ‘coasterian’ community it claimed to represent; and that a politics of patronage encouraged electoral participation, particularly because so many levels of political office were being contested at the same time. Despite this participation, however, the sense of marginalization remains very powerful among many people at the coast.

What Has He Got up His Sleeve? Advertising the Kenyan Presidential Candidates in 2007

Abstract Formal advertising played an unprecedentedly prominent part in the 2007 Kenya elections. This article offers a brief description of the media advertising campaigns of the two main contenders for the presidency, and suggests that, particularly in the case of the incumbent, this visible media campaign shared much of its message with a campaign which was pursued by leaflets, emails, text messages and in speeches, which emphasised the alleged dangers of a Raila victory.

Violence, Authority, and the State in the Nuba Mountains of Condominium Sudan

While British colonial rhetoric consistently identified tradition as the basis of legitimate authority, colonial practice actually produced far-reaching changes in the nature of government in Britains African possessions. New institutions, and new holders of power, emerged in African societies in response to the particular needs of colonial administration. This article explores this transformation in one part of Condominium Sudan, which was effectively a British possession but which has often been excluded from historical discussions of the impact of colonialism because of its unique status. The Nuba Mountains have recently gained notoriety as a particularly bloody theatre of Sudans long post-colonial civil war; while some have sought to explain this as the result of British policies which encouraged racial antagonism, the article suggests that here, as elsewhere in Africa, the real legacy of colonial rule was the creation of new kinds of local government which sat uneasily with enduring local ideas of spiritual power and proper authority.

Killing Bwana : peasant revenge and political panic in early colonial Ankole

The killing in May 1905 of Harry St. George Gait, a senior official of the Uganda Protectorate, has generally been treated in the literature as a political murder mystery. It can more usefully be seen as a window on two issues: the importance of clientship in relationships between agriculturalists and pastoralists in the kingdom of Ankole, and British reliance on pastoral allies to make real their power in Ankole. This paper suggests that Gait was killed by an agriculuralist frustrated by his own failure to advance in Ankole society; but that the repercussions of the killing were magnified by the fears and uncertainties of British officials on the spot over the reliability of their pastoralist allies. The British were, however, unable to dispense with these allies, and the crisis generated by Gaits death was resolved by a reaffirmation of the alliance between the British and the pastoralist elite, after the effective scapegoating of two minor chiefs.

‘A Model of its Kind’: Representation and Performance in the Sudan Self-government Election of 1953

In December 1953 Sukumar Sen, an Indian civil servant, bid farewell to Sudan, having just overseen Sudans ‘self-government’ election. ‘Your election’, he told the people of Sudan in a radio broadcast, ‘can legitimately claim to have been a model of its kind.’ The election had seen determined attempts at manipulation—by Sudanese and by Sudans rival colonial masters, Egypt and Britain. Much of this manipulation revolved around the mechanics of the election, and there were bitter arguments within the Electoral Commission which oversaw the event. Yet all involved were driven by a concern over representation—over how the election would look, to outsiders and to those involved. This paper will examine the debates over how the election should be conducted, and will suggest that, for those who organised it, the election was concerned not so much with representation of the will of the people, but rather with the representation of process.

'Clean Spirit': Distilling, Modernity, and the Ugandan State, 1950-86

Abstract This article explores official attitudes to illicit distillation in Uganda in the mid-twentieth century. Tracing continuities in rhetoric which are strikingly revealed by two reports on the problem of illicit distillation, the article offers a discussion of the development of illicit distillation and argues that for officials in the late-colonial and independent state, this became a symbol of the potential dangers of modernity. Governmental schemes for the production of a ‘clean’ distilled drink, on the other hand, asserted the ability of the state to provide a safe route to modernity. The state was challenged in this field – with such challenges made possible by the patrimonial nature of authority, which has constantly subverted the pretensions of the state – yet policy on the production of spirits has remained an important area for the discursive creation of legitimacy.

A portrait for the Mukama: Monarchy and empire in Colonial Bunyoro, Uganda

In September 1934 the ruler of Bunyoro, in the Uganda Protectorate, was presented with a signed portrait of King George V. It was a ceremony which immediately suggests the role of the imperial monarchy as a focus for the public performances which sustained the authority of colonial states, and evokes an image of an ‘ornamentalising’ British imperial vision of authority. Yet a detailed examination of the context of this gift suggests the ambivalence of British attitudes towards the idea of African ‘kingship’, and indicates the importance of African attempts to exploit the idea of kingship in pursuit of local agendas.