| This is a historically specific case study of political repression in Kenya under colonial and post-colonial rule, from 1902 when Kenya’s present borders were settled, to 2002 when the party of independence, KANU, lost its forty-year hold on power starting with independence in 1963.;Using both an analytically descriptive and historical-structural methodology we undertake to advance knowledge about political repression of political parties in Africa, through an analysis of the linkages between the colonial and post colonial states, ethnicity, and social classes in formation, consolidation, and conflict in Kenya. We regard these as the key determinants of the means and mode of domination and thus repression deployed in the country. The analysis of the social and structural changes in state power and its apparatus over this period assists us to describe and explain the patterns, variability and scope of political repression.;We provide an alternative theoretical framework to conventional wisdom, which identifies the determinants of political repression against organized political opposition in a typical, but also exceptional, Third World outlier state that is Kenya. In this framework, political repression is studied using an analysis which, while emphasizing, internally, the nature and role of the state, ethnicity and class stratification within Kenya as most important, also recognizes the importance of the external determinants in their asymmetrical but dialectical relationship with the concrete situation within the country.;Through a review of the colonial regime (1902-1962), the subsequent Kenyatta (1963-1978), and Moi (1978-2002) eras, this analysis elucidates the roots of the Kenyan development ideology and practice, and explores how this ideology favored administration over politics and popular mobilization, and why avenues of popular expression and political action were systematically closed off and subverted by an increasingly narrow, politically insecure, but still dominant political class. The study concludes with a summary presentation of steps towards realization of greater political space within which political opposition can flourish, and with it, growth of more respect for, and protection of, fundamental human rights in Kenya. |
