Colonial legacy in Africa

Global capitalism is designed to subjugate most African countries. It doesn’t work for any country outside the majority-White West though it’s debatable whether it works even there.

I was born in Kenya and I’m drawn to this place in a way that I can’t really explain. But I’ve lived most of my years in Britain; I’ve got friends and family here; I’ve gone to school here, set up a business. Everything that living is, it all makes me British.

Kenya is a place that had a massive British settlement and now people are trying to be as “developed” as they can be, which kills parts of the culture. And yet, when I’m there, I feel, wow, I could do something here, for my people, for my ancestral home.

Stuff can be done

My dad was a politician. My older brother is a politician. While the other kids were out playing football, I was home watching the news channel, a weirdo who didn’t play any sport at all and stuck to politics instead.

We have politicians who are in it to make money or just don’t have a clue. There’s is a lot of corruption at all levels of government, so there are hospitals without drugs and a transport system that doesn’t work. But these things don’t work because the government has decided they shouldn’t work. Kenya had plenty of opportunity and no civil war or any large-scale fighting, unlike the surrounding countries that were either at war or chose a system that tanked their ability to develop.

In the sixties and seventies, people who worked with aid in the neighbouring countries were often headquartered in Kenya, so we had this massive expat community that helped things. It also meant that the Kenyans coming back from university had jobs available to them, which wasn’t the case in places like Nigeria or Ghana, where there was little to come back to and many people chose to stay in Europe. This is becoming true for Kenya, too; with so many things not working, people are choosing to make their home elsewhere.

Colonial legacy in Africa

They way I look at it, we’re part of a global system of capitalism or neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, that’s designed to subjugate most African countries. It’s a system that doesn’t work for any country that’s outside of the majority-white West though it’s debatable whether it works even there.

People like to say that colonial legacy in Kenya was more benign than than that in some other countries, but it was still far-reaching. Kenyans weren’t allowed to get university education. My dad was the first in his family to leave the country for university when people saw Western education as a way to get proximity to power. In the sixties, the first tranche of educated Africans returned to Kenya. To be as British as possible, they took on all the good and the bad that the British did and perpetuated the colonial system.

The country might have become independent, but it still mattered where you went to school and what social class you belonged to, which had the Whites at the top, then the Indians and the Arabs, only then the Africans. When the British left, they left the country in the hands of the Indians. When the lucky few Africans made it into the government, it was usually through corrupt networks. And so, decades later, we have a country where people are trying to make as much money as possible, send their kids to British and American schools, and have them come back and do the same.

Flawed government thinking

I have a love for where I come from and the people that I come from. I have a kind of family obligation to carry on with what my father was involved with and what his father was involved with, though on a different level. I go to Kenya and I think, this is a country with a lot of potential that’s not being realised. I want to see this change.

Sure, the system’s corrupt, but you can work within that system to improve people’s lives. Different countries with similar systems fare differently, so you can’t blame it all on the system. For example, why does Kenyan economy do better than that of Sierra Leone? Both countries are by the sea, neither is landlocked, Sierra Leone has more natural resources than Kenya. We have the odds stacked against us, but we’re doing relatively well. The system doesn’t explain everything.

There is a massive slum in Nairobi, where the government has set up a housing project to provide decent homes for the people who live in shanties. Once the houses were built and rented out for something affordable, the guys in the slums rented these houses to people slightly less poor than them and moved back to shanti towns, leaving the housing project to the people who could afford to pay higher rents.

This is the problem: The government looked at the situation, asking, what’s the most urgent thing? Housing. Sure, but you have to realise that someone who has a decent house and nothing to eat is not going to prioritise one over the other. The better question is, how do you provide these guys with decent income alongside decent housing?

Wish to contribute

Maybe it’s just my romantic view of Kenya, but I hope this need to contribute, that it’s not being overly optimistic. A lot of people say, people try to do these things all this time, and they fail, what makes you feel you can. It’s a very legitimate question. Maybe it really is too difficult to change anything. Or maybe people go into politics for the wrong reasons and the reality surprises them. I’ve seen people make a difference; I know it can be done.

There’s this thing about Kenyans that they’d never grow old in another country. They’d stay abroad until late adulthood and then come back to be buried in Kenya. It’s a massive deal. Our funerals are bigger than weddings. Kenyans, wherever they are, they never feel at home, every day is just a step on a journey back home, just another day before I end up back in Kenya. This sense of allegiance, it makes me want to contribute.  

This interview about colonial legacy in Africa was recorded anonymously in 2020.