The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya

Once the major success story of a troubled continent, by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them.

Introduction; 1. Staging politics in Kenya; 2. Shattered silences: political culture and 'democracy' in the early 1990s; 3. Open secrets: everyday forms of domination before 1990; 4. Moral economy and the quest for wealth in central Kenya since the late nineteenth century; 5. The dove and the castor nut: Embu household economy in the 1980s; 6. Conclusions: 'the showpiece of an hour'.