Seeing Like a Citizen : Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980

Authors

Kara Moskowitz

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world.

Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

Copyright Statement

Seeing Like a Citizen © 2019 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446898

Publication Date

11-12-2019

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz, Kenya, decolonization, postcolonial state, citizenship, development, rural Africa, Rift Valley, African history, political transitions, colonial legacy, state power, governance, aid, local agency, independence, postcolonial politics, Kenyan historiography, rural development, global-local dynamics

Disciplines

African History | Economic History | Growth and Development | Political History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Moskowitz, Kara, "Seeing Like a Citizen : Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980" (2019). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 98.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/98