Just about every Kenyan schoolchild knows the reason why in 2008, America was able to elect as president, a senator from Illinois who we Kenyans very much regarded as “one of us”. It is that the senator’s Kenyan father, Barack Obama Snr, travelled to the US for advanced studies just before independence in 1963.
What is not asked often is this: Why was it necessary for the Independence era leaders (most notably Tom Mboya and Dr Gikonyo Kiano) to arrange for so many promising young Kenyans to travel to the US for college education?
Well, the reason is that there is a world of difference between colonial government (which Kenya had been under for about 50 years at the time of Independence) and even a corrupt and incompetent, but popularly elected indigenous government.
The colonial-era governors did not have the education of the local African children very high up on their priorities.
Their education was left to voluntary efforts of Christian missionaries and this explains why many of our prominent leaders of the early days of Independence were all alumni of missionary schools such as Alliance High School, Maseno, Mang’u, etc.
All colonial administrative structures, and economic policies – and above all, agriculture policy – were geared towards creating a small class of wealthy large-scale farmers, and a large pool of destitute indigenous Kenyans to provide cheap labour on those farms.
This cruel side of colonial agriculture policy within Africa arose from the fact that the colonial system had no interest in developing within the local communities, human capital, defined as “the knowledge, skills, competencies and other attributes embodied in individuals or groups of individuals acquired during their life and used to produce goods, services or ideas in market circumstances”
Indeed, every European colonial power preferred to bring its own people to govern their colonies, rather than share their advanced knowledge and technology with the indigenous communities.
Along with that, indigenous leaders who agitated for freedom and individual rights were comprehensively stigmatised—our own Jomo Kenyatta famously having been declared to be “a leader unto darkness and death” by the Kenyan colonial establishment.
When it seemed clear that it is precisely such men who would be leading the newly independent African nations, the white colonial civil servants and other vital bureaucrats fled the continent ‘en masse’.
And so most African nations which came to independence in the wave of decolonisation from the late 1950s to the 1960s were completely lacking in local human resources of the kind needed to govern a modern nation.
That is why higher education was so important to the newly independent Kenya. And responsible leaders sought every opportunity to send promising young Kenyans to universities overseas, in a heroic effort to create a modern civil service from among their ranks, virtually overnight.
I explain all these details about the Kenyan situation at Independence, to illustrate a point that applies as much to Kenya as to Zimbabwe and South Africa:
That in a situation in which for generations the ruling white administrative elite had not taken any trouble to help build up indigenous human capital required of a modern state, “independence” was bound to be a very mixed blessing indeed.
The yearning for liberty is one thing. But political liberty was bound to prove very hollow if not accompanied by clear economic progress.
And, unfortunately, for most citizens of the former colonies, economic progress was very narrowly defined as revolving around just two things: the ascension of educated local elites to white-collar jobs and the possession (or repossession) of land for the masses.
The first proved relatively easy to do. And indeed, in Kenya we were so successful in this that at present we have a large diaspora of educated Kenyans working overseas.
The second challenge – to provide economic opportunity to the masses through the ownership of small farms – has remained unresolved in every former colony that once had a substantial community of wealthy white farmers.
Indeed, it is now obvious that this idea that the possession of land – in and of itself – was bound to lead to prosperity was a tragic delusion.
