Decolonising the History of Kenya’s Political Governance

Abstract This paper critiques the discursive history of political governance in Kenya, focusing on the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial epochs. Drawing on decolonial scholarship to examine these periods, the paper contends that whereas Kenya’s precolonial societies used Indigenous languages for governance and to achieve consensus, the advent of colonialism completely obliterated and restructured this system. Instead, Eurocentric (highly centralised) models of governance were imposed, using English, a language that was an indexical of colonial exploitation, control and domination. The net effect was to rationalise an imposed and alien political governance architecture, which invisibilised Indigenous people’s voices and ethnotribalised and stratified the society to advance the interests of the colonialists and elites in Kenya. This paper suggests that to push back the frontiers of this colonially inherited system of governance, the “languages of the people” need to be centred to produce devolved models that consider Kenya’s diverse cultural and ethnolinguistic polities.