CHAPTER 5:

Inheriting a Legacy of Domination:

The Postcolonial Period

The urban centers of East Africa - such as Dar Es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, and the coastal city of Mombasa in Kenya - include all of the amenities and luxuries of European and North American cities. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and the socioeconomic center of East Africa, especially evidences these characteristics. The Kenyan metropolis bustles with human activity along its sidewalks and in its streets throughout the day. The inner city has shops and markets, hotels and restaurants on every corner. Peddlers and vendors sell jewelry, "elephant hair bracelets," artwork, carrying bags, and cloth throughout the inner city. Vast skyscrapers glisten under the intensity of the Kenyan sun and shimmer in the African heat. Although annual growth in Kenya's GNP has been low - %0.6 from 1983 to 1993 - the economic activity in Nairobi seems to indicate successful economic growth and expanding capitalist production since Independence from the colonial era in 1963. However, the basic, external appearance of the modern metropolis is deceiving. Closer observation reveals that there are many infrastructural problems in the city. The city streets are strewn with garbage because there are almost no garbage cans and no effective disposal systems in Kenya or Tanzania. Beggars suffering from debilitating diseases including typhoid, polio, cerebral palsy, and elephantiasis are huddled on sidewalks throughout the city, and Nairobi is renowned for a large population of street children who crowd around white tourists begging for money, food, or whatever they can spare. Although there are drinking fountains throughout the city, none of them work because water supplies are regularly not available, even in hotel rooms reserved for white tourists. Although there are impressive restaurants and beautiful hotel palaces in the city center of Nairobi, they are vastly more expensive than the majority of black Africans can afford. Likewise, expensive paintings, jewelry, and trinkets in the shops of the city are reserved for consumption by the white tourists from Europe and America who visit Nairobi, and not the black Africans who actually live in the city. Furthermore, the majority of cars in the city are owned by a small, wealthy elite of black Africans and white tourists or foreign ambassadors. The dirty, claustrophobic buses that operate as public transportation are always filled to capacity with the rest of the people of Nairobi. And a closer investigation still of the city reveals that the skyscrapers are all owned by foreign interests - primarily from Europe and America - and the inner city of Nairobi makes up only the small portion of the metropolis that most white tourists visit. The outlying districts - as I discovered when I explored them this spring and lived on the outskirts of the city for several weeks - are made up of small settlements and vast slums that have no running water, inconsistent electricity, and severe sanitation problems. Most of the urban Kenyans of Nairobi live in these districts. The situation is even more bleak in the rural areas, where lack of clean water, lack of good sanitation, lack of electricity, and lack of access to medicinal supplies because of poor transportation networks and impoverished standards of living plague the majority of rural communities. The image of "modernization" that Nairobi and the other urban centers of East Africa portray, cannot hide the profound realities of Southern impoverishment and degradation today. Economic growth and capitalist expansion in the postcolonial period after Independence have provided a small elite of wealthy black Africans and privileged white tourists - and the foreign corporate owners of East African resources - with a significant increase in socioeconomic opportunities. But for the majority, environmental degradation and social impoverishment have worsened since the colonial period as capitalist dynamics and the preservation of a dependency relationship between "North" and "South" have been maintained and exploited to the full advantage of "Northern" socioeconomic empowerment. For the majority of people in Nairobi and in East Africa, the postcolonial period has only been an extension of imperialist domination and exploitation of the people and the environment.

The Preservation of "North/South" Dependency

Rodney (1981) stresses the negative social, economic, and environmental impacts of the colonial period when he states: "The only positive development in colonialism was when it ended" (261). Although Rodney (1981) accurately deconstructs the European colonization of Africa as a fundamentally oppressive relationship which fostered African dependency and alienated the African peoples from their cultural identities, their traditional sociocultural organization, and their sustainable relationships with the environment, he fails to make a strong enough connection between colonial dependency, and postcolonial exploitation and extraction of resources by Northern - primarily U.S. and Western European - capitalist interests. In 1961, Tanganyika gained independence from the British colonial system (and joined with the island nation of Zanzibar in 1964 to form Tanzania), and in 1963, the colonial period ended in Kenya with independence as well. However, the "end" of the colonial period did not mean an end to "Northern" exploitation of East African resources, human labor, and systems of production. Although Kenya and Tanzania were no longer settler colonies occupied by white farmers, administrators, and officials, they continued to relate to Britain, and increasingly to the United States after World War II (when the U.S. became the significant, economic world power and began to "aid" developing countries through IMF and World Bank loans), as an oppressed member of an exploitative, dependency relationship that "Northern" countries fostered to preserve their capitalist interests and socioeconomic dominance in the global economy. The preservation of this dependency relationship throughout the postcolonial period has taken many socially and environmentally destructive forms in East Africa, and it is extremely important to deconstruct the negative dynamics and aspects of this relationship to understand how imperialist exploitation from the "North," and from within Kenya and Tanzania, has continued to reproduce itself, the degradation of the East African environment, and the impoverishment of the East African people.

Jarrett (1996) begins this process of deconstruction by arguing that the destructive impacts of African "neo-colonialism" (an apt title referring to the continuing exploitation and domination of African human and natural resources during the postcolonial period) involve a number of "key participants in the exploitation of Africa's economy" (82), the most important of which are: the indigenous political and administrative officials and elites of Kenya and Tanzania; and the corporate and capitalist interests of developed nations, represented by the continuing involvement of the World Bank, the IMF, and "Northern" interests on a governmental level within the context of the East African geography. The importance of each of these actors within the context of postcolonial power dynamics, conservation and development issues, and the reproduction of extractive and oppressive capitalist interests in East Africa and in the context of the "global economy," are considered below.

Swallowing the Colonial System: Indigenous African Elites and Officials

The colonial period of British occupation of Kenya and Tanzania was destructive for the people and the environment of East Africa for a number of reasons, including: the forceful use of East African labor (to create the railroads, to work on plantations, to work as wage laborers); the degrading use of exotic genetic resources imposed upon the East African environment; and the devastating eradication of East African wildlife, forests, and crops to make way for European monocropping, intensive agriculture, and commercial livestock husbandry. However, one of the most profound and lasting effects of the colonial process is less tangible. Perhaps the most destructive aspect of British colonialism in the long term was the internalization of the contradictions of the colonial, capitalist-centered world view by the East African people; the profound sociocultural disruption of traditional systems of human and environmental management realized over the course of the colonial period radically changed the ways in which many Kenyan and Tanzanian peoples were capable of relating to each other and the environment. A number of pastoral groups - such as the Samburu, the Maasai, and the Turkana - actively rejected certain aspects of colonial lifestyles and world views because these beliefs systems were in fundamental opposition with the ways in which pastoralists and nomads structured their lives (e.g. according to seasonal migration vs. sedenterization, holistic rather than rationalizing approaches to the world, coexistence with rather than domination of the natural world, etc.). But many East African peoples were not able to follow this pattern. Increasing population pressures (due to increasing food supplies, medicinal supplies, and sedenterization of populations) and the imposition of an exploitative and extractive model of capitalist-based socioeconomic organization forced many East African peoples to abandon strategies and lifestyles that had been sustainable for them during the precolonial era, in favor of urban wage labor and intensive agricultural production based on the dependency relationships designed by British colonial efforts in East Africa. By the time East African peoples began to resist the oppressive and dominating dynamics of British colonial occupation of Tanzania and Kenya in the 1940s and 1950s, the disruption of traditional, ideological and sociocultural frameworks of many East African peoples effected by colonial restructuring of the East African geography had been profound enough that East African peoples embraced the realities of the colonizing mentality as their own. As Davidson (1992) suggests, "Against the 1950s leaders of nationalism, the real count is not that they failed to foresee the traps and snares that lay ahead, but that they all too easily accepted what was offered them. They accepted the colonial legacy - whether of frontiers or of bureaucratic dictatorship - on the rash assumption that they could master it. But as things turned out, it mastered them" (181), because they had accepted the realities of the colonial and capitalist mindset responsible for their own subjugation and oppression; they had swallowed the framework of their own dependency, and this had profound effects in connection with developmental and conservation failures, and the increasing ecological and human crises in East Africa, throughout the modern era.

The departing colonial officials, especially from Kenya, ensured that the postcolonial governments headed by indigenous Africans would not only embrace capitalist philosophies and forms of socioeconomic organization, but that they would furthermore guide the economic growth of the East Africa Region as an economic satellite supplying "Northern" nations with resources and cheap exports within the context of the global economy. The colonial administrators did not want a capitalist competitor; the British colonial administration intended to manipulate emerging East African leadership so that East African socioeconomic policies were consistent with the dependency model that the British had structured throughout the colonial period in Kenya and Tanzania. Although Tanzania's election of Nyerere as president soon after independence began a resistance of purely capitalist policies in favor of socialist organizational principles (a trend which changed as Tanzania sought to embrace capitalist markets and forms of production throughout the 1980s and 90s), the appointment of Jomo Kenyatta and of Daniel Arap Moi (pictured here) as Kenya's postcolonial presidents has been effective in perpetuating capitalist-based dependency relationships between the "North" and "South" in the postcolonial era. Although Kenyatta and Moi were heralded by many Kenyan peoples as "heroes" representing the people, their popularity was in fact supported by colonial expatriate officials who saw the opportunity in Kenyatta and Moi to preserve colonial policies and designs for the East African environment as a source of raw materials and labor strengthening "Northern" economic superiority on a global scale. It is no accident that the economic policies instituted under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes have favored foreign investment, foreign ownership of resources, and capitalist principles of production and resource exploitation in Kenya. It is also no accident that while these policies continued to provide a lack of sustainable solutions for the majority of the Kenyan people - especially in the rural areas - the personal wealth and luxuries of the presidents and of their administrations - in the form of expensive cars, personal jets, and multiple homes - have been profound. The political structure of the postcolonial Kenyan nation was purposely organized around the corruption of high officials to preserve the colonial and capitalist legacies of socioeconomic domination and exploitation in East Africa. Jarrett (1996) stresses this connection in his analysis of neo-colonial, indigenous leadership in Africa: in "the African version of neo-colonialism,... the indigenous African leaders and chief officials are engaged simultaneously in massive exploitation of their people and in contributing greatly to the economic progress of developed nations" (81) based on the personal wealth that the leaders continue to accumulate through the process. Unfortunately, political leadership by a small, wealthy elite of corrupt state officials has been guiding capitalist-driven policies, and systems of degradation and impoverishment in East Africa, consistently since the "end" of the colonial period, reinforcing the relationship of dependency that Western Europe and the U.S. has actively fostered in East Africa throughout the modern era. The promotion of "Northern" development and conservation policies, in the form of governmental "aid" projects, will be considered further in the following section on the contributions of "developed" nations to the postcolonial power dynamics and the reproduction of extractive and exploitative capitalist interests in East Africa.

Although the corruption of sociopolitical leadership in East Africa is partly responsible for the crises of environmental devastation and human poverty, it is not sufficient to account for the institutionalization of capitalist dynamics and dependency relationships between Europe and the U.S., versus Kenya and Tanzania. Stahl (1993) recognizes that, "from a broad perspective, factors contributing to [environmental crisis] include recurrent drought, unfavorable terms of trade, unwise use of loans and grants, population growth, corrupt leadership, civil strife, etc." (505). Although corrupt leadership contributes to land degradation and human underdevelopment in East Africa, Stahl acknowledges that corrupt leadership is only one factor within a greater contextual framework of socioeconomic management based on a capitalist model that has proven destructive and dysfunctional within the East African context. The approach that indigenous governmental and non-governmental conservation and development strategies have taken - even those that are not biased by political corruption - have been riddled with failures to provide sustainable solutions for land degradation and rural poverty, because these strategies have been fundamentally based on capitalist and colonial notions that East Africans have embraced implicitly since the colonial period. This is further reinforced by the basing of most indigenous organizations heading development and conservation projects (such as the Kenya Wildlife Services, the dominant, governmental division reserved for conservation efforts) within the urban centers, where capitalist processes are most prevalent within the East African context.

The failures that urban East Africans have encountered with conservation strategies organized according to a modernizing, capitalist approach are illustrated clearly by a number of authors addressing the subject. Chiuri et. al. (1991) argues convincingly that the marginalization of women from the conservation and land management process during the colonial period has continued throughout the postcolonial era, based on the preservation of male-dominant principles that existed during the precolonial era of gender divisions in traditional societies, and that were perpetuated and used to alienate women from the development and conservation process during the colonial era. Chiuri et. al. (1991) suggests that women have been disregarded because their beliefs in sustainable management challenge the capitalist mentality and the concept of nature as a set of exploitable resources, that most government officials take for granted in their modeling of conservation strategies: "the new management practices exercised mainly by the government sector and development agencies view nature as a commercial entity which human beings can exploit to meet their needs. Theirs is a mechanistic approach to bringing nature under control" (20). According to Chiuri et. al. (1991), lasting and effective conservation and development of the human and natural environment must involve women - who are the primary environmental managers in East Africa - and their holistic, traditional approaches to natural resource management. The continuing alienation of women according to a mechanistic model of the domination of nature as a "commercial entity" perpetuates a colonial and capitalist model of "development" which has failed to provide lasting models of social, ecological, and economic sustainability for the East African context.

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