Kenya's progress since independence has been tortuous and uncertain, a story perhaps of clashing visions and failed hopes, marred by outbursts of extreme violence and the shadow of corruption and authoritarianism, all of which derive in part from Kenya's equally conflicted colonial past. But Kenya's peoples have also made their own history. Charles Hornsby's magisterial history examines what they have wrought in the past half century.

Hornsby's is not the first post-independence survey, but it is by far the longest and most detailed; and, within its limits, it may be the definitive version. Overall, his judgement seems sound and his discussion of controversial issues – political murders, ethnic violence and sometimes astonishing levels of corruption – is balanced and informed. He writes with authority and picks his way through a crowded and complex past with skill. The book's focus is on the state and its rulers, rather than on the social and the popular. Divided into short periods, it moves along a clearly defined chronological track. But it is more than just a political narrative. Sections on the developing economic and international contexts offer important insights into the more impersonal forces shaping Kenya's recent past and counterpoint the detail of elite intrigue. Additionally, Hornsby pays attention to the ‘deep politics’, the meshing of underlying social and moral imperatives with the ‘high politics’ of government and the ‘low politics’ of attracting popular support, which is both fundamental and enduring. It matters that there is, and always has been, a gap between ‘the Kenya we have’ and ‘the Kenya we want’, and this is central to the popular debate and critique that has rarely been entirely suppressed, although it can also take violently divisive expression.

The book begins and ends with more widely discursive chapters that probe beneath the surface of Kenya's recent history to consider its deeper meaning, plot its trajectory and suggest broad themes and underlying tensions that might help us to understand where Kenya has come from and, perhaps, where it is going. These chapters are both thoughtful and thought-provoking, and they combine the threads of contingency and continuity in illuminating ways. The decisions taken in the first few years after independence about the way the state would be run and what its priorities would be may be traced back to the colonial past and have been hard to reverse, but they have also been influenced and challenged by immediate events, ambitions and rivalries. Some of Hornsby's points are all too evident: the influence, both practical and moral, of endemic corruption and of a patrimonialism so coercive and pervasive as to threaten at times to turn Kenya into ‘a nation of beggars’; the centrality of land and demography which has turned the social, economic and political terrain into a minefield; the shift in ethnicity from a means or cause of dispute to the essence of dispute; the demand for a basic level of public security – one of the ‘goods’, along with governmental efficiency and sustainable growth, that the state has only fitfully delivered. Others are less immediately obvious. Hornsby characterizes Kenya as a ‘brittle’ rather than a ‘stable’ state and links this to a certain nervousness about change, lest it should shatter the very structures through which government is carried out – a conservative perception frequently to be found in the thinking of Kenya's colonial rulers. But Kenya has not yet quite broken, although at times this has seemed imminent. In a similar vein, Hornsby also points to the alternation between short bursts of purposive and pre-emptive, though not always positive, action and longer periods of stasis (or recovery): the succession of ‘false dawns’ on the Kenyan horizon. Several of Hornsby's points are couched as cleavages or conflicts, and they are deep-rooted, part of Kenya's ‘deep politics’: between centralization and ‘regionalism’; between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’, or, better, between community and state; and between authority, which might bring development (maendeleo), and democracy, which could simply lead to siasa (‘business’). Hornsby keeps these themes in play as he develops his narrative.

At nearly a thousand pages (and £45), this is a weighty book, and, unfortunately, it is not likely to have a wide popular circulation in Kenya itself, where this history not only matters but is not yet even past. Possibly attention to detail and maturity of thought have been the enemy of the wide sweep and gripping storytelling that a more popular history might deliver. Hornsby ends his story in 2011 and is wise not to make specific predictions. However, it is fair to say that nothing that has happened since has so far confounded his analysis – and one wonders whether Kenya: a history might yet be future State House reading.