Expertly researched, superbly written, Kara Moskowitz's Seeing Like a Citizen leads a growing number of histories that reconsider the politics of development and economic planning during and long after decolonization in Kenya. Moskowitz travels down the developmental supply chain, from the lofty planning goals of international organizations and Kenyan technocrats to the experiences of rural Kenyan citizens grappling with the uneven execution and corruption of those goals. Seeing Like a Citizen focuses on how diverse groups of rural Kenyans viewed development and citizenship in Uasin Gishu, a county in the western highlands. They did so through kaleidoscopic sets of relationships: with the land that they worked, with the neighbors whom they shared the land, and with the state that frequently failed to meet its obligations.
Focusing on rural nonelites, Moskowitz takes on two decades-old, yet still powerful, conceptual tools used by historians of Africa: Frederick Cooper's ‘gatekeeper state’ and James C. Scott's ‘seeing like a state’. Moskowitz challenges the idea that the government in Kenya was a gatekeeper state that drew its authority from distributing international aid. She argues that it ‘never achieved monopolistic, centralized control over the flow of aid or commodities’ but remained one of many actors in the flow of development. Moskowitz then inverts ‘seeing like a state’ to argue that Kenyan citizens did not endure an authority-laden state testing high modernist techniques on them. Instead, she suggests that the relationship between the Kenyan state and its citizens was the site of more complex encounters in which the local communities of Uasin Gishu had much more sway.
As Jomo Kenyatta centralized power around the state and himself after independence in 1963, people viewed development through their local, often fraught engagement with the regime's technocrats. These development encounters played powerful roles in how rural Kenyans imagined themselves as citizens. Development became a means of demanding rights, accepting responsibilities, and measuring whether the state fulfilled its obligations.
And when the state failed, or when its unevenness exposed growing inequalities, people looked afield for alternative expressions of citizenship. More often than not, people in Uasin Gishu turned to ethnicity. Drawing on the work of Julie MacArthur and Derek Peterson, Moskowitz shows how frustrated farmers often ethnicized land and space, citizenship and rights. Those left wanting by government development programs articulated a sense of ‘ethnic patriotism’ rooted to the land, which in turn came with expectations that anyone residing within these ethnic geographies should conform to certain ethnic norms.
Moskowitz comes to these conclusions and contributions after years of exhaustive archival and ethnographic research. Drawing on material from a wide variety of sources, she weaves together local archives, like the provincial archives in the Rift Valley, with national archives in Nairobi and London and transnational archives at the World Bank and Billy Graham Center. Her expansive research enables her to connect the desires and actions of Kenyans in Uasin Gishu to the intentions of international development organizations and practices of the Kenyan state. This is impressive enough; yet the text's real strength lies in Moskowitz's ethnographic work, which allows her to hear how these communities saw themselves as citizens. Moskowitz conducted 111 interviews among eight different communities in Uasin Gishu between 2012 and 2018. Her methodology is instructive: by giving her interviewees space to share their insights at length, she is able to give her readers a sense of these people as she met and interviewed them. The effect is powerful, making these people interlocutors and co-producers, not mere informants.
Over its seven chapters, covering the period from 1945 to 1980, Seeing Like a Citizen eschews a strict chronological sequencing in favor of thematic case studies highlighting specific development programs that local communities thought important. The book's thematic organization allows Moskowitz to tease out the complexities of Kenyans’ experiences with development. Uasin Gishu is geographically, climatically, and ethnically diverse. Moreover, Moskowitz must deal with the continuities and changes between the late colonial state and the governments of Jomo Kenyatta and his successor Daniel arap Moi. The Kenyans who benefited from these resettlement schemes came from a variety of backgrounds: educated workers living in Nairobi, landless migrant laborers, and well-to-do, politically connected elites. Add to that the very different experiences among women and men. By and large, Moskowitz holds all these strands together, but at times you can feel the narrative stretched by the weight of so much complexity.
The first two chapters offer a quick tour through the political and economic process of decolonization, focusing on Kenya's most urgent development project at independence: land settlement through the Million Acres Scheme. Moskowitz explores the selection process: who got land, who did not, and shifts in procedures that facilitated cronyism and ethnic tensions. She then uses microhistories of three settlement schemes — Lumakana, Sosiani, and Mautuma — and reveals their very different outcomes, ranging from gratitude to ambivalence to outright hostility. She returns to these communities throughout the book.
It is clear that landless citizens did not reap the benefits of these initial resettlement programs. Chapter 3 is one of Moskowitz's best; in it she examines the hardships of landless Kenyans, especially women, as they sought land rights from a wholly unprepared state, which was financially unable to offer land to everyone. Officials sped up the settlement process, offered smaller, less fertile plots, and hoped that enough citizens received land to quell any future unrest. Most were left wanting.
Moskowitz develops these threads of development and citizenship, land and ethnicity in Chapters 4 and 5 through her focus on farming cooperatives and marketing boards. Prior to and after independence, cooperatives served as a means to funnel development to and inculcate fiscal responsibility in farmers. For a time, farmers found some value in cooperatives, but eventually many drifted away from them, frustrated by corrupt, incompetent leaders. The state also struggled with the Maize Marketing Board. Despite state efforts to monitor production, control prices, and direct maize for export and national consumption, farmers simply sold most of their crops privately. As Moskowitz dramatically recounts, when the maize crop failed in the mid-1960s, Kenyans found themselves waiting in food lines, listening to the radio for news of American food aid, and watching loved ones starve.
Moskowitz's final two chapters consider harambee, the Kenyatta regime's preferred gloss on ‘development’. According to the logic of harambee, before making demands on the government for assistance, Kenyan citizens were first to help themselves by building roads and schools. Many communities threw themselves into the work of local development, often working with international aid institutions. Yet those same communities did not always receive the support that the state promised — yet another sign of state failure. Furthermore, even when the state did have specific projects in mind, it often faced tremendous local resistance as it did when it tried to create a softwood plantation and paper factory in Turbo, Uasin Gishu, on land that had been meant for resettled squatters.
Smashing the boundaries between the colonial and independence periods, Seeing Like a Citizen is a fascinating and much-needed exploration of the complex and shifting ways that rural African communities experienced development and understood citizenship. From this grassroots vantage point, Moskowtiz sees the intense negotiations between global, state, and local actors in Uasin Gishu. She then shows us the fragility of the Kenyan state, its authority contingent on an ability to meet its citizens’ expectations. She also gestures to the very ethnic ways the people of Uasin Gishu reimagine citizenship when the state fails to meet those expectations. The future of Kenya, and what it meant to be Kenyan, depended on the aspirations of those far removed from the center of power but no less powerful. The result is a benchmark study that scholars and practitioners of development can use as a roadmap to explore how other communities in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa imagined themselves as citizens.
