This is a serious, angry, erudite and challenging work. The author is as unsparing of his readers as he is of the failed leaders of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania but repays their close attention. Professor Aseka teaches political history at Kenyatta University and knows at first hand of what he writes. He asks why postcolonial leaders have achieved so little by way of transformation of their societies in the past forty years and more, but first admits that they had enormous problems to overcome. They had to transform a colonial inheritance that offered them scarcely any assistance. Their states were by origin arbitrary occupying forces, ‘imposed on a mosaic of ethnic traditions’ (p. 407) with varied legitimizing ideologies; there were weakly developed markets, and no relevant political experience, since Africans, and especially nationalists, had been marginalized by colonial rulers; and yet they inherited a monopoly of power that was, of its nature, corrupting. What were leaders to do? In answering this conundrum Aseka consults a number of political philosophers, including Althusser, Gramsci, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant and Nietzche and, from their various wisdoms distils the vital importance of maturity and integrity in leadership, the only intelligible and politically plangent embodiment of ideologies able to energize and inspire coherent and responsible political communities out of the unpromising historical material left behind by British imperialism. Only one postcolonial leader, Nyerere, had any inkling of the immensity of the task and the intellect to address it. But, Maseka argues, that was not enough to transform Tanzania. Indeed Nyerere's very intellectual certainty was Tanzania's undoing: such was his towering stature that no other intellectual projects had any hope of contesting the President's or of subjecting it to the criticism that no political project can do without. Tanzania almost died from good intentions. Neither Obote nor Kenyatta, however, were able to pursue such good intentions, nor their successors. It was not that they were entirely without transformational vision but that they got bogged down in the merely transactional politics by which they survived the maze of intrigue and corruption to which they were condemned by the competitive politics of ethnicity. As for Zanzibar, that was ethnicity with racial barbs added.

It is this shared impasse that leads Aseka to stress the necessity of moral integrity in a leadership that is sufficiently convinced of the managerial efficiency of popular involvement and freedom of expression for its ideological vision to liberate rather than suffocate creative energy. Moreover, there has to be popular involvement of specific sorts, especially of women with subversive notions of what constitutes liberty, so as to cross-cut the otherwise deadly influence of politically involved ethnicity that has caused such strife in Uganda and such futility in Kenya. It is in relation to the gender implications of his focus on the unrealized creativity of ideologically visionary leadership that Aseka reflects most interestingly on what is needed in order to practise transformational politics. To what other communities of involvement, and with what particular visions, can leaders appeal who wish to break out of the currently unproductive politics of contemporary East Africa? I would have liked Aseka to have spent rather more time in pursuing such questions, the answers to which would I think be found more in his own acute observation and less in the alleged wisdom of Althusser and his like.