This chapter shows how, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the WCC sought to spread the liberationist form of human rights activism developed in response to authoritarianism in Latin America to other world regions. In Asia and Africa, the ecumenical movement sought to apply lessons derived from the Latin American context while at the same time developing approaches suited to the particular contexts at play. South Korea’s minjung theology, which played a prominent role in resistance to the country’s military dictatorship as well as its deep economic inequality, was a widely influential example of Asian liberation theology that mixed with human rights advocacy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the All-Africa Conference of Churches encouraged churches to resist their political leaders’ efforts to deflect criticism of their own human rights records, though the struggle against apartheid and skepticism of human rights as essentially Western hampered such efforts. For Christians in Western Europe and North America, meanwhile, taking up a liberationist human rights agenda meant applying a critical lens to Western societies, but especially finding ways to act in solidarity with the Third World.

Chapter 5 explores how migration management aid impacts a democratic state like Kenya, in the context of its colonial legacy and contentious regional politics. While there have been two significant revisions of the Refugee Act (2006/2021), Kenyan refugee policy relies on a compromise: the government agreed to host thousands of refugees in camps in exchange for billions in aid and a shirking of responsibility for managing the camps. Within this context, the EUTF is the latest package of funding in which Europeans condition aid on reforms by the Kenyan government. The chapter traces the long history of migration and international meddling in Kenya from formal colonialism to independence, examining the role of migration aid in the de facto encampment policy and in the 2006 and 2021 reforms. Through various interventions supported by the EUTF, Kenyan elites gained important political and financial capital, while pushing unpopular migration policies. Despite some democratic progress, we document specific projects related to counterterrorism and peacebuilding that securitized migration in Kenya, justifying more repression and restrictive policies (pathways I, II, III).

This chapter investigates theorized claims about how politicians lobby and bargain with donors to achieve electoral advantages. Especially, it examines the correspondence between electoral geography and aid distribution over time in Malawi, Kenya, and Sierra Leone. The analysis shows how ruling parties have biased aid in favor of ruling party coalitions. Additionally, this chapter includes a case study analysis of how aid distribution in Kenya changed during the electoral transition from President Moi to President Kibaki in 2002.

This chapter explores the experiences of hundreds of Kenyan students who travelled to the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria and other communist states during the late 1950s and 1960s and the politics surrounding them. Initiated for similar reasons as Mboya’s own airlift of students to the United States and expanded in a deliberate effort to compete with Mboya’s programme, the support of students for study in Eastern and Central Europe was a major part of Odinga’s efforts to build his own political base and to address Kenya’s urgent educational needs. After independence in 1963, and with Odinga increasingly in conflict with both Mboya and Kenyatta, these students became a source of considerable political controversy. The fact that some of the students had been sent for military training under agreements struck by nationalist leaders before independent Kenya’s military deals with Britain were finalised meant that returning graduates became the subject of Cold War–inspired rumours of coup plots to support Odinga. With Odinga forced out of the ruling party and government in 1966, the graduates from Eastern and Central Europe were frozen out of senior roles in government.

Kenya’s labour movement was deeply embroiled in the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and the colonial campaign against the insurgency between 1952 and 1956. Militant labour leaders were integral to the growth of the rebellion in Nairobi, but the colonial government sought to use the opportunity presented by the State of Emergency declared in October 1952 to bring the entire labour movement to heel. This created an opportunity for a young Tom Mboya, who became leader of the Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions, later renamed as the Kenya Federation of Labour. Mboya used the organisations links to the British Trades Union Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to campaign for the release of wrongly arrested moderate trade unionists, and to develop further opportunities for trade union training, including a scholarship for him to study in Oxford and his attendance at an ICFTU seminar in India. However, Mboya became frustrated with the limited appetite within the ICFTU or TUC to support the adoption by the KFL of an avowed anti-colonial stance, which in turn pushed him towards the United States.

The conclusion to the book considers the significant contribution of Kenya’s worldmakers to the anti-colonial cause and the place Tom Mboya rightly holds within the pantheon of Kenya’s great nationalist leaders. He is held dearly in the memory of Kenyans as the personification of the potential for a successful Kenyan multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan democracy. His legacy has been invoked regularly at moments of political crisis in the decades following his death. But the conclusion argues Mboya’s legacy was more complicated and interesting than this posthumous memorialisation allows. He shows instead how the practices of worldmaking ran alongside those of gatekeeping. Mboya and others like him had little choice but to adopt this dual strategy of global engagement because of the context of the Cold War. Drawing on Mary Dudziak’s work on the civil rights movement in the United States, the conclusion considers in detail the influence of the Cold War on the politics of decolonising Kenya. Although the Cold War helped enable decolonisation, it also acted to limit the possible trajectories states such as Kenya could adopt once independent.

Mboya’s engagement with the AFL-CIO was a critical stage in his development as a nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader. Cultivated during a hugely successful tour of the United States in 1956, his relationship with figures connected to the American labour federation would last until his death in 1969. But Mboya’s network in the United States stretched beyond the labour movement. By following Mboya on his 1956 tour, the chapter shows his rapidly developing and deep connection to the American Committee on Africa, which had emerged out of the civil rights movement. Mboya returned home to Kenya as a hero, and decided to capitalise on his fame by standing for election to the colony’s legislative council in 1957, the first opportunity Kenya’s African population had to vote for their representatives. Mboya’s charisma, record as a trade union leader and policy platform certainly made him very popular in his Nairobi constituency, but the financial support his American allies provided was also a significant reason for his success. Mboya also leveraged his international profile on the Pan-African stage too, most notably when chairing the All-Africa People’s Conference held in Ghana in 1958.

Perhaps Mboya’s most famous initiative was the so-called ‘Airlift’, a programme that provided travel assistance to hundreds of Kenyans to enable them to take up scholarship opportunities in North America. Remembered now for its alumni, the airlift was a major part of Mboya’s efforts to get returns from his international networks, both in terms of the political capital he accrued as a result of the massive popularity of the programme and the opportunities it provided to Kenyans. Education was a particularly powerful issue within the politics of decolonising Kenya. The limited educational opportunities provided by British colonial rulers to Kenya’s African subjects meant there was enormous demand and need for any opportunity to travel overseas to acquire a university education. However, the programme was also highly political. The chapter considers the role played by members of Mboya’s American network and how their participation was shaped by Cold War priorities. It also examines the personal experience of the students, with a particular emphasis on the financial hardships many faced as a consequence of the way the programme was deliberately structured.

Mboya’s assassination in July 1969 remains one of the most traumatic and controversial episodes in Kenya’s post-colonial history. This chapter sets his death in its political context. It first shows how the returns on his network-building were diminishing, both for Kenya generally in terms of foreign investment and personally as Kenyans reacted against his close ties to the United States. Nevertheless, Mboya remained committed to working globally, seeking to influence international debates about development at the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Africa and in other settings around the world. At home, he was still determined to extract political advantage from the funding his international network continued to provide. Although Odinga was marginalised by 1969, Mboya’s reliance on external funds now set him at odds with Daniel arap Moi, the vice president and Mboya’s great rival to succeed Kenyatta. The two men were battling to win influence within KANU ahead of a general election due in 1969, the outcome of which would likely determine any process to appoint a new president in the event of Kenyatta’s death. It was in this context that Mboya was assassinated.

Further developing the theme of competition between Mboya, Odinga and their respective international networks and domestic power bases, this chapter explores the impact of the cultural Cold War on the politics of newly independent Kenya. Although mainly focused on the organisations and activities supported by Mboya’s network, most notably the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, it also discusses rival efforts by Odinga to use the press, publishing and training to strengthen his own position within Kenya’s fractious post-colonial politics. The chapter details the extent to which Mboya’s activities received funding through CIA front organisations. The chapter is particularly concerned with the ways in which Kenya’s debates about development, which were the source of the disputes between the KANU government and Odinga’s new opposition party, were shaped by the publications and organisations aligned to Mboya. As public awareness of the origins of Mboya’s funding grew from 1967, the chapter concludes with an examination of the increasing criticism made of him from both the left and right in Kenyan politics and the enforced closure of the EAISCA.

Chapter 7 examines Kenya’s electoral institutions from the era of the Electoral Commission of Kenya through the post-2007 crisis reforms that created the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. It explores how the breakdown of party consultation, unilateral appointments, ethnic tensions, and administrative failures contributed to the 2007 electoral disaster. The chapter evaluates the post-crisis reforms that sought to strengthen autonomy through constitutional redesign and professionalization, while also documenting persistent challenges related to capacity, trust, and inclusion. Through interviews and secondary reports, the chapter assesses how Kenya’s evolving institutional design influenced the country’s ability to manage contentious elections and highlights the importance of sustained, structured engagement with political actors.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.