The Kenyan Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (KTJRC) operated from August 2009 to August 2013. It consisted of nine commissioners (six Kenyan and three international) and examined gross violations of human rights committed between December 12, 1963 (the date Kenya achieved independence), and February 28, 2008, though the Commission also had the power to look at relevant events before and after those dates. During its four years of operation the Commission collected over forty thousand statements from individual Kenyans, the largest number of statements collected by any truth commission; incorporated violations of economic, social, and cultural rights in its fact-finding and analysis (one of the first such truth commissions to do so); and increased the participation of women in the process by, among other things, conducting women-only hearings at each of the more than one hundred locations where public hearings were held. In addition to these successes, the KTJRC faced two significant challenges. First, its chair was linked to three violations of human rights within the Commission’s mandate, leading the Commission to recommend that he be investigated and, if the evidence warranted, prosecuted. Second, the Office of the President interfered in the Commission’s Final Report to remove certain references to the president’s family, leading the three international commissioners to issue a public dissent. The Commission made a number of recommendations for the government to implement, including the creation of a comprehensive reparations program. Only one of the recommendations in the Commission’s Final Report has been implemented: the president publicly apologized on behalf of the Kenyan government for the history of gross violations of human rights committed since independence. The Kenyan government has not moved to implement any of the other recommendations. Finally, the KTJRC was the first major truth commission to operate simultaneously with investigations and indictments by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC often overshadowed the work of the TJRC in media coverage, and efforts to coordinate the activity of the two parallel investigative initiatives were minimal and unsuccessful
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The Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission
Ronald C. Slye
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The Nile Waters Issue
Terje Tvedt
To understand the role of the modern Nile in African history, it is first necessary to have familiarity with the premodern “natural” Nile, including both its hydrology and societal importance. It is well known that no river basin in the world has a longer, more complex, and more eventful history. The Nile water issue in modern times is a history of how economic and political developments in East and North Africa have been fundamentally shaped by the interconnectedness of the Nile’s particular physical and hydrological character; the efforts of adapting to, controlling, using, and sharing the waters of the river; and the different ideas and ambitions that political leaders have had for the Nile.
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Popular Politics in East Africa from Precolonial to Postcolonial Times
James R. Brennan
Popular politics have influenced the development of East Africa’s political institutions from roughly two millennia ago up to contemporary times. Among the discernible political dynamics over this time period were pressures to include or exclude peoples from key institutions of belonging, the decisive role of patron–client relationships across all political institutions, the role of generational conflict, the source of political authority based on command of the visible and invisible worlds, and the changing role of indigeneity and “first-comer” status claims. These dynamics can all be found at work in the development of conventional political structures that span this time frame—that is, from the small chieftaincies and kingdoms of the precolonial era; to cults of public healing and medicine making; to engagement with European colonial institutions and the 20th-century creation of “traditional” indigenous authorities; to the growth of associational life that led to political parties, one-party states, and their postliberalization successors. Yet there was also tremendous diversity of these experiences across East Africa, which goes some way toward explaining the differences not only among the region’s contemporary nation-states but even within those nation-states. Popular pressures for inclusion either resulted in the expansion of existing political institutions or created demands for new institutions that directly challenged the exclusionary and often brittle existing political structures.
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History of Higher Education in Kenya
Michael Mwenda Kithinji
The history of higher education in Kenya is defined by a struggle for domination by the various forces that have sought to influence the country’s social, economic, and political trajectory in the colonial and postcolonial periods. During the colonial period, the church had a major interest in education, which they viewed as an important tool in their evangelizing mission. However, the colonial government regarded education as an agency for social control as it attempted to mediate the competing interests of the missionaries, white settlers, and African nationalists. Similarly, the postcolonial governments saw education, especially at the higher level as significant due to its role in forming the elite class and as a mechanism for ideological control. Consequently, Kenya’s higher education landscape has witnessed a striking transformation as it served as an arena for powerful competing interests from the colonial period to the present.
The period between the inception of higher education in the late 1940s until the early independence period in the late 1960s was dominated by the colonial inter-territorial policy that severely limited the opportunities to access higher education. While the first postcolonial government of President Kenyatta largely upheld the colonial elitist ideas on higher education, this approach changed when President Moi came into office in 1978. President Moi wanted to leave his mark on education by increasing access to higher education. Many students were thus able to access university education, previously a preserve of the privileged few. University expansion remains an enduring legacy of President Moi’s administration, which the succeeding government of Mwai Kibaki inherited and enhanced.
