In that context, my second debt is to fellow students of Kenyan affairs and Africa specialists. It is my hope that my Kenyan colleagues, in particular, will be able to expand and correct the analysis presented. This project has underscored what we all know but often do not acknowledge: scholarship is a community endeavor. Task of refining and improving this understanding will necessarily lie with others. I look forward to the day when I might acknowledge their assistance individually.īecause of the limits on information-gathering and analysis in Kenya, there are not only additional facts but also nuances and interpretations or events and statements the author may have overlooked. My first debt is to those Kenyan citizens who tolerated my clumsy questions, took the time to discuss events in their country, and assumed the risks they did. Those lessons were sometimes painful but always invaluable. FINALE INVENTORY CHANGE SUBLOCATION SERIESThe process of carrying out the study and writing successive drafts thus offered a series of object lessons about what it means to live in a political system rapidly becoming both less competitive and more uncertain. Politics was not fit material for discussion in public places because of the proliferation of security agents in bars, clubs, and offices. During the period in which the research was carried out, Kenyan civil servants became noticeably less willing to take decisions, for fear of disapproval, and government business in some ministries slowed markedly. In the 1980s, restrictions on speech and association in Kenya chilled discussion of policy and institutional development. The research that led to this book offered the kind of political education graduate schools and secluded research centers do not provide. Somewhere in the "literature reviews," mathematical models, "event counts," and language of "transaction costs" are buried issues and incidents that have real impacts on people's lives. Today's political science too often inculcates a dispassionate view of politics among scholars. The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From "Harambee!" to "Nyayo!". Berkeley: University of California, 1992.
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