In order to complement ongoing current empirical research, this article draws wider lessons from the crisis that grew out of the disputed Kenyan presidential election of December 2007. Looking beyond the immediate trigger for the subsequent violence ? namely, the election itself ? the paper instead locates the roots of the crisis within three historical trends: eli...

Despite only a minority of Kenya's African population being literate at the time of independence, letter-writing constituted a significant form of engagement between grassroots political participants and national leaders during decolonisation. This paper sets out to ask why individuals and collaborative groups of writers sent large quantities of letters to their le...

The paper explores the extent to which other domestic political matters and post- colonial ties to Britain shaped the Kenyan Government’s actions in northern Kenya between independence in 1963 and the death of President Jomo Kenyatta in 1978. The paper has a particular emphasis on the Shifta War of 1963–1967. Disputes between rival nationalist leaders at independen...