Though it began independence as a deeply divided society after the trauma of Mau Mau, Kenya maintained one of the open political systems in Africa despite its formal one-party status. National elections provided a device by means of which new blood could be incorporated into the regime. More recently growing economic difficulties and the insecurity of President Moi have greatly intensified authoritarian tendencies. Elections have increasingly been rigged in order to sustain Moi's narrow power base. As elsewhere in Africa the regime gave in to the demands for multi-party politics but the first such elections produced a highly fragmented political scene.

IT is generally accepted that the Second World War was a period of acute crisis for Africa, following the economic hardships brought on by the Depression. The first two years of the war saw the dislocation of shipping, diminished demand for African exports and serious shortages of imported goods. Even when the demand for Africa's produce increased after 1941, consumer goods for peasant producers remained in short supply. Africans suffered shortages of essential foodstuffs, as well as luxuries, and resignedly endured the problems of rampant inflation and, in the cities, rationing. Meanwhile the increased returns from their cash crop exports were siphoned off by the government marketing boards. Colonial sterling balances were held in London, and these funds were used to finance British military purchases from the United States. 1 Looking back to the years of Depression, Berque and Iliffe have identified the 1930s and 1940s as a broader period of metropolitan commercial exhaustion and of waning energy among colonial settlers in the front line, while African discontent grew as the diminishing returns of Imperialism became increasingly evident. African peasants experienced first the withdrawal symptoms of international capitalism during the Depression, and then the intensification of economic exploitation and the dislocations of war. 2 In Kenya it is impossible to divorce discussion of the war from the context of the political and economic effect on Africans and settlers of the preceding ten years of Depression. The Second World War obviously had a profound impact upon the colony, but the political structure of the colonial state in Kenya, the specific balance of power between emerging African capitalism, the settler community and metropolitan authority, and the battles they fought in the 1930s, meant that the consequences of the war were more subtle than is at first apparent. Doubtless, in other parts of Africa the war had equally contradictory effects. It stimulated new policies which marked an important transition in British attitudes to Africa, but it also delayed the implementation of plans which had been devised during the Depression. In Kenya the continuity between the 1930s and the post-war decade was, perhaps, peculiarly strong. We argue, therefore, that the perception of the war as a watershed must be examined against the background of the evolution of government thinking in the 1930s.

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