Pwani C Kenya? Memory, documents and secessionist politics incoastal Kenya

Abstract

Following the elections of 2007, there was a significant increase in public expressions of secessionist feeling on the Kenya coast. The language of secessionism is historical, and revisits the vivid political debates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when politics in coastal Kenya revolved successively around two constitutional issues. The first was the possibility that the Ten-Mile Strip, nominally the sovereign territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar, might not become a part of independent Kenya; the second was the 'regionalist' constitution of 1963-64. This article explores the way that people now retell the history of earlier debates, and argues that these retellings suggest both the power and the plasticity of claims to historical knowledge, and that they reveal a profound fault line within 'secessionist' opinion, which separates those who claim political primacy on the basis of autochthony from those who locate their claim to independence in the language of colonial-era treaties. DURING 2010 AND 2011, THE MOMBASA REPUBLICAN COUNCIL (MRC) became a prominent presence in the politics of coastal Kenya, articulating multiple, longstanding grievances and setting out a defiant agenda which poses an existential threat to the Kenyan state by demanding independence for the coast. 1 Continuing disputes over land ownership; the sense that wealth and jobs are largely held by 'up-country' people; the belief that the coast is deprived of educational facilities and that the revenues generated by tourism all end up elsewhere; conspiracy theories about drugs and politiciansall come together in the meetings and leaflets (and now, on the Facebook page) which bear the name of the MRC-though, as will be suggested below, the level of cohesion and

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