Kenya, Imperialism, and the Myth of Kenyatta’s Pan-Africanism: A Conversation with Prof. Wandia Njoya

During the decolonization movements that swept the African continent in the 1950s and 60s, Kenya waged a fierce, protracted armed struggle for national liberation against British colonial rule. The uprising of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (also known as the “Mau Mau” resistance) remains one of the most celebrated chapters in Africa's anti-colonial history. Yet today, Kenya stands as a bastion of Western imperialism on the continent—a contradiction brought into sharp relief by recent events: William Ruto's agreement with the U.S. which designated Kenya as a major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) U.S. ally (MNNA) and included the deployment of Kenyan troops to Haiti on behalf of Washington; and the military accords signed with France during the Africa Forward summit.

In Anatomy of Neocolonialism in Kenya: British Imperialism and Kenyatta, 1963–1978 (2017), A.O. Maloba unpacks the imperial machinations that installed a neocolonial regime in Kenya, detailing how the post-independence government of Jomo Kenyatta collaborated closely with Western intelligence services amid sustained anti-communist campaigns during the Cold War. Maloba argues that the ideological struggle in Kenya was among the most intense and enduring on the continent—a battle that ultimately defeated radical anti-imperialism and African nationalist consciousness, with profound repercussions for both Kenya and the wider continent.

In this interview, I speak with Prof. Wandia Njoya—a Kenyan scholar, social and political commentator, and a sharp critic of Western ideological hegemony and educational structures in Kenya. Firmly rooted in anti-imperialist thought, she brings a critical lens to questions of knowledge production, politics and development. Our conversation explores the contours of the ideological struggle in Kenya from the Mau Mau uprising to the present, the enduring myth of Kenyatta’s Pan-Africanism, and the popular support among Kenyan masses for the sovereignty project of the Alliance of the Sahel States.

LatSouk Sène (LS): You have been a vocal critic of the Western ideology that members of the Kenyan bourgeois and ruling elite classes have completely embraced. Could you share your thoughts on Kenya's position as, what many Africans describe, an outpost of Western imperialism in Africa? How did we get here and how does this position differ from that of the Kenyan masses, especially the working class, who launched massive protests against their government?

Wandia Njoya (WN): Let me just say, it’s a real tragedy what happened to Kenya. It has taken me a while to understand, and it's something I'm still researching. From what I've seen, especially when I read Maloba's work, is that what was tragic about the Kenyan struggle was that the Mau Mau was basically led by peasants. It was inspired by the working class, especially in the city, and then spread to the rural areas where most of the people affected by colonialism were.

“…while the military war was being waged,

there was also a covert war for the hearts and minds of Kenyans.”

Because Kenya was a settler colony, the people who were dispossessed of land were the ones who felt colonialism the most. When the workers' struggles in urban areas began, the uptake from the peasants and people working on the land was very fast and very strong. So, when the British cut off the workers from the struggle and isolated the people—especially in central Kenya—from the rest of the country, the peasants were basically on their own. Then the British waged a counterinsurgency. While they were fighting the Mau Mau War, there was this covert war, in terms of propaganda. They waged a major campaign against the Mau Mau, both locally and internationally.

There were also liberal reforms, where they started giving Africans the opportunity to farm in the White Highlands – an area previously reserved exclusively for white settlers. They offered a few Africans the chance to farm there, which bought off a number of African elites. Most of those given this opportunity were collaborators, or what they called “loyalists.” So there was propaganda, and there were these liberal economic reforms—allowing a few Africans to plant cash crops like coffee and tea, which had mainly been reserved for whites before.

Then the last element of the counterinsurgency was education. Before the Mau Mau struggle, the British kept shutting down schools. They said Africans were not allowed to start any schools beyond the first four years. And the missionaries, using their racist ideologies, claimed that the African mind could not handle more knowledge than what was already available. So by the time the Mau Mau struggle began, very few Kenyans had access to education beyond the first four years. Thus, when the British waged the counterinsurgency, they were extremely effective. They found Africans who didn't know much because they hadn't been exposed to education. The British also cut off the core of the struggle from the rest of the country and used propaganda to demonize the people from central Kenya.

So, what happened was that while the military war was being waged, there was also a covert war for the hearts and minds of Kenyans. And that war—sorry to say—seems to have been largely successful, because the goal was to convince Africans that what the British were offering was better than what they would get if they won a struggle against the British. Unfortunately, when the British started propping up Jomo Kenyatta [anticolonial activist who served as Prime Minister and later as the first President of an independent Kenya] and other African elites, the Mau Mau supporters—who were understandably tired of the concentration camps, torture, and taxes—saw that as their victory. So, they supported him. Even the Pan-Africanists thought Kenyatta was a victory of the peasant struggle. They didn't know what had been happening behind the scenes, because the British controlled access to information about what was going on in Kenya.

“By the time independence came, we had an animal we didn't even know we had; we were being ruled by elites who had been completely bought and trained by the British.”

Kenyans, and much of the world, did not understand what had happened in 1963 [the year of Kenya’s flag independence with Jomo Kenyatta as president]. The people who had been given power were not anti-imperialists; they were moderates. They were happy to be included and trained in colonial logic. In fact, the civil servants who took over at independence went to the colonial training school in 1961—two years before independence. They were taken to the school for colonial officers, brought back, and then studied under British officers.

By the time independence came, we had an animal we didn’t even know we had—we were being ruled by elites who had been completely bought and trained by the British. And it didn't help that the British governor who was in charge when we became independent returned as the second British High Commissioner to Kenya. He managed independence and sanitized Kenyatta’s reputation. Initially, the British had jailed Kenyatta for supporting the Mau Mau, so even the settlers were angry that Kenyatta had been made president. That kind of worked for the Pan-Africanists, because they thought the settlers’ opposition meant Kenyatta was a real Pan-Africanist. They didn't understand that Kenyatta was a moderate.

So that’s the tragedy—everyone in their own spaces thought they were dealing with an anti-imperialist leader, when we were actually dealing with a moderate. And very few people understood that. The few who did understand that, after independence, were assassinated, and the Kenyan government was getting help from the British and the Americans. When all these people were assassinated, taken out of the system, or politically isolated, most people within Kenya and outside didn’t understand what was going on.

So that's Kenya's tragedy. The transition to independence was so closely managed that by the time we got independence, we were basically on the side of the West. We supported Britain in its support for apartheid. We did not give support to other African struggles. I think there was a way in which the aura and euphoria of the Mau Mau war blinded everybody to the reality of what Kenya had become.

What Kenya is now is the same, and it’s been like this since 1963—it hasn’t changed. We’ve always been supporting imperialism from the level of the state. And ordinary Kenyans have always known that something is wrong, that we have been betrayed, but because of the control of education, we have not been able to articulate for ourselves exactly what that betrayal was. The fact that the British weaponized ethnicity and that the elites were dominated by Kikuyus [one of the largest ethnic groups in Kenya] makes it very difficult for Kenyans to arrange all the pieces so they understand exactly what happened to Kenya. So that has been our tragedy.

For me, I feel really bad when I see Mau Mau being innocently celebrated—not because they didn’t do anything, but because I can tell the world has still not understood the difference between the elites and the Mau Mau, or the weaponization of ethnicity. You hear people saying “the Kikuyu fought,” but that’s a British narrative. The Mau Mau was a political movement—it was a British anthropologist who made it an ethnic one. I think that because Kenya had captured the Pan-African imagination, the British were especially committed to controlling the narrative—ensuring that independence leaders were sympathetic to their views. They put in a lot of work to manage Kenya’s story. We also know they burned and buried many records of what they did between 1952 and 1961, and so much of that information is still inaccessible to Kenyans. I only learned about the counterinsurgency two years ago. Even the concentration camps were called “rehabilitation centers.”

I come from central Kenya. I learned about the torture from my family, but I didn’t understand its full extent or that it was deliberate. Without an overarching narrative, people just say “those were bad times” and avoid talking about it—people are traumatized. Even my parents did not answer these questions when I was young. Everyone was traumatized.

It took Caroline Elkins—a white American—to publish that book [Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005)], for us Kenyans to grasp the scale of the torture and camps. That tells you how well the British managed us—our thinking, our memory, and our access to knowledge. Plus, the fact that the world accepted the British narrative has allowed the Kenyan elite to hide behind it. So, when the Kenyan elite approach the world, they sound Pan-Africanist, but in reality, they are still pro-imperialist. Such a tragedy.

“Kenyans approve of the AES, but they are not historically and theoretically grounded in understanding what that means.”

AS: In the past few years, Western imperialism has relaunched its global assault in its most vicious and primordial form, seeking to salvage what remains of its hegemony in its terminal stage. This assault is also a response to the growing organized resistance against imperialism and the struggle for sovereignty. The Alliance of the Sahel States (AES) is one example of this resistance. Pan-Africanism is likewise re-emerging in popular discourse and intellectual debates as a framework to orient our struggle for liberation. How would you describe the state of Pan-Africanist debates in Kenya, especially at this current juncture where Western hegemony in Africa and other parts is in crisis?

WN: There is a way in which Kenyans approve the AES, but they are not historically and theoretically grounded in understanding what that means—first, how it came about, and second, what it means. That’s simply because we were engineered to sound Pan-Africanist, but not to be Pan-Africanist in action and belief. I think that this is still a risk when it comes to the AES.

Kenyans support the AES, but I don't think they understand why the AES arrived where it did, or what that means for them. My biggest worry is the difference between how the elite see the AES and how the common Kenyan sees it. The elites—and those who call themselves Pan-Africanists—support the AES, but they tend to copy-paste what happened in the Sahel and say that the same should happen here. The problem is that Kenya and Burkina Faso, for example, are not the same.

We are not the same. We are pro-capitalist and completely westernized. We don’t understand that when Ibrahim Traore comes to power, he does so on the shoulders of the people—the people pushed him into power, and they already had a revolutionary legacy with Thomas Sankara. We don’t have the same conditions. In Kenya, where Ruto is hoping to extend his term limits and become president for life, it’s very dangerous when elites say we should go the Burkina Faso way. They’re not talking about anti-imperialist organizing or building an economy for Africans—they’re talking about having an imperial presidency for life. Unfortunately, because Kenyans are not grounded in history and anti-imperialist theory, they have no rebuttal to that kind of argument, since it comes from the elites.

So that's one danger I see—elites who may support Traore are being reckless. They are not clarifying the circumstances in which the AES came to power. What we need is not to copy-paste what Traore did, because Ruto is not Traore. I suspect he will try to make a similar argument, and if the Americans support him, they will say, “How come you're supporting Traore but don’t want to support Ruto?”

LS: When you say that the elite seem supportive of—or are putting on a show of support for—the AES project, in what way? I'm trying to think about what you said earlier, which is that it’s a support for Pan-Africanism and a support for sovereignty, but still within an imperialist framework. Is that right?

WN: Yes, that’s it. So, there are two trends among the elite.

One trend pays lip service to sovereignty and calls for the AES model to be pasted here, but that’s not what it will turn out to be—it will just be imperialism in disguise. Then there’s the liberal elite, the donor-funded side, who say this was a coup, it goes against democratic norms, and ask why Kenyans are supporting dictatorships instead of democracy. They argue there’s no problem with elections; the problem is just with how they are conducted. So whether the elite claim to be Pan-Africanist or liberal, they do not support a real fight for sovereignty in Kenya. That’s what I would say.

Then you have the Kenyan public. I think, like the rest of Africa, Kenyans are seeing that the AES has exposed the reality of imperial interference. Kenyans have always suspected this—they just haven’t had concrete evidence of it. They've always known their independence was engineered by the British. So in that sense, they really appreciate the AES model, because it has articulated what we always knew but found hard to argue for, given the counter-argument that we’re just blaming colonialism for our own dictatorships and corruption.

But like I said, I’m concerned that Kenyans don’t have enough historical and ideological grounding to distinguish the elites’ pseudo-support for Traore from genuine anti-imperialism, or to counter either side’s arguments. We haven’t understood it, and we lack a strong theoretical foundation to respond.

LS: Thinking about everything you've said so far, fast-forward to the Africa Forward Summit. Macron has played heavily into fake Pan-Africanist discourses. As Mordecai Ogada from Kenya pointed out, only in Kenya would Macron have the temerity to call himself Pan-Africanist without pushback. Others—like Farida Bemba Nabourama from Togo—noted that even with African leaders present, none stood up against this flagrant mockery of Pan-Africanism by an empire in decline. This speaks to how easily Pan-Africanism can be co-opted—not just in Kenya, but across Africa, even amid anti-imperialist resurgence. Yet Kenya is especially ripe for it. That’s why Macron could step in, rebrand France-Afrique as “Africa Forward,” claim Pan-Africanism, and face little resistance. Everything you’ve described helps explain how we arrived here.

WN: I suspect Macron was referring to the Black Paris of the 1920s and 30s—Senghor, Césaire, and the Négritude movement meeting African Americans in Paris. But that’s a history Kenyans don’t know. On top of that, the way British colonial ideology worked in Kenya—as I saw that in a civil servant’s autobiography—the narrative Kenyans were taught is that through our struggle, we had proved ourselves equal to the British. Just as the British have English, Kenyans have Kikuyu, Kamba, Maasai, and so on. So when Macron says he’s Pan-Africanist, in the Kenyan mind, he’s showing he’s equal to us— we are in an equal exchange. We are partners.

Because of the violence of settler colonialism, we expect Europeans to come with guns blazing and insults, apartheid and lynching. That’s what we expect from racism. So when a white man says “I am Pan-Africanist,” we feel he’s come down to our level, and we are now equals. That’s how Kenyans hear it, and they get impressed. That’s how Macron could say that here. Kenyans don’t know West African history, and they also believe independence proved we are equal with whites. So if we are Pan-Africanists, then whites—as equals—can be too. That’s the logic.

And that’s why anti-imperialism must be entrenched in Kenya—so Kenyans can see we are not equals. How are we poor and the West rich if we are equals, if we are partners? We can’t be in the same WhatsApp group if they are rich and we are poor. Even France-Afrique operated like that—French presidents used to hold hands with African leaders and call them brothers.

LS: That’s exactly how they sold us France-Afrique during neocolonialism, through a discourse of equality that was not the case. Before that, France sought to assimilate its colonies—gave them citizenship and integrated them into the political apparatus, with African members of the French parliament like Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Lamine Guéye, Leopold Sedar Senghor etc. But even that citizenship wasn’t on an equal basis. Extending citizenship to Africans in French colonies also served a need for labor within the metropole, bringing them in as laborers.

“We have to stop thinking knowledge is objective—it's not. We should take an unapologetic stand that we are anti-imperialist. I don't think knowledge produced any other way can work, at least not in Kenya.”

Let’s talk about knowledge now, to close our conversation. What type of knowledge do you believe African intellectuals should generate to support our struggle for liberation?

WN: Speaking from where I sit in Kenya, our knowledge has to be anti-imperialist. We have to stop thinking knowledge is objective—it’s not. We should take an unapologetic stand that we are anti-imperialist. I don’t think knowledge produced any other way can work, at least not in Kenya. Unfortunately, Kenyan intellectuals have bought into the idea that knowledge can be objective, and I’ve shared my thoughts on why that is not the case.

I also think it would clarify what I said before—that a return to our roots is not necessarily anti-imperialist. Anti-imperialism has to include an element of power. We have to talk about power, sovereignty, and material resources. What Kenyans have been doing in the name of being anti-colonial is writing in our languages, praising our cultures, talking about African dance and music—but they never go beyond that. The question of what kind of relationship we have with the West is not in Kenyan conversations.

For me, African scholars have to be anti-imperialist, and that means looking at historical relationships, our resources, and access to power. Too many Kenyans talk about culture and don’t mention the imperial question. I don’t subscribe to that idea and neither am I doing the dancing and singing thing. A traditional dance at a conference presentation doesn’t turn you into a Pan-Africanist.

LS: It seems there is an intentional narrative that Pan-Africanism should be organized around cultural lines—cultural affinity and shared ties. That in itself is a counterinsurgency against the political and economic vision of Pan-Africanism. It serves Western imperialism well that we are so focused on the cultural aspect.

Even today, in online discourses, you see people fighting over questions of nationalism within Pan-Africanism, and it always gets anchored back to culture again. The idea of nationalist consciousness is still hooked around culture, which is very different from what Pan-Africanism should be.

Again and again, people have to push back and say Pan-Africanism is first and foremost a political project—an economic integration project. But people don’t really understand that either. And that serves Western imperialism well—that we remain so focused on cultural affinity.

“If they had not praised Kenyatta so much and romanticized the British narrative of the Mau Mau, the Kenyan elite would have no leg to stand on. This is something Pan-Africanists must reconsider.”

WN: In fact, I think it was Larry Madowo—the CNN journalist from Kenya—who made a sarcastic comment on X, in relation to the Macron visit, basically saying: if you’re speaking English instead of local languages, what are you telling us about Pan-Africanism?

There’s a phenomenon —I don’t know if this happens continentally, but in Kenya it does—that when people push back against a narrative, it takes about a day for the CIA or whoever to regroup and come back with a counter-narrative. So Macron announced his Pan-Africanism one day. The next day, Africans said, “That’s crap.” And the following day, the counter-narrative appeared: if you’re speaking English or French, how can you call yourself Pan-Africanist? If you’re wearing Western clothes, what do you mean by Pan-Africanist?

So that’s when people started pushing back and saying, no, this is about politics—it’s not about identity or food. Yes, food matters, but in the political sense, in the Sankara sense—what is on your plate is what imperialism has done. That’s what we want to talk about.

That use of identity is a very British narrative—I don’t know about the French side, but on the British side, it is. The British basically said: we are British, you are Kikuyu, you are whatever ethnicity. But British is a nationality, not an ethnicity. To equate a nationality with an African ethnicity has completely disempowered Kenyans. They find it very difficult to argue against pro-imperialist narratives.

To me, one thing African intellectuals must do is to be very political in their arguments. When I say that in Kenya, people think I mean you have to attack the government. No—we have to talk about our relationship to the world in terms of resources and power. That’s it. If you’re not talking about that, I don’t want to hear what you have to say. For real, in Kenya, I’m just not listening.

I think Pan-Africanists also have to undo the naivete that put us where we are. If they had not praised Kenyatta so much and romanticized the British narrative of the Mau Mau, the Kenyan elite would have no leg to stand on. This is something Pan-Africanists must reconsider. When I see continental Africans and Africans in the diaspora praise Kenyatta, I realize people didn't understand who Kenyatta was.

I think for the ordinary African, that might be a bit difficult, but intellectuals need to do the work of unpacking who Kenyatta was and what Kenya is. Part of why Kenya gets away with all this is that when we present ourselves internationally, people expect us to talk heroically. So most Pan-Africanists don’t pay attention to Kenya. I got the impression people were shocked by the way Ruto has behaved. But all this time, since ‘63, Kenya was even supporting apartheid, and Pan-Africanists missed it. They didn’t see it.

We need support from outside Kenya to undo the mythology of Kenyatta. That’s really important. So that when Kenya presents itself as imperialist, people are not surprised. Right now, I see Africans struggling to understand. They seem to ask, “But Ruto was talking against imperialism the other day, how come he’s at the G7? It doesn’t add up.” So we need to do the work of explaining why Kenya was never what they thought it was.

And that book, Facing Mount Kenya—oh God, it's so Eurocentric. It was commissioned by a British anthropologist. What Kenyatta does is interpret Kikuyu culture as European. He even modified the Kikuyu myth of origin to fit the Genesis story. What he presents as the myth of origin is not the myth of origin—he modified it. Can you imagine? Even with Kenyatta, the British really got us—they got us proper.

LS: Well wasn’t Kenya considered the crown jewel of the British empire on the continent?

WN: Actually, Uganda was the primary interest—Kenya was supposed to be a playground for aristocrats. Kenya is not as fertile as Uganda. The British were looking for the source of the Nile, seeking a route through Egypt to the UK. When they couldn’t find it, they decided to build the railway from Uganda to the port of Mombasa. That's how Kenya got co-opted into the colonial project. We were not the primary interest. The primary interest was Uganda and the Nile.

But then they decided to build the railway, and that’s how Kenya became a point of interest. Then, in 1904, the governor at the time said, “Why don’t we invite British settlers here?” There was also a way Kenya captured the imagination through wildlife hunting—it was basically a playground for Roosevelt and all those people. And Kenya still advertises itself with those narratives. Some time back, the Ministry of Tourism said, “Kenya is where you can get the colonial experience.”

LS: Wandia, this was an excellent conservation. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your commitment to anti-imperialist knowledge. I look forward to many conservations.

Wandia Njoya is a scholar, social and political commentator and blogger based in Nairobi, Kenya. She curates a YouTube channel called Maisha Kazini—@MaishaKazin—that explores critical issues on politics, work, education and life in Kenya from a critical perspective.

LatSouk Sène is a member of AISC.