"Peace and Order are in the Interest of Every Citizen": Elections, Violence and State Legitimacy in Kenya, 1957-74

The campaign against the Shifta separatists of northern Kenya involved so much extra-legal violence that an extraordinary law was passed indemnifying police, soldiers, and administrators against responsibility for their actions-in direct imitation of the 1955 double amnesty which had offered similar protection to those involved in the campaign against Mau Mau.11 The decade after independence was punctuated by a series of assassinations; the murders of Pio Gama Pinto in 1965, Tom Mboya in 1969 and J.M. Kariuki in 1975, have never been fully explained, but it was widely assumed that all were linked to senior figures in the government.12 The use of extra-legal violence, and the derogation of violence to others, was very much a feature of Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s. [...]elections also offered a way to manage and obscure what Abrams calls the "actual disunity of political power," which is concealed by the idea of the state.102 And so they were ultimately successful in drawing population and civil service into an enactment of the imagined distinction between state and society, which authorized certain forms of coercion and violence while delegitimizing others-and maintained the political order.