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About this talk

Since the return of multiparty democracy in the 1990s, the study of the contemporary history of Kenya has been dominated by a focus on ethnicity and elections. However, the nature of Kenya’s recent wave of popular protests invites us to reconsider these frameworks. The maandamano cut across typical ethnic or partisan faultlines and rather represented a broader critique of economic inequality and injustice.To explore the deeper history of these issues, this paper argues for a reckoning with the political economy of neoliberal reform. It examines the role played by Kenyan economists, intellectuals, journalists and entrepreneurs in driving processes of economic and financial change in Kenya after the oil crises of the 1970s. Whereas at independence the country’s economists, intellectuals and politicians argued that state-led development would be the engine for national growth, by the 1990s they advocated that the market would set Kenyans free, even as the same transformations created the conditions in which corruption like the notorious Goldenberg scandal thrived. Rather than presenting this as simply as a time of loss, this paper suggests the need to think about structural adjustment as a constructive moment, with implications for our understanding of the troubled present.Dr George Roberts is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. He works on the contemporary history of Kenya, Tanzania, and Comoros and is the author of Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam (Cambridge University Press 2021, Mkuki na Nyota 2025). During the 2026–2027 academic year he will be  a fellow at Oxford’s Koch History Centre.

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