ARCHIVE: A Review of Colin Leys' Underdevelopment in Kenya

Colin Leys' book, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism, caused quite a conversational stir when it was published just over forty years ago. Here is a review of it that I wrote in 1976, and which remains a manuscript:

The central purpose of this study is to examine the "significance of independence for the mass of (Kenyan) people." Before doing so, however, it is imperative, so the author argues, to "try to disengage oneself" from the biases of existing literature. It is imperative for three reasons:

First, it is impossible to understand the relationship between the 'private sector' and the pattern of Kenya's post-independence development in purely Kenyan terms. Second, a focus on the 'private sector' or the 'economy' as something distinct from the 'political system' is seen as an artificiality and an obstacle to clear understanding of "the reality." The suggestion here is that existing literature has committed this 'sin'. Third, in order to answer the basic questions about the significance of independence, one must reject the false 'value-freedom' of existing literature and make a choice as to what interests and political practice one's framework of inquiry "should try to embody" or serve. Leys' conscious choice, or 'bias', is what we may call the "underdevelopment" or "dependency" model which in his view represents "an immense advance , politically and intellectually, over conventional development theory, in spite of some very serious defects of its own" (p. xiii), The theoretical context of the book is indicated in chapter I. 

Leys argues that the theory of underdevelopment originated in the writing of Marx and Lenin (one supposes that 'Marx' includes Engels) -- though their "prime concern" was with Europe and European Russia. A "major theoretical development has been required," he adds, since the first socialist revolution did not... 

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