This article examines the design and implementation of agricultural loan schemes extended to African farmers in colonial Kenya between 1948 and the late 1950s. Drawing on administrative correspondence, district returns, loan records, and financial statements from the African Land Utilisation and Settlement (ALUS) machinery, it reconstructs how African credit was organised, monitored, and assessed within late colonial developmental policy. The article argues that African agricultural credit was structured not as an inclusive financial system, but as a tightly controlled experiment in supervised development. Loans were small, selectively allocated, and embedded in a bureaucratic regime that linked access to credit with assessments of discipline, locality, reliability, and repayment behaviour. The 1952 Directive formalised procedures and reporting requirements, while the Mau Mau Emergency intensified official concerns over arrears, mobility, enforceability, and political risk. Descriptive tabulations of loan allocation and repayment show that lending remained limited in scale and unevenly distributed, while arrears emerged less as evidence of African financial incapacity than as a product of institutional design, administrative limits, and colonial conditions of insecurity. The scheme reveals how late colonial development policy incorporated African producers into monetised agriculture while reproducing racialised inequalities in land, capital, and financial autonomy.
Despite its ongoing participation in various peace support operations across the globe, Tanzania can generally be considered a reluctant intervener. In its first 30 years after independence (1961-1991), Tanzania viewed intervention to advance the self-determination of other African polities as central to its own security and reputation. However, from the middle of the 1990s to date, Tanzania has viewed interventions as something potentially inimical to its own development. While scholars have shown notable interest in Tanzania's early support for self-determination, the question of how the country's international posture has evolved from a willing to a reluctant intervener has not received as much attention. Going beyond the official narrative that the completion of liberation in Southern Africa made policy change necessary, this paper demonstrates that the shift began almost a decade before the said completion. It also points to the impact of a costly intervention in Uganda as a key but often unacknowledged imperative behind the change in the country's posture. This paper is based on key informant interviews, archival sources, and secondary materials.
Since the mid-2000s, debates on the economic and social legacies of colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa have seen a revival, including on questions of agricultural change, welfare, inequality, and the role of colonial policy. Existing research has largely focused on wealthier peasant-export colonies and on settler colonies. The dynamics of poorer peasant colonies remain less understood. This paper examines Tanganyika, a British mandate territory from 1920 to 1961, where colonial administrations officially prioritised peasant development and the expansion of African agriculture. Drawing on a newly constructed dataset on African agricultural production at national and provincial levels, the paper analyses trends in cash crop production and food security, situating quantitative evidence within an analysis of colonial policy and African cultivators' agency. The findings show substantial growth in African agricultural production, particularly after World War II, driven primarily by African farmers responding to market opportunities, rather than by colonial intervention. However, agricultural development was highly uneven, regional inequalities widened, and food shortages remained recurrent. Limited market access, paternalistic, regulatory policies, and the colonial administration's failure to secure African cooperation are identified as major constraints on cash crop expansion and food security.
This article explores the opportunities and challenges of knowledge exchange in East Africa around the societal implications of generative AI. These technologies' capacity to work with and in certain African indigenous languages is increasing rapidly and generative AI is quickly becoming part of the region's digital platform landscape - albeit in an unpredictable and experimental fashion. Drawing from the authors' practice-based research in Somalia and their work on Somali-language educational and public engagement resources regarding generative AI, the article argues that translation is a crucial but ambiguous space through which critical debate and resistance to dominant tech narratives can be enabled. This is because of the centrality of language to the (in)accessibility of debates about AI, as well as the emerging impacts of AI on language and translation practices themselves. Building on previous work on the power and problematic aspects of predictive text algorithms that function in East African languages, the article emphasises the importance of evaluating the implications of rapid global AI developments from Eastern African vantage points, foregrounding historical inequalities around language and ongoing (data) extractivism.
Commissions of inquiry are a useful governance tool, which, through their ritualised proceedings, look to provide authoritative knowledge that can help to distract attention, justify policies, and/or assert state control. By drawing upon the case of Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, or Waki Commission (2008), we show how the very characteristics that help commissions of inquiry to serve as a useful governance tool - namely, their ostensible independence, involvement of experts, ability to offer recommendations, and public nature - render them unpredictable. Final reports can offer findings and recommendations that make demands upon or pose challenges to the government and, even if recommendations are never implemented, a commission's public nature ensures that the process and the discussions around it become part of the official archive, public debates, and social imaginaries. As a result, commissions of inquiry exhibit a legitimacy paradox: the performance of legitimacy structurally sows seeds of agency that can be used in unintended ways by those involved and by those who subsequently refer to a Commission's life or legacy. Taken together, this ensures that commissions of inquiry are a more important and complex part of Kenyan and global politics than is generally acknowledged by practitioners and scholars.
