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Two Faces of Kenya: The Researcher and the State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
Extract
“When all Kenyans entrusted me with the leadership of this nation six years ago, I declared that I would continue to strengthen and defend all the fundamental principles upon which our nation was founded. I pledged to uphold the ideals of democracy, social justice and human dignity. I also stated that my leadership would always spring from the will of the people. It is my firm belief that the creation of a just and progressive society must always emerge through a partnership between the people and their Government.”
—President Daniel arap Moi (Kenya Times, 12/13/84)“There is no doubt in my mind that Kenya has been a model neo-colony.… When a regime becomes more and more alienated from the people, it tends to become more and more repressive as a way of maintaining its dominant position in that country. That's what has happened to the Kenya regime. All centres of democratic expression have been repressed.… Parliament…has become no more than just a mouth piece of the ruling regime. The University was the only centre, broadly speaking, of democratic expression…the university, by purely maintaining the liberal bourgeois ideals of freedom of expression, the right to receive different opinions, was being seen as more to the left, not because the university was actually moving to the left, but by the fact that the regime has been moving so far to the right that the liberal position, the liberal ideals of the university, were becoming, or being seen as a threat to the regime.… The regime has gone so far to the right as to be contemptuous of the people of Kenya as a whole. The regime has become completely anti-Kenyan in its stance.…”
—Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1985: 23–24)- Type
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