Book Reviews WI
The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya,Angelique Haugerud, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (1995), ISBN: 0-521-47059-5, 266pp inc index,
Price: £40, US$59,95 (h/b).
Kenya has often been portrayed by liberal scholars as a success story, but
Angelique Haugerud' s account challenges that representation. The analysis in this
book ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields of vision - from national
political culture, oratory and the staging of politics to everyday struggles for
livelihood among people in one rural locale during the past century.
As the author notes in the preface, the final book was influenced by the 1990s
winds of change in Africa. For Kenya, Haugerud's attention was focused on the
vigorous new political contests and heterodox political voices that now stormed the
public domain - through popular music, theatre, sermons, court battles by human
rights lawyers and politicians' speeches.
To provide the reader a sense of immediacy, this book gives one the contours
of the public assemblies that were usually held outdoors, ranging from huge rallies
of several thousand people to smaller gatherings of a hundred or so individuals
seated on grass in the countryside and the city. The largest included gatherings in
the capital city, Nairobi, held on patriotic national days and addressed by the
president and other officials. As a unique political feature of Kenya, the book
correctly notes that these assemblies or "baraza" are some of the few occasions
for the public display of elite group cohesion and exclusiveness.
This study of Kenya is compulsory reading for all those focusing on donor
politics, the state and the post-cold war regional politics in Africa. The author
systematically analyses Kenya from the popular images and scholarly paradigms
that have over the years been shaped by global forces that have ascribed the country
a "success story" status based on progressing small-holder agriculture and absence
of any coups which had become a routine means of transferring power elsewhere
in Africa.
To understand Kenya in the post 1990 era, this book suggests that institutions
like the "baraza" should be focused on to understand the nature of contending
political and social forces in the country. It is submitted that the gatherings are an
amalgam of security and danger, predicability and surprise, cohesion and conflict,
conformity and creativity. Whilst most people have never really understood how
a degenerating regime maintains itself as a contending force in politics, Haugerud' s
account shows how national political culture. as conveyed through the "baraza"
is a prism that refracts local realities. Official rhetoric docs not necessarily "fool"
citizens, though it sometimes symbolically neutralises social divisions that might
threaten social order.
102 Book Reviews
The book. which is divided into six chapters, covers democracy issues, forms
of domination before 1990, the colonial economy of central Kenya and finally,
Kenya's political communities in a state of rapid flux in the early 19908, formed
around the shifting local, ethnic, regional and religious identities that are sometimes
manipulated from above.
It is interesting to note that author identifies the post -1990 forces which called
for a better democratic culture and respect for human rights and notes that the leftwing
voice was missing. Given the unfolding processes and brutality of the regime,
one would have been interested to know whether this voice would have changed
anything. In my view, this analysis would have been very important given the fact
that she acknowledges in the final chapter that the struggle for the control of the
state in Kenya was not a battle over any proposed fundamental restructuring of the
economy.
The strength of the book lies in its use of theatrical metaphors to illustrate why
politics of spectacle, fantasy and image-making dominate this "post-modem" era.
In this respect, the book becomes compelling reading. As correctly noted in this
book, the daily dramas of state politics inn Kenya invite artistic satire. The state as
a political theatre conveys more tragic outcomes as well: lives lost, rights denied,
poverty perpetrated.
Reviewed by Thomas Deve. Assistant Editor. Sapes Trust. Harare. Zimbabwe.
Children, Medicines and Culture, Patricia Bush, et al, Pharaceutica1 Products
Press, an imprint of The Haworh Press, Inc. (1996), New York, ISBN: 1-56024-
937-4, 420pp inc index, Price: US$39,95 (bib).
Children. Medicines. and Culture provides a multicultural, multidisciplinary look
at how children in nine European countries and the United States are socialised into
medicine use. The team of authors, comprised of social and medical scientists,
takes a sociocultural approach to understanding why the use of medicines varies
among countries. Their premise is that beliefs, expectations, and behaviours about
medicines are learned in childhood and are influenced by families and the wider
culture. Authors interviewed children and their families and discuss children's
knowledge of medicines, their autonomy in medicine use, the attitudes of children
and their parents about medicines, how children act as decision-makers, medicines
kept at home, treatment of childhood fever, and alternative therapies.
Chapters in the book represent individual country reports and cross-national
comparisons as the authors seek to understand how children are socialised into
medicine use in Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands,
Spain, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. It would be useful for