NOTEBOOK / Bombing's Rubble May Obscure the Real Kenya ALL EDITIONS

THE RECENT bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania seemed to confirm stereotypes strongly held among many elite opinionmakers in the industrialized West. In this view of things, Africa is violent, unstable, dangerous and chaotic. Its people are characterized - or, rather, caricatured -...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNewsday
Main Author Percy C. Hintzen. Percy C. Hintzen is chairman of African American studies at the University of California at Berkeley
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 16.08.1998
EditionCombined editions
Subjects
Kenya
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Summary:THE RECENT bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania seemed to confirm stereotypes strongly held among many elite opinionmakers in the industrialized West. In this view of things, Africa is violent, unstable, dangerous and chaotic. Its people are characterized - or, rather, caricatured - as inept candidates for self-government, requiring the more mature tutelage of the North Atlantic powers. In Kenya, nothing is further from the truth. If anything, the bombings reveal how vulnerable these countries are to the actions of global agents. So heavily are they penetrated by the interests of powerful foreign actors that they have little control over their own affairs. This is a legacy of more than 100 years of colonial occupation and domination. Colonial penetration has been deep and wide. Sixty-six percent of Kenya's population is Christian (Anglican and Roman Catholic) and its official language is English. Its governmental institutions are more-or-less direct implants from Britain, its former colonizer. And the main engines of its formal economy are firmly rooted in the country's colonial past.