Introduction

Thus far, at least two research propositions on transnational encounters and connections (TEC) exist. The first sees social and political groups as integral to the politicization of existing natural environments. According to this perspective, circumstances and outcomes will depend on prevailing hegemonic social and political interactions and formations. The second perceives TEC as reflecting particularly sustained subjective human aspirations that rest on conscious, independent social expression and positioning.

Research on TEC draws on and builds on a nation-state systemic approach. However, in recent years, emerging research has highlighted the socio-political transformative mechanisms of local transnational encounters and connections (LOTEC). Such studies stress community struggles and achievements through processes of sociopolitical and sometimes cultural mobilization. However, such LOTEC research also considers community mobilization as a means to an end, such as overcoming/diversifying dominant social, political, and social structures.

In contrast, research on LOTEC, such as the Aarhusomali case, although recognizing existing research conclusions, complements the more complex society and community-centric approaches by first analyzing the ongoing and continually transformative community mobilization and circumstances, and second, considering the community's sustained LOTEC not just as an end but also as an existential right on its own.

In the book, the New Transnational Activism (Tarrow, 2005) Sidney Tarrow calls for the extension of existing transnational research orientations. Such existing research analyzes formal organizational patterns from within the state and macro-society perspectives (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Therefore, the arrows advocate the inclusion of transnational processes sustained by ordinary migrants and refugees. To illustrate his point, Tarrow shares the story of his father from the 1920s, then a young man, who boarded a steamer from Hamburg to New York. The young man fled from recurring “poverty” and “disorders,” which often targeted transnational Jewish communities in Europe. In the US, Tarrow's father obtained American citizenship, remitted monetary sources, and social capital to support his remaining relatives in Europe. After some years, he temporarily returned to his ancestral land for marriage, during which he, together with other transnational community members in New York, established schools and health clinics. From his base in the United States, he co-created vibrant transnational community associations, rescuing Jewish victims from Nazi persecution in Europe.

Introduction

Aristotle, the Greek political philosopher, perceptibly hypothesized that human beings are by nature political animals. From this Aristotelian perspective, individuals are political animals because they cannot only reason, but they can also communicate with fellow human beings and, ipso facto, have the capacity to transform the environment of human existence for the better because they can recognize the difference between right and wrong. Herein, the central Aristotelian thesis is that human beings, imbued with reason by their creator, must naturally premise their approach to politics on the basic concept of the good of all human beings in the polity. This is the essence of true civic nationalism. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the nature of modern politics reveals that the notion of politics aiming at the general good for all human beings in a given polity is trumped by the manipulative tendencies of the political class. This is amply illustrated by the discussion in Chapters 3 and 4 regarding the establishment of single-party authoritarianism in Kenya that essentially amounted to a betrayal of anti-colonial nationalism.

Whether politics aims at the general good or not has a lot to do with the manner in which the public space is organized, as this has serious implications for the way in which actors conduct themselves therein. Conversely, the nature of the political actors, their worldviews, and political orientations, have equally serious implications for the nature of the public space and the discourses conducted therein. Whereas political independence was achieved under heightened anticolonial nationalism with expectations of a democratic dispensation post-independence, the process of political consolidation saw the emergence of a single-party state, which was rationalized as the most viable means for maintaining national integrity, engendering nation- and state-building, and ensuring socioeconomic development (Nasong’o 2005). This eventuality witnessed increasing consolidation of power in the hands of the executive in a conjuncture that led to the overwhelming dominance of the state in the Kenyan political economy as elsewhere on the African continent. Within this authoritarian context, political opposition was criminalized and those viewed as radicals or as a threat to entrenched interests were systematically marginalized from politics, harassed, detained, and even assassinated. Some saved themselves by escaping into exile.

Introduction

For a long period of time after attainment of political independence in 1963, Kenya's foreign economic relations remained principally tied to her former colonial power, Britain and, by extension to the European Union countries and the United States. Beginning with the Kibaki administration (2003–13), however, Kenya has increasingly looked East to China in terms of its economic relations and sourcing of development loans. Although these relations between Kenya and China existed under President Moi when China helped with the construction of Nairobi's Nyayo National Stadium and the Moi Sports Complex in Kasarani, in Nairobi as well as the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, the relations picked up pace under President Mwai Kibaki and intensified under Uhuru Kenyatta, measured in terms of volume of amounts of development financing involved. The construction of the Thika Superhighway under Kibaki, and the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), and the Nairobi Expressway both under Uhuru Kenyatta, are three of the biggest projects financed by Chinese loans in Kenya.

This chapter examines the increasing role of China as Kenya's development financier and seeks to answer the question as to whether the partnership between the two countries is mutually beneficial or whether Kenya is increasingly being mortgaged to China in a new form of imperialism. The chapter begins with an exploration of the economic rise of China and its increasing interest in Africa. It then focuses on the theme of the country's development loans to Kenya, which have increased dramatically since the decade of the 2010s. The main argument of the chapter is that as an emerging global economic power characterized by tremendous economic growth over the last several decades particularly as a consequence of Deng Xiaoping's (1978–89) reforms, China's interest in Africa in general, and in Kenya in particular, is dictated by its voracious economic needs in the form of natural resources to feed its industries and markets for its industrial goods and burgeoning labor force as well as its strategic geopolitical ambitions. Being so, China's dealings with countries such as Kenya may not be as benign as they are made out to be. As pointed out in Chapter 4, foreign policies of states are planned and implemented with the sole purpose of advancing self-interest. Helping others is never the primary purpose of any country's foreign policy in their relations with others.

INTRODUCTION

The first edition of this book was directed to my fellow economists. At that time it was reasonable to presume that they would be sufficiently familiar with my prior work that a few brief references would be sufficient to indicate the extent to which it was incor¬porated in the present book. With the passage of time this presumption is no longer true; indeed, despite precise indications in the text and in footnotes, few readers of the original edition seem to have recognized the genesis of certain important innovations, such as user costs, in my earlier Treatise on Money (1930a, b). This problem was particu¬larly acute in Chapter 17, which built on the interest rate parity theorem first set out in my Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), and on an extension of what I had called the ‘short-period’ theory of prices in Volume II of the Treatise on Money (1930b).

Although I alerted readers of the first edition to what I considered to be the impor¬tant differences with respect to the Treatise on Money, they could only be appreciated by those familiar with my earlier work, and I was perhaps remiss in failing to stress suffi¬ciently the continuity that remained. For example, in the Preface (page vii) I noted that:

I went on to summarize ‘the general relationship between the two books’, noting that in the first:

Fisher's question: If the price of wheat in terms of gold rises at a rate d per period, and the rate of interest on gold is i = 10% per period and the rate of growth of wheat is j = 4% per period, what is the relation between i and j that must be paid to lenders to make them indifferent between denominating the loan contract in gold or wheat.

Being indifferent means lending either 1D or 1B today and receiving either D(1 + i) or B(1 + j) at the end of the period, or D(1 + i) = B(1 + j). Since B = D(1 + d) this can be rewritten as D(1 + i) = D(1 + d)(1 + j) substituting for B. Simplifying yields the Fisher relation for the rate of inflation of the price of wheat in terms of gold that would leave lenders indifferent between lending in gold or wheat:

i = (1 + d)(1 + j) = j + d + dj which simplifies to i = j + d since dj will be small.

If we use the rates assumed above, then 0.10 = 0.04 + d + 0.04 d or

0.10 − 0.04 = 1.04 d

0.06 = 1.04 d

d = 0.577 or money must depreciate in terms of purchasing power by 5.77% relative to wheat.

The same result can be reached on the basis of a market arbitrage:

Borrow 1B of wheat today and sell it for 1D of gold.

Lend the gold to receive 1.10D gold at the end of the period.

Buy 1.04 B of wheat for 1.04D

Repay wheat loan and interest of B(1.04)

Keep the difference in Profit of 1.10D − 1.04D = 0.06D

To eliminate this arbitrage profit, either the cost of wheat in terms of money today will have to fall or will have to rise tomorrow to eliminate the 6% arbitrage profit.

On the evening of December 10, 1968, on the seventy-second anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, a slightly built Indian American man, only 44 years old, stood before King Gustaf Adolf of Sweden on a stage in the Konserthuset Stockholm (the Stockholm Concert Hall). By the king's side were Princess Christina and Prince Bertil of Sweden. The slightly built man was Har Gobind Khorana, and he was there to receive his share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Accompanying him was his Swiss-born wife, Esther Elizabeth.

The Prize ceremony was followed by a formal banquet with about 1,300 guests. The menu included lobster and avocados as a starter, lamb with creamed mushrooms as the main course, and pineapple ice cream and cake for dessert. To drink, they had a choice of Pommery & Greno Brut or Château d’Yquem 1962. Afterward the Khoranas sipped Courvoisier. It was a joyous occasion.

In 1968, as today, the Nobel Prize was the greatest honor that a scientist can receive. Khorana received his prize for his role in solving the most important problem of molecular biology of his era: the nature of the genetic code. By the mid-1950s it had become clear that a string of four DNA nucleotides (adenosine [A], cytosine [C], guanine [G], and thymine [T]) in genes determined, by the order of their occurrence, the string of amino acid residues in protein molecules that carried out most of life's activities. These amino acid residues were of 20 types. But which sequence of DNA nucleotides specified which amino acid residues? This translation was carried out according to the genetic code. It turned out, as Khorana definitively established, that a triplet “codon” of nucleotides specified each amino acid residue. He established exactly which triplet of nucleotides specified each amino acid residue.

The problem of the genetic code had moved to the center of attention in molecular biology in the late 1950s, shortly after Francis Crick and James D. Watson established that DNA had the structure of a double helix with nucleotides strung along the two backbones that faced each other along the central core of the double helix.

INTRODUCTION

It is ironic that the breakdown of the golden age of post-war capital accumulation in the 1970s should have signalled the crisis of Keynesian economics. Ironic, for as Fausto Vicarelli pointed out, Keynes's entire theoretical edifice was constructed in order to interpret the instability of capitalism, indeed ‘the stimulus to his analysis was always some moment of capitalist crisis’. In contrast to those announcing the ‘crisis of Keynesian economics’ in the face of the increasing instability of the 1970s, Vicarelli argued forcefully ‘that Keynes's thought has direct relevance to the present moment of capitalist crisis’ (Vicarelli, 1984, p. 184). Yet, as a result of the crisis, the majority of economists have abandoned Keynes's theory in favour of what has come to be called the ‘New Classical’ economics, which seems to exclude instability by definition, or the inappropriately named ‘New Keynesian’ economics, which seems to rely on the failure of the perfectly competitive market to allocate information efficiently.

Vicarelli's carefully argued case that Keynes's economics was even more appropri¬ate to periods of crises than to the Golden Age of post-war stability has been completely ignored by most professional economists. The present paper will try to recall and rein¬force some of Vicarelli's arguments, drawing on his interpretation of Keynes to inte¬grate it with some more modern theory.

THE EXPLANATION OF ECONOMIC INSTABILITY

Even before Keynes wrote there was broad agreement that economic instability was caused by ‘imperfections’ which were represented by mistaken forecasts of the future and associated disappointment in expectations (cf. Kregel, 1977), or from mistaken gov¬ernment policies (extending to the very existence of government) producing inappropri¬ate expectations (which is what the Treasury View seems to have been), or most simply the absence of competitive conditions. By and large they tended to be maintained after Keynes and were still prevalent at the time of the ‘crisis in Keynesian economics’. All of these explanations implicitly accepted the self-adjusting operation of the market mech¬anism. This explains why the rational expectations hypothesis had such a powerful and immediate impact, for it simply brought expectations formation within the already accepted self-adjusting mechanism.

Introduction: Conflicting Transnational Citizenship Formations

In January 2021, New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern, in an urgent press conference, strongly blamed the Australian government for “abdicating its responsibilities” to its citizens. The controversy emerged following the Turkish authorities’ apprehension and deportation of a prisoner with dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship. Prisoners had extreme inclinations. The Turks preferred to deport the detainee to New Zealand, their birth nation. During the press briefing, Prime Minister Jacinda insisted that women belonging to Australia—a nation she said the accused not just obtained citizenship but also grew up since childhood. In contrast, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, with a strongly worded statement, declared that the protection of his country demands steadfastness. Justifying his position, the Australian prime minister highlighted policies revoking citizenship from foreign extremists (BBC News, February 2021). The New Zealand prime minister stressed the sociopolitical relevance of transnational citizenship, under which people who adopt and socialize into a particular national context and society should, in principle, belong to that society. Meanwhile, the Australian prime minister preferred legislative procedural dimensions, sanctioning actual and potential transgressors of conventional national security.

Around the same time in Copenhagen, a city councilor, Ali Hansen, a member of the progressive Danish Red Greens, complained about the existence of “white middle class” domination in the fight against racism in a country like Denmark. Though admittedly suggesting of not directly experiencing racism in person, neither within nor beyond his party, the transnational Danish politician expresses apprehension about the predicament of the “white middle class,” particularly among party leadership insisting on presumed capabilities of combating racism on their own. Specifically, Mr. Hansen accuses members of his political party of avoiding social mobility within party politics. This includes the process of not designating prominent positions for ethnic minorities, especially during pre-election candidate selection.

In preparation for potentially approaching elections, political parties in Denmark introduce party lists from which the electorate picks its favorite candidates. Certain parties maintain an open list. Thus, regardless of their numerical position, the obtained electoral votes determine accessibility to legislative seats and, thereby, power within the party, as well as within the overall political system (Pedersen, 2019).

If 1979 had been a year of transcendental success because Khorana had finally succeeded in creating a synthetic gene that could function within a cell, it followed a year that had brought him great personal sorrow. His younger daughter, Emily Anne, succumbed to leukemia on July 12, 1978, after a protracted illness. She was 23 years old and her mortal remains were interred at Henniker Cemetery in Henniker, New Hampshire, where the Khoranas had bought a cabin.

The family was devastated, though they knew Emily's death was coming. Friends mourned with them across the world. In Liverpool, Gobind's old mentor, Roger Beer found it sadly ironic that Khorana, who had done so much to reveal the secrets of life, had been helpless when cancer attacked his young daughter. He could well have asked: What was the point of all this biological research?

Emily's death dominated 1978, but was not the only tragedy that year. On June 26, 1978, George Kenner, who had had a history of depression, died by suicide. After teaching at Cambridge for a number of years, he had moved to the University of Liverpool in 1957, where he became Heath Harrison Professor of Organic Chemistry and, after 1976, Royal Society Professor. When the Khoranas visited Beer at Liverpool over the years, they had also kept up with George and his wife, Jill. While Kenner had had a superb research career studying protein synthesis, eventually he succumbed to his depression and took his own life in a remote area in the hills of Wales where he loved to hike.

Following Kenner's death, the University of Liverpool Department of Chemistry instituted the George Kenner Prize and Lectures. The first of these lectures was held on October 28, 1980. Todd introduced the lecturer who, appropriately, was Khorana, speaking on the final complete synthesis of a functional gene (“Synthesis in the study of biological function of nucleic acids”). Todd also presented Khorana with an engraved bowl designed by Denis Mann of Caithness Glass, a well-known glass artist (see Figure 8.1). Khorana stayed with the Beers as usual. It must have been a bittersweet reunion: Kenner had been a friend to all of them.

Introduction

Contemporary Kenya, like all the states of Africa save for Ethiopia and the island states, is a product of colonial imperialism. The landmark development in the formal colonization of Africa was the holding of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 when the continent was formally sliced up and shared by seven colonial powers as discussed in Chapter 1. Kenya was claimed by the British who officially declared it a British Protectorate in 1895 under the name “East African Protectorate.” Uganda had been declared a British Protectorate in 1894. To open the hinterland and connect it to the bustling Port of Mombasa, the British commenced the construction of a railway linking Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with Kisumu (then known as Port Florence) on Lake Victoria. Construction of the railway began in 1896 and was completed in 1901, spanning 965 kilometers. Although construction of this so-called Uganda Railway proceeded briskly, it was seriously interrupted and halted between March and August 1898 in the Taru Desert of Tsavo in present-day Taita Taveta County by two marauding lions nicknamed “Man Eaters of Tsavo” that terrorized Indian and African railway workers, killing 135 of them before they were finally killed by Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson after a nine-month period of horror among railway workers (Patterson 1985).

In 1902 the border between Kenya and Uganda was defined, making Kisumu and the area around Lake Victoria part of Kenya. In 1907, the British colonial administration moved from Mombasa to Nairobi. Three years later, in 1910, Nairobi became the official capital of Kenya, having been founded in 1899 as a railway depot. From 1895 to 1906, the protectorate was administered by a commissioner. Thereafter, the title changed to Governor, with Sir James Sadler as the first governor, having been preceded by three commissioners including Arthur Hardinge, Charles Eliot, and Donald Stewart (see Table 2.1). The country remained the East African Protectorate until July 1920 when it was declared the Crown Colony of Kenya. Among the most critical issues that defined the development of Kenya within this colonial context include the White settler demands, the Indian question, the land and labor issue, and the rise of anticolonial nationalism. This chapter explores these issues with a view to evaluating their impact in the making of contemporary Kenya.

During the last few days much has been said and written about “long-period” and “short-period” theories of “effective demand”. While the original purpose of this paper was to try to clarify, from a Keynesian perspective, what may be meant by the term effective demand, it is obvious that the terms long- and short-period also bear definition. I shall thus commence with a digression on what I shall intend by these terms.

1 DIGRESSION ON LONG- AND SHORT-PERIOD

Marshall is only apparently the source of the problem. Yet, Marshall did not have a short- and a long-period theory of value and distribution (perhaps it would be more correct to say “price”). There is one, and only one, theory of price in Marshall. He did, however, use the market period, the short period and the long period to separate out the analysis of all the various aspects of the relevant forces operating to determine prices. The major operative force was substitution-instigated competition or as Knight was to summarize it, the “law” of one price. The market period concentrates on the operation of competitive forces on prices alone; substitution is only possible among final outputs. In the short period an additional aspect, substitution of existing productive capacity is added. Finally, in the long period substitution operates on all inputs and outputs. The full operation of these forces was thought to produce the tendency towards full employ¬ment of all inputs and the sale of all outputs.

In the same way, the Classical economists had only one theory of value and distribu¬tion. It emphasized the fundamental forces of competition which lead entrepreneurs to invest in those sectors yielding the highest rates of profit; what is now summarised by the “tendency to a uniform rate of profit”. The operation of these forces was analyzed by separating market values from natural values and both from the stationary state. In the case of market values, chance factors could completely offset the fundamental forces; while in the stationary state their work had been brought to the limit set by population growth and technical progress.

Kalecki was always quite clear that he considered his theory to apply to long periods only when viewed as a series of short-period situations. The distinction of Kalecki's approach is that it uses price determination to produce an explanation of the level of output.

Introduction

Through legislative institutions and procedures, Danish society formally pursues policies to repatriate refugees from Denmark (Vitus and Jarlby, 2021). The state wants them to return to their country of origin. Countries fled due to the fear for their lives. Concretely, Danish political parties and coalitions, in recent years right-wing coalitions supported by public opinion against refugees, have introduced policies for repatriation targeting refugees. Additional policies also facilitate programs in which former refugees, who currently might hold residence permits or even Danish citizenship, could also qualify for repatriation if they voluntarily wish to return home. Diverse bureaucratic structures, as well as civic groups and NGOs advocating for refugee rights, play an intermediate role in the process, complicating the implementation of such restrictive policies. The bureaucracy specifies and implements policies, while civic groups and NGOs criticize or directly fight against such policies. Certain civic groups also mobilize and empower refugee-migrant communities in resisting policies, thereby overcoming the immediate and expected long-term challenges of some of the particularly ratified policies.

However, although the stated legal and political dimensions of repatriation policies remain central, how the targeted communities respond formally and informally to such processes also influences the eventual outcome. In particular, the dilemma communities confront includes their prevailing ambivalent connections to both host and homeland environments. Most community members want to periodically return and connect to their homelands, but obviously on their own terms. At the same time, many of them did not aim to abandon Denmark. Therefore, for most of them, it is not a question of either or nor, as many have invested in belonging to both societies and thereby establishing roots and ties. Among the scholars studying such uncertainties, Kibreab describes transnational ambivalence as follows:

KEYNES's CHALLENGE TO MONETARY AUTHORITIES IN 1930: INTRODUCE ZIRP AND QE

At the end of 1930, as the US stock market crash was starting to have a negative impact on the real economy in the form of falling commodity prices, falling output, and ris¬ing unemployment, John Maynard Keynes, in the concluding chapters of his Treatise on Money, launched a challenge to monetary authorities: take ‘deliberate and vigorous action’ to reduce interest rates and reverse the crisis. He argued that until ‘extraordi¬nary’, ‘unorthodox’ monetary policy action ‘has been taken along such lines as these and has failed, need we, in the light of the argument of this treatise, admit that the banking system can not, on this occasion, control the rate of investment, and, therefore, the level of prices’ (Keynes 1930a: 387). The ‘unorthodox’ policies that Keynes rec¬ommends are virtually identical to the Japanese central bank's experiment with zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) in the 1990s and the US Federal Reserve's experiment with ZIRP, accompanied by quantitative easing (QE1 and QE2), during the recent crisis. While too late to be considered a response to Keynes's challenge, these modern policy measures provide a clear test of Keynes's belief in the power of monetary policy to coun¬ter financial crisis. This modern response to Keynes's challenge would appear to be a clear admission of the inability of monetary policy to influence the rate of investment as a means of responding to the crisis. Indeed, Keynes himself seems to have modified his position as his thinking evolved towards the analysis of the General Theory.

THE OBJECTIVES OF MONETARY POLICY

In the penultimate chapter of volume 2 of the Treatise, Keynes raises ‘the crux of the whole matter’ of monetary policy: ‘[D]oes it lie within the power of a central bank in actual practice to pursue a policy which will have the effect of fixing the value of money at any prescribed level?’ (Keynes 1930a : 339).

Despite some residual doubts, Keynes nonetheless answers his own question in the affirmative, urging central bankers to adopt ‘extraordinary’, ‘unorthodox’ measures to reduce interest rates to near zero in an attempt to counter the deepening recession.

Keynes's major contribution to economic theory is often characterised as an emphasis on the possible difference between ex-ante decisions and ex-post results or on the recogni¬tion that, in an uncertain world, expectations may be disappointed. On such an appre¬ciation of Keynes's contribution to economic theory numerous writers have, reasonably, questioned the frequently avowed Keynesian parentage of what has come to be called post-Keynesian (or Cambridge) economic theory. Professor Lachmann maintains that the practitioners of the “Cambridge School” are “ill-equipped to deal with autonomous changes in demand or in the range of divergence of expectations, to which Keynes attributed importance and drew our attention, and on which the pattern of specifying investment decisions depends”, and that the approach thus lacks essential factors associ¬ated with Keynes's work. Professor Lachmann further maintains that this deficiency is especially visible in the complete reliance of the Cambridge school on static macro equilibrium; a concept that he believes to be non-existent in, and certainly inconsistent with, any economic theory claiming Keynes as parent.

Professor Blaug has recently echoed this particular theme, asserting that post-Keynesian theory has “been no more successful than the orthodox theory in throwing off the straitjacket of equilibrium analysis in conditions of perfect certainty and full information”.

Such arguments lead to two conclusions. First, that the post-Keynesian generalisa¬tion of the General Theory is a sham and neglects the most important aspects of Keynes's work, especially through reliance on steady-state equilibrium models; and secondly, that the use of such an equilibrium approach makes the theory a poor substitute for, if not identical with, the orthodox theory of static equilibrium (cf. Blaug, op. cit., pp. 83–6).

It is the purpose of what follows to show the dubious nature of such conclusions and to demonstrate both how post-Keynesian theory can be seen as a legitimate extension of the basic methodology employed by Keynes in the General Theory and that the nature and use of the concept of equilibrium in post-Keynesian theory is unmistakably dif¬ferent from the orthodox nature and use of the concept. The implicit conclusion is, of course, that most critics have seriously misinterpreted Keynes's methodological position in the General Theory.

The Nobel Prize brought Khorana fame, but it also brought even higher expectations. Though he may not have minded the fanfare, psychologically, all the attention took its toll. A short time after returning to Madison from Stockholm, he suddenly disappeared from his laboratory apparently in a state of mental exhaustion, possibly depression. For several months he was unavailable. Laboratory members tracked him to Vancouver, where he was recuperating, but showed little interest in an immediate return. Friends said that he sat by the water for hours every day staring into the distance. But, soon, a crisis emerged within the laboratory as a dispute burst open between two factions that refused to work together. RajBhandary duly reported the problem to Khorana and it finally had the effect of making him return to establish peace. The laboratory could start functioning again.

Laboratory members also recall that wherever Khorana went—and he gave many seminars in the late 1960s—he was repeatedly asked whether he had finished synthesizing a gene. Was it done yet? When would it be done? He must have felt immense pressure though, after that initial retreat to Vancouver, it would not manifest itself publicly.

He had brought the pressure on himself. In the early 1960s, when not even the sequence of a single gene was known, he had announced his goal of the total synthesis of a functional gene. He was always explicit that the drive to decipher the genetic code was a mere detour from that pursuit even though it had brought him fame and a share of a Nobel Prize. Synthesizing the gene was a much more challenging—and, therefore, intellectually satisfying—problem:

Introduction

The fight for political independence in Kenya was waged on many fronts—the cultural, the social, the political, the economic, and the military—and by multiple social forces—individual and corporate, ethnic, and religious, as well as regional and trans-regional. Nevertheless, in spite of the multiple identity groups involved in the struggle for independence, they all found common ground in anticolonial nationalism and harnessed unity that mirrored the dictum; “we either hang together or are hanged separately.” The urgent sense of purpose on the part of these anticolonial nationalists was almost contagious. Yet, within the first decade of independence, the sense of unity and collective purpose irreparably atrophied, and, by the end of the decade, it had virtually died. More than six decades since independence, Kenya is much less of a nation than it was in 1963. The erstwhile objective of “nation-building” has largely been betrayed. This chapter sets out to probe, explore, and analyze this betrayal of anticolonial nationalism in Kenya, and evaluate its consequences for the future of the country. The chapter proceeds by focusing on the paradoxes inherent in the relationship between two political families—the Odingas and the Kenyattas—whose political dynamics have, to a large extent, defined what ought to have been and what actually is in the Kenyan body politic.

Kenyatta and Odinga: The Making of Two Nationalist Leaders

The Kenyattas and the Odingas are formidable political families that have had and continue to have a significant imprint on the politics of Kenya. Within the politics of decolonization, the patriarchs of these two families, Jomo Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga respectively, found common ground in their anticolonial nationalism within the ambit of the Kenya African National Union (KANU). The partnership between the two saw Kenyatta become the first president of independent Kenya and Oginga Odinga the first vice president. Yet this partnership did not last long on account of ideological differences between the two and their opposite visions of what independence ought to have signified. The two leaders fell out with each other within the first two years of Kenya's independence in a manner whose implications were profound for the new republic.