Why local literature remains corruption's most potent fuel

In his research on the journal ‘Transition and Black Orpheus (1986)’, Peter Benson reports how the late Ali Mazrui suggested that Kenyans rally behind the Mau Mau to cement a sense of nationhood. That was daring intellectualism from a matchless political thinker. First is because Kenya’s independence came in 1963, six years after the end of the land-centred Kikuyu movement in 1957.

Second is that Mazrui did not foresee the pitfalls of such myth-making in a multi-ethnic Third World state, namely the danger of ethnic entitlement. That cancer, I think, is what much of the writing from Central Kenya has always exacerbated, and its result is corruption which currently inundates Kenya.