By DAVID W. THROUP
Kenya has been regarded as a successful African state by both academics and journalists. Although it came under attack in the 1970s for its neocolonialist policies and has encountered acute economic difficulties with the end of the coffee boom and the second dramatic increase in oil prices in 1979, it seems to have weathered the storm. Kenyatta's death in 1978, the maize shortages of 1980, the attempted coup of August 1982, the Njonjo affair, and the 1984 drought have all been negotiated. Its critics are less sure of themselves than in the early 1970s because leftist inclined regimes have also lurched from economic crisis to crisis. Leys (1974, 1978) and Swainson (1976, 1978, 1980) have pointed to the development of indigenous capitalism while Cowen (1972, 1974b, 1976, 1980), Kitching (1980), and the Cambridge historians have provided a more complex portrait of capitalist articulation, putting Africans back into Kenya's political economy as participants not simply victims of history.
Most recent research has focused upon the processes underlying the development of Kenya's political economy and particularly peasantization (Leys 1971; Anderson and Throup 1985; Lonsdale 1986c). This chapter relates this development to the nation's "high politics" and seeks to examine the operations of the political process at two levels:
The high politics of elite competition for control over policy and patronage at the center, and the "deep politics" of social and economic relations, which legitimize the regime through the incorporation of local clients. We shall see that the study of high politics provides insights into what has happened since independence and more particularly since Kenyatta's death in August 1978
