Crimes of Capitalism in Kenya

This is the first number in the Research and
Documentation (R&D) series from Vita Books and Ukombozi Library. It
covers a shameful period of Kenya’s past under the government of
President Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002) who ruled Kenya with an iron fist
and conducted his reign of terror on those opposed to his dictatorship.
He stifled violently people’s desire for change, equality and justice.
He sought to drown the call of the independence movement for land and
freedom in blood, torture and loot of national resources.

The
wounds inflicted on people cannot even begin to be healed unless the
full extent of the problem is first brought out in the public domain.
But the same comprador regime that instigated these horrors then went on
to suppress information about its terrorist rule over unarmed workers,
peasants, students, professionals and other progressive people and their
underground movements such as the December Twelve Movement and
Mwakenya. It is no surprise that young Kenyans today are unaware of the
full extent of Moi’s Reign of Terror.

Crimes of Capitalism
provides a glimpse of this period through contemporary press cuttings.
It also highlights the fact that the crimes of Kenya’s first two
Presidents should be understood not only as evil actions of the
individuals concerned. The ruling class and their party, KANU, that they
nurtured became the agents of imperialism which sought to impose
capitalism on the country and to suppress the growing calls for
socialism.

The material from which these cuttings are taken are
available in Nairobi’s Ukombozi Library, ‘Kenya’s First Socialist
Library’ as Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung describes it. Vita Books and the
Ukombozi Library will continue to use such documents to highlight other
hidden aspects of Kenya’s history in future issues of the Research and
Documentation Series.