Britain’s recent offer of £20 million to survivors of Kenya’s Mau Mau anti-colonial revolt though a somewhat good idea reopens the vexed question of the impact of British colonial rule in Africa and other parts of the world

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.