Worker, businessman, entrepreneur?: Kenya's shifting labouring subject

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as a salve for the political problem of jobless growth and shrinking state coffers. But, its contemporary position at the frontiers of African capitalism is premised on nearly a century of attention on the African ‘economic man’, figured and reconfigured through efforts of governments and international development institutions. This paper traces a genealogy of this labouring subject in Kenya, describing the ideological, discursive and material practices undertaken to mould African workers into productive economic agents. Across colonial and post-colonial periods, and within different employment contexts, the purported African habitus has been construed as an obstacle to progress, one that can be surmounted through the acquisition of enterprising qualities and entrepreneurial dispositions. Steeped in an ideal of selfhood as individualistic, industrious and future-oriented, the productive economic man has come to represent a set of ideas about the future of the nation, and is deeply entwined with moral valuations of Kenya's citizenry and with idioms of development and economic growth. The paper details how the productive and enterprising subject is continually invoked as a response to shifting economic and political dynamics, and invested with a perennial capacity to reinvigorate the nation.

L’entreprenariat est de plus en plus promus comme un baume pour le problème politique de la croissance sans emploi et la décroissance des caisses d’Etat. Mais sa position contemporaine à la frontière du capitalisme africain s’appuie sur presque un siècle d’attention pour ‘l’homme économique’ africain, présenté et représenté à travers les efforts de gouvernements et d’institutions de développement international. Cet article trace une généalogie de ce thème de la classe ouvrière au Kenya, et y décrit les pratiques idéologiques, discursives et matérielles entreprises pour modeler les travailleurs africains et en faire des agents économiques productifs. Sur l’ensemble de différentes époques coloniales et post coloniales, et au sein de différents contextes d’emploi, il a été estimé que le prétendu habitus africain entrave le progrès, obstacle qui peut être surmonté par l’acquisition de qualités d’entreprise et de dispositions entrepreneuriales. Empreint d’un idéal d’individualité -individualiste, industrieux et orienté vers le futur, l’homme économique productif en est venu à représenter un ensemble d’idées sur le future de la nation, profondément entrelacé avec des estimations morales de citoyenneté du Kenya et avec des locutions touchant au développement et à la croissance économique. L’article précise comment la question de la productivité et de l’entreprise est constamment invoquée comme réponse à la mutation des dynamiques économiques et politiques, et investie d’une capacité pour revigorer la nation de façon pérenne.

Keywords:

• labour
• colonialism
• development
• economic man
• entrepreneur
• Kenya

Mots clés:

• Kenya and travail
• colonialisme
• développement
• homme économique
• entrepreneur
• Kenya

Acknowledgments

We thank Karin Eli and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Catherine Dolan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3939-6607

Notes

1 ‘Entrepreneurship’ is an ambiguous concept characterized by considerable discursive flexibility in the social science and management literature. Its elasticity allows it to accommodate a range of actors and models of economic action (wage labour, petty trade, small and medium-size enterprises, door-to-door selling, tech innovators etc.) across time and space.

2 The trope of economic man (Homo economicus) can be (arguably) traced to John Stuart Mill (1967), whose turn to the neoclassical paradigm in the late 19th century replaced the Marxist view of economic value as a product of commodity production with a focus on the “the subjective calculations of individuals seeking to maximize their own utility” (Hahn and Hart 2011, 37). Within economics, the concept has since come to represent a universal subject whose actions are premised on economic rationality, calculation and self-interest. In contrast, Foucault anchored homo oeconomicus in the transition from classical liberalism to the neo-liberal form. Whereas the former – the 18th century homo oeconomicus – was represented as “one of the two partners in the process of exchange”, the latter is an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Foucault 2008, 226).

3 This paper is based on archival research conducted at the UK Public Records Office and the Kenya National Archives, and a range of secondary sources. Ethnographic research conducted on youth entrepreneurship in Kenya (2012–2014) informed much of the discussion and analysis of millennial entrepreneurs.

4 Bourdieu (1990) defines habitus as socially learned dispositions, skills and ways of acting: a set of rules by which we interpret the social world from our particular position within it and that predispose us towards certain ways of behaving, thinking and acting.

5 This paper is concerned with how a discursive regime centred on the construction of the productive and enterprising ‘economic man’ has operated and been reproduced in Kenya, through engagement with myriad institutions and actors, and across time. It does not address the impact of this discourse on social reality. Though Kenyans have expressed agency in the face of discourses and practices thus entailed, this paper centres on the specific modalities through which “economic man” is conjured and the labourers it interpellates rather than how the discourse is interpreted or experienced.

6 Throughout the colonial and early post-independence periods, economic development policies were focused largely on the African man. Women's development, through education and craft production, was couched in terms of their reproductive role as mothers and wives (Hood 1997).

7 Though the model of the productive economic man remains constant across time, how this idealized figure relates to wider social and communal relations shifts according to the broader policy and political economic environment, in which social relations vacillate between being an asset and constraint on economic development.

8 The term ‘native’ is employed to reflect the nomenclature of the colonial state. The term ‘Africans’ represents indigenous inhabitants of Kenya.

9 The threat African production posed to the profitability of the settler farming community underpinned the establishment of native reserves, which aimed to force Africans ‘out of the produce market and into the labour market’ (Austin 2016, 318).

10 Foucault argued that pastoral power, originating in the Christian East, formed a foundation for forms of state-based governmentality. Exercised by a pastor over his flock, pastoral power held as its purpose the ultimate goal of individual salvation. In the ‘modern’ state, salvation is focused on this life rather than on the hereafter in the form of health, well-being, and security, etc. (Foucault 1982).

11 The conditions under which Africans, particularly youth, laboured provoked heated criticism in Britain over a decade earlier, when the Colonial Office was accused of failing to honour their international obligations (Ocobock 2017).

12 This assumption was challenged by Arthur Lewis (1955:, 103), whose work on African economic development concluded that Africans were ‘as materialistic and acquisitive as other peoples.’

13 The report of the commission, published in 1955 was dubbed ‘Adam Smith Goes to Africa’, reflecting a market-based perspective on economic development founded on privatization and individualism (Hunter 2015).

14 As part of its strategy for economic indigenization, the state issued trade licenses and works permits (Komollo 2010).

15 See Betanav (2019) for a discussion of how the concept of the informal sector was part of a wider history of ILO attempts to identify a measure of un- and under-employment in ‘least developed’ countries.

16 Schumpeter theorized that the entrepreneur drove economic growth and development through a process of innovation and creative destruction (Schumpeter 1993).

17 See Catherine Honeyman’s (2016) ethnography of the Rwandan government's mandatory entrepreneurship curriculum for secondary schools.

18 Youth aged 15–34 years form 35% of the population yet have the highest unemployment rate (67%) (Obonyo 2018).

19 Women and youth are key targets of development through entrepreneurship, seen to deliver a triple win that is ‘good for development’, ‘good for business’, and ‘good for the poor.’

20 The power of markets to quell the disaffection of youth may be over-stated. As the history of Mau Mau shows, the market could not accommodate all who wished to be landed producers, leaving the colonial state vulnerable to the agitation of disenfranchized farmers. I am grateful to the reviewer for this insight.

21 In 2008, it became the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (Hope 2012).

22 See Huang (2017), Schuster (2015) and Freeman (2007) for how female entrepreneurs negotiate the tension between neoliberal discourses of the enterprising subject and ‘local’ gender norms of docility, social obligation and reputation.