This Chapter 2 argues that the constitutional founding of the Kenyan and African State, and incipient, extent, and future statehood or nationhood, based on three (3) variables. First, constitutional or political negotiations that involved the quest for liberty, the struggle for independence, the transfer of power in Kenya and Africa. Second, militancy, including conquest, expeditions, massacres, assassinations, and even post-independence violence in Kenya and Africa. Third, an appropriate combination of constitutional negotiation and militancy or violence at independence and in the post-independence period. The reconstruction of the Kenyan and African state and nationhood have followed a similar trajectory in constitutional sociology, political economy and cultural politics.
I adopt an Afro-Kenyanist theory, methodology and praxis on statehood as well as the three (3) main components of nationhood and nation building. First, ethnic nationalism including positive or moral ethnicity and negative tribalism. Second, civic or juridical nationalism. Third, progressive territorial nationalism vis-à-vis retrogressive nationalism in transnational relations, law and political economy.
All these problematize and contextualize ethnicity as real, invented and imagined. I thus argue that Kenya African nationalism has three interrelated characteristics. First, real. Second, imagined. And third, invented. We shall address these three concepts in the subsequent section.
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