This is from Jina Moore (who is doing a great job as East Africa bureau chief).

Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the father of Raila Odinga, negotiated independence with the British. The colonial rulers wanted Mr. Odinga to lead the new Kenya, but Mr. Odinga had other ideas: He demanded Mr. Kenyatta’s freedom — and his appointment as Kenya’s first head of state.

“Kenyatta would not have been released, and he wouldn’t have been made prime minister, if it hadn’t been for Odinga’s backing,” said Daniel Branch, a professor of history at the University of Warwick and an expert on post-colonial Kenyan politics. “The two men always admired each other.”

Willy Mutunga, who was chief justice of the Supreme Court from 2011 to 2016, believes Mr. Odinga was motivated by more than mere admiration. “I think he genuinely believed that the country was going to be better off with somebody who had become a legend,” he said.

And so, in 1964, when Kenya became a republic, Jomo Kenyatta became its president, and Jaramogi Odinga vice-president.

The piece is worth reading. I liked the bits about the Odinga/Kenyatta conflict over land redistribution.

It would be interesting to think of the counterfactual: What if Odinga/Kaggia had won over Kenyatta/Mboya and redistributed all the land? What kind of Kenya would have emerged? Would it have been more stable and prosperous than present day Kenya? Was this a feasible option given the preferences of Whitehall? What would have been the political and human costs?

My (positivist) take is that most people under-estimate the important role that the “willing buyer willing seller” mantra played in facilitating elite-level buy-in into the Kenya Project (state-building and elite-level stability). It’s not just Kenyatta and his co-ethnics that got land. Lots of elites from other communities in the districts got land, too, and a chance to earn rents. For example, as part of his coup-proofing strategy, Kenyatta bought off the officer class in the armed forces (mostly composed of non-co-ethnics) with land. Kenyatta’s cabinets reflected this political economy reality, too. All the major districts had a representative.