Colin Leys’ intellectual life has long been shaped by Africa—its politics, its contradictions, and its enduring entanglements with global capitalism. From his work at the University of Nairobi to his searing critiques of neo—colonialism, his writing has mapped the structural dimensions of post—independence power. But in this latest work, Norman Leys and settler colonialism in Kenya, he turns to something more intimate: the life of a half—uncle, Norman Leys—a colonial doctor turned anti—racist reformer. In this conversation, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato interviews Colin Leys to explore the threads that connect a family story to empire’s long shadow, and ask what this moment of return reveals—not only about Kenya’s past, but about the contested present in which this book now arrives.
Caroline Wanjiku Kihato (CWK): Early in the book , and again later, you say that unlike most historians, your interest isn’t in what impact Norman had on events, but in how the events he lived through shaped him. That feels like a subtle but significant shift. Why did you choose that orientation? Was it simply a biographical preference, or did it emerge from a deeper, perhaps more personal, curiosity about who Norman was becoming as he lived inside empire?
Colin Leys (CL): To answer that I should explain how the book came to be written. I had just finished working on a very different topic when the Covid pandemic struck and we were locked down. A friend suggested I should use the time to write a memoir, and in doing that I came to see how influential on my life Norman Leys’ classic book Kenya had been. I had read it when I was a student and it led me to do my first field research in another settler colony, Zimbabwe. But at the time I hadn’t seen how advanced Norman Leys’ thinking was, or how unusual it was for anyone to have arrived at his views at that time, and to be willing to pay the cost.
I found myself trying to see imperialism through his eyes, and the more I learned the more I was impressed by the intellectual independence, and the strength of character, that it required to take the stance he did. And then the Gaza conflict erupted, and settler colonialism, which Leys had been among the first to analyse, became a defining issue of our own time. So writing his biography was driven partly by a wish to assert his place in history, but also by a wish to shed some light on what it means to live in an empire—as we still do, just not in the one we used to run—and the choices it forces us to make.
CWK: There’s a powerful tension in the book between the structural violence of empire and your portrait of Norman as someone committed to a kind of radical ethical clarity, rooted not in religiosity, but in the teachings of Jesus. You write that his experiences in Africa refined and toughened this conviction. Was this part of your aim in writing the book, to retrieve a sense of moral struggle or humanity that empire itself seemed to extinguish?
CL: Yes, and to retrieve it in the present. Norman Leys was dismayed by the way ‘pro-native’ liberals in Britain failed to condemn what he correctly called ‘modern slavery’ in Kenya; he called their behaviour ‘Phariseeism’. I am dismayed by the same thing today. I was shocked by the failure of the liberal establishment in Britain to denounce the judicial persecution of Julian Assange for exposing the wrongdoing of the American empire. No eminent literary figure stepped forward to defend Assange in the way Zola defended Dreyfus. Leys’ example in exposing the wrongs done to the Africans of Kenya, regardless of the cost to himself, challenges those of us, myself included, who don’t yet do all we can to oppose the wrongs committed by contemporary imperialism.
CWK: You’ve spent decades writing from a rigorous political economy framework—dissecting systems, elites, dependencies. But in this book, you turn toward something more personal: the life of Norman Leys, your half-uncle and inspiration. Yet you approach it with remarkable academic restraint. How did you navigate the tension between writing as a scholar and writing as someone embedded in this lineage?
CL: I suppose I am embedded in his lineage, though rather indirectly. But Norman Leys was a half-uncle, and a much more distant relative than the label ‘uncle’ suggests. Although I never knew him I did have some feelings of filial obligation, and some pride. But I was anxious to write a book that would find a respected niche on the shelves of university libraries. I also wanted it to be engaging. I was more than happy when a friend read the draft and said it read like a novel.
CWK: Did you ever feel the pull to speak more personally, or was the academic distance a way of holding the complexity of family, politics, and history without collapsing them?
CL: I have felt that pull, but I didn’t want to put myself in the picture. I have allowed myself a few comments, but I wanted readers to feel the pressure of events on Norman Leys, and to draw their own conclusions.
CWK: This biography lands at a time when the modern foundations of empire, development, and racial capitalism are being deeply questioned. Did your own intellectual trajectory offer you any new lens on Norman’s life, particularly in light of contemporary critiques from decolonial thinkers?
CL: There are two questions here. When I first went to Africa in 1955 the British Empire was still intact. India was out of it, but African nationalism had not yet become irresistible. When I went next, in 1960, independence was imminent, even in Kenya. Up to that point you could say I was ‘part of the Empire’ in the same way Norman Leys had been, though I saw myself as assisting in the process of ending it. It was only in the 1970s that neocolonialism became obvious and with it, the wider significance of imperialism. From that standpoint I now look back and think how remarkable it is that Norman Leys, who was a medical doctor, not a social scientist, had developed by 1924 an analysis of the Kenyan social formation that anticipated much of underdevelopment theory half a century later.
As for contemporary critiques by decolonial thinkers, my main take—away from the life of Norman Leys—is to ask whether decolonial thinking may be focussed too much on the colonial past and too little on our colonial present. For example, I strongly support the demand voiced by people like Dalia Gebrial for the history of imperialism to be part of all public education, and to be taught from the standpoint of the ruled, not the rulers. But such a history needs to include our status within the American empire today. It was not some anti-imperialist critic but a master strategist of the American empire, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote that the future role of smaller developed countries such as the UK would be that of ‘vassals’ of the USA. Today Britain, no less than Kenya, is a vassal of the U.S., though higher up the vassal hierarchy. Decolonial thinking needs to embrace this reality too.
CWK: Norman was a white man working inside the colonial system, trying to live by strong ethical values. That’s a complicated story, especially for people today who are deeply critical of empire and its afterlives. What do you hope readers take from that complexity?
A portrait of Norman Leys in England copyright Colin Leys
CL: You are right, it’s one of the questions that keeps coming up in discussion with people much younger than myself, although it was already there in the work of historians of Kenya in the 1970s. By then all right, thinking people were embarrassed by the European record in Africa, and felt critical of the very existence of the empires.
But Leys did not. He saw that the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in Europe meant its inevitable penetration throughout Africa, and he saw the carving up of the continent among the main European powers as equally inevitable. He also thought that imperial rule was better than the mayhem that uncontrolled commercial capitalist competition would have entailed. For him, the only practical question was whether imperial power was exercised in the interest of Africans. He opposed it when it was not.
Similar but also different difficulties of analysis and ethics face us today. The number of great powers has declined to three, and capital has become more and more tightly integrated into great power policymaking. We can’t pretend that today’s empires are a product of the hidden hand of the market, or limit our ethical concerns to what can be done inside the one we find ourselves living in. The U.S. empire has become as dangerous and intolerable to the rest of the world as the European empires were to Africans. We need to take our share of responsibility for what it does.
CWK: This is a deeply personal book, but it also enters a charged historical and political archive. In today’s climate—where conversations about colonialism, race, and knowledge are often urgent and unsettled—what do you see as the risks or limits of telling Norman’s story in this way? What responsibilities do you feel, if any, when writing about someone embedded in empire from a position of personal connection?
CL: I feel responsible for being as honest and objective as I can. Luckily Norman Leys was honest to a fault, so I didn’t feel the need to paper anything over. He accepted the official limits on what a colonial medical officer could say or do, obeying what he called ‘the mechanical part of my brain’. But he firmly rejected any wider interpretation of such limits, especially not one of ‘loyalty’—i.e. to the Empire.
For example, he thought MPs in Britain had a right to know what was common knowledge in Kenya, and acted on this by telling them things that the government in Nairobi wasn’t reporting, knowing it would probably lead to his dismissal, which it did. His loyalty was to his principles. I now feel a greater obligation to try to live by his rules. I think we should always ask whose interests are served by the limits polite society sets on what we can say and do. I will consider the book a success if a few other people share this feeling after reading it.
CWK: Looking back across your body of work, how did this book move through you differently? Did anything unexpected surface in the process of writing about Norman—about history, about legacy, or about your own relationship to the long arc of empire?
CL: Yes: my research gave me a huge new respect for historians, for their commitment to evidence and their handling of complexity, and for their clean and sometimes even elegant prose. And one unexpected thing did surface while I was working on the book. I came across a letter from a distant relative that had been sitting in a file unread, awaiting attention. It informed me that my great-great-grandfather had owned 120 enslaved people in Barbados.
When slavery was abolished he was paid the equivalent of £2.5 million of today’s money in compensation. He soon lost the money through bad investments, but not before getting a son educated in England. This son became a senior administrator in Barbados and in turn got his daughters educated in England. One of these married my grandfather. Money was short, so she educated her own two daughters at home, but was able to do it to a level that got them into university. Her sons did get a school education, but having an unusually well-educated mother certainly helped my father to a career, and that helped me.
Large numbers of people in England have benefitted indirectly from slavery in this sort of way, but the information was all the same sobering. I was already well aware of how lucky I had been to see the British Empire before its collapse, and to witness its dissolution in Africa, from the privileged position of an outsider based in the imperial core. But the debt this entails has now been reinforced by an additional debt, however remote and unwished for, to generations of Africans enslaved on a sugar estate in Barbados.
Dr. Caroline Wanjiku Kihato is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford Department of International Development and a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her work focuses on urbanism, migration, gender, informality, and marginalized populations’ access to urban markets and livelihoods. She is the author of Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Life in an in-between City and co-editor of Urban Diversity: Space, Culture and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide. She is co-creator of Atlas of Uncertainty, a book and exhibition project that reimagines mobility in African cities through essays, data visualisations, and artworks from Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg.
Colin Leys was a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and then became Principal of Kivukoni College, Dar es Salaam. He subsequently taught at the universities of Makerere, Sussex, Nairobi, Sheffield and Queen’s University in Canada. He was also for three years a fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. For most of his career he worked on development in Africa. Since the late 1990s his work has focussed mainly on the political economy of Britain. His books include European Politics in Southern Rhodesia (1959); Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975); Namibia’s liberation struggle (with John S Saul and others, 1995); The rise and fall of development theory (1996); Market driven politics: neoliberal democracy and the public interest (2001).
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