Abstract
Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”