By Joe Gill
East Africa was where the war on terror began, with the al-Qaeda bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi and Dar as Salam on August 7, 1998 that killed more than 200 people.
Despite this, the impact of America and Britain’s decades-long campaign of ” fighting terrorism” in Africa is often overlooked.
Samar al-Bulushi, assistant professor of anthropology at University of California Irvin, undertakes an intimate exploration into the way the war on terror led to the targeting and profiling of Kenya’s Muslim and Somali minorities, following the US-backed invasion of Kenya’s northern neighbour in 2007.
Through the lens of the individuals and families along Kenya’s coast in cities like Mombassa, whom she becomes friends with in her research, she examines the way Kenya’s ruling elite became “complicit in the normalisation of militarism and endless war”.
Kenya’s political leaders sought to brand Kenya as a reliable African ally to the US and UK counter-terrorism strategies in east Africa, with millions of dollars of security aid and intelligence infrastructure pouring into the country, turning it into a test lab for methods of social control among “suspect” populations.
“How am I supposed to think of the UK and US governments when they fund and train a killer squad that kidnaps and tortures people in Mombassa,” a young Muslim man tells the author.
His question was a response to a wave of disappearances and deadly raids by a US-UK funded and trained counter-terror unit that targeted communities in the wake of an al-Shabab attack on Nairobi’s upscale Westgate mall in 2013.
The author shows how the militarised response to al-Shabab attacks has its roots in British colonial policies deployed to crush the Land and Freedom (Mau Mau) movement in the 1950s, which the new rulers of independent Kenya integrated into their view of minority populations.
A secretive Kenyan Rapid Response Team, trained by the CIA, and partnering with the UK’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad, was the primary force in the raids, summary executions and enforced disappearances that hit these areas.
Kenya also signed an agreement in 2014 with an Israeli firm to develop a biodata system for national security cards.
The author critiques the human rights organisations that have come to dominate discourse over state activities, replacing the radical and anti-imperial culture of resistance of earlier periods.
Given that most of these organisations are funded by the same powers that have securitised policing and counter-terror operations in Kenya, their presence has depoliticised Kenya’s civil opposition to the war on terror.
The “reward” for Kenya’s loyalty to empire over the years was western aid: this was linked to its role in fighting al-Shabab in Kenya and Somalia, and also providing international forces for the policing of Haiti following the breakdown of order in the Caribbean nation.
In both the cases of Somalia and Haiti, it was the decades-long interventions, and economic strangulation that brought about the rise of armed groups who filled the vacuum created by the collapse of government and economy.
The US war on terror brought Kenya into what was called the “grey zone” between war and peace in its global imperial strategy, the author explains.
In understanding how Kenyans have responded to this hostile environment, Bulushi humanises its subjects and gives them agency that is too often denied in western framing of African experience, in a similar way in which Arab and Palestinian lives are problematised as threats to Western security.
She deploys a rich plethora of theoretical sources and concepts, some of which are of limited interest to non academic readers, and at times inhibit the reader’s progress. Yet overall this is an important work of original research and thinking about empire and the role of local client states in Africa in upholding this global militarised order.
The author’s fieldwork in 2014 to 2015 took place at the end of the Obama era, when US policy was dressed in the language of human rights and democracy. That era now feels like ancient history, with Donald Trump and the genocide in Gaza having stripped away the illusion that the empire has evolved from its core principles of brute violence and resource plunder.
With tectonic shifts taking place in Africa, from the Sudan war to the new Sahel alliance rejecting western control of resources, a new chapter is being written in the continent’s role in imperial war fighting.
War Making as World Making : Kenya, the United States and the War on Terror by Samar al Bulushi, Stanford University Press 2025
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