as noted earlier, there were clear British mandates in the objectives of the
colonial law in Kenya.
The colonial law in Africa supported colonial economic interests and
dismantled African traditional practices to provide what was perceived by the
Europeans as more “civilized” legal structures. Kamari Maxine Clarke defines
justice as a complicated and changing social process that has varied meaning
and interpretation; it was challenged even more because it was based on legal
pluralism.28 According to Clarke,
“Justice making, as an effect, represents domains of negotiation,
communication, collaboration, cohesion, and domination made manifest
through action...Thus, justice is mediated within the domain of politics and is
actually an outcome of struggle. This is the space of justice making - political
struggles to attain power through which to control the terms of engagement,
to mobilize action, and to resignify meaning.”29
In effect, justice is a process that is “produced”.
The varied judicial systems were incompatible in their overall meaning and
interpretation of justice. The different legal approaches can help us understand
the cultural problems and sources of judicial conflict when exploring the colonial
criminalization systems. Later we will see how the added fear, threat, and
intensity of the Mau Mau movement, specifically as it relates to the
criminalization of taking and administering the oath, created even more confusion
and problems with justice in Kenya. However, in Kenya justice is a product of the
social, cultural, and political moment. In order to understand how justice was
28 Kamari Maxine Clarke, Fictions of Justice, The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal
Pluralism in Sub-Sahara Africa, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 24.
29 Clarke, Fictions of Justice, 25.
118