The Rise and Fall of the Bureaucratic Bourgeoisie: Public Sector Employees and Economic Privilege in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania

Abstract

In 1961, Frantz Fanon scathingly characterised the emerging African elite as a bourgeoisie of the civil service. Many have since described Africa's public sector employees as a rentier class that grew disproportionately large in relation to the continent's underdeveloped private sector. Is this characterisation still accurate? Using educational data and household budget surveys from Kenya and Tanzania, this article situates public sector employees within their respective educational hierarchies and national income distributions over time. It finds that since independence, the share of public sector employees at the top of these distributions has declined. The corollary to this is an increase in the share of private sector employees and business owners at the top, providing some cautious support for the notion of a rising private sector upper and middle class. © 2020 The Authors. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.