We may have forgotten colonialism but, as the newspapers show, Kenyans believe Britain is still trying to control them - by, for example, selling them sub-standard school textbooks

During my recent stint as a sub-editor on the Standard newspaper in Kenya, one of my tasks was to proofread the opinion pieces written by the paper's regular columnists.

The task required a certain self-control. No matter how much I might disagree with a view, I had not only to control the urge to press "delete", but also to help the writer get his message across by pruning unnecessary verbiage and heightening the impact of his phrases. Kenyan writers, for whom English is usually a third language, have a habit of throwing themselves headlong at idioms and missing gloriously. The best sub-editors, they say, rewrite in the style of the author. So how do you correct a mixed metaphor, disentangle a proverb, without flattening the special music of Kenyan English, reducing it to a Queen's English so formally "proper" that it could never have come from the pen of the columnist concerned?

I did my best, bouncing queries off colleagues. "When the columnist says a writer must 'stand up on his pen', what do you think he means?" (Answer: "The author must justify his opinions.") "Will our readers understand when we say a minister 'drives a big desk'?" (Yes. It means the minister has an important portfolio. Obviously.) "Is 'splitting sticks with someone' a common phrase?" (No. The writer probably means "fall out with".)

Weaving my way around these hurdles, I received a crash course in how the well-educated, middle-class, urban Kenyan male - for that is what almost all these columnists were - views the world.

What a curious vision it sometimes seemed. At its best, it was scathingly irreverent, as disrespectful towards Kenya's new government as it was towards George W Bush. At its worst, it sounded whiny, locked in the past, obsessed with the continent's victim status and blessed with the most selective of memories.

So the writers railed against foreign donors for the patronising way in which they often bypassed Kenya's government to shower aid on charities, yet these same writers conveniently forgot the state corruption that leached the nation's wealth away. One week they lambasted the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for meddling; the next, they were criticising "the Bretton Woods twins" for not getting more involved. The world over, there is nothing to beat a columnist for sheer inconsistency.

But to the outsider, especially a British outsider, few things seemed more surprising than their harping on the nefarious role played in Kenya's affairs by her former colonial master, four decades after independence. If you are a Briton under 40, the notion that members of your government still sit in Whitehall offices cynically plotting Kenya's destiny probably prompts an incredulous guffaw. Not so the Standard's columnists, to whom London has merely swapped the overt control of the white settler era for more insidious forms of manipulation.

Take education. As one Standard writer told our readers, Britain cleverly uses it as a tool to keep modern Kenya enslaved. How? By deliberately providing textbooks of such low quality that Kenyan pupils are doomed to fail. "Make no mistake, we are victims of a soulless and valueless education, stage-managed by London. Forty-one years after independence, education remains firmly under foreign control."

The writer happens to be a publisher, and one senses that commercial rivalry with UK-based educational publishers lay behind his rant. Yet the column clearly chimed with its readers' innate beliefs. Nobody wrote in to make a few obvious points: for example, that those scorned publishing houses are private companies rather than agents of government policy; or that, as a sovereign nation, Kenya is free to change her syllabus whenever she pleases.

In every African nation I have visited, I have registered this radical disconnect between how its citizens believe they are viewed by the former colonial master and how the former colonial master actually views the country concerned.

Like a love affair gone sour, the colonial experience has left behind a poignant imbalance, with one party still smarting over old injuries and humiliations, while the other has almost forgotten that there was ever any relationship at all. While the once-colonised are convinced that the masters of yesteryear still care enough to meddle and plot, those same masters suffer from political Alzheimer's.

It reminds me of something, this gap between how Africans assume western nations view their former territories and the cool, forgetful reality. Now, what is it? Oh yes, I know. With its exaggerated sense of self-importance, willingness to ignore relative positions of power and blithe readiness to see connections where few exist, it reminds me of the inflated assumptions we Brits make about our "special relationship" with the masters of today: America. As one of the Standard's columnists might put it: "We must stop making mountains out of moleskins."

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