Janet McIntosh has written a fascinating account of white Kenyan attitudes and identities in the contemporary period. The work makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of whiteness studies in Africa, and, indeed, to the study of whiteness as well as post-colonialism in general. At the same time, McIntosh highlights what is distinctive about Kenya. Africanist scholars have made powerful arguments recently based on case studies of Zimbabwe and South Africa. This emphasis on the southern subcontinent – where whites ruled longer – has perhaps distorted our view of pigment-based politics in Africa. McIntosh's Kenyan research examines whites a full two generations after decolonisation. It also places whites in a much more complicated ethnic mosaic – amid Asian and Arab influences as well as in a social landscape deeply incised by ‘tribal’ divisions among Africans. This setting allows McIntosh to ask more provocative questions than have her comparators: How, for example, does white identity intersect with nationalism and subnationalism, that is, to say with multiplex, constructed African ethnicities?

As a text, Unsettled teaches us something both in what McIntosh writes and in the way she writes it. McIntosh's chief explanatory device is what she calls ‘structural oblivion’ – a deep-rooted disregard of seemingly obvious aspects of whites’ past power and contemporary privilege. In the service of their sense of belonging, whites marginalise the past. In their ideology of the sovereign, liberal self, one belongs where one is born (although some whites also emphasise their three previous generations of Kenyan residence). Furthermore, the son does not inherit the sins of the father. The contemporary European-descended Kenyan need only bear responsibility for his or own (mal)treatment of servants and so on. Context becomes irrelevant. McIntosh's informants, in other words, don't simply forget the past; they disqualify it from consideration – in a fashion that is more offhand than lawyerly. McIntosh returns to this midpoint between reflex and intention when she describes ‘linguistic atonement’, a post-colonial regret among settlers’ grandchildren. They don't quite get the apology right: they learn KiSwahili in good faith, seeking to belong as equals in Kenya, but then they insult its native speakers by describing it as a pre-modern, romantic tongue. As a skilled linguistic anthropologist, McIntosh listens carefully and captures whites’ code-switching as it happens.

Regarding the way in which she wrote Unsettled, I am ceaselessly impressed by the book's means of ‘studying up’. Wealthy, educated informants write back, and a thin-skinned critic-insider can undercut the success of any publication. On the other side, an ethnography that appeals to elites too much can undercut one's credibility within the larger society. McIntosh threaded this needle, and she did it in a most daring fashion. Early in Unsettled, she describes whites as becoming aware of a ‘double consciousness’. Although she admits to a seeming absurdity in applying W.E.B. DuBois's interpretation of African Americans, McIntosh's admirably nuanced ethnography shows Kenyan whites negotiating their identity, belonging, and internal exile in a way analogous to any stigmatised social group.

Ultimately, Kenyan whites face a conundrum: as McIntosh relates, they have surpassed or suppressed their own past bigotry in order to belong in a Kenya where some Kenyans practice ‘tribalist’ bigotry with increasing fervour. Perhaps, Euro-Kenyans’ striving for unity sets them apart from – rather than belonging among – fellow citizens. Should whites, then, seek to be a tribe among other Kenyan tribes? McIntosh raises this question, one that no outside anthropologist can answer. Unsettled should help white Kenyans and those who care about them to consider this and other post-colonial options as thoughtfully as possible.