Imperial Reckoning Read online

  They acquired estates of enormous size. Lord Delamere, the popular settler leader in the early days of the colony, owned the largest, receiving title to some one hundred thousand acres in 1903 and acquiring another sixty thousand acres a few years later. Other landholdings, though smaller, were nonetheless impressive in size. They were all located in the fertile and temperate highlands of central Kenya, an area which was to become the heartland of White Man’s Country. These wealthy families did not come to Kenya to work, but rather to take advantage of the British government’s offer of land, labor, and capital, an offer which the settlers interpreted rather generously. Kenya’s new aristocrats shared Lord Delamere’s ambition to create a plantocracy modeled on the American South. Like the colonial officers, they were united by their cultural and social values. Many of them were old Etonians, or from similar public-school backgrounds, and accustomed to a life not of working but of overseeing the work of those around them. And they expected all levels of the British colonial government to support them in this vision.21

  Kenya’s big men quickly established a leisurely lifestyle aspired to by all Europeans in the colony. On their estates or farms or in European neighborhoods in Nairobi, every white settler in the colony was a lord to some extent, particularly in relationship to the African population. They all had domestic servants, though the wealthier families would have dozens. Some servants would have but a single responsibility, like tending a favorite rose garden or, as in the case of Karen Blixen, carrying the lady’s favorite shawl and shotgun.22 They enjoyed game hunting and sport facilities, with the Nairobi racetrack and polo grounds being one of the most popular European social spots in town. Beyond such gentrified leisure, these privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink, and dance, followed by more of the same. In Nairobi, where some settlers lived a full-time urban, professional life, they congregated in the Muthaiga Club, also known as the Moulin Rouge of Africa. They drank champagne and pink gin for breakfast, played cards, danced through the night, and generally woke up with someone else’s spouse in the morning. At the Norfolk Hotel, better known as the House of Lords, settlers rode their horses into the Lord Delamere Bar, drank heavily, and enjoyed Japanese prostitutes from the local brothel. Outside of Nairobi part of the highlands became the notorious Happy Valley, where weekend houseguests were often required to exchange partners, cocaine and morphine were distributed at the door, and men and women compared their sexual notes when the debauchery was over. The colony’s settlers were notorious worldwide for their sexual high jinks, and the running joke in Britain became, “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?”23

  The large landholding settlers were also a political force to be reckoned with, even in the early days of the colony. Settlers influenced colonial decision making using their political ties back in London—many fathers, brothers, and uncles sat in the House of Lords—as well as because of the economic promise they represented to the colony. From the start settlers made strident demands on the British colonial government and were quite successful in gaining concessions that placed their own interests above those of the African population. They insisted upon and were granted low-interest loans, reduced freight charges, and government subsidies for their crops; they pushed for and won an extension of their land leases in the highlands—from 99 to 999 years. Most important, they gained access to the central institutions of the colonial government in Nairobi when their representatives—like Delamere and later other notables like Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck and Michael Blundell—became members of the Kenya Legislative Council. Here they had a direct role in the formulation of the colony’s laws and regulations. Once the British colonial government decided to base Kenya’s economy on the production of export commodities from the settler estates, it agreed in principle to ensuring that there would be ample land and labor to sustain settler production—land and labor which of course would come from the Africans.

  Settler self-interest was predicated on a sense of entitlement that resulted not only from the shared aristocratic pedigree of many British immigrants but also from a perception of profound racial superiority that infused every rung of the colony’s white socioeconomic ladder.24 By virtue of their skin color, whites of all classes were the master race and therefore deserving of privilege. To the settlers there was nothing noble about the African “savage.” Many believed the African to be biologically inferior, with smaller brain sizes, a limited capacity to feel pain or emotion, and even different nutritional needs, requiring only a bowl of maize meal, or posho, to maintain their health. African men had to be controlled; they were unpredictable and sexually aggressive, threatening both white women and the maintenance of their idealized chastity as well as the racial purity of the colony’s European community.25 Virulent racist ideology grew more intense over time as the so-called native was moved along the racist spectrum from stupid, inferior, lazy, and childlike to savage, barbaric, atavistic, and animal-like. This shift in characterization would correspond closely to the Africans’ increasing unwillingness to be exploited by the colonial economy, and with their desire to reclaim land they considered to be rightfully their own.

  Though all indigenous groups were affected by British colonial rule in Kenya, none experienced a transformation as intense as the Kikuyu. This was the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government’s policies of land alienation, or expropriation, and European settlement.26 The Kikuyu were agriculturalists who lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers, mostly in southern Kiambu, a highly fertile region just outside of Nairobi that would become some of the most productive European farmland in the colony. After the British military assault and natural disasters of the late nineteenth century, many Kikuyu migrated back to their ancestral territory in the highlands, only to find Europeans living on their land. To make matters worse, the Kikuyu had for centuries relied upon territorial expansion into surrounding frontiers to alleviate population pressures or to defuse internal civil struggles. In particular, young men would typically set off into the forests to colonize new land, establish homesteads, marry, and raise a family. But with the coming of colonial rule, the Kikuyu found themselves hemmed in on all sides: to the south, east, and north were settler farms, to the west were the government-controlled forest reserves of the Aberdares, and to the southeast was the expanding urban center of Nairobi.

  This loss of land was devastating to the Kikuyu. They were to have an increasingly difficult time sustaining themselves, particularly as their population began to recover from its earlier losses with the introduction of Western medicine and subsequent declining mortality. By the 1930s the land’s productivity began to deteriorate as there were simply too many Kikuyu living on it. But for the Kikuyu there was also a terrible social consequence to the British landgrab. To be a man or a woman—to move from childhood to adulthood—a Kikuyu had to have access to land. A man needed land to accumulate the resources necessary to pay bridewealth for a wife, or wives, who would in turn bear him children. Land and family entitled him to certain privileges within the Kikuyu patriarchy; without land a man would remain socially a boy. A woman needed land to grow crops to nurture and sustain her family; without it in the eyes of the Kikuyu she was not an adult. A Kikuyu could not be a Kikuyu without land.

  From the start there was a bitter emotional intensity surrounding the land issue. The Kikuyu complained angrily over the loss of their “stolen land,” and there was nothing the British colonial government could do to assure them that their remaining territory was secure. There was ample reason for Kikuyu anxiety, because the very foundation of the settler community was the alienation of African land. Settlers were determined to create their White Man’s Country, and once land had been confiscated from the local population they were singularly focused on protecting it against any possible threat of its loss. After much lobbying, the settlers extracted several guarantees from the colonial government about the racially exclusive and permanent nature of white settlem
ent in the highlands, now calling it the White Highlands. Seeking to expand their numbers and increase the value of their land, they also successfully pushed for continued immigration into the colony. After World War I the empire became a logical place to resettle demobilized British soldiers. Lieutenant generals, major generals, brigadiers, colonels, majors, captains, and their subordinates all came to Kenya. By the early 1920s over five hundred of these former officers and soldiers, together with their families, were living in the colony, some on newly expropriated African land.27

  The promise of White Man’s Country was only partly fulfilled by the colonial government’s offer of free, or relatively free, land to the settlers. There was also the issue of labor, or more precisely cheap labor. It seems not to have mattered whether settlers were relatively well-capitalized aristocrats, poor whites from South Africa, or former British soldiers; among all classes agricultural productivity was pathetically low, at least until the economic boom brought on by World War II. Curiously, settlement policy in Kenya seemed to be focused more on numbers of immigrants than on potential economic production.28 Many British immigrants had little or no farming experience before arriving in the colony, and many of those coming from South Africa left because they could not make ends meet there, despite the incredible economic favoritism given to the white population over the African majority. In Kenya there was considerable tension between inadequate settler production on the one hand and, on the other, the settlers’ desire to make the colony into a white man’s enclave. It was not the inherent strength of their agricultural productivity that entitled the settlers to racial privilege and political power, but rather a highly interventionist colonial government that did everything it could to promote the settlers’ economic success and, by extension, the financial viability of the colony.

  It grew increasingly clear that the local African population was going to be sacrificed on behalf of settler agricultural subsidies and productivity. Labor was the one factor in the economic equation that the settlers and the colonial government could jointly manipulate, and they did so ruthlessly. Rather than offering wage incentives, the European employers relied upon coercion by the colonial government to recruit African labor, which was, more often than not, drawn from the Kikuyu population then living on the edges of the White Highlands. The government’s guarantee of cheap and bountiful Kikuyu labor was based on a complex set of laws aimed at controlling nearly every aspect of Kikuyu life. Over time, four regulations, together, pushed the Kikuyu off their remaining land and into the exploitive wage economy.

  First, the colonial government established African reserves, which were defined rural areas, eventually with official boundaries, much like the homelands in South Africa or the Native American reserves in the United States, where each African ethnic group in the colony was expected to live separately. The Kikuyu had their own reserves in the Central Province districts of Kiambu, Fort Hall, and Nyeri, the Maasai resided mostly in the colony’s Southern Province, the Luo lived in Nyanza Province, and so forth. This practice of divide and rule was also a cornerstone of the colonial government’s labor policy. With insufficient land in their reserves many Africans had little choice but to migrate to the European farms in search of work, and survival.29

  But confining the Africans was not enough to force them all into the wage economy. As an additional tactic of control, the British colonial government taxed them. The second colonial regulation called for a hut tax and poll tax, together amounting to nearly twenty-five shillings, the equivalent of almost two months of African wages at the going local rate. In response, thousands of Kikuyu began to migrate in search of work. It was at this point that colonial officials decided to introduce the third regulation, this one to control the movement of the African workers and to keep track of their employment histories. By 1920 all African men leaving their reserves were required by law to carry a pass, or kipande, that recorded a person’s name, fingerprint, ethnic group, past employment history, and current employer’s signature. The Kikuyu put the pass in a small metal container, the size of a cigarette box, and wore it around their necks. They often called it a mbugi, or goat’s bell, because, as one old man recalled to me, “I was no longer a shepherd, but one of the flock, going to work on the white man’s farm with my mbugi around my neck.”30 The kipande became one of the most detested symbols of British colonial power, though the Africans had little recourse but to carry their identity cards at all times; failure to produce it on demand brought a hefty fine, imprisonment, or both.

  From the start the Africans, who were deeply resourceful and in fact often much more accomplished agricultural producers than the settlers, did everything they could to negotiate their way through the new colonial economy, and to avoid being captured in the coercive and exploitative labor contracts on the settler estates. In Central Province Kikuyu who had enough land adapted to the new colonial economy by increasing their own maize production and selling their surpluses in the expanding internal market. Some Kikuyu were so efficient that they were able continually to undercut the price of settler-grown maize. In the early days, most Europeans in the colony understood that African peasant production was expanding. Quick to appreciate the significance of this threat, and to do everything in their power to stymie it, the settlers again put pressure on the colonial government to intervene. Though colonial officials harbored doubts about settler productivity, the commitment to agricultural production by European settlers had been made, and with it the entrenchment of a vocal, and formidable, white minority. There was no turning back. As its fourth strategy for forcing Africans into the wage economy, the colonial government sought to limit African agricultural production for the marketplace. Africans were forbidden to grow the most profitable cash crops such as tea, coffee, and sisal though they were able to produce and sell maize freely until marketing boards were established after the Second World War that required Africans to sell their grain at a set price. These marketing boards would throw up roadblocks against African agriculture, further forcing the indigenous population to turn to wage labor for income.31

  These four measures were clearly designed to subordinate African peasant agriculture to that of the settlers, but this subordination did not happen overnight, nor did it always take the form preferred by the colonial government and the settler population. There was another, more feudal labor relationship that took hold in the White Highlands precisely because the settlers could not capitalize effectively on their embarrassment of land. Africans relentlessly and often subtly sought to negotiate their way through and outwit the very system that afforded the settlers more land than they possibly could farm. A form of sharecropping called squatting evolved on cash-strapped European farms throughout the colony and would quickly provide the Kikuyu with access to alternative arable land outside of their reserves. Shortly after the settlers’ arrival, thousands of Kikuyu left for the White Highlands with their families and livestock and settled on European farms, where, in return for laboring for the European owner for about a third of the year, they could cultivate a plot of land, graze their cattle and goats, and raise their children. These Kikuyu were not wage laborers who migrated back and forth between the reserves and the White Highlands; instead they left the reserves for good and set off to forge new lives and communities on the European farms. Squatters relieved the population pressures in the Kikuyu reserves, at least temporarily, and they also kept alive the myth that the frontier of migration was not entirely closed off, but rather took on a new form with settler colonialism. There was a common fear among the settlers that Kikuyu squatters, particularly those living alongside the poorest settlers, would start to demand tenant rights. Still, there was no way of ending the squatting phenomenon, because without these so-called Kaffir farmers the settler economy would likely have collapsed prior to the Second World War.32

  The squatters and the settlers remained, however, in an unequal economic and political relationship, with Europeans relying on the support of the British colonial g
overnment to protect their interests against those of the tenant farmers. Like the settlers, the squatters believed themselves to be pioneers with long-term potential claims, but in reality their years as residents on European-owned land were numbered, and those that remained would increasingly become more punitive and less profitable. The squatters enjoyed a golden age of relative freedom and thriving productivity until the end of World War I. But in 1918 the British colonial government introduced the first of several Resident Native Labourers Ordinances. Together, these ordinances would drastically reduce squatter wealth by limiting the amount of cattle they could own and the size of their tenant farms on European land, while increasing the number of days Africans were required to work for their settler landlords. As the settlers gradually became more efficient agricultural producers, the squatters simultaneously became more and more an economic anachronism. Moreover, the growth of independent squatter communities, where the Africans collectively organized self-help organizations and elders’ councils, were perceived as a threat to political stability in the White Highlands. The settlers doggedly pushed for further legislation that would control the squatters, to the point of forcing all of them into the role of virtual wage laborers. For their part, the Kikuyu living on European farms fought back by illegally cultivating crops and grazing their cattle, organizing go-slows, sabotaging settler machinery and livestock, and striking outright. While such strikes were handily put down, squatters occasionally managed to wrest small concessions from their European farmer landlords.33