The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (59 page)

and depicted his holdings as a “new Australia.” But his company soon

teetered on bankruptcy because the region lacked exploitable mineral

resources and its local economies were not suited to easy extraction.

Few East Africans in the interior produced commodities for the world

market, which meant that MacKinnon could not emulate Clive’s success in India by capturing preexisting trade and tax systems. To make

matters worse, his charter required him to occupy the lake kingdom

of Buganda at considerable expense. MacKinnon’s only hope of survival was a government subsidy for a railway linking Mombasa to

the highlands, but his enterprise was doomed once the Liberal prime

minister William Gladstone refused to saddle the British taxpayers

with such an expensive enterprise.

MacKinnon was a prototypical example of a failed imperial speculator. Although he benefi ted from western advances in commerce

and technology, he had no means of extracting wealth from his new

subjects. Many of his original employees were trained geologists, but

their desperate search for economically viable mineral deposits was

fruitless. Realizing that custom duties on the caravan trade were the

region’s only signifi cant revenue source, MacKinnon essentially took

over the old Afro-Arab trade network. His caravans employed many

of the same coastal peoples who had initially chartered the highland

trade, although they no longer engaged in slave raiding and elephant

hunting.

Given these realities, it is hardly surprising that the IBEAC had

diffi culty attracting investors. Handicapped by a chronic capital

shortage, MacKinnon lacked the means to govern and develop the

highlands. He escaped total ruin when the more imperially minded

prime minister Lord Rosebery claimed the Uganda and East Africa

Protectorates in 1894 and 1895 on the assumption that the source of

the Nile had suffi cient strategic importance to warrant the expense

of direct intervention. Having bought out MacKinnon and his investors, Rosebery concluded that the Treasury would have to take fi nancial responsibility for replacing the caravan route from Mombasa to

Uganda with a railway. In investing some nine million pounds of state

funds in the project, he implicitly committed the British government

to completing the IBEAC’s conquest of East Africa. MacKinnon was

British

Kenya 303

off the hook, and most of his employees continued their careers in

government service.

The Foreign Offi ce had responsibility for the new protectorates

until the Colonial Offi ce took them over in 1906. This fi t the overall

pattern for the new British Empire. Administratively, the Crown was

the source of executive authority in every British-controlled territory, but in practice there was no uniform or integrated system of

governance. In London, a variety of government ministries instead

shared responsibility for imperial oversight. The Foreign Offi ce initially ran most of the African protectorates, but as in East Africa, it

handed off most of these territories to the Colonial Offi ce. The India

Offi ce oversaw the Raj and an extensive Indian Civil Service that was

separate and distinct from the rest of the colonial service. In practical terms, however, the Treasury exercised the greatest infl uence of

all the metropolitan ministries because the chancellors of the Exchequer stood in the way of speculators who sought to shift the costs

of empire to the metropolitan government. The British East Africa

Company was a notable exception to this rule.

Otherwise, the EAP followed the standard imperial template

by dividing the newly conquered territory into provinces, districts,

and African “locations.” The Protestant missions adopted a similar

strategy in apportioning the protectorate into spheres of infl uence

to ensure that they did not compete with each other. In terms of

governance, a commissioner, whose title later became governor, presided over a central secretariat, several specialized departments, and

the larger fi eld administration. These district offi cers supervised the

chiefs who actually ruled the African majority under the doctrine of

indirect rule.

In pretending to rule through local sovereigns, the British imported

the Indian model of imperial rule to Africa. As in the Raj, British

offi cials claimed to govern through African institutions of authority

rather than ruling directly. This made the “tribe” the basis of imperial

administration. Confused by the range of fl uid and often overlapping

ethnicities of preconquest Africa, British offi cials concluded that Africans lived in unchanging tribal societies. In the imperial imagination,

a tribe was a lower form of political and social organization that, with

proper paternal guidance, might one day evolve into a nation. Theoretically, these tribal identities were biologically ingrained, thereby

making them fi xed and corporate rather than individual. Working in

304 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the service of colonial governments, anthropologists mapped tribal

languages, social institutions, and customary laws to fashion the tools

of imperial administration for district offi cers. The African tribe was

thus a useful fi ction to update the venerable imperial strategy of coopting local institutions of authority. This indirect rule lowered the

cost of administration and allowed the new imperialists to portray

themselves as philosopher-kings in the Platonic tradition.

However, British offi cials actually knew very little about the

local institutions and customs they claimed to protect. Their ignorance created opportunities for ambitious individuals to convince

imperial offi cials and ethnographers to make them chiefs with the

vested authority to defi ne the tribal customs that became the basis

of imperial administration. As John Iliffe famously noted: “Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to

belong to,” and the origins of the Mijikenda, Kalenjin, Luhya and

other contemporary Kenyan “tribes” date from the imperial era.13

The opportunities of imperially defi ned tribalism thus encouraged

subject peoples to frame political and social debates in tribal terms. In

doing so, they played into the hands of the new imperialists, for tribal

status disqualifi ed Africans from membership in the British nationstate. Metropolitan Britons were technically “subjects” of the British

Crown, but in practice they were citizens with the full rights and

protections of British law. Tribal Africans, conversely, were “protected

persons,” with no individual rights. Instead of citizenship, the British

imperial system granted collective rights to tribes.

The complication was that while indirect rule worked relatively

well in the Raj, where sultans and maharajas had substantial authority, these Indian rulers had few counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa,

where, like the Nandi, most societies were stateless. This meant that

there were multiple sites of authority in a given community and

no single individual had the power to govern autonomously, collect

taxes, or rule on “native law.” In most territories, British offi cials

compensated by turning cooperative individuals with some measure

of infl uence into “chiefs.” But this was not the equivalent of Napoleonic
ralliement
, for few of these men were true local notables. Similarly, imperial administrators solved the problem of statelessness by

lumping related communities together into tribes under the nominal

authority of these imperial proxies. While it did not have the power

to force Africans to accept these tribal identities, the imperial regime

British

Kenya 305

created a powerful incentive for them to think tribally by refusing to

acknowledge them as individuals. Tellingly, individualistic westerneducated Africans such as the Sierra Leonean Krios had to be shunted

aside because they were too individualistic and “modern.”

It took some time for the Nandi and the rest of the highland communities to realize the consequences of these developments. Peoples

living along the route to Lake Nyanza/Victoria, which IBEAC offi cials

called the Buganda Road, saw both danger and opportunity in the

expanding British presence. Initially, there were profi ts to be made

by supplying the company with food, water, and labor. In the central

highlands, a Kikuyu trader named Kinyanjui made himself useful

by provisioning the caravans. Likewise, Mumia, a relatively minor

Luhya clan leader on the northern shore of Lake Victoria/Nyanza,

used his connections with the company to become a powerful chief.

At the same time, MacKinnon’s men also provoked highland communities when they resorted to foraging, which was essentially looting,

to the expense of bartering supplies. That there were no rich treasures

to plunder in the highlands did not mean that these latter-day conquistadors were any more virtuous than their predecessors.

Koitalel’s followers and other young warriors who had no stake

in commerce further hindered the company’s ability to turn a profi t.

Preferring raiding to trading, they made the caravans’ long trek from

Mombasa to Buganda diffi cult and dangerous. Indian work gangs

building the Uganda Railway were similarly at risk. The company

initially dealt with this threat by fortifying its food stations, but the

Foreign Offi ce, which had little patience for local interference with a

multimillion-pound construction project, adopted a more aggressive

response. It reorganized the private company army into the KAR to

bolster British authority in the new protectorates. This “native force”

reduced the cost of empire by following the chartered company practice of recruiting ex-slaves and other poorly paid marginal peoples for

service against more established communities.

Led by seconded regular army offi cers such as Richard Meinertzhagen, the KAR companies, backed by “native auxiliaries” and

Indian troops on loan from the Raj, gradually forced the peoples of

the highlands to accept imperial subjecthood. For the fi rst decade of

its existence the EAP’s main business was conquest. From 1895 to

1905, the total cost of these pacifi cation campaigns came to more than

six thousand pounds, which was one-third of the protectorate’s total

306 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

expenditures.14 The operations that led to Meinertzhagen’s execution

of Koitalel were fairly typical. Often devolving into mass cattle raids,

these small but vicious wars usually ended when protectorate troops

forced defi ant communities to surrender by seizing their livestock

and burning their huts and crops.

The resulting famines contributed to the devastatingly high mortality rates that affl icted the highlands at the end of the nineteenth

century. Racked by hunger and epidemic disease, weakened East Africans struggled to cope with the British invasion. Once again, smallpox in particular played a central role in western empire building.

Spread by the caravans along with cholera, pneumonia, and other

deadly pathogens, it ravaged communities whose relative isolation in

the highlands made them dangerously vulnerable to contagious Old

World diseases. Rinderpest, a highly virulent cattle disease originating in South Asia, and bovine pleuropneumonia (lungsickness) made

matters even worse by wiping out the herds that were both a food

source and a measure of wealth. Estimates vary, but it appears that

these human and biological disasters may have killed off as much as

30 to 50 percent of the population of the central and northern highlands.15

Although there were a few exceptions, the Nandi surrender in

1905 generally marked the end of open African resistance. With

British rule secure, the pacifi cation operations that brought glory to

Meinertzhagen and other ambitious empire builders now became an

expensive embarrassment and hindered the process of orderly extraction. As one of his fellow offi cers in the King’s African Rifl es candidly acknowledged, it was no longer “the object of the KAR to kill

potential British subjects, especially as they are expected to become

tax-payers and profi table customers.”16

As with earlier empires, the imperial regime viewed the East Africans primarily as exploitable subjects rather than consumers. Anxious to recoup the nine million pounds that metropolitan taxpayers

had invested in the Uganda Railway, protectorate authorities cast

about for paying passengers and shippers. Giving far too much credibility to the denigrating ideologies of empire building, they failed to

realize that many African farmers gladly would have produced crops

for export if given suffi cient access to global markets via the railway.

Instead, the EAP’s commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, concluded that

it would take a civilized people to develop the highlands. As the line

British

Kenya 307

neared completion in 1903, imperial offi cials considered and dismissed

Indian peasants, Afrikaner homesteaders, and even Theodor Herzl’s

Zionists before committing themselves to enticing aristocratic Britons to settle in East Africa.

Building this elite settler society took some doing, for the pioneer empire builders in East Africa were anything but noble. As in

the early stages of most imperial projects, the protectorate tended to