The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (62 page)

Africa). Africans in the other two territories saw this as a bid by

the Kenyan settlers for control of the entire East African highlands.

“Natives” had no voice in high imperial policy, but the Ugandans

and Tanganyikans were fortunate that the plan fl oundered with the

depression.

Realistically, the imperial special interests were in no position to

sustain an East African Federation. Large plantations on the coast

brought the Kenyan government some revenue through export tariffs, but the neomercantilist nature of the new imperialism effectively

ruled out industrial development in the colony. The Colonial Offi ce

blocked a bid by Asian entrepreneurs to build a textile mill, to ensure

it did not compete with metropolitan weavers, and most manufac-318 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

turing enterprises involved the production of soap, fl our, fats, jam,

tobacco, and beer for local consumption. The Magadi Soda Ash Company, which was Kenya’s only viable export industry, needed a subsidized railway branch line simply to stay in business. In many years

the metropolitan Treasury had to help balance the colony’s budget,

which demonstrated that the British government had made a particularly poor investment in choosing the settlers to drive Kenya’s

economic development. Most were inept farmers who spent most of

their income on creature comforts instead of improving production.

They depended on short-term loans to fi nance future plantings but

had diffi culty establishing good credit because speculation drove the

value of their land beyond its actual capacity.

High production costs meant that the settlers needed protective

tariffs, reduced railway rates, and extremely cheap labor to remain

competitive. Securing abundant supplies of African labor was the

most viable of the three strategies, for the Congo Basin Treaty limited

the Kenyan government’s ability to restrict trade. Furthermore, the

Uganda government refused to pay higher freight costs on imports

to subsidize Kenyan exports. The settlers therefore returned to the

prewar strategy of trying to turn their political infl uence to extractive ends. In addition to demanding government assistance in labor

recruiting, they also wanted higher African taxes, restrictive employment laws, and permission to forcibly discipline their workers.

While the Kenyan imperial authorities were sympathetic, coerced

labor in any form was politically indefensible in interwar Britain.

In 1919, settler leaders convinced Governor Sir Edward Northey to

issue a series of circular orders directing district offi cers to “exercise

every possible lawful infl uence” in pushing African men, women, and

even children to “come out into the labour fi eld.” The fi rst and most

controversial circular warned that the government would have to

resort to “special methods” if particular communities did not produce

suffi cient numbers of workers. Intense metropolitan criticism forced

Northey to issue a follow-up order clarifying that he did not expect

government offi cials to recruit labor directly for private employers.

Instead he increased the African poll tax from ten shillings to sixteen and pointed out that while “no actual force can be employed to

compel a man to go out to work, he can, however, be made to pay his

tax.” The unspoken assumption in this statement was that defaulters

would work for the settlers. Finally, the governor took the particularly

British

Kenya 319

controversial step of making wage labor a greater priority than work

on African peasant farms, which raised the risk of famine in many

communities.39 Northey, who, as a native-born South African, was

particularly sympathetic to settler interests, was uncompromising in

removing district offi cers who balked at implementing the circulars.

The Conservative imperial enthusiast Leopold Amery defended

Northey’s actions in Parliament by claiming that they would save

East Africans from dying out like the Amerindians and Polynesians.

This argument carried little weight with the humanitarian lobby.

While this coalition of missionaries, antislavery activists, liberal civil

servants, and socialists generally agreed with Northey that Africans

should work, they absolutely rejected the concept of forced labor.

Frank Weston, the Anglican bishop of Zanzibar, was one of the most

uncompromising critics, and his scathing attack on the Kenyan labor

policies entitled
The Serfs of Great Britain
helped push the Colonial

Offi ce to order Northey to issue a new circular spelling out greater

protections for African laborers.

The Kenyan authorities had better luck defending the Registration

of Natives Ordinance, which required all African men and boys over

the age of fi fteen to carry a special labor passport, known as a
kipande

(piece, slip) in Swahili, that recorded their fi ngerprints, tribal origins,

biographical data, and employment record. Carried in a metal case

worn around the neck, the
kipande
was one of the great innovations

in the history of empire. For once, an imperial power had a viable way

to keep track of rural people, and the
kipande
made it much harder

for individuals to resist or evade oppressive policies by blending into

a nameless subject majority. Men traveling outside their reserves

had to supply it to any policeman or district offi cer on demand, and

the chief registrar of natives kept a duplicate copy of each certifi cate,

thereby making it possible to identify a man by his fi ngerprints.

Most signifi cant, the system kept wages down because workers

could not fi nd a new job unless their previous employer signed off

on their
kipande
. The most abusive settlers kept their laborers in virtual bondage by refusing to do so. Men who broke their contracts

faced legal sanction, and the government made it easy for employers to prosecute them with a “Complaint of Desertion of Registered

Native” form. The Kenyan authorities issued more than one million

labor registration certifi cates by the end of the 1920s and charged

roughly ten thousand men per year with
kipande
violations. Those

320 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

who destroyed or tried to forge the certifi cates faced stiff fi nes and

three months in jail.

Africans, understandably, detested the system. They found the

fi ngerprinting demeaning and compared the metal
kipande
case and

neck strap to a dog collar. Harry Thuku, a mission-educated telephone

operator, fanned this widespread anger to organize the fi rst mass

African political resistance to imperial rule. Using popular discontent

over wage cuts, high taxes, settler land seizures, and most particularly

the
kipande
system as catalysts, he founded the East Africa Association (EAA) in 1921. The Association claimed to be nonpolitical, but

it challenged the government’s unqualifi ed support for the settlers.

Thuku audaciously held public meetings where women and girls

recounted rapes on settler farms, and he called on people to turn in

their
kipandes
en masse for delivery to the governor. The authorities found this sort of organized opposition intolerable. In 1922, the

Kenyan police arrested Thuku for subversion and forcibly broke up a

crowd that gathered to demand his release. In doing so they injured

twenty-fi ve and killed Mary Nyanjiru. By all accounts, she was of

common origins, but her death and the mass protest forced the government to reduce the poll tax from sixteen shillings to twelve and

address some of the worst labor abuses. However, the imperial regime

refused to acknowledge that it had bowed to African pressure, and

it tried to cover up the riot and Mary Nyanjiru’s death by exiling

Thuku and shutting down his association.

Banning the EAA appeared to smother the
kipande
protests, but

the Kenyan authorities did not understand that simmering tensions

in the countryside were the greatest threat to British rule. By the

1920s, many of the twenty-four separate native reserves, which covered more than forty-six thousand square miles, had become considerably overcrowded and eroded. With average population growth

rates ranging from 1 to 2 percent per year, it was only a matter of

time before they lost the capacity to support subsistence agriculture.

Conditions were most severe in the three Kikuyu districts of Nyeri,

Kiambu, and Fort Hall (Murang’a), where population densities of

roughly 280 people per square mile forced up to three-quarters of the

able-bodied men in some localities to leave home in search of work.

The strain was almost as intense in the densely populated Luo and

Luhya reserves in western Kenya, where between one-quarter and

one-half of the adult men also became labor migrants.40 Population

British

Kenya 321

pressure, land shortages, commercialized agriculture, and class formation were far more effective than the Northey circulars in forcing

poorer Africans to work.

Many of these people, however, went to Nairobi, Mombasa, and

corporate plantations instead of the white highlands. Unable to offer

decent wages, the settlers had to court laborers by giving them permission to raise their own crops and cattle on the vast unused portions of their farms. Under Kenyan law, these were supposed to be

contract workers, but by 1930 there were approximately 120,000 of

these “squatters” permanently occupying 20 percent of the land in the

highlands. Ironically, some were working land that had belonged to

their families in the preconquest era. This squatter system was cheap

but ineffi cient. Exploiting African peasant production was hardly a

mark of progressive agricultural development, and the settler farm

was more of a “feudal estate” than a capitalist enterprise.41

Seeking greater dignity and autonomy, some landless people

understandably preferred “trespassing” in the native reserves of other

tribes to squatting or working for Europeans. This illegal migration

had the added benefi t of providing an escape from chiefl y supervision

and taxation. In effect, it was a way to cease being a tribesman. For the

Kikuyu, the nearby Maasai reserve was a tempting destination. Covering almost fi fteen thousand square miles of prime agricultural land,

it had a population density of just three people per square mile. The

approximately forty thousand Maasai held title to such a vast swath

of territory by virtue of a pair of treaties with the IBEAC that were a

legacy of their participation in the conquest of the highlands.42 These

treaties barred the Kenyan government from redrawing their tribal

boundaries to relieve population pressure in the most overcrowded

regions on either side of the Rift Valley. District offi cers were legally

bound to send interlopers back to their reserves, where they had little

chance of competing with the chiefs and mission school graduates

who had already appropriated the best land.

Although they were the privileged elite of the reserves, these

chiefl y and educated intermediaries also disliked being treated like

imperial subjects and bitterly resented the settlers’ dominance of the

white highlands. In 1925, a more aggressive younger generation of

Kikuyu took control of Thuku’s East Africa Association and transformed it into the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). Although

the chiefs tended to distrust the mission-educated men of the KCA,

322 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

almost every Kikuyu shared a deep antipathy toward the reserve system. For this reason, many of the imperial regime’s most important

allies quietly backed the association’s decision to send Jomo Kenyatta

to London in 1929 to petition the British Parliament for relief from

oppressive land and labor policies.

The metropolitan authorities refused to even consider the KCA’s

appeal on the technicality that it did not come through the Kenyan

government. Nevertheless, pressure from the humanitarian lobby

forced the Colonial Offi ce to create a special commission to investigate Kenya’s ethnically based land policies. Although British offi cials

had no sympathy for the KCA, the environmental degradation of

the North American dust bowl and rapid African population growth

raised the prospect that the agricultural foundation of the tribal economies might collapse, thereby rendering the entire system of indirect

rule unsustainable. The Kenya Land Commission’s main concern was

to protect the settlers’ claim to the highlands by repairing the native

reserve system. Its report ruled that the reserves were suffi cient for

the needs of Kenya’s tribes, but it recommended an ambitious conservation and development program to increase the carrying capacity

of African land. Acknowledging the growing African land hunger, the

commissioners called only for a small revision of the tribal boundaries as well as opening some marginal parts of the forest reserves for

African settlement.

In defending the racial and ethnic division of land in the colony,

the Land Commission gave the government sanction to begin expelling surplus squatters from the highlands. While they needed some

Africans to work their land, by the 1930s the settlers were growing increasingly anxious about the size of squatter families on their