Kenya was always Britain’s most troublesome African colony because it was neither one thing nor the other.
It was not on the Atlantic west coast, with a wholly African population, nor in the south, where white settlers dominated. It was betwixt and between. British policy vacillated accordingly. Kenya’s historiography has been similarly stormy. Its controversies are important, not only for what they reveal about Kenya, but also for the light they shed on wider debates about imperialism and colonialism, especially settler colonialism, and the nature of African interaction with it. As to the last, historians used to frame their arguments in simple terms of resistance and collaboration. They have long conceived of a more complex dialogue. That historiographical transition informs the present argument, in which three controversies are examined in the light of colonial Kenya’s seven ages of ambiguity.
Any analysis of colonial kenya’s history excites disagreement. Its three main controversies concern large simple concepts for organizing an historical narrative. The first focuses on European imperialism generally: was it a civilizing or a brutalizing mission? The second concerns, specifi cally, the political economy of settler colonialism: did it destroy indigenous peasant forms of production, or did it, instead, bring them into a productive relationship with the state? Finally, what was the relationship between race and class in colonial capitalism: did racial difference straightforwardly separate white capitalists from black workers, and did that racial-class correlation determine their political behavior? All these simple questions are owed complex, that is, historical, answers.
The first controversy, about the nature of imperialism, has in Kenya’s historiography centered on the Mau Mau movement that dominated the local politics of decolonization. At the time, in the 1950s, almost all British observers saw Mau Mau—a rising that mobilized many of Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, who were
themselves about 20 percent of the total population-as irrational, tinged with religious reaction, and lacking legitimate grievance. Most officials, missionaries, and settlers thought it to be the convulsion of a bewildered people, disoriented by colonial development, literacy, exposure to modern markets, and the subversion of former social hierarchy. Such people were too easily led by self-seeking agitators, of whom Jomo Kenyatta was the chief. This explanation presumed that British rule was either too progressive to be assimilated by the native Kikuyu mind or that civilization had not yet penetrated far enough. There was room in the British view for deep disagreement over the counterinsurgent relationship, therefore, between repression and reform, each with an eye to fostering a rational, racially and ethnically inclusive Kenyan political culture within which power might safely be shared and to which, eventually, it could be devolved.
Against that British analysis, rejected and then ignored these last forty years, historians now argue that most Kikuyu, especially the young and the poor, had a burning sense of grievance in their fear of impending social extinction. This pitted them not only against the British but also against their own elders and betters. They felt they were about to lose the opportunity to achieve civilized, fully adult Kikuyu status. The scarcity of land, employment, and education meant that there was no way for them to gather the material means with which to marry, bring up children, build the future of their society, and so become respected ancestors. Social extinction was eternal.
But what caused this apprehension? This leads to the second layer of controversy, about the nature of settler colonialism in Kenya and how far it did, or did not, destroy African agriculture. The radical supporters of Mau Mau, of whom Caroline Elkins is the latest, argue that white settlement rested on the “stolen lands” that Kikuyu and others lost early in the twentieth century, before the First World War. That loss caused a general sense of poverty and oppression and all for the benefi t of worthless settlers up to all sorts of white mischief with other men’s wives, “parasites in paradise” as Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist, has called them. On this analysis, Mau Mau was a nationalist vanguard, crushed, as Elkins argues, with horrifi c savagery because of the total opposition, within a generally brutal imperialism, between whites who exploited the land, and Africans who had been pushed off it. The repression of the revolt could therefore be almost genocidal in scale with, in her estimation, between 136,000 and 300,000 dead among a Kikuyu population of around 1,600,000. The main actors were the British, local and metropolitan, desperate to regain supremacy by restoring a racial balance of terror. Their African auxiliaries were not so much allies as quislings. There was no civilizing impulse visible in counterinsurgency thought and practice, despite propaganda claims to the
contrary.
Like the original British view, this radical analysis of Mau Mau and British counterinsurgency is too simple in its assumptions about Kenya’s political economy. In reality, the colonial era saw a great expansion of African peasant farming, largely at the expense of cattle keepers, the Maasai and Kalenjin peoples. While Kenya is a large country, a little larger than France, with nearly a quarter of a million square miles, useful Kenya is small. Most of the country is desert and semi-desert. There are about 30,000 square miles of what agriculturalists call high- and medium-potential land, fertile and well watered. Eighty percent of this land was in the “native reserves”; about 20 percent was in white hands. Much of the White Highlands (mostly over 5,000 feet) was less well watered, used mostly for ranching. The important point for this analysis is that the large area of good rain-fed land available to Africans allowed peasant agriculture to grow and differentiate. It was moreover at times encouraged to do so. The colonial government repeatedly called on smallholders to repair the weaknesses of large-farm agriculture, fi rst to boost government revenues in the depressions of the early 1920s and 1930s, and then in the 1950s as part of the “second prong,” the civilian arm, of counterinsurgency, to give Africans the incomes, and hopes, that settler farming had failed to offer. Whenever the British did try to enlarge peasant export production, however, they generally did so under rigorously conservationist land- and cattle-husbandry regimes that imposed real and immediate costs in labor, land, and livestock, but offered only long-term, rather speculative benefi ts not open to all.
The other crucial point to make is that African agriculture developed not only on this premium “native” land, but also on much of the White Highlands, previously uncultivated, where the Maasai had herded. Like the Cherokee seventy years before them, the Maasai were forced to embark on a trail of tears in 1911. They had
to vacate half their land for the benefi t of British settlers and their largely Kikuyu clients, the so-called squatters, tenant-workers. These colonized the former lands of the Maasai to often greater productive effect than their white patrons had done. Other pastoral people lost land too. The cultivating Kikuyu, the people of Mau Mau, lost about 6 percent of their land. Those most involved in the militant, violent wing of Mau Mau were in northern Kikuyuland, where the least land was lost. Those in the southern Kikuyu lands, who lost the
most, were the least involved in Mau Mau warfare, a paradox yet to be explained.
Land loss and its consequent poverty, therefore, are too simple as explanations for Mau Mau. Similarly, extermination of a rebel tribe is too simple to be a plausible aim of British counterinsurgency. The Mau Mau war was unquestionably barbaric, on both sides; guerilla wars are. But from the outset of the Emergency, the British envisaged the need for a second prong to offset the political costs of military repression. It was also unavoidable in a political economy that had long needed to bring the peasant in. The British instituted land
reforms, bringing what they saw as economic and legal reason to the social intricacies of African inheritance; and they fostered African coffee and tea culture, even while fi ghting Mau Mau rebels, detaining suspects in vast wired-in camps, and herding women and children into strategic hamlets. Counterinsurgency would make no imperial sense without the growth and stability that might, with luck, restore Kenya to a governability that made politically thinkable a decolonization that was, in any case and in the long run, inevitable. Again, one has to pursue a more complex argument to grasp the experience and thoughts of both insurgents and rulers .
The third controversy raises questions about the relationship of race and class, and the nature of political community. Among Kenya’s first professional historians, in the 1960s and ‘70s, when a vulgar neo-Marxism was in vogue, one fi nds two parallel arguments. According to the first, the settlers, whose leaders were drawn from the British officer class, saw Africans as a working class—a seemingly natural correlation. Fitting Africans into a known class system, it used to be argued, dictated Kenya’s unequal race relations. The second argument mirrored the first by analyzing Mau Mau as a worker-and-peasant revolt that drew on class rather than ethnic solidarity. This had the added advantage of making Mau Mau a class conscious nationalism rather than an ethnically sectarian outburst.
Both theses can be questioned on their own neo-Marxist terms. As to the supposed class character of Mau Mau, the racial apportionment of Kenya’s best farmland, together with the settlers’ economic weakness before 1940, allowed African social differentiation to grow. Not all were flattened economically, into workers and small
peasants, especially not in Kikuyuland, situated as it is in the center of Kenya. Well watered, cool at night, above the malaria line, it was not only good for peasant farmers but also attractive to missionaries, who there established more schools than in other, less climatically favored regions. Kikuyu made the money to pay their school fees by trading beans, maize, and charcoal in the capital city, Nairobi, their local market town, and by generally making themselves useful to their white employers and rulers. Partly as a result, the Mau Mau movement lacked solidarity and fell apart from within even as it was attacked by the British from without. Kikuyu squatters were also the foundation of white farming. That is why it is also vital to understand how settlers saw Africans.
There is certainly truth in the idea that middle-class Britons thought of Africans as a natural working class, but, again, that is too simple. One can discern at least three British attitudes toward race and class in Kenya, changing through time. The first was aristocratic. Early colonists invested in Kenya because, in the words of
one, “you could feel the future of it under your feet.” Similarly, Violet Carnegie, married to a ninth earl’s third son, called her Somali headman Omar “the best type of old family retainer,” since he was “perfectly frank, but never familiar.” Initially, whites imagined a hierarchy of individual patrons and their personal African clients, not two opposed classes. Moreover since, before the 1940s, there were few telephones or police and most white farmhouses were miles from a neighbor, “self-help” promised more safety than any rule of law. This aristocratic attitude was transmuted over time as settlers came to realize that Africans were also political animals, and that they themselves were no longer superior colonists but, rather, a cultural minority, and one unable to rely on the unconditional support of the metropolitan government. Insecurity made them defensive, unwilling to concede to Africans, increasingly threatening as a majority race, the rights of an organized working class. Finally, after the Second World War, some urban employers with managerial rather than pioneering instincts were increasingly willing to see Africans as workers and, with Colonial Office persuasion, allowed them to bargain as organized trade unions.
There is a nice irony here, of the sort historians enjoy. Organized workers were the least likely to join Mau Mau—contrary to the neo-Marxist thesis. Their leader, Tom Mboya, became the man the British most trusted in negotiating the politics of decolonization. An easy identifi cation of race and class, and of class and Mau Mau rebellion, therefore, is entirely misleading. The more complex truth is that socially differentiated class formation occurred within African peasantries suffi ciently prosperous to sustain such division. Those who have studied African class politics have tended to look for the evidence in towns. People certainly act as workers there, but what made them workers? Who drove them off their land? To answer that question, one has to look within rural families, within landholding lineage corporations. Intimate rivalries and jealousies
are the ones to engender violence; Mau Mau’s origins are here. Kikuyu were the richest peasantry in Kenya, which is to say they were the most divided: there were those who exploited their kin seniority in the markets for power, land, and labor, and the weaker kin and clients whom they excluded from opportunity. It was the insecurities of incipient class division, under the constrictions required by white supremacy, that made Mau Mau, not class solidarity.
In summary, then, Kenya’s settler colonialism was no simple tyranny but a maze of contradictions. These complexities were played out in seven stages. The colony’s origins, fi rst, rested on a complementarity between an imperial geopolitics focused on India and an entirely African politics of British conquest. Settlers could make trouble here but could scarcely take command. The Great War, next, reinforced the global British dependence on India. Settlers could try to counter this only by creating something they could scarcely foresee and would certainly not have welcomed, the possibility of a modern, educated African politics. In the third stage, between the wars, the failures of settler agriculture allowed African peasant expansion on the misnamed White Highlands and forced the government to encourage farming in the “reserves” so that Africans could continue to pay tax. This relationship between settler and African economy, next, led to disaster only as the profi tability of production in the Second World War allowed settlers to repudiate their African squatter clients while refusing them the rights of workers. But the consequent intimacy of confl ict between returning squatters and their more secure kin in the reserves was almost entirely confi ned to the Kikuyu people, who almost alone entered the ranks of Mau Mau. Kenya’s penultimate example of ambiguity was in the Mau Mau war itself, degrading and dirty on both sides and yet also providing a final opportunity for the colonial government to bring black peasants into a political economy that would once again be safe for settlers. In a final irony, colonial reform made Kenya safe for Kenyatta, the man
the British blamed, above all, for the misery of Mau Mau. History is not a linear process. Neither a Whiggish story of imperial enlightenment
nor a “subaltern” tale of oppression and resistance does justice to Kenya’s past and the lives of those who made it move.
As important to an understanding of colonial Kenya as the small number of British settlers was the comparatively large number of Indian immigrants, which rose from 25,000 in 1921 to 180,000 at independence, in 1963. By contrast, Indians were of negligible importance in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa, other than in Natal. British Kenya was initially an African province of India, part of India’s African line of defense. Kenya’s railway, without which there could be no settlement, was designed by Indian engineers and built by Indian labor. The Indian rupee was Kenya’s currency until 1921. Indian law held sway in the courts. Indians controlled most local trade. They occupied all those subordinate positions, on the railway or in government, requiring technical or clerical skills. The Viceroy of India and, after 1947, Prime Minister Nehru were more central to British diplomacy and security than any colonial governor. This meant that London could not approve any policy that too blatantly favored settlers over Indians. The Colonial Office increasingly tried to stay above such quarrels by declaring that Kenya belonged to neither.
Representative outpost of a multiracial Empire, Kenya was an African and Indian rather than a white settler colony. It was conquered with the help of Indian troops before the fi rst settlers arrived, in 1903. The British had already made peace with Africans by practicing what Ronald Robinson, my mentor, called “the politics of collaboration.” All colonial governments tried to generate legitimacy by enlarging, leaning on, and rewarding the authority of those whom they thought already possessed it in indigenous society. So it was in Kenya. Settler politics, far from exercising a racial tyranny, are better seen as an ultimately failed effort to supplant the multiracial props of empire that they found in place: the global Indian prop, the local African one. This failure too was a fatal cause of Mau Mau, as settlers tried to segregate themselves from multiracial patronage and retreat into something like a British Home County on the Equator.
The twin foundations of British rule, Indian and African, were closely joined in Kenya. Indian traders imported consumer goods—bicycles and cottons —and bought African produce, everything from maize to hides and skins, in exchange. The politics of collaboration was made fruitful by Indian commerce long before whites
produced anything. Better-connected Africans could pay their tax and mission-school fees without working for whites. Indian trade was a major promoter of African agriculture and education.
Early settler politics were often outrageous, in consequence. Whites went to histrionic lengths to make themselves more visible, useful, and troublesome than Africans and Indians. Utility demanded investment, and that often brought ruin. Trouble was cheaper and attracted more attention. Settlers often beat their employees, who lacked recourse to the courts—indeed, once beat them in front of the courts—and threatened to suppress imagined native revolt if the colonial government did not demand more labor or impose higher taxes or take more land. Yet for all these efforts to assert control over Kenya’s imperial narrative of progress, the colony’s politics never escaped the complexities of its hybrid, Indo-African origins.
During the First World War, the second episode in this brief history, the East African campaign cost tens of thousands of African lives. What is now Tanzania was then German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika), where Paul Erich von Lettow-Vorbeck, a tenacious general, led the British a miserable dance for all the four years of war,at African expense. The consequences were as ambiguous as Kenya’s origins. War appeared to strengthen the settlers’ hand. They officered African troops in defense of the Empire and saw off the Hun. They obtained local executive responsibility. They were promised the vote as reward. Locally, they were essential imperial allies; globally, the story was different. Indian troops and taxpayers were strategically vital. Two thousand settlers of military age were not. This contrast between pygmy settlers and militarily mighty India was the
root of the post-war political crisis, the “Indian question.” As settlers pressed for their promised electoral power, the Viceroy in India, responding to Indian National Congress alarm, vetoed such gains unless Indians were also brought into the political arena. The Colonial Office resolved the dilemma by reiterating for Kenya the “west
coast” doctrine of British trusteeship for African interests, in which neither settlers nor Indians could expect to share.
The least-noticed yet most important effect of this crisis was the settlers’ realization that to receive imperial recognition, they must portray themselves as co-trustees of the African future and deny that role to Indians. They allied in this with the otherwise mistrusted Christian missionaries, who feared lest African opinion be led by Indians, many of them Muslims. In the 1920s, with some minor financial help from settlers, Protestant missionaries started the first African secondary school, the Alliance High School, still the Eton of Kenya. By the 1940s, Alliance did better than white schools in public examinations, and in 1963 supplied half the cabinet ministers of Jomo Kenyatta’s fi rst independent government. Settlers had scarcely bargained for this when calling in the African cause to trump the Indian claims. Probably by the 1940s, and certainly by the 1950s, the Alliance school choir was singing the folk song “In an English Country Garden.” It was to a segregated country garden on the Equator that, by the 1940s, the settlers were trying to retreat. To many whites it was intolerable that the Alliance High School boys should presume to get there too.
The unacceptability of a modern African elite owed something to the fact that a mass of poor Africans, a fifth column, had already got inside the White Highlands fence, or under it, as farm squatters. In this third aspect of Kenya’s story, whites could recruit labor and pay it the meager wages the fi rst farmers could afford only by offering cultivating and grazing rights to African, largely Kikuyu, peasant families in return for the obligation to labor. Both parties benefited from this arrangement until at least the late 1930s, partly because
settlers found it hard to make a profit. They were 500 miles from Mombasa’s docks. Shipping lines did not offer freight rates competitive with those at Durban or Bombay. Whites with the least capital grew maize in competition with Africans, a hopeless proposition in the 1930s. Ranchers faced the risks of rinderpest plagues and tickborne East Coast fever and could not compete with Argentine beef. Squatter cultivation and livestock did at least keep farmland clear of bush and grasses sweet. At the same time, the government, as deep in debt as any white farmer, encouraged cash-crop cultivation in the reserves in order to maintain its African tax base. African farming therefore prospered on two fronts. But squatters seem to have had the best of it; a survey in the 1940s found that squatter householders had more wives than their counterparts in the reserves.
Disaster came to fi rst black and then white when settler farmers started to mechanize in the Second World War, the fourth episode in Kenya’s history, and as ambiguous in its results as the Great War had been twenty years before. White farming at last fl ourished. The overseas market that had been so diffi cult to enter now came to Kenya instead. An army of South African and West African troops arrived to help the King’s African Rifl es, the local regiment, throw Mussolini out of Ethiopia, across Kenya’s northern frontier. Italian prisoners
of war fl ooded in, more than doubling the white population. Not far away, Montgomery’s Eighth Army was keeping Rommel from Suez. Soldiers and prisoners had to be fed. The Indian Ocean was less risky for shipping than the Atlantic or Mediterranean. Even in overseas markets, therefore, Kenya gained a comparative advantage. Settlers paid off their debts. They became the state’s economic managers. Kenya became a settler colony.
Settlers were also imperially visible, but as ambiguously as before. They again led African troops, of whom some 90,000 volunteered from Kenya. Farmers’ sons died, along with peasants’ sons, to put Haile Selassie back on his Ethiopian throne. East Africans then helped drive the Japanese out of Burma (Myanmar). Settlers’ sons
leading African platoons—more-senior officers were from Britain thus helped make it possible for the British to decolonize India and for Nehru to become white Kenya’s weightiest critic.
Most significant for the settler future, however, was the war’s effect on African social differentiation. Black cultivators prospered along with whites. Their maize, East Africa’s staple, fed not only armies but also the enlarged urban workforces that in Mombasa and Nairobi helped supply the war. Economic growth did not, in general, create the degree of differentiation that might have split African politics into moderate and militant camps. Kikuyuland was the exception, close to both the railway and Nairobi, the hub of Kenya. Kikuyu landowners continued to do well after the war, as did settlers, so long as primary products commanded high prices in a halfstarved world.
Three sorts of Kikuyu, however, did particularly badly. Few were so marginalized among other ethnic groups. Those who fared worst were the squatters who had colonized the White Highlands under white patronage. During the war, settlers not only put more land under the plow, but also became nervous about how a future British Labour government might regard their squatters’ rights. They turned the screws on their squatter dependents, accordingly, reducing their rights to cultivate and herd. Many squatters left the White Highlands and tried, often unsuccessfully, to find a home back in the reserves. This second theft of land was more grievous than the first. Most of the white farmland they had enjoyed was not theirs historically but had been made their own by a generation of sweat. Here, in squatter dispossession by their former patrons, lay the
proximate cause of Mau Mau.
Moreover, settlers could not accept the one alternative the government proposed. Offi cials argued that if farmers no longer wanted squatter tenants, if they wished to reduce them to landless laborers, then an English remedy would be to settle them in villages between white farms, with property rights as cottagers and able to sell their labor to whomever they chose. Settlers rejected this class-divided solution. They saw squatters not so much as a class but as a race. It was as a race that whites enjoyed their exclusive Highland property. They could not share it; in an uncertain world it was their one insurance. Refusal to allow Africans working-class status was one of the chief stimuli to Mau Mau. Displaced squatters were prominent in the rebellion, joined by poor peasants from the reserves, squeezed off their land by successful Kikuyu farmers, and by townspeople
caught in the scissors between raging wartime infl ation and an end to wartime employment.
In all three categories men and women feared social extinction, exclusion from all hope of founding a family, all hope of honor and esteem. Mau Mau was in part an intergenerational conflict. Younger men were first inspired by moderate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, but then—disillusioned by his failure to deliver what they most needed, land and self-mastery—outran him in the violence of their political action.
Controversy rages at present about casualties in the Mau Mau war, the sixth episode of this history. The historiography of the Emergency has changed radically over the years. The first studies, in the 1960s and 1970s, were by Frank Corfi eld and Anthony Clayton. Corfield, a retired civil servant from the Sudan and Palestine, wrote the one offi cial report on Mau Mau’s supposed origins, and Clayton was a Kenyan offi cial who has since become a distinguished military historian. While Corfi eld said little about the counterinsurgency
that Clayton detailed, both took the view that the British had fought a war, principally in the forests where Mau Mau militants took refuge. Their statistics, therefore, were military. Of those killed in action, Mau Mau numbered over 11,000; the security forces, 164. In these accounts, the civilians killed by Mau Mau numbered
32 whites, 26 Asians, and nearly 2,000 Africans. Clayton and Corfield agreed on the fi gures. Clayton also noted, however, as Corfield did not, that the British hanged over 1,000 Mau Mau convicts, an unprecedented use of the gallows. Neither, however, saw counterinsurgency as a social trauma for the Kikuyu, but rather as a war in which casualties were confi ned, broadly, to those on either side who were murdered or killed in action.
Only recently have two historians, David Anderson of Oxford and Caroline Elkins of Harvard, examined the total nature of the war and asked other than military questions. In his Histories of the Hanged, Anderson analyzed, principally, the degradation of British judicial norms and procedures protective of suspects. From official files and court records, he found that the colonial government, largely for fear of white vigilantism, reclassifi ed many offenses as
capital crimes: the possession of arms, consorting with or giving aid to guerrillas, and so on. To judge by its collusive cover-ups, the British establishment was properly ashamed of the rough justice it meted out in its panic to get justice done, although of 1,500 capital convictions, 400 were either commuted to imprisonment or were successfully appealed. Many Kikuyu-Anderson thinks probably 150,000 in all, about 71,000 at the peak, in late 1954–were also detained, on suspicion rather than on evidence, in a “pipeline” of wired-in work camps. Almost all were released by late 1958, after between three and five years of detention and after confessing their Mau Mau oaths.
Elkins, whose Britain’s Gulag (or Imperial Reckoning) was also published in 2005, was interested in a still wider aspect of the Emergency: the Kikuyu experience of the physical and mental rigors, tortures even, of a counterinsurgency war waged more often behind barbed wire than in the dripping forests of Mount Kenya. While Elkins calls this an untold story, most of it was known at the time, was subject to parliamentary inquiry, greatly embarrassed the government of Harold Macmillan, and has been analyzed by more than one historian since. She argues that no less than 95 percent of the Kikuyu population was detained, since she includes villagization, largely of women and children, as a form of detention, along with the generally male
work camps. In this she is justifi ed, since Kikuyu had not previously lived in close village communities. The agricultural upheaval, forced labor, and new proximity of living brought malnutrition and disease in its wake. From the census reports of 1948 and 1962, either side of the Emergency years, Elkins calculated that up to 300,000 Kikuyu died or were not born in the 1950s, largely due to the hardships of villagization. She could propose what seems to be an unbelievable level of mortality because of her general interpretation of colonial rule in Kenya as settler tyranny, a political economy that needed Africans only as the cheap labor that, by the 1950s, was available in larger numbers than could be employed. British rule in Kenya had no prudential disincentive, therefore, against genocide. Having little need of Kikuyu, the British had little reason not to kill them. The more complicated story I have outlined suggests that the British had every need of Kikuyu, not just as labor but also, and increasingly, as independent market-minded cultivators.
More-detailed census findings are in an article in African Affairs by John Blacker, an offi cial in the East African Statistical Department in the 1950s and 1960s and a consultant for two Kenyan censuses after independence.7 He has used not two censuses but four, and calculated back-projections of family formation. He believes up
to 50,000 Kikuyu went missing during the Emergency years, one sixth of Elkins’s higher estimate. How many of these were unreported killings by Mau Mau, he does not speculate. Of the 50,000, some 17,000 were men-and the British admitted to killing over 1,000. Probably 7,000 women died, chiefl y of malnutrition. Half of all deaths—26,000—were of children under ten. Blacker finds this tragedy unsurprising. A raised mortality rate for under-fives, 20 percent higher than normal in the Kikuyu case, is to be expected at time of war. In the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, Blacker was chief demographer for the United Nations in Iraq, where he found that child mortality had doubled. He cannot say how many of these Kikuyu children died and how many were yet to be born. There was a baby boom, as after all wars, in Kikuyuland after the Emergency.
Death rates matter, not because they tell us much about the relative brutality of insurgent and counterinsurgent war-which was harsh enough no matter how many died-but because of what they say about
the historical structures of settler colonialism within which the Mau Mau war was fought. Blacker has found that young Kikuyu women of secondary-school age in the 1950s had a year or two of education more than their sisters in other ethnic groups. This Kikuyu advantage lasted through the Mau Mau years. While many children undoubtedly perished, many were also apparently missing because of the later age of female Kikuyu marriage, which was due both to the horrors of war and, more prosaically, to the fact that many teenage
young women were still in school. The second prong of social and economic reform was not all propaganda. The British had experienced too many years of educated African pressure to get away with that. Peasant ambition had acquired its own momentum. The missionary interest was too strongly entrenched.
The fi nal complication in the Kenya story is that settler property, stolen land, became the foundation of postcolonial stability. Unlike most other African colonies at the time, Kenya was well surveyed, a precondition for orderly resettlement. It was also relatively well provided with agricultural services, roads, irrigation, and veterinary controls. Once it was decided to buy out the settlers at the time of independence, it was quickly done. The state-supervised peasant settlement of the former White Highlands in the early 1960s was the
chief source of popular support for Jomo Kenyatta and, since then, an important reason for Kenya’s comparative postcolonial peace.
Peasants were once again central to the political economy. They had been there from the start, as the basis of the politics of collaboration. Their production had founded many an Indian fortune. They had invaded the White Highlands as squatters, and there
prospered until the 1940s. Their dispossession thereafter, officials knew, was a major cause of Mau Mau. It was this knowledge that had stirred the government to embark on an agricultural revolution during the Emergency—which was, together with trade-union recognition, the second prong of counterinsurgency—to force peasants to consolidate their patches of land into smallholdings, with freehold title, on which to grow coffee and tea. These reforms were intended to draw the sting of African landlessness, to make Kenya safe for the white minority under any future “multiracial” government. In a final irony of history, they helped Africans, instead, finance their anti-colonial politics and then brought stability to a Kenya ruled not multiracially but by Jomo Kenyatta, the man whom the British had so recently hated and feared.
Neither imperialism nor settler colonialism were total impositions. They were not civilizing or brutalizing missions, but dialogues. TheBritish had to weigh profi t against peace. Africans adopted changing combinations of acceptance, opportunity, and resistance. And for much of Kenya’s colonial history, Indians held the ring between them.
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