Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed

Abstract

This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony's economic difficulties during the Depression. In the mid-1930s the Kenya government sought to encourage African production, particularly among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya, in order to bolster the fiscal base of the colonial state and to subsidize the survival of the settler farming community. Promotion of African agrarian production brought conflict with the settler farming sector, and generated a serious crisis in the political economy of Kenya. These antagonisms became sharper during the war, when, after the Japanese advance in S.E. Asia, the Allied war effort demanded greater production from Kenya's settler farmers. Assisted by high guaranteed prices, both settler and African production was able to expand during the war. Previous studies of the impact of the war in Kenya have underplayed the extent to which African producers were able to capitalise upon this economic boom. Easily able to by-pass official marketing channels, African peasants produced for the black market. By doing so during the mid-war drought and maize crisis of 1942–3, African producers were able to obtain very favourable prices. Emerging peasant households among the Kikuyu and Abaluhya were therefore economically strengthened by the circumstances of the war, as was the settler farming sector. Europeans and Africans in Kenya were set on a collision course, which was to culminate some seven years after the war in the Mau Mau rebellion.