Confrontation over Kenya: the Colonial Office and its Critics 1918–1940

Abstract

Between the world wars, Colonial Office decisions regarding Kenya were subject to two opposed pressures: while the settlers wrestled with officials for greater control of their own affairs, a body of pro-African reformers loudly protested every concession and lobbied for equal rights and an end to the colour bar. This humanitarian lobby was largely the creation of two former colonial servants, Dr Norman Leys and W. McGregor Ross. Working mainly through the Labour Party, these men broadcast their social democratic ethics and demonstrated that the colony's political economy was badly weighted against African progress. They were the precursors of a more full-bodied socialist approach to colonial reform which during World War Two began to permeate the imperial bureaucracy. Until African initiative became a major determinant of Colonial Office policy in the early 1950s, these critics, with their colleagues in religious and humanitarian groups, were able to hold the front against settler self-government in a few indirect ways. Their allegations that Africans had been unjustly deprived of land and that they received far less in services than they paid in taxes were officially corroborated by command papers in the thirties. By creating a body of pro-African opinion which could exert political pressure on the Colonial Office they discouraged official plans to surrender responsible government to the settlers. Their direct impact on the Colonial Office was simply to alienate officials. Records of the confrontations between these reformers and Whitehall reveal that during this period Colonial Office officials were not only powerless to initiate reform. They were also, with few exceptions, uninterested in reforming the colony's political economy.