OPOLOT OKIA. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion, 1912-1930.

Abstract

Opolot Okia documents the persistence of coerced, unpaid communal labor in Kenya Colony in the 1920s even though official policies prohibited forced labor on European farms and public projects. In defense, the fiction was maintained that communal labor was rooted in African tradition and acceptable to colonial subjects. Okia uses the papers of Archdeacon Walter E. Owen, who took special interest in labor abuses, to show that communal labor was neither voluntary nor necessarily communal. Numerous incidents of coercion, punishment, and violations of existing colonial regulations reflected the continued practice of intimidating Africans, often women and children, to labor for the benefit of and financial advantage to the colonial government and, sometimes, European settlers. Coerced labor continued because the abused lacked access to justice and because colonial officials denied culpability when challenged by shifting the blame to headmen and chiefs. When the attention of the London Colonial Office was drawn to such abuses, it invariably waned after official prohibitory directives were issued. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya draws on a variety of sources, including reports, testimonies, newspaper editorials, and public correspondence authored by colonial office administrators, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries such as Owen, and British-based advocates such as John Oldham, secretary of the Conference of Missionary Societies.