Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya's Flogging Scandals, 1895–1930

Abstract

The administration of justice throughout colonial Africa was profoundly influenced by questions of race. Taking as its starting point studies of the disciplining of farm labour in southern Africa, especially the work of Morrell and Pete on colonial Natal, this article surveys a number of notorious cases that reveal the brutality of corporal punishments administered by settlers to their employees in Kenya before 1930. By the 1920s, Kenya's reputation for excess in respect of corporal punishment was unrivalled anywhere in the British colonies. Kenya's white settlers staunchly defended their right to enact ‘rough justice’ on the farms, while the provisions of the Indian Penal Code contributed to the passing of lenient sentences in several notorious court cases. As in Natal, settlers in Kenya justified their ‘right’ to inflict physical punishment on the ‘raw native’ with reference to the ‘primitive’ nature of African society. The Kenya judiciary was criticised for its leniency in dealing with settler assaults on African workers, and for its own tendency to impose corporal punishments. Although the judiciary initially resisted pressures for reforms that would restrict judicial and extra-judicial corporal punishments, the article illustrates how perceived ‘injustices’ in a series of flogging cases culminated in the rewriting of the Penal Codes by 1930.