SETTLER CAPITAL AND THE ASSAULT ON THE SQUATTER PEASANTRY IN KENYA'S UASIN GISHU DISTRICT, 1942–63

Abstract

TODAY YOUNG NANDI BOYS keep watch over their cattle and prevent them from wandering onto the Eldoret-Kitale highway. Scattered homesteads of rondavel huts and shambas (agricultural plots) litter the Uasin Gishu plateau; maize in abundance in the Kerio valley can be viewed from the spectacular heights of the Elgeyo escarpment. The western highlands of Kenya is now, like the rest of the former colony, black man's country. Only a handful of white settlers remain.l Most of them left in the early 1960s after the Lancaster House Conference of 1960 proclaimed the demise of white supremacy. The impact of colonialism is still evident, though. Finger-millet and other crops were grown before the advent of the white man in the early twentieth century; cattle roamed the plateall. But now the crops are cash-crops. Cattle has become commoditized, land privatized. Milk is sold to the Kenya Co-operative Creameries Capitalism and commodity production are the legacy of the brief colonial period, little more than sixty years in East Africa. The Uasin Gishu district of Kenya, lodged against the Uganda border and once part of the neighbouring protectorate, was on the periphery of settler capitalism in Kenya. It is also on the periphery of an historical literature which concentrates on the capitalist-core region around Nairobi, the centre of the colonial state, the ganglion of settler and Kikuyu politics, and the focus of nationalist bargaining.2 It was not until the mid-1920s that the railway reached the plateau and not until after World War II that white farming in this remote district broke free of the margins of monoculture and entered an age of prosperous mixed farming. It was in the war years that European