White Settlers in East Africa

Abstract

In East Africa, here taken to comprise present-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, the term “settler” usually describes white people with livelihoods dependent on farming and closely related activities during the colonial period. Most settlers arrived in East Africa in the short time frame from circa 1900 to 1960. Although always small in number, settlers had significant and enduring impacts. The impetus for migration came from “push” and “pull” factors, working hand-in-hand in ways that could be hard to disentangle. The three-layered racial hierarchy of white, Indian, and African, as well as white identity, was highly politically charged. Settler farmers were generally the most conservative members of the white population, which also included traders, missionaries, and government officers. Settlers included wealthy aristocratic landowners in the Kenyan “White Highlands.” However, most settlers were undercapitalized, inexperienced, and farming unsuitable land. For some, survival was heavily reliant on an external income, such as an army pension. Reconciling settler ambitions of domination and self-rule, requiring African land and cheap labor, with the trusteeship of Africans supposedly undertaken by the colonial administration, was an inherent and intractable contradiction of colonial rule. Settlers bought into and perpetuated paternalistic versions of colonial racism as enunciated through the “white man’s burden” and “civilizing mission.” The heterogeneous settler communities became even more economically and socially diversified after World War II. Despite class, gender, and a significant town-country divide, settlers were united by racial solidarity. Their leadership tended to be English. The settler culture included beliefs and behaviors to subjugate the colonized, including a brutal violence inherent in interracial relations, and a premise that Africans were children requiring settlers and the state to act in loco parentis, plus the continuation of class attributes from Europe. Settlers considered maintaining white prestige, which also sought to instill among Africans a sense of inferiority and dependence on whites, to be their best protection from numerically dominant Africans. Apart from settler criticism that missions contributed to detribalization, religion is rarely mentioned in writing by or about settlers. Aristocratic and upper-class settlers have attracted disproportionate attention, marginalizing the large majority of settlers for whom life was economically very insecure and mundane. Although African agency and resistance to colonialism generally, and white settler domination specifically, was abundant, African voices and lived experiences have also been neglected in settler writings and literature on colonialism. There are more whites in East Africa today than at any time during the colonial period. Their lives reveal continuities with the colonial period as well as changes. They maintain standards of living far above national averages. Some possess considerable landholdings and business assets. Many settlers and their descendants were eager to reinvent themselves as “White Africans” in the newly independent states. Post-independence, by far the largest number of settlers and settler descendants live in Kenya, but, throughout East Africa, they are now dwarfed by other white residents.