British Kenya Research Articles

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa by Bernhard Gissibl

Reviewed by: The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa by Bernhard Gissibl Andrew Denning The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa. The Environment in History: International Perspectives, vol. 9. By Bernhard Gissibl. New York: Berghahn, 2016. Pp. xiv + 360. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-1785331756. Bernhard Gissibl’s The Nature of German Imperialism combines the history of empire, environmental history, and animal studies to offer a fresh interpretation of German East Africa, the German overseas empire, and colonialism more generally. By focusing on hunting (particularly of charismatic megafauna such as elephants) and associated conservation policies in colonial East Africa, Gissibl argues that colonialism was, at its base, “a political ecology constellation that essentially pertained to the land and its properties” (10). Such an argument adds nuance to recent trends in scholarship on the German empire, which has focused on the discourses and culture of imperialism, drawing inspiration from postcolonial theory. However, as Gissibl makes clear, German imperialism had a materiality manifested in patterns of land use and the imposition of imperial order on seemingly disorganized African spaces. Indeed, the conservation of East Africa’s charismatic megafauna became a central concern of the German civilizing mission, at once justifying colonization and shaping colonial policy. The Nature of German Imperialism demonstrates the potential of environmental history and animal studies to complicate and expand scholarship on the German empire. The environmental history of empire has grown markedly in recent decades, but has been dominated by historians of the British Empire, in particular. Historians of the German Empire in Africa have recently joined the conversation: Philipp Lehmann has brought an environmental perspective to German Southwest Africa, and Gissibl’s [End Page 176] book builds on studies of German-Tanzanian environmental relations by Thaddeus Sunseri and Thomas Lekan. Gissibl shows that attention to animals and conservation scrambles the usual temporal and geographical boundaries of German imperialism. He argues that hunting was, in the terms offered by Richard White, a “middle ground”: a common field of action and discourse where Germans and Africans cooperated and shared knowledge and experience. Far from representing the wholesale imposition of German practices onto African societies and landscapes, hunting produced hybrid cultures that traced continuities between precolony and colony. German bureaucrats acted within established networks of African “big men” who translated their control over the ivory trade into political capital. The German colonizers “saw like a state, but acted like big men” (96). Although Gissibl points to the continuities between the precolonial and colonial eras, he recognizes that the years of German rule (1885–1914) marked a definitive change in human-animal relations in East Africa, and that current hunting and conservation practices are indelibly marked by the age of German empire. In geographical terms, Gissibl’s multiscalar approach layers the colonial (East Africa) atop the transimperial and transnational (British Kenya and the British Empire) and the metropolitan (Germany). Conceptions of Weidgerechtigkeit imported from Germany became marks of distinction, not only between Germans and Africans, but between gentlemanly, conservationist German hunters and the capitalistic, damaging hunting practices of Boer ivory traders. But the relationship between colony and metropole was more complicated than the export of policy from Berlin to East Africa. In Gissibl’s East Africa of hunting and conservation, all politics were local, with many hunting ordinances emerging from within the colony, in the context of forging alliances with African “big men.” Chapters 3 and 7 deploy transnational and transimperial lenses to complicate assumptions of Anglo-German imperial rivalry before World War I. Gissibl describes instances of “conservationist internationalism” (112), where officials in German East Africa and British Kenya codeveloped conservation practices that continue to shape land use in contemporary East Africa. Finally, a fascinating final chapter (chapter 8) traces the formulation of German ideas of nature between colony and metropole. Gissibl shows that the Naturschutz and Heimatschutz movements in pre-World War I Germany were indelibly shaped by East Africa, as the German romanticization of Africa’s idyllic landscapes and large mammals shaped metropolitan perceptions of the loss of wilderness at home. The Nature of German Imperialism is theoretically sophisticated and impeccably researched...

Identifying Colonial Subjects

Abstract Examining the introduction of fingerprinting in British sub-Saharan Africa between 1900 and 1960, this article demonstrates how this region became an important site of experimentation in the use of biometric methods for maintaining a racial hierarchy. Focusing on British Kenya, the article shows that many Africans experienced race-based fingerprinting as a threat to their personal honor and dignity. African opposition to this practice caused political conflict not only in Kenya, but also in the British metropole, and was a significant factor behind the emergence of the Kenyan nationalist movement.

Conceiving the Nation: The "Politics of the Womb" in Kenya, the United States, Greece, and Ireland

Alexandra Halkias. The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv + 413 pp. ill. ISBN 0-8223-3311-2 (cl); 0-8223-3323-6 (pb). Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer. Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. xxii + 296 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0954-8 (cl). Jennifer E. Spreng. Abortion and Divorce Law in Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. ix + 259 pp. ISBN 0-7864-1675-0 (pb). Lynn M. Thomas. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiii + 300 pp.; maps. ISBN 0-520-22450-7 (cl); 0-520-23540-1 (pb). Feminist scholars and activists alike have long been attentive to the shape and effects of the modern nation-state's interests in women's reproductive behavior. Across disciplines and in many different struggles they have demonstrated that nationalist ideologies as well as material processes of state formation depend fundamentally on elites' ability to control which citizens have how many babies and whether they have them or will be allowed to prevent themselves from having them. These four books offer quite different but ultimately complementary perspectives on what Lynn Thomas so aptly calls the "politics of the womb." Together they enrich our cross-national understanding of the gendered nature of the nation-state as well as of women's often contradictory responses to state formation and legitimation. Lynn Thomas gives us a fascinating and rich analysis of what she calls the "entanglement" of precolonial gender, sexual, and reproductive relations with colonial attempts to "reform" family law in the Meru region of twentieth-century British Kenya. Despite the colonial state's intended strategy of ruling Africans indirectly by reforming and shoring up customary systems of local rule in the rural areas not settled by white farmers, its agents intervened regularly in those systems when colonial interests changed. In [End Page 151] turn, new definitions of Meru tradition reconstructed women's practices, although often not in the ways state actors, their African collaborators, or newly marginalized traditional elites intended. Unrestricted access to a plentiful supply of cheap black labor was the colonizers' top priority, particularly in settler colonies such as Kenya. Paradoxically, however, colonization indirectly decreased Meru birth rates; the destruction of precolonial economic structures forced newly impoverished families to delay marriages—and the clitoral excision ceremonies that made Meru girls marriageable—until young men could pay bride wealth. Delayed marriage meant more premarital sex and, predictably, more out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Because Meru men would not pay to marry unexcised mothers, young women used abortion and infanticide to protect their chances of marriage. Rather than address the economic crisis underlying the declining numbers of Meru laborers, British officials used their interpretations of customary law to encourage the Meru to legitimate rather than terminate out-of-wedlock pregnancies. In their attempts to reduce bridewealth costs, sever the connection between female genital excision and marriage, and punish fathers who refused to marry the women they impregnated, colonial officials and their African collaborators created a local government in Meru. British transformations-cum-codifications of customary law and the actual court cases to which they gave rise—all done in the struggle to control African wombs—tied rural families, economies, and ideologies to the larger project of state formation in Kenya. Thomas's oral histories of Meru women and men born before Kenyan independence combined with her close reading of paternity cases brought to the tribal courts effectively demonstrate that African women both resisted and embraced interventions in marital, sexual, and reproductive relations. Meru girls fought off attempts by local agents of the state and male elders alike to stop excision; as clitoral surgeries went underground, they became more dangerous but neither less frequent nor...

Louis Leakey, John Napier and the history of Proconsul

The first Proconsul fossil was found in 1927, but it was not until 1942 that Louis Leakey was able to devote much time to studying the Miocene. An enormous wealth of plant and animal fossils was found by the British Kenya Miocene Expeditions between 1947–1950. Accounts of the fauna were published by the British Museum in a new series of monographs. The first, by Sir Wilfrid LeGros Clark and Louis Leakey (1951), was devoted to the hominoids and included an account of the famous 1948 skull. Not much effort was devoted at first to the few post-cranial remains that were thought to belong to Proconsul. This situation changed when Le Gros Clark invited John Napier to study the 1950 partial skeleton (KNM-RU 2036). Napier's monograph, with its contribution by P.R. Davis on four foot bones (Napier & Davis, 1959) was in the forefront of the paleobiological approach to primate paleontology, by beginning the study of the fossil with what was then known about modern primate locomotion and morphology. Several expeditions since then have added to the wealth of Proconsul specimens from Rusinga. Many isolated specimens show us that the size variation we see is sufficiently great that two species have to be present. It remains to be demonstrated, however, what these two species should be called. The larger is P. nyanzae, of which the 1948 skull may possibl be a female, and the smaller is almost certainly not P. africanus. More parts of the KNM-RU 2036 skeleton have been discovered, both in the old Kenya Museum collections and at the site on Rusinga. Parts of at least nine individuals were found in 1984 at Kaswanga. Practically every body part is represented, including a natural cast of some Proconsul soft tissue. Our ideas about Proconsul have changed considerably since the 1950s, but not all of this is due to the dramatic increase in the number of fossils. In large part it is due to the development of primate paleobiology, a field which John Napier helped start.

Work of the British–Kenya Miocene Expedition during 1949

Work of the British–Kenya Miocene Expedition during 1949