Colonial Kenya Research Articles

S. H. Fazan. Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change. Edited with a foreword by John Lonsdale. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. xliii + 358 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1780768656.

S. H. Fazan. Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change. Edited with a foreword by John Lonsdale. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. xliii + 358 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1780768656.

GENDER AND TECHNOLOGY USE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM FIRMS IN KENYA

Kenyan firms rely on technology to overcome obstacles associated with excessive regulations, poor infrastructure and widespread corruption. This study shows that reliance on technologies such as email, website and the internet for communication purposes has significant positive impacts on productivity for firms with one or more female owners. Using a representative sample of industries, the exogenous component of technology use is isolated by using information on the presence of schools from colonial Kenya as well as a geographical indicator measuring rainfall shocks. These instruments pass a series of checks on strength and relevance, and satisfy the exclusion restriction. Results indicate that for firms with female owners, a 10 percent increase in technology use results in a 1.69 percentage point increase in value-added per worker. For male-owned firms, a positive effect is evident but significantly more muted.

Indians in Kenya: the politics of diaspora

Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.Indians intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians diasporic identity influenced Kenya s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and civilize East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.

Legacies of British Colonial Violence: Viewing Kenyan Detention Camps through the Hanslope Disclosure

A number of works have recently been published that seek to re-narrate colonial histories, with a particular emphasis on the role of law in at once creating and marginalizing colonial subjects.1Focusing on mid-twentieth century detention camps in the British colony of Kenya, this article illuminates a colonial history that was deeply buried in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) building for many years. As such, the analysis supports the revelatory work of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, who highlighted the violence that underpinned British detention and interrogation practises in Kenya.2In particular, the article explores recently declassified colonial files, and pieces together a picture of administrative subterfuge, suppression of facts, and whitewashing atrocities, threaded through with official denial, which long outlived its colonial genesis. Against the hypothesis that detention laws created an architecture of destruction and concomitant custodial violence in Kenya, the article establishes that an accountability deficit is the legacy of detention without trial as it was practiced in colonial Kenya. By untangling a complex web of colonial records and government papers relating to Kenya, this article reveals the often insurmountable pressure that was exerted to conceal evidence of detainee violence, and the role of a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that controlled the public narrative of a violent incident when outright denial was impossible.

“These Our Games” – Sport and the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya, c. 1907–1937

Abstract:In this article I use oral and documentary evidence gathered during recent fieldwork and archival research in the UK and Kenya to explore the ways in which the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya attempted to use sport to “civilize” and “discipline” the people of Central Kenya. I make a case for the important contributions the topic of sport can make to the study of African and colonial history, and offer a comprehensive critique of the only book-length work which explores the history of sport in colonial Kenya, John Bale and Joe Sang’sKenyan Running(1996).

Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents. By Christine S. Fair and Sumit Ganguly (eds.). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 362 pp. ₹ 995.00, $39.95, cloth.

Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents. By Christine S. Fair and Sumit Ganguly (eds.). New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 362 pp. cloth. Policing is a concept that has only recently attracted attention in debate on counter-insurgency (COIN). For a long time, COIN was seen as a purely military affair, clearly with a political dimension, but conceived and discussed as a strategy that would concern military personnel and civil administration. This volume is one of few that addresses role of police forces in cases of counter-insurgencies, mostly in South and Southeast Asia but includes case studies on Kenya, Colombia, Iraq, and Northern Ireland. It addresses two predominant assertions on role of police forces in counter-insurgency campaigns. The first sees police as part of problem as its repressive practices fuel rebellion instead of offering security. The second see police forces as a core component of a successful COIN. As David P. Fidler in his succinct summarizing contribution points out, this volume really goes beyond this dichotomy and adds to our knowledge on actual dynamics of situations in which police forces are part of rebellions or outright civil wars.The balance sheet of 10 case studies in this book shows a very mixed result. Contributions of police forces for success of COIN operations were at times really important as Kumar Ramakrishna shows for case of what is perhaps a bit euphemistically called the Malayan emergency, a rebellion of leftist peasants between 1948 and 1960. The emergency was an outright guerilla war and cost around 10,000 lives, mostly of rebels who had fought against British colonial rule. Walter C. Ladwig III's article on a rebellion in Philippines (1946-1954) also only marginally addresses political agenda of Hukbalahap rebels who fought against foreign rule and feudal domination. Such a depoliticized account might look justified when analysis of police work is real topic of investigation. However, one might wonder whether police work is actually as apolitical as some contributions present it. According to authors, both cases show that committed leadership, a professionalization of force, and an institutionalized responsibility toward civilian population as well as an end of indiscriminate violence at least enhances acceptance of police and renders it seemingly more efficient in fighting a rebellion instead of just fuelling violent escalation. Other cases, like attempt of British to quell Mao-Mao rebellion in colonial Kenya (1952-1960) or (1952-1960) or violence in Northern Ireland are examples, however, that there is no magic formula that works under any circumstances.Jugdep S. Chima shows in his contribution on Sikh rebellion in India's Punjab that even if all conditions mentioned above like committed leadership, sufficient support, and institutionalized responsibility within police forces are met, success still depends on another variable that is beyond police forces' control: political constellation under which police reform is done. The rebellion in Punjab dried out in 1990s as participation of grass-root organizations and inclusion of local power holders eased situation.A similar mechanism, although with a different result, seems to be at work in Afghanistan after 2001, as Austin Long argues in his contribution. …

British War-Effort Programme and the Making of the Land Degradation Narrative in Colonial Western Kenya

Most of the scholarship on colonial environmental policies in Africa focuses on how African communities were cast as culprits for environmental problems that plagued rural Africa. This interpretation overlooks ways in which colonial policies led to problems such as land degradation. This article demonstrates how exigencies of the Second World War elicited British colonial agricultural and labor policies amongst the Abaluyia community in western Kenya that exacerbated soil erosion. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how colonial economic policies and international crises contributed to the evolution of the colonial degradation narrative within the British Empire, and Africa in particular.

The Women of Kenya Speak: Imperial Activism and Settler Society, c.1930

AbstractThis article examines the politics of colonial voluntary work as an aspect of settler society and in relation to broader networks of imperial activism and reform. The East Africa Women's League, a predominant white women's organization in colonial Kenya, participated in settler politics during debates in 1930 concerning a Closer Union of British territories in East Africa. This involvement established connections between the voluntary welfare activities of settler women in Kenya and contemporary transimperial activist networks. Drawing on the private archives of the League, this article argues that the public lives of white women in colonial Kenya were entwined in the tensions of welfare in the twentieth-century British imperial project.

Friends or foes? A critique of the development of the media and the evolving relationship between press and politics in Kenya

The article focuses on the development of the press in colonial and postcolonial Kenya over the last 100 years. However, it is important to point out that communication systems existed in Africa even before the development of mass media as we know it today. Often, communication scholars, like other social scientists, tended to treat Africa at the onset of colonialism as a tabula rasa (Bourgault 1995: 2), because in early times in African history, the art of communication was conducted through oral means (Magaga 1982). However, because what is often termed ‘systems’ of mass media were introduced during the colonial period, the analyses of these systems, historical or otherwise, tend to reflect only what happened starting from the 20th century (Bourgault 1995). The limited scholarship on contemporary events until the 1990s, and the focus on the state's reluctance to permit historical research, has led to the creation of ‘imagined histories’ in Kenyan discourse and, consequently, the history of independent Kenya is encrusted with myth and little consensus on historical events (Hornsby 2013: 15). The article therefore seeks to detail the history and development of the media, its relationship to politics and the subsequent effect on media freedom in colonial and postcolonial Kenya.

The Samburu laibon's sorcery and the death of Theodore Powys in colonial Kenya

This paper examines the role that laibons (diviners and ritual healers) played and continue to play in warfare among Samburu pastoralists through their use of divination and sorcery to defeat external enemies. The paper focuses on the 1931 death of Theodore Powys, a white ranch manager in northern Kenya whose death was, in time, attributed to murder by five Samburu warriors. The event and trial occurred as conflicts increased among Samburu pastoralists, white settler ranchers of Laikipia District, and the Kenya colonial administration in the early 1930s. Although the warriors eventually were acquitted of murder charge, their laibon, Ngaldaiya Leaduma, was arrested before the trial under the Witchcraft Ordinance and deported for intimidating witnesses and interfering with the investigation. The larger Samburu community also faced harsh fines and disarmament and was incorporated into the settler-dominated Rift Valley Province. This paper focuses on three themes – conflicts over grazing land between the Samburu and the settlers; colonial responses to local ritual leaders such as the laibon; and Samburu conceptualizations and use of spiritual power in political conflicts. It demonstrates that ethnographic approaches and methodology can complement historiographical methods of archival research to present a multivocal account of a period of conflict and disruption.

“A most horrifying maturity in crime”: age, gender and juvenile delinquency in colonial Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising

This article examines the difficulties encountered by British colonial officials when attempting to determine the legal age of juvenile offenders in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1963). It identifies a main contradiction in the management of juvenile delinquents. In a trans-imperial project of reform, colonial governments across the British Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds created or expanded legislation with specific age limits. The practice of actually establishing the legal age of children and young people in local communities that relied on divergent criteria of classifying generations, however, was highly contested and subject to inconsistencies. This article highlights the complications of transporting metropolitan legal discourses to colonial settings. Using several case studies rooted in the Kenyan context, this article demonstrates that the categories of child, youth and juvenile were highly unstable and contentious categories. This was not a problem unique to Kenya, as colonial officials confronted the issue in other parts of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. However, this article explores how the context of the Uprising heightened tensions surrounding intersections of gender, age and criminality.

POLITICS OF THE SOIL: SEPARATISM, AUTOCHTHONY, AND DECOLONIZATION AT THE KENYAN COAST

AbstractThis article examines the perceived interdependence of territorial rights and social identity in colonial Kenya. In the early 1960s, attempts to win full autonomy for a narrow strip of Indian Ocean coastline – the Protectorate of Kenya – encouraged an exclusivist discourse of autochthony. To establish their historical ownership of the coast, both political thinkers who supported and decried coastal separatism emphasized the correlation of race, ethnicity, religion, and physical space. Through competing claims to ‘the soil’, all parties articulated a dually integrative and divisive language of citizenship. As a result, autochthony discourse exacerbated tensions within coastal society, fortified divergent visions of the postcolonial nation, and highlighted reductive definitions of the coast as either maritime or continental in orientation.

Cattle and Soil: Soil Erosion Discourse and Native Administration in Colonial Kenya

Cattle and Soil: Soil Erosion Discourse and Native Administration in Colonial Kenya

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

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.

Hybridity in Meja Mwangi’s Little White Man

The study examined elements of hybridity in Meja Mwangi’s Little White Man, a text set in colonial Kenya. In particular, the study was interested in the writer’s juxtaposition of the world of the child characters with that of the adult characters and the hybrid syncretic crossings reflected therein, against the backdrop of colonialism. The postcolonial theory was useful in the analysis of the selected text. The findings reveal that the text reflects both cultural and character hybridity. For the child characters, hybridity is a site for social reconstruction from which they emerge wiser and more enlightened through social interaction and practical experience of each other’s world. The adult world on the contrary, stands in total contrast to the children’s world. It is characterized by suspicion, insecurity, tension, contempt, violence and racial prejudice. It largely revolves around the interplay of power relations with the colonial settler at the top and the natives at the bottom. At interpersonal level, the adults always impose their will on the children. In effect, colonization is depicted at two levels in that, the Africans are colonized by the whites and secondly, the children are colonized by the adults who deny them the freedom to pursue their personal interest. It is notable however, that even under such strict conditions; the children always maneuver their way around the adults so as to pursue their own interests. This they do through being noncommittal, giving excuses and vague responses as in the case of Kariuki, the protagonist. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n6p267

Dangers to the Colony: Loose women and the "poor white" problem in Kenya

While a great deal of recent scholarship has focused on the problematic presence of so-called "poor whites" across the European colonial empires, comparatively little work has tackled their presence in Kenya. In part this may be explained by the force of Kenya's contemporary reputation as a destination for socialites and aristocrats. Yet it also reflects the fact that, until 1939, attempts by authorities to minimise the "poor white" presence succeeded. This article argues that only after this point, when existing social control mechanisms fell redundant, did a "poor white" problem in Kenya emerge. Yet to understand "poor whites" simply in terms of an anomalous conjunction of (White) race and (low) class is analytically insufficient. What the evidence presented here shows is that endeavours to manage "poor whites" centred on the management of women. Deviance was gendered. "Poor white" men were doubtless problematic in the settler colony but women, as mothers, produced them. The disciplining of a White female subjectivity demanded the policing of female deviants first of all. While there is evidence of "poor white" men throughout the history of colonial Kenya, it was only during the years of the Second World War that "poor white" women came to government attention. The endeavour to control them, moreover, brought with it the discovery of a "poor white" problem and a racialised welfare project designed to resolve it.

An Echo without a Medium: An Artist's Project

This article engages the German architect Ernst May and the complex legacies of his work in colonial Kenya from 1933 to 1953. Tiven examines three structures and parses their political, aesthetic, and biographical dimensions: one proposed, but never built (the Native House for Concrete Pre-manufacture); one still inhabited today (the Delamere Flats); and one demolished ca. 2005 (the Oceanic Hotel). The article explores May’s impulse for gardening as a kind of anti-architecture and crosses his narrative with those of two other architect-horticulturalists: Erica Mann, a Jewish Romanian refugee and May’s architectural colleague in Nairobi; and Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister.

The Delight of the Yearner: Ernst May and Erica Mann in Nairobi, 1933–1953

This article engages the German architect Ernst May and the complex legacies of his work in colonial Kenya from 1933 to 1953. Tiven examines three structures and parses their political, aesthetic, and biographical dimensions: one proposed, but never built (the Native House for Concrete Pre-manufacture); one still inhabited today (the Delamere Flats); and one demolished ca. 2005 (the Oceanic Hotel). The article explores May’s impulse for gardening as a kind of anti-architecture and crosses his narrative with those of two other architect-horticulturalists: Erica Mann, a Jewish Romanian refugee and May’s architectural colleague in Nairobi; and Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister.

The Gulf between Tortious and Torturous: UK Responsibility for Mistreatment of the Mau Mau in Colonial Kenya

In June 2009, five Kenyan nationals brought a claim against the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) for acts of torture allegedly committed against them in the course of the emergency regime established following the Mau Mau uprising of 1952. The preliminary judgment handed down in this case responds to an application for summary judgment brought by the UK Government on the basis of its claims it was not legally responsible for the abuse. Many of the arguments made by the UK Government gain strength from the fact that, under UK law, the action is not in torture, but in the tort of trespass to the person. The judgment of Justice McCombe raises the prospect of an emerging disjuncture between liability for torture and liability for the tort of assault/battery where this constitutes torture. The main focus of this article is on whether the fact that the impugned conduct constitutes torture should be relevant to the resolution of liability issues relating to an action brought in tort.

Offended Christians, Anti-Mission Churches and Colonial Politics: One Man’s Story of the Messy Birth of the African Orthodox Church in Kenya

Abstract Thomas Nganda Wangai’s personal account of the beginnings of the Orthodox Church in Kenya gives a first-hand narrative of the Kikuyu resistance to mission Christianity and mission-imposed education that led to the break with the mission churches and colonial-approved mission schools. The subsequent creation of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association as well as independent churches attempted to create a new identity outside the mission church establishment in colonial Kenya. This desire to remain Christian while throwing off the yoke of Western versions of Christianity led Nganda and other early leaders to seek out a nonmission form of Christianity that reflected the ancient purity of the early church. Nganda tells the story of how a schismatic archbishop of the African Orthodox Church provided the initial leadership for the nascent Orthodox movement. Nganda charts the interrelatedness of the search for an ecclesiastical identity and the decision to align with the Alexandrian Patriarchate and the growing political conflict with the Kenyan colonial authorities. The paper concludes with Nganda’s description of the Orthodox Church’s response to the declaration of Emergency in 1953, along with the hardship and suffering that the subsequent ten years of proscription imposed.