Kenya Colony Research Articles

Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya

Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya

World War 1 and Colonialism in Kenya: Perspectives through Historiography and Literary Imaginaries

ABSTRACT During World War I, what is today Kenya was part of the British East African Protectorate. Direct fighting took place within the region as the neighbouring Tanzania was a German colony. The cultural and economic repercussions of the war transformed the social landscape and colonial approach to the administration of the region. Historically, the war period between 1914 and 1918 coincided with the acceleration of British colonial intrusion into Kenya and a close control of the different aspects of the local communities’ political, social, and economic day-to-day operations. It was also marked by the transformation of large parts of present-day Kenya into white settlements. Moreover, during the war, mostly male members of the various Kenyan communities were conscripted into military service and forcefully pressed into the British war service. The war memories in works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, M. G. Vassanji and Margaret Ogola revolve around the sense of being caught in unknown crossfire, the inhumanity of conscription, causalities and other horrors of the war, and the irreplaceable loss of the most productive community members in the war.

Influence of Machiavellian Principles of Political Power, Religion and Development on Successive Regimes in Kenya, 1963-2007

This paper interrogates Kenyan politics through the lenses of Niccolo Machiavelli’s ideas on political power. It analyses the relevance of Machiavelli’s political ideas, as they have applied by different political leaders in Kenya. It pays special attention at how over the years Kenyan politicians at the helm of Kenyan political stage, the state house, have shrewdly mastered and used religion channelise politics of their times. Colonial rule in Kenya witnessed the emergence of a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape and underdevelopment. With all capacity resided in a strong prefectural provincial administration, political parties remained underdeveloped making Kenyan politics to be leader centred. Politics is perceived as a game in which interests clash and political leaders attempt to establish stability amid conflicting interests. This reality is captured in the ideas of Machiavelli, whose works in political philosophy created the ideological ground for the emergence of Machiavellianism. The most significant aspect of colonialism in Kenya was political domination control, underdevelopment and authoritarianism. Colonialism in Kenya between 1895-1963 was characterized by economic exploitation and colonial expression. Sadly, the spectre of repression, exploitation and underdevelopment persisted in independent Kenya all against the hopes Kenyans had at independence. In this work, we argue that the post independence history of Kenya is replete with key aspects of Machiavelli’s conception of political power, ‘ misuse’ of religion by leaders and glaring underdevelopment all in the name of managing politics. Therefore, this paper examines the application of Machiavellian principles in the independent Kenya between 1963 and 2007.

Memory, Compromised and Implicated Identities, and Narrative Ethics in Rachel Seiffert’s Novels

ABSTRACT Though thematically diverse, the novels by German-British writer Rachel Seiffert share an interest in exploring the various ways in which ordinary people become entangled with structures of violence. Ranging from children to elderly people, the characters in The Dark Room (2001) and A Boy in Winter (2017) find themselves enmeshed in the politics of the Third Reich, whereas those in Afterwards (2007) and The Walk Home (2014) contribute to maintaining British colonialism in Kenya and Ireland. This paper proposes a narratological analysis, informed by theories within memory, trauma, and perpetrator studies, of the situated and multiperspectival narratives employed in the novels to reveal how Seiffert negotiates the ethical challenges implicit in the shades of grey existing between victims and perpetrators. It also intends to demonstrate that the tensions between the collective and the personal are deeply revealing in terms of exposing covert memory gaps and fostering new forms of solidarity.

Kenyan NFD Muslim Communities: The Painful Past and Pending Justice

The political history of Muslim minorities in the world is one of the emerging areas in the Muslim world’s contemporary issues that need to be addressed. This research examines the political history of Muslim communities in Kenya’s former Northern Frontier District (NFD), which was part of Somali Jubaland but annexed to Kenya Colony by British authorities in 1925, and the challenges they confronted during British colony (1895-1963); in terms of isolation measures, political marginalization and disregarding the 1962 referendum which expressed their will to unite with Somalia. Furthermore, the study discloses the harder difficulties that encountered NFD natives after Kenya independence in 1963; which appeared through the Shifta War (1963-1967), human rights violations, chronic marginalization and pending justice over historical grievances. The research will contribute to discovering the political and social history of Muslim communities in NFD and its impact on the current situation of former NFD’s residents in Kenya towards gaining a long-lasting stability in Kenya.

Whiteness in Christianity and Decoloniality of the African Experience: Developing a Political Theology for ‘Shalom’ in Kenya

The decolonial discourse around Christianity must not avoid dealing with Whiteness if there is going to be any fruitful decolonization. Colonialism and the Western missionary enterprise were not necessarily two distinct and unrelated entries to precolonial Kenya. How then did Christianity, for decades, live side by side with colonialism? In this article, we contend that Colonialism in Kenya could not have been possible without the missionary enterprise activity. The impact of that unholy relationship is felt and sustained in contemporary forms of violence. Unfortunately, critics of such a discourse dismiss the decolonial efforts in African Christianity citing intellectual activism. Such voices of dissent may not be far from the truth as Jesus’ ministry involved elements of activism. Whenever he confronted oppressive institutional structures, he used activism tempered with a degree of pacifism. Looking at the history of historical injustices in Kenya, we see instances whereby missionary Christianity conveniently abetted injustices for colonial structures to sustain the oppression of the indigenous Africans. Such injustices have been unresolved to date because the oppressive structures are still in place in the shape of neocolonialism. Land, for example, is a present source of conflict in Kenya. In the precolonial African ontology, the land was in harmony with the people. For land to be taken away from its owners, a separation of the people from the land had to happen. This was facilitated by a Christian theology that created existential dualism, violently separating the African bodies from their souls and the person from the community. Hence, Christian doctrine that emphasized ‘saving souls’ and ‘personal salvation’ was entrenched. This separation and fragmentation are fundamental to Whiteness. Whiteness universalizes truth, even theology; it puts a face of neutrality that obscures specificity. Such has made the church uncritical of oppressive and unjust political structures. Whiteness realizes that it is hard to enter into something that is in harmony. Therefore, separation needs to happen for Whiteness to succeed. Unfortunately, much of our theological understanding today is tempered with a neocolonial mindset that separates the soul from the body for Christian triumphalism. It anesthetizes the pain of oppression with the eschatological promise of future deliverance. This paper will analyze the impact of Whiteness in Kenya during and after colonialism to demonstrate how the British explorer–settler–missionary alliance ‘oiled’ the religious and economic disenfranchising of African people. Secondly, it proposes a political theology that will restore ‘Shalom’ in a socially, economically, and spiritually broken country. It is such a theology undertaken in Africa that will confront oppressive structures and identify with the marginalized communities in Kenya.

Extinctionscapes: Spatializing the commodification of animal lives and afterlives in conservation landscapes

ABSTRACT This article advances a more-than-human perspective on geographies of death and dying, engaging with extinctionscapes as spaces where the memorialization of nonhuman life generates affective and commodifiable experiences with species loss in conservation landscapes. Bringing geographical concepts, such as absence-presence, into conversation with recent literature on lively commodities, we describe how animals at the threshold of life and death are made to work for conservation as well as how their afterlives are subjected to ongoing forms of commodification through acts of memorialization in landscape. Specifically, our analysis focuses on the stories of three rhinos at a conservancy in Kenya to consider the themes of death and dying, value, and commodification in relation to endangered species conservation. By situating the lives and afterlives of these rhinos in the history of settler colonialism and capitalism in Kenya, we examine how commodification, as a social and cultural process, becomes entangled with the corporeal and discorporate lives of animals and contributes to the reproduction of historic injustices through extinctionscapes. Ultimately, we argue for ongoing critical engagement with the amorphous borderland of life and death in geographies of conservation, which represents an important space of biopolitics and commodification.

Judicial Review in Kenya: The Ambivalent Legacy of English Law

This Chapter considers the evolutions in the practice of judicial review in Kenya, and the continued relevance of English law, in the broader context of the role of judicial review in facilitating the attainment of democratic governance. It argues that English law bequeathed to Kenya an ambivalent legacy that continues to shape the exercise of the judicial review power. In theory, law has promised to provide a bulwark against the abuse of governmental power. In practice, however, it has largely served to facilitate authoritarianism. The Chapter begins by locating judicial review in the context of governance in colonial and post-colonial Kenya. It then examines the nature and role of judicial review in the Kenya colony, Independent Kenya, and more recently after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

Emergency Communal Labor and Gender in Central Province During the Mau Mau War in Kenya, 1953–1960

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Kenya Colony administration’s use of communal labor as a punitive, coercive labor practice during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Faced with the Mau Mau rebellion, the administration transformed the preexisting communal labor system and began to use it on an unprecedented scale as a form of collective punishment against the mainly Kikuyu African civilian populations thought to be in collusion with the Mau Mau guerrillas. Communal labor, which was previously justified as a building block of development and used widely throughout the colony as cooperative village labor, now became an aspect of the punitive “rehabilitation” of the Kikuyu populace in Central Province. Although colonial officials directed Emergency communal labor against all of the African civilians living in the rural areas of Central Province thought to be in tacit support of Mau Mau, women were the corps of most of the communal labor work parties. As a result, this article examines the role of gender in the British administration’s wielding of communal labor as a punitive measure in Central Province during this time period. This window into the machinations of communal forced labor also sheds more light on the wider issue of gender and forced labor during the colonial period in Africa.

Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands

In 1929 the administration of Kenya Colony under the governorship of Edward Grigg ordered the formation of a special committee to report on what had become known as ‘the Dorobo question’ across eastern Africa. As conceived by the committee, the Dorobo question was effectively that of how to govern ‘most hunting people’ under British rule in the region – particularly those thought to be ‘pre-tribal and pre-pastoral’ – and who were often inconveniently found to be living within newly demarcated forest reserves. An examination of the committee’s recommendations grants us insight into the ways in which colonial perceptions of incipient ‘environmental’ problems were often insidiously bound up in the social Darwinism of the period. Here, European perceptions of the Dorobo as a supposedly ‘dying race’ of forest-dwellers brings the entanglement of the period’s nascent ‘racial’ and natural sciences squarely into focus. Engaging these phenomena in relation to the case of the Sengwer community in western Kenya’s Cherangani Hills, I suggest that renewed inquiries into such conjoined discourses of race and nature may assist us in further enriching our understanding of the multiple, perpetually contested dimensions of identity formation within (post)colonial East Africa. Not least, the nuances of these dynamics may help us to more fully understand how the afterlives of these diverse racialisations and tribalisations continue to impinge upon the grievances of affected communities in the present, enabling an explicitly postcolonial – rather than, necessarily, a primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist – perspective on recent articulations of ‘indigenous’ or ‘ethnic minority’ rights in eastern Africa.

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: William (Bill) Kennedy, 9 September 1924-September 1934

William Kennedy was born in Scotland in 1884 and was elected a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (MRCVS) in 1908. Working in British East Africa (now largely Kenya) in the years before the First World War (!914-1918) as a Veterinary Officer he was in part responsible for ensuring the health of livestock moving from the northern Masai areas to a southern reserve and preventing disease being transmitted to the herds of white settlers. Kennedy served in the East African Veterinary Corps as a Major throughout the war, was on the Staff of the Commander in Chief when Britain was fighting the armed forces of German East Africa and where his main concern was to ensure the health of the large number of riding and transport animals. He was three times Mentioned in Despatches and awarded the Distinguished Service Order. After the war he was successively acting and then Chief Veterinary Officer of the Kenya Colony and Protectorate, issuing numerous proclamations designed to control rinderpest, contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia and foot and mouth disease. Leaving Kenya in 1924 he was appointed Director of Veterinary Services in Sudan, the first civilian to occupy the position. He served in Sudan until 1934 during a period when disease identification, diagnosis and control made great progress. Honoured with the award of the Order of the Nile Third Class by the King of Egypt, he retired to England and died there aged 80 in 1965.

Nahashon Ngare Rukenya and the Moral Re-Armament in Kenya: The Turning Point and the Post Mau-Mau War Reconstruction (1959–1970)

Nahashon Ngare Rukenya (1930–1996) was initially a Mau-Mau leader during Kenya’s war of independence (1952–60). Mau-Mau rebels were a militant group that waged guerrilla warfare against British colonialism in Kenya; and was largely seen as anti-Christian, anti-Anglican and anti-Presbyterian. As political advisor to the Mau-Mau, especially in their military offensives, Ngare Rukenya was once waylaid by the colonial forces, captured and detained. His turning point as Mau-Mau leader came when a Christian sect called the Moral Re-Armament (MRA)—founded by an American missionary Dr Frank Buchman in 1938—visited various detention camps to deliver counselling and teaching services. In particular, the MRA taught about the equality of all humans as children of God. They preached peace and reconciliation amongst all people living in colonial Kenya, while using biblical references to support their theological and ecclesiastical positions. After listening to their argumentation—while at Athi River detention camp—Ngare Rukenya’s politics of “land and Freedom” (wiyathi na ithaka—the core theme in Mau-Mau politics), changed to peace, reconciliation and resettlement of post-war Kenya. It re-energised his lay Anglican Church leadership, a church seen as pro-colonialism; hence hated by the local populace. This article sets out to unveil the problem in reference to Ngare Rukenya: How did the MRA influence socio-political discourses and eventually play its role in post Mau-Mau war reconstruction in Kenya (1959–1970)? The article is set on the premise that without Ngare Rukenya’s contribution regarding peace, reconciliation and resettlement, Central Kenya (as epicentre of Mau-Mau rebel activities) would have experienced civil war after colonialism in 1963. Ngare Rukenya and the MRA represent a major turning point in the Kenyan ecclesiastical history. The materials in this presentation are largely gathered through oral interviews, archival researches and limited consultation of published works.

Decolonizing interwar anticolonial solidarities: The case of Harry Thuku

This essay suggests that a focus on the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century interwar anticolonial movements in Africa creates opportunities to decolonize a historiographical tendency to foreground certain elitist accounts of the period that continue to pervade contemporary anticolonial scholarship. The essay explores the case of Harry Thuku, an early Kenyan nationalist and pan-Africanist active in Kenya Colony in the early 1920s, and subsequently imprisoned and exiled by the British colonial administration. Contemporaneous accounts largely painted Thuku as an insignificant lone agitator, being manipulated by East African Asian organizations, whilst more contemporary scholarship continues to depict him and his movement in strictly methodologically nationalist terms. This essay presents evidence to suggest Thuku’s actions were constituted across domestic cultural and class boundaries, as well as transnational anticolonial and pan-African networks. As such, the essay constructs an account of transcultural, transnational anticolonial solidarities that have thus far largely been confined to analyses of more obviously globally networked interwar spaces (i.e. imperial metropoles, West Africa, South Africa, and Ethiopia) and which thus unwittingly risk perpetuating a colonial historiography of the period.

Modus Operandi of Oppressing the “Savages”: The Kenyan British Colonial Experience

Colonialism can be traced back to the dawn of the “age of discovery” that was pioneered by the Portuguese and the Spanish empires in the 15th century. It was not until the 1870s that “New Imperialism” characterized by the ideology of European expansionism envisioned acquiring new territories overseas. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 prepared the ground for the direct rule and occupation of Africa by European powers. In 1895, Kenya became part of the British East Africa Protectorate. From 1920, the British colonized Kenya until her independence in 1963. As in many other former British colonies around the world, most conspicuous and appalling was the modus operandi that was employed to colonize the targeted territories. Part one of this article discusses the tactics of subjugation used by the British to oppress, humiliate, subdue, conquer and colonize the Kenyan communities. These tactics included crown land ordinances; capitalist estate production; the establishment of African reserves and squatter systems; the formation of the “white” highlands; the imposition of taxes and forced labor; the imposition of the pass or Kipande System; missionary churches; the declaration of a state of emergency; military operations; villigilization; ethnic divide and rule; and flogging, torture, incarceration and execution. The findings offer a comparative template about the tactics used by the British in other colonies. Part two of this study addresses a new focus about the link between British colonialism and ethnopolitical conflicts in Kenya. This presents a new avenue for more focused interventionism in addressing such conflicts. Part three of this study introduces a new important inquiry about “what next?” for the victims and survivors of British colonialism in Kenya. The argument is that the study of British colonialism cannot be complete without interrogating transitional justice for the victims and survivors of colonial atrocities. The focus on transitional justice introduces a new debate about the need for collaborative action in facilitating restitution, reparations, healing and closure for victims and survivors of British colonial atrocities. Although resistance to colonial invasion was experienced in many parts of Kenya, this study concentrates on the Mount Kenya region where it was most intensive and dominant.

Anthropos into humanitas: Civilizing violence, scientific forestry, and the ‘Dorobo question’ in eastern Africa

Early interactions between state administrators and forest-dwelling communities in eastern Africa yield significant insight into colonial attempts to grapple with difference across hierarchically conceptualized ‘races’, classes, tribes, and radically alternative livelihoods. In particular, uncertainties related to the governance of forest-dwellers resulted in a problematic known as the ‘Dorobo question’ in Kenya Colony, the former word being a corruption of the Maasai term for the poor, the sinful – and hence – the cattle-less. Drawing upon archival research in Kenya and the United Kingdom, I argue that halting attempts to govern such communities illuminate an historically and geographically specific dimension of late imperial Britain’s apparently ‘liberal’ biopolitics, which entailed not the ‘abandonment’ of populations, per se, but rather the elimination and subsequent transformation of livelihoods, ontologies, and sustainablities perceived as fiscally barren or otherwise of little use to the colonial state. Far from being resolved, however, the afterlives of these logics of elimination highlight the stakes of contemporary struggles over eastern African forests, and particularly so in the context of an emergent transition to ostensibly ‘green’ forms of capitalism in the region.

Strategies to Increase the Number of Kenyan Diaspora in Southeast Asian Countries under the Accreditation of Kenya Mission in Bangkok

The enormous contribution of Kenyan Diaspora to Kenya’s economy is increasingly becoming a major area of attention to policy makers. The Diaspora contributes a significant percentage to the GDP from the financial remittances they send back home. They have also been instrumental in the promotion of trade, investment, tourism, education, employment and transfer of technology and expertise to Kenya. Over 75% of the Diaspora contribution comes from North America and Europe, leaving only 25% for the rest of the world. About 30% of Kenyan Diaspora lives in North America, 26% in Europe, 24% in Africa, 9% in Asia while 11% is unaccounted for in different parts of the world. Approximately 0.02% of Kenyans abroad lives in Southeast Asian (SEA) countries under the accreditation of the Kenya Mission in Bangkok, namely: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. The contribution of Kenyan residents in the five SEA countries is minimal. In this research, factors which contributed to the low number of Kenyan Diaspora in the five SEA countries, and ways in which the number could be expanded were examined. Over 70% of respondents agreed that the British colonialism and colonial legacies in Kenya, long duration of weak economies of SEA, government policies and limited diplomacy, limited information on opportunities, tough immigration policies and visa conditions, and inadequate transport system are some of the factors for the low numbers of Kenyans in SEA countries. Relaxation of tough immigration policies and rigid visa conditions, improvement on transport system, establishment of more diplomatic Missions, signing of MoUs and agreements, and information dissemination on opportunities in the five SEA countries are some of the ways to increase the numbers of Kenyan Diaspora in these countries. The research findings will help Kenya Government to formulate effective Diaspora Policy.

Earning an Age: Migration and Maturity in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1952

This article explores the migration of boys and young men from their parents’ homes out onto the coffee, sisal, and tea estates of the settler colony of Kenya. Age and gender figured prominently in their decisions to leave home and work for wages. Young men viewed their physical mobility, financial independence, and distance from elder surveillance as essential to enjoying their youth and rethinking their manliness and coming of age. As they made demands on their elders to acknowledge and ritually authenticate their newfound maturity, they sparked heated debate about and complicated their generational and kinship relations. Age also mattered a great deal to the British colonial state. One of the primary tasks of the state was to ensure the profitability of the settler and multinational firms that produced Kenya’s most important cash crops. With one hand, the state levied its authority, often violently, to draw the young into the wage labor market. With the other, pulled along by social reformers, British officials tried to shield communities from what they believed to be the breakdown of generational, patriarchal authority by legislating underage labor, regulating recruitment, inspecting farms, and fining unscrupulous employers.

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.

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.

White man's country: Kenya Colony and the making of a myth

This article explains the cultural construction of Kenya Colony. It does so by combining two related histories – those of international tourism and of colonial rule – and two key explanatory themes – those of crisis and of commodity. The cultural construction of the colony, the article argues, emerged from two decisive moments: the “Indian crisis” of the early 1920s and the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s. Its content, meanwhile, was determined by its creation as a product, to be constituted, marketed, purchased and consumed. Colonial decline coincided with the emergence of Kenya Colony as global brand. Whilst the political project to maintain white man's country failed, the commercial project – to market white man's country as a commodity – succeeded emphatically. Attending to political crisis and cultural construction together, moreover, illustrates the function of the Kenya myth. The myth of Kenya Colony, the article argues, operated through recursive tropes of the picturesque, the transcendent and the primeval that are manifest not only in the writings of colonials themselves but also in accounts of Kenya produced in the period after independence. By examining the post-colonial period alongside the formative years of colonial rule, the extent to which ideas about Kenya circulating in the world today should be thought of in neo-colonial terms becomes apparent.