Imperial British East Africa Company Research Articles

The Ecology and Economic Practices of the Isukha and Idakho Communities in Colonial Period 1895-1963

The penetration of colonialism in Isukha and Idakho can best be understood within the general framework of the global imperialism of the nineteenth century, with Europe being the hub of global imperialism where the imperialists were motivated by economic, humanitarian and strategic factors. After the 1886 and 1890 Anglo-German treaties at Berlin's conference, East Africa was divided between the British and the Germans. British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda) was under the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEACo). In 1894, Uganda was declared a protectorate and its sphere included the Baluyia. This same year, protectorate officials were sent to Mumias, which was by then a traders' entry-point on the road to Uganda. This paper analyses the ecology and economic environment of the Bisukha and Bidakho of the Luyia community during the colonial epoch. The paper took a qualitative approach to data collection, engaging participants in oral interviews and focused group discussions on understanding the two community practices. In what is termed an ethnographic approach, the author finds that the natives lost control of resources that were crucial in the proper management of their environments and the practice of various economic activities. This paper, therefore, finds that Land as a natural resource was alienated with forests being gazetted and animals confiscated to feed the soldiers of World Wars I and II.

Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

The casual observer might be forgiven for assuming that just about everything of interest had been researched and written about colonial Kenya. The territory carved out of eastern Africa in the 1880s and 1890s by the Imperial British East Africa Company, through agreement with the German Government, has attracted—or so it seems—more scholarly attention than almost any other British colony in Africa. From the travails of the early settlers and the f ledgeling administration before the First World War, to the violence and shame of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, historians have been drawn to this most complex, mesmerising and troubled of countries. In large part, this fascination stems from the presence of the small but powerful, and intriguingly heterogeneous, white settler community which attempted—according to popular contemporary perception, at least—to build a veritable Eden in the highlands of the southern interior of Kenya. Their story has been told through novel, film, memoir and scholarly monograph; yet Edward Steinhart, a historian of some considerable standing who has previously worked on western Uganda, has succeeded in approaching the history of colonial Kenya from a direction which brings new insights to that story. His concern is hunting; and the history of hunting, it quickly becomes clear, tells us a great deal about the environmental, social and indeed political history of Kenya. Many Europeans—as well as Americans, including such celebrities as Theodore Roosevelt and, rather later, Ernest Hemingway—came to Kenya to hunt. For many it was sport; for others it was a livelihood. But Steinhart is not simply interested in white hunters. Africans were hunters, too, until they became the all-important porters and guides for white safaris, and subsequently they became the poachers of the book's title. Indeed, Steinhart goes to great lengths to demonstrate the importance of hunting to Kenya's pastoral and agricultural communities, something which has been consistently overlooked in the extant literature. Doubtless this is to some extent rooted in the racial interpretation of hunting which accompanied the first white hunters in Kenya, who exported the norms and ethos of the aristocratic hunt to the new territory from the early 1900s onward. Through this social prism—created around notions about man's relationship to both land and game—did Africans come to be viewed as inherently inferior, subservient, and lacking the capacity to control or shape their environment. Moreover, it is Steinhart's contention that the process of marginalising and criminalising Africans in the context of hunting and the environment is completed in more recent times by the increasingly powerful conservationist community. This book will be of great interest to students of the social history of colonial Kenya, and to students of African geography and environment. In this study, Steinhart succeeds where so many fail (if they even attempt it) in combining scholarly rigour—the book is admirably well researched—with wonderful readability, and this important contribution to African colonial history is indeed an enjoyable read.

Legacies of Slavery in North-West Uganda: The Story of the ‘one-Elevens’

AbstractThis article outlines the history of a people known as ‘Nubi’ or ‘Nubians’, northern Ugandan Muslims who were closely associated with Idi Amin's rule, and a group to which he himself belonged. They were supposed to be the descendants of former slave soldiers from southern Sudan, who in the late 1880s at the time of the Mahdi's Islamic uprising came into what is now Uganda under the command of a German officer named Emin Pasha. In reality, the identity became an elective one, open to Muslim males from the northern Uganda/southern Sudan borderlands, as well as descendants of the original soldiers. These soldiers, taken on by Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, formed the core of the forces used to carve out much of Britain's East African Empire. From the days of Emin Pasha to those of Idi Amin, some Nubi men were identified by a marking of three vertical lines on the face – the ‘One-Elevens’. Although since Amin's overthrow many Muslims from the north of the country prefer to identify themselves as members of local Ugandan ethnic groups rather than as ‘Nubis’, aspects of Nubi identity live on among Ugandan rebel groups, as well as in cyberspace.

Legacies of Slavery in North-West Uganda: The Story of the 'One-Elevens'

This article outlines the history of a people known as ‘Nubi’ or ‘Nubians’, northern Ugandan Muslims who were closely associated with Idi Amin's rule, and a group to which he himself belonged. They were supposed to be the descendants of former slave soldiers from southern Sudan, who in the late 1880s at the time of the Mahdi's Islamic uprising came into what is now Uganda under the command of a German officer named Emin Pasha. In reality, the identity became an elective one, open to Muslim males from the northern Uganda/southern Sudan borderlands, as well as descendants of the original soldiers. These soldiers, taken on by Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, formed the core of the forces used to carve out much of Britain's East African Empire. From the days of Emin Pasha to those of Idi Amin, some Nubi men were identified by a marking of three vertical lines on the face – the ‘One-Elevens’. Although since Amin's overthrow many Muslims from the north of the country prefer to identify themselves as members of local Ugandan ethnic groups rather than as ‘Nubis’, aspects of Nubi identity live on among Ugandan rebel groups, as well as in cyberspace.

Massacre at Ribo Post: Expansion and Expediency on the Colonial Frontier in East Africa

The colonial conquest of East Africa was a protracted and haphazard business spanning decades, first begun in the early 1890s but not completed until 1919. As the frontier of colonial conquest advanced, there were many episodes of Africa resistance but also many examples of capitulation and collaboration.1 The best survey of this complex period of colonial conquest in East Africa is surely to be found in John Lonsdale's two essays on the subject, the first dealing with the British East African Protectorate between 1895 and 1905, the second focusing more specifically upon events in Western Kenya between 1894 and 1908.2 At the level of the Protectorate, Lonsdale identifies three distinct in the conquest of territory. The first of these saw Britain dominate the coast through the influence of the sultan of Zanzibar, with penetration inland being carried out by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). In the second phase, from 1895 to 1901, with the declaration of protectorates over Uganda and East Africa (Kenya), British interests rallied to protect the road to Uganda and to construct a railway linking the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria (Nyanza). In the third phase, commencing with the railway's completion in 1901, colonial control was finally extended over a broader front, with episodes of violence alongside economic incorporation and political accommodation. Narrowing his focus to Western Kenya and the conquest of the many Luyia, Luo, and Gusii polities in this region, Lonsdale offers a more detailed and subtle examination of the second of these phases. seen from Western Kenya between 1895 and 1901, the process of conquest was uneven and sporadic, violent at times but compliant to local politics at other moments. Lonsdale here discerns five sequential phases in this six-year period: (1) coexistence, from August 1894 to June 1895; (2) ascendancy, from July 1895 to March 1897, driven by enhanced military capacity; (3) coexistence again, from April 1897 to June 1898, a function of limited resources of conquest and the fragility of British authority; (4) domination, from July 1898 to April 1900, the restoration of a firmer colonial authority characterized by a willingness to deploy coercive force and to exploit local political allies; and (5) control, from May 1900 onwards, with the consolidation of colonial military power and the formalization of authority through the co-option of allies within the structures of the colonial regime. The sequence of conquest reveals that the triumph of the colonizer was seldom inevitable, frequently deflected by the limitations of colonial resources, and more often than not driven by the opportunities afforded by the dynamics of local politics. British success was usually dependent upon African allies and confederates. The extension of the colonial frontier in Western Kenya was therefore not a coordinated and orderly advance, but a spasmodic and opportunistic struggle for ascendancy in a political environment that was both obscure and unpredictable. Lonsdale's account of local conquest, like those of Godfrey Muriuki, Peter Rogers, and Richard Waller for other parts of the East African Protectorate, rightly gives prominence to the British concern to protect Sclater's road, and then the Uganda railway.3 Until 1901 there was little attempt to extend colonial authority beyond this limited horizon. One notable exception to this was in the Baringo region of the northern Rift Valley, where between 1899 and 1901 the British made a bold-perhaps even reckless-attempt, to extend colonial authority far to the north of the road and railway that connected Mombasa to the great lake. The advance into Baringo was prompted by the desire to control the rich ivory trade of the northern regions, in the hope that this would bring much-needed revenue to the coffers of the colonial administration.4 The difficulty of this task was seriously underestimated. Since the British were only dimly aware of the workings of the ivory trade, without any established base of support among local Kalenjin-speaking peoples who dominated the region, and completely dependent for supply and military support upon small pockets of Maa-speaking allies, this imperial venture proved to be premature. …

The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery in Northeast Africa

The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery in Northeast Africa

Shipping Subsidies and Railway Guarantees: William Mackinnon, Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, 1860–93

This article reassesses Sir William Mackinnon's role in the evolution of Victorian imperialism in Eastern Africa. It rejects the view that Mackinnon's activities in Eastern Africa were motivated by a desire for self-glorification and attempts, by contrast, to demonstrate the relevance of business considerations. A search for shipping subsidies and railway guarantees, spreading out from British India, accompanied the Mackinnon Group's development of steamshipping and mercantile interests in Africa, in support of investments in the Persian Gulf and western India. Promotion of these interests drew Mackinnon into schemes to lease the Sultan of Zanzibar's mainland territories and to consolidate British rule in the Transvaal by the construction of a railway from Delagoa Bay. During the 1880s the Group's shipping and commercial operations were threatened by the rise of foreign competition. Behind the formation of the Imperial British East Africa Company lay the hopes of Mackinnon and his business associates that public funds could be attracted to the defence of the Group's interests in Eastern Africa and to the reconstruction of its shipping services in the western Indian Ocean.

The Kedong Massacre and the Dick Affair: A Problem in the Early Colonial Historiography of East Africa

On the morning of 25 November 1895 Maasai fighting men slaughtered hundreds of Kikuyu and Swahili caravan porters and askari in the Kedong Valley of Kenya (then in the Uganda Protectorate); the carnage caused one European to describe the area as the “Valley of Death.” The next day Andrew Dick, a British trader formerly with the Imperial British East Africa Company, learned of the massacre and resolved to avenge it. In a fierce counter-attack, Dick killed at least one hundred Maasai before being put to death himself.While they were dramatic events, the Kedong Massacre and the Dick Affair are of far less significance from the perspective of the 1980s than during the colonial period. They were without question also much less important than was often assumed in bringing about amicable relations between the Maasai and the British. However, the concern of this paper will be with the varying accounts of these incidents that are available to the historian today, and the problems of the sources of the early colonial history of East Africa that are put in somewhat depressing perspective by the fact that, as Charles Miller has remarked, “nearly every individual writing about the 1890s has his own version of the incidents.” Many of these versions, often accepted as independent sources, have been adopted from the accounts of others. Through comparison of accounts one can use internal evidence to suggest an individual author's unacknowledged sources and in some cases trace the “genealogy” of the account. At the risk of further complicating the picture, we will attempt to analyze the historiography of the incidents and suggest that scholars and popular writers have largely overlooked or ignored one important account of the massacre and its aftermath.

A Bio-Bibliography of C.W. Hobley

Charles William Hobley, C.M.G., was born in 1867 at Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire. Educated at King Edward VI School, Nuneaton, he enrolled in 1882 for a three-year engineering course at the Mason Science College, Birmingham, and spent the next five years in the shops and drawing offices of engineering firms at Nuneaton and at Dartford in Kent. He was admitted as a student in 1888 to the Institution of Civil Engineers, to which body he was elected an Associate Member in February 1894.In March 1890 he was appointed geologist to the Imperial British East Africa Company, which was trying with pitifully inadequate resources to administer and develop the British sphere in East Africa, for which it had been granted a charter by the British government. Like most of the handful of trained members of the Company's staff, Hobley had to carry out a multitude of duties outside the scope of his appointment, among them surveys for the ill-fated Central Africa Railway, road building, improvements to water supplies on the Uganda road, and exploratory surveys. During the course of these duties he devoted some time to investigating the mineral resources of the coast and hinterland. The most important exploratory survey was the journey in the stern-wheeler Kenia up the Tana River as far as Hameye, whence Hobley and a companion marched across country to the slopes of Mount Kenya and Machakos, and back to Mombasa along the Uganda road. After a period as Transport Superintendent at the coast, Hobley left East Africa in September 1893, at a time when it was becoming obvious that the Company could not long continue to meet the obligations imposed on it by its charter.

The British and the Kikuyu 1890–1905: A Reassessment

This article argues that trade rather than confrontation was the predominant theme of the early years of interaction between the Kikuyu and the British. It suggests that the Southern Kikuyu in particular enjoyed an important initial period of co-existence with the British, the economic basis of which was a rapid expansion in the 1890s of an already existing trade in agricultural produce with caravans moving along the road to Uganda. This development was, however, not universally welcome among the Southern Kikuyu, and there was a clash of interest between those concerned with an increased production of agricultural surplus, and those whose economic interests were centred on livestock. The death of Waiyaki removed from the scene the most influential trading elder and facilitated, from the areas previously under his influence, hostile opposition to the trading activities now centred upon the permanent fort of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The steady increase of food production encouraged the emergence of a number of Southern Kikuyu traders; this was particularly true for Kinanjui, who had established himself at a time when the military resources of the I.B.E.A. Co. were negligible and poorly organized. It is argued that Kinanjui's status can no longer be regarded as merely the result of assistance from the British. It was significant that the British did not at any time prior to 1900 deploy at Fort Smith a permanent garrison of troops. There existed instead a balance of military resources which made possible an important local arena of political activity between the Southern Kikuyu and the British. The Northern Kikuyu, by contrast, despite their longer-standing trading contacts with the coast, were denied similar opportunities by virtue of more positive policies of control directed initially towards revenue collection.

The Origins and Development of the Witu Sultanate

In October 1890 British forces landed at Kipini near the mouth of the Tana River on the east coast of Africa and proceeded the sixteen miles inland to Witu where they made every effort to utterly wreck and destroy the town and its defenses. All of the stone buildings, including the palace of the Sultan, were blown up, their inhabitants fleeing into the forest.2 Although it took three more years for the British to complete their roundup of the Witu Sultan and his allies, the destruction of the town marked the downfall of a political entity which had conformed neither to the wishes of the sultanate of Zanzibar nor to those of its successor, the British protectorate. The Witu state is a vivid example of a widespread resistance to Arab and British domination on the northern East African coast during the nineteenth century. The sultanate of Witu, because of its reputation in its last years as a thorn in the flesh of the British, achieved notoriety in Imperial British East Africa Company and Foreign Office annals. Company and protectorate officials viewed the Witu people as a band of outlaws whose only goal was to upset the economic and political life of the northern Swahili coast. The treaty enacted between Witu and a German group in 1885 only reinforced British opinions. But it is to the observations of the Germans who visited Witu, as well as to other records which precede those of the British intrusion, and to oral sources that we must turn for a more balanced assessment of Witu.

Mackinnon and East Africa, 1878-1895: A Study in the `New Imperialism.'

In the 1870s Britain dominated the coast of east Africa by informal influence exerted from Zanzibar through the renowned consul-general, Sir John Kirk. This unchallenged position ended with the decision of Bismarck to back Carl Peters in his treaty-making activities and the mainland opposite Zanzibar was partitioned in 1886 into British and German spheres. The British government was not willing to assume the responsibility and expense involved in administration of its area of influence and it assigned control to the Imperial British East Africa Company headed by William Mackinnon. The company's life was short and inglorious. The government attributed its failure to the ineffectuality of Mackinnon and the Company's directors blamed the government for using the Company to advance political objects and not providing it with proper support. Professor Galbraith's book considers this episode in British Imperial History, the factors involved and Mackinnon's part in it. The book considers the interaction of Mackinnon and the government from the 1870s when his first efforts in east Africa were frustrated by Salisbury to the liquidation of the Company in the mid-1890s.

British Administration in The central Nyanza district of Kenya, 1900–60

On 10 June 1894, the British Government, after much hesitation and heart-searching, was finally compelled by circumstances to declare a protectorate over the native kingdom of Buganda. Later in the same year the country between the coast and Buganda on the caravan route up from the coast passed from the control of the Imperial British East Africa Company to that of the Acting Commissioner in Uganda, who was empowered to establish stations in it, under European officers.1

New books

The Land of the Nile Springs: Being chiefly an Account of how we fought Kabarega. By Colonel Sir Henry Colvile, K.C.M.G., C.B., Grenadier Guards. Illustrated by Mr. J. Burrell‐Smith and Mr. Twidle, from Sketches by the Author and Major Thruston, and from Photographs by the Author. Two Maps. Pp. xv + 312. London: Edward Arnold, 1895. Price 16s. Canyons of the Colorado. By J. W. Powell, Ph.D., LL.D. Meadville, Pa.: Flood and Vincent, 1895. 4to. Pp. 400. Das Deutsch‐Ostafrikanische Schutzgebiet. Im amtlichen Auftrage von Dr. Karl Peters. Mit 23 Vollbildern und 21 Textabbildungen, sowie 3 Karten in besonderer Mappe. München und Leipzig: R. Oldenbourg, 1895. Pp. 419, Appendix and Index. Matabeleland and how we got it. With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaldnd, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British Smith Africa Co., the adjoining British Territories, and Protectorates. By Capt. Chas. L. Norris Newman. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. Pp.243. Among the Gods: Scenes of India, with Legends by the Way. By Augusta Klein. Edinburgh and London: Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1895. Pp. x+355. Quaint Korea. By Louise J. Miln. London: Osgood, M'Ilvaine, and Co., 1895. Pp. 306. The Model Republic: A History of the Rise and Progress of the Swiss People. By F. Grenfell Baker. London: H. S. Nichols and Co., 1895. Pp. 550. Price 10s. 6d. net. The History of the Australasian Colonies from their Foundation to the year 1893. (Cambridge Historical Series.) By Edward Jenks, M.A. With two Coloured Maps. Cambridge: The University Press, 1895. Pp. xvi + 352. Price 6s. The Buding Races of Prehistoric Times in India, South‐Western Asia, and Southern Europe. By J. F. Hewitt, late Commissioner of Chota Nagpore. Volume II. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, Publishers to the India Office, 14 Parliament Street, S.W., 1895. Pp. xxxv + 382. British East Africa or Ibea: A History of the Formation and Work of the Imperial British East Africa Company. By P. L. M'Dermott. With Map and Frontispiece. New edition. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1895. Pp. 454, 18 Appendices and Index. The Royal Natural History. Edited by Richard Lydekker, B.A., F.R.S., etc., with Preface by P. L. Sclater, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., etc. Illustrated with 72 Coloured Plates and 1600 Engravings, by W. Kuhnert, F. Specht, P. J. Smit, G. Mützel, A. T. Elwes, J. Wolf, Gambier Bolton, and many others. Vol. ii. pp. xii + 583; vol. iii. pp. xv + 584. London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1894. A Text‐Book of Zoogeography. By Frank È. Beddard, M.A., F.R.S. (Cambridge Natural Science Manuals, Biological Series.) Edited by Arthur E. Shipley, M.A. Cambridge: University Press, 1895. Pp. viii + 246. 5 Maps. A Chapter on Birds. Rare British Visitors. By R. Bowdler Sharpe, LL.D., F.L.S., etc. (Zoological Department, British Museum.) London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1895. 8vo. Pp. ix + 124. 18 Coloured Plates, by Keulemans. Price 3s. 6d. Open Air Studies: an Introduction to Geology out of Boors. By Prof. Grenville A. J. Cole, M.E.I.A., F.G.S. London: Chas. Griffin and Co., 1895. Pp. xii + 322. Price 8s. 6d. School Geography. By James Clyde, M.A., LL.D. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1895. Pp. 551. The Geography of the British Isles, Physical, Political, Commercial. By William Hughes, F.E.G.S., and J. Francon Williams, F.R.G.S. London: George Philip and Son, N.D. Pp. 119–224. Price 1s. 6d. Cassell's Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland: Being a Complete Topographical Dictionary of the United Kingdom. Ched‐Frome. London, Paris, and Melbourne: Cassell and Co., 1895. Climbing in the British Isles. 2.— Wales and Ireland. Wales by W. P. Haskett Smith, M.A.; Ireland by H. C. Hart. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895. Pp. viii + 197. Price 3s. 6d. Illustrated Europe: Nos. 164 and 166. The Stanserhorn and the Stanserhorn Railway. By Woldemar Cubasch.—Ospedaletti. By E. Adler. Zürich: Art. Institut Orell Füssli. Price 6d. each. Panorama seen from the Observatory on the Summit of Ben Nevis. From Drawings by James E. Shearer. Stirling: E. S. Shearer and Son.

The Juba River

AT the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on Monday evening, Commander F. G. Dundas, R.N., read a paper describing his ascent of the Juba river. This was the first serious attempt to explore the river since Von der Decken's illfated expedition in the Guelph in August, 1865. The stern- wheel steamer Kenia, belonging to the Imperial British East Africa Company, under the command of Captain Dundas, crossed the bar of the Juba on April 25, 1892, an operation of much danger, as the vessel was exposed broadside on to heavy rollers; the depth at high water is only one fathom, and the water swarms with sharks and crocodiles. The coast Somalis lined the bank with hostile movements as soon as they saw that the vessel was to go up the river, and detained the expedition for a fortnight, until a message was sent to the head chief, the Sultan of the Ogaden Somalis. It was July 3 before amicable arrangements could be made, and the expedition fairly started. The Somalis met with everywhere were very strict Mohammedans, and secluded their women, but a number of Galla slave-girls were seen amongst them. There were few villages, Hajowan and Hajaualla opposite each other near the mouth being the only large ones until Munsur, 360 miles, and Bardera, 387 miles from the sea, were reached. The lower reaches of the river were very winding. On one occasion Captain Dundas observed a stream flowing parallel to the river he was on, and going across to see it recognized the landmarks as those he had passed three hours before. The Waboni tribe, who live by hunting, and use the bow and arrow, occupied the thick woods of the lower river. Above them the curves became more gentle, and the Gusha district was reached, where the people cultivated the land, which was cleared by burning; and for a hundred miles the Kenia's furnaces were fired with the dead trees which had been killed, but left unburnt by the fire. Cotton is cultivated as well as food plants, and there is a primitive system of weaving. Above Bilo, and about 100 miles from the sea, a branch was found to run off from the main river to the south-west through very dense forests. This is probably the Sheri, which reaches the sea midway between Lamu and Kismayu; the land between this and the Juba mouth being probably of deltaic origin. This branch was explored in a boat for twenty miles. The dense forests formed a broad belt on both sides on the river, and after steaming for five days through uninhabited woods the Kenia suddenly emerged into open country on August 2. The people were of very mixed race, friendly and well supplied with all sorts of food. Hills began to appear, and the river grew shallower, until on August 10 the steamer moored to the batik opposite Bardera. Here the Sultan forbad a landing, and the people, who numbered about 1200, were hostile, but ultimately peace was arranged, and one of the subordinate sheiks accompanied the Kenia to the rapid, where the river sweeps between steep rocky hills 300 to 400 feet high. There are three channels in the rapids, but at the time of the visit none was navigable, and the natives reported a waterfall over a ledge of rock about four hours' march further up, in latitude 2°34′ N. The wreck of the Guelph was visited and examined, but the rapid falling of the water made it necessary to hasten back to the sea. The climate throughout was found agreeable, and there were few mosquitoes. The river does not overflow, so there are no malarial swamps along the banks.