The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (61 page)

moral veneer of the new imperialism prevented the EAP from simply

forcing Africans to work. Eliot and his successors came under considerable criticism for taking their time in abolishing slavery on the Swahili

coast. Unwilling to disrupt the relatively lucrative plantation economy,

they tried to extend the immoral institution’s life by pretending that it

would gradually die out on its own accord. Realistically, slavery was no

longer a viable tool of imperial extraction, and settlers and speculators

had to fi nd more civilized ways to harness African labor.

Initially, however, most East Africans had little incentive to work

on imperial enterprises because their subsistence economies met

most of their needs. Those that did accept paid employment usually

did so just long enough to earn enough money to buy useful western

material goods such as clothing, cutlery, or bicycles before returning

home. Frustrated would-be employers therefore charged that Africans were inherently lazy. A settler newspaper published an unfl inchingly racist poem that typifi ed this view of African men as indolent,

unmanly drunkards who lived off the labor of their wives.

Jack Nigger you’re as cute’s can be

Five beans to you make ten

You drink and scrounge and sleep and laze

And laze, scrounge and drink again!

Your
bibis
[wives] do domestic jobs

They sow and plough and reap

And mend your pants and mind the kids

While you lie fast asleep.

British

Kenya 313

In fact they live for you alone

You gay and lazy dog

They make and fetch your
pombe
[beer] and

They feed you like a hog

And with it all but one thing can

Disturb your lordly rest

And that, Jack Nig, you likewise know

Is twenty of the best.31

The phrase “twenty of the best” referred to fl ogging.

Far from being embarrassed by the settlers’ extensive use of

corporal punishment, a member of the Kenyan Legislative Council

unashamedly declared in open debate: “I always treat my natives

the same as I treat children. I try to be kind to them, and to advise

and direct them, but when kindness has no effect you have to do

the same as they do in the public schools at home and throughout

the empire—use the cane.”32 Exempted from western conceptions

of morality and the rule of law by virtue of their race, the settlers

sometimes beat their employees to death while teaching the value

of “honest” work. The early years of British rule in Kenya were so

corrupting that even Norman Leys, a vehement critic of the settlers, admitted that he too gave in to the seductive power of the

racialized new imperialism. “You see I have lived in the fog myself.

I have cuffed and kicked boys [Africans], sometimes because for

the moment it seemed that [in no way] else could things be done,

sometimes because my mind was tired beyond control, sometimes

because I hated the people I kicked, though I never hated them as I

hated myself.”33

The protectorate government therefore cast about for more politically acceptable ways to produce African labor. The most obvious

answer was to destroy local subsistence economies. On the whole,

simple taxation proved the most effective strategy. The protectorate’s

relatively meager gross tax receipts were quiet small, but introducing

the poll and hut tax, with mandatory payments in rupees and later

shillings, required East Africans to fi nd paying jobs. By 1910, they

had to pay Rs 3 for each hut and Rs 3 for the individual poll tax each

year. Defaulters lost their huts and crops and had to work one month

for each rupee owed.34 Europeans, in turn, did not pay a direct income

tax until the late 1930s, leaving their “native” subjects to fund the

settlers’ schools, hospitals, and other amenities.

314 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Africans could have raised their tax money by selling crops and

livestock, but the native reserve system created land shortages that

made it diffi cult to produce for the market. This meant that men and

women had to sell their labor to avoid breaking the law. This subtle

form of imperial coercion was both inexpensive and acceptable to the

humanitarian lobby for all “civilized” people had to pay taxes. In the

EAP, however, civilized people did not have an obligation to pay a fair

wage. Desperate to keep the labor costs down, settlers and speculators

used their infl uence to depress African pay scales. But even minimal

wages were suffi cient for most Africans to cover their taxes, which

meant that most still avoided wage labor whenever they could. Moreover, the tendency of some of the EAP’s poorly made coins to literally

disintegrate when exposed to the elements hardly inspired confi dence

in the cash economy.

European employers therefore used every political resource at

their disposal to press the EAP to institute a comprehensive program of forced labor. The settlers never got the government to recruit

workers for them directly, but the imperial regime ordered district

offi cers and chiefs to compel Africans to build roads, dams, and irrigation systems. These forced laborers even had to carry administrative offi cials on litters through the largely roadless rural areas. The

EAP also turned a relatively blind eye to the abuses of unscrupulous

private labor recruiters who used coercion and deception to get laborers to sign exploitive contracts. Those who ran away from abusive

employers faced prosecution under a Master and Servants Ordinance.

In 1912, reports of these excesses forced protectorate authorities to

commission an investigation of “native labour” that acknowledged

that chiefs and labor recruiters were forcing people to work by burning their huts, seizing their land, and fi ning them excessively.

The First World War only made matters worse. Dominating the

protectorate war council, the settlers won new authority to round

up laborers under martial law regulations by depicting African resistance to wage labor as traitorous. Even worse, the military authorities demanded huge numbers of men to support the largely futile

three-year invasion of German East Africa (modern Tanzania). British, Indian, and South African troops initially took the lead in the

operation, but mounting loses due to combat and disease led imperial

generals to rely on local African troops. The East Africa, Uganda, and

Nyasaland protectorates supplied more than thirty thousand African

British

Kenya 315

soldiers for the King’s African Rifl es during the campaign, but this

paled in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of laborers the civil

authorities conscripted to carry supplies. Recordkeeping from this era

is poor, but it appears that at least fi fty thousand of these “carriers”

perished as a result of combat, disease, and gross mistreatment during

the East African campaign.

The imperial authorities refused to even acknowledge African

contributions to Britain’s victory. Instead, the protectorate government seized half a million more acres of Nandi and Kikuyu land

in 1919 to provide farms for demobilized British military offi cers.

Designed to strengthen white settlement, the Soldier Settlement

Scheme opened 685 new farms to qualifi ed applicants of pure European origin with demonstrated assets worth at least one thousand

pounds. A supplementary plan set aside additional land and one hundred thousand pounds for disabled veterans to grow fl ax. Precious

few of the soldier settlers had any agricultural experience and most

sold out to land speculators within a few short years. The participants in the fl ax scheme went bankrupt when global prices for the

commodity crashed.

In 1920, the metropolitan government acknowledged the settlers’

preeminent place in East Africa by transforming the EAP into the

Kenya Colony and Protectorate. Most settlers expected this to set

Kenya on the path to self-government and possibly even dominion

status. They elected two representatives to the governor’s Executive

Council, which served as his cabinet. Their representatives in the

Legislative Council had a majority on the Finance Committee and

took a more direct role in drafting laws. A series of pro-settler governors worked closely with these “unoffi cial” elected legislators and

often signed off on laws without sending them on to the Colonial

Offi ce for formal approval. A Chief Native Commissioner supposedly spoke for the African majority in the Executive Council, while

a single appointed missionary represented “native” interests in the

legislature.

Imperial apologists argued that tribal Africans were not suffi ciently educated to speak for themselves. Not only was this absurd, it

was also hypocritical. The imperial regime had no intention of giving

its subjects the western-style education that was a prerequisite for the

franchise. In 1924, the Kenyan government spent just 4 percent of its

seventy-fi ve-thousand pound education budget on African children.35

316 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Apart from a few government schools, the Education Department

left “native education” almost entirely in the hands of the missions,

which were so powerful in East Africa that the evolutionary biologist

Julian Huxley, who became an expert on imperial education, labeled

them a “de facto Third Estate.”

While the missions helped legitimize British imperial rule through

their evangelical efforts, their schools served the equally important

role of training the inexpensive African clerks, tradesmen, and skilled

laborers that made indirect rule economically feasible. As the labor

expert William Ormsby-Gore acknowledged: “The economic development of tropical Africa calls increasingly for Africans to man the

railways, the motor lorries, to build, to carpenter, and to do a thousand things which are familiar to us and quite new and strange to

the African.”36 At the same time, British administrators never forgot

that Thomas Babington Macaulay’s attempt to create a loyal western-educated class of Indians that was “English in taste, in opinions,

in morals, and in intellect” helped produce the Indian National Congress. Anxious to avoid repeating that mistake in Africa, they sought

to make Africans “better natives” by teaching them to respect manual labor and tribal chiefl y authority instead of aspiring to be “black

Europeans.” As a babooist Tanganyikan offi cial sneeringly observed:

“Does anyone who sees the Europeanised African believe him to be

genuine? Too often he seems only a caricature of a European and an

insult to his own race.”37 The Colonial Offi ce’s Advisory Committee

on Native Education in British Tropical Africa therefore embraced the

southern American states’ segregated industrial education model in

the hope of training skilled laborers without also producing political

agitators.

In Kenya, the Anglican and Presbyterian missions shared these

views, but they were also reasonably committed to offering advanced

schooling for at least some of their students. The Catholic Church and

the heavily evangelical African Inland Mission, however, believed

that their converts needed only a basic level of literacy to read the

Bible. The resulting narrow educational pyramid denied African communities a political voice and ensured that they had to speak through

chiefs and tribal representatives.

Comparatively speaking, the immigrant South Asian community

was a much more serious threat to settler dominance in East Africa.

Outnumbering Europeans by more than two to one in the interwar

British

Kenya 317

era, the approximately thirty-eight thousand Asians demanded equal

political representation and permission to buy farms in the white

highlands.38 Although they had few legal rights, they had considerable economic infl uence in Kenya because long-standing and extensive commercial ties throughout the Indian Ocean allowed them to

mobilize capital much more easily than the settlers could. They were

the real driving force behind the growth of Nairobi, and a railway

contractor named A. M. Jivanjee was one of the city’s largest landowners in the 1920s.

The Asian challenge led the settlers to push for strict immigration limits and a formal declaration from the metropolitan government that Kenya was indeed a “white man’s country.” In doing so

they overreached themselves, for the interwar Colonial Offi ce was

less sympathetic to their agenda. In 1923 the colonial secretary, Lord

Devonshire, issued a white paper formally declaring that African

interests in Kenya were “paramount” over those of both the British and Indian “immigrant races.” The settlers were predictably outraged, and an extreme faction went so far as to hatch a ridiculous

conspiracy for an armed uprising. They actually had little to worry

about. Devonshire’s declaration effectively blocked Asian expansion

in Kenya, and a subsequent 1927 white paper affi rmed the settlers’

right to share in the “responsibilities of government” by declaring

that Africans were best served by avoiding “clashes of interest” with

the European community.

Assured that Kenya was a country for white men, the most ambitious imperial partisans dreamed of an East African Federation comprising Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika (the former German East