The squatters, though, lacked one critical option. They could not return to their reserves, having given up their land claims when they migrated to the White Highlands. Indeed, many became squatters in the first place because either they did not have access to land in the reserves, or that to which they did have claim was insufficient in acreage or quality, or both, to support their families. When the most draconian piece of resident native legislation was introduced in 1937, transferring virtually all responsibility for the squatters to the settler-controlled district councils, squatters simply had no choice but to search for new and perhaps more radical ways to fight off this encroachment on their way of life.
Until World War II, there were at most eighty men in the Kenya Administration, and they had day-to-day responsibility for the approximately 5 million Africans living in the colony. In practice this meant that administrators in the field needed African subordinates willing to exercise delegated power, and they found them in colonial-appointed chiefs. Throughout Britain’s African empire colonial rulers sought out collaborators who would be willing to assume an authoritative role within the colonial government, beneath the provincial and district administrators to be sure, but decidedly above the rest of a colony’s African subjects. This was the basis of indirect rule, a way of administering the empire on the cheap by co-opting local African leaders, using them to enforce discipline and control over local populations, and in return providing them with generous material rewards. Such a system was predicated upon the European stereotype of traditional African political systems, which always placed the chief at the top of the hierarchy; the chief, in turn, had the fundamental role of maintaining “tribal order.”34
But the Kikuyu did not have chiefs. Prior to colonialism, they were a stateless society, governed by councils of elders and lineage heads. In Kikuyu districts these new chiefs were a phenomenon of colonial rule. They were created by the colonial government and thus wholly illegitimate in the eyes of ordinary Kikuyu people. By accepting British authority, the chiefs were granted a monopoly of power in the African districts and given a great deal of autonomy to exercise it. Their primary jobs were labor recruitment, or labor encouragement, as the colonial government called it, and tax collection—two colonial demands that the ordinary Kikuyu attempted to avoid, or at least negotiate. But the chiefs had sufficient incentives to enforce these measures with impunity. If they did not perform, they would be dismissed and replaced, and sacking would mean the loss of their bogus chiefly title and all of the political power and socioeconomic privilege that went along with it. So the chiefs ruled with an iron fist, earning a reputation for both corruption and oppression. They traveled with their own semiofficial entourages of “tribal retainers,” many of whom did the dirty work of collecting taxes and procuring labor. This labor was not only for the agricultural support of the settlers but also for the colonial government. In the early days of Kenya the colonial government was the largest—and rumored to be the worst—single employer of African labor, which it put to work building the colony’s infrastructure of roads, secondary railways, and the like.
The introduction of chiefs brought with it a bitter internal conflict within the Kikuyu community, a conflict that only intensified over time. This is not to say that there was no internal differentiation among the Kikuyu prior to colonial rule. The Kikuyu certainly did not live in a pre-colonial socialist utopia without class divisions. The competitive environment that spawned the chiefs was a direct result of the intense internal competition for resources and wealth that peaked at the time of colonization. The chiefs merely capitalized on the opportunities that came with the power they derived from colonial rule. Catapulted into the new colonial hierarchy by their self-interest, they proceeded to do away with local Kikuyu competition by forcing the entrepreneurial masses out of the peasant economy and into the colonial wage market. To add insult to injury, the chiefs were rewarded for their loyalty to the colony and the Crown with larger and more fertile parcels of land in the reserves, superior seed, licenses to conduct internal trade, and access to local cheap labor, all ingredients for success in the peasant agricultural sector. Throughout its rule the colonial government would accelerate and manipulate socioeconomic differentiation in Kikuyu society. While the Kikuyu could easily be described as the most exploited group of Africans in Kenya, at the same time a tiny minority of them would become among the greatest beneficiaries of colonial rule.
The hypocrisies of British colonialism did not escape the Kikuyu. By the early 1920s a small group of progressive and educated young men formed a political organization called the Kikuyu Central Association, or KCA, to challenge the colonial establishment. Politically savvy and knowledgeable about the intricacies of the British colonial government, these men pursued their complaints through the limited channels of petition and constitutional redress. They took their demands on matters of land and forced labor from the local field level of the Kenya Administration to the colony’s central government in Nairobi and ultimately to the final arbiter, the Colonial Office in London. Working through formal channels for several years, the KCA would leap into the spotlight when it waged a cultural battle against the British colonial government over the issue of female circumcision.
Leading the KCA as its general secretary in the late 1920s was a young Kikuyu by the name of Johnstone Kenyatta. Like the KCA’s other members, Kenyatta was relatively conservative and upwardly mobile, and was seeking to capitalize on the opportunities made available by the new colonial system, though denied to him because he was not an appointed chief. Importantly, Kenyatta and his fellow KCA members were products of a missionary education. The missionaries had a leading role in Britain’s civilizing mission in Kenya, as they did throughout most of the empire. Missionaries were determined to convert the Africans not just to Christianity but to an entire Western way of life. They competed with one another for African souls, with each denomination carving out its own spheres of influence throughout Britain’s colonies. In the Kikuyu reserves the Presbyterians, the Anglicans, the Methodists, and the Catholics dominated the Christian scene, establishing mission stations—which included churches, schools, and medical clinics—condemning the heathenism of Kikuyu religious and cultural practices, and preaching the values of Christianity, commerce, and civilization. For the colonial government, missionaries offered civilization on the cheap. To the degree that any education or welfare services were provided to the local African population, they were delivered largely by missionaries. Of course, the Africans would have to pay school fees and health-care costs; in fact, to earn the right to buy these services the Kikuyu, like all other colonial subjects, had to renounce their own religion and convert to Christianity.35
When Protestant mission societies launched an attack on the Kikuyu custom of female circumcision, the KCA responded vigorously by defending their cultural practice. The issue exploded in the 1920s after several missionaries banned the practice for their converts. In response to missionary pressure, colonial officials in Nairobi altered their typical hands-off approach toward African customs and urged the Local Native Councils in the Kikuyu districts to restrict and regulate female circumcision. By 1929, thousands of Kikuyu were protesting and leaving the established churches to form their own independent churches and schools, which would permit the practice to continue. This single cultural issue mobilized the Kikuyu peasants for the first time and, in so doing, provided the KCA with a mass political base.36
The repeated, reasoned demands that were issued by Kikuyu politicians on the subject of circumcision brought home the realities of Britain’s civilizing mission in Kenya. The colonial government responded to the KCA with unequivocal hostility, labeling it a dangerous and subversive organization that was unrepresentative of the Kikuyu majority. This reaction was a reflection of both British imperial self-interest and a twisted sense of colonial paternalism, particularly on the part of the Administration in the Kikuyu reserves. Despite the fact that these men on the spot, the young membe
rs of Britain’s ruling elite who considered themselves to be the protectors of “their natives,” were watching Kikuyu country rapidly deteriorate around them, many continued to believe they had come to Africa to oversee a slow, organic change from savagery to civilization. They were trustees who acted in the best interests of the African, who after all had to be protected from himself. Though this paternalistic notion permeated all ranks of the colonial government, it was particularly strong in the African reserves, where the members of the Administration re-created their own public-school drama, taking the role of the tough but loving headmaster and casting the Africans in that of the young and artless innocents.
Kikuyu political leaders had no role in this script. They were a rival leadership, outside of the colonial hierarchy, and, according to colonial officials, betrayed the dangers inherent in educating Africans too quickly. Their demands for responsibilities for which they were assumed to be ill-equipped rendered them, in the eyes of the colonial government, detribalized or semi-educated agitators. In the wake of the female-circumcision controversy, KCA members were no longer simply agitators but also atavistic, anti-Western, and anti-Christian agitators. It became the duty of the British colonial government to protect the hapless Africans from these troublemakers.
In hindsight it is difficult to assess how much British colonial officials actually believed their own delusional rhetoric. They could not fail to see the destructive impact of British colonialism on the Kikuyu population, though colonial logic always seemed able to find fault with presumed African inefficiencies, or customs, or inherent racial inferiority rather than the injustices of colonial rule. Such myopia freed colonial officials from responsibility for the collapsing Kikuyu society. At the outbreak of the Second World War the British colonial government outlawed the KCA, on the pretext that Kikuyu political leaders were secretly contacting fascists in the nearby Italian colony of Ethiopia, in preparation for an armed invasion. As Kenya readied itself for war, colonial officials believed that with the elimination of the self-interested Kikuyu politicians and with even more paternalistic British guidance, the Kikuyu could aspire to someday achieving the lofty standards of British civilization.
The Second World War brought vast changes to Kenya, changes that exposed the inequities of British colonial rule, galvanized Kikuyu discontent, and channeled it into a mass peasant movement that would be called Mau Mau. The war converted the settlers into a powerful economic force in Kenya. The economic boom resulting from wartime demand at long last transformed their agricultural production into a profitable venture, and profits would continue for the next twenty years. The colonial government continued to intervene to satisfy the settlers’ wartime labor needs, conscripting Africans onto European farms. Meanwhile, the Administration in the African districts, and particularly the Kikuyu reserves, followed the directives of their superiors in Nairobi and London and pushed the local African farmer population to produce as much as possible for the war effort, a complete about-face from the explicit discouragement of peasant production in previous decades. Under increasing pressure, the Kikuyu were left with little choice but to abandon such traditional farming practices as crop rotation and resting land with fallow periods, and instead intensely cultivate every available parcel in their reserves.
The settlers were poised to take advantage of a notable change in Kenya’s relationship with the British government. A tighter economic bond between the colony and London persisted after the war as Britain looked to its empire to help the nation through its reconstruction. A series of Colonial Development and Welfare Acts were passed that provided unprecedented sums of capital to the colonies. Misleadingly named, these infusions of cash were not intended to strengthen colonial trusteeship of the Africans, but rather had the clear objective of lifting Britain’s economy out of its postwar crisis. These capital investments were targeted largely at the settler economy in Kenya, in response to its recent expansion of scale and profitability. By ramping up settler agricultural production, the British government planned to purchase European-produced products like coffee, tea, and pyrethrum through local government-controlled marketing boards, then resell the same products on the world market at higher prices. Since many of these goods were going to the United States, the British government would in exchange receive dollars that were critical to paying off its wartime debt to the Americans. For their part, the settlers benefited from unprecedented government support and financial intervention calculated to ensure the expansion and increased profitability of their estates.37
In spite of their hard work, after 1945 the Kikuyu way of life suffered a serious decline, particularly in relationship to the settlers. After decades of intensive farming, the reserves were on the brink of an agricultural crisis, and the Kikuyu were divided between the rich but tiny chiefly minority and the majority, who had endured not just exploitation but loss of land and status under British rule. Making matters worse, the colonial government was convinced that the so-called traditional and primitive Kikuyu agricultural practices of land-mining, continuous cultivation, and overstocking of cattle and goats were the real reasons for the reduced soil fertility and accelerated erosion. In an effort to mitigate the ill effects of these practices, colonial authorities introduced a series of postwar development projects aimed at averting what appeared to be an incipient ecological disaster.38
In practical terms this meant that active steps were taken to prevent the Kikuyu from producing for local markets. Restricted from capitalizing on the expanding colonial economy, the Kikuyu were left to subsistence production in the reserves and forced to work free of charge on a variety of soil conservation programs. This proved to be the most egregious of all colonial programs of coerced labor, with women shouldering the bulk of the strenuous and unpleasant work—such as the creation of hundreds of miles of communal terraces to counteract soil erosion—since most of the men had become more and more dependent upon wage labor. The root of the problem in the reserves was, of course, the simple fact that too many Kikuyu were living on too little land. The only solution was an expansion of the boundaries of the Kikuyu reserves or a change in policy to allow the Africans to own land in the exclusive White Highlands. Neither policy was considered at this time.39
The Kikuyu soldiers who returned from war would galvanize the growing popular discontent. As part of the Allied forces, the British government marshaled troops from around its empire. The Kikuyu, like other British subjects, joined the British army and were shipped off to fight in the Middle East and the India-Burma theaters of war.40 After the Allied victory, they returned home with a new global awareness of nationalist movements like that in India, as well as a genuine belief that they had fought for the principles of self-determination against the forces of fascism. In Kenya Kikuyu veterans found many of their British counterparts receiving demobilization support from the colonial government in the form of land, low-interest loans, and job creation programs. Ex-servicemen from Britain constituted another wave of immigrants to Kenya, coming to the colony through soldier settlement schemes much like those after the First World War. Kikuyu veterans expected a homecoming different from the status quo, perhaps even one bringing improvements to their daily lives commensurate with their contributions to the war effort. Dismayingly, they found that their fortunes, and those of their fellow Kikuyu, not only had remained unchanged but were steadily worsening.
The basis for a popular Kikuyu movement extended well beyond the boundaries of the reserves. In the White Highlands increased mechanization introduced by European settlers forced thousands of squatters off their farms, and those that remained were forced to work harder and for longer hours. The closing of the squatter frontier created an agitated group of homeless and property-less people in a land they considered to be their own. Some went back to the reserves, though they received a less than warm reception from distant family members who were already struggling. Popular discontent was also taking hold in depressed urban areas, particularly Nairobi, to which many o
f the dispossessed squatters and impoverished peasants from the reserves migrated in search of work. The African residential areas in the city quickly became overcrowded, unemployment escalated, and inflation skyrocketed. The so-called informal economy—including hawking, beer brewing, and prostitution—offered many urban residents their only hope of survival. It was hardly surprising that the Kikuyu poor, already disaffected by their loss of land and condemned to an alien urban existence, sought to redress their grievances against both the European and African agents of colonialism.
In spite of abundant Kikuyu frustration, there still did not exist the means by which to mobilize. Kikuyu politicians from the KCA, as well as the nascent trade union movement, had been forced underground during the war, only to reemerge in 1944 with the formation of the Kenya African Union, or KAU. Three years later Kenyatta—now calling himself Jomo Kenyatta—returned to Kenya after a sixteen-year stay in Britain, where he studied at the London School of Economics, cosponsored a Pan African Congress with Kwame Nkrumah, and wrote his controversial book, Facing Mount Kenya, which was a highly polemical defense of the cultural practices of the Kikuyu, and of their ability to speak for themselves.41 Kenyatta’s return electrified the colony, making it apparent that he was not only the chosen leader of the Kikuyu people but also the popular protagonist for the entire indigenous population in Kenya.
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