World War I and the Interwar Period
The demand for African labor escalated dramatically in 1914 when World War I came to East Africa. Despite a few German raids across the border, most of the actual fighting took place in neighboring Tanzania—then called Tanganyika and a German territory—and in Mozambique. Some 250,000 Kenyan men were conscripted into military service for the war. While a few served with the prestigious Kenya African Rifles (KAR, or “Keya”), the great majority served as porters in the Carrier Corps. Neighborhoods in East Africa still named “Kariakor” reflect the location of these wartime barracks. About one-fifth of the Kenyan men conscripted for war-time service never returned home, dying more often from malnutrition and disease than from battle wounds. Those who survived came back to Kenya with a new willingness to demand political and economic change. Colonial officials feared these new attitudes and determined to attract more white settlers to maintain the status quo. An official “soldier-settler” scheme offered qualified British veterans a chance to take up substantial farms at nominal cost, and more than twelve hundred additional farms were allocated under the scheme.
Despite the increased settler presence and demands for labor, many African farmers prospered during the 1920s as they grew cash crops for local markets and for export. The Great Depression greatly reduced those chances for prosperity, however, as worldwide demand for agricultural exports declined, jobs for Africans dried up, and white employers unilaterally slashed wages. Meanwhile a series of measures gave European settlers increased control over African squatters. A 1937 ordinance, for example, allowed settlers to limit the number of acres that squatters could cultivate on their own, eliminate squatter livestock, and increase the number of working days per year from 180 to 270. The interruption of the Second World War gave the squatters a certain grace period, but settler pressure for control resumed with a vengeance after 1945, forcing many squatters back to the reserves and provoking their participation in the resistance movement. In 1946–47 a group of Kikuyu ex-squatters at Olenguruone actively challenged government restrictions on their farming and took oaths of unity to protect their rights. Ultimately evicted by colonial officials in 1950, the Olenguruone settlers had close ties with the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA); through these experiences the squatter movement became politicized and the squatters helped to radicalize the KCA.
World War II and the Rise of African Nationalism
The difficult years of the Depression were soon followed by the crisis of World War II. Kenyans were required to fight with British forces against the Italians in Ethiopia and Somalia and against the Japanese in Burma. This time most of them were trained in the use of weapons in combat. Kenya’s primary contribution to the war effort, however, was to provide extensive food supplies for the troops. African homesteads were ordered to sacrifice livestock and crops as “voluntary” contributions to a war effort they understood little about. The war years also witnessed government attempts to silence potential opposition by banning African newspapers and political movements.
The years following World War II saw a great increase in racial tensions and political conflict. Kenyan soldiers who returned home had a new sense of European vulnerabilities and expected to be treated with greater respect for their war service; they also returned with substantial pay packets and great expectations. At the same time, white settlers who had enlisted, or who had stepped in to replace colonial officials called up for the war effort, fully expected to be rewarded for their sacrifices and to have a greater say in the colony’s affairs. These conflicting expectations would collide violently in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s as white settlers confronted greater African militancy in both labor organizations and political movements.
While Nairobi was a British colonial city, with clusters of African neighborhoods scattered around a white official and residential core, Mombasa remained very much the African town it had been for centuries. That is perhaps why the organized Kenyan labor movement centered around the workers of Mombasa, under the able leadership of men like the Luo Tom Mboya and the Indian Makhan Singh. Labor protests at the port of Mombasa beginning in the 1930s culminated in widespread general strikes in 1939, 1947, and 1957, each of which effectively shut down the port and other public operations within Mombasa, and often spread to Nairobi as well. Each strike gained workers some concessions and higher wages, though never as much as they had demanded.
The roots of Kenyan political nationalism lay in the 1920s, when a range of locally based organizations were formed to protest such issues as land alienation, the kipande system, hut taxes, forced labor, and the appointment of African chiefs who lacked local legitimacy. One of the best known of these protest organizations was the Young Kikuyu Association, led by Harry Thuku. When Thuku was arrested for sedition in 1922, hundreds of his supporters surrounded the Nairobi police station and demanded his release; when they refused to disperse, twenty-five people were killed in Kenya’s first large-scale political riot. Thuku was then exiled to British Somalia and his organization banned. A newly named Kikuyu Central Association with similar concerns was formed in 1925. When some Christian missions tried to undermine the Kikuyu tradition of female circumcision by prohibiting initiated girls from attending school, the KCA helped establish an informal network of “independent” schools. By 1939 the KCA had become the colony’s main protest organization and was able to continue underground operations despite its formal banning during World War II.
Nationalist pressures gained momentum with Jomo Kenyatta’s return to Kenya in 1946 after years of study abroad. Widely recognized as the leader of Kikuyu nationalism, Kenyatta was president of the new Kenya African Union (KAU). While other ethnic groups shared many of the same colonial grievances, Kikuyu dominance within KAU and the shaping of the culture of resistance to reflect Kikuyu traditions—including the widespread use of oaths to recruit new members and bind them to secrecy—meant that the nationalist revolt was primarily, though not entirely, a Kikuyu affair.
The Mau Mau Revolt and Kenyan Independence
The Kenyan government declared a State of Emergency in 1952, following sporadic outbreaks of violence targeted at Europeans and African loyalists. The brutal crackdown on African dissent sparked a widespread anticolonial revolt that is known as Mau Mau. Putting martial law in place—including imposing curfews and detaining suspects without trial—colonial police arrested several hundred Kikuyu political activists in the Nairobi area, including Kenyatta himself. Thousands of Kikuyu in Nairobi were forcibly repatriated to the rural areas. Losing their key leaders at one blow, the movement went underground and developed a more decentralized leadership in rural areas. Hundreds of Kikuyu men and some women fled to the forests of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares, where they formed the military arm of the Mau Mau movement, the Land and Freedom Army, and staged guerrilla raids on British command centers and loyalist farms.
While several white settler families were attacked and the greater white community lived in fear, those who suffered most during the 1950s were clearly the Kikuyu themselves. Perhaps 100,000 Kikuyu men and women were arrested and held in detention camps where they were beaten and required to perform hard labor. Great hardships also faced those who remained on the land. Perhaps a million Kikuyu were forced to abandon their existing homes and build new houses in concentrated settlements in an attempt to cut off peasant support for the guerrilla fighters. Made up primarily of old men, women, and children, these stockaded villages were usually surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and a deep trench, and were guarded by armed loyalists.
Kikuyu women were active in support of the Mau Mau struggle, one important example being the women’s organization Maendeleo ya Wanawake (Progress for Women). Originally founded by European women in the 1950s, Maendeleo helped improve the lives of African women through training in domestic arts and science. After independence Maendeleo helped women learn crafts which could generate income for their families, and gave them a collective voice in society and politics.
In 1989, perhaps because of the success of that independent voice, the Kenyan government absorbed Maendeleo into the dominant party, making it essentially the women’s branch of the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), despite the independent Kenyan governement having been largely a men’s affair.
The State of Emergency was finally lifted in 1960. After nearly a decade of struggle, some fifteen thousand Africans had died, while at most a hundred Europeans had been killed. Mau Mau suspects kept in detention often returned home to find their farms and cattle reallocated to loyalists. The disruption of African life in central Kenya had been severe. But while the Land and Freedom Army might have lost the battle, in the sense that effective military challenge was largely put down within a few years, they had essentially won the war. The costs of continued colonial control were simply too high for British officials, and negotiations began to settle the terms and process of the transition to Kenyan political independence; African representatives were first elected to the Legislative Council (LegCo) in 1957.
Most white settlers gave in bitterly and withdrew in the early 1960s, selling their farms and leaving Kenya. A few stayed on, and the first minister of agriculture in the new government was a European. The independent Kenyan government purchased many abandoned white farms to make them available for landless peasants; in practice most farms were purchased by members of the new African elite, who relied on tenant farmers to provide labor.
In December 1963, Kenya became an independent nation under the political leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, with a democratically elected Legislative Council. In December 1964 a republican constitution was adopted and Kenyatta became president. Despite the rhetoric of the radical nationalists, the new Kenyan government declared its commitment to capitalism and to private property. Kenyatta assured world leaders that his would not be a “gangster government,” and urged Kenyans to forget the past. The powerful Kenyan labor organizations were ultimately folded into the Kenyan African National Union, the dominant political party, as KANU leaders felt a new and fragile nation could not afford confrontation with workers.
Only a month after formal independence, a short-lived mutiny occurred at the Nairobi headquarters of the Kenya African Rifles in January 1964, and British troops quickly restored order. Kenyatta moved swiftly to improve wages and barracks conditions for the rank and file and to promote Africans within the KAR to positions previously held by whites.
President Kenyatta ruled the country until his death in 1978. A smaller ethnic group, the Kalenjin, came to enjoy the fruits of power under his successor, Daniel arap Moi. Kenya’s population has increased rapidly in recent years, while the changing terms of trade for agricultural products since the early 1980s have led to a generally stagnant rural economy. A coup attempt in 1982—the most serious threat faced by the new nation—was sparked by air force officers who attacked Moi’s government for corruption and economic mismanagement. Forces loyal to the government restored order after a few days. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and other Western nations have pushed the Moi regime to reduce corruption, impose economic reforms, and permit a more open political system. Moi capitulated to international pressure in late 1991 and announced that opposition political parties could form and compete in national elections. In the face of the relative weakness of the ethnically fragmented and under-funded opposition, the regime has continued its repression of dissent, including the use of government-funded ethnic violence to convince ordinary Kenyans that they are safer clinging to the status quo.
Jean Hay
Boston, June 2000
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye is one of the most prolific women writers, not only in Kenya, but also in Africa. She has distinguished herself as a writer of novels, poetry, and children’s stories. She was born in Southampton, England, in 1928 and came to Kenya as a missionary bookseller in 1954. She married D.G.W. Macgoye in 1960 and subsequently integrated into her husband’s extended family and the Luo community. This feature is well manifested in her literary works which have been acknowledged all over the world. Coming to Birth won the Sinclair Prize for fiction in 1986, while Homing In won second place in the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1985.
The Feminist Press is an educational nonprofit organization founded to advance women’s rights and amplify feminist perspectives. FP publishes classic and new writing from around the world, creates cutting-edge programs, and elevates silenced and marginalized voices in order to support personal transformation and social justice for all people.
See our complete list of books at feministpress.org
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
Changes
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ISBN: 9781558610651 | Ebook coming soon!
Esi decides to divorce after enduring yet another morning’s marital rape. Though her friends and family remain baffled by her decision (after all, he doesn’t beat her!), Esi holds fast. When she falls in love with a married man—wealthy, and able to arrange a polygamous marriage—the modern woman finds herself trapped in a new set of problems. Witty and compelling, Aidoo’s novel, according to Manthia Diawara, “inaugurates a new realist style in African literature.”
“Aidoo writes with intense power in a novel that, in examining the role of women in modern African society, also sheds light on women’s problems around the globe.” —Publishers Weekly
And They Didn’t Die
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ISBN: 9781558612136 | Ebook coming soon!
Drawing on firsthand experience, distinguished South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo depicts the lives of rural women in South Africa, paying homage to the extraordinary courage and remarkable endurance of these unsung heroines of the struggle against apartheid.
Set in the barren Sabelweini Valley in the 1950s to 1980s, the novel centers around one young woman, Jezile, whose political consciousness deepens as state laws threaten her earnings and her land. Arrested along with hundreds of others and sentenced to six months hard labor in prison, Jezile returns home to find her child dying of starvation. When her husband is arrested for stealing milk to save the child, Jezile must fight to ensure her family’s survival. “And They Didn’t Die brilliantly chronicles the untold predicaments of women caught between custom, white law, and the migrant system,” notes Anne McClintock.
David’s Story
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ISBN: 9781558613980 | Ebook coming soon!
The 1987 publication of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town won Zoë Wicomb an international readership and wide critical acclaim. As richly imagined and stylistically innovative as Wicomb’s debut work, David’s Story is a mesmerizing novel, multilayered and multivoiced, at times elegiac, wry, and expansive.
Unfolding in South Africa at the moment of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1991, the novel explores the life and vision of David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement—a world seldom revealed to outsiders. With “time to think” after the unbanning of the movement, David is researching his roots in the history of the mixed-race “Coloured” people of South Africa and of their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers.
“For years we have been waiting to see what the literature of post-apartheid South Africa will look like. Now Zoë Wicomb delivers the goods. Witty in tone, sophisticated in technique, eclectic in language, beholden to no one in its politics, David’s Story is a tremendous achievement and a huge step in the remaking of the South African novel.” —J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace
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The Present Moment Page 23