The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (60 page)

attract marginal men and fortune hunters. They were a sorry collection of adventurers, hunters, con men, drunkards, and outright criminals who were hardly the best representatives of the civilized west.

Slipping the bonds of metropolitan conceptions of morality, they had

free rein to indulge their lust for wealth and power. Bartolomé de

Las Casas, Edmund Burke, and other earlier metropolitan critics of

empire would have recognized these corrupting imperial infl uences.

Meinertzhagen at least was honest about how serving the East Africa

Protectorate tested him.

It is hard to resist the savagery of Africa when one falls under its

spell. One soon reverts to one’s ancestral character, both mind and

temperament becoming brutalized. I have seen so much of it out here

and I have myself felt the magnetic power of the African climate

drawing me lower and lower to the level of a savage.17

In his eyes, most KAR offi cers were “regimental rejects” who failed

this test by becoming obsessed with money, drink, pornography, mistresses, and small boys.18 Precious few of the men who did the messy

work of empire building were suited to be capitalist entrepreneurs

or sober landed gentlemen, and migrants leaving Britain with agricultural experience had far better options in the United States and

the dominions. Apart from about 280 itinerant Afrikaners from the

Transvaal, there were only one hundred permanent settlers in the

protectorate in 1903.

Eliot therefore recognized that it would take signifi cant inducements to lure the right kind of men to East Africa. Seizing land from

the Maasai, Kikuyu, Nandi, Kamba, and other highland communities,

he offered settlers ninety-nine-year leases on parcels of 640 acres of

prime agricultural land at the rock-bottom rate of less than one pence

per acre. Companies could apply for even larger concessions ranging up to one hundred thousand acres, and a new ordinance in 1915

increased the tenure of the leases to 999 years. Even these generous

308 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

inducements did not bring the expected rush of settlers, and land

speculation proved far more profi table than farming. By the opening of the First World War, less than 10 percent of the alienated land

was under cultivation, but farms that went for six pence per acre in

1903 were selling for one pound per acre in 1914. Moreover, powerful

imperial interests and syndicates used political and family connections to buy up much of the available land. This gave fi ve individuals

and two syndicates the means to acquire 20 percent of the highlands,

and in 1912 there were still only about one thousand permanent settlers in the protectorate.19

The imperial regime’s legal authority for this blatant land theft

was the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902, which gave the Crown

title to all “unoccupied” land in the protectorate. Linking land and

identity, this legislation also set up a “native reserve” for each tribe.

Theoretically, these reservations prevented unscrupulous European

or South Asian speculators from duping ignorant tribesmen into selling lands that were their tribe’s communal property. As one offi cial

paternalistically claimed, the Crown’s ownership of African land was

a legal fi ction intended to “protect the natives from themselves.” This

was nonsense, and in reality the actual purpose of the reserve system

was to open up the protectorate for expropriation by Europeans. The

highlands thus became the “white highlands,” which developed into

a three-million-hectare settler “native” reserve off-limits to Africans. The peoples of the coast and the western Lake Nyanza/Victoria

region did not lose land directly to western settlement, but they too

became subject natives.

Imperial offi cials tried to legitimize these land seizures by depicting the highlands as underpopulated. Sir Harry Johnston described

them as “admirably suited for a white man’s country” because they

were “utterly uninhabited for miles or at most its inhabitants are

wandering hunters who have no settled home.”20 In fact, most highland communities were well on the way to demographic recovery

from the devastation of the 1890s by the time Eliot began to promote

European settlement. The Kikuyu in particular expanded rapidly

during this period by sending landless young men to carve out new

farms on the margins of their territory. British demands for food for

caravan porters, railway laborers, and settlers accelerated this process

by giving entrepreneurial Kikuyu farmers an incentive to increase

their agricultural output. Ironically, these ambitious men would have

British

Kenya 309

made ideal customers for the Uganda Railway. Company agents at

the time described the Kikuyu heartland as “one vast garden,” and

even Johnston’s comrade Frederick Lugard had to admit that their

“whole country may be said to be under tillage.”21

The Maasai, by comparison, found another way to recover from

the disasters of the previous decade. Finding common cause with the

British invaders, they rebuilt their herds by enlisting as native auxiliaries in the pacifi cation campaigns. While postindependence Kenyan

nationalists might have viewed this as treason, East Africans had no

reason to identify themselves collectively, much less nationally, until

the imperial era. From the Maasai standpoint, the IBEAC was a useful ally in their struggle with far more threatening rivals such as the

Nandi and Kikuyu. They had no reason to suspect that British settlers would eventually displace them by claiming three-quarters of

the Rift Valley.

This is why the totality of the imperial conquest shocked most

communities. In just a few decades, the British made a quick transition from useful trading partners and political allies to plundering but

manageable marauders and then to determined land-stealing empire

builders. The father of political activist Harry Thuku was stunned to

fi nd that a government offi cial suddenly claimed title to his farm, and

he had little recourse when the Europeans told him: “You have no

land. The land belongs to God. God has given it to the white man, and

they have it now.”22 Just as Iberians and Andeans turned to prophecy to explain the totality of their defeat, East Africans now recalled

the warnings of oracles and wise men who foretold the arrival of the

pale-skinned foreigners and their railway. The Nandi remembered

that Koitalel’s father, Kimnyole, had prophesized that whites borne

by a giant shrieking, crawling, and smoking serpent would come to

kill his sons, take their cattle, and drive them from their homes. The

Kikuyu recorded that Mogo wa Kebiro issued similar warnings about

strangers colored like frogs and bearing magical fi re-belching sticks.23

These tales were not the result of primitive superstition; they were

born of the highland communities’ desperate need to make sense of

their enormous losses.

In time, their children recognized the conquest for the imperial power grab that it really was. Writing three decades later, Jomo

Kenyatta blamed the Kikuyu defeat on their willingness to befriend

the European strangers who appeared in the country as tired and

310 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

hungry vagrants and wanderers. Assuming that these people would

be temporary sojourners, the Kikuyu elders signed their treaties and

granted them permission to settle temporarily as clients. In Kenyatta’s view, his people were defeated through treachery, not because

they were somehow culturally inferior. “The Gikuyu lost their lands

through their magnanimity, for the Gikuyu country was never

wholly conquered by force of arms, but the people were put under

the ruthless domination of European imperialism through the insidious trickery of hypocritical treaties.”24

Protectorate offi cials and settlers dismissed or muzzled this opposition by portraying East Africans as primitive tribesmen lacking

the capacity to make proper use of the rich highlands. But the EAP

also struggled to attract the right kind of settler. Anxious to be rid of

the politically embarrassing lumpen rabble that had undertaken the

original conquest of the highlands, Eliot was determined to make the

protectorate an aristocratic “white man’s country.”

The commissioner had an ally in Lord Cranworth, a member of the

House of Lords with extensive interests in East Africa, who published

a book promoting the EAP as the perfect place for English elites to

create the feudal society of privilege and deference that they believed

had withered away in democratic industrial Britain. With chapters on

health, climate, agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, horse racing,

polo, and other sporting pursuits, the book claimed that the protectorate had everything a propertied Englishman could want.

A perfect balmy climate? Take Nairobi and Kyambu. Something

a little more bracing and with a touch of frost? Try Likipia or the

Uasin Gishu plateau. Would you have a reminder of the West coast

of Scotland with heavy rain, mist and lovely days interspersed? The

Mau or the Nandi Escarpment will give it [to] you. A touch of the

wind off the North Sea in East Anglia? The West Kenia plains can do

that. While something really cold and bitter you must climb up into

Kenia’s glaciers.25

This sort of advertising drew men like Hugh Cholmondeley (Lord

Delamere), who purchased one hundred thousand acres in the highlands for just fi ve thousand pounds at the tender age of twenty-eight.

Strict immigration controls required would-be immigrants to prove

they had at least one thousand pounds in the bank, and the government deported to Bombay poorer undesirables who might diminish

British

Kenya 311

“white prestige” after fi rst forcing them to work off the cost of their

passage in the Mombasa jail.26

Although they had no formal position of authority in the EAP,

Delamere and the settler aristocracy had considerable infl uence over

sympathetic protectorate offi cials. In 1907, they won the right to elect

representatives to the Legislative Council, and their Convention of

Associations became a virtual lower parliamentary house. Opened by

the governor (formerly the protectorate commissioner), the convention called offi cials to testify on government policy and debated bills

under consideration in the formal legislative council.

Nevertheless, the settlers never felt physically or morally secure.

Although they had their own militia, they relied on the European-led

African soldiers of the KAR and “native” policemen for their protection. Those living on remote farms worried constantly about their

safety, particularly when the press carried a report or rumor of an

African assault on a European. The fact that these “outrages” were

actually extremely rare was not reassuring. Ever mindful that they

were a privileged minority, the settler community relied on the illusion of racial and cultural superiority to exercise authority. This is

why Grogan insisted that European prestige “must be maintained at

all costs, as it is the sole hold we have over the native.”27 Strict racial

segregation concealed the settlers’ inherent vulnerability, and they

strove futilely to create all-white enclaves where Africans would only

visit as domestic servants and temporary laborers.

The settlers staked their claim to the highlands by asserting that

they alone had the means to develop the protectorate, but African

produce accounted for 70 percent of the EAP’s exports before the

First World War. The settlers nevertheless justifi ed their privileges by

depicting Africans as irredeemably simple and slothful. The Kikuyu

came in for particular abuse as the settlers’ chief agricultural and

political rivals, and Cranworth unashamedly described them as “a

most miserable cowardly race.”28 This was empire at its most hypocritical, for Cranworth’s estates would have been worthless without

Kikuyu to work them.

As in earlier empires, the East Africa Protectorate’s true wealth

was in its people. The settlers reconciled their labor demands with

the imperial lobby’s humanitarian rhetoric by depicting toil as inherently civilizing. Frederick Lugard, Britain’s foremost imperial ideologue, reassured the metropolitan public that it was possible to both

312 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

uplift Africa’s “native races” and exploit its resources. He asserted

that the “white races” had a moral obligation to make the continent’s

wealth available to the wider world by directing their labor.29 Invoking Lugard’s declaration of this “dual mandate,” the colonial secretary

Leopold Amery confi dently told the Houses of Commons: “Our fi rst

duty is to [our African subjects]; our object is not to exploit them, but

to enable them materially, as well as in every other respect, to rise to

a high plane of living and civilization.”30

Rhetoric aside, the fortunes of settler farmers, concession holders,

and speculators depended on a poorly paid, subservient African work

force. Most westerners came to East Africa with the expectation that

Africans would grow their food, build their houses, and tend to their

most basic domestic needs. In the settlers’ eyes, the EAP was obliged

to supply this cheap if not free labor. The complication was that the