Was land or labour the deeper grievance in colonial Kenya?

The short answer

• A railway that needed freight. Britain built the Uganda Railway to secure Uganda and the Nile. Once the line was built, its cost—about £5.5 million, far above early estimates—posed another problem: London wanted the protectorate to do without Treasury grants. Officials expected European export farmers to furnish paying freight. From 1903 Commissioner Charles Eliot advertised highland land to prospective settlers in Britain and South Africa. The effort to finance transport thus became a policy for settling the land.
• Land declared empty. The land was not empty merely because its users lacked European titles. Pasture that Maasai herders left to rest in the dry season could nevertheless appear vacant to surveyors unfamiliar with their practice. The 1902 ordinance authorized the Crown to lease “waste and unoccupied” land; the 1915 ordinance made even occupied African land Crown property. In 1911–13 the Maasai were moved off Laikipia. As in Saint-Domingue a century earlier, colonial wealth rested on a legal fiction about ownership and about who could be made to work the land.
• Taxes and the pass made a labour force. Land alone would not produce settler crops. Farmers needed workers, and government measures helped provide them. The hut tax of 1901 and poll tax of 1910 required cash, pushing men toward wages. The kipande, compulsory from 1919–20, recorded employers and allowed police to stop men anywhere; its records could trace someone who left a harsh employer. The state helped discipline a dispersed rural labor force, and the pass became the most hated object in colonial Kenya.
• A state that listened to settlers. The people who held the highlands also had a place in making colonial law. Settlers sat on the Legislative Council from 1907, with Lord Delamere as their leader until his death in 1931; Africans had no elected voice. When settlers demanded self-government in the early 1920s, London’s Devonshire Declaration of 1923 called Kenya “an African territory” and made African interests paramount. It checked the settlers’ political ambitions. Their land, however, remained in their hands, leaving the promise made in London far from the conditions Africans faced.

What it changed

Kikuyu land politics takes the lead. The Kikuyu Central Association pursued land claims through evidence and petitions. It collected accounts of lost fields for the Kenya Land Commission, sent Kenyatta to London, and, after the 1929–31 quarrel over female circumcision, backed schools independent of the missions. Kikuyu land politics became the best-organized African politics in Kenya after 1922. When the commission confirmed the White Highlands in 1934, a generation saw petitions fail to recover the land. The next chapter follows the resulting search for another course into the oath.

Squatters move onto the settler farms. Dispossession also sent Kikuyu families onto settler farms as squatters. These resident laborers worked for the farmer in exchange for a plot and grazing, much as tenants might pay rent in labor. The arrow traces their movement from the reserves into the Rift Valley; by the early 1930s they numbered more than 100,000. The arrangement depended on settlers’ need for labor. When the bargain collapsed after 1945, the Rift Valley became a cradle of Mau Mau.

A colony of separate peoples. Administration through separate reserves, chiefs and labels encouraged separate political organization among the Kamba, Taita, Luo and Luhya, and Kikuyu. The consequences reached the parties of 1960: KANU spoke for the larger communities, while KADU represented smaller communities that feared them. Thuku’s earlier attempt to unite people across those lines had raised a question that remained open at independence and long afterward: could Kenyans act as one people?