• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The company failed and faced financial collapse. Colonization only began in earnest in 1895, when the British Foreign Office (and then the Colonial Office in 1905) took charge. London’s main interest was strategic: controlling the Nile headwaters and thus, theoretically, supporting British interests downriver in Sudan and Egypt. Toward this end, a railroad was built from costal Mombasa into Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Completed in 1901, the railway quickly opened the country to white settlement, commercial exploitation, and political pacification. A contemporary article explained, “The Uganda railway, in addition to the political effects of its construction, must have, and indeed already has had, a marked effect on the habits and mode of life of the natives. It has brought them into immediate contact with civilization, and opened up possibilities of trade. It has calmed inter-tribal animosities, and checked the feudatory raids of the aggressive races. It has opened up the whole of the countries lying near the coast-line of the Victoria Nyanza Lake to comparatively easy communication with the sea and with Europe.”3

In this regard, the railway, though a single line, acted as a socioeconomic fence, enclosing and transforming the regions around it: local forms of economic production were destroyed, displaced, or incorporated as subsets of the growing international capitalist economy.4 By 1907, white settlers were pouring in. Through force of law, taxation, and economic might these settlers took possession of what are now the highlands of central Kenya. From 1895 to 1903, British forces conducted regular “punitive expeditions.” This use of force was central to wresting land from African hands, though not necessarily in the direct fashion of, say, the Belgian campaigns of violent theft in the Congo. More often than not, the actual transfer of land from Africans to settlers involved legerdemain, haggling, cooperation, and co-optation, all conducted against the backdrop of violence. In the process, some African elites even made out well.

John Lonsdale, another doyen of East African history, describes the nuance as follows: “What transpired on the battlefield then, when the Hotchkiss or Maxim was assembled or the bayonet charge went in; when the thatch was fired or the cattle captured—all this was of fundamental importance in establishing a sense of mastery or subordination. But force was not power. Power comes not by a single act of confrontation but by repeated transactions within some ordered set of social relations; its costs and benefits must at least carry the possibility of calculation and prediction.”5 In other words, states are born of violence, but they cannot be made solely of violence.

Along with colonial administration from Britain, white settlers established their own local government of sorts, the Legislative Council, which worked with London, but also against it. At their height, some 350,000 whites lived in Kenya. It was they who most antagonized and directly exploited the native population.6 London and Nairobi bickered constantly about military expenses and the low economic productivity of the white farmers. “In its first nine years military costs swallowed nearly one-third of the Protectorate’s budget; they exceeded local revenue, and were chiefly to blame for the tripling of the annual Imperial subsidy in the five years from 1896.”7

Using Crisis, Seeding Crisis

Aiding British political consolidation—which is to say, the eventual formation of a modern state system in East Africa—was the ecological crisis of the 1890s, when drought, livestock diseases, and smallpox killed almost a quarter of the native people in central Kenya. The survivors were desperate for patrons both for defense against raids and for access to resources. “In the devastated areas of Kenya the British happened to be the best patrons available. . . . They had also come as conquerors.”8

As local modes of production spun into crisis, the settler class used its money to buy up land. But the white farms