Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [33]
The effect of these coddling, racist restrictions and subsidies was to retard development of a functional capitalist economy within the colony. The matrix of protection established by and for the settlers was only removed in the 1930s, when the buildup to World War II triggered a global commodity boom. Britain needed raw materials and food imports more than it needed a white African cowboy aristocracy. As Colin Leys has shown, when black farmers were finally allowed to compete for and produce a share of exports, Kenya’s economic growth took off.9
Kikuyu Pushback
By the 1950s, the Kikuyu, who had been deracinated from the highlands by white settlers, had nonetheless created something of a merchant, farming, and town-based intellectual leadership, and they began to agitate for greater political rights. This was met with repression, and soon many Kikuyu turned to guerrilla warfare.
The Mau Mau rebellion, as this uprising was known, provoked a brutal and sophisticated counterinsurgency. Whites called it “the Emergency,” and the internal siege was replete with armed sweeps, terror squads, mass detention, torture, reeducation and the use of small, elite counterguerilla units. The official casualty figure was 11,503 killed; however, scholars now put the number much higher.10 David Anderson settles on 20,000. Caroline Elikin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya estimates the dead to have numbered 70,000 or more.11 The Mau Mau were crushed, but they put Kenya on schedule for full independence and the end for white minority rule in East Africa.
As decolonization approached, the authorities began negotiations with their former adversary, Jomo Kenyatta. During the Emergency, white officials had demonized Kenyatta as a madman, a Mau Mau, and a communist and put him under house arrest. In reality Kenyatta was a liberal nationalist, who, once released, acted as Britain’s reasonable native interlocutor. The final arrangements of independence protected settler wealth and gave settlers who wished to leave the option to sell their property at market prices. To pay off these departing landlords, the new Kenyan government borrowed money from the United Kingdom. Acquired assets—land and businesses—were mostly distributed to a new Kikuyu ruling class, who were also heavily represented in Kenyatta’s new government, and the Kenya African National Union, which was the ruling party until 2002. This dominant position partially explains—but in no way justifies—the pogroms against Kikuyus in 2007; once again, class antagonisms took ethnic form.
Decline of Old Raiding
By 1909 colonial administrators had established the Collective Punishment Ordinance that attempted to stop raiding by levying punitive fines on whole communities.12 Colonial files at the National Archives in Nairobi are full of reports from District Officers detailing an endless flow of tit-for-tat attacks between the tribes. British officials routinely held hearings, issued reports, detained suspects, levied fines, pursued fugitives, and sternly admonished local subchiefs, who were usually leaders appointed by the British.
The historical trend of East African cattle violence is difficult to measure with total accuracy—the records are incomplete, skewed, and tainted—but there is evidence of a relative decline in raiding from about the late 1920s until the early 1970s. Steady expansion of the state’s administrative capacity and the absorption of ever more people into the formal labor market seem to have cut down on the violence. The British created legally delineated “group ranches” designed to separate warring tribes and bring about the economic integration