Was land or labour the deeper grievance in colonial Kenya?

The short answer

• A railway that needed freight. The protectorate existed to protect a railway, and the railway needed paying traffic. Built to secure Uganda and the Nile, the line cost about £5.5 million, far above early estimates, and London expected the protectorate to stop relying on Treasury grants. Officials concluded that European farmers growing export crops would supply the freight, so Commissioner Charles Eliot advertised the highlands to settlers in Britain and South Africa from 1903. A transport project became a settlement policy, and the colony’s politics followed from it.
• Land declared empty. Colonial law treated African land as vacant whenever nobody could show a European kind of title. The ordinance of 1902 let the Crown lease “waste and unoccupied” land, the ordinance of 1915 made even occupied African land Crown property, and the Maasai were moved off Laikipia in 1911–13. Pasture left to rest in the dry season looked empty to surveyors who did not understand herding. As in Saint-Domingue a century earlier, the colony’s wealth depended on a legal fiction about who owned the land and who could be made to work it.
• Taxes and the pass made a labour force. Settlers needed workers even more than they needed land, and the state supplied them. A hut tax from 1901 and a poll tax from 1910 had to be paid in cash, which pushed men into wage work, and the kipande, compulsory from 1919–20, recorded each man’s employers and let police stop him anywhere. A worker who left a harsh employer could be traced through his papers. The pass turned a scattered rural population into a disciplined labour supply, and it became the most hated object in colonial Kenya.
• A state that listened to settlers. Settlers sat on the Legislative Council, the colony’s law-making body, from 1907, and Lord Delamere led them until his death in 1931, while Africans had no elected voice at all. When settlers demanded self-government in the early 1920s, London answered with the Devonshire Declaration of 1923, which called Kenya “an African territory” in which African interests must be paramount. The words checked the settlers’ political ambitions, yet the land stayed in their hands. Kenyans learned that promises made in London changed little on the ground.

What it changed

Kikuyu land politics takes the lead. After 1922 the best-organised African politics in Kenya was Kikuyu politics about land. The Kikuyu Central Association gathered evidence of lost fields for the Kenya Land Commission, backed schools independent of the missions after the quarrel over female circumcision in 1929–31, and sent Kenyatta to London. When the commission confirmed the White Highlands in 1934, a generation concluded that petitions would not bring the land back, the conclusion the next chapter follows into the oath.

Squatters move onto the settler farms. Landless Kikuyu families moved onto settler farms as squatters, resident labourers who worked for the farmer in return for a plot and grazing, much like tenants paying their rent in labour. By the early 1930s there were more than 100,000 of them, a movement traced by the arrow from the reserves into the Rift Valley. Their bargain held while settlers needed labour more than land, and its collapse after 1945 made the Rift Valley a cradle of Mau Mau.

A colony of separate peoples. Colonial rule had drawn a reserve, a chief and a label for each people, and each organised on its own: the Kamba, the Taita, the Luo and Luhya, the Kikuyu. These separate politics shaped the parties of 1960, when KANU spoke for the larger communities and KADU for the smaller ones that feared them. The question Thuku had raised, whether Kenyans could act as one people, stayed open at independence and long after it.