Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia 1900–1963, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
5. Clayton, A. and Savage, D. C., Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895–1963, London, Frank Cass, 1974, give a full account of the evolution of various categories of labour in the colony. Also, see especially Van Zwanenberg, R. M. A., Colonial Capitalism and Labour in Kenya, 1919–1939, Nairobi, East African Literature Bureau, 1975.
6. Interview, James Mumbu Muya, alias Kinuthia Muya, 14 October 1976, Elburgon.
7. Interview, Arphaxad Kiiru Kuria, 21 September 1976, Elburgon. The abundance of land was constantly mentioned by informants as having been a major determinant of squatter movement to the White Highlands.
8. For the majority of settlers, capital was scarce and farming in the White Highlands difficult. See, for example, Simpson, A., The Land that Never Was, London, Selwyn and Blout, 1937; and Whittaker, E. Dimbilil: The Story of a Kenya Farm, London, Morrison and Gibb, 1956, for an insight into the daily struggles the settlers faced.
9. Ghai, Y.P. and McAuslan, J.P.W.B., Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, Nairobi, OUP, 1971, pp. 83–4. From a previous average of 90 days per year, the squatter was required to do at least 180 days’ work per year after the enactment of the 1918 RNLO.
10. ibid., pp. 95–6.
11. See Rosberg, C. and Nottingham, J., The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya, Nairobi, EAPH, 1966, pp. 248–59.
12. Among other works, Wasserman, G., The Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and their Land Use, 1960–1965, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976 analyses how decolonisation was organised so as to give the upper hand in the deliberations to the settlers and colonial government.
One
The Genesis of the Squatter Community, 1905–18
By the end of the First World War, the squatter system had become an established part of the socio-economic structure of European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations.1 This study shows how, contrary to settler and colonial government intentions, the squatter phenomenon was created as a response to the difficulties of settlers in securing labour power and of Africans in gaining access to arable and grazing land.
To some extent, the squatters did meet the settlers’ labour needs, but on terms other than those preferred by the settlers. The squatters, trying to cope as best they could with pressures from their own society, which were intensified by land alienation and labour extraction by the chiefs, exploited the weaknesses and dependence of the settler economy to turn themselves precisely into the kind of independent community the settlers and government feared. The squatter and settler communities thus created two incompatible systems. This dichotomy reached successive crises during the kifagio period (when the squatters lost their livestock) and in the Mau Mau rebellion.
The development and success of the European settler plantation agriculture as the basis of Kenya’s economy depended heavily on the availability of land, labour and capital. In a series of excisions, the government alienated about 7 million acres of land, including some of the most fertile in Kenya. This land comprised what came to be known as the White Highlands, or the Settled Areas, which were set aside for exclusive European agriculture.
As well as access to land, the settlers needed a cheap and abundant supply of labour. It was intended that Africans should be farm-workers on settler farms. The government proceeded to impose various legislative and financial measures to force Africans into the labour market.2 These measures included the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively), the alienation of African lands and the discouragement of African cash crops, especially in areas bordering the White Highlands. These would ensure that Africans were unable to become self-sufficient and would have to seek wage employment to meet their cash needs. For a period, the government even procured forced labour. The 1906 Masters and Servants Ordinance and an identification pass known as the kipande (1918) were used to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion. At the same time, the government sought to strengthen the settler economy by providing various services. These included a rail and road network, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services and credit and loan facilities.3
The above measures were all designed to polarise the settler and African economies, by subordinating the latter to the former.4 The process was protracted, violent and subtle, and unleashed numerous conflicts and contradictions. Although they were progressively subordinated, Africans, particularly the squatters, sought to adjust, and in some cases to outwit, the colonial machinations. The following examination of land alienation among the Kikuyu attempts to illustrate both the colonial government’s disregard for African rights of proprietorship in land, and the Kikuyu responses to the situation, especially with regard to the emergence of the squatter community.
Land alienation among the Kikuyu
When the British government declared a Protectorate over what came to be known as Kenya, Kikuyu settlement stretched northwards of Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya.5 European settlement of the White Highlands began in the southern district of Kikuyu country.6 It soon transpired that settlers intended to appropriate the more highly cultivated areas, land that had already been broken in preference to waste and unoccupied land.7 Administrative officers entrusted with the task of processing European applications for land usually gave settlers immediate authority to occupy land, with the only condition being that they pay the Kikuyu owners a meagre three rupees per acre compensation for their loss of rights.8 In the Kiambu-Limuru areas about 60,000 acres of Kikuyu land were alienated between 1903 and 1906.9 By 1933, 109.5 square miles of potentially highly valuable Kikuyu land had been alienated for European settlement. A register listed 50 Europeans who were expected to compensate the African owners of the land they now occupied with a total of 3,848 rupees to be shared between approximately 8,000 Kikuyu. A further 3,000 Kikuyu living on the land at the time of alienation received no compensation whatsoever.10
This indiscriminate alienation of African land rendered several thousand Africans landless. Those Kikuyu who had lost their land to European settlers in the Kiambu-Limuru areas were urged to stay on to provide labour for them. By July 1910, there were 11,647 Kikuyu on the Kiambu-Limuru settler farms cultivating approximately 11,300 acres of land then owned by European settlers. Some of these ‘squatters’ were the original owners of these same farms.11
The term ‘squatter’, which originated in South Africa, denoted an African permitted to reside on a European farmer’s land, usually on condition he worked for the European owner for a specified period. In return for his services, the African was entitled to use some of the settler’s land for the purposes of cultivation and grazing. In the case of the Kiambu-Limuru Kikuyu, this meant that those who continued to reside on the same land were transformed from landowners to squatters overnight. This first group also included Kikuyu families that had fled from the Kiambu-Limuru area to Muranga during the 1899 famine and had since returned. They too were encouraged to remain on their alienated land to provide for the labour demands of the settlers.12 But this initial attempt to create an African labour force was largely unsuccessful. Africans were reluctant to work as wage-labourers except temporarily and at their own convenience. In many cases, wage labour meant having to work far from home. This, coupled with the various hardships of wage labour, including inadequate housing, low wages, long working hours and unfamiliar diets, precipitated unrest and desertion among the workers.13
Attempts to turn the Kikuyu into farm-workers were
