day-to-day administration to specially designated African functionaries dealt with the inability of the slim ranks of British officials to be everywhere at once in the districts under their authority, and indirect rule had the added advantage of being cheap. To borrow Sara Berry’s famous phrase, indirect rule was meant to enable “hegemony on a shoestring” and institutionalize a political, racial, and social hierarchy.26
Implementing indirect rule required the work of imagination and invention. British authorities had a “mental map” in which Kenya’s diverse and numerous ethnic groups were neatly divided into easily discernible “tribes,” with particular expectations attached to them. “Tribes,” as Brett Shadle points out, “were in the colonial imagination discrete collections of people attached to unique cultural, political, and societal norms, ruled by strong chiefs.”27 Even if African communities did not assert “tribal” identities, Shadle’s statement brings us to the second layer of invention—the creation of African institutions and offices where none had existed before or had been present in significantly different forms. In many instances, the British introduced hierarchical political organization into ethnic groups that were acephalous, or “without a head,” or which located and exercised authority through councils typically composed of elders. As one 1909 administrative report neatly summed up, “The prestige of the chiefs is in the process of being created in most cases.”28 The introduction of indirect rule and the tribal imaginings that accompanied it had far-reaching consequences in East Africa. Images of the British administrator in a pith helmet and the loyal, submissive African chief in “tribal dress” emerged, like those of the white hunter and the settler baron, as avatars of colonial rule.29 Indirect rule was also part of the politics of “divide and conquer,” as British policy and practice hardened flexible webs of ethnic affiliation and affinity into distinct, cemented “tribal” categories, and subsequently parceled out power and privilege to favored “tribes” whom they deemed more “advanced” or “evolved.” This (re)imagining of fluid ethnicities into fixed tribes mobilized Victorian views of European history and contemporary notions of scientific racism. As John Iliffe explains, British officials believed that “every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar, to academic distinction between tribal societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, and to postwar anthropologists who preferred ‘tribal’ to the more pejorative word ‘savage.’”30
This view of the African as inherently “tribal” not only shaped colonial policy and practice, but also transformed the ways in which Africans reckoned their own identities and conceived of “self” and “other,” “us” and “them.” While the ethnic boundaries of many communities were ossified through this process of “inventing” tribes out of ethnicities, entirely new “umbrella” groups, such as Kalenjin, Abaluhya, and Mijikenda, were also formed out of amalgamations of smaller groups and imagined as discrete cultural communities for the first time.31 Overall, from the top down, British policies “invented tribes,” but Africans worked to shape and manage these identities throughout the colonial period.
Local politics, upended by a model of colonial rule that introduced new offices and often filled them with young men who would have been on the outside of conventional precolonial power structures, came to be deeply inflected by “tribal” identifications and interests. As amply illustrated by the Luo embrace of Obama that forms the core of this book, ethnic affinities continue to drive Kenyan politics, while “tribalism” has remained the central trope used in characterizing politics in Kenya from the colonial era into the present day.32 The effects of indirect rule and “tribal imaginaries” were not confined to the social and political arenas, but also profoundly reshaped economic life in Kenya. The next section turns to living and laboring and law in colonial Kenya and the myth of the “dutiful native.”
Creating Markets and Compelling Labor: Settler Violence and the Myth of the “Dutiful Native”
The alienation of African lands to white settlement was carried out through a series of laws that created two side-by-side systems of landholding in Kenya. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902 solved the problem of who “owned” land in Kenya, rendering all land not “physically occupied by local people” free for white settlement. The 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance further alienated land for whites only. Acquiring massive estates, settlers were quick to enhance their prestige as landed colonial aristocrats, with Africans realizing that many settlers had little desire to increase productivity. By 1920, more than three million acres of Central and Western Kenya’s best farmland was owned by European settlers, with just 5.6 percent of this land under cultivation.33 As settler and author Elspeth Huxley summed up in her biography of Lord Delamere, “The government had a certain obligation to the European farmer. They had deliberately invited him into the country to sink his capital and make his home there. . . . They had, therefore, an obligation to help him obtain native workers.”34 Further, an important element of the colonial project was the integration of commodities produced on settler farms—especially precious arabica coffee—into world markets, and the wide-scale plantation agriculture necessarily demanded vast numbers of laborers.
The introduction of a colonial cash economy, together with the implementation of a colonial tax system and land alienation, compelled Africans to enter wage labor markets. For example, the Native Hut and Poll Tax Ordinance (No. 2) of 1910 taxed individuals and their dwellings, putting an unfair tax burden on polygynous African families. Each wife was required to have her own home, which the British pejoratively labled a “hut.” Africans’ efforts to resist this tax resulted in lifestyle changes that forced societies to break long-standing cultural taboos in order to avoid the punitive tax system. An administrative report from the early twentieth century noted a decline in tax revenues “owing to the fact that people have broken up their huts and placed more than one wife in a hut.”35 Such heavy annual tax demands payable only in cash drove black Kenyans to the colonial labor market, forcing them off the reserves and onto settler farms and into emerging urban centers to labor for wages. In turn, pass laws regulating the registration of African males were introduced in 1920. The kipande, or pass, permitted black Kenyan men to leave the reserves for employment and served to regulate the quality, quantity, and flow of the African workforce.36 Following the model of another settler colony—South Africa—Kenya was spatially segregated along racial lines, particularly in urban areas. White settlers and officials regarded Africans at best as temporary instruments of labor that could be removed from white areas when they were no longer needed, and as sources of dangerous dissolution at worst. For example, a 1926 report produced by Kenya’s Native Affairs Department quoted the 1921 South African Native Affairs Commission: “A town is a European area in which there is no place for the redundant native who neither works nor serves his people but forms the class from which professional agitators, slum landlords, liquor sellers, prostitutes and other undesirable classes spring. The exclusion of these redundant natives is in the interests of Europeans and natives alike.”37
Once African laborers were employed at low wages and in generally poor conditions on settler farms or in urban centers, their employers were free to treat them as they saw fit. Settlers saw transforming Kenyans, whom they regarded as shiftless and work-shy, into “dutiful natives” as both economically necessary and central to their “civilizing mission.” “Evidence given to the Native Labor Commission of 1912–1913,” Shadle writes, “revealed that many settlers believed violence to be integral to labor relations,” and noted that white settlers could mete out corporal punishment to their laborers with virtual impunity.38 Propagandist British discourse, in contrast, portrayed African servants and laborers as simple, obedient, and docile subjects; grateful for the benevolent paternalistic embrace of their colonial masters.39
Coercion was not confined to settler enterprises. While taxation created much-needed revenue for the colonial state, programs of forced labor—presented under the guise of “communal” labor—compelled Kenyans to work without wages on light infrastructure-development projects. These programs
