colonial labor pool. In some instances, colonial officials went so far as to coercively procure “communal” labor to serve the needs of individual settlers.40
Settler violence and colonial coercion were in many cases met by African resistance. Kenyans used “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance,” the well-known “weapons of the weak,” to counter burdensome and violent compulsions to colonial labor.41 They also countered the violent discipline of colonial economic order through supernatural and spiritual means. For example, the colonial administration was forced to acknowledge that the consistent brutality of a white settler toward his Kenyan workers had been a factor in the outbreak of a prophetic possession movement that had severely impeded the collection of tax and the procurement of labor in the region southeast of Nairobi. A King’s African Rifles (KAR) patrol dispatched from the capital was eventually able to exert a “quieting effect” over the area.42 By the 1920s such politically inflected outbreaks of prophetic or spiritualist activity were hardly unusual. Relatedly, decades of missionary activity had led to the establishment of various African churches that interpreted and translated the Christian message in accordance with local belief structures, often clashing with European conceptions of morality and of scriptural and doctrinal interpretations. The leaders of these new African churches mobilized the “politics of the pulpit” to contest colonial rule. Colonial administrators were quick to interpret (and dismiss) supernaturally based forms of political expression in racist and ethnocentric ways. For instance, in 1929, a district commissioner (DC) reporting on the Nomiya Luo Mission, and independent Africans churches more generally, explained:
This class of thing is met with throughout Africa, where mission influence has been at work for some time. To my mind it is but a clear indication that the natives are unable to embrace the Christian religion as presented to them. As long as they are under the immediate influence of the European Missionary they are stimulated but as soon as they became so numerous or scattered that the influence can be but a shadow they search about and work out for themselves some of the Bastard Christianity more suited to their mental and social development. . . . My experience in South Africa taught me that it is a mistake to think these movements will die out. I am inclined to think this one is no exception and is on the increase.43
The DC’s comments both reflected the discriminatory character of white minority rule and foreshadowed the rise of African resistance. As Kenyans increasingly mobilized not only supernatural but also political strategies to contest the power of the colonial state in the 1930s and 1940s, religion and ethnicity provided key spaces in which black Kenyans debated sociopolitical life under colonial rule as African resistance began to segue into desires and demands for independence. The next section of this chapter turns to Kenya political movements, the anticolonial Mau Mau rebellion, and the (ethnic) dilemmas of rule in independent Kenya.
Politics and Revolution in Colonial Kenya: From Migration to Mau Mau to Nationhood
The reshaping of identities and economies that accompanied colonial rule simultaneously brought about significant social and political transformations in the lives of many Kenyans. In Central Kenya, for example, land alienation did not simply displace Kikuyu people but severely disrupted a complex system of tenancy called githaka, which allocated land and organized landholding along clan and generational lines as well as importantly providing for the integration of outsiders into Kikuyu communities.44 In Western Kenya, Luo people, far from the settler farms of the White Highlands, were compelled to migrate in search of wage labor. As in Kikuyu areas, this economically driven displacement challenged notions of property and belonging that revolved around the dala, or Luo homestead.45 These ruptures around land and labor, and the social transformations that accompanied them, together with the emergence of coteries of mission-educated Kenyans, drove African politicization that was skewed along regional and “tribal” lines. By the 1920s, Kikuyu- and Luo-speaking communities had established political organizations—the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and the Young Kavirondo Association (YKA)—concerned with the promotion of their respective material interests and the articulation of what it meant to be “Kikuyu” or “Luo” in rapidly shifting colonial landscapes.46
Yet, even as African politicization continued to expand and accelerate over the next two decades, whites settlers and many colonial administrators still clung to the idea that they were enacting a “civilizing mission” for the benefit of Africans mired in “tribal” primitivity and that governance should remain exclusively the domain of whites. These racist and paternalistic ideologies were well entrenched by the 1940s, and many colonialists in Kenya and in Britain believed that diverse “tribes” would never be capable of uniting under any banner of Kenyan nationalism. For example, a 1943 Colonial Office memorandum on political affairs in Kenya reiterated the dominant view:
These tribes speak different languages and have entirely different social customs. Many of them are in a very primitive state and it is not possible to envisage the time when they will become sufficiently united as a whole, speaking a common language and having trust in elected leaders from their own tribe or still less of another tribe. It would be very much easier to make a united Europe under the domination of Germany than to make a united Kenya under the domination of the Maasai. The conception of a central self-government elected by these primitive tribes is simply not within practical politics.47
Five years later, marginalized Kikuyu had begun a campaign of violent rural action—including labor strikes, arson, and maiming of farm animals. By the early 1950s, such violence was steadily rising and increasingly politicized, organized through a network of oathing. This movement emerged into a full-scale rebellion known as Mau Mau, which gave rise to an enduring representation of Kenya as a space in which tribal atavism and savage violence always simmered below the surface of social and political life.48 Colonial political propaganda and the Western media portrayed the rebellion as a race war that pitted families of peaceful white farmers against African “terrorists,” as a contest of primitive African “savagery” versus white, modern “civilization,” and overlooked the brutality of the colonial and complex violence of decolonization in settler colonies like Kenya.
The rebellion took the shape of an insurgency carried out by the Land and Freedom Army, a disparate guerrilla force of landless Kikuyu supported in varying degrees by Kikuyu who pledged (on pain of death and not always voluntarily) to simply keep silent or to actively assist the fighters with intelligence and supplies. As Mau Mau action escalated and violence intensified, the colonial governor declared Kenya in 1952 to be under a state of emergency, which lasted nearly a decade. While it retained its anticolonial character and targets, Mau Mau further developed into a civil war between supporters of the guerrillas and those Kikuyu who had benefited from indirect rule—namely Kikuyu chiefs and headmen—and other Kikuyu loyalists or “home guards.”49 In the protracted course of the rebellion, the British effectively dehumanized individual Kikuyu, interning a substantial proportion of the adult male Kikuyu population (and thousands of women) in interrogation camps that were often established on settler lands and run with wide-ranging brutality, sometimes by settlers deputized by the colonial state. In the end, as David Anderson notes, only thirty white settlers died during Mau Mau, while at least 20,000 Kikuyu were killed, with an additional 150,000 imprisioned in internment camps.50
While political leaders of various “tribes”—most notably the Kikuyu politician Jomo Kenyatta—were accused of organizing the rebellion, convicted in kangaroo courts, and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, Kenya, outside of Nairobi and the White Highlands, was largely untouched by the violence of the rebellion.51 In Kikuyu areas, however, the British threw their military might at the insurgency, bombarding the forests around Mount Kenya with fighter planes, calling in regiments from Britain, and importing counterinsurgency experts from other parts of their empire. They also set in motion a potent propaganda machine that militarized the “civilizing mission,” portraying the colonial forces as defenders of law and order and the Kikuyu as “terrorists” who had lost their collective sensibility and veneer of
