to make labor more regular and permanent, officials like MacDonald believed the state had to pry open the reserves and draw out African labor with a firmer hand.
Steadily, the number of Africans working away from home grew from 5,000 in 1903 to 120,000 in 1923.9 Part of this change reflected several strategies the British employed to draw out labor. First, they relied on the heavy hands of local chiefs, often only recently installed themselves, to compel young men into the labor market. Eager to secure their political positions, African chiefs traveled from village to village rounding up laborers by any means necessary.10 Under pressure from chiefs, fathers often turned to their children to fulfill compulsory labor demands, which, when discovered by missionaries like Archdeacon Owen, embroiled British authorities in international scandal.11
Second, British officials turned to taxation. The hut tax required married men to pay for the number of homes in their compounds. It targeted the wealth of older men who might send their young male dependents into the labor market and then use their wages to pay the tax. Officials also introduced the poll tax, targeting young, unmarried men over the age of sixteen.12 Almost immediately, district officials struggled to determine who was sixteen years of age and eligible to pay. They examined would-be laborers for circumcision to determine whether or not they were old enough to work. The same generation of provincial administrators who pressured families to initiate their sons at a much earlier age also used male initiation to determine whether those same young sons should pay the poll tax. By the 1930s, parents and even some chiefs complained that boys faced the knife too early, ended up on the tax register, and then had to work at too tender an age.13
A third strategy was the continued eviction of families off their land. Before World War I, European emigrants settled on grazing lands used by the Maasai and farmland tended by Gikuyu. In the interwar years, as land seizures spread west, Kipsigis and Nandi also lost their lands to British war veterans and large agricultural firms. Many African heads of household, especially among the landless, chose to move onto European estates as squatters. Squatters spent part of their days tending a settler’s livestock, cash crops, or household. In exchange for their labor, squatters gained access to plots of land where they grew their own foodstuffs and grazed their own herds. An entire squatter family, including young sons and daughters, balanced work between their household and that of their employers. Before and during the interwar years, squatting was an attractive, profitable arrangement, so much so that poor, landless young men in the reserves sought out work as squatters.14 With their profits, they expanded herds and even hired laborers to increase production.15 In the Gikuyu reserves, some of the first to set off for European estates were landless tenants who had worked the farms of their wealthier Gikuyu neighbors. Others saw the estates as a means to escape burdensome taxation, compulsory labor, and tense familial relationships.
While many African families settled into work as squatters, others entered the wage labor market as seasonal migrants.16 After their own crops had been planted and harvested in the reserves, they traveled to settler estates and hired themselves out on temporary contracts. Rather than bring their families with them, these employees left home alone or with a few male kin and worked for a short while. Once their contracts expired, they either signed up for another or returned home. Many estates used a combination of squatter and migrant labor. During the interwar years, a growing number of settlers and large-scale agricultural industries began relying more heavily on migrant contract labor. Settler estates located near African reserves could rely on short-distance commuter labor. European farms in areas without nearby African settlements, especially the sisal industry, required workers brought from farther afield. Moreover, larger British agricultural firms had been attracted to Kenya to produce cash crops like sisal and tea. These firms purchased vast tracts of land, invested heavily to expand production, and intensified demand for larger numbers of African migrant laborers, especially during the harvest season.17
By the 1920s, African curiosity, compulsory labor drives, taxation, evictions, and a growing list of labor laws alone were not enough to meet the demands of large agricultural industries and more sure-footed settlers. In response, a fourth means of drawing young African men into the labor market reached new heights: professional and private recruitment. The networks of recruitment that developed in Central, Rift Valley, and Nyanza Provinces relied on a coalition of interests: the creative strategies of ignominious recruiters and employers as well as the emerging desire of young men to earn a wage. The elder state tried to exercise some control over recruitment and mitigate the scandal that resulted if Britons discovered young Africans were spirited away to work in sisal mills—all the while encouraging the young to leave home and work.
“SCOURING THE DISTRICTS”
Recruitment became one of the most influential techniques to draw out African labor in Kenya. From their earliest years on the coast, the British recruited laborers to work on clove plantations in Mombasa and Zanzibar.18 As the railway wound its way through Central Kenya, and forts and farms bloomed along the route, European and Asian recruiting agencies scoured Kamba and Gikuyu villages for young men. In 1908, the colonial state ordered that recruitment should be left largely to market forces—a combination of settler demand, recruiter persuasion, and African curiosity.19 Wary to be seen compelling Africans to work directly for private enterprise, British officials hoped professional recruiters would fill the void. And they did. From 1913 to 1914, an estimated 74 percent of Africans out working had been recruited.20 By the end of World War I, the vast majority of young men in Machakos, Kitui, and Kiambu had engaged with a labor recruiter.21
Yet the British were wary of throwing open the gates of the African reserves to unregulated privateers. The Master and Servants Ordinance created the position of labor agents: individuals or firms appointed to serve as middlemen between recruiters and employers. In theory, labor agencies eased the burdens on provincial administrators by issuing recruiter permits, recording the number of men leaving the districts, and protecting the reserves from being overrun by too many privateers. For their part, district and labor officials tried to systematize recruitment by creating labor camps where recruiters had to bring laborers for inspection before sending them to employers. In reality, labor agencies often participated in recruitment and colonial officials did not cope with the sheer number of recruiters operating in and laborers traveling out of the reserves.
Nowhere were officials more inundated by recruiters and recruits or more aggravated by abusive recruitment practices than in 1920s Western Kenya. As labor demands reached new heights after World War I, all eyes turned toward the reserves of Nyanza and Rift Valley Provinces. By 1923, 75 percent of registered recruiters in the colony operated out of Nyanza Province.22 Around the same time, communities out west had become more receptive to seasonal migrant labor. Although the creation of reserves ended their ability to expand their holdings, less land had been taken from them than from their Maasai and Gikuyu neighbors. Families of Kipsigis, Luo, or Gusii had little reason to leave their reserves to become squatters on European estates. Instead, households sent out their boys and young men to work in the hopes that their income would supplement household wealth and pay taxes. Most young men went out confident they could still rely on one day inheriting their fathers’ farms and herds.
Before World War I, thousands of young recruits passed through the Kisumu labor camp. Linked by rail and road to Mombasa and Nairobi, the camp served as a base of operations for labor agents and recruiters. Young laborers were forwarded from the camp by train or lorry to employers in Kericho, the White Highlands, Nairobi, and as far as the sisal estates near the coast. Between January and March 1914, more than four thousand African men passed through the camp—this during the recruiting off-season when men usually stayed home to harvest their own crops.23 Africans despised the Kisumu labor camp. The journey was arduous and, for a few, fatal. Many arrived at Kisumu with sleeping sickness, malaria, and other diseases. Fearful that recruiters would load the sick or dying onto cattle cars and send them out east, British officials required that all laborers undergo medical examination. Africans resented the intrusive exams, unexplained vaccinations, and detention in overcrowded conditions.
