unfit, they were expected to return home on their own. Of the four thousand men who passed through the camp in the first three months of 1914, medical officers denied work to nearly six hundred.
District and labor officials saw all this as a success. By 1919, the chief native commissioner noted that because of the system, the government registered most labor coming out of the region and outfitted them with work passes. Nyanza recruitment was a vast improvement, he argued, over practices in Coast and Central Provinces. But by the mid-1920s, the strings colonial officials pulled to control Nyanza recruitment frayed. High on their list of complaints: the rising number of underage Africans passing through the Kisumu labor camp. In March 1925, the assistant district commissioner inspected the 10:30 a.m. train out of Kisumu. On board he found “a number of uncontracted totos [children]” being forwarded to employers by the Kavirondo Labour Bureau and John Riddoch, both successful labor agents in Nyanza. At the labor camp he found a further thirty-four boys, all of whom were sent home. In July of that same year, labor inspector P. de V. Allen informed the chief native commissioner of a growing number of Nyanza boys working at railway fuel and ballast camps and on sisal estates in Thika and Fort Hall. Allen worried that they lived in squalor, earned too little to feed themselves, and might drift to towns and slip into criminality. A month later, at a labor camp along the new Thika-Nyeri rail line, the district commissioner of Fort Hall found fifteen Gusii boys, all between the ages of twelve and fifteen, working construction. To his astonishment, all of them carried proper registration and passes.24
Despite these complaints, it was only when young laborers died, when parents complained, or when girls went out to work that officials scrambled to investigate and promise reforms.25 In 1926, labor officials traveled to Thika to investigate the deaths of eight young employees of British East Africa Fiber and Industrial. They interviewed two twelve-year-old Gusii boys named Mugire Kyamukia and Obuya Nyarang—the only survivors. According to the boys, a fellow Gusii named Petro had recruited them back home. Inspectors knew Petro all too well. He worked for the Kavirondo Labour Bureau in Kisumu. The bureau’s labor agents, Messrs. Yates and Mackey, were notorious in Nyanza for their flagrant disregard of regulations. Mugire and Obuya admitted that they had undergone neither medical inspection nor registration before boarding the train. A month after their arrival, eight of their coworkers fell ill and died. Fortunately, Mugire and Obuya had been taken to the hospital in time. When questioned later, Mackey took responsibility for his recruiter Petro, but argued that once the boys arrived at the sisal estates, whether they lived or died was none of his affair.26
FIGURE 2.1. Extracting sisal fiber, n.d. Photo courtesy of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies Winterton Collection, Northwestern University.
FIGURE 2.2. Sisal in Kenya. A view of the interior of the Machakos sisal factory showing the brushing, grading, and baling sections, n.d. Photo courtesy of the National Archives, Kew.
The strategies of men like Mackey and Petro revealed to the British, in the starkest of terms, just how little control they had over the flow of labor out of Nyanza. Professional recruiters hired African subcontractors who knew the country, spoke local languages, and understood local custom. Many subcontractors sought out young men, often relatives, from their own villages.27 When these men ran afoul of district authorities, recruiters like Mackey and Yates simply argued that their subcontractors had hired relatives; what transpired had been a voluntary family decision, not recruitment. Recruiters also let their subcontractors take the fall for breaking recruitment rules by paying fines or spending a few days in jail. Recruiters used other tactics to circumvent the authority of district officials. When medical officers rejected a batch of boys, recruiters put them on the train anyway or drove them by foot to different labor camps. In September 1928, officials discovered that recruiters eluded the Kisumu labor camp by taking boys up to North Kavirondo District, where medical officials were less stringent. Recruiters also mixed boys into larger groups with older men, in the hope that government officials might be unwilling to check each and every individual.28
Officials loathed recruiters like Mackey and Yates. The commissioner of South Kavirondo described them as “ex-convicts, defaulting debtors, dipsomaniacs, or men of straw” who should not be allowed to “roam about or to live in the heart of a Native Reserve for the purposes of recruiting.”29 The commissioner in Kisii complained that his town was swarming with recruiters who fought among themselves and created an unseemly spectacle that did not go unnoticed by the African community. Recruiting, he argued, opened the door to a “host of undesirables who will compete with each other for labour and [stop] at nothing to get it.”30 Recruiters revealed European weakness, corrupting the image of respectable authority district officials had worked tirelessly to create.
Yet when the government had the opportunity to stop the recruitment of boys, it did very little. In 1927, the provincial commissioner of Nyanza Province visited a medical officer in Kisumu to observe the procedure for examining would-be laborers. While there, he watched three batches of boys arrive and undergo examination. The recruiters informed the commissioner that two batches would go to coffee estates in Kiambu and Fort Hall, the third to the Donyo Sabuk sisal estate in Thika. After looking over the recruits, the medical officer determined that the average age of one group was about seven. All of them were approved for work and loaded onto a waiting train.31 The most powerful colonial official in Western Kenya had just observed the inspection of Africans as young as seven and their transport to work hundreds of miles from home. There was no record of his outrage—only his silence—as the boys boarded the train.
Agents of the colonial state sometimes actively participated in recruitment. African chiefs often assisted recruiters in their search.32 Raphael Ndai, who grew up in North Kavirondo, recalls that chiefs would call young men to his homestead with promises of sugar and caramel. Once assembled, Raphael and his age-mates were told to line up. The chief inspected them and took the tallest boys aside. During one particular recruitment drive, Raphael’s elder brother was among them. He was taken to Kisumu by foot, vaccinated, loaded onto a train, and sent to the sisal estates.33 Whether chiefs coaxing boys with candy or British officials standing by as medical officers approved boys for work, the elder state found itself implicated in the very recruitment process it claimed to regulate. As detestable as they found recruiters like Yates and his ilk or as dirty as they got their own hands, the British did exercise some measure of authority over recruitment. Labor agents, professional recruiters, and subcontractors still brought most young men to labor camps for inspection, registration, and transport. And British officials still had some power to turn unsuitable workers away, fine recruiters, or revoke contracts.
By the late 1920s, employers began to bypass the system of professional recruitment. In 1926, John Riddoch warned district officials that employers had begun hiring private recruiters, who answered to no colonial regulation.34 The depression-era economy of the 1930s pushed employers, especially larger tea and sisal firms, to look for cheaper labor and more efficient methods of recruitment. By hiring privateers or turning their own laborers into recruiters, estates looked to extend their influence directly to African communities, sidestepping labor agencies, camps, and inspectors. In 1928, African Highland Produce even hired a former colonial labor inspector, Ernest McInnes, to organize its recruiting system. The Kenya Tea Company, run by Brooke Bond, paid its employees to return home and offered incentives for bringing back relatives.35
Private recruitment made it easier for many young men to find work. Recruiting offices began to appear in trading centers across Western Kenya. Boys from nearby villages easily walked to these offices and boarded transport directly to tea or sisal estates.36 Lazaro Weke recalls meeting a recruiter in the trading center of Awendo in South Kavirondo District. Rather than walk the hundred miles to the Kisumu labor camp, Lazaro boarded a bus with several other boys, which
