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Take up the White Man's burden-
Send forth the best ye breed -
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captive's need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild -
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden, 1898 [1]
Their poets who write big of the "White Burden." Trash!
The White Man's Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Satan Absolved, 1899 [2]
These poetic fragments of Kipling and Blunt embody two seemingly irreconcilable views of the nature of the British empire. To Kipling the burden of imperial leadership and improvement is a moral obligation, often thankless and unpleasant, but one which cannot be shirked. Blunt dismisses the idea of an onerous but essential `mission' as a rhetorical camouflage for naked exploitation. Echoes of the approaches embodied in these views - the ostensibly philanthropic and the clearly exploitative - can be found in the Kenya of the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the established social and political order was challenged by the burgeoning desire of the colony's Indian community to establish their civil and political rights. It was in response to this movement that the Devonshire Declaration emerged.
The document that came to be known as the Devonshire Declaration is a brief one, occupying only some nineteen pages of text, yet that text, which ostensibly addresses a specific historical situation - the status of Indians in Kenya - can be used to help explore a host of complex problems that can be found at the core of Britain's colonial experience. This document, the Duke of Devonshire's Indians in Kenya memorandum of 1923 [3], was intended to - amongst other things, it will be suggested here - propose solutions to the conflicts that were growing in Kenya as a result of the Indian community's campaigns.
The document, as well as representing the result of His Majesty's Government's "prolonged and anxious consideration" [4] on this specific issue, can also be seen, more widely, as part of the continuing process of evolving government in the colonies. The memorandum also raises broader questions for the historian: about the historical actors' ideas about race; about how these ideas were manifested; and about the explicit and implicit assumptions and cultural bases that these attitudes rested on.
This essay will address the immediate problems at issue in Kenya which gave rise to the Devonshire Declaration, and attempt to place them in a wider historical, political, and cultural context. In doing so, the main aim will be to draw some general conclusions about how some of the deep-seated, culturally-conditioned ideas of race interacted with the sphere of imperial policy-making and administration. The explicit and implicit assumptions about race, it is claimed here, crucially inform policy-making and development strategies, since they are part of the foundations of belief about human nature upon which any system of political thought and practical administration must rest. Such beliefs about human nature circumscribe ideas about what is possible, practical, and desirable. These basic beliefs and attitudes, it will be suggested, helped create the conditions under which Kenya's economic and political systems developed. Further, these systems, once in place, developed along lines which were constrained and informed by the belief systems that attended their birth.
The essay that follows aims to broaden the understanding of policy-making and administrative action by combining an appreciation of the political and economic forces that were at work in Kenya with an analysis of some of the cultural and cognitive factors which influenced the actors involved and which shaped the political and economic systems. Economic and political forces on their own do not make policy-decisions. Human beings make those decisions, based on rational or irrational analysis of a variety of factors - strategic, logistical, economic, political. We must always remember that the beliefs and assumptions of the actors in these events influence the decisions that they make. They are not the unthinking agents of blind historical forces: they think, they choose, they bring into play the values and beliefs that dominate their age, their peer group, their institution. It is this area that I hope to illuminate - how these values and beliefs about human nature and race interacted with the economic and political developments in Kenya that converged on the Devonshire Declaration of 1923. The core discussion of these wider cultural contexts is contained in sections V and VI, with the preceding material providing a detailed framework for this analysis.
In addressing this problem this essay will be structured as follows: section I below will provide a historical sketch of Kenya (formerly the East Africa Protectorate) in imperial context; that is, how the colony came to be created, and some of the important developments prior to 1914. Section II will outline the post-1914 circumstances that prefaced the publication of the Devonshire Declaration, and section III will discuss the provisions of Lord Devonshire's memorandum itself. Section IV deals with the political structures and processes of Kenya, and with the economic issues that impinged on Kenyan political and social life during this period. Sections V and VI both deal with the broader political-cultural contexts: the former with the `moral and political economy' of Kenyan development policy, the latter with dominant and influential ideologies of `race'. Section VII re-examines the Devonshire Declaration in the light of these contextual discussions, and offers some summary conclusions.
The British were not the first to colonise eastern Africa. Over hundreds of years, the lands that the British would later designate as Kenya Colony, which stretched east from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean, had attracted migrants: Nilotic pastoralists, agricultualist Bantu, and cattle-herding Masai all sought to use the soil and resources of east Africa. Later, the `coastal strip' and the important off-shore island of Zanzibar came to be dominated by another group of incomers - traders and settlers from southern Arabia who incorporated eastern Africa into the extensive trading networks that they operated throughout the Indian Ocean and its environs. It was the coastal strip, from which the Arab Zenj city-states controlled the interior and oceanic trade, that came to dominate development. The city-states constituted attractive targets for predatory trading dynasties such as the Omani sultanate, and they were forcibly incorporated into the maritime empire of the Portuguese, later regaining their independence as the `first' British empire came to dominate maritime trade. East African ports and traders supplied quantities of exotic produce: cloves, palm-oil, ivory, and, increasingly importantly, slaves.
The slave trade was controlled from and channelled through Mombasa and Zanzibar where, by the early nineteenth century, the Omani dynasty ruled the coastal strip, Said ibn Sultan having taken up permanent residence in Zanzibar. Along with concerns about "Britain's general commercial and strategic interests in the Indian Ocean," [6] it was the slave trade which helped to focus British attention on east Africa during the nineteenth century.
The Sultan's move to Zanzibar had brought closer contacts with European traders and governments, and from the 1830s onwards treaties of "amity and commerce" [7]were signed, German businesses established, and consuls dispatched from the USA (1837), France (1844), and Britain (1840). [8] British policy after 1840 sought to use `informal influence' over the territory - operated through the Sultan - to further British interests in east Africa and the Indian Ocean. [9] This policy included the Sultan's responsibility to "lead the fight against the slave trade" [10] in east Africa. Pressures to do so created conflict and tensions within the Sultanate - where the slave trade was the source of much wealth and prestige - and eventually the British intervened with some genuine `gunboat diplomacy' to ensure the succession of a compliant heir in 1859 - 61. Even so, they were compelled to take further coercive action to stiffen the Sultan's resolve to outlaw the slave trade: the anti-slavery Treaty of 1873 was buttressed by the de facto control of the Sultan by the British agent, Dr Kirk. [11] Under this arrangement, the British extended their influence and a number of proposals were made to utilise this control to develop the interior of east Africa, but the imperial government, in line with a general policy of non-involvement in the east African mainland, refused to support such measures. [12] In this vacuum, private interests - missionaries, mining concerns, railway entrepreneurs, concession hunters and traders all displayed interests in extending into east Africa's mainland territories. [13]
The circumspection of the imperial government was overcome later in the century when the `Scramble for Africa' gathered pace. For many years, tropical Africa had interested a number of European powers, but by the 1880s the potential for conflicts of interest and the need for clarification of who should dominate where was considered sufficiently important for the German Chancellor Bismarck to convene a conference on the matter.
British interest in Africa, as suggested above, had long been predicated on the perception of east Africa as part of the strategic puzzle in the Indian Ocean, and as a bulwark against the slave trade. Historians have offered differing explanations for the British desire to extend their presence and power on the mainland: the control of the headwaters of the Nile, threatened by incursions in the north; access to the strategically important Lake Victoria; the "vocal and growing lobby of private and official interests pushing an expansionist policy in east Africa from the 1870s onwards" [14]; and the simple idea that "avarice was the most obvious motive of the scramble." [15] It is perhaps in a conflation of these explanations, with private and public interests intertwining and influencing diplomatic policy-making, that the complex motivations for British control of east Africa can be found. Whatever the importance of these different factors, the reality of partition was embodied in the Treaty of Berlin which followed the Berlin conference of 1884. In this Treaty "the rules were laid for the final [sic] partition of Africa" [16] which meant that in east Africa, a `northern sphere of influence' was ceded to the British, complementary to the German sphere in the south.
The British sphere of influence was not to be run directly by a government department. Instead, in a move which lends credence to the `avarice' argument, and which echoedthe early imperial activities of the East India Company, a royal charter was granted to the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC), headed by William Mackinnon. [17] The company's responsibilities were short-lived, however: despite claiming Uganda (through the efforts of the future Lord Lugard), helping curtail German influence in the region, and extending control inland, the company collapsed, bankrupt, in March 1895. [18] The British government, faced with withdrawal or intervention, formed the East Africa Protectorate.
The Protectorate that the British government would administer under the auspices of the Foreign Office - "all the territories in East Africa...except the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba and the Uganda Protectorate" [19] - was composed of what we might now call a cosmopolitan multiracial society: the territory's history had ensured that the original African population had been joined by an array of other nationalities and ethnic groups: Indians, Goans, Arabs, Portuguese, Germans, and British - including a vocal and influential South African element. It was out of this heterogeneity that the conflicts and tensions that would result in the Devonshire Declaration emerged. Numerically, the Africans were the largest group (2.6 million in 1920), with Asians the next most significant (17, 000). There were 6, 000 Europeans in Kenya in 1920. [20] Indians had come to east Africa as traders and merchants, and under the Omani dynasty's liberal fiscal policies and largely benevolent attitudes towards Indians, they had established themselves as the territory's commercial and financial class. The requirements of building the Uganda railway to Lake Victoria swelled the influx of Indians as the constructors imported `suitable' labour from India. Indeed, it was the construction of the railway that gave impetus to both Indian and European immigration to the Protectorate.
It was in this context - a multiracial society - that the Protectorate began to be developed through the expansion of the railway and through the settlement of Indians and Europeans. By 1905, when the Protectorate passed to the control of the Colonial Office, the construction of the railway had helped to transform many aspects of the Protectorate's development: it had extended the government's authority westward and northward; it had created the sinews to support trade and administration; it had secured newly accessible land for settlement; and it had opened up the fertile and temperate highlands, simultaneously encroaching on the traditional tribal lands of the Kikuyu, amongst others. [21] Additionally the railway - which had been financed with government money - constituted a substantial investment (£5 million in capital costs) which helped drive the need to develop the Protectorate's economy in search of greater self-sufficiency. [22]
By the outbreak of war in 1914, a number of patterns had been established in the Protectorate which would profoundly influence subsequent social, economic and political developments: the Protectorate could not pay for itself; there were growing European and Indian communities, the latter of which had been "relegated to a secondary social and political position and denied access to the best agricultural land" [23]; the Highlands were seen as essentially a `white man's country'; Africans were seen by the European settlers as primitive, and a mere labour pool with few rights, to be marshalled for work as the white settler saw fit [24]; and the Colonial government's freedom of action was hampered by the political and economic dominance of the white settlers. I will now turn to the key empire-wide developments after 1914 and the immediate local circumstances which preceded the Devonshire Declaration.
At the end of the first world war, as has often been observed, the British empire had reached its greatest territorial extent. This, coupled with the fact that Britain had been one of the victorious powers - albeit at a terrible price - suggested to some policy-makers that this was the time to consolidate the empire, returning to the normality of pre-war trade, with the additional territories that had been acquired being incorporated into the imperial system. There was "little reason to suppose that the strength to hold on to new acquisitions was not there" [25] and in some eyes the goal was to restore the "lost paradise" [26] of 1913. However, the structural economic and social changes that the war had accelerated or brought about were to severely constrain the British government's freedom of action in attempting to recapture the pre-war Arcadian spirit.
The economic changes that the war had wrought on Britain's domestic economy and upon the global imperial system were to have important consequences for policy-making in Africa and upon the relationship between the colonies and the metropole, especially those colonies which had been under-capitalised before the war. [27] Before the war Britain was still one of the world's leading industrial and economic powers, despite relative decline compared to Germany and the US. The empire, as part of the British trade system, helped supply Britain's imports - largely food and raw materials - whilst simultaneously helping to disseminate British exports - largely manufactured goods. [28] Britain's deficit on this visible trade was offset by invisible income from foreign investment, shipping, banking, and insurance, and by the dividends generated by these foreign investments. Something like half of this foreign investment was within the empire. [29] Britain's pre-war strengths were thus its manufacturing base - particularly the older industries of coal, iron, steel and textiles, and heavy manufactures such as ships, vehicles and machinery - and its foreign investment portfolio. These strengths were to be undermined by the first world war.
By 1918, British imports had risen and exports fallen as the economy focused on war production. Large debts had been accumulated to pay for the war effort, as government borrowing had risen to 1.57% of national income by 1919 compared to 0.26% in 1913. [30] Gold reserves had been depleted and, crucially, Britain's overseas investments had been decimated by confiscation and by extensive liquidation of overseas assets. Indeed, assets abroad declined by one quarter between 1914 and 1918. [31] These changes meant that the balance of the global economy shifted: Britain was no longer in a position to act as the `world's banker', and, after a brief period of post-war boom, increasingly turned towards the empire as a buffer against economic adversity and as a semi-protectionist imperial trade zone. It is in this context that post-war economic development in east Africa was to take place. These developments will be returned to in section IV below.
Post-war developments echoed pre-war thinking at the Colonial Office, which even then had seen colonial economies as "primary producers feeding the needs of industrialised economies." [32] But the Colonial Office view and the official policy espoused in London are only one part of the picture: the effects of the war had also been significant at the `local' level - that is, in east Africa itself.
The military campaigns in Africa and the African experience of the war, although they now only occupy a peripheral position in popular culture and much historical writing, nevertheless had a profound influence on post-war developments in east Africa. The war exacerbated the already onerous working conditions of the native Africans who made up the bulk of Kenya's working population, and placed "infinitely more severe burdens" [33] upon them, whilst the war increased the "direct power and indirect influence of the local European community," [34] whose economic contribution was greatly valued by the British government. Perhaps the most significant effect was in deepening pre-war trends in the authoritarian control and management of labour (for further development of this issue, see section IV below), which was brought to a crisis during 1919 - 20, when severe labour shortages evoked controversial and divisive labour policy directives.
The entrenchment of European paramountcy in the economic and political spheres also contributed to the resurgence of Indian resistance to European domination. Long-standing Indian efforts to improve their `second-class status' focused on four main issues: the de facto segregation that was in place in the towns; the land-allocation legislation and administrative practices which maintained the highlands as a `white reserve'; immigration policy; and representation on the territory's ruling councils. The activities of the `expatriate' Indian community were complemented by an increasingly radical and outward-looking Indian nationalism in the sub-continent, [35] and by the pressure that Indian nationalists were able to exert on the government in India. The grievances of the Indian community passed through an extensive series of consultations and discussions between the metropolitan government, the Indian government, the colonial government, and representatives of European and Indian communities in what had become, in July 1920, Kenya Colony.
All attempts to overcome the impasse failed, usually since what was acceptable to one of the key groups was not acceptable to the others. [36] In 1920, Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, had given legal endorsement to a number of de facto policies which had served to antagonise the Indian community in Kenya: "segregation in the townships" [37], the `white Highlands' practices, and the minimal role allotted to Indian representatives in legislative and executive functions. After February 1921 Milner's successor, Winston Churchill, adopted what was essentially a more conciliatory stance, but he stressed that policy must be based on "equal rights for civilised men." [38] By 1922, after Churchill had made a speech at the East Africa Dinner in London which seemed to attempt to mollify angry settler opinion, Indian "protest was at an all-time high," [39] and there was a "burgeoning alliance between the Africans and the Indians." [40] Social change was also affecting the Africans and creating instability and disruption which concerned the colonial state: traditional ties of kinship and stability had been severed by the development of the wage-economy, and traditional modes of land tenure had been disrupted by land alienation to settlers and government. Settler modes of production conflicted with native commodity production, and growing urbanisation brought attendant social problems. [41]
It was in this context, and following Governor Coryndon's rejection of the 1922 Wood-Winterton proposals (which offered some concessions to the Indians over enfranchisement, segregation and immigration), that the British government instigated negotiations in London during the spring and early summer of 1923. The fruit of these negotiations was the Devonshire Memorandum, produced by Lord Devonshire, the then Secretary of State at the Colonial Office.
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