What was the empire for? This retrospective question overshadows any discussion of the motives and actions of specific policy-makers at specific times in specific places. Even if we accept, as Lord Hailey suggests in his Foreword to Sir Philip Mitchell's African Afterthoughts, that in colonial administrators' formal announcements "there is often a difference between their actual motives and the carefully phrased reasons by which policy is commended by them to the public," [1] nevertheless it is possible to discern, from the consistency of those pronouncements and from any supporting or contradictory evidence in actuality, what were the real motives and assumptions behind policy. This section attempts, in broad terms, to highlight contemporary thinking behind the acquisition and development of East African territory and resources. In this context, `moral economy' refers to the basis on which imperial possession and `exploitation' was rationalised or justified on moral or philosophical grounds, while `political economy' is used in the classical sense whereby it refers to the economic choices that are made by the various economic actors based on a range of alternatives.
The `moral economy' of East African development was predicated upon wider conceptions of what the empire was and what it was for. Here, we must distinguish between two different themes: firstly, the `will to empire', or the motives behind the acquisition of the territories and relationships that constituted the empire; and secondly, the ex post facto rationalisations and justifications for the administration and exploitation of the imperial sphere. This is not the place to fully explore these issues, but some awareness of them is necessary when discussing Britain's involvement in East Africa. The first thing that should be recognised is that in Africa, as in the rest of the empire, there was no single driving force for acquiring territory or influence. Rather, a range of factors operated: economic goals, religious zeal, strategic considerations, prestige, commercial adventure, the campaign against the slave trade, and so on. [2] The well-known idea that the empire was acquired `in a fit of absent-mindedness' seems particularly appropriate when considering the extension of imperial control in Africa. As Lord Salisbury put it in 1891 when speaking of Britain's increased involvement in Africa: "I do not exactly know the cause of this sudden revolution. But there it is." [3] In the same vein, it has been observed that:
Against all precept and prejudice, against the experience and trends of previous expansion, the British occupied Egypt and staked out a huge tropical African empire. [4]
Even if the motives for expansion in Africa were confused, obscure, and multifarious, and the `why?' of imperial acquisition must necessarily be passed over here, we can examine the rationales that were given for Britain's presence, and the nature of the British `mission' in Africa. It is to a broad analysis of how contemporaries saw their role in Africa that I will now turn.
There was no single over-arching `ideology of empire' - the empire was too diverse, too long in the making, and too full of contradictions for that. But there were certain dominant `ideological' strains that continued to echo through the minds and mouths of policy-makers during the sixty years that bracketed the turn of the nineteenth century.
In Disraelian rhetoric, imperial achievement was part of the British values which would "command the respect of the world." [5] His antagonist, Gladstone, found that "true national glory lay in moral superiority - supported of course by commercial good sense." [6] These two views can be seen to have been reconciled in a view of empire which perceived a British mission to pass on the benefits of its civilisation to the world. These benefits were moral - in the sense that British were obliged to share their good-fortune and values, commercial - a trading relationship with Britain would bring benefits to metropole and colony alike, and universal - Britain was helping make the resources and potentials of the colonised territories available to the whole world. Through all of these benefits - however they are construed - there runs the assumption that the British or `western' way was best, as well as the "inherent conviction that civilisation in itself was good." [7] This assumption finds expression in Sir Charles Eliot's observation that
The past of Africa has been, except in the north, uneventful and gloomy [but an East African European colony] will mean the opening of a new world, and its destinies will influence the whole continent [8]
This mission to lighten the darkness of the `dark continent' was informed by an implicit sense of superiority and a paternalistic attitude towards the indigenous population, whereby a more advanced, wise nation becomes the trustee of the interests of the native and oversees their development until such time in the (indeterminate) future when they can assume responsibility for themselves. This assumption informs Lugard's view that
Evolution and progress are a law of nature, and since the necessities of his existence compel civilised man to share the produce of the tropics, let us see to it that the process is accompanied by as much benefit and as little injury to the natives as may be. [9]
It is worth noting that Lugard is genuinely concerned with the ill-effects that the civilisers are having on some aspects of the natives' existence, [10] but that the rectitude of the civilising mission is taken to be self-evident. Here, the "pronounced self-confidence of the British people in the superiority of their own culture" [11] is a seminal influence. This influence is also apparent in the outlook of the European settlers in East
Africa, to whom a
Civilizing mission...meant the establishment of a bastion of European civilization in East Africa, not the civilization of Africans. [12]
It is apparent that the moral propriety of colonisation and exploitation was largely taken for granted during this period. [13] Given this framework, it is important to discuss the instruments by which East Africa was to be developed to a more `civilised' level. A vital aspect of this question is that of economic development, which underpins the whole imperial enterprise in East Africa.
Before the first world war, the economic development of imperial territories oscillated somewhere between two poles: the `self-interest' school associated with Joseph Chamberlain, which stressed the benefits to the metropolitan economy; and the `Colonial Office' model where the objective was to create financial self-sufficiency in the colonies through the development of productive facilities and infrastructure. [14] In East Africa, development had been complicated by the presence of the European settlers, who resisted the development of indigenous production and favoured the development of their own farms and estates. A concomitant of this development was the need to harness African labour, and to develop legislative and coercive instruments to mobilise and control that labour. [15]
During the war years the `siege economy' mentality of the metropolitan government had helped to entrench East Africa's coercive labour policies. The end of the war found East Africa's finances exhausted, its African labour force weakened by famine and disease, and local tax and rent revenues severely curtailed. [16] This period also saw the reassertion of Treasury spending controls after four years of war expenditure. The corollary of the last point was that Kenya was expected - as in the pre-war period - to expand its economy to render the colonies more self-sufficient. This was to be achieved by the influx of more settlers and by the expansion of production, which in turn generated greater need for labour coercion and mobilisation. Thus was the labour crisis of 1919 - 1920 engendered, which formed part of the cluster of influences in the European settlers' attempts to entrench their position of power and influence. The centrality of economic development and labour to the settlers' aims can not be stressed too strongly. To this writer, the articulation of these aims was crucially informed by their views of Africans as a `race', by their conceptions of `race' more generally, and by how these views influenced what they saw as proper and acceptable in developing East Africa. It is to contemporary ideas of race, and the specific views of the settlers on the subject, that I will now turn.
`Race' is a strange and divisive concept. In our rational age, the consensus among most scientists is that race as an analytical concept is moribund: one recent commentator writes that
At last there is a real understanding of race, and the ancient and disreputable idea that the peoples of the world are divided into biologically distinct units has gone for ever. [17]
At the same time, I would argue that Ashley Montagu's conception, written in 1964, still holds true:
The man[sic]-on-the-street uses the term [race] in much the same way that it was used by his 19th century compeer. Here, physical type, heredity, blood, culture, nation, personality, intelligence, and achievement are all stirred together to make the...popular conception of `race'. [18]
This is not the place to debate the `natural' and `culturally-constructed' aspects of race, but it is worth reflecting that the continued confusions that the term `race' evokes today are rooted in historical usage of the term and the actions that such views of race were used to sanction and rationalise. It is these aspects - the political, social, cultural and economic actions that followed from a particular set of views about what race was and what it meant - that I intend to discuss here in relation to East Africa.
Ideas about race have a long life-time, and influence us in subtle ways. A text on evolution published in 1969 - which informed this writer's intellectual development - illustrates this point: in an illustration of the "Five Basic Racial Types... [from which] All the world's 3,000 million human beings are descended," [19] only the blue-eyed, blond `Caucasoid' is wearing a suit and tie and standing in front of a modern building. Of the other five, two are bare-shouldered, one is a shaven-headed Buddhist monk, and the `Negroid' has a face severely marked by some kind of ceremonial scarring. [20] The conflation of cultural and biological features which this illustration seems to imply would have been familiar to the Victorian exponents of empire and those that followed them in the years before 1923. To understand their views of race, it is necessary to consider more long-standing intellectual and cultural traditions.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the biological conception of race was becoming well-established. Previously, it had been widely assumed by scientists and intellectuals that the human race was all of a piece, and that the differential development of different groups was the result of the action of "unnatural and archaic restraints." [21] These constraints, such as climate or despotism, were barriers to the attainment of the higher stages of development which all human beings - given the opportunity - could achieve. In this view, human nature had a `fixed' quality throughout all groups and all regions. As the century progressed, however, emergent scientism spilled over into the study of human beings. As the grip of biology tightened on anthropology - where, previously, cultural and political factors had dominated, [22] the view emerged that the status of the different racial groups was fixed by their biological origins. In this view, adumbrated by Herbert Spencer in the 1850s and cemented by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection in his 1859 Origin of Species, the differences between groups were inextricably bound to their biology. Spencer's idea that the social and economic structures of society were also rooted in biological evolution became established as `social Darwinism', and came to be widely applied to Britain's domestic society as well as to the broader imperial domain. The conflation of the biological with the social, coupled with the reification of race in biology, meant that, increasingly, "the idea took hold that cultural attainment and racial attributes were interdependent." [23] As Spencer pithily put it: "There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts." [24]
It is debatable whether these scientific and pseudo-scientific theories created the sense of uneradicable racial differences or merely provided a more rational underpinning for a pre-existing propensity to see other races as essentially `separate' and `alien'. However, it is quite plausible that this `rational racism' contributed to the "heightened criticism and contempt for `inferior' cultures" [25] and to the process by which, by 1880, "the diverse sentiments of Empire...were coalescing...into grandiloquence and chauvinism." [26]
These factors help influence the development of a hierarchical view of humanity, with Europeans at the top (and northern Europeans at the pinnacle), Eastern races in the middle, and Africans and Pacific cultures at the bottom. [27] The African and the Indian, likewise, are seen as occupying different places in the hierarchy, although special dispensations were made for the `martial tribes' who had distinguishing qualities that the British prized. Generally though, the African was seen as savage, without history, and possessing no natural rights in the sense that Europeans had them. The Indian was seen as somewhat `civilised', possessed of natural rights, and the product of a culture and a history which was a cut above the African. [28]
One does not have to search very hard to find echoes of these racial attitudes in the thoughts and writings of policy-makers, administrators, and settlers in the East African context. Sometimes the concepts of `fixed' and `malleable' human nature are found in the same works and - strangely to modern eyes - they are often mixed, seemingly unproblematicaly, with the rhetoric of `trusteeship' and a paternalistic commitment to development.
Thus Sir Charles Eliot, writing in 1905, suggest that Europeans are temperamentally and physically better-suited to occupy the fertile Highlands, whilst the Africans should be confined to the lowlands, to which they are best-suited. [29] He also suggest that the African race can be `improved' by `hybridisation' with other racial groups:
Fusion between Europeans and negroes is of course out of the question; but...the hybrid between...[the Arab] and the negro (the Swahili) has many excellent qualities. [30]
Here it is clear that the African is regarded almost as a form of domesticated animal. In a similar vein two colonial officials, writing in 1909, could argue that
In dealing with African savage tribes we are dealing with a people who are practically at the genesis of things...and we cannot expect to lift them in a few years from this present state to that of a highly civilised European people....The evolution of races must necessarily take centuries to accomplish satisfactorily. [31]
In 1908, the Secretary of the Colonists' Association referred, in a letter to the Governor, to the "savage mind" of the native, and described African labour as "idle, unskilled, and untrustworthy." [32] Lord Cranworth, writing in 1912, said that Africans, "with a good master...form distinctly good servants." [33] These few examples serve to indicate the commonality of such views amongst administrators and settlers alike.
It was this underlying view of the African as savage, ignorant, and childlike which contributed so strongly to the development of the Protectorate's and the Colony's labour laws: the recalcitrance of African labour and its lack of initiative could only be improved through detailed direction, the civilising influence of the settler and administrator, and through authoritarian treatment. [34] There is thus a linkage from the intellectually-derived and widely disseminated ideas about racial hierarchy and biological fixity, through the refracting prism of development philosophies and strategies, to the making of policy and law at the practical level in East Africa. It is with an awareness of these framing contexts that I will return to the Devonshire Declaration of 1923 and reconsider it in this wider frame.
Earlier, in the introduction and section III above, it was suggested that the Devonshire Declaration, although dealing with the specific issue of the position of the Indian community in Kenya, in fact embodied in its considerations many other, wider issues. In this sense it can be seen as a flawed mirror, where the picture immediately before it is reflected, but so are some features not immediately apparent, and some that are behind the mirror.
The wider issues that informed the Devonshire Declaration and helped to shape the solutions that it proposed were rooted in the long-term development of East Africa, and especially in parallel economic and political developments. Economic development, almost from the start of the European presence, had been predicated on the use of African labour to service the needs of settler production. The nature of that production, and European settler attitudes in their role as employers, meant that a distinctive system of employment practices emerged, an essentially coercive system whose "controls and pressures [were] far greater than those found in any other British colony in Africa." [35] This system had been based upon the habits and attitudes of the settlers and the colonial officials `on the spot'. It was well-known that many of the settlers used brutality and cruelty to inculcate the desired values of hard work and reliability in their African employees, and the colonial government was ill-placed, given the settlers' dominance of the economy, to do much more than curb the worst excesses. The colonial government needed the settlers, and the settlers needed labour. These exigencies, coupled with the dominant views of Africans as a race and of the perception of the Africans' position in the racial hierarchy, allowed coercive employment practices to become entrenched, and exacerbated through legal measures during the war years.
Politically, settler influence reflected their privileged position in the economy and in social standing. The concessions made to settlers on the Legislative Council indicate their emerging political power and their ability to `flex their political muscles'.
After the war, it became apparent that the deleterious effects of labour, disease, and famine on the African workforce were being aggravated by the need to expand production to fuel economic self-sufficiency. This labour crisis was paralleled by growing social problems in the developing urban centres, and by growing Indian reaction to the entrenchment of European paramountcy. It can be strongly argued that it is in this matrix of developments that the genesis of the Devonshire Declaration can be found, and that the doctrine of `native paramountcy' that it espoused was designed to achieve two main goals: to defuse the immediate Indian-European conflict; and to re-establish some grounds for the Colonial Office and the metropolitan government being the arbiters of policy rather than the settlers. The extent to which `native paramountcy' was a real commitment is debatable, given the paucity of policy developments that backed up the Devonshire Declaration in the years that followed. The reality is that de facto European paramountcy continued.
The expediencies of political and economic policy-making in East Africa and Kenya have, I believe, a common theme that unite them: the racial outlooks of Europeans; settlers, officials, colonial and metropolitan governments alike. In the dominant view, which saw Africans as inferior to Europeans in the racial hierarchy, East Africa, its resources and its population could be seen and treated as instruments of the Europeans. Even `enlightened' individuals, who were paternalistic, benevolent, and desirous to alleviate the sufferings of the Africans, were in thrall to this view. It was the assumptions that went along with this view that allowed those employment practices to develop that came to dominate labour relations. In my view, it was these underlying assumptions about race, and the `instrumental' modes of development that they helped to sanction, that brought about the dislocations of African society and generated the conflicts that were to lead to the Devonshire Declaration. In this sense, the espousal of `native paramountcy', however uncommitted it might have been, can be seen as a recognition that the problems generated by the dominant development mode and by the historical contingencies of war had, by 1923, come to pose such a threat to the ability of the metropolitan and colonial governments to rule effectively that a fundamental reappraisal was necessary. In hindsight it is apparent that that reappraisal was not effectively reflected in policy-making, and it is perhaps not too much to suggest that the assumptions of superiority and moral rectitude were retained. As late as 1947 Sir Philip Mitchell - the Kenyan Governor - could still write:
How primitive the state of these people is, and how deplorable the spiritual, moral and social chaos in which they are adrift. [36]
Assumptions about race are indeed long-lived and influential: they continue to surround us, in thought and in cultural discourse, and to inform our thinking and behaviour in subtle and often deleterious ways. By finding their sources, and by tracing their historical development and effects, we can perhaps help to lessen the severity of those effects.
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[1] Sir Philip Mitchell, African Afterthoughts (Hutchinson, 1954), pp. xi - xii
[2] for a fuller treatment of these issues, see, for example, Andrew Porter, European Imperialism 1860 - 1914 (MacMillan, 1994), passim.
[3] cited in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, op. cit., p. 17
[4] ibid., p. 17
[5] cited in Morris, op. cit., p. 382
[6] ibid., p. 383
[7] Elspeth Huxley, White Man's Country, p. 80
[8] Sir Charles Eliot, op. cit., pp. 3 - 4
[9] Sir F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (Blackwood, 1929), p. 91
[10] ibid., pp. 91 - 93
[11] Andrew Porter, Empires of the Mind, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 185
[12] Sorrenson, op. cit., p. 238
[13] I am aware that there were dissenting voices (see, for example, Bernard Porter's Critics of Empire). The point here is that these voices were not of major influence amongst policy-makers and settlers in the period under discussion.
[14] see Constantine, op. cit., pp. 18 - 26
[15] see Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, pp. 104 - 6
[16] see Clayton and Savage, op. cit., pp. 100 - 102, and Constantine, op. cit., pp. 62 - 83
[17] Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes: Biology, History, and the Evolutionary Future (Harper
Collins, 1993), p. xi
[18] Ashley Montagu, The Concept of Race, in Ashley Montagu (ed.), The Concept of Race (The Free Press, 1964), p. 14
[19] Ruth More et al., Time-Life Young Readers Library: Evolution (Time-Life, 1969), p. 124
[20] ibid., p. 125
[21] Andrew Porter, Empires of the Mind., p. 217
[22] see, for example, Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), passim., and particularly chapter 8
[23] Porter, Empires of the Mind, p. 220
[24] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics(1851), cited in Hannaford, op. cit., p. 273
[25] Porter, Empires of the Mind, p. 220
[26] James Morris, op. cit., pp. 387 - 8
[27] see Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 27, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican, 1981), passim.
[28] Bolt, op. cit., pp. 209 - 10
[29] Eliot, op. cit., pp. 1 - 4
[30] ibid., p. 107
[31] John Ainsworth and C. W. Hobley, C.O. 533/63,, cited in Sorrenson, op. cit., p. 227
[32] Cd. 4122, p. 4
[33] cited in Sorrenson, op. cit., p. 231
[34] see Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, p. 106
[35] ibid., p. 116
[36] cited in Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden (James Currey, 1992), p. 179
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Book One: State and Class (James Currey, 1992)
Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)
Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner, The White Man's Burdens - an Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire (University of Exeter Press, 1996)
Fred G. Burke, Political Evolution in Kenya, in Stanley Diamond and Fred G. Burke (eds.), The Transformation of East Africa (Basic Books, 1966)
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688 - 1914 (Longman, 1993)
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914 - 1990 (Longman, 1993)
Anthony Clayton and Donald C. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya 1895 - 1963 (Frank Cass, 1974)
Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914 - 1940 (Frank Cass, 1984)
Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden (James Currey, 1992)
Stanley Diamond and Fred G. Burke (eds.), The Transformation of East Africa (Basic Books, 1966)
Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (Frank Cass, 1966)
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican, 1981)
Great Britain, Cmd. 1922. Indians in Kenya (HMSO, 1923)
Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the British Empire 1890 - 1939 (Clarendon Press, 1971)
Baron W. M. H. Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories Part I. East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika (HMSO, 1950)
Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996)
John D. Hargreaves, Decolonisation in Africa (Longman, 1988)
HMSO, Cd. 4122. Correspondence Relating to Affairs in the East Africa Protectorate (HMSO, 1908)
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1969)
Elspeth Huxley, Race and Politics in Kenya (Faber and Faber, 1944)
Elspeth Huxley, White Man's Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya. Volume One 1870 - 1914 (Chatto and Windus, 1953)
Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes: Biology, History, and the Evolutionary Future (Harper Collins, 1993)
John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, The Colonial State in Kenya 1895 - 1914, in Journal of African History 20 (1979)
P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
W. McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within - A Short Political History (Frank Cass, 1968)
Ashley Montagu, The Concept of Race, in Ashley Montagu (ed.), The Concept of Race (The Free Press, 1964)
James Morris, Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (Penguin, 1979)
George J. Moutafakis, The Colonial Heritage of East Africa, in Stanley Diamond and Fred G. Burke, The Transformation of East Africa (Basic Books, 1966)
Roland Oliver and Gervase Mathew (eds.), History of East Africa, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 1963)
Sidney Pollard, The Development of the British Economy 1914 - 1990 (Edward Arnold, 1992)
Andrew Porter, European Imperialism, 1860 - 1914 (MacMillan, 1994)
Andrew Porter, Empires of the Mind, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), the Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share (Longman, 1996)
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (MacMillan, 1981)
M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Oxford University Press, 1968)