Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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TERRITORIAL CONTRASTS
should be a 'black man's country' on broadly West African lines
and, while much basic law was taken from Indian codes, Nigerian
models influenced plans for land law and African administration.
The policy of indirect rule, elaborated by Lugard into a doctrine,
was now
to be
adopted
in
Tanganyika. The first step
in
this
direction was taken
on
strictly financial grounds.
In
1920-2
Britain had to give the territory grants-in-aid worth £408,000;
it
therefore insisted that new means be found
to
increase revenue
and reduce expenditure. Byatt thought this could best be done by
increasing government's share
of
the proceeds from sales
of
African cash-crops. Hitherto, much of this income had been paid
to chiefs as tribute; henceforward, chiefs received
a
salary from
government while tribute payments were commuted to
a
monetary
tax additional
to
hut-
or
poll-taxes.
In
1925
a
new governor
arrived: Sir Donald Cameron, who had served in Nigeria for 17
years.
Cameron at once set about the introduction of indirect rule,
whereby chiefs became paid agents
of
local 'native administ-
rations' rather than
of the
central government.
A
native
administration comprised three bodies:
a
native authority,
whether chief or council;
a
native court; and
a
native treasury,
which collected
tax,
forwarded
a
percentage
to the
central
government and used
the
rest
to
pay
the
staff
of
the native
administration. It was hoped that native administrations, in close
touch with the people, would prove more efficient in prising taxes
out
of
African pockets than officials
of
central government;
it
seemed certain that they would be cheaper.
For Cameron, indirect rule was
not
just
a
means
to
more
efficient administration;
it
was also a way of training Africans to
take part eventually in territorial politics. But this was a long-term
aim. Like most
of
his colleagues, Cameron firmly believed that
Africans should not become 'bad imitations' of Europeans, but
develop along 'their own lines'.
It
was widely assumed that this
meant fostering the 'tribe' as the largest unit of African society,
and several
of
Cameron's subordinates tried
to
group native
administrations into tribal paramountcies, in the belief that they
were thereby repairing damage done by German rule to African
institutions. In practice, indirect rule often meant the introduction
of chiefs and paramounts without any traditional standing, but
such innovation was seen as a stage in a distinctively African path
of evolution. This approach influenced Cameron's views
on
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African education, which echoed those of many missionaries and
also the Phelps-Stokes Commission which visited East Africa in
1924:
schools should make Africans 'useful members in their own
community life'.
7
It was in this spirit that the government began
to assist selected mission schools. In 1925 it refused to help
Africans learn alongside Indians, since this might give Africans
'political ideas'. In the same year, it founded a school at Tabora,
but for ten years entry was restricted to the sons of chiefs and
headmen.
Indirect rule provided new scope for African abilities, but it
was clearly far from being a programme for indiscriminate
African advancement; in important respects, it was a policy of
segregation. This was underlined in 1929, when the native courts
became part of a judicial pyramid from which professional
advocates were excluded and in which appeal lay through district
and provincial commissioners up to the governor, and not to the
High Court.
8
There was nothing incongruous in the fact that
Cameron simultaneously sought to promote white settlement. In
1925 Britain and Germany resumed normal relations, which
meant that Germans were once more entitled to settle in Tanga-
nyika. Many small farmers from Germany regained property on
Kilimanjaro, while others took up leases around Iringa, in the
southern highlands, where they vainly sought to make fortunes
from coffee. It therefore seemed highly desirable, both to Cameron
and the Colonial Office, that British settlers with a modicum of
capital and experience should be encouraged as a counterweight
to the Germans. In 1930-2 a survey team specified certain areas
as suitable for white settlement. Some preference was given in the
later 1920s to European coffee cultivation: Africans were denied
assistance in growing the more profitable
arabica
variety except
on Kilimanjaro, where it was already firmly established. Imperial
loans were obtained for railway extensions, not only from Tabora
to Mwanza but also from Moshi to Arusha, which was seen as
a centre for white farming. The economy became increasingly
dependent on European enterprise: while the total value of
exports was nearly quadrupled between 1921 and 1929 (when it
was £3.7m), the contribution of sisal rose from 22 per cent in
1921-3 to 40 per cent in 1929. This was achieved by accelerating
7
Thomas Jesse Jones,
Education
in East Africa (New York, n.d.), xvi.
8
Kenya followed suit, in 1950; Uganda, in the end, did not.
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the flow of migrant labour from the remotest population clusters
in the south and west; the Ha were first systematically taxed
in
1923,
and in 1926
a
labour department was set up
to
supervise
labour migrants
in
transit. Meanwhile Europeans once more
obtained political representation and so too, for the first time, did
Indians.
In
1926
a
legislative council was formed, comprising
thirteen officials and seven nominated unofficial; five of the latter
were British whites and two were Indians, who
in
this context
were also British; non-British European residents were specifically
excluded. In 1929 two more unofficial whites and one Indian were
added. There was no revival of elections
in
urban government,
but Europeans
and
Indians were nominated
by
officials
to
township authorities.
It was Indians who pioneered political action on
a
territorial
scale in Tanganyika. Their meagre representation in the legislative
council was no measure of their importance. During the war they
had suffered greatly from
the
collapse
of
external trade,
but
afterwards the Tanganyika government drew heavily on India for
English-speaking clerks and artisans. As exports revived, Indian
traders increased, and
a
few bought sisal and coffee plantations.
By 1931, when the European population was 8,200, there were
25,000 Indians — four times their number in 1912. Meanwhile,
in 1918, an Indian Association had been formed, and
in
1923
it
helped to organise a closure of Indian and Arab shops throughout
the territory: this obliged the government to abandon an attempt
at closer supervision of traders' accounts.
The reassertion of the Indian presence had far-reaching effects
among Africans:
it
stimulated their awareness of belonging to
a
single colonial territory and prompted them to organise accord-
ingly. Ironically, the conditions for this were created by colonial
policy. Colonial officials might envisage African progress in terms
of tribes, and see the legislative council as the exclusive concern
of immigrants, but the British themselves had already sponsored
the advance
of
' detribalised' Africans. When the Tanganyika
government began looking for English-speaking staff at the end
of the war,
it
found them not only in India but among Africans
educated by British missions. Since the late nineteenth century,
the Universities' Mission
to
Central Africa (UMCA) had been
sending Africans from the mainland
to
Kiungani, on Zanzibar,
for training as priests or teachers. The German government had
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distrusted such African Christians and gave them few jobs;
instead, they had favoured literate Muslims. When the British
took over, they soon gave key posts as government clerks and
interpreters to graduates of Kiungani and the Church Missionary
Society school at Mombasa, and also to educated Africans from
Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Uganda. Such men resented
the predominance of Indians in the middle grades of the civil
service and the preferential treatment of Indian clerks. To
challenge this, in 1922 both Christians and Muslims in Tanga
founded the Tanganyika Territory African Civil Service Associ-
ation; in 1925—7 the branch in Dar es Salaam led a systematic if
unsuccessful campaign to improve terms of service and achieve
parity with
Indians.
In
its
early
years,
TTACSA mainly represented
a coastal elite, but its stronghold was the capital and framed a
perspective of the territory as a whole.
Meanwhile, educated Africans up-country were also coming
together: their field of action was the tribe, but their tribes were
economic communities rather than the administrative construc-
tions of colonial officials. In 1924 the Bukoba Bahaya Union was
formed by clerks in opposition to coffee-rich chiefs, and a similar
rivalry among the Chaga inspired the Kilimanjaro Native Planters'
Association, founded in 1925. This protected its members against
Asian coffee-traders by dealing through a single agent; it also
resisted threats of European encroachment and in 1929 even
sought representation in the legislative council. Such fears and
rivalries exposed the contradictions inherent in the compart-
mentalised structure of Tanganyika society; they were to become
more urgent as the structure was stiffened by a new economic
depression.
Kenya
In the East Africa Protectorate, in sharp contrast to Tanganyika,
white settlers were much more powerful at the end of the war than
at the beginning. Several had played key roles in government, and
most were well placed to take advantage of the post-war
commodity boom. By 1919 coffee contributed 25 per cent of
exports, and from 1920 onwards it was the country's leading
export, usually followed by sisal. High prices for both crops
encouraged further expansion, to which the main obstacle seemed
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TERRITORIAL CONTRASTS
to be a shortage of African labour. This was due to the ravages
of
war.
Men who had survived and recovered were busy putting
their own farms back into commission; they were in no mood to
continue working for white men. So further measures were taken
to conscript them. In 1918 the Resident Natives Ordinance
compelled African squatters to work for their landlords for at least
six months of the year. In 1919 General Northey, a veteran of the
East Africa campaign, became governor, and he soon issued
circulars instructing district officials
to'
persuade' labour to come
forward. Meanwhile, the settlers' position had been strengthened
by the colonial secretary, Lord Milner, as part of a broader
strategy for entrenching British hegemony in eastern Africa. In
the legislative council, eleven (out of thirty) seats were to be filled
by election among the 9,000 Europeans. The 25,000 Indians were
allowed to elect two members but refused to do so; the Arabs
were given one nominated member. Britain also supported the
settlers' plan to double their numbers by offering farms on easy
terms to ex-servicemen. In 1920 the territory was renamed Kenya
Colony;
9
this had no constitutional significance but allowed the
government to raise
a
loan of
£5 m
in London, in order to improve
Mombasa harbour and extend the railway into Uganda through
European areas in the western highlands. In the same year,
African taxes were increased by one-third, and the Native
Registration Ordinance tightened the grip of both employer and
tax-collector by obliging every adult male African to carry a
registration certificate
(kipande).
At the end of 1920 the post-war boom collapsed; besides, most
people, of whatever colour, suffered losses as a result of the
conversion of East African currency from the Indian rupee to
sterling. For many Africans, wages were now the most likely
source of cash: economic circumstances pulled them on to the
labour market even as recent legislation pushed them. It has
indeed been reckoned that by 1922 an African had to work four
times as long as in 1910 to earn his tax money.
10
Thus when in
1921 the Colonial Office insisted that Northey withdraw his
9
The coastal strip remained, as before, a protectorate, under the entirely nominal
suzerainty of the sultan of Zanzibar. In 1925 Kismayu and territory west of the Juba
river was transferred to Italian Somaliland, to fulfil an agreement made with Italy in
1915.
10
R. L. Tignor, The
colonial transformation
of
Kenya.
Tie Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from
if
00
to if)f (Princeton, 1976), I8J.
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circulars, it made little real difference, for labour was now cheap
and plentiful. In the same year a judge ruled that, since Kenya
was a colony, Africans could not own land as Europeans could;
they were mere tenants-at-will of the Crown. Meanwhile, settlers
showed that civil disobedience could succeed: they mostly refused
to pay an income-tax imposed in 1920 and it was withdrawn in
1922.
Against the steady advance of settler power, Africans now
began to organise resistance. In June 1921 a Kikuyu telephone
operator in the Treasury, Harry Thuku, founded the Young
Kikuyu Association. This campaigned both in Nairobi and in
Kikuyu reserves against the
kipande,
tax increases, forced labour
and land alienation. In March 1922 Thuku was arrested and
deported to the coast; this caused a riot in Nairobi in which over
twenty Africans were killed. By this time, Thuku's grievances
were also being voiced by Luo chiefs and by a Young Kavirondo
Association. This last included many Anglicans who until 1921
had belonged to the Uganda diocese, in which they had enjoyed
a high degree of self-reliance and autonomy. The Luo meetings
were taken seriously by the government, and in August the recent
tax increases were abolished. In 1923 the government sanctioned
the transformation of
the
Young Kavirondo Association into the
Kavirondo Taxpayers' Welfare Association, which under the
leadership of the Anglican Archdeacon Owen addressed itself for
some years to local self-help as well as to carefully worded
protests.
Meanwhile tensions between Europeans and Indians became
acute. In 1919 Northey had bluntly told the Indian Association
in Nairobi that European interests must be paramount, and early
in 1922 the new colonial secretary, Churchill, encouraged
Europeans to look forward to eventual self-government. But the
government of India, hard-pressed by nationalists, compelled the
British government to think again. In mid-1922 Northey was
replaced by the more flexible governor of Uganda, Robert
Coryndon. Whitehall now proposed to mollify Kenya's Indians
by creating a common roll for elections to the legislative council.
This frightened a group of white settlers into plotting rebellion:
plans were made to kidnap the governor. Early in 1923 the British
government arranged talks in London, at which settlers and
Indians sought to buttress their rival claims by championing the
rights of the African majority. Their bluff was called: after
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suggestions from J. H. Oldham, secretary of the International
Missionary Council, the colonial secretary, now the Duke of
Devonshire, issued a White Paper which declared: 'Primarily
Kenya is an African territory...the interests of the African natives
must be paramount.'
11
In face of widespread settler opposition,
Indians were assured the right of unrestricted immigration and
were offered five (instead of two) communally elected seats in the
legislative council; but they scornfully ignored this concession
until
1933.
12
The Arabs gained one elected seat, while an official
seat was filled by the senior Arab liwali on the coast. African
interests were to be represented by one nominated European, a
missionary. Nobody had won, but tempers cooled as commodity
prices began to rise again. The prospects for European farming
were also much improved by the reduction of rates for carrying
maize on the railway, which from 1922 was run by
a
South African
director, advised by a settler-dominated council. From 1923 tariffs
protected wheat and dairy farmers, and in the same year the
legislative council set up a finance committee to approve the
budget; on this, settlers outnumbered officials by eleven to three.
In 1923—4 there was a sudden influx of new settlers: white
landowners increased by
one-half.
The middle 1920s were the best years in our period for
European farming in Kenya. There was little white immigration
after 1924, and in 1928 only one-eighth of the 'white highlands'
were cultivated. All the same, between 1920 and 1929 the area
under white cultivation increased between three- and four-fold;
the white population rose to 16,000. Export values rose fairly
steadily and in 1930 were almost twice those of 1921 (which had
reflected the height of the post-war boom). These exports were
mostly marketed by Europeans; the African contribution, which
had been greatly reduced by the war, rose to 25 per cent in 1925
but then declined, and consisted largely of hides and skins.
Between 1924 and 1927 the value of simsim exports, mainly from
Kavirondo and the coast, reached record levels but thereafter fell
away rapidly. Since 1916 Africans had been officially discouraged
from growing coffee, potentially the most lucrative export crop.
There was, of
course,
an important home market for food-crops;
the Kipsigis, for example, sold plenty of maize to their European
11
Indians in Kenya, Cmd. 1922 (1923), 1.
11
Meanwhile, some Indian seats were filled by nomination.
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TANGANYIKA
I 'European land Crown land
CZZZlAfrican reserve WWII Forest reserve
0
| |
150 km
(5
'
100 miles
25 Kenya: the White Highlands, 1935
and Masai neighbours, making increasing use of ploughs as well
as water-mills.
In
general, however, African agriculture
was
handicapped by lack of capital, low productivity and inadequate
transport. Coryndon proclaimed
a
'dual policy' whereby both
European
and
African agriculture would
be
promoted,
but
between 1921 and 1930 the agriculture department was run by yet
another South African, Alex Holm, who openly championed
white farmers: between 1925
and
1929
the
proportion
of its
budget devoted
to
Africans was halved. Besides, African access
to meat markets was restricted by the decision to combat disease
in African-owned cattle through quarantine measures rather than
mass inoculation, even though African pastoralists, such as the
Kamba, Samburu, Turkana and Masai, regularly sold part of their
herds:
indeed the Masai supplied Nairobi with much of its meat.
To the anger of many district officials, it became ever clearer that
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TERRITORIAL CONTRASTS
African taxation was being spent, not on African welfare but on
subsidies for frequently inefficient European farming: not only
through technical aid but through the cost
of
tariff protection,
road-building
and
uneconomic railway rates. Indeed, railway
costs were deliberately increased; the government raised new
loans
to
build expensive branch lines between 1924 and 1929
throughout the white highlands. One such line benefited Kikuyu
reserves, and the line to Kisumu was extended further into Luo
country,
but to
build
all
these railways
the
government was
obliged to enlist forced labour.
Thus in the course of the 1920s white settlers in Kenya came
to regard the colonial government
as
a friendly partner rather than
a potential enemy. Their hopes of territorial self-government had
been dashed
in
1923,
but
since then they had received many
material benefits from the imperial connection; besides, they were
given a large measure of local self-government on municipal and
district councils
set up in
1929. These favours
to the
settler
community were the price which Britain made Kenya's Africans
pay for the assurance that their interests would be 'paramount'
— that
the
colony would
not be
formally handed over
to
immigrants. For the time being there was no sustained African
criticism of this bargain. The demarcation of new reserves in the
mid-1920s temporarily allayed African fears for their land. By and
large, most articulate Africans during the 1920s were concerned
with the balance of power within their own communities rather
than at the centre. They were anxious to improve their access
to
European culture and
its
associated responsibilities,
but
they
sought this
by
exploiting local tensions and solidarities:
as in
Tanganyika, the most ardent ' improvers' were among the most
dedicated ' tribalists'.
Once
the
agitation
of
1922 had subsided,
it
was Christian
missionaries and government-appointed chiefs, quite as much as
settlers, who came under attack from African teachers and farmers
in central and western Kenya. In 1925 the government introduced
partly elective local native councils (LNCs), which obliged chiefs
to share power with their literate subjects. The councils were soon
used
to
press home the attack on missionaries, whose primary
schools failed to satisfy African demands for education that would
fit
them for leadership. In 1926, with government aid, Protestant
missionaries opened Alliance High School in Kiambu, but what
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EAST AFRICA
many Africans wanted was government schools in which mission-
aries would
no
longer be able
to
interfere with African customs,
an especially sore point among the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu Central
Association (KCA), formed
in
1924, was devoted not only
to
the
cause
of
higher education and the redress of economic grievances
but
to the
defence
of
Kikuyu culture,
and it
strove
to
promote
a sense
of
Kikuyu unity
as a
basis
for
communal progress. Thus
the conflict with
the
missions
in
1929 over
the
Kikuyu practice
of ditoridectomy crystallised aspirations both towards freedom
of cultural choice
and
towards
a new
sense
of
ethnic loyalty.
It
was
no
paradox that
in the
same year Kikuyu LNCs raised over
£20,000
to
build their own schools while Johnstone (later Jomo)
Kenyatta, secretary
of the KCA,
editor
of the
country's first
African newspaper and
a
champion
of
ditoridectomy, called
for
'a methodical education
to
open
out a
man's head'.
13
Uganda
In 1918 there
was
still
no
official agreement
as to the
relative
importance
of
African
and
European enterprise
in
Uganda's
future. But the hundred-odd European planters were very hopeful.
During the war they had mostly prospered. Exports of coffee and
rubber substantially increased, both
in
value
and in
bulk. They
still formed only a small proportion of total exports (together they
amounted
in
value
to 10 per
cent
in
1918-19),
but in
1920
the
planters were sufficiently encouraged
to
press, like white farmers
in Kenya,
for
special assistance from government
at
the expense
of African producers. They
had
friends
in
high places:
the
chief
justice, Morris Carter,
and a
South African governor, Robert
Coryndon (1918-22).
In
1921 Coryndon introduced
a
legislative
council
in
which five officials were joined
by two
nominated
Europeans;
one
nominated seat
was
provided
for the
Asian
community, who until 1926 boycotted
it in
protest.
In the
same
year, Churchill,
as
colonial secretary, approved long-standing
proposals
to
make available
for
alienation large areas
in
the three
kingdoms bordering Buganda.
These soon proved hollow victories,
for
meanwhile export
prices
had
collapsed.
The
depression,
and the
East African
" Quoted by T. O.
Ranger,'
African attempts to control education in East and Central
Africa, 1900-19)9', Past
and
Present,
1965, 32,
67.
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