Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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TERRITORIAL CONTRASTS
currency
crisis,
ruined several businesses and abruptly exposed the
essential frailty of white enterprise in Uganda. Like the coffee-
farmers of Kenya and Tanganyika, the Uganda planters were
unhealthily dependent on extremely volatile overseas markets;
they too had grown accustomed to government collusion in
keeping down wages; and their transport costs were highest of
all.
When their luck ran out, they found that the Uganda
government was only a fair-weather friend. For in Uganda, in
sharp contrast to Kenya, African cash-crop production had come
through the war relatively unscathed: indeed, in the Eastern
Province it had markedly increased. Cotton had been valued as
a contribution to the war effort, and low-cost African production
had powerful champions, including S. S. Simpson, director of
agriculture from 1911 to 1929. When disaster struck European
producers in 1921, Simpson's arguments gained new force, and
in 1922 Coryndon abandoned his plans for land alienation; he also
abolished forced labour. This sudden volte-face was paralleled in
London, where Churchill was replaced by the Duke of Devonshire.
Henceforward, the Colonial Office was committed to furthering
African production in Uganda. In this, it responded to pressures
from Humphrey Leggett, chairman of the British East Africa
Corporation, which had long co-operated with the Uganda
Company in processing and marketing Uganda's cotton. On a
visit to East Africa
in
1908,
Leggett had encouraged cash-cropping
in Nyanza, and it was partly due to his influence that the Colonial
Office in 1922 recalled Nor they from Kenya and caused the
annulment of African tax increases.
The belated acceptance of African production as the foundation
of Uganda's economy was dramatically reflected in export patterns
during the 1920s. Between 1923 and 1929 cotton exports more
than doubled in bulk and their value rose from
£2111
to £3.3m; in
1925 they were worth £4.701 and accounted for
93
per cent of all
exports. These achievements were partly due to improved
productivity following research promoted by the Empire Cotton
Growing Corporation from
1923.
Meanwhile the Uganda govern-
ment began to assist Africans to grow coffee.
Arabica
had already
been promoted among the Gisu, on Mount Elgon; elsewhere,
robusta
was grown, and by 1929 Africans were producing the
greater part of coffee exports (which amounted to 4 per cent of
all exports). In sharp contrast, European enterprise stagnated: a
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few rubber estates survived, but from 1926 their exports dwindled
to near-insignificance. However, prosperity rewarded two Indian
businessmen who began producing sugar in Buganda and Busoga
in the 1920s: they met a rapidly growing African demand and had
no need of overseas markets.
The post-war boom, and the rapid recovery from the slump of
1921—2,
boosted revenue (£1.51x1 in 1925) and made possible a
marked increase in government expenditure. Civil administration
was extended to Karamoja in
1921;
14
in 1922 a technical school
was opened at Makerere, near Kampala, and in 1924 an education
department was set up, while a variety of jobs in the civil service
hitherto reserved to Indians were opened up to Africans. In 1928
Uganda was finally linked by rail to the coast: in that year the new
line through the Kenya white highlands was extended west as far
as Busoga; a branch line struck north to Teso, and the main line
reached Kampala in 1931. A network of motorable feeder roads
was built, and there was a notable expansion of medical and
veterinary services.
For many Africans in Uganda, the 1920s were a period of
relative prosperity and promise. But it was also a decade of
growing tension and conflict. In the first place, it witnessed —
as in Tanganyika —
a
change in the relations between chiefs and
the colonial government. In the lakeside kingdoms, chiefs who
had allied with the first British officials were rapidly giving way
to younger men, among whom the British now favoured those
who were not only literate but could speak English. Indirect rule
through 'native authorities' was gradually introduced, and in
Uganda this often meant new curbs on chiefly power: salaries
replaced tribute and tax-rebates, and the younger officials tended
to regard chiefs as junior civil servants rather than as potentates
in their own right. In 1924 the government forbade the extension
of
mailo
allodial tenure outside Buganda, where it had facilitated
the concentration of wealth and power within the Christian
oligarchy. Following agitation led by clan heads, the lukiiko
(parliament) of Buganda was induced in 1927 to set a legal limit
to the levies of chiefs and other landlords on their tenants.
Thus one trend in official policy in Uganda after 1922 was to
shelter the mass of
small
producers not only from rival European
enterprise but also from the exactions of African aristocrats.
14
In 1926 Uganda transferred to Kenya the Turkana country west of Lake Rudolf.
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TERRITORIAL CONTRASTS
Another sort
of
protection was much less popular. The funda-
mental political issue in this expanding agricultural economy was
the price paid to growers of the main cash-crop, cotton. This was
subject to the play of forces between the growers, the middlemen
(mostly Indian, though by 1920 several were African) and the
ginners (among whom Indians outnumbered Europeans by 1925,
following
a
boost in exports to India and Japan). By the late 1920s,
the ginners' attempts
at
collusion
to
secure local monopsonies
provoked heated opposition from growers and middlemen: this
was expressed both by occasional refusals to plant cotton when
prices were unduly low and by protests from the Ganda lukiiko,
the Young Busoga Association and the Association
of
Uganda
Farmers. The government, however, was more inclined to further
the interests of established businesses, in the name
of
' rational-
isation
',
than to expose African growers and traders to both the
risks and windfalls of a free market. A ginners' scheme in 1929
for
restricting the price paid to growers was thwarted only when
a poor harvest compelled them
to
compete for the diminished
crop.
If the growth
of
the cotton economy intensified old tensions
between chiefs and subjects, and introduced new ones between
growers and ginners, it also underlined geographical contrasts of
wealth and poverty. For various reasons, including their remote-
ness from the major transport routes, the northern and western
districts became sources of labour rather than cash-crops. In the
early 1920s the expansion of public works and private enterprise
increased demands for labour even as the power
of
chiefs and
officials
to
conscript
it
was eroded. Thus the government pro-
moted recruitment in Acholi and West Nile, while by 1925 there
may have been 10,000 immigrants from Ruanda-Urundi
in
Buganda: many were working for Ganda cotton-farmers. In 1928,
famine drove 35,000 people from Ruanda-Urundi
to
Buganda,
while another 20,000 entered from Tanganyika. By 1930, some
of the migrants were settling on plots of their own in Buganda,
but most went home; and the territory's increasing dependence
on cheap, short-stay labour tended to depress wages generally.
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Closer union
Britain's acquisition of Tanganyika under mandate had far-
reaching implications for British policy throughout eastern
Africa. The fact that Britain now ruled three large contiguous
territories in East Africa prompted moves to draw their govern-
ments closer together. In 1920 the East Africa Currency Board
was set up; in 1927 Tanganyika adopted the customs tariff in force
in Kenya and Uganda, and all three territories agreed on the free
movement of local products across their own borders; this
promoted a regional trade in foodstuffs. But any substantial moves
towards political unification would depend on co-ordinating
social policy. After the Devonshire White Paper on Kenya of
1923,
it seemed as if, at least in theory, all three mainland
governments were committed to giving priority to African
interests. In practice, the balance between the communities in
Kenya was very much an open question, and the terms on which
closer union might be achieved became a matter of keen debate.
In 1924 a parliamentary commission visited East Africa, chaired
by a Conservative spokesman on colonial affairs, W. Ormsby-
Gore. While broadly
in
favour of white settlement, the commission
advised against federation, in view of opposition from the
territorial Indian associations. Instead, from 1926, the mainland
governors and senior officials began to meet more or less regularly
to discuss matters of common concern.
More was at stake, however, than regional co-operation or even
union. Tanganyika, after
all,
supplied the final link in a continuous
chain of British control or influence reaching from the Cape to
Egypt. The expulsion of the Germans had revived visions of a
British ascendancy in East and Central Africa based on British
colonies of settlement: in time, the region might comprise one
or more Dominions modelled on South Africa and closely
associated with it. Smuts was one such visionary; another was
Milner's disciple Leo Amery, who from 1924 to 1929 was colonial
secretary. In 1925 Amery appointed as governor of Kenya Sir
Edward Grigg, who shared his hopes, and in 1927 Amery
despatched a new East Africa Commission comprising Sir E.
Hilton Young, Sir George Schuster, Sir R. Mant and J. H.
Oldham. This move back-fired: in their report of 1929 all but the
chairman opposed closer union, unless in the form of a high
commissioner with power to override local legislatures on matters
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DEPRESSION
AND
STRAIN
of African policy, while they favoured
a
common electoral roll
— the main demand
of
Indians
in
Kenya. Soon afterwards,
a
Labour government was returned to power in Britain and the new
colonial secretary, Lord Passfield, issued two White Papers
on
East Africa which broadly supported the Hilton Young majority
report. The White Papers were submitted for approval to a joint
select parliamentary committee which reported late in
1931,
after
the Labour government had fallen. The committee, dominated by
Conservatives, returned to much the same position as Ormsby-
Gore's commission:
it
advised against closer union,
in
view of
local hostility, but it also opposed a common roll, and it stressed
the importance of European enterprise. In the later 1930s, settler
fears that Tanganyika might be handed back to Germany promp-
ted further pressures for closer union, but the original deadlock
persisted: no plan which would please white settlers would
be
accepted by East Africa's Indians, and throughout the deliber-
ations their case had been pressed on the Colonial Office by the
Government of India, which in the last resort counted for more
than the 'South African' lobby.
In the short term, at least, the chief result of the controversy
was
to
aggravate communal suspicions
in
East Africa
and
crystallise African thought on questions of territorial policy. The
commissions
of
1924 and 1927 both received submissions from
African organisations, and the parliamentary committee
of
1931
heard evidence
in
London from African witnesses. They were
carefully chosen by the colonial governments but included such
influential men as Martin Kayamba, founder of the Tanganyika
Territory African Civil Service Association; Serwano Kulubya,
treasurer
of
Buganda;
and
Chief Koinange
of
the
Kiambu
Kikuyu. This was the first time black East Africans had been given
an official platform to speak on major political issues, and they
joined in recording well-argued objections to any scheme which
might enlarge the political scope of white settlers.
DEPRESSION AND STRAIN, 1930-1940
In 1930 the world's commodity markets collapsed. East Africa
was hard hit. Between 1929 and 1932 world prices for sisal, coffee,
maize and hides fell by 70 per cent while cotton prices fell by over
60 per cent.
To
some extent the region benefited from efforts
elsewhere to counter the depression. From 1932, Empire prefer-
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EAST AFRICA
ence provided some shelter for producers of coffee and sisal. The
abandonment of the gold standard by Britain in 1931 and by the
USA in 1933 caused the price of gold to rise by two-thirds
between 1931 and 1935: this stimulated the exploitation of East
Africa's scattered deposits and by 1938 gold was the second
largest export from both Kenya and Tanganyika. In some fields,
moreover, the local response to falling export prices was increased
production, which curbed the decline of export
values.
Meanwhile,
some imports became cheaper. Despite imperial preference, East
Africa was prevented by the Congo Basin treaties
15
from discrim-
inating against cheap Japanese manufactures, and these were now
available in large quantities. In the course of the 1930s Japan
captured much of the East African market for cotton and silk
goods, and for the great mass of consumers this was clear gain.
In general, however, import prices fell less sharply than those of
exports. At the same time, the burden of fixed obligations became
relatively much greater than hitherto: on reduced incomes, most
Africans had to pay as much tax as before, while most European
farmers had large debts to service. Governments were in the same
predicament: between 1929 and 1932 their revenues fell on
average by 15 per cent but they too had fixed debt charges to pay,
and also pensions, so there were cut-backs in administration and
social services, while investment in new public works came to a
halt. Financial constraints reinforced the political arguments
against any comprehensive scheme for closer union in East Africa,
though in 1930-1 the mainland governments agreed to increase
protective duties on imports, and in 1933 the postal and telegraph
services were unified in the interests of economy. By 1935 export
prices had revived, and in 1936-7 export values finally surpassed
the highest levels achieved in the 1920s, but this growth was not
sustained. The mood of retrenchment persisted throughout the
decade. In 1940 total government revenue was 14 per cent higher
than in 1929, but this and other resources had to be distributed
among more and more people: the populations of East Africa may
have risen by as much as
14
per cent between 1931 and 1939, when
there were probably 6.5 million in Tanganyika, 4.8 million in
Kenya, 4.2 million in Uganda and 230,000 in Zanzibar.'
6
15
See Lord Hailey, An African
survey
(London, 1958), 1341—3.
16
These are extrapolations from the first East African census of 1948: see D. A. Lury,
'African population estimates: back projections of recent census results',
Economic and
Statistical
Review
(Nairobi), 1965, 16, viii-xii.
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
Tanganyika
Of all the East African territories, Tanganyika suffered most
from the depression. Between 1929 and 1931 exports slumped
from £3.8m
to
£1.7111,
and
government revenue (around
£2111
from 1925 to 1929) fell by
a
quarter. The government already
spent one-quarter of its revenue on debt charges, but
it
had
to
borrow heavily in 1932 from the British Treasury, which enforced
stringent economies. At the same time, the railway lost its share
of the Katanga copper traffic (which in 1930-1 supplied half its
freight earnings)
to
the new Benguela railway. The slump was
mainly reversed by increasing production of coffee and cotton,
which between 1930 and 1936 rose in volume by 90 per cent and
300 per cent respectively. The production
of
sisal, which takes
seven years
to
mature, expanded more slowly. Thus
in
1932-5
there was a rise in the relative importance of African production,
which
in
the later 1920s
had
tended
to
decline. From 1936,
however, Tanganyika's exports clearly owed more to European
than to African production. Sisal remained the principal export;
in 1936-7 (as in 1929-31) it exceeded 40 per cent of
the
total. And
from 1931 gold became steadily more important:
by
1940
it
accounted for almost a quarter of total exports (now worth £51*1).
Alluvial panning had begun
in
Lupa district,
in
the southern
highlands, in 1922, but in the 1930s the bulk of the country's gold
output came from reef-mining: in the Lupa area; at Sekenke, east
of Tabora; and at Geita and around Musoma, near Lake Victoria.
Alluvial gold at Lupa attracted several hundred 'diggers', includ-
ing some Africans, but the industry was mainly in the hands of
a few companies with mining interests elsewhere. By the later
1930s it employed well over 25,000 men — several thousand more
than the copper-mines in Northern Rhodesia.
Economic difficulties prompted the Tanganyika government to
strengthen
its
links with expatriate business. The depression
halted the net growth of the European community, but emigration
was offset by a continuing influx of German smallholders, which
in turn reinforced the solidarity of British officials and settlers. In
1930 the Tanganyika Sisal Growers' Association was formed,
mainly to reduce wages; its president was the unofficials' leader
in the legislative council, and in 1937 British settlers dominated
a government commission
on
labour.
In
1938
a
committee
of
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EAST AFRICA
unofficial advocated government aid for increased white settle-
ment; this found favour with the new governor, Sir Mark
Young, who in 1939 appointed three white unofficial to the
executive council. He also appointed one Indian: an acknow-
ledgement of the importance in the legislature of the richer Indian
businessmen, doctors and lawyers. Since 1929, moreover, Indian
schools had enjoyed increasing government support, which partly
offset the great hardships endured by Indian traders during the
depression.
To Africans, the 1930s brought no such compensations. For
all but a few it was a lean decade of contracting opportunities and
growing regimentation. In 1932 the government launched a' plant
more crops' campaign, but it was chiefly directed at those areas
in the north and north-west where export crop-production was
already established; it was not intended to check migration from
the principal' labour reservoirs' in the south and west. In any case,
the campaign exposed more clearly than ever before the inherent
contradictions of indirect rule. Revenue from cash-crops enabled
native authorities to enjoy limited fiscal autonomy, but the more
people grew them the more their interests diverged from those
of their chiefs. The government determined crop prices for
growers, and increases in production, especially of Sukuma
cotton, often had to be enforced by chiefs. The persistent decline
in coffee prices aggravated tensions between chiefs and other
farmers. On Kilimanjaro, the coffee farmers' trading association
was taken over by the government in
1931,
and in 1937 there were
riots in protest against the way in which it was manipulated. In
the same year there were riots in Buhaya, provoked by new rules
for coffee-growers, government opposition to African middlemen,
and the unpopular behaviour of certain chiefs. Elsewhere, there
had been efforts to organise coffee sales and beat down Indian
buyers, but finance was lacking to form true co-operatives.
Besides, there was a large and widening gap between the great
mass of cultivators and the small minority of farmers who
produced the great bulk of African cash-crops, with the help of
seasonal labour and sometimes ploughs.
Meanwhile, the expansion of expatriate enterprise greatly
increased the number of wage-earners: this doubled between 1927
and 1936, when 244,000 Africans were employed by non-Africans.
About one-fifth of these workers came from Burundi, Northern
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
Rhodesia and Mozambique, and as always
it
was those migrants
from furthest afield, with least hope of an alternative livelihood,
who were most willing to perform the exceptionally unpleasant
task
of
cutting sisal. Real wages mostly held firm during
the
depression, but they tended to fall after
1935.
In 1937 dockworkers
struck at Tanga; in 1939 there were dock strikes at both Tanga
and Dar es Salaam, and that
at
Tanga spread
to a
nearby sisal
estate. These protests brought no concessions, but they indicated
a growing awareness of shared predicament among a nucleus of
workers who had been dependent
on
wage labour
for
several
years.
Resistance to economic crisis was least evident in food-growing
areas,
such as Bonde or Ukaguru. The growth of the labour force
enlarged the market
for
local food-crops, but continuing high
transport costs rendered them still less profitable than export
crops.
Educated clerks were far less likely to take up maize or rice
than coffee or cotton, and local leadership suffered in consequence.
To be sure, the depression did evoke
a
popular response in several
remote and impoverished rural areas, but on the plane of ritual
rather than political action. In 1933, the
mchape
cult of witchcraft
eradication briefly appeared in the far south-east and west, as in
Central Africa,
to
offer an answer
to
current misfortune where
missionaries and colonial officials had clearly failed.
The government did little to encourage the growth of African
leadership which might widen discussion of the country's discon-
tents.
Before his departure in 1931, Cameron had joined Martin
Kayamba
in
proposing
the
formation
of
provincial African
councils. But Cameron's vision was not shared by his successors,
for whom indirect rule became an end
in
itself.
There was
no
platform on which officials could exchange views with the African
Association. This had been formed in 1929, in Dar es Salaam, in
order to voice opposition to closer union among British-educated
civil servants, veterans
of
the German regime and
the
main
African groups
in
the capital (where by 1931 there were 35,000
people). Cameron himself warned the civil service members not
to engage in 'polities', and fears for their jobs in the depression
further unnerved them. The association tended to become a club
for the urban elite and was soon challenged by the more radical
civil servants and traders of the Tanganyika African Welfare and
Commercial Association: this was founded in 1934—6 by a Ganda
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EAST AFRICA
shopkeeper, Erica Fiah, who
in
1937 started
Kwetu,
the country's
first independent Swahili newspaper. But the African Association
formed branches
in a few
up-country towns;
it
assimilated
the
energetic Bukoba Bahaya Union;
and it
extended
to
Zanzibar,
where
in
1939 delegates from most parts
of
the territory attended
the association's first territorial conference.
A
year later another
conference was held
in
Dar es Salaam, and
it
renewed
the
request
for provincial councils:
'in a
word,
we are now
claiming
for a
voice
in the
Government'.
17
The
request
was
rebuffed;
but it
could
not be
sidestepped much longer.
In
1938
the
government
had begun
to
contribute funds
to
Makerere College,
in
Uganda,
where school certificate courses
had
been introduced
in
1933.
By
1939,
despite drastic cuts in education since the depression, nearly
fifty Africans from Tanganyika had found their way
to
Makerere.
These students came from all strata in the African layer of colonial
society, and from all over the country. There could be no question
of confining their horizons
to the
bounds
of a
native
administration.
Kenya
In Kenya,
the
depression compelled
a
partial reappraisal
of the
economic role
of
European settlers. The elaborate framework
of
subsidies erected
to
help them
in the
1920s presupposed high
prices
for
their exports and
a
rapid expansion
of
production.
But
in
1929
much
of
Kenya suffered both drought
and a
locust
invasion, and the value of coffee exports fell by one-third.
In
1930,
despite
the
world depression, Kenya's exports were worth more
than ever before (£$.3m),
due to
record harvests
of
coffee
and
maize. But between 1931
and
1934
a
prolonged drought combined
with falling prices
to
halve the value of exports.
By
1940 they had
risen
to
nearly
£4m, but
this recovery
was
largely
due to new
commodities. Coffee remained
the
principal export,
but in
1938—40
it
was closely followed
by
gold:
by
1940,
the
output
of
gold from reef-mining
in
different parts
of
Kavirondo was worth
£650,000, though already
the
volume was beginning
to
decline.
From 1935 Kenya's third export
by
value was tea, mostly grown
in
the
south-western highlands
by
firms financed from London.
By 1938, sisal
was
followed
by
pyrethrum
(a
daisy which yields
insecticide
and is
especially suited
to the
Kenya highlands).
17
Quoted
by
John Iliffe,
A
modern history
of
Tanganyika
(Cambridge, 1979), 419.
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