Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
Meanwhile, the need to boost exports
as
prices fell had undermined
both official and settler objections
to
African production.
By
comparison with the earlier
1920s,
the African share of production
for export declined. Nonetheless, after falling to 9 per cent in 1931
it rose to between 15 per cent and 20 per cent after
193
j,
and this
revival was mainly due to the energetic promotion of cotton in
Nyanza.
At
the same time many Europeans abandoned maize-
farming, their least profitable enterprise,
in
favour
of
dairy-
farming, and African maize-growers filled the gap. Many Kikuyu
also began to grow wattle trees (mimosa): these cost little land
or labour and could
be
either consumed
or
sold
for
fuel
or
building-material, while expatriate firms extracted their tannin for
treating leather. In 1934 the government even began to encourage
a very
few
Africans
to
grow coffee, though pyrethrum was
reserved for Europeans.
The impact
of
the depression, and ensuing changes
in the
structure
of
the export economy, provoked new tensions both
between government and the various racial communities and also
within them. In 1931, just before leaving Kenya, Grigg set up
a
Land Bank which helped to rescue indebted white farmers who
had been abandoned
by
the commercial banks. But revenue,
which had risen by 1929 to £3.3m, was 10 per cent less in 1932.
The new governor, Sir Joseph Byrne, promptly made cuts
in
expenditure without consulting settler politicians, while
the
railways required bulk exports to pay their way. The government
had saved white farming as such, but it could no longer help the
least efficient. By the end of the decade, one in five white farms
had failed, and perhaps one-third of white-owned land was idle
or hardly used.
In
1936, following
a
critical report on Kenya's
finances by
Sir
Alan Pirn, income-tax was again imposed
on
whites. The British government was anxious not to strain settler
loyalty too far (the Italians had recently occupied Ethiopia) and
in 1937
it
appointed
a
governor, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham,
much more ready than Byrne
to
plead their case. But over the
decade the government showed increasing interest both in low-
cost African farming and in planters with ties to overseas capital,
as opposed
to
the smaller European farmers who leaned most
heavily
on
the state. And whereas such farmers tended
to
see
African producers as rivals, planters were glad to buy their maize,
while their cotton was welcomed by British trading houses.
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The enlargement
of
scope
for
African production
was not,
however, matched
in the
political sphere.
In 1927 and 1931,
African witnesses to enquiries on the question of closer union had
called
for
direct representation
in the
legislative council. Once
closer union
had
been firmly shelved, both Africans and Indians
ceased
for
a time
to
fear that Kenya was about
to
be handed over
to white settlers, and their concern over communal balance
in
the
council diminished.
In
1933 elected Indians finally took the seats
allotted them,
18
and in
1936
an
Indian unofficial was appointed
to
the
executive council. The government remained firm against
admitting Africans
to the
legislative council; instead,
a
second
European was nominated
in
1935
to
represent African interests,
but
in
fact this
was
done much more effectively
by an
Indian
member, Isher Dass.
By
this time, economic adversity
was
drawing certain Indians and Africans closer together.
In
1935 and
1937
new
regulations
for the
marketing
and
transport
of
crops
aided monopoly purchasers, such as the Kenya Farmers' Associ-
ation (a European co-operative) at the expense of both Indian and
African traders.
In 1935
Indian artisans formed
a
trade union
which
two
years later led successful strikes
in
Nairobi
and may
have encouraged subsequent strikes among African workers,
though the Kikuyu Central Association maintained an attitude of
somewhat detached interest.
Land, however, was the most ominous source
of
tension
in
the
1930s.
In the
course
of
the decade, several factors combined
to
create serious land shortages
for the
first time. Population
was
increasing; African families
in
the reserves needed more land
for
cash-crops;
and
squatters were moving back into
the
reserves
from white farms. Many settlers
now
preferred
to
obtain their
labour from non-resident wage-earners rather than from squatters
occupying potentially valuable grazing land,
and in 1937 the
grazing rights
of
squatters were severely restricted.
Yet the
government made little effort
to
ease pressure on the reserves.
In
1930,
at the insistence of the Colonial Office, a Native Lands Trust
Ordinance had strengthened the legal security of African reserves,
but
in
1932
it
was modified
to
facilitate European access
to the
Kavirondo goldfields. Attempts to check the rapid exhaustion
of
soil
in
Kamba country by destocking provoked fierce protest
in
1938,
in
which Kamba herdsmen were backed
by the
Kikuyu
18
Indians also filled communally elected seats
in the two
municipal councils:
in
Mombasa from 1929 and
in
Nairobi from
19)6.
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
Central Association. In the same year the total area of reserves
was increased by almost i,
5 00
sq. miles following a recommend-
ation of the Morris Carter Land Commission appointed in 1932.
But much of this land was of dubious quality, and only
15
sq. miles
were added to the congested Kikuyu reserves. Besides, in 1939
the Highlands Order-in-Council stressed that this was a 'final
settlement'; outside these reserves, Africans were permanently
denied land rights while it seemed clear that in practice, if not in
law, Indians would continue to be excluded from the white
highlands. Against this measure, the KCA and KTWA composed
a joint protest, read by Isher Dass to the legislative council; a year
later, the KCA was proscribed as subversive.
Land scarcity in central Kenya aggravated social differentiation.
In the first decades of colonial rule, this process had been most
conspicuous in a territorial perspective: African leadership had
shifted decisively from the coast to the interior. Land alienation
and the abolition of slavery had crippled the pre-colonial coastal
plantations, and Muslims had mostly rejected such education as
was offered by missions and government: the latter only began
to provide for Koranic teaching in 1924, and for Arabic in 1938.
For many years, therefore, jobs on the coast requiring literacy in
English tended to be given, not to Arabs or Swahili, but to
Indians, especially Christians of Goan origin. In Mombasa, the
increasing use of Luo and Kikuyu migrant labour depressed
wages and housing conditions, which in 1939 provoked a series
of brief strikes. Up-country, Muslim Swahili and Christian
freedmen from the coast had enjoyed a headstart in petty trade,
government and teaching, but they were soon supplanted by
locally educated men. This process was reinforced from the 1920s
by the tendency of settlers and officials, for political reasons, to
prefer local Africans to Indians both as skilled employees and as
traders in the reserves. By 1930 Alliance High School was
beginning to turn out teachers and clerks for government and the
railways, while a few went on to Makerere; in 1939 one Alliance
man became the country's first African doctor. As a Masai, he was
very much an exception; more than half the pupils at Alliance were
Kikuyu, and it was not until 1938 that secondary courses were
started in Nyanza. Next year the unpredictable Archdeacon Owen
was calling on the government to reduce aid for higher education,
since it was giving rise to a new privileged class.
There was certainly a growing division between haves and
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have-nots, especially among the Kikuyu. Their mixed farming had
in pre-colonial times been based on an open land-frontier; it was
now constrained within increasingly crowded reserves. For chiefs
and others with secure access to land, a comfortable living could
be made from maize and wattle; in the early 1930s such men also
greatly enlarged their herds with livestock bought cheap from
drought-stricken neighbours. But this meant even less land for
former squatters returning to the reserves; most in effect
exchanged white for black masters or chanced their luck in town.
Land rights had long been bought and sold among the Kikuyu; in
1938 a meeting of Local Native Councils proposed a land register
as a step towards the establishment of titles. A growing elite
with bourgeois aspirations was closing ranks against the
disadvantaged.
Uganda
In Uganda, as elsewhere, the collapse of export prices in 1930
was countered both by increased production and by diversifying
the range of exports. The rise in cotton output outlasted the
depression: it doubled between 1929 and 1938. This was made
possible by special circumstances in Buganda and Teso. During
the depth of the depression Ganda farmers had cut down their
use of migrant workers, but by 1938 they employed about
50,000, while another 28,000 migrants paid rent as tenants to
Ganda farmers. In Teso, ploughs had proved easy to use, and
cotton output rose as they were more generally adopted. Among
the Langi, by contrast, cotton output stagnated after 1931. Their
well-wooded country was unsuited to the plough, and there was
no labour for hire, so that further production for export could
only be at the expense of food-crops. Besides, there were many
farmers in Buganda who found that
robusta
coffee yielded a better
return on labour than cotton, even though coffee prices fell
throughout the decade. Meanwhile, the government continued to
assist the rapid expansion of
arabica
cultivation in Bugisu, and by
1938 it was also widely grown in Ankole and Kigezi, which had
long lacked an export crop. Throughout the 1930s coffee
contributed between
6
and
10
per cent of total exports and in 1938
coffee exports weighed 14,000 tons, as much as Tanganyika's and
not much less than Kenya's. Sugar exports also rose sharply (until
checked by international quotas in 1937), while tobacco-
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
production expanded
in
Bunyoro
and
West Nile districts.
European rubber estates survived, but several planters began
to
replace coffee with tea. From 1936 gold (mostly from alluvial
deposits in the south-west) ranked third among exports, contrib-
uting 2-3 per cent; together with tin, from southern Ankole,
it
accounted for some 10,000 wage-earners.
The expansion
of
African export crop-production was much
more pronounced in Uganda than in either Kenya or Tanganyika,
but official strategies were not fundamentally very different. The
government's chief concern in the depression was to protect both
its sources of revenue and the country's leading business firms.
In Uganda, this meant above all strengthening African capacity
to produce for the market, even at the expense of labour supplies
from the north-west or south-west. The government could do this
precisely because labour continued
to
flow
in
from other
territories.
In
1936,
for
example, some 20,000
men
from
Tanganyika entered Uganda in search of work, while 90,000 came
from Ruanda-Urundi, spurred on by the recent devaluation
of
the Belgian franc.
In
the following year, there were on average
83,000 unskilled wage-earners at any one time in Uganda, exclud-
ing those on Ganda farms: the total number employed was around
130,000 — as compared with 180,000 in Kenya. The government
did nothing to check the country's growing dependence on cheap,
underfed, short-stay labour, which for the time being suited nearly
all employers, whether European, Asian
or
African.
In
other
respects, however, there was sharp conflict between the economic
interests of African farmers and non-African immigrants. In the
name of' quality control', and under pressure from the Empire
Cotton Growing Corporation, the government finally entrenched
local monopsonies
in
cotton-buying, whereby the price
to
the
grower was jointly fixed by officials and ginners. As export prices
revived,
it
was the ginners, not the growers, who gathered the
profits. Meanwhile,
a
marketing ordinance severely obstructed
African trade in most other cash-crops. Africans were thus largely
denied the opportunity
to
accumulate capital and develop the
skills
of
the entrepreneur. By 1940, despite exports worth over
£5111,
Uganda's economy was approaching a dead end. There was
little scope for expansion on existing lines, since most of the better
land was now exploited, while erosion was already
a
cause
of
concern.
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EAST AFRICA
Despite the firm limits set to African economic enterprise,
Uganda's people suffered less hardship in the 1930s than other
East Africans. This was partly due to the more ample resources
of government. Though revenues never much exceeded the level
reached in 1929 (in
1937
they rose to £i.9m), the burden of foreign
debt was comparatively low. Between 1928 and 1938 that part of
the budget devoted to public works and social services rose from
38 to 51 per cent, and spending on education was doubled. In the
1920s and early 1930s the government was much concerned, as
in Kenya, to train Africans to replace Indians as government
clerks. But Sir Philip Mitchell, who became governor in 1935,
brought a new emphasis on academic education and helped to set
Makerere on the road towards its post-war evolution into a
university college.
Mitchell also brought views on indirect rule refined by long
experience in Tanganyika; he sought both to broaden the social
base of native authorities and to extend the autonomy of the
Buganda government. And it was above all the central fact of
Buganda's pre-eminence (reflected in the preponderance of Ganda
at Makerere) which defined African political horizons. Buganda
offered Ganda its own broad avenues to power, while non-Ganda
thought mainly in terms of creating new ethnic communities
which might rival Buganda's relative wealth and independence.
There was widespread protest against cotton monopsonies, but
it was highly localised. The most energetic African organisations
of the 1930s were perhaps the Bagishu Welfare Association and
the Young Bagwere Association, both of which voiced the
resentment of chiefs and teachers against local Ganda settlers. In
contrast to Kenya, or even Tanganyika, there was no clear central
stage for political conflict: neither Europeans nor Indians found
occasion to make the legislative council a forum of serious debate.
Despite the country's small size and compact shape, even the most
educated Africans had little, if
any,
sense of territorial identity by
1940.
This trend towards regional solidarities was strengthened
in the schools. In 1927 the mainland governments agreed to
promote Swahili as an African lingua franca, but in Uganda this
aim was thwarted both by the Ganda and by a general missionary
preference for local vernaculars. Official policy was more success-
ful in Kenya, but it was only in Tanganyika — in continuation
of German policy — that both missions and government collabo-
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
rated
to
make Swahili the medium
of
instruction
in
primary
schools, with far-reaching consequences for the future.
Zanzibar
In marked contrast
to
mainland East Africa, the economy
of
the Zanzibar Protectorate scarcely expanded at all between 1905
and 1940. There was
no
significant increase
in
output
of
the
principal crop, cloves. Thus
the
territory's domestic export
earnings depended almost entirely on the vagaries of weather and
prices. The latter were highest
in
the early 1920s; the ensuing
decline continued until just before 1940, when exports were worth
£900,000. Re-exports from the mainland, which the Germans had
begun to close off, revived when the British took over Tanganyika,
but they fell away rapidly after 1930. Revenue, worth £589,000 in
1923,
declined thereafter and stagnated throughout the 1930s. The
absence
of
growth was due
to
various factors:
the
relatively
inelastic market for cloves; the fact that much of the better land
was already under cloves by 1905; and the chronic indebtedness
of many Arab plantation-owners. This had its roots far back
in
the nineteenth century, and arose from
the
planters' lack
of
frugality, the high interest rates charged by Indian
financiers,
and
the extreme volatility of clove prices. By 1914 senior protectorate
officials considered that Arab planters should be replaced either
by African smallholders or by Europeans. Nothing came of the
latter idea, but indigenous Africans did in fact gradually buy up
Arab land. By the early 1920s self-styled 'Swahili' owned nearly
a quarter of the clove trees on Zanzibar island and half those on
Pemba (which throughout the period exported more than twice
as much as Zanzibar).
Despite this fundamental shift in economic power, the govern-
ment sought to shore up the Arab planters. Even in the days of
the slave-trade, they had depended heavily
on
seasonal wage-
labour. With the abolition of slavery, contract labour had been
imported from German East Africa,
and in the
early 1920s
supplies of mainland labour were stepped up, especially since local
Africans were turning to copra-production for their cash income.
By 1924, when the total population was around 220,000, about
20 per cent were mainlanders (of whom perhaps
a
third were of
slave origin). They formed the base
of
a social pyramid which
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EAST AFRICA
became ever more rigidly stratified along lines of colour. In 1925
the Zanzibar government was detached from that of Kenya and
in 1926 a legislative council was set up, comprising ten officials
and six nominated unofficials; the latter represented Europeans,
Indians and Arabs. From 1927 a Clove Growers' Association
(CGA), assisted by the government, helped to reduce both
marketing costs and wages.
The depression brought indebted planters to the verge of ruin:
by
193 3
it was reckoned that half the clove trees in the protectorate
were mortgaged to Indians. In 1932 a financial report by Sir Alan
Pirn attacked the government's excessive employment of
Europeans and Indians and its general neglect of the African
population. But his call to provide Africans with better education
and more responsible jobs in local administration went unheeded;
as on the mainland, the government refused to make use of
literacy in Swahili in Arabic script, even though this was
widespread among Africans. The chief concern of officials was to
retain the confidence of Sultan Khalifa (reigned 1911-60) and the
Arab minority. Between 1934 and 1937 the CGA was reorganised
and given a complete monopoly of exports. A moratorium was
declared on Arab or African debts to Indians, who were also
effectively prevented from buying land. In 1937 Indians in both
Zanzibar and India boycotted the clove-trade and sales were
halved, to the advantage of producers in Madagascar. In 1938 a
new Resident reduced the power of the CGA and associated
Indians with its operations; meanwhile (after consultations with
the Indian government) the Zanzibar government undertook to
guarantee debt repayments.
This crisis was the only real shock sustained by Zanzibar's social
system between the wars. The African majority was deeply
divided, despite the prevalence of Sunni Islam and the Swahili
language. Those who had become dove-growers on their, own
account aspired to social assimilation as Arabs. Many of the
indigenous population lived on the edge of the cash economy, as
fishermen and subsistence farmers, but only those on Zanzibar
island had suffered large-scale dispossession by Arabs. Besides, the
indigenous population as a whole was inclined to despise the
mainlanders, who carried out the most menial work on plantations
and in Zanzibar town. The African Association, formed in 1934,
was a welfare society for mainlanders on the island; it had contacts
in Tanganyika, but not until 1939 was a Shirazi Association
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DEPRESSION AND STRAIN
formed
to
represent
the
indigenous majority, first
in
Pemba
and
later
in
Zanzibar.
Conclusion
By
1940 the
similarities between
the
territories
of
East Africa
were perhaps
as
striking
as the
differences.
The
depression
had
halted
the
growing divergence
in
social policies apparent
in the
more expansive climate
of the
1920s. True, Uganda
was
still
committed to small-scale African production; Kenya and Zanzibar
to
the
primacy
of
immigrants' estates; Tanganyika
to an
uneasy
compromise between African production
and
alien plantations.
But underlying these contrasts was
an
increasing official commit-
ment
to the
interests
of
overseas,
and
especially British, capital,
as against the claims
of
local capital
or
African farmers; there was
also
a
growing dependence on cheap migrant labour. Throughout
the region,
the
colonial order involved varying degrees
of
segregation
in
employment, education
and
urban residence.
The
early hopes fastened
on
white settlement
had
been dimmed,
but
white acceptance
of
the much larger Indian presence was scarcely
more than
a
grudging concession
to the
Government
of
India.
For Africans, indirect rule could
be
both shelter
and
prison.
Increasingly, officials sought
to
'protect Africans from them-
selves':
in
much of Tanganyika (as earlier
in
Uganda) this meant
removing thousands
of
people into anti-tsetse concentrations,
often
on
poor land,
and
expanding game reserves.
In
Mahenge
district, hillside rice-cultivation
was
banned
in
1937
in
order
to
prevent erosion: there was famine the following year.
19
Thus
the
hard-won knowledge
of
African farmers might well seem
discounted. Besides, there
was as yet
little room
in the
colonial
order
for the
best-educated Africans,
and
virtually none
for
African businessmen
or
permanent town-dwellers.
The
leading
towns
of
East Africa had grown rapidly
in
the 1920s, and
by
1938
there were 65,000
in
Nairobi, 60,000
in
Mombasa, 45,000
in
Zanzibar town
and
perhaps 40,000
in Dar es
Salaam.
For
most
town-dwellers, conditions were very bad and getting worse. Part
of the problem was urban unemployment (the other face
of
rural
impoverishment),
but
official neglect
was
more serious, since
it
was rooted
in
prejudices largely impervious
to
economic fact.
20
">
L. E.
Larson,
'A
history
of
the Mahenge (Ulanga) District, c. 1860-19J7' (Ph.D.
thesis,
University
of
Dar
es
Salaam, 1976),
300-1.
20
Cf.
chapter
1, p. 50.
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CHAPTER
14
ETHIOPIA AND THE HORN
Ten years after defeating
the
Italians
at
Adowa
in
1896,
the
Christian monarchy
of
Ethiopia was more powerful than
it
had
been
at any
time since
the
fifteenth century. Recent territorial
expansion
had
brought
its
frontiers
to the
extremities
of the
Ethiopian plateaux, which contained the most fertile and populous
parts of north-east Africa. One-quarter of the Somali people were
incorporated
in
Ethiopia.
The
rest were nominally subject
to
Britain, France
and
Italy,
who had
annexed
to
their colonial
empires the whole of the sea
coast.
Between them, Britain and Italy
claimed vast tracts inland but had occupied very little. The Italians
had held
on to the
fertile highlands
of
Eritrea, which had once
been part of the Ethiopian empire; elsewhere, except for riverine
strips in Somali country, the European territories permitted little
more than seasonal grazing. Thinly spread, the Somali and
c
Afar
pastoralists were still largely independent in 1905. Aside from the
Christian empire
of
Ethiopia and the narrow band
of
European
control, the only political centre towards which wider loyalties
might gravitate was the Islamic reform movement led by Sayyid
Muhammad 'Abdallah Hasan. This seemed capable
of
creating
a
successor to the confederations of Muslim farmers, both riverain
and highland, which
had
prospered
in the
Horn
for
several
centuries until the mid-nineteenth century.
The demography of north-east Africa has received little serious
study,
and it is
possible
to
make only
the
most tentative
observations.
By
1905 there were probably
no
more than
two
million people left outside the Ethiopian empire, whose popula-
tion was estimated by informed foreigners
in
the early twentieth
century as between eight and thirteen million. Later
guesses,
when
not patently distorted for political reasons, indicate little growth,
though European doctors attested to
a
very high birth-rate among
cultivators. A smallpox epidemic swept from the northern Somali
coast through southern Ethiopia
to the
White Nile
in
1904-5.
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