Anne King

A history of population growth in Kenya and Uganda

Economic history is the study of people and their way of life; it is concerned with all the people, not simply the rulers or decision-makers, and it is therefore very important that economic historians should know about the number of people in the community they are studying; in other words, they must concern themselves with the size of the population. As historians they also need to know how the size of the population has changed over time; has it increased in size, or decreased, and even more important, why and how have the increases or decreases occurred? This chapter will attempt to answer some of these questions.

Marketing and Distribution

What is marketing and why is it important for the process of production? Marketing is the vital link which connects the producer to the consumer. This link is of crucial importance in all economies because without a marketing mechanism, the producer’s surplus crops rot in the field. In economies which are strongly orientated towards external trade as is the case of East Africa, it is the marketing mechanism which connects the producer to the world market, and which, as will be shown in this chapter, supports the producer against world price fluctuations dealt with in the previous chapter.

Agricultural Change in Kenya and Uganda: A Comparison

We shall begin this chapter with an account of nineteenth-century land use and land tenurial practices. Land use covers the ways in which people farm their land, the techniques of digging the ground, the division of labour between men and women and the rotations of crops to ensure the continuing fertility of the land. Land tenure defines a person’s rights in holding property. Land rights were usually directly related to an individual’s connections by kin. The kinship system and the land holding system were closely connected, so that any man’s or any woman’s right to produce food from the soil was dependent on his relationships with other members of his particular community.

Nineteenth-Century Craft Industries

The industry in hand-made goods in nineteenth-century East Africa is important because such goods were vital to society, supplementing and complementing agricultural and pastoral activities. For example, iron hoes were used by all agricultural communities. Weapons, such as iron spears, were also important. The people with the more skilful blacksmiths, who could forge the sharpest and longest-lasting swords, had a distinct advantage over people without such craftsmen. Salt was another essential commodity produced on a small scale. A great deal of salt was available from local natural sources, for example salt was extracted from the water of salt lakes or dug from the shores. Salt was traded over considerable distances but supplies were irregular especially for those people who did not have a suitable natural source of salt in their neighbourhood. As a substitute a great deal of salt was manufactured from plants, leaves and earths. But our knowledge of how the extraction processes, of which there were probably quite a number, were carried out is still very limited.

Nineteenth-Century Arab Trade: the Growth of a Commercial Empire

The expansion of Arab caravans and Arab personnel into the interior of East Africa throughout the nineteenth century was in a sense the first stage of imperialism which was to transform the face of Africa in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century Arab trade did not produce such radical changes as the European imperial trade which followed. The technology of transport was still based on human muscle power, the main export goods were ivory and human beings which were exchanged for cloth and a few iron goods. The Arabs were concerned almost exclusively with the export-import trade. Unlike the Europeans they did not have the physical means to set up central government controls in any part of Eastern Africa. Yet, despite this lack of innovation, by the 1880s there were very few areas that had not been influenced by the Arabs’ activities in one way or another.

Industrialisation in the Twentieth Century

The basis of the wealth of the western capitalist world and Soviet Russia, wealth which has been created over the last hundred and fifty years, has been the rapid growth of manufacturing industry (which for convenience we can call ‘industrialisation’). All societies, however simple their technology, manufacture some goods which include clothes and tools for production and defence. During the last two hundred years or so we have learnt how to manufacture not only the old things which people have always wanted, like clothes, on a vast scale, but also new things like motor cars and aeroplanes, which our forefathers never even dreamt about. We have learnt how to produce all these things by understanding our material environment. Men have always understood their environment to some extent; those aspects which they could not explain in material terms, they explained in terms of the working of supernatural powers. But it has only been since the time of a scientific understanding of the material environment that man has been able to consciously manipulate it in order to produce the goods he wanted. The difference between an historical understanding of the physical environment and a scientific understanding is as follows.

African Trade in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In this chapter we shall be looking at the patterns of trade which have been predominantly controlled by Africans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In reality, we cannot isolate African trade patterns from others in either century; African and Arab trade patterns overlapped and intertwined in the nineteenth, while in the twentieth African, Asian and European trade patterns were divided on a racial basis, until just before political Independence. Incoming foreigners have therefore stimulated, as well as severely limited, African trade in both centuries. But for purposes of historical analysis, it is useful to look at the African dominated patterns of trade alone for the following reasons.

Foreign Trade in the Twentieth Century

In the previous two chapters we have dealt with two types of trade of the nineteenth century, the patterns of internal African trade and external Arab—African trade. The chapter on the latter has illustrated the mechanics of the trade which initially opened East Africa to the goods of an industrialising Europe. The Arab incursions into Eastern Africa were, in a sense, the first stage in economic integration of the area with Europe. The second stage of this economic integration came with colonisation. The introduction of crops for export — cotton, coffee, sisal, tea, pyrethrum and a few others — provided the means of earning foreign exchange, mainly sterling. With this cash East African communities began to import a wide range of goods manufactured in Europe, such as motor cars, whisky and fertilisers.

Agriculture in Uganda: Change without Development

In comparison with Kenya, the history of land and agriculture in Uganda in the twentieth century has been less dramatic. The difference was due to two factors: (i) white settlement failed in Uganda; (ii) there has always been at least twice as much high-quality land in Uganda as in Kenya.

Nomadic Pastoralism: the Process of Impoverishment

Few historical studies have been made of the nomadic pastoral peoples of East Africa and consequently we know little about their past, even in the nineteenth century. Such studies as have been made have concentrated on the broad sweep of the history of migration of pastoralists or on their recent political past and little attention has been paid to their economic or social histories. For information in these fields we have to turn to the work of anthropologists, but use of this source itself provides problems for the historian. Anthropologists, who are concerned with the economic and social aspects of the societies they are studying, tend to concentrate on the current structures and functions of social and economic institutions. As a result the view of life they present tends to be timeless and to give an impression that things have not altered, unless the studies are specifically concerned to examine change in the society. Existing studies of nomadic pastoralists in Eastern Africa, give an impression of timelessness — that methods of production in the precolonial period have hardly altered and that in modern times change has passed these societies by.