John Lonsdale

Coping with the Contradictions: The Development of the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895–1914

By drawing on the current Marxist debate about the nature of the capitalist state, this article argues that the colonial state was obliged to be more interventionist than the mature capitalist state in its attempts to manage the economy, since colonies were distinguished by the way in which they articulated capitalism to local modes of production. This posed severe problems of social control, since the capitalist sector required the preservation of indigenous social institutions while also extracting resources from them. In early colonial Kenya this problem was mitigated by a rough compatibility between the needs of settler capital and the patronage exercised by African chiefs within a peasant sector which was expanded to solve the colonial administrations initial need for peace and revenue. The peasant sector was not destroyed, rather it was represented in the state, which never ceased thereafter to be plagued by the conflicts between the two modes of production over which it presided.

Soil, Work, Civilisation, and Citizenship in Kenya

Abstract What does Kenyas crisis say to academic discussion about globalisation and the rise of local claims to ‘belong’, as autochthonous ‘sons of the soil’? The Kenya case supports the view that the changing relations between global pressures and states may exacerbate local conflicts that promote ethnocentric, exclusive concepts of belonging. But this article argues, further, for the importance of local concepts of self-worth and cultural value. Since Kenyas most ‘indigenous’ of peoples are the weakest, and almost all other Kenyans fairly recent immigrants, claims to territory are strategies justified by other arguments – to have improved the land, to have brought civilisation. Such managerial arguments do not help the poor, or women. Claims are evaluated according to an implicit moral hierarchy of ‘work’, and are best understood as expressions of local patriotism. These hold both generous and chauvinistic potential.

Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with elites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated elite .

South Africa in question

Features: * Problem-solving opportunities to challenge children to think about concepts that they have learned in mathematics in more abstract ways. * Practical, hands-on activities in which pupils actively explore mathematics through activities such as measuring, making models and so on. * Talk about points to encourage children to make links and connections between mathematics and the real world and to verbalise and communicate their ideas. * Literacy support in the form of activities which develop reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. * Interactive group activities which encourage children to process information and pose their own questions about learning. * Assessment pages which can be used in continuous and formal assessment.

Town life in colonial Kenya

This paper raises more questions than it answers. While, as my references will make clear, much excellent work has been done, there is as yet no mature urban historiography of Kenya whose theoretical debates one can epitomise. The most I can do is try to pull together some ideas from the secondary literature, supplemented by research of my own, to suggest elements of a connected research agenda, informed by a few organising themes. This can, * sense of what is important for us to study and argue about, and is by no means exhaustive. Other themes will suggest themselves to other scholars, and that will be all to the good. Colonial Kenya’s historians have hitherto paid more attention to its rural political economies than its urban social histories. As the British Institute

Ornamental Constitutionalism in Africa: Kenyatta and the Two Queens

Evidence from the political career of Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya suggests that Africans took a constitutional rather than ‘ornamental’ view of the imperial monarchy. Far from accepting that majesty and aristocracy domesticated alien overrule, they expected the British monarchy to protect them against local colonial excess. Kenyattas Gikuyu (Kikuyu) people had two grounds for this view. One was a sense of imperial history, in which land alienation in favour of white settlers was a form of oppression unthinkable in the days of Queen Victoria – a more equal past that the Crown ought to restore to them. The other was their projection on to the imperial stage of an indigenous sense of the reciprocal relations of advantage that should exist between wealthy patrons and loyal clients. Kenyattas political strategy after the Second World War was conditioned by this Gikuyu constitutionalism.

Compromised Critics: Religion in Kenya’s Politics

Early in 2008 up to half a million Kenyans fled their homes in fear for their lives. Their country seemed about to rupture into communal violence after a disputed election or, in some areas, in anticipation of it. Hundreds were killed before they could flee. Some had their homes or businesses or, in one especially horrific incident, their church, torched and burned over their heads (Cheeseman & Branch 2008). Many wondered if “Kenyans” could still exist after such a horrendous breach of trust between neighbors. Had they become, irrevocably, tribesmen and women, mutually hostile, no longer fellow citizens? The poor, especially, had known political violence for more than a decade, suffering at the hands of thugs acting on behalf of political elites. Other gangs outdistanced their patrons’ ability to control them. The state had lost its monopoly on the use of force (Mueller 2008). Memories were revived of the partisan violence of Mau Mau—the insurgency that had propelled, hindered, and then divided the politics of freedom half a century earlier. The colonial state, barely more than half a century before that, had itself been founded on violence, small in scale, localized and spasmodic, but destructive all the same. The burning of huts and standing crops and the confiscation of livestock had, in British eyes, “punished” native obduracy. As if that history were not intimidating enough, soon after the colony’s birth, in the First World War, the British had had to defend it against its German neighbor, now Tanzania.

From colony to industrial state: South African historiography as seen from England∗

A key question in South African historiography is how far South Africas original relations of conquest (as distinct from white supremacy) has shaped her subsequent relations of industrial production. To address this question properly, South African historians should free themselves from their tendency to be bewitched by too partisan a set of perspectives and an unwillingness to concede that other analytical perspectives may have value. Fortunately there are signs that the liberal‐Marxist dichotomy is beginning to fade sufficiently for both sides to see more clearly the common ground on which they may fruitfully disagree. The article argues that liberal and Marxist historians of South Africa are in fact less divided than some of them suppose. This theme is developed with reference to four overlapping controversies in South African historiography: the issues of racial ideology among whites, of market and hierarchy, “failures in class formation” and the South African states managerial functions on behalf o...

Ethnic diversity and economic instability in Africa : interdisciplinary perspectives

List of figures List of tables Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Notes on the contributors Introduction Findings of development economics and their limitations Gustav Ranis Part I. De-mystifying Ethnicity: 1. Ethnic patriotism and markets in African history John Lonsdale 2. The concept of ethnicity: strengths and limitations for quantitative analysis Graham Brown and Arnim Langer 3. Essence of ethnicity: an African perspective Bethwell Allan Ogot Part II. Does Ethnic Diversity Hinder Economic Development?: 4. State, ethnicity and economy in Africa Yash Pal Ghai 5. Ethnic politics, economic reform and democratisation in Africa Bruce J. Berman 6. Evidence from spatial correlation of poverty and income in Kenya Nobuaki Hamaguchi Part III. Relationships between Ethnicity and Stability: 7. Belonging, exclusion and ethnic competition Parker Shipton 8. Horizontal inequalities and market instability in Africa Graham Brown and Frances Stewart 9. Impact of ethnicities on market outcome: results of market experiments in Kenya Ken-Ichi Shimomura and Takehiko Yamato Conclusion: key findings of our interdisciplinary dialogue Hiroyuki Hino Author index Subject index.

Conclusion: South Africa in African History

Since Africa is a large continent and not a single country its history is bound to be full of diversity. Its many regions have been subject to variations in economic geography, human ecology and commercial connections, not to mention the fierce localisms of political will. In the long view South Africa’s exceptional industrial and political history since the mineral discoveries is no more surprising or instructive than any other such singularity in Africa’s many pasts. As well as the broad contrasts that mark the experiences of west and east Africa, or of the Mediterranean north and Africa south of the Sahara, or of forest, sahel and savanna, other exceptionalisms as sharp as that of South Africa come to mind, like those of ancient Egypt, medieval Ethiopia, the Gold Coast’s ‘model colony’ or contemporary Rwanda or Somalia. But neither is South Africa’s distinctiveness any less illuminating than these. It should be noted here that I use ‘south Africa’ to mean South Africa before 1910.