Richard Waller

REBELLIOUS YOUTH IN COLONIAL AFRICA

‘That rebellious youth’ alarmed colonial authorities and elders alike is increasingly an issue for historians. This article surveys the issue as an introduction to the two studies that follow. It considers both the creation of images of youthful defiance as part of a debate about youth conducted largely by their seniors and the real predicaments faced by young people themselves. Concern revolved around the meanings of maturity in a changing world where models of responsible male and female adulthood, gendered expectations and future prospects were all in flux. Surviving the present and facing the future made elders anxious and divided as well as united the young. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas, including leisure and politics, where the voice of youth might be more clearly heard, and proposes comparisons – with the past, between racial groups and between ‘town’ and ‘country’ – that link the varied experiences of the young.

Tsetse fly in western Narok, Kenya.

This article studies the expansion of tsetse fly in one part of Kenya Maasailand between 1900 and 1950. It follows the lines of investigation first suggested by Fords work and examines in detail the interaction between changes in four elements in the Mara ecosystem: climate, vegetation, land use and tsetse. Tsetse was able to expand because its habitat expanded and the spread of bush and fly into the grasslands both caused, and was facilitated by, shifts in patterns of Maasai grazing and occupation in the area. Up to the 1890s, the Mara Plains were regularly grazed by Maasai herds; but the general depopulation of Maasailand in the aftermath of the rinderpest pandemic and civil war left the region vacant until after 1900 and allowed the spread of bush cover which was then colonised by tsetse. When Maasai returned, they altered their grazing patterns to avoid such areas. However, the progressive encroachment of tsetse-infested bush continued and was not halted until bush-clearing schemes and closer grazing forced the fly to retreat by destroying its habitat. The study is set within the wider context of ecological change and capitalist development in East Africa and suggests that the common assumption that colonial capitalism was responsible for the disruption of the ecosystem and, therefore, for the spread of disease and environmmental degradation needs careful re-examination in the light of a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of ecological change.

Clean and dirty: Cattle disease and control policy in colonial Kenya, 1900-40

This article traces and contextualizes the development of veterinary policy in Kenya from 1900oo to 1940, with particular reference to three diseases: East Coast Fever, bovine pleuro-pneumonia and rinderpest. Disease affected almost every aspect of society and economy in Kenya, but the threat that it posed was constructed and confronted differently by the various constituencies - official, settler and African - that made up the divided pastoral economy. Policy emerged and changed from containment to eradication as the result of continuous argu- ment, in which the Colonial Office played a key role, about both the nature of disease and the most effective way of combating it.

Pastoral Production in Colonial Kenya: Lessons from the Past?

Abstract: This article examines the troubled course of attempts to modernize and control pastoral production in Kenya over the last hundred years. It begins with an overview of changes in pastoralism to provide context and then gives more detailed consideration to the failure of colonial attempts to manage livestock resources. Finally, it discusses recent developments in relation to the past. It argues that study of pastoralisms past offers valuable lessons and provides insights into its present and possible future.

Towards a contextualisation of policing in colonial Kenya

Abstract This paper looks at the social and legal context of policing in colonial Kenya before 1950, drawing on a range of archival sources in Britain and Kenya. It considers the methods of policing, its objectives, the difficulties it encountered and the social and political terrain on which it operated, a conflicted terrain shaped by geography, race and the existence of other sources of authority and control. Kenya can be divided into a number of zones of policing, from areas that were fairly closely policed, in which there was an increasing expectation that crime would be detected and punished, to areas where the police could do little more than attempt to keep the peace between local communities, all of which had strong traditions of self-help and no confidence in or wish for external intervention. Until 1920, the Kenya Police had a very uneven reputation, but, during the inter-war years, the force grew in numbers and effectiveness.

CHARLES HORNSBY, Kenya: a history since independence . London: I. B. Tauris (£45 – 978 1 84885 886 2). 2012, 958 pp.

prerequisite to a good life’, according to Sandgren (p. 63). Those students who made it into secondary school in the mid-1960s represented only about 1 per cent of their Kenyan age cohort, and maybe only one-quarter of these made it to Form 4 and a pass in the CSC. They were, undeniably, an elite. But maybe not the top elite: Giakanja was a day school, and its pupils were outshone by the very best of those from the more expensive and longer established rural boarding schools. Nonetheless, many at Giakanja did very well in the newly independent Kenya. Sandgren’s boys represent a good cross-section of Kenya’s postcolonial African middle classes. He selected three cohorts, each of thirty students, and managed to make contact with seventy-five of the ninety students in all. In contrast to their parents, who lived traditional lives in rural communities, most of these boys went on to form nuclear families and to live in modern housing complexes, often among multi-ethnic communities, and in cities or market towns. They had but a single wife, and a relatively modest average of four children. Wives usually came from their home areas, however, with relatively few making marriages far from home. Yet the elite lives that this class enjoyed into the 1980s and 1990s have not been fully replicated for their children. Despite greater and higher educational opportunities, Kenya’s weakening economy and the difficulties of finding employment have made it harder for the next generation to turn their education to advantage. Increasingly, the experience of Sandgren’s cohort of schoolboys takes on the appearance of a golden age – a time when aspiration could be achieved, and when ambition was worth nurturing. For youth in today’s Kenya, things do not look so rosy. And lastly, there is Mau Mau. Some 10 per cent of Sandgren’s informants were Gikuyu squatters who were forcibly repatriated to Nyeri before the declaration of the Emergency in 1952. Many of these students returned to the Rift Valley after completing secondary school. Another 25 per cent of the boys had a father detained during the Emergency; some of them had both parents committed to imprisonment. Many students also remembered forced villagization in the late 1950s. Six students saw their mothers killed during the Emergency, four lost their fathers in the violence and two were sons of local sub-chiefs who were assassinated by Mau Mau. Sandgren tells us that other boys came from loyalist families, but does not give us the figures. Perhaps this is because even today people are less keen to admit that they were loyalists than to acknowledge their rebel sympathies. The Mau Mau period was evidently deeply traumatic for many of the schoolboys, but Sandgren concedes that there are few clues in his interviews that show how they might have coped with the horrors they experienced: silence, he says, was itself a way of coping.

Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous

returning to the United Kingdom, land of their ancestry, when in the 1980s it finally granted them British citizen rights. The dual legacy of the coloured community, she shows, is still at play, long after the demise of the British Empire. What, then, is the particular contribution of Milner’s work? There is a vast literature on the creation of coloured identity worldwide, but this book is only the second work to focus on the history of the coloured community in Zambia. IbboMandaza’s publication Race, Colour and Class in Southern Africa was based on his doctoral research in the 1970s and focussed mainly on their role as politicians. Milner’s auto-ethnographic work is distinct from Mandaza’s. I had expected to learn more about the ‘lived experiences’ of the coloured community in Zambia from such a self-styled (p. 18) personalised account. But, recognising the limitations of colonial archival resources, Milner creatively relies on other materials, such as novels, personal memories and a comparative analysis of the ‘mixed-race’ issue in the region and worldwide. Her unique connection to this community should have enabled her to make more use of oral history, thereby contributing to the establishment of an oral history database, sadly lacking in Zambia.

Michael Bollig, Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment. New York: Springer (hb £80.50 – 387 27581 9). 2006, 442 pp.

Smith claims it was based on factual data, the authors approached the topic already committed to a belief that God universally reveals himself in order that the Christian message will be recognized and accepted when it is preached. In Smith’s words: ‘When the Christian missionary comes with the Good News of God revealed in Jesus Christ as a loving Father – whatever else in his teaching they find it hard to accept, this [belief in God] at least they readily take to their hearts.’ Young concludes rightly that on the whole non-theological studies have ignored Smith’s contributions to the study of African cultures and religions. He cites Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987) as an example, where Morris reviews the history of the relationship between anthropology and religion but, in Young’s words, does so ‘without mentioning Smith at all’. If Young’s book lacks a certain critical distance, it does redress such an oversight. After reading Young’s account, if nothing else, the reader will be forced to evaluate the significance of Edwin Smith as an Africanist, whose skills extended to a wide range of academic disciplines and whose impact on African studies Young convincingly demonstrates.

Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment (review)

Smith claims it was based on factual data, the authors approached the topic already committed to a belief that God universally reveals himself in order that the Christian message will be recognized and accepted when it is preached. In Smith’s words: ‘When the Christian missionary comes with the Good News of God revealed in Jesus Christ as a loving Father – whatever else in his teaching they find it hard to accept, this [belief in God] at least they readily take to their hearts.’ Young concludes rightly that on the whole non-theological studies have ignored Smith’s contributions to the study of African cultures and religions. He cites Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987) as an example, where Morris reviews the history of the relationship between anthropology and religion but, in Young’s words, does so ‘without mentioning Smith at all’. If Young’s book lacks a certain critical distance, it does redress such an oversight. After reading Young’s account, if nothing else, the reader will be forced to evaluate the significance of Edwin Smith as an Africanist, whose skills extended to a wide range of academic disciplines and whose impact on African studies Young convincingly demonstrates.