Dissertation Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Dissertation submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. in the University of Cambridge STUDIES IN DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION IN THE EAST AFRICA PROTECTORATE (1895-1918) By T.H.R. Cashmore Jesus College, CAMBRIDGE November 1965 ii “Studies in district administration in the East Africa Protectorate 1895-1918.” “Imagine this state of affairs on board a ship……The Master is bigger and burlier than any of the crew, but a little deaf and short-sighted and no less deficient in seamanship. The sailors are quarrelling over the control of the helm; each thinks he ought to steer the vessel, though he has never learnt navigation….what is more they assert that navigation is a thing that cannot be taught at all, and are ready to tear to pieces anyone who says it can. Meanwhile, they besiege the master himself, begging him urgently to trust them with the helm…..” (Adeimantus in Plato’s “Republic”) iii iv Foreword Thanks to Hugh Walker, lately of the Kenya administration, who transcribed the text into an electronic format, the Cambridge African Studies Centre is pleased to be able to offer Dick Cashmore’s PhD. dissertation to a new readership—those without access to the Cambridge University Library. Since 1965 the thesis has there been consulted by barely two dozen scholars. It deserves a wider public. Why? There are four good reasons. Cashmore pulls together instructive conflicts in Kenya’s early colonial history that have not received similar connected treatment since. He also tells us more than other authors about the country’s first colonial rulers, their social origins, their assumptions, their practical rules of survival, their failures. In Kenya’s uneasy birth one may see the source of its later troubles. Further, Cashmore is a pleasure to read. Above all and finally, in this thesis he helped to initiate discussion of important themes in colonial African history that other scholars have developed in the ensuing forty-five years. His own approach was shaped by his experience as a district officer in the last years of British rule. It is striking that his judgments, coloured by his colonial career, have not been questioned since, however much post-colonial scholarly perspectives have inevitably changed since the 1960s. Later scholars have argued that colonial Kenya was shaped by processes and conflicts, interests and intrigues other than those which preoccupied Cashmore. Their core themes have been the origins of white settlement,1 with its need of African land, labour and loyalty, and the reactions of the major highland peoples, Luo, Luyia, and Kikuyu. Cashmore noticed such questions only insofar as they affected his own main interest. This, as his title foretells, was in how his predecessors contrived to build ‘district administrations’, a task sometimes but not always bedevilled by high politics. His study of the Maasai moves certainly tackles a central political issue; he argues nonetheless that the Maasai would have been a British problem even in the absence of white colonists (page 137). By taking only this sidelong glance at what distinguished Kenya from many other British colonies Cashmore was able to illuminate more general themes of imperial rule. His main actors are neither settlers nor African ‘resisters’, nor yet the Indian traders whose purchase of African produce enabled the British to raise a revenue. His professional ancestors play his leading roles, upcountry administrators and frontier officers, together with the African leaders with whom they fought or reached a working understanding. But only his British ancestors speak. Since 1965, then, historians have focused on those aspects of Kenya’s history that Cashmore took as the troubling background to the local problems faced by early officials. Moreover, these later scholars adopted perspectives contrary to his, post- colonial rather than colonial. They have examined African rather than British actions and reactions, citing sources, often of African origin, other than those officials on whom Cashmore chiefly relied. They have also employed new scholarly languages— Marxist, ‘subaltern’, ‘post-modern’ and so on—that in their different ways have claimed to ‘deconstruct’ official speech, to reveal its self-regarding deceptions. Despite all this critical and potentially hostile scholarly activity, Cashmore’s judgments on official policy and actions have stood the test of time. Perhaps this is because one of his main findings is that the colonial officials of a century ago shared many of the concerns of their scholarly critics today. One might also suggest that 1 For which the standard account remains M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968). v today’s historians see things in much the same way as the colonial servants of the past whose ‘protest voice’ appears several times in the Index that has been added to the original dissertation. To act as a ‘tribal representative’, a ‘chameleon’, could at times be a professional necessity. Yet Cashmore refers to their paternalism once only and on his last page (215)! The term never appears in the sources he quotes. British officials clearly saw as an unquestioned virtue, not worth mentioning, what today is most deplored by colonialism’s critics. But then few are given the insight to see how others will see us a century hence. This Foreword outlines how Cashmore tackled five closely entwined threads of colonial history and then how new readers may, if they wish, test his discussion against the more recent views found in a small selection of the many works on Kenya’s early history. Those who do read these later scholars will find themselves asking an intriguing question in historical method: How far do new interpretations necessarily build upon the earlier ones which they aim to revise or destroy? Cashmore’s overriding interest is the character of early British colonial rule, both its policy-making ‘mind’ and its ground-level practice. The British, he argues, tried to govern according to general notions of ‘native trusteeship’, modified by the need to encourage the economic activity that would profit investors, generate a government revenue, and benefit, or at least not harm, ‘native interests’. There were many, even ‘pro-native’, officials who thought white settlement could meet all three criteria provided that government regulated African labour conditions and ensured that African tax was spent to African benefit. Such issues invited differences of opinion. Kenya’s early administration had a troubled conscience. Cashmore’s second theme takes up this self-criticism over the issue of colonial violence. He examines officials’ views on the relation between British force and the African consent without which little could get done. Force was inherent in any imperial rule imposed on peoples who normally ruled themselves under lightweight institutions, embodied in kinship and generation. The British justified their force as the birth-pangs of a new, supposedly more civilised, social order to which Africans would in due course assent. That their force might fail to elicit consent is best seen on Kenya’s north-eastern frontier, the subject of chapter VII. But even pacification of an unruly frontier did not solve the problem. How African self-interest could be satisfied under alien rule was always in question. In Cashmore’s period this was most painfully true during the First World War, when the consent of Kenya’s most populous and productive peoples was tested near to breaking point. But the Great War’s demands were merely an extreme example of how colonial necessity could (but not inevitably) damage African wellbeing, principally by expropriating African labour from its productive household tasks. Cashmore’s case studies, all failures (page 85), give him more opportunity than British successes to show how the tensions and flash-points of alien rule could promote or frustrate the fortunes of both Africans and Britons. Few colonial careers flourished, more were blighted—along with the lives of many Africans—in the years in which Kenya was known as the East Africa Protectorate or EAP. To turn now to the later historiography, Cashmore’s main theme, the ‘official mind’ of ‘ground-level imperialism’, continues to be of interest. Under Cashmore’s hand the official mind, the ‘worm’s eye view’, was twice distilled. It was first articulated when EAP officials dictated to their Goan clerks letters of explanation or excuse to higher authority. It has been further interpreted by Cashmore himself. He vi knew in his bones what most concerned his ancestors-in-office, their moral instincts, their racial assumptions, their political subterfuges, their collective spirit, their personal fears, loneliness especially.1 An official mind from a junior generation has glossed the mind of seniors two generations earlier, made known by past precedents re-told at sundown in the bar or on the veranda. The administration, like the Africans it thought it ruled, had an instructive oral tradition, full of cautionary tales (page 5). Other historians have been outsiders, without this intuitive heritage. Despite this difference in perspective, they have done little more than re-emphasise the ambiguities of the official predicament, if with more evidence for and greater interest in the African social history with which officials had to come to terms. Officials had to cope, as Cashmore knew but other historians had to analyse, with the contradictions of their dual mandate. They were expected to rule in the interests of both their native subjects and of outside interests to whom African ‘progress’ was a by-product of their own profit. Colonial government could never break free from these contending forces in order to hold the ring between them. An article in the Journal of African History, more than a decade after Cashmore’s PhD, confirmed this worm’s eye view with high-level abstraction and Marxist political economy.2 The mandarins of Whitehall scarcely helped the men on the spot in their ‘inconclusive groping’ for a coherent policy (page 66).