An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800-1970 an Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800-1970

AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF KENYA AND UGANDA 1800-1970 AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF KENYA AND UGANDA 1800-1970 R. M. A. van ZWANENBERG with ANNE KING © R. M.A. van Zwanenberg with Anne King 1975 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1975 978-0-333-17671-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Totten ham Court Road, London WlP OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-02444-5 ISBN 978-1-349-02442-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02442-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Transferred to digital printing 1999 TO OUR ClULDREN PATRICK FRED, JOANNA KATE, WILLIAM AND CAROLINE May you grow up free of the social restraints of your forefathers Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction XV PART ONE PEOPLE 1 A History of Population Growth in Kenya and Uganda 3 PART TWO PRODUCTION 2 Agricultural Change in Kenya and Uganda: a Comparison 25 3 Agriculture in Kenya : Large- versus Small-Scale Farming 33 4 Agriculture in Uganda: Change without Development 57 5 Nomadic Pastoralism : the Process of Impoverishment 79 6 Nineteenth-Century Craft Industries 110 7 Industrialisation in the Twentieth Century 123 PART THREE EXCHANGE AND DISTRIBUTION 8 African Trade in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 145 9 Nineteenth-Century Arab Trade : the Growth of a Commercial Empire 163 10 Foreign Trade in the Twentieth Century 183 11 Marketing and Distribution 201 12 East Africa and Economic Federation : the East African Common Market 227 viii Contents PART FOUR INSTITUTIONS FROM ECONOMIC GROWTH 13 Urbanisation 253 14 Money and Banking 275 Conclusion 297 Bibliography 305 Index 323 Foreword This book is one of the first attempts to write an integrated economic and social history of Kenya and Uganda covering the nine teenth and twentieth centuries. We have chosen to limit our discus sion both in time and length for a number of reasons. We realise that to pick up the story at the beginning of the nineteenth century is, in many ways, to plunge into it in midstream and that we run the risk of implying that nothing much happened in the preceding period. That is far from being our view. Changes and developments -the stuff of history- are a part of the human condition and no period can be truly described as static. However, at this stage of historical research in Africa our knowledge of earlier periods is limited. As one approaches the present day the volume of material available, both raw data and academic studies, becomes greater : thus we know more about the twentieth century than the nine teenth, more about the nineteenth than the eighteenth and so on. We have decided, therefore, to restrict ourselves to a period about which we have relatively abundant material. Even so, attempting to account for some aspects of the nineteenth century has proved difficult. Our knowledge of nineteenth-century agricultural produc tion, for example, is woefully inadequate. As a consequence readers will find that we have been unable even to give the nineteenth· century sections in most chapters the emphasis which we think they deserve. The exception to this neglect is in the chapters on trade. Here we have been fortunate in having at our disposal a richer field of published sources which we have been able to supple ment with our own research; the reader will notice that we have been able to devote two chapters to nineteenth-century trade alone. We could, of course, have further limited our discussion and dealt with only the twentieth century, about which there is not a lack but an overwhelming amount of material. In our view, how ever, this would have given a false picture. Although there are many sharp contrasts between nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in Kenya and Uganda, the colonial period does not mark a sharp break with the pre-colonial past. Rather, many of the develop ments which took place in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth, and conversely, many developments of the twentieth X Foreword century cannot be understood without a knowledge of their pre colonial roots. We have chosen to discuss Kenya and Uganda rather than the whole of Eastern Mrica for two reasons. First, a study of Kenya and Uganda makes for interesting comparison and contrast in a discussion of change and development. In the nineteenth century, we can contrast southern and western Uganda's centralised systems of social and political authority with decentralised systems of nor thern and eastern Uganda and most of Kenya. Economically, we can compare and contrast between the systems of production of these areas; both were geared for subsistence production, but cen tralised systems existed which had the additional burden of provid ing a livelihood for the administrators and court officials not directly engaged in agriculture. During the colonial period the contrast between Kenya and Uganda as economic units comes into clearer focus : here we can contrast Uganda, developed predomi nantly through the production of peasant-grown export crops, and Kenya, developed predominantly through the production by ex patriates of plantation export crops. The differences in the eco nomic systems have important repercussions on the societies involved. Our second reason for concentrating on Kenya and Uganda is a practical one : to have included Tanzania or to have ranged further afield in Eastern Mrica to consider Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Somalia and Malagasy would have multiplied the number of points of comparison and contrast to a bewildering degree and would probably have resulted in the production of either an unwieldy tome or a short book of generalities. At this stage in research into the social and economic history of Africa it seemed more practical to limit our ambitions and deal with a smaller area which could be treated in some detail. As a result of the rapid increase in academic specialisation in Mrican history in recent years there are now a large number of books and papers on topics relevant to this study. However, the nature of this increase itself poses problems for the general reader. These recent works are often studies of short periods or of small geographical areas so that while we may have a wealth of infor mation on a particular topic in one area, we may have little com parable information on a neighbouring area, or on the same area at a different time. Inevitably, therefore, the present book will tend to reflect the unevenness of available material. Again, some aspects of historical study have received more attention than others. Economic history in particular has been tragically neglected and social history has often to be extracted with great difficulty from timeless anthro pological and sociological accounts and from oral traditions. As a Foreword xi consequence, material on economic and social history has to be collected from a wide variety of (at present) disparate sources. A related problem is that even where there is adequate material on a wide area or over a long timespan, the detail of the primary studies may make it difficult for the general reader to grasp the essentials of the situation. Our aim in this book is to attempt to synthesise recent research on economic and social history in Kenya and Uganda in such a way that the important processes of change and development over the last hundred and fifty years or so can be understood. Specialists, therefore, will find little new material here, but they may perhaps find the integrated discussion of some value. In drawing up lists for further reading we have attempted to show where material can be found to supplement the discussion of topics in this book. Finally, we have placed the emphasis on topics rather than on chronology in order to show more clearly the changes and develop ments which have occurred in specific areas of study. Each section of the book deals with a group of related topics (population, society, manpower, production, exchange and distribution, new institutions) while the chapters themselves break down the topics into themes, discussing each more or less chronologically, and where necessary, according to geographical area. This approach inevitably leads to some duplication and cross-referencing but we hope that it will have the advantage of allowing both historians and other social scientists to find information and discussion on a given subject con veniently and efficiently. Acknowledgements Most of this book was written in Nairobi while Dr van Zwanenberg was a member of the History Department of the University and Dr King was a member of the sister History Department at Kenyatta University College. Thanks are due to our colleagues in both places who, led by Professor B. A. Ogot and Dr 0. J. E. Shiroya respec tively, provided much inspiration and stimulation for the work. We were also much assisted by colleagues at Makerere University, Kam pala; in particular we would like to mention Professor J. B. Web ster, Mr Oliver Furley, Dr Phares Mutibwa and Dr Keith Rennie of the History Department and Professor B.

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