Constructing Race and Sexuality in Colonial Kenya, 1885- 1963

Sexual Trusteeship: Constructing Race and Sexuality in Colonial Kenya, 1885-1963

A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Elizabeth W. Williams

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Advisor: Anna Clark, Co-Advisor: Patricia Lorcin

July, 2017

© Elizabeth W. Williams 2017

i

Acknowledgements

The research and writing of this dissertation has been supported by several grants

and fellowships. I thank the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change for a

year of financial support, space to write, and a vibrant and imminently friendly

intellectual community. A Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship funded a year of writing,

while a Thesis Research Travel Grant provided necessary funds to visit Kenyan archives.

In Kenya, my thanks go to the Department of History and Archeology at the University

of Nairobi, and in particular then-Chair Professor Ephraim Wahome for providing me

with an institutional home. My thanks also to the archivists and librarians at Rhodes

House, University of Oxford, the Bird Library at Syracuse University, the Kenya

National Archives, the Jomo Kenyatta Library at the University of Nairobi, the British

Library, and the British National Archives.

My largest thank you goes to Anna Clark, who has been an endlessly supportive

advisor and an academic inspiration since I first read her work as an undergraduate

student. I’ve been tremendously lucky to work with her. Patricia Lorcin awes me with her

ability to produce rich and important scholarship with seemingly effortless grace. She has

also usefully shamed me about my tendency towards split-infinitives. The other members

of my committee, MJ Maynes, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Reg Kunzel, and Jigna

Desai not only provided incredible mentorship as professors, but slogged through an

extremely long dissertation. I promise that your thoughtful critiques will make the next

version much better.

I’ve been blessed with a supportive community of peers who have been with me

throughout this process. I benefitted from the insights of two writing groups, the first with

Mia Fischer, Katy Mohrman, and the late great Jesús Estrada-Pérez, and the second with

Melissa Hampton, Joanne Jahnke-Wegner, and Laura Luepke. Special thanks go to Adam

Blacker, a member of my incoming cohort who has been enormously supportive and

generous, and also forthcoming with facts about small German towns. Katie Lambright,

Brooke Depenbusch, Wesley Lummus, Ketaki Jaywant, and Melissa Hampton helped me

establish a small but highly defensible historian enclave in uptown. Ann Zimo, Jecca

Namakkal, and Emily Bruce paved the way and never hesitated to offer advice and

encouragement. Sophie House and Aubrey Menarndt made my stay in Oxford fun—I’m

very grateful for their friendship.

Friends both in academia and without have provided essential emotional support

during the past eight (!) years. Lars Mackenzie and Sarah Records have cooked me

countless dinners, shared their lovely pets, and welcomed me into their family with open

arms. Anne Wolf has gotten me through the rough patches with commiseration, advice,

and pictures of her baby. The members of Queer World, Angela Carter, Karisa Butler-

Wall, Eli Vitulli, Jesús Estrada-Pérez, Libby Sharrow, and Raechel Tiffe, have been allies

in queer world-making and have graciously played L-Word bingo at approximately six of

my birthday parties. Meryl Puetz-Lauer has also played a round or two, and been a

steadfast and delightful friend. My sister, Olivia, remains my oldest and best ally. She has

coached me through countless panic attacks, exposed me to the joys of the Real

Housewives of Atlanta, and reassured me many times that I will not flunk out of grad

ii

school or die alone and be eaten by my cat. The cat, by the way, started as a loan but has

become an essential companion and source of love and tuna-scented breath; my thanks,

accordingly, go to Miss Lady.

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Dedication

For Jesús Estrada-Pérez, who left too soon.

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Abbreviations

BEAP: British East African Protectorate

BL: Bird Library, Syracuse University

BNA: British National Archives

CO: Colonial Office

EAS: The East African Standard

EAWL: East African Women’s League

IPC: Indian Penal Code

KNA: Kenya National Archives

PP: Parliamentary Papers

RH: Rhodes House Library

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Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ iv

Introduction: Sexual Trusteeship and Normative Primitivity ............................................. 1 Chapter 1: A Short Political History of Kenya ................................................................. 39 Chapter 2: Administration, Ethnology, and Psychology: The intellectual roots of African

sexual normativity ................................................................................................. 84 Chapter 3: “A Canker in Imperial Administration”: Consent, Morality, and Modernity in

the Silberrad Scandal of 1908” ........................................................................... 134 Chapter 4: "Stoop Low to Conquer”: Race and Sexual Trusteeship in the Kenyan “Indian

Crisis” of 1923 .................................................................................................... 182 Chapter 5: “No Modesty to Offend: Childhood, Consent, and Race in “Black Peril”

Cases, 1907-1952” .............................................................................................. 229 Chapter 6: “Earls Gone Wild: Whiteness and the Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange’s

Kenyan Novels” .................................................................................................. 317 Chapter 7: Mau Mau and Detribalization ....................................................................... 359 Chapter 8: Eating the Other: Erotic Consumption, Oathing Mythologies, and Rebel Drag

in the Mau Mau Corpus ...................................................................................... 422 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 466 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 472

.

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Introduction: Sexual Trusteeship and Normative Primitivity

In what has become one of the most cited texts on 19th century race and sexuality,

Sander Gilman described a vision of African sexuality characterized by lasciviousness

and lack of sexual self-control. Anatomists asserted that this sexual pathology could be

seen on the body, as in the infamous case of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Bartman,

whose body was exposed to a leering public viewership both in life and after death.

Public displays of Africans in European cities underscored the fascination with a vision

of blackness that “signified the diseased yet attractive other.”1 Based on these popular

representations of a pathological African sexuality, Gilman asserted that "Perversion is

the basic quality ascribed to the sexuality of the Other."2

Compare this to a statement made by Hildegarde Hinde, the wife of a doctor

working for the Kenyan government, in 1921. In a piece entitled “The Black Peril in

Kenya. A Frank Talk to Settlers,” Hinde asserted that to the extent interracial rape was a

problem in the colony, it had been produced by the misbehavior of white women.

“Primitive natives,” she maintained, were incapable of “visualizing the possibility” of

raping a white woman. “It was entirely beyond their physical desires as it was beyond

1 Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 110. An article which later appeared as Chapter

Three in this book created much controversy. Critics were particularly concerned that

Gilman had reproduced highly racialized and stereotyped images of black and white

women, with no commentary about how the inclusion of such images might enable

voyeuristic readings. For more on these criticisms, see Mieke Bal, “The Politics of

Citation,” Diacritics 21, no. 1 (1991): 25–45.

2 Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, 192.

2

their mental imaginings—neither their minds nor their bodies could have evolved such

ideas.”3 When sexual assaults did occur, Hinde maintained, they were the result of

indecorum on the part of white settlers. A memo submitted to the Governor’s office

summarized this view more pithily: “the average native is simply an unmoral creature,

and as a general rule he becomes immoral only after contact with certain forms of

civilization, either Eastern or Western.”4

These quotes are typical of the overarching discourse about Kenyan-African

sexuality in several ways. First, they portray the “more civilized” settler populations—

both Europeans and Indians—as a threat to the sexual morality of Africans. Desires

which would never occur to the “primitive native” could emerge through contact with

settlers. Second, while asserting the absence of certain forms of sexual deviance (such as

rape, incest, prostitution, and homosexuality) in Kenyan African societies, this discourse

nevertheless maintained the superiority of colonial cultures, and did not question the

legitimacy of white supremacy in the colony.5 As I will establish in this dissertation, the

vision of African sexuality that developed in Kenya is remarkably different from the

standard narrative of African (and African diasporic) sexual pathology. Yet this

3 Hildegarde Hinde, “The ‘Black Peril’ in British East Africa. A Frank Talk to Women

Settlers,” The Empire Review and Journal of British Trade, vol. xxxv, edited by Sir

Clement Kinloch-Cooke, London, Eng.: Macmillan & Co, 1921, 194.

4 Kenya National Archives [KNA]: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5). Indecent Assaults, 1920-1944.

Room 1, Shelf 269, Box 1. Memo or report, “East Africa Prot: Cont,” no author no date.

5 The position of Kenyan-Indian settlers was rather more tenuous, as will be discussed at

length in Chapter 3.

3

alternative narrative did not serve the interests of Africans; rather, it was deployed by

settlers and administrators in order to augment white supremacy.

This dissertation seeks to answer two primary questions: what vision of African

sexuality emerged through Kenyan colonization, and how did those with power exploit

this alternative vision to their own advantage? My research demonstrates that a new

narrative of African sexuality emerged in Kenya during the interwar period, one that

emphasized not the excess and pathology of African sexual mores, but rather its

naturalness and innocence. Administrators and settlers argued that a sexually normative

population of colonized Africans required guidance and protection. This protection would

be provided by more abnormal communities of settlers, settlers whose very distance from

the natural, healthy sexual mores of the colonized signaled their more advanced

civilizational status. The dissertation therefore reverses the prevailing work on

normativity and deviance, asking how strategic claims to deviance could/can be

mobilized to gain and maintain access to power.

The existing scholarship on sexuality and normativity shares two basic premises.

First, it maintains that a particular set of sexual practices, desires, and relationships are

associated with the “normal.” As Gayle Rubin noted in her landmark essay “Thinking

Sex,”

sexuality that’s ‘good,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘natural’ should ideally be heterosexual,

marital, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial. It should be coupled,

relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. It should not involve

4

pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male or

female. Any sex that violates these rules is ‘bad,’ ‘abnormal,’ or unnatural.6

The trio of “good/normal/natural” and its reverse “bad/abnormal/unnatural” implicitly

calls to mind the ways in which ideas about sexual morality (good/bad) were tied with

ideas about sexual health (normal/abnormal), and civilizational status (natural/unnatural).

As we will see, this is because ideas about sexual normativity emerged out of a sex of

19th century evolutionary discourses which influenced medical doctors, sexologists,

anthropologists, and moral reformers.

The second premise that the scholarship on sexual normativity shares is that to be

marked as having/practicing/embodying abnormal sexuality is to be excluded from

power, and, vice versa, to be able to claim normativity is an essential prerequisite for

attaining power. In her study of disability and the ab/normal body, Rosemarie Garland-

Thomson has theorized the concept of the normate, a “neologism [which] names the

veiled subject position of the cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant

others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.”7 Garland-Thomson

presents a binary where the invisible or assumed normate body is produced via a contrast

with the disabled body. While constructed as an invisible identity, the ability to inhabit

this normate identity has real effects:

The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can

represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the

6 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: A Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The

History of Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Vol 1, eds. Clark and

Williams (Routledge: London and New York, 2015), 43. 7 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in

American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8.

5

constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and

cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the

power it grants them.8

But what happens if sexual deviance and abnormality come to be associated with

civilization? In such a situation, how might the idea that a community has a sexuality that

is “normal and natural” serve as a rationale for their exclusion from “civilized”

institutions of power? This was precisely the case in colonial Kenya. As I discuss at

length in Chapter 2, a major shift in anthropological and sexological views of “primitive”

sexuality occurred in the late 19th and 20th centuries. As Europeans grew increasingly

anxious about the strains that “civilization” placed on sexual health, experts increasingly

envisioned “primitive” sexuality as a primer for more natural, unrepressed, and thus

healthier sexual mores. Suddenly, the most “primitive” peoples seemed to be the most

sexually functional—yet this revision of sexual narratives did not prompt a rejection of

colonialism. Rather, as I will show here, administrators and settlers argued that

colonialism was necessary in order to preserve the sexual innocence of colonized

peoples.

Kenya provides an interesting case study of how these new sexual discourses

were applied in an imperial discourse. Founded at the very end of the 19th century, Kenya

was a formed at precisely the moment when these new discourses of sexuality were being

disseminated. Furthermore, Kenya had a distinctive racial and political structure; as a

Crown Colony, it was under the direct control of the Colonial Office, yet the small

population of white settlers held enormous political sway. The tensions between the

8 Ibid.

6

Colonial Office’s duty to protect the welfare of colonized peoples and its commitment to

protecting the interests of a vocal and volatile settler minority meant that, in order to

maintain their political dominance in the colony, Kenyan settlers needed to find a way to

present white supremacy as a boon to African welfare. The solution to this problem lay in

the production of a vision of African sexuality that needed to be protected from

contamination by more deviant settler populations. The settlers’ more “advanced” stage

of civilization meant that they were uniquely positioned to advocate for the welfare of

more “primitive” peoples. Yet, it also meant that the sexual proclivities and moral

standards of Europeans posed a threat to the welfare of a less evolved, and therefore more

innocent, set of African sexual mores. Policies limiting African mobility, access to

Western-style education, and political participation were thus presented as a way of

protecting African sexual health.

Normative Primitivity

To explain how exactly Kenyan whites managed this difficult discursive task, I

have developed two terms that serve as a short-hand of concepts that I develop

throughout the dissertation. First, I use the term “normative primitivity” to describe a

discourse that characterized African sexuality as natural and unrepressed. The

evolutionary narratives of the day characterized Africans as occupying the bottom rungs

of the civilizational ladder. They thus supposedly practiced a “primitive” sexuality

characterized by promiscuity and an absence of shame. What was also absent, however,

were practices associated with “civilized” vice; prostitution, homosexuality, adultery,

7

rape, and incest were all considered to be foreign to indigenous Kenyan African societies.

As Marc Epprecht explains, because Africans were viewed as being close to nature, “By

definition this meant that they could neither be decadent nor exhibit social traits and

behaviors that were assumed to come with a sophisticated level of culture.”9

At the turn of the 20th century, a new body of anthropological and sexological

literature emerged which questioned the effect of “civilization” on the sexual health of

the European middle class, and increasingly looked to the “unrestrained” sexuality of

primitive peoples as a curative solution. This literature will be discussed at much greater

length in Chapter 2, but in short, it posited that the sexual freedom that supposedly

characterized African societies also protected their sexual health by guaranteeing that

their sexual urges would be directed towards partners of the appropriate age and sex, and

that they would be executed in “natural” ways. Anthropologists and ethnographers

generally (although not always) associated the “natural” with the “norm”—opening the

door for “primitive” sexuality to be construed as more normative than the deviant and

dysfunctional sexuality of “civilized” Europeans. Even missionaries, the group that was

most critical of the discourse of normative primitivity, believed that certain forms of

deviance were entirely absent from Kenyan African societies; while they criticized

practices like clitoridectomy and polygamy as backwards, they nevertheless viewed such

practices as “heterosexual immoralities.”10

9 Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of

Exploration to the Age of AIDS, New African Histories Series (Athens: Ohio University

Press, 2008), 40.

10 Ibid, 41.

8

To say that Africans practiced a sexuality that was “natural” or “innocent” would

not, however, necessarily indicate that this sexuality was normative. After all, the popular

trope of the “noble savage” stressed that he/she was both admirable in his/her connection

to the natural world, and marked as barbaric, violent, and animalistic.11 What made this

discourse of African sexuality normative was the ways in which it was contrasted with

the deviant sexual practices of more “civilized” peoples—and the fact that African

sexuality was offered up as a curative for “civilized” vice.

The evolutionary thinking of the day held that Europeans had passed through the

stage of primitive sexual innocence, progressing towards their current state of advanced

civilization. It was this superior evolutionary status that justified their colonization of less

evolved peoples. Yet, in order to achieve such an advanced stage of development,

Europeans had to repress their sexual instincts, redirecting their energies towards the

growth of learning and culture. While necessary for the attainment of greatness, all too

often the repression of sexual urges resulted in sexual disease and dysfunction. Thus,

anthropologists and sexologists began to advocate for a return to a more instinctual and

natural sexuality, one that they believed continued to be practiced in the more “primitive”

parts of the world.

My use of the term “normative primitivity” is meant to raise questions about the

relationship between concepts of normativity and deviance and claims to power. It also

11 In fact, as Lyons and Lyons point out, the trope of the “noble savage” was rarely

applied to Africans. Andrew Lyons and Harriet Lyons, Irregular Connections : A

History of Anthropology and Sexuality, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 42.

9

signals some the ways that evolutionary racism impacted ideas about sexual health. The

pairing of these two loaded words is meant to invoke how each concept was entangled

with the other; African sexuality was “normative” to the extent that it had failed to invent

certain kinds of deviance. Such inventions were the process of civilized repression;

therefore, within this racial rhetoric, tthe very normativity of African sexuality also

signaled their lack of evolutionary progress.

Because this idea of African normative primitivity was firmly lodged in an

intellectual tradition of evolutionary racial thought, the association with normativity did

not enable Africans to access power. Quite the contrary: because sexual deviance was

seen as a product of civilization, the complete lack of deviance which supposedly

characterized African sexualities also signaled their political immaturity. It was thus

possible for African sexualities to be conceptualized as both backward and normative.

Visions of African sexuality were never based on careful empirical data on the actual

sexual practices of African people, or the place of sexuality in their worldviews. Rather,

this was a vision crafted in European minds to meet European needs. In the 19th century,

the image of a pathological, hypersexual African Other had proved useful in legitimizing

the slave trade and the extension of imperialism. In the 20th century, a vision of an

instinctual, natural African sexuality proved useful to the maintenance of African

empires. In Kenya, it did so through sexual trusteeship—the second term I use in this

dissertation to gloss a particular discourse about sexuality and race.

Sexual Trusteeship

10

Despite their belief that African sexuality was more mentally and psychically

healthy than that of more “civilized” groups, colonial settlers and administrators did not

believe that Africans were prepared for self-rule. On the contrary—the very normativity

of African sexuality was viewed as evidence of their need for protection. The very lack of

deviance and degeneracy that supposedly characterized Kenyan African sexuality was

viewed as evidence of their failure to progress into higher levels of civilization. Kenyan

settlers and administrators exploited this vision of African normative primitivity to

cement their own position as colonizers. The discourse of sexual trusteeship characterized

colonists as guardians of African sexual welfare. In order to preserve African normative

primitivity, settlers and administrators argued, Africans must be protected from the

“contaminating” influences of “civilized” life. Positioning themselves as trustees of

African sexual welfare allowed colonizers to oppose African urbanization, education, and

political involvement on the basis that they would introduce deviant sexual behaviors to

an uncontaminated colonized population.

The concept of sexual trusteeship built on a much larger imperial rhetoric. The

philosophy of trusteeship had its roots in 18th century India, where the British

conceptualized themselves as “guardians” of Indian “wards.” In exchange for the right to

conduct trade in India, the British East India Company acquired certain responsibilities to

protect the wellbeing of indigenous peoples.12 Of course, the BEIC was much more

invested in making a profit than in protecting the interests of colonial wards. This tension

12 Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa; Labour’s Experiment with the

Doctrine of Native Paramountcy., University of California Publications in History ; v. 72

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 6.

11

came to a head in the trial of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, the

Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke accused the British East India Company

(BEIC) of forming a vast conspiracy that allowed it to act with impunity against the

interests of Indians while insulating its employees from prosecution for their misdeeds.

The thrust of Burke’s (rather lengthy) statements in the House of Commons was that the

British government, and by extension the British people, had a responsibility to protect

Indians from the abuses of the BEIC. Thus, as James Conniff explains, Burke proposed

“to make the English Parliament and people surrogates for the Indians”—that is, to

position the Parliament and people as trustees of the welfare of Indians. 13 The British

government did not take over direct control of the administration of India until almost 70

years later, in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857; nevertheless, the concept of

trusteeship had been established as a part of the British philosophy of rule.14

13 James Conniff, “Burke and India: The Failure of the Theory of Trusteeship,” Political

Research Quarterly 46, no. 2 (June 1, 1993): 303, 291. For a study of Burke’s rhetoric

during the trial, see Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain

in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren

Hastings,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 589–630. For a lively discussion of

the trial, see Chapter 4 in Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British

Constitution (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004).

14 The practice of trusteeship in India, however, differed from Burke’s vision. As Andrew

Porter has pointed out, “Burke focused on British laws to restrain the activities of British

subjects; indigenous freedoms were to be preserved by restricting the incursions of

outsiders. India’s administrators justified their own direct intervention by devising laws

to channel the activities of Indian subjects; indigenous freedoms were to be extend by

allowing the wise paternalism of responsible outsiders.” Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship,

Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed.

William Roger Louis et al., vol. 3 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),

201.

12

Trusteeship also had a clear connection to the notion of a colonial “civilizing

mission.” During the early 19th century, liberal imperialists like John Stuart Mill had

supported British imperialism for economic reasons, but also because of the belief that

the direct governance of “primitive” peoples would lead to their gradual development and

improvement; the so-called “civilizing mission” characterized colonized peoples as

hopelessly backward and in need of reform from more ‘civilized’ societies.15

Colonization was the mechanism by which this reform would be accomplished.

In the mid-century, however, imperialists began to favor a policy of indirect rule,

which coopted indigenous institutions, ruling through local authorities and following

indigenous moral/legal norms.16 The turn to indirect rule thus required a revision of

beliefs about the nature and value of indigenous institutions. As Karuna Mantena

explains,

15 Eileen P. Sullivan, “Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defense of the British

Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 4 (1983): 599–617.

16 Karuna Mantena has argued that this shift towards indirect rule was inspired by a series

of colonial rebellions in the mid-nineteenth century, most significantly the Indian

Rebellion of 1857. Rather than perceiving the events of 1857 as a political movement, the

British depicted the Indian Rebellion as the result of insufficient knowledge about Indian

religious norms; they suggested that the rebellion had been sparked by the use of pig and

cow fat in the casings of gun cartridges. Since the tip of the cartridges had to be bitten off

by the Indian Sepoys who carried them, both Hindu and Muslim soldiers would be

contaminated by substances forbidden by their religion. In 1858, the Queen’s

Proclamation mandated the principle of noninterference into Indian religious beliefs—the

first step, according to Mantena, towards a philosophy of indirect rule. Karuna Mantena,

Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J:

Princeton University Press, 2010). Mahmood Mamdani has also advanced this thesis in

the first chapter of Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule Native as Political Identity,

W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012).

13

If the native of reform was figured as a child amenable to education, conversion,

and assimilation, by contrast, the native of late empire was construed as

tenaciously bound to custom, whose acquiescence to British rule would depend on

protecting the traditional basis of native society. The inscrutability of the native in

revolt would be overcome by attentiveness to and deep knowledge of the unique

(cultural) logic of native society, a logic that purportedly made imposed radical

change impossible and/or undesirable.17

This new philosophy fetishized the perceived locus of indigenous authority—in India, the

village or caste, and in Africa, the tribe—and therefore sought to preserve it from those

forces which might contaminate it. The latter included civilization, religion, modernity,

Western-style education, and Christianity—precisely those values lauded by the previous

generation of imperialists. "What unified indirect rule,” says Mantena, “was a distinct

account of threats to the imperial order--namely, the impending collapse of native

societies-and that this disintegration could be remedied by the preservation and

incorporation of native institutions into imperial power structures."18

While the shift towards policies of indirect rule certainly inspired a reevaluation

of the value of indigenous institutions, it is easy to paint too stark a division between the

civilizational

motives of the early part of the 19th century and the preservationist bent of the latter

half.19 In

17 Mantena, 5. 18 Ibid, 171.

19 There are a number of other criticisms that could be levied against her account. She

has, for instance, been accused of “minimizing administrative and policy precedents” to

indirect rule in the first half of the 19th century. See Madhavi Kale, “Alibis of Empire:

Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Review),” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3

(2012): 571–72. In addition, even as staunch a proponent of the civilizing mission as John

14

fact the civilizing mission lived on in both indirect rule and trusteeship. Following World

War I, the philosophy of trusteeship was extended to the mandates system, which

established fourteen

mandated territories governed by seven European powers. The mandates were divided

into three groups according to “civilizational” status: “A” mandates, like the former

Ottoman territories, had "reached a stage of development where their existence as

independent nations can be

provisionally recognized." “B” mandates, which included most of Germany’s former

African colonies, needed to be directly governed by the West. Finally, “C” mandates,

including the Pacific Territories and Southwest Africa, were to be governed as colonies.20

While ostensibly based on humanitarian goals, as Susan Pedersen has noted, throughout

the 1920s "the mandates system served largely to mitigate Anglo-French antagonisms, to

promulgate a paternalist definition of 'trusteeship', and to push claims to 'self-

determination' off the table."21 Trusteeship, then, was a useful tool for throwing a

humanitarian veil over imperial ambitions.

Perhaps the most influential text on the philosophy of trusteeship was written by

Lord Lugard, the former Governor of Nigeria, in his 1922 publication, The Dual Mandate

in Tropical Africa—a book which the historian of anthropology, George Stocking, has

Stuart Mill was equally concerned with deriving economic benefits from imperial

relationships. Sullivan, “Liberalism and Imperialism.”

20 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, 1

edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29.

21 Ibid, 12.

15

called it "the bible of 'indirect rule' in the interwar period."22 The titular “dual mandate”

referred to the obligation of the colony to serve the interests of both the metropole and the

colonized peoples. Since the metropole invested in the colonies, contributing to their

governance, protection, and development, the first mandate held that the colonies ought

to provide economic benefits for the home country. The second mandate was to preserve

and develop the resources of colonized spaces for indigenous peoples until they became

sufficiently civilized to govern themselves; this was the concept of trusteeship.

As a handbook for indirect rule, The Dual Mandate also offered practical

instructions for the adaptation of indigenous norms to administrative needs. Wherever

possible, Lugard proposed, the colonial government should employ existing figures of

authority to administer colonial policy. Ideally this authority would be a chief, but when

such a figure was unavailable or uncooperative, other men who were perceived as

influential could be promoted.23 Indigenous populations should also be governed by

customary law, or the existing mechanisms for enforcement of moral and social norms.

Customary law should prevail in all cases except where the law was found to be “in any

22 George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 383. Charles Allen adds that the book was required

reading for cadets in the Colonial Service. Charles Allen, Tales From the Dark Continent

(London: Futura Publishing Co Inc, 1981), 41.

23 The elevation of Maasai religious leaders as administrators in Kenya is a good example

of this phenomenon. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and

the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) 81;

Dorothy Louise Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural

Politics of Maasai Development (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

16

way repugnant to any valid principle of English common law, equity or statute."24 This

“doctrine of repugnancy” gave the colonial government the option to intervene into

“traditional” practices deemed unsuitable; legal scholar T. O. Elias cites “slave-raiding

and slavery, witchcraft, trial by ordeal, and the destruction of twins at birth” as common

targets of the repugnancy clause.25

The impossibilities of achieving the dual mandate are clear to any modern reader:

the exploitation of colonial resources for the benefit of the metropole does not serve the

interests of indigenous peoples. The incompatibility of these two goals was not, however,

as obvious to supporters of colonialism at the time, who argued (sincerely or not) that

colonized peoples were not sufficiently civilized or technically sophisticated to make

good use of their own resources. As Lugard put it, “the civilised nations of the world

have at last recognized that while on the one hand the abounding wealth of the tropical

regions of the earth must be developed and used for the benefit of mankind, on the other

hand an obligation rests on the controlling Power not only to safeguard the material rights

of the natives, but to promote their moral and educational progress.”26 Thus, there was an

inherent tension in Lugard’s philosophy of rule: while indirect rule necessitated the

24 Quoted in T. Olawale Elias, British Colonial Law: A Comparative Study of the

Interaction between English and Local Laws in British Dependencies (London: Stevens

& Sons Limited, 1962), 51.

25 Elias, 106. Interestingly, Elias notes that the authoritative case on the subject of

customary law in the English tradition is the 17th century Tanistry case, where the English

intervened in the laws of succession in the Irish nobility. Ibid, 105.

26 Sir F. D Lugard (Frederick Dealtry), The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa

(Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922), 18.

17

preservation of indigenous cultures, the dual mandate simultaneously stressed the need to

develop and improve colonized peoples.

This tension was particularly stark in Kenya, where both the principles of

trusteeship and the “Dual Mandate” took unique forms. Lugard had developed his

concept of the dual mandate with reference to Nigeria, a colony which he felt was

unsuitable for white settlement due to its unhealthy climate. He therefore had little to say

about the rights or responsibilities of white settlers in fulfilling either mandate. In Kenya,

however, the dual mandate was transposed into a “dual policy,” which held that the

colonial government must advocate equally for the interests of white settlers and

indigenous peoples. Proponents of the dual policy argued that policies which benefited

white settlers would necessarily also improve the lives of Africans; as Kenya’s Governor

Edward Grigg put it, “If the native thrives, we thrive. If we thrive, the native thrives.”

Thus, he concluded that “the interests of the natives of this country and of the settlers in

the country are inseparable.”27 (In reality, the interests of the settlers were often attended

to at the expense of other communities. The task of balancing the interests of the

immigrant and indigenous populations made Kenya, in the words of John Lonsdale,

Britain’s “most troublesome African colony.”28 As the binary name suggests, the dual

27 Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa ; Labour’s Experiment with the

Doctrine of Native Paramountcy, 63. Gregory argues that Lugard has been given more

credit than he deserves for the development of the Dual Mandate; he sees Cecil Rhodes

and Kenyan Governors Coryndon and Grigg as much more influential. Ibid, 61-63.

28 John Lonsdale, “Kenya: Home County and African Frontier,” in Settlers and

Expatriates: Britons Overseas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75. John Cell

also emphasizes the peculiarity of Kenya. There were two prevalent schools of thought

on the problem of “Native administration” in the interwar period. The South African

18

policy also ignored the fact that the colony was home to several other populations,

notably Arabs and Indians.)

The notion of trusteeship had great utility in managing the particularities of

Kenya, a Crown Colony governed from the metropole, yet strongly influenced by a small

population of European settlers. The notion of trusteeship envisioned colonization as the

process which would allow Europeans to provide the necessary guidance to usher

“primitive” peoples into modernity. However, because of the prevailing belief that

“civilization” would corrupt the morals and manners of colonized peoples (and

potentially encourage them to rebel against their colonial mentors) part of the trustee’s

duty was to protect those peoples from the very forces—education, urbanization,

Christianization—which were seen as essential to self-rule. As Susan Pederson has

written with regards to trusteeship in the League of Nations’ mandate system, "it was the

mandated populations' incapacity that required trusteeship" yet "trusteeship in turn

required--even constituted--that incapacity."29 For Africans to “progress” too quickly

would present a threat to their well-being; thus, the fictive date when colonized Africans

would be ready for self-rule was pushed ever further into the future.

school (also popular in parts of central and eastern Africa) "stressed economic

development through white initiative, capital and management of migrant black labour,

the evolution of Africans 'on their own lines', and segregation." The West African school

(also prevalent in Uganda) "emphasized peasant production, protection of African

interests, and indirect rule." Kenya became "the swing colony,” where “the South and

West African schools met head-on." John W. Cell, “Lord Hailey and the Making of the

African Survey,” African Affairs 88, no. 353 (1989): 481.

29 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 76.

19

This dissertation is especially concerned with how Kenyan settlers and

administrators adapted the idea of trusteeship and applied it to realm of colonial

sexuality. The discourse of sexual trusteeship positioned Kenyan whites as the guardians

of African sexual and moral welfare. Significantly, their duty was not to reform

indigenous sexual practices, but rather to protect them from contamination. Whites were

particularly concerned about the negative effects of “detribalization,” which occurred

when Africans became alienated from the mores and social strictures which supposedly

prevailed in rural, traditional spaces. Mission education, urbanization, and political

engagement were identified as the primary motors of African detribalization; Africans

exposed to these forces developed immoral behaviors and desires that would never occur

to a “raw native.”

It is notable that this discourse depicted European civilization as a sexual threat to

the well-being of African peoples, even while continuing to assert its superiority. How

was this rhetorically possible? To answer this question, it is helpful to examine the

parallels between the idea of detribalization and degeneration. Both of these ideas

invoked time and evolutionary progress in a very particular way. The degenerate

European was a subject who had reached the highest stage of civilization, and then

slipped back into sexual practices or desires that were associated with an earlier stage of

development. An adult man who was “addicted to masturbation,” for instance, had

reverted to a sexual practiced associated with childhood. His behavior was problematic in

that it was inappropriate for his stage of development—both the evolutionary stage of

development of the European “race” and his sexual development as an individual.

20

Similarly, Kenyan whites attributed the sexual dysfunction of the detribalized African to

a too-rapid movement forward on the evolutionary chain. Rather than gradually

progressing over a period of many generations, the detribalized African was plucked

from a sexual environment appropriate to his/her stage of development and placed into a

stage of civilization with which he was unprepared to cope. Degeneration and

detribalization both expressed anxiety about the speed and directionality of evolutionary

progress; the degenerate slipped backwards on an evolutionary scale that was designed

only for forward movement, while the detribalized African skipped ahead to a stage of

development for which he was psychically unprepared. In both cases, sexual deviance

and dysfunction was the result.30

Sexual trusteeship legitimized the maintenance of white supremacy in Kenya as a

way of protecting African normative primitivity from the contamination of outsiders. It

was particularly useful because it provided a rhetorical strategy which allowed settlers to

oppose practices like Western-style education and Christianization—both widely viewed

as essential to preparing colonized peoples for self-rule—on the basis that those practices

would taint African sexuality. It is not coincidental that these were the very same

practices that tended to produce the most vocal opponents of white supremacy in the

colony. Importantly, an examination of the discourse of sexual trusteeship in Kenya—

30 Occasionally this connection between the concepts of detribalization and degeneracy,

as in 1930 when the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoski worried about the figure of the

"detribalized tropical European-whether he develops the pathological form of Kenya

lunacy or only the ordinary idiocy of the average colonial administrator or missionary."

Qtd. Bruce Berman, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta,

Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya,” Canadian Journal of African

Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 30, no. 3 (January 1, 1996): 329.

21

how it was developed, and how it was applied—allows us to see that visions of sexual

normativity can be just as useful as accusations of sexual deviance in producing a racial

Other and excluding him/her from power.

Literatures

In her landmark study, Race and the Education of Desire, Ann Laura Stoler

argues persuasively that the emergence of a European bourgeois sexual identity needs to

be placed in the context of imperialism. To the four figures which Foucault identified as

key to 19th century sexological discourses, the masturbator, perverse adult, Malthusian

couple, and neurotic woman, Stoler proposes that we add a fifth: the colonized subject.

Stoler is particularly interested in tracing how "bourgeois identities in both metropole and

colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race."31 While agreeing with her

contention that the metropole and the periphery need to be viewed as a contiguous

discursive terrain, in this study I reverse the directionality, showing not how ideas about

ideas about the colonized “Other” shaped whiteness, but rather how the changing

constructions of whiteness produced a new vision of African sexuality in Kenya.

Furthermore, while Stoler is interested in showing how the "discursive

management of the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the

colonial order of things,"32 in this dissertation I make no claims about sexual practices, or

the effects that the discourses of sexuality described here might have had on them. This is

31 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire : Foucault’s History of Sexuality

and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 7. 32 Ibid.

22

part of a conscious decision to avoid making truth claims about the sexual identities or

practices of any given group. In fact, part of what I am interested in critiquing here is the

practice of assigning particular “sexual personalities” to various racial and ethnic groups,

which, in Kenya, served as a key methodology for the construction and management of

racial regimes. My exclusive focus on the discursive manifestations of sexuality means

that this project will prove unsatisfactory to readers looking for a description of the

material realities of every day sexual practices. Likewise, because Africans were

generally not admitted into the venues where such sexual discourses were produced, only

a few (generally elite) African voices appear in these pages. While future research may

illuminate these neglected questions, I hope that this work will provide a necessary first

step by identifying a previously unexamined revision of the standard set of discourses

around colonial sexuality.

This project builds on several bodies of literature on the history of sexuality in

Africa and other colonized spaces. There have been relatively few works devoted to the

history of sexuality in Kenya—Luise White’s 1990 study of prostitution in Kenya

remains the key work.33 However, a number of works on Kenya that do not focus

particularly on issues of sexuality have threads of analysis related to sexuality running

33 Luise White, The Comforts of Home Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1990). A few other studies have more recently appeared

which engage explicitly with discourses of race and sexuality in Kenya. These include

Carolyn Martin Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Chloe Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics in

Colonial Kenya, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester [.a.]: Manchester Univ. Press,

2007).

23

through them. Part of the task of this project has been to notice these threads, and weave

them together into a larger structure which makes the history of sexuality in Kenya more

visible.

The most prominent of these threads is the discourse of detribalization. Many

scholars working on the history of colonial Kenya have noted how colonial

administrators and settlers circulated a discourse of detribalization that depicted

urbanization, Western-style education, and political involvement as antithetical to

African moral and psychological well-being. They have also noted how this discourse of

the threat of detribalization was useful to colonial projects which sought to control the

movement and access to resources of African men and women.

In an article about juvenile delinquency, for instance, Chloe Campbell notes the

prevailing view in Kenya that detribalization occurred when Africans moved to cities.

Urban Africans were viewed as those most likely to develop criminal tendencies.

Colonial authorities used concerns about detribalization/urbanization to produce laws

criminalizing African mobility, with the result that more Africans were accused of

committing crimes.34 This was not a coincidence—the discourse of detribalization was

very useful to the broader project of restricting the movement of African people within

the colony, and ensuring that the majority of Africans would stay put on “Native

Reserves” or white-owned farms. Detribalization discourse thus operated hand in hand

with the concept of trusteeship, in that it suggested that exposure of colonized peoples to

“civilization” must be accomplished very gradually to avoid moral and mental decline.

34 Chloe Campbell, “Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1939,” The

Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 136.

24

Carolyn Martin Shaw has developed the idea of the “colonial pastoral” to describe

the “fiction of the organic, rule-governed, preindustrial community” which prevailed in

colonial Kenya. Shaw notes how this idea of the colonial pastoral was used by

administrators and anthropologists to delegitimize African nationalist movements:

speaking particularly of the Gikuyu (the community most active in early nationalist

groups like the KCA), she notes that administrators "represented Kikuyu [an alternate

spelling of Gikuyu]35 society as an ideal little community that would be torn apart by

individuality, greed, and 'politics.'”36

Bruce Berman has connected this vision of rural spaces as the most “authentically

African” to a metropolitan ethos of “Catonism”37 in the British landed upper-class. As

aristocratic lifestyles became increasingly untenable in the interwar years, catonism

promoted

an image of society as an integrated organic community characterized by stability

and harmony. Change was regarded as disruptive unless it took the form of a

gradual organic evolution that preserved essential continuity and order. These

ideas were coupled with an emphasis on the value of tradition, a romanticised

image of rural society (notably the English country village of some ill-defined

golden past) and an insistence on loyalty and a sense of duty toward the

community or group ('team spirit').38

35 I use the preferred spelling “Gikuyu” in my own writing; colonial authorities, and some

contemporary writers, use the less-accurate spelling “Kikuyu.”

36 Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya. 103

37 He borrows this term from Barrington Moore’s 1966 study Social Origins of

Dictatorship and Democracy.

38 Bruce J. Berman, “Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and

the Origins of the ‘Mau Mau’ Emergency in Kenya,” British Journal of Political Science

6, no. 2 (1976): 151.

25

Colonial administrators, he argued, exported this idealization of the “traditional,” rural

space to Kenya, where they “deeply distrusted economic individualism, urbanization and

industrialization as threats to the organic unity of society."39

As Matthew Carotenuto has argued, African elites were also able to capitalize on

this discourse of the threat of detribalization to oppose processes which threatened their

influence. He notes that settlers and administrators had used the threat of detribalization

to oppose the free movement of Africans within the colonies since at least the 1920s

(though my research suggests that the discourse emerged even earlier). The association of

urbanization with immorality and criminality was useful for supporting pass laws, anti-

vagrancy legislation, and the removal of indigenous peoples to native reserves.40 In the

1940s and 50s, Luo men exploited this discourse of detribalization to demand that women

be returned to the Native Reserves. These “repatriations” of Luo women, Carotenuto

notes, thus “reinforced a paternalistic state view that African colonial citizenship should

be limited to the confines of rural life and carefully managed under the disciplinary

oversight of static institutions of "tradition" and gerontocracy. This view came from the

top of a colonial order that viewed Africans as rural subjects and reserved the concept of

urban citizenship almost exclusively for Europeans."41

39 Ibid.

40 Matthew Carotenuto, “Repatriation in Colonial Kenya: African Institutions and

Gendered Violence,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45, no. 1

(February 2012): 11-12.

41 Ibid, 11.

26

It is work by Tabitha Kanogo that has most explicitly connected the discourse of

“detribalization” to issues of gender and sexuality. She argues that both African men and

administrators attempted to limit African women’s mobility by suggesting that urban

spaces bred vice and disorder. Both groups blamed "travel and modernity … for

women's unacceptable

abandonment of 'traditional' obligations, roles, and spaces."42 She identifies "a

widespread belief that the onset of the colonial presence interrupted a sheltered, isolated,

and idyllic life in the villages ... Cultural order was represented as being synonymous

with spatial locatedness."43 In an insight which supports the larger arc of this dissertation,

Kanogo shows that ideas about the moral and sexual disorder of the cities were thus used

to restrict the mobility and independence of Africans, especially women.

Megan Vaughan has also argued that detribalization (what she terms “deculturation”)

was viewed as productive of madness in colonized Africans.44 Colonial medical

authorities drew an explicit connection between exposure to “civilizing” influences like

education and urbanization and the incidence of madness in their African patients.

Doctors divided their patients into those who suffered from “native” delusions, and those

whose illness had been brought on by the stress of a premature modernity: this latter

42 Tabitha M. Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-50, Eastern African

Studies (London, England) (Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi, 2005), 2.

43 Ibid, 6.

44 While Vaughan uses the former term, in my archive the term

“detribalized/detribalization” occurs with much greater frequency and with an equivalent

meaning. In French colonies, the term “déraciné” served a similar purpose.

27

group "with their sexual disturbances and European type of delusions, and their fondness

for offence against property, seem to manifest a more European attitude of mind than the

members of other groups."45 (A further parallel between discourses of degeneration and

detribalization can be seen in colonial Kenyan diagnoses of “madness.” As Will Jackson

has shown, white women who had sexual relationships with African men were liable to

be institutionalized. While contact with “civilization” bred madness in African Kenyans,

too much contact with “primitive” populations was seen as a sign of mental illness in

white women.)46

Scholars have established, then, that the discourse of detribalization was a useful way

of promoting discriminatory policies. The idealization of rural “tradition,” and the

parallel notion that exposure to “civilization” produced moral and mental decline in

Africans supported the maintenance of the colonial status quo. This dissertation embarks

on a more sustained engagement with the discourse of detribalization, focusing

particularly with how the twin discourse of detribalization and degeneration produced a

new vision of sexuality in Kenya. I examine not only the production of this discourse, but

also demonstrate how it was strategically applied throughout the colonial period to

exclude Africans (and sometimes other groups) from power.

This dissertation also engages with a relatively new body of literature in Queer

African Studies which has taken up the contentious question of what “natural” or

45 Qtd. in Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Repr.

(Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), 108.

46 Will Jackson, “Bad Blood: Poverty, Psychopathy and the Politics of Transgression in

Kenya Colony, 1939–59,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 1

(2011): 73–94.

28

“authentic” African sexuality looks like. Work on GLBT issues in Africa has been

plagued by the legacies of 19th century anthropological “truth-finding” missions. Starting

in the 1980s, several studies attempted to locate gay and lesbian identities and practices

in the precolonial African past. Keguro Macharia has neatly summarized the problematics

of such studies:

well-meaning ethnographers rush out to record “traditional” practices and rituals

before the latter change or disappear. At their worst, these efforts repackage

colonial discourse (e.g. “primitive” societies) for consumption by Anglo-

European audiences. At their best, they resurrect the vision of the Noble Savage

living in a Noble Society that provides an honored place for at least some forms

of transgendering or same-sex sexual activity.47

Some African scholars responded with hostility to such attempts to trace a GBLT African

past. In a ground-breaking book which established the long history of marriages between

Igbo women in precolonial Nigeria, Ifi Amadiume chastised Black lesbians in the West

for making connections between such marriages and their own relationships. “Such

interpretation[s],” she noted, “would be totally inapplicable, shocking and offensive to

Nnobi women, since the strong bonds and support between them do not imply lesbian

sexual practices.”48 She accused Black American, Caribbean, and British lesbians of

using “prejudiced interpretations of African situations to justify their choices of sexual

47 Keguro Macharia, “African Queer Studies,” Gukira, 2014,

https://gukira.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/african-queer-studies/.

48 Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African

Society (London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Zed Books, 1987), 7. She accused Black

American, Caribbean, and British lesbians of using “prejudiced interpretations of African

situations to justify their choices of sexual alternatives which have roots and meaning in

the West.” Ibid.

29

alternatives which have roots and meaning in the West.”49 Other scholars based in Africa,

like Sylvia Tamale, have asserted that same-sex sexual practices surely existed in

precolonial Africa, but maintain that these practices "did not mirror homosexual relations

as understood in the West, nor were they necessarily consistent with what we may today

describe as a gay or queer identity."50 While rejecting attempts to impose a set of

sexualities constructed in the West upon African experiences, Tamale is equally critical

of conservative claims that homosexuality or feminism are "unafrican"; such claims "are

simply reductionist oversimplifications of extremely complex human phenomena that are

impossible to bind in racialized or ethnicized bodies."51

Partly as a result of such criticisms, more recent historical studies of

homosexuality in Africa have focused less on proving that same-sex practices existed in

precolonial times, and more on providing a genealogy for the idea that homosexuality is

an un-African practice. The political stakes of this literature are high, as the idea of

homosexuality as a colonial import has been used by several African leaders to justify

legislation targeting homosexuals.52 Marc Epprecht has traced this of the non-indigeneity

49 Ibid.

50 Sylvia Tamale, "Confronting the Politics of Nonconforming Sexualities in Africa,"

African Studies Review 55, no. 03 (December 2012): 35.

51 Ibid, 40.

52 For instance, at a 2015 meeting of the UN General Assembly, President Robert

Mugabe of Zimbabwe rejected what he viewed as an imposition of Western gay right

agendas upon his country, declaring "We equally reject attempts to prescribe new rights

that are contrary to our norms, values, traditions and beliefs. We are not gays.” “Africans

Are Not Gays, Mugabe Tells UN, Vanguard News, Sept. 19, 2015.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/09/africans-are-not-gays-mugabe-tells-un/. In July of

30

of homosexuality back to the colonial era; he argues that it is homophobia, not

homosexuality, which is the Western import.53 Epprecht’s study is particularly useful in

that it places discourses of African sexuality within the broader field of discourses about

race and sexuality in the 19th century. A more recent study of homosexuality in Africa by

Neville Hoad also argues that the 19th century discourses which produced “the

homosexual” and the “primitive” borrowed from each other (an insight that is itself

indebted to work on the US by Siobhan Somerville.)54 He is, however, more hesitant to

apply a Western-based discourse of human rights to the issue of divergent sexualities in

Africa. In particular, he suggests that “anti-imperialist attacks on homosexuality can be

seen as refusals to carry the imputation of primitiveness, and to counter-project the racist

charge of retardation and/or degeneration onto its western source, by scapegoating the

west’s own sexual deviants or what these attacks perceive as their local proxies.”55 Basile

the same year, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni asserted that homosexuality had

been imported into East Africa by colonial nations, and that attempts by the west to quash

anti-gay legislation in Uganda smacked of neocolonialism. Elizabeth Landau, Zain

Verjee, and Antonia Mortensen, “Uganda President: Homosexuals Are ‘Disgusting,’”

CNN, February 25, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/24/world/africa/uganda-

homosexuality-interview/index.html.

53 Epprecht and ebrary, Heterosexual Africa?

54 Neville Wallace Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Neville Hoad, “Arrested

Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of

Difference,” Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy 3, no. 2 (2000): 133–158;

Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of

Homosexuality in American Culture, 1ST edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Books, 2000); Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the

Homosexual Body,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (1994): 243–266.

55 Hoad, “Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages,” 151.

31

Ndjio has provided a case study which illustrates how this phenomenon works in

practice. In Cameroon, he argues, subjects disenfranchised by the Biya regime have

advanced the notion of a homosexual elite to “give meaning to the new forms of social

and economic exclusion they have been experiencing.”56 The government has responded

in turn by promoting legislation targeting homosexuals as a way of distancing themselves

from this critique. While reproducing certain colonial stereotypes about the virile African

man, the figure of the “muntu” (the heterosexual male) nevertheless “embodies the

nationalist effort to rewrite colonial narratives about the African body and sexuality.”57

These studies have argued persuasively that the narrative that Africans did not

practice same-sex intimacies has proved useful to both colonial and postcolonial regimes.

But by focusing only on one form of “non-normative” sexuality, such studies miss the

opportunity to explore the distinctive ways that “normativity” and “deviance” might have

functioned in colonial spaces. By extending my analysis beyond same-sex practices to

include other forms of sexual deviance—including rape, adultery, prostitution, and

intergenerational sex—I am able to identify a broader discourse of “normative

primitivity” and show how it was used to preserve white supremacy in colonial Kenya.

By questioning the universality of the association of “normativity” with those in power,

and “deviance” with those excluded from power (or “deviance” as the rhetorical device

by which power executes itself), we begin to gain a more complicated vision of how

56 Basile Ndjio, “Post-Colonial Histories of Sexuality: The Political Invention of a

Libidinal African Straight” 82, no. 4 (2012): 622.

57 Ibid.

32

these concepts work. Specifically, we encounter a situation where sexual deviance and

dysfunction, while problematic, is nevertheless associated with advanced civilizational

status. Conversely, sexuality “normativity” is deployed as evidence of evolutionary

immaturity, and hence unfitness for self-rule.

Chapter Outline

In the first chapter is meant to orient the reader within the broader history of

Kenya. Because this dissertation is organized thematically, rather than chronologically, I

begin with an overview of major events in Kenyan history. Those readers who are

already familiar with this history may wish to skip this section. I also provide some

background on the concept of whiteness as it was constructed in colonial Kenya.

Whiteness, as I show, was a contested identity; yet, given their relatively small numbers

in the colony, Kenyan Europeans tended to present themselves as a solid political unit in

disputes with the colonial office. Importantly, whiteness was constructed directly in

relation to the colonial mission; those who were deemed to be marginally white, because

of class, nation, or behavior, were often perceived of as a threat to the well-being of the

colonial state.

Chapter Two explores the intellectual heritage which informed conceptions of

“primitive” societies as pure, vulnerable, and in need of protection. One strand of this

heritage can be found in British colonial administrative philosophy, and particularly in

the shift towards indirect rule, that is, rule through indigenous institutions, and a concept

of trusteeship which envisioned colonial peoples and lands as in the trust of their

33

colonizers until the time when they should be sufficiently developed for self-rule. These

administrative concepts in turn had important connections to anthropological trends.

Although the early 20th century has generally been presented as a time when

anthropological theory shifted from a racially-oriented Evolutionist anthropology

tradition to a cultural-relativist Functionalist anthropology, both schools of thought

presented their research as key to the successful administration of colonies. Likewise,

evolutionist tropes continued to inform later anthropological schools of thought,

especially because of the profound influence of a third intellectual tradition,

psychoanalysis, in the 1910s and 20s. The final section of this chapter demonstrates how

Freud’s theories of sexual development were built upon Evolutionist scaffolding, so that

beliefs in both the normativity and primitivity of African sexuality could be held

simultaneously. I also show how one early African nationalist and Functionalist

anthropologist, Jomo Kenyatta, exploited this tension in his ethnography of the Gikuyu

people, arguing (in psychoanalytic prose) that Gikuyu sexual development was superior

to that of Europeans because the lack of sexual repression amongst Gikuyu youth

prevented the development of neurosis and perversions.

The third chapter, “‘A Canker in Imperial Administration’: Consent, Morality,

and Modernity in the Silberrad Scandal of 1908,” centers around the story of Hubert

Silberrad, a colonial administrator whose dalliances with three African girls sparked a

major controversy. Silberrad’s defenders suggested that his actions were excusable, since

he had followed ‘traditional’ protocol by paying brideprice to the girls’ African

guardians. Applying the philosophy of indirect rule to his own sex life, Silberrad

34

suggested that sexual relationships between adult British men and African girls was

acceptable as long as it was arranged with due deference to African male authorities. His

opponents, meanwhile, argued the power disparities of his relationship meant that it was

not possible for the girls to consent to a sexual relationship. Both sides of the debate,

then, viewed the girls’ own experiences as irrelevant to the debate. The proposed solution

to the problem of interracial sex was to import more white women into the colony. This

chapter serves as a prehistory of the discourses of sexual trusteeship and normative

primitivity that solidified with the establishment of a white settler population. The

scandal positioned white men in the colonies as sexually out of control, white women as

an acceptable outlet for these problematic sexual drives, and African women as a

voiceless property exchanged between men.

Chapter Four, entitled ““Stoop Low to Conquer: Competing Kenyan Colonialisms

in the ‘Indian Crisis’ of 1923,” examines the role of sexuality in defining who could be

included in the Kenyan body politic. The ‘Indian Crisis’ occurred when Kenyan-Indians

demanded equal voting and property rights with whites. In addition, they claimed a role

as fellow colonizers of African subjects: to be full citizens, Indians believed, meant

gaining an equal role in the British civilizing mission. Claiming that Indian men practiced

deviant sexual behaviors--including sodomy, child-marriage, and polygamy, whited-

owned papers presented their opposition to Kenyan-Indians as an extension of the duties

of sexual trusteeship: whites must protect Africans from the threat of Indian morality.

However, Kenyan-Indians also claimed be acting as trustees of African sexual welfare.

The Democrat, an Indian nationalist newspaper, printed a column asserting that it was

35

white women, not Indians, who were morally and sexually depraved. By conducting a

close-reading of this previously undiscussed source, this chapter demonstrates how

colonial belonging was defined through narratives tying racial groups to particular sexual

identities. It also shows how the debate between Indians and whites racialized Africans

by proxy; the idea of African sexual purity and moral vulnerability underscored the

broader debate over Indian citizenship.

I return to the issues of age and sexuality in Chapter 5, “No Modesty to Offend:

Childhood, Consent, and Race in “Black Peril” Cases, 1907-1952.” This chapter

examines cases in which white or Asian children were sexually assaulted by African

domestic servants. Although settlers and colonial administrators disagreed about the

seriously of the “Black Peril” problem, both groups blamed whites for the attacks. In

rural African societies, they maintained, rape did not occur; because Africans had regular

access to sex, they had no need to resort to sexual violence. Likewise, because African

sexuality was not repressed, sexual deviants did not develop. White Kenyans embraced

this rhetoric of “White Peril”-- the tendency of whites to contaminate their African

employees through excessive familiarity-- in order to promote the maintenance of strict

racial boundaries within the home. I also explore how the characterization of all Africans

as “children” dependent upon British colonizers was viewed as mitigating the negative

effects of sexual assaults on white children.

A collection of romance novels by a former Kenyan settler is the focus of the

sixth chapter, “Earls Gone Wild: Deviance, Disorder, and Whiteness in Nora Strange’s

Kenyan Novels.” These incredibly popular novels have been almost entirely ignored by

36

scholars, despite the key role they played in establishing the association of “whiteness”

with sexual neurosis in the Kenyan context. Strange’s novels frequently pivot around the

story of a neurotic, frigid couple whose engagement with the Kenyan landscape

successfully instructs them in heterosexual desire. I use these novels to explore the

cultural significance of Kenya for domestic Britons in the interwar period. Kenya was

depicted as a reparative eugenic space that could cure the sexual neuroses of over-

civilized whites by putting them back in touch with a primitive environment. However,

for eugenically unfit settlers, Kenya proved to be a deadly landscape; characters with

lower-class backgrounds or marginally white ethnicity often die from tropical diseases or

animal stampedes. These novels reveal anxieties about the sexual degeneration of the

European middle-class and their ability to rule more virile colonized populations.

The final two chapters explore the sexual discourses surrounding the Mau Mau

rebellion. Chapter Seven, “Mau Mau and Detribalization,” brings the dissertation’s

argument full circle. Having established that some kinds of sexual deviance did not occur

in “primitive” African societies, authorities were able to argue that the depraved sexual

practices that supposedly accompanied Mau Mau oathing rituals proved that the Mau

Mau were corrupt, detribalized, and, hence, illegitimate Africans. I examine the work of

two “experts” on African psychology, Louis Leakey and J.C. Carothers, both of whom

were called upon by the colonial government to provide explanations for the outbreak of

the Mau Mau rebellion. Eschewing the stated explanations of the rebels themselves,

namely that they were demanding land and freedom, these experts promoted an

explanation of Mau Mau as the traumatic reaction of a group of “primitive” people to the

37

contaminating forces of civilization. Connecting this discourse of the dangers of

detribalization to the broader narrative of “normative primitivity,” I show how both

Leakey and Carothers argued that gendered and sexual disorder epitomized the ways in

which contact with “civilization” had destroyed the mental and moral health of the

Gikuyu people. Having established the essential sexual normativity of Africans during

the first 50 years of colonization, whites were able to present Mau Mau as essentially un-

African by pointing to their supposed sexual deviance.

The final chapter, Chapter Eigh: “‘Eating the Other’: Erotic Consumption,

Oathing Mythologies, and Rebel Drag in the Mau Mau Corpus,” extends the previous

discussion of the role of sexuality in Mau Mau discourses by turning to a particularly

prominent theme:

sexualized consumption. During the rebellion, a genre of “oathing mythologies”

developed which described in detail the deviant practices which supposedly accompanied

Mau Mau oaths. In particular, oathing mythologies accused the Mau Mau of consuming

materials that were sexualized and corporeal. The ubiquity of sexualized consumption as

a rhetorical theme served several purposes. First, the accusation that Mau Mau required

oath-takers to violate the most central sexual taboos of the Gikuyu culture provided an

explanation for the power of the oath to “transform” loyal Gikuyu into violent rebels. It

also signaled anxieties about Mau Mau’s demand to consume resources, particularly land.

I examine how and why a broader (white) public so eagerly consumed oathing

mythologies. By elaborating upon this kind of consumption, whites transformed oathing

mythologies into a pornographic text; one that could be (and was) pleasurably consumed

38

by whites. By cannibalizing oathing mythologies, whites could displace their anxieties

about African resistance, but such consumption also displayed anxieties about the

firmness of the boundaries erected between colonized and colonizing bodies. A final, and

even more extreme, form of consumption is discussed in the final section of the chapter.

Here, I examine memoirs written by the so-called “pseudo-gangsters,” white men who

dressed up in black face and ventured into the forests of Kenya in order to track and

detain recalcitrant rebels in a kind of racial-gendered drag. Through an erotic

consumption of African corporeality, white pseudo-gangsters reassured themselves of

both their racial mastery, and their mastery of race-- that is, their ability to know and

discern the racial Other.

39

Chapter 1: A Short Political History of Kenya

More than 50 years after the end of colonial rule, there continues to be

considerable popular interest in the history of colonial Kenya. In particular, a number of

studies have appeared which eulogize the lives of the European settlers. Errol Trzebinksi

has written a number of rather rosy accounts of life in colonial Kenya,58 and several other

studies have told the sensational stories of Kenya’s most scandalous figures.59 Such

popular accounts can tell us much about settler cultures (and more about modern-day

nostalgia for empire), but they do not often provide a broader sense of the structure of

Kenyan colonialism. In what follows, I provide a brief overview of major events in

Kenyan history. Because this dissertation is organized thematically, this chapter is meant

to root readers in the basic chronology of colonial Kenyan history. In the second part of

the chapter, I discuss the construction of whiteness in colonial Kenya. Although, as I will

58 Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak : A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and

His Relationship with Karen Blixen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977);

Errol Trzebinski, The Lives of Beryl Markham : Out of Africa’s Hidden Free Spirit and

Denys Finch Hatton’s Last Great Love, 1st American ed.. (New York: WWNorton,

1993); Errol Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers (London: Heinemann, 1985); Errol

Trzebinski, The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth behind the Happy Valley

Murder (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).

59 James Fox, White Mischief (London: Cape, 1982); Frances Osborne, The Bolter: Idina

Sackville, the Woman Who Scandalised 1920s Society and Became White Mischief’s

Infamous Seductress (London: Virago, 2009).

40

show, whiteness was a contested identity, colonial whites nevertheless tended to present

themselves as a unified political community in disputes with the Colonial Office. A

unique brand of colonial whiteness emerged in Kenya, framed by the exigencies of a

vastly outnumbered settler population with ambitions for self-rule.

The History of Colonial Kenya

The history of colonial Kenya is marked by a few reoccurring themes. The first is

the struggle between the two major “immigrant” populations, the European settlers and

Kenyan-Indian settlers, over which group should exercise authority in the colony.

Tensions between the Colonial Office and the small but influential European settler

community also frequently shaped colonial policy. Finally, the European settlers

succeeded in attaining a form of white supremacy that guaranteed them disproportionate

representation and rights in the colony, particularly the exclusive right to own land in the

most desirable areas of the colony. The colonial government also adopted policies which

encouraged African men to work on white-owned farms, while restricting their claims as

tenants. Partly because of the prominence of the philosophy of trusteeship, however, the

settlers were never able to attain their ultimate goal of responsible self-government (i.e.,

white minority rule, as in colonies like South Africa); rather, the “dual policy” was

interpreted in ways that benefitted white settlers at the expense of Africans (and, to a

lesser extent, Indians) but did not extend to full white rule.

41

There a number of works examining the history of pre-colonial Kenya.60 This

story, however, begins in 1888 when the Imperial British East African Company received

its royal charter. The company quickly floundered, thwarted by the lack of transport, the

dearth of mineral resources, and the lack of interest in their products expressed by the

local population.61 In 1895, the British government stepped in, establishing the East

African Protectorate (EAP) and taking over the proposed railway project. In his study of

the early colonial period, M.P.K. Sorrenson notes that the chief attraction of the Kenyan

territory for the British was as a route to Uganda, seen as an important staging point for

campaigns in the Sudan.62 The Protectorate covered the land all the way to the Uganda

border, with the exception of a ten-mile strip along the coast; this land was leased from

the Sultan of Zanzibar, who maintained sovereignty in name only.63

In order to build the railroad (thereby ensuring access to Uganda) the new

Protectorate needed to find laborers. The local African populations, who existed outside

60 These include Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations

within the British Empire, 1890-1939, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971); Stanley

Diamond, “The Transformation of East Africa; Studies in Political Anthropology” (New

York: Basic Books, 1967); Kenneth Ingham, A History of East Africa., Rev. ed.. (New

York: Praeger, 1965); Zoë Marsh, An Introduction to the History of East Africa, 3rd ed.

(Cambridge England: University press, 1966); Roland Anthony Oliver, History of East

Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Charles Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the

Age of Imperialism: The Central Region in the Late 19th Century (New Haven u.a.: Yale

Univ. Pr., 1988).

61 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, British Institute of

History and Archaeology in East Africa. Memoir ; No. 2 (Nairobi: Oxford University

Press, 1968), 1.

62 Ibid, 10.

63 Ibid, 18.

42

of a waged economy and showed little desire for Western trade-goods, could not be

induced to join up. Even those few Africans who did agree to work on the railroad

insisted on leaving periodically to cultivate their fields.64 The government turned instead

to importing indentured laborers from India. Indians had of course had a centuries-long

trading presence on the East African coast (including participation in the Indian Ocean

slave trade).65 By the time the Uganda Railroad was completed in 1901, just under 32,000

Indians had been imported as laborers, primarily from the Punjab, but also from Sind and

the Bombay Presidency.66 Roughly 8% of these indentured laborers died in East Africa,

mostly of disease, although the infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo claimed 28 lives.67

After the railway’s completion in 1901, less than 7,000 Indians remained in the

Protectorate, most becoming traders, artisans, owners of small shops (dukas), and

clerks.68 In this capacity, Kenyan-Indians became extremely important to the colonial

economy; Desh Gupta estimates that by 1903, 80% of the Protectorate’s capital was in

64 Gregory, India and East Africa, 51.

65 The Indian-Ocean slave trade ended in 1873 after the British threatened the Sultan of

Zanzibar with a naval blockade. Slavery itself was abolished 1897 on the islands of

Pemba and Zanzibar, and on the Sultan’s mainland territory in 1907. Ibid, 26.

66 Ibid, 54.

67 This story was recounted by the overseer of the Tsavo bridge project, Colonel John

Henry Patterson, in his memoir, and later adapted into a a 1996 film, The Ghost and the

Darkness, starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. The lions, which Patterson shot, can

be viewed today at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. See J. H Patterson (John Henry),

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other African Adventures. (New York: The Macmillan

company, 1927). Stephen Hopkins, The Ghost and the Darkness, Paramount Pictures

(1996).

68 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, 24.

43

Indian hands.69 The importation of railway laborers was not, however, the only period of

Indian migration; as Sana Aiyar points out, Indians in Kenya retained a connection to

their homeland, participating in circular migratory patterns which send them back and

forth across the Indian ocean.70 The Indian population continued to grow throughout the

colonial period (see Fig. 1), always outnumbering the other significant immigrant

population—the Europeans.

Figure 1: Population of Kenya71

Year Europeans Asians

(including

Goans)

Goans Arabs Africans

(estimate)

Other

“non-

native”

69 Desh Gupta, “South Asians in East Africa: Achievement and Discrimination,” South

Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 21, no. 1 (1998): 110.

70 Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the

Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930-1950,” American Historical Review 116, no. 4

(October 2011): 987–1013.

71 This chart combines information from several sources, the most important being Ghai

and McAuslan, p. 36. They take their figures from the East African Statistical

Department and census reports. I have added further information, where available, for

Goans, Africans, and other “non-natives” from R.R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of

the British Colonial Empire, vol. II (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University

Press (Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs), 1949).

The category “other non-native” This category included Abyssinians, Afghans, Anglo-

Indians, British West-Indians, Chinese, Comoro Islanders, Japanese, Malagasi,

Mauritians, Seychellois, Sinhalese, South African Coloureds, Syrians, and “other foreign

subjects.” Baluchis were classified as Indians in the 1921 census, as “other races” in

1926, and as either Indians or Arabs in 1931. No official census of Africans was taken

until 1931. Until that time, the colony relied upon estimates—and various sources

recorded different estimates. I have used the data reported in the Colonial Office List,

from the Demographic Survey, 145. For an extensive discussion of the difficulties

involved in estimating the “native” population, see pages 127-144

44

1911 3,175 11,787 9,100

1921 9,651 25,253 2,431 10,102 2,483,500 627

1926 12,529 29,324 2,565 10,557 2,682,848 1,259

1931 16,812 43,623 3,979 12,166 2,966,933 1,346

1939 22,808 46,897 3,702 15,481 3,413,371 1,795

1948 29,660 97,687 24,174 5,251,120

In the earliest years of the Protectorate, European migrants came primarily from

the South. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a small wave of migration of

South Africans (chiefly British South Africans) to East Africa, which M.P.K. Sorrenson

accounts for as "a minor repercussion of the Anglo-Boer War and the post-war

depression caused by the withdrawal of troops, a shortage of labour in the mines and the

slow recovery of the war-torn economies."72 A smaller migration of Boers occurred in

1907; these migrants tended to settle in the Uasin Gishu plateau, away from the

administrative centers of the colony (first Mombasa, and after 1907 Nairobi). Colonists

also arrived from Britain; in fact, the most vocal and politically influential Europeans in

the colony, including Lord Delamere, Berkeley and Gailbraith Cole, Colonel Ewart

Grogan, Lord Cranworth and Lord Hindlip, emigrated from Britain. The European

community was still comparatively tiny; in March of 1914 the total European population

72 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, 65.

45

numbered 5,438, a figure that included administrators and missionaries; Sorrenson

estimates that only 1,000 of the Europeans were settler farmers.73

After 1908, migrants from Britain began to outnumber those from South Africa, a

pattern that would continue for the rest of the colony’s history. In general, the Colonial

Office did not make an effort to encourage white migration. The Kenyan government did

not offer assisted passage and set minimal capital requirements for settlement in desirable

farming areas.74 Because Kenyan-Indians had an established presence as tradesmen, shop

owners, and clerks, Kenya offered few employment opportunities for poor whites.75 Due

in part to these financial restrictions, Dane Kennedy notes that a "disproportionate

element of the new settlers derived from backgrounds that are best termed

gentlemanly."76

The colonial government actively discouraged the growth of a class of “poor

whites,” a population that they viewed as having created extensive problems in South

Africa. The major government-sponsored emigration program, the Soldier Settlement

Scheme adopted after WWI,77 was designed to accommodate only the “better class” of

73 Ibid, 145.

74 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern

Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 43.

75 Ibid, 50.

76 Ibid, 44.

77 For more on the Soldier Settlement Scheme, see C. J. Duder, “‘Men of the Officer

Class’: The Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya,” African

Affairs 92, no. 366 (January 1, 1993): 69–87.

46

migrants. Although the scheme allowed 250 small farms to be distributed to veterans

without a capital qualification, the majority of plots were sold to ex-soldiers who met a

capital requirement of £500—a requirement that was almost immediately raised to £5000

by Governor Northey.78 Such restrictions guaranteed that the scheme would recruit a

population of “Young Officers and Old Public School Boys"—the target specified in a

pamphlet promoting the Soldier Settlement Scheme.79 Kenya also saw significant

immigration by retired civil servants/officers from India and other African colonies: as

Kennedy puts it, "The rising rate and progressive bent of income taxes and death duties,

the declining number and increasing expense of servants, the spreading influence of

technocratic and meritocratic values, the growing power of the working class” in Britain

made former officers hesitant to return home.80 By retiring to Kenya, ex-officers were

able to maintain a lifestyle that was increasingly impossible at home.

Despite their very small numbers, the Europeans dominated Kenyan politics. In

April of 1905, responsibility for the East African Protectorate was transferred from the

Foreign Office to the Colonial Office, after which it was treated for practical purposes as

a colony.81 In 1905, the EAP ceded to settler demands for representation in the colony by

78 Kennedy, Islands of White, 56.

79 Kennedy notes that 550 of the 685 non-local participants in the Scheme were officers,

and had or subsequently inherited peerages. Ibid.

80 Ibid, 71.

81 The Colonial Office had a larger staff and was thus thought to be able to handle the

EAP more efficiently. Yash P. Ghai, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya; a Study

of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present (Nairobi,

New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 42.

47

creating a Legislative Council and an Executive Council. In theory, the Councils

provided a check on the Governor’s82 power; in practice, the Governor retained authority

to veto any of the Councils’ propositions, and the members of the Councils would be

chosen by him. However, as Ghai and McAuslan explain in their legal history of Kenya,

the Councils, with their changing composition, provided a flexible mechanism for

accommodating different racial and tribal claims to share in policy and

administration. Increased representation in one or the other Council was offered to

a group as a palliative, and compromises over numerous controversies were

resolved by the allocation of a specific number of seats. So long as an official

majority was maintained, the experiments in the allocation of seats could be

conducted in the safe knowledge that the basic order of things would remain

unaffected.83

While the Executive Council was made up exclusively of government officials, the

Legislative Council included two nominated unofficials in addition to the six official

members (all of whom were European). In 1919, a Legislative Ordinance granted the

white settlers the right to elect eleven members of Legislative Council; it therefore also

had to establish who was eligible to vote. The Ordinance granted full suffrage to any

adult “British subject of European origin or descent,” including women.84 European

settlers were not, however, satisfied with this level of representation. They continued to

agitate for an “unofficial majority” – that is, a majority of settler representatives over

82 The 1905 Order in Council also established that the head of the Kenyan government

should be a called a Governor rather than, as formerly, a Commissioner.

83 Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 45.

84 This was Legislative Ordinance No. 22 of 1919. It was thus the first area of the empire

outside of Britain to establish (white) women’s suffrage. Ibid, 46.

48

colonial officials—in the Legislative Council for almost the whole of the colonial

period.85

They also formed the Convention of Associations, known as “the settler’s

parliament,” to represent their interests. The Convention of Associations, formed in 1910,

combined several older settler groups including the Colonists’ Association (established in

1902) and the Planters and Farmer’s Association (established in 1903). The Association

was headed by large landowners, including Lord Delamere, Lord Hindlip, and Colonel

Grogan; South African farmers tended to belong to the less-influential Pastorialists’

Association, headed by R.A.B. Chamberlain.86 Although not officially sanctioned by the

Kenyan government, the Convention of Associations was viewed as an important

political force, as evidenced by the fact that colonial governors attended Conventions

meetings until 1927; after this point, the Convention of Associations began to dim in

importance, and was gradually eclipsed by the Elected Member’s Organization, founded

85 The white settlers obtained an unofficial majority in 1948, but by that time sufficient

members of other races were represented so that the unofficials could only out-vote the

officials if all the races voted together—an unlikely scenario given the racial tensions of

the time. Ibid, 57-8.

86 Dane Kennedy suggests that the split between the two organizations was primarily

class-based, with the Convention of Associations representing large land-owners and the

Pastorialists’ Association representing small-farmers. The Convention of Associations

did include some South African members (including a Mr. Botha). Members of the

Convention of Association also sometimes challenged the dominance of large-

landowners in the organization, as in 1926 when a Mr. Hawtrey accused Lord Delamere

of representing the interests of only the wealthy elite, and envisioning Kenya as a

“playground” for aristocratic settlers and American tourists. “Rhodes House Library,

Oxford Univeristy [RH]: MSS Afr. s 594. [Convention of Associations] Box 1A- “Report

of The Session of the Convention of Associations held in The Memorial Hall, Nairobi on

October 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, & 29th. 1926.”

49

by Lord Delamere in 1929. 87 In 1948, when serious consideration of multi-racial

government began in Kenya, the Elected Member’s Organization added the qualifier

“European” to the beginning of its name.88

In addition to establishing elective representatives for whites, the Legislative

Ordinance of 1919 appointed additional members to the Legislative Council to represent

the other communities: the Indian community could elect two members and an additional

unofficial member was nominated to speak for the Arab community. To qualify for the

franchise, a Kenyan-Indian must be “a British subject of Indian origin or descent or an

Indian under the suzerainty or protection of His Majesty”89 (meaning that Goans could

not vote). While the Arab member of the Legislative Council was nominated by the

Governor, Arab men who were able to write in Arabic characters could vote in municipal

elections.90 The legislation established an electorate based on a “communal roll,” with

each enfranchised racial community (Europeans, Asians, and Arabs) voting exclusively

for representatives from their own race. The communal roll would be a continual source

of displeasure for the Kenyan-Indian community—it was one of the major sources of

contention in the Indian Crisis of 1923, discussed at length in Chapter 2. Kenyan-Indians

would continue to agitate for a common roll until 1947, when Muslim Asians in Kenya

87 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations]. Biographical note.

88 RH: MSS Afr. s596 [European Elected Members Organisation (EEMO)/Elector’s

Union]. Biographical note.

89 Kenya Gazette, March 12, 1929. Local Gov't (District Councils) Ordinance

90 The literacy requirement included either Kiswahili or Arabic, but specified that either

language must be written in Arabic script. Arab women were not eligible to vote.

50

responded to the Partition of India by demanding a separate electorate for Muslim and

non-Muslim Asians. Although the Hindu-dominated East African Indian Congress

opposed the separation, in December of 1951 the Kenyan government passed legislation

splitting the Asian electoral role.91

Racial divisions were reflected not only in the electorate, but in the colony’s land

policies. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1903 set the stage for an appropriation of

African lands by white settlers, allowing Crown Lands to be leased to European settlers

for a period of 99 years and defining African land rights in terms of occupation.92 At the

time, indigenous African peoples were recovering from a famine, small-pox, and an

outbreak of rinderpest which killed large numbers of cattle; Luise White estimates that

these forces killed as much as 70% of population of the central Kenya.93 The decimated

population of both people and livestock meant that many areas of grazing land which had

91 The East African Indian National Congress wrote a petition to the King opposing this

legislation. “For many years,” it read “elections of non-Africans have taken place under a

system of water-tight racial separate electorates. That system was imposed upon the

Indian community in 1923 against its determined opposition maintained for several years

and it has not tended to promote mutual confidence or harmony.” Referring to the “vivid

and painful lessons of the Partition,” they opposed the religious separation of the South

Asian community. The petition included a resolution passed at a joint meeting of the

Kenyan African Union and the EAINC opposing the separate elections, which the

petition presented as evidence that “the African community is as much opposed to the

principle of introduction of religious separate electorates as the Indian community.”

Syracuse University’s Bird Library [BL]: Asian Records in Kenya. Miscellaneous. Film

2174, Roll 2, papers of Zafrud Deen, President, East Africa Muslim League. For more on

Kenyan-Indian politics during the post-partition period, see Aiyar, “Anticolonial

Homelands across the Indian Ocean.”

92 Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 27.

93 White, The Comforts of Home Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, 32.

51

historically been used by central Kenyans were unoccupied, and hence up for grabs by

the colonial government. Beginning in 1904, the government began moving Africans into

“Native reserves,” leaving their former homelands available for European occupation; the

reserves were expanded after 1905 when the Kenya Land Committee recommended that

“the reserves made for natives should be few in number but of a large extent and far

removed from European centers.”94 The majority of the territory that would become the

“White Highlands,” the coveted farming area in central Kenya, belonged to the Maasai.

In order to make room for the settlers, the Maasai were twice removed to new (and

inferior) lands—in 1904 and again in 1911.95 Government physician Norman Leys was

so outraged by these moves that he wrote a letter of protest to the Acting Governor

Bowring; the Colonial Office responded by removing him to Nyasaland (Malawi).96 Leys

would later become one of the most prominent and vocal critics of colonial policy in

Kenya, penning three exposés published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth

Press.97 Another Crown Lands Ordinance in 1915 defined the reserves as Crown Land,

94 Kennedy, 149, 150.

95 For a book-length discussion of the relocations based on oral histories, see Moving the

Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, 2006 edition (Basingstoke England ; New York :

Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

96 Mr. Hollis [Governor’s Secretary?] noted that “His Excellency [the Governor] took the

gravest view of the attitude which Dr. Norman Leys appeared to have adopted towards

the approved policy of Government with regard to the Masai tribe, which had been

endorsed by official having a far longer and more intimate acquaintance with the tribe

than Dr. Norman Leys.” RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon]. Box 2, File 4, ff 12-

17.

97 Norman Leys, Kenya / by Norman Leys (Fulani Bin Fulani) ; with an Introduction by

Gilbert Murray, 3rd Edition (London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the

52

and prevented Africans from selling this land. This Ordinance also gave the Governor the

power to veto the sale or lease of land in the highlands to non-whites.98 Thus, well before

the East African Protectorate became the Colony of Kenya in 1920,99 the practice of

segregated land ownership had been established in Kenya.

Having established farms in the White Highlands, white settlers needed laborers

to work on them. However, both the government and the settlers opposed the South

African-style of share-cropping (known as “Kaffir Farming”) on the basis that it would

establish a landlord-tenant relationship between white landowners and African laborers.

Such a relationship would allow Africans to develop tenant rights to the land. Instead,

white farms in Kenya employed “squatted labor”: African men and their families were

allowed to live on white-owned farms and cultivate their own crops there in exchange for

performing a set amount of labor (originally 180 days per annum, but expanded to up to

270 days in 1937)100 on the farmer’s land. The practice of “Kaffir farming” was officially

banned by the Resident Native (Squatters) Ordinance of 1918, thereby establishing a

Hogarth Press, 1926); Norman Leys, The Colour Bar in East Africa (London: Hogarth

Press, 1941); Norman Leys, A Last Chance in Kenya (London: Hogarth Press, 1931).

98 Gregory, India and East Africa, 180. Although not explicitly banning Indian ownership

of land in the Highlands, in practice the Ordinance ensured that the Highlands would

remain in white hands.

99 The 10-mile coastal strip owned by the Sultan of Zanzibar continued as a Protectorate.

100 The relevant laws are the Resident Native (Squatters) Ordinance of 1918 and the

Resident Native Labourers Ordinance 1937. For a more detailed discussion of this

legislation, see Anderson, Masters and Servants, 465-466; Bruce Berman and John

Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Eastern African Studies

(London : Nairobi : Athens: J. Currey ; Heinemann Kenya ; Ohio University Press, 1992).

104-122.

53

labor system which Ghai and McAuslan characterize as “involving elements of

involuntary servitude.”101 Although a variety of ethnic groups performed waged labor for

the European settlers, the farms of the Highlands tended to be dominated by Gikuyu,

Nandi and Kipsigis, with the majority of squatted labor being Gikuyu.102 By 1930, over

150,000 Gikuyu were squatting on white-owned farms.103

The Kenyan government bowed to settler pressure by establishing a number of

measures to control and coerce labor. The “Hut Tax” (first levied in 1901) required

African men over the age of 16 to pay a set tax for each hut they occupied; 104 the tax

thereby had the effect of forcing men to leave the Reserves and enter into waged labor in

order to pay the tax.105 Because men generally built a separate hut for each of their wives,

101 The legislation established that squatters must work for 180 days out of the year for

the land-owner in exchange for the right to live and farm on his/her property. Ghai and

McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 83.

102 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa,

Eastern African Studies (London: Nairobi: Athens: J. Currey ; Heinemann Kenya ; Ohio

University Press, 1992), 108-110.

103 David Anderson, Histories of the hanged: the dirty war in Kenya and the end of

empire, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 24.

104 The hut tax was also imposed on widows. As Fiona Mackenzie notes in her study of

African women’s collective organizing, this fact caused much consternation in 1937

when widows in the Murang’a District began to refuse to pay it. In just three months, 550

women in the district were prosecuted for non-payment of taxes. Fiona Mackenzie,

“Political Economy of the Environment, Gender, and Resistance under Colonialism:

Murang’a District, Kenya, 1910–1950,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue

Canadienne Des études Africaines 25, no. 2 (1991), 249.

105 In her study of the social meanings of currency in Kenya, Wambui Mwangi argued

that the hut tax helped establish the notion of an African individual, as opposed to a

member of a (tribal) collective: “The hut, then” she writes “was the space of African

individuation--the generative place of the subject.” Wambui Mwangi, “Of Coins and

54

the hut tax essentially operated as a wife-tax as well; in fact, even if more than one wife

lived in a single hut, the man was taxed for each wife.106 Mr. Parkinson of the Colonial

Office explained that the rationale for this tax was based on the widely-held idea that

Africans considered women property; although attitudes might be changing with

colonization, Parkinson held that “It is however doubtful whether, in general, the natives

have ceased to think of wives as chattels which are purchased; and if that is the case it

might be argued that when a native can afford to acquire this property, he can be

reasonably be taxed upon it.”107 Ironically, while the Colonial Office critiqued Africans

for their “backwards” views towards women, they simultaneously imposed a tax which

defined wives as a commodity. As this example indicates, issues of gender and sexuality

were often an unstated but central aspect of both discriminatory policies and, eventually,

the agitation against them.

Interestingly, white settlers sometimes opposed the hut tax; they argued that

farmers were forced to pay their laborers inflated wages so that they could pay the tax.

During a session of the Convention of Associations in 1926, a Captain Wright proposed a

scheme by which the employer would pay part of the hut tax for his African laborers,

arguing that this would help induce Africans to work on white farms. Lord Francis Scott

agreed, noting that “He thought he had the physchology [sic] of the native correct when

Conquest: The East African Currency Board, the Rupee Crisis, and the Problem of

Colonialism in the East African Protectorate,” Comparative Studies in Society and

History 43, no. 04 (October 2001): 780.

106 British National Archives [BNA]: CO 533/396/5

107 Ibid.

55

he said that the native liked to get something outside the usual thing,” ie, a bonus or

perquisite.108 The settlers, meanwhile, were required to pay a poll-tax, but in 1924 they

successfully quashed the recommendation by a Parliamentary Commission that they be

required to pay income tax.109

In addition to the hut tax, the colonial government adopted several other policies

which helped control and coerce African Labor. A number of Masters and Servants

Ordinances (imposed in 1906, 1910, and 1916) fined laborers who “deserted” their place

of employment before the end of their contracts.110 As David Anderson points out, the

punitive element of Masters and Servants legislation had been eliminated in Britain by

the Employers’ and Workmen Act of 1875: the introduction of Masters and Servants laws

in East Africa thus “arose from a deliberate decision to impose a type of legislation that

was by then already considered outmoded in the metropole.”111 The 1910 Ordinance

provided some guidelines for the protection of laborers, but also established that Masters

108 RH: MSS Afr. s 594 [Convention of Associations]. Box 1A- “Report of The Session

of the Convention of Associations held in The Memorial Hall, Nairobi on October 25th,

26th, 27th, 28th, & 29th. 1926.”

109 Marjorie Ruth Dilley, British Policy in Kenya Colony (Psychology Press, 1966), 191.

110 David M. Anderson, “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939,” Journal of

African History 41, no. 3 (November 2000): 459.

111 After 1923, however, a court ruled that resident laborers (squatters) were not servants

and could therefore not be penalized for desertion. David M. Anderson, “Master and

Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939,” Journal of African History 41, no. 3 (November

2000): 465.

56

and Servant legislation applied only to Arabs and Africans.112 The enforcement of the

Masters and Servant legislation was enabled by another piece of legislation, the

Registration of Natives Ordinance passed in 1915 but not enforced until after the end of

World War I. This Ordinance required every African man over the age of 15 to carry a

pass containing identification and an employment record.113 The pass was known as a

kipande, meaning “a piece” in Kiswahili, for the small metal container in which it was

carried (usually hung about the neck). Employers signed the laborer’s kipande at the end

of their contract; if an employee did not receive this signature at the end of his contract,

the worker could not obtain work elsewhere.114 Settlers could take advantage of this fact

to silence disputes with their laborers: as Anderson notes, “By failing to sign a kipande,

or by noting derogatory remarks on the document, an employer might entrap the worker

or prevent him from moving to new employment.”115 A further Ordinance in 1926

provided for the registration of domestic servants; as discussed in Chapter 5, this

legislation was prompted in part by concerns about the assault of white women and

children by African servants.

The colonial government also resorted to more direct methods of forcing

Africans into waged labor. Most infamously, the Kenyan government required African

men to do 24 days of unpaid “compulsory labor” each year, based on the belief that such

112 Ibid, 463.

113 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 113.

114 Anderson, “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939,” 464.

115 Ibid, 465.

57

labor had been “traditionally” exhorted by indigenous leaders; importantly, any African

man who had worked for wages during three months of the previous year was exempt.116

Contradictorily, colonial settlers also sometimes argued that compulsory labor was

beneficial to Africans because it helped instill in them a work ethic: thus in 1932, the

Convention of Association opposed legislation that would restrict compulsory labor

because “it is believed that such a system of labour, fairly administered, is of

considerable advantage to the natives themselves and that its proposed abolition is

unlikely to be looked on with favour by the native community.”117 This communal labor

was generally used for public works projects such as building roads and bridges.

However, in 1919, the Chief Native Commissioner John Ainsworth (acting on the orders

of the Governor) responded to settler pressure with a Circular explicitly exhorting

government officials and “Native Chiefs and Elders” to “exercise evert possible lawful

influence to induce able-bodied male natives to go into the labour field.”118 Women and

children were also to be encouraged to pitch in.

The Circular prompted one of the first major humanitarian scandals in Kenya.

Local missionaries, outraged at what they viewed as an attempt by the government to

force Africans to work on European farms, pressured the Colonial Office to intervene.

116 The Native Authority Amendment Ordinance of 1920 expanded compulsory labor,

making it legal for chiefs/headmen to require another 60 days of labor with minimal

compensation. Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 110.

117 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations]. Box 1, File 12 Minutes of first

session 1932, March 8, 9, 10, 11.

118 Quoted in Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa; Labour’s Experiment

with the Doctrine of Native Paramountcy, 28.

58

The Secretary of State for the Colonies (at that time Winston Churchill) proceeded to

issue a statement outlawing the use of compulsory labor for private individuals

(compulsory labor for government public works projects was still allowed) but the

statement had little effect in the colonies. It was not until the late 1920s when the

government stopped actively recruiting African labor for white farms; according to

Lonsdale and Berman, “the indirect pressures of taxation and growing population

pressure in some of the reserves and a growing African taste for cheap consumer imports

combined to ensure an increasingly adequate flow of labour without further direct

administrative coercion.”119

In fact, the issue of compulsory labor, and particularly the use of African women

and girls in public works projects, helped prompt one of the first organized anticolonial

movements. Harry Thuku, founder of the Young Kikuyu Association (renamed the

Kikuyu Central Association in 1922), led a movement opposing coercive labor practices.

Specifically, Thuku suggested that African women and girls were vulnerable to sexual

attack/seduction by their fellow laborers while working on communal projects; Thuku

sent a telegram to London complaining about the “compulsory taking of girls [and]

married women for plantation work culminating into immoral practice.”120 Thuku thus

borrowed from the discourse of the sexual threat posed by “detribalization” to oppose an

oppressive labor policy. On March 14, 1922, Thuku was arrested and detained in the

119 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 112.

120 Audrey Wipper, “Kikuyu Women and the Harry Thuku Disturbances: Some

Uniformities of Female Militancy,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute

59, no. 3 (January 1, 1989): 331.

59

police barracks in Nairobi. A crowd, composed largely of women, gathered in the

following days to protest existing labor practices as well as Thuku’s arrest; on March 16,

police opened fire into the crowd killing 18 people and wounding a further 31. Thuku

was subsequently deported to Kismayu, but in 1924 a new nationalist organization, the

Kikuyu Central Association, emerged as a powerful political force.

The KCA was subsequently at the forefront of agitation around the Female

Circumcision Crisis of the 1930s, a second major humanitarian scandal which focused

metropolitan attention upon the colony. In 1929 Church of Scottish Missionaries stop

giving Communion to supporters of female circumcision. Traditionalists, including

members of the KCA, supported the practice as an important element of Gikuyu identity.

As Susan Pederson explains, the struggle soon took on nationalist connotations: “As a

defense of clitoridectomy became entangled with long-standing Kikuyu grievances about

mission influence and access to land, clitoridectomy . . . came to be seen as a mark of

loyalty to the incipient, as yet imaginary, nation.”121 Humanitarians in the metropole, led

by the Duchess of Atholl and Eleanor Rathbone, demanded that the government intervene

to protect African women from a practice they viewed as cruel and barbaric; Atholl

claimed that circumcision was a practice “even more injurious to the race than suttee”

(the practice of burning widows within Hindu communities of the 19th century).122

121 Susan Pederson, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial

Policy-Making,” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (1991): 651.

122 Pederson, 658. Stuart Cloete, a member the most politically prominent Kenyan South

African family, also made a connection between the circumcision crisis and the Raj.

"There is some resemblance,” he claimed, “between this outbreak and the Indian mutiny

where the reason for the Sepoy's revolt was the report that pigs' fat was used in the

60

However, their agitation was not successful, primarily, according to Pederson, because of

a hesitance to discuss female sexuality in the public and political sphere.

In Kenya, the crisis contributed to the establishment of the Kikuyu Independent

Schools Movement.123 Mission societies like the Church of Scotland Mission and the

Africa Island Mission were the primary providers of education to Africans in the colony;

when they took a firm stance against female circumcision (and required church members

to support this stance), enrollment in their schools fell drastically; in 1929, out-school

attendance at the CSM had dropped to only 87 students, compared to an average of 728

the previous year.124 While attempts to establish independent schools had already begun

in the mid-20s, the crisis hastened the development of two major organizations, the

Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and the Kikuyu Karinga Education Authority.

Settlers blamed the Independent Schools for fostering anticolonial sentiments and

criticized them for providing extensive training in the English language; the latter was of

particular importance since, as Chloe Campbell explains “proficiency in English was seen

cartridges issued to the Native troops. That is to say, religion and custom were involved

as they have been in Kenya by the attempt to prevent female circumcision among the

Kikuyu." Cloete dismissed the political connotations of both Indians and Kenyan

Africans, emphasizing instead “religion and custom” as explanatory factors. Stuart

Cloete, Storm Over Africa: A Study of the Mau Mau Rebellion, Its Causes, Effects and

Implications in Africa South of the Sahara (Cape Town: Culemborg Publishers, 1956),

19.

123 The Church of Scotland Missionary schools, however, recovered in a few years.

Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 395.

124 Chloe Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, Studies in

Imperialism (Manchester [.a.]: Manchester Univ. Press, 2007). 133 The KKEA was in

fact explicitly anti-colonial, while KISA’s political approach was more muted. Ibid, 134.

61

as a further breach of the racial barrier.”125 Many members of the KCA were active in the

Independent Schools movement, giving it a further political taint in the eyes of

colonists.126 Significantly, as Berman and Lonsdale have pointed out, “the state

authorities came to see the associations as the tools an unrepresentative ‘self-appointed’

minority of ‘detribalized’ agitators”127—the discourse of detribalization thus helped to

discredit anticolonial movements.

In 1940, the KCA was banned and several of its leaders (including Joseph

Kang’ethe, Jessie Kariuki and G.K. Ndegwa) were exiled to Kapenguria.128 The Kenyan

African Union, founded 1942, assumed the political position formerly held by the

KCA.129 It’s new leader, Jomo Kenyatta, had been the editor of the KCA’s Gikuyu-

125 Ibid.

126 For more on the Circumcision Crisis, see Penelope Hetherington, “The Politics of

Female Circumcision in the Central Province of Colonial Kenya, 1920–30,” The Journal

of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 1 (1998): 93–126; Jan Jacob de Wolf,

“Circumcision and Initiation in Western Kenya and Eastern Uganda: Historical

Reconstructions and Ethnographic Evidence,” Anthropos 78, no. 3/4 (January 1, 1983):

369–410; Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw

Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality,” History Workshop Journal 65, no.

1 (2008): 23–48; Lynn M. Thomas, “Imperial Concerns: State Efforts To Regulate

Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, c. 1910–1950,” The Journal of

African History 39, no. 01 (1998): 121–45; Thomas, Lynn M, Politics of the Womb:

Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2003).

127 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 240.

128 J. Spencer, “‘KAU’ and ‘Mau Mau’: Some Connections,” Kenya Historical Review 2

(1977): 210–24.

129 Known as Kenyan African Study Union until 1947 when Kenyatta took over

leadership.

62

language paper Muigwithania (meaning “The Reconciler”).130 Like many African

nationalist papers, Muigwithania was published and financed by Kenyan Indians (in fact,

Muigwithania was printed by Sitaram Achariar, whose paper The Democrat figures

prominently in Chapter 3).131 The late 1930s and 40s also saw significant collaboration

between Indians and Africans in the trade unions movement. A prominent example of

this trend is the Labour Trade Union of Kenya, a multi-racial organization founded by

Fred Kubai, Bildad Kaggia, and Makhan Singh in 1937.132 Despite such instances of

collaboration, tensions remained between the African and the generally more

conservative Indian communities. Such tensions were intentionally fueled by the settler

community; as Seidenberg explains, “fearing a potential Asian-African political alliance,

the Europeans were also willing to propagate the view that the Asians were the merciless

exploiters of the African,” deriding the Kenyan-Indians as “the Jews of Africa.”133

130 Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, “The Labors of ‘Muigwithania:’ Jomo

Kenyatta as Author, 1928-45,” Research in African Literatures 29, no. 1 (1998): 16–42.

131 Harry Thuku’s paper Tangazo was printed in the offices of M.S. Desai’s East African

Chronicle. Dana April Seidenberg, Uhuru and the Kenya Indians: The Role of a Minority

Community in Kenya Politics, 1939-1963 (New Delhi: Vikas PubHouse, 1983), 16. For

more on Kenyan print culture, and particularly the connections between African and

Indian nationalisms, see Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Print, Newspapers and Audiences in

Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connections,” Africa 81,

no. 1 (2011): 155–72.

132 Singh was born in the area now known as Pakistan, but came to Kenya in 1927. The

Labour Trade Union of Kenya was formed when Singh opened the Indian Trade Union to

all races. Dana April Seidenberg, Uhuru and the Kenya Indians, 43. For a biography of

Makhan Singh (written by the granddaughter of another Indian nationalist, A. Jeevanjee)

see Zarina Patel, Unquiet: The Life & Times of Makhan Singh (Nairobi: Zand Graphics,

2006).

133 Dana April Seidenberg, Uhuru and the Kenya Indians, 14.

63

The 1940s also saw the first stirrings of anti-colonial violence. The Dini ya

Msambwa (the religion of the spirits/ancestors) was founded in 1943 by two former

missionary converts, Elijah Masinde and Benjamin Wekuke. Unlike many of the political

organizations mentioned above, the Dini ya Msambwa (and the several other Dini

movements it sparked134) was not dominated by the Gikuyu; rather it had a multi-ethnic

composition, with members from the Luhya, Gusii, Pokot, Nandi, Turkana, and

Karamojong communities.135 The Dini ya Msambwa movement articulated an

explanation of colonialism that ingeniously subverted the British colonial project; the

wazungu (white people) had come to East Africa to provide the people there with

technologies and consumer goods. The purpose of the Dini was to call forth the ancestors

by embracing precolonial ways of life. The ancestors would then oust the wazungu from

their territories, allowing the indigenous Kenyans to benefit from the goods they left

behind.136 In several important ways, the Dini ya Msambwa anticipated the colonial

134 Other movements include the Dini ya Msango or Dini ya Yomot among the Suk, the

Dini ya Jesus.

135 Audrey Wipper, “Elijah Masinde--A Folk Hero,” Hadith 3 (1971), 163.

136 Jan de Wolf takes issue with several aspects of Audrey Wipper’s interpretation of the

Dini ya Mswamba. He rejects Whipper’s translation of Mwamba as “spirits,” asserting

that it refers more to ancestral powers and Bukusu (Luhya) customs in general. More

significantly, he objects to her characterization of the movement as a form of anticolonial

militancy, suggesting that that the Dini’s goals were not sufficiently “rational” or

“premeditated” to amount to a militant protest. Given de Wolf’s extremely restrictive

definitions of what counts as anticolonial action, I generally prefer Whipper’s accounts.

Jan J. de Wolf, “Dini Ya Msambwa: Militant Protest or Millenarian Promise?,” Canadian

Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 17, no. 2 (January

1, 1983): 265–76. See also Wipper’s response, “Lofty Visions and Militant Action: A

64

response to the Mau Mau rebellion roughly a decade later. Commentators maintained that

the Dini rituals corrupted tribal norms--the inclusion of women in such ceremonies was

cited in particular as proof of this corruption.137 As in the case of Mau Mau, the Dini was

characterized as practicing deviant sexual behaviors that would never be contemplated by

“traditional” Africans; a government report in 1955 characterized a movement among the

Pokot (Suk) as involving ‘universal and incestuous copulation on a command of the

teacher.”138 Perhaps most significantly, like Mau Mau the Dini was characterized as a

form of madness that had taken hold of its followers; Elijah Masinde was in fact

incarcerated in the Mathari Mental Hospital, where he was placed under the care of Dr.

J.C. Carothers, one of the key architects of the government response to Mau Mau.139

The Mau Mau rebellion emerged out of longstanding grievances about colonial

labor policies, political discrimination, and access to land. World War II exacerbated

these grievances in two ways: first, the roughly 75,000 Kenyan-Africans who served in

the war returned home to find that their efforts would not be recognized with any change

Reply to Jan de Wolf,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des

Études Africaines 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1983): 277–94.

137 Audrey Wipper, Rural Rebels : A Study of Two Protest Movements in Kenya (Nairobi ;

New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 211.

138 Ibid, 207, footnote 179.

139 Of Masinde, Carothers wrote: “The above mentioned inmate of this hospital is likely

to retain a generally persecutory attitude an peculiar religious ideas for the rest of his life.

But he has been of excellent behaviour here for a long time, an di the sort of case that

might be looked after at home satisfactorily by his relations, provided the latter were

responsible persons and recognized that he was mentally abnormal.” Ibid, 168.

65

in political or social status.140 The war also brought economic changes (including more

investment in colonial development and an expansion of the monetary economy) that

increased the wealth of whites, but did not benefit Africans. Berman and Lonsdale point

to economic trends that exacerbated existing grievances among the Gikuyu and other

groups; growth in the monetary economy and increased metropolitan investment in

colonial development programs meant that the social gap between white settlers and

Africans increased during the war.141 In fact, the economic situation of Kenyan Africans

grew more dire during this period. As white farmers increasingly abandoned old crops

like coffee, tea, and pyrethrum in favor of cattle and dairy farming, they employed fewer

African laborers. Those who remained were not allowed to keep their own livestock, as it

was believed that “native” cattle would spread disease to the expensive imported breeds

farmed by whites.142

By the late 1940s, Gikuyu (and, to a lesser extent, Embu and Meru) had begun to

form the movement that would become known as Mau Mau, acquiring weapons and

administering a series of oaths (sometimes by force) ensuring loyalty. The extensive

scholarship on Mau Mau does not agree on how to characterize the movement. David

140 David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged : The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of

Empire, 1st American ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 3.

141 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 256-7.

142 For on the connection between squatted labor and Mau Mau, see Tabitha M. Kanogo,

Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-63, East African Studies (London, England)

(London: JCurrey ; Athens, 1987); Robert Bates, “The Agrarian Origins of Mau Mau: A

Structural Account,” Agricultural History 61, no. 1 (1987): 1; David Throup, Economic

& Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945-53, Eastern African Studies (London, England)

(London: JCurrey ; Athens, 1988).

66

Anderson has classified it as a civil war in which Gikuyu militants targeted those seen as

collaborators with the colonial government.143 Others see it as a nationalist anticolonial

war.144 Members of the “Nairobi School” have classified it as a “tribalist” movement

aimed at gaining more power for the Gikuyu,145 while social histories of Mau Mau

emphasize its roots as a peasant revolt against exploitative land practices.146 What is clear

is that the Kenyan government took drastic steps to repress the movement; after the

murder of a prominent “chief” in October of 1952, the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring,

declared a State of Emergency which allowed the colonial government to conduct mass

arrests and detain suspects without trial. The government targeted the Gikuyu, Embu, and

Meru peoples for mass “screenings,” in which members of these groups were rounded up

and interrogated to find out whether they had taken the Mau Mau oath of loyalty. Those

who were determined to have taken the oath were sent to a system of detention camps,

which sought to “rehabilitate” those contaminated by the oath. Those not detained as Mau

Mau, particularly women and children, were often sent to “villages.” Designed to prevent

civilians from passing supplies and information to the Mau Mau rebels, who had by this

143 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.

144 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of the End of Empire in Kenya

(New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Carl Gustav Rosberg, The Myth of “Mau

Mau”: nationalism in Kenya, Third printing, 1975.--.., Hoover Institution. Publications ;

49 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1975).

145 The most prominent proponents of this view are William Ochieng’ and B.E. Kipkorir.

For a summary of this school of thought, see Maina wa Kinyatti, “Mau Mau: The Peak of

African Political Organization in Colonial Kenya,” Kenya Historical Review 5, no. 3

(1977): 303-304.

146 Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-63.

67

time retreated to the forests of the Kenyan highlands, these villages were also envisioned

by white “experts” like Dr. J.C. Carothers as spaces where Gikuyu morals could be

reformed. Abuses in the detention camps and villages—most notably the murder of 11

prisoners in the Hola Detention Camp in 1959—increased pressure on the colonial

government to dismantle the camps. By 1960, the Mau Mau rebellion was over, but it

was clear that Britain could no longer retain control over Kenya.

From the mid 1950s, Kenya had begun to take steps towards a multi-racial

government. African representation on the Colony’s Legislative Council was extended,

and bans on African political organizations were lifted. The Lancaster House Conference

of 1960 lay out the plan by which Kenya would proceed to independence. Although the

Conference proposed a Bill of Rights to safeguard the minority populations (white,

Asian, and Arab), the Conference put an end to their hope to retain authority in a post-

independence Kenya: as Tom Mboya put it, “The five weeks of the Lancaster House

Conference . . . not only brought about the declaration we had sought, that Kenya was to

be an African country; it also reversed the whole Constitutional process.”147 Further

revisions were made to the Constitution at a second Lancaster Conference two years later,

and Kenya achieved self-government on the first of June, 1963. Following independence,

KANU took over and Kenya became a one-party state, led by Kenyatta until 1978.

Independence also saw a wave of migration of white settlers either back home to Britain,

or to other colonies (particularly South Africa and Australia). Kenya was just one element

of a larger wave of decolonization; as Harold Macmillan famously stated, the winds of

147 Quoted Ghai and McAuslan, 77.

68

change were blowing, and the old imperial vision must give way. Writing in 1956, settler

T.J. O’Shea anticipated this change in attitudes. “Our occupation of Kenya,” he wrote,

“started just as the old British Lion was beginning to show signs of senility. The old boy

has aged rapidly since, and now desires no more than to be left in peaceful enjoyment of

a full belly.”148

Whiteness and its shades of gray

In his comparative study Islands of White, Dane Kennedy outlines a central

challenge of discussing whiteness in Kenya and Rhodesia---the tendency of public

discourses to project an image of a homogenous white community. Although there were

real differences in social class and national origin within the white settler population,

"colonists showed great reluctance to demonstrate their disagreements in public debate,

preferring instead to resolve such matters through private negotiations between the

government and special interest groups such as farmer and other occupational

associations."149 Furthermore, because the white settler population was so small, class

divisions were not as rigorously enforced in social spaces like Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club

as they would have been in the metropole—a tendency which Kennedy characterizes as

“a deliberate rejection of European social values."150 Thus, he concludes, “"If the claim

148 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations]. Box 10, File 5. Letter from T. J.

O’Shea to Howard Williams, Chairman, Council for Self Government, June 3 1956.

149 Kennedy, Islands of White, 184.

150 Ibid.

69

of a homogenous white society was little more than a myth, then, it nevertheless proved

an exceedingly potent one" because "by obscuring the genuine divisions between

colonists, the myth of homogeneity, even classlessness, eased the social schizophrenia

that troubled European immigrants" and provided a sense of racial solidarity.151

In the following section, I discuss some of the nuances expressed within the

category of “white” settlers. I identify three major fissures within the white settler

community. The first was based in class status, the second in national origin, and the third

and perhaps most persistently articulated division was between settlers and colonial

administrators. However, I will also show how public discourses in Kenya tended to elide

such nuances, creating an imagined community of white Kenyans with shared interests

and ambitions. Whiteness as a racial construct was effective in large part because it

minimized internal divisions, helping the small minority of white immigrants to assert

political unity.

Kenyan law played an essential role in creating the idea of holistic racial groups.

The category of “white” or “European” Kenyans, for instance, was legally defined as

“any person of European origin or descent.” This phrase was used to define voting rights

(e.g., the Local Government (District Councils) Ordinance of 1928),152anti-miscegenation

legislation (e.g., The Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance of 1913),153 and eligibility to

151 Ibid, 186.

152 Kenya Gazette (Nairobi), March 12, 1929.

153 Kenya Gazette 1913. The same language was used in the revised 1930 Kenya Penal

Code. Kenya Gazette May 29, 1930.

70

serve on the Colonial Defence Force (e.g. A Bill to Provide for the Organisation of the

European Inhabitants of the Colony of Kenya for the Defence thereof).154 The Removal

of Lunatics (European) Ordinance of 1918 made a rare nod to the existence of interracial

sexual relations, clarifying that the phrase “European” “means an person of pure or

unmixed European origin or descent.”155 The phrase makes its final appearance in the

Kenya Gazette (the organ of the colonial government, used to publish all bills and

ordinances) in December of 1959 (less than 4 years before independence) in reference to

a Sh. 50 tax imposed on Europeans to fund the (segregated) Eldoret European

Hospital.156

Culturally, however, whiteness had a more contested meaning. In July of 1954 J.

M. Foxley Norris, the Chairman of the Mt. Kenya Branch of the Elector’s Union,

illustrated the ambiguities of the term during a debate on the “Maintenance of White

Leadership” in the colony. He questioned whether skin color was a sufficient definition

of whiteness, and even suggested that civil servants should perhaps not be considered

white.157 On the question of immigration, Foxley Norris raised concerns about both class

and nationality of “whites,” asking whether the immigration of poor whites ought to be

154 Kenya Gazette, March 16, 1927

155 Kenya Gazette, Sept. 4, 1918.

156 “Uasin Gishu County Council, Eldoret European Hospital Rate,” Kenya Gazette, Dec.

1 1959.

157 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations] Box 10, File 5: Corres. 1954-1958.

Letter to Mt. Kenya Branch of Elector’s Union from J.M. Foxley Norris, July 4 1954.

71

avoided.”158 In his questions Foxley Norris neatly encapsulated the major fault lines

within the category of “white” Kenyans. Whiteness was contingent on class, and national

origins, but also on one’s status as a settler/farmer: note that Foxley Norris questioned

whether officials could be considered white, highlighting a persistent division between

settlers and officials in the colony.

In important ways, the debates over class and national origin were inextricable.

As discussed above, many of the earliest European migrants to the colony came from

South Africa. Despite the fact that most of these migrants were British South Africans,

they tended to be to be lumped in with Boers. Dane Kennedy quotes a colonial

administrator’s summary of the situation “English people think that the majority of the

lower class Afrikanders [here meaning British South Africans] have all the vices of the

Dutch without any of their redeeming qualities.”159 As the administrator’s statement

indicates, South African origin was frequently conflated with lower class status.160 In

fact, most South African immigrants were poorer than British-born immigrants, at least in

part because they were able to enter the colony by walking through the borders. Potential

immigrants from Britain, meanwhile, had to satisfy a capital qualification as well as

paying for their transportation to the colony. Kenyan South Africans tended to congregate

together, and were not politically influential; only a few families, like the Cloetes,

became important figures in the Kenyan political scene.

158 Ibid. 159 Kennedy, Islands of White, 48.

160 Kennedy notes that in Rhodesia, too, Afrikaners “were commonly regarded as the

main candidates for poor white status.” Ibid, 173.

72

Kenyan South Africans were also associated with the racial dynamics of their

home country, an example that Kenyan officials were determined to avoid. The existence

of a population of poor whites in South African was viewed as causing a number of

problems, and was to be avoided at all costs. In fact, Europeans who threatened to

become dependent upon the state were classified as “Distressed British Subjects” and

deported from the colony. Dane Kennedy has argued that "The 'poor white problem,' as it

came to be called, was one of the central bogies of colonial society, rivaling the black

peril in its power to induce anxiety."161 British Kenyans (including officials) also argued

that South Africans treated Africans with excessive cruelty. The Chief Native

Commissioner John Ainsworth, for instance, was frustrated by the demands of many

settlers, “including all the South Africans,” to

have the country governed with the idea of making it absolutely a white man’s

country, and making all the laws to suit the white man; they wish that all natives

should be of no particular account, except in so far as they are useful to further the

white Colonists’ ends. This I know is the South African ideal.162

Interestingly, Kenyan Indians sometimes echoed the contention that South Africans were

more racist than the British. In 1923 the Muslim Association of Kenya sent a published

petition to William Ormsby-Gore of the Secretary of State for the Colonies’ office

complaining of “a section of the Kenya European Settlers who for reasons of their

having, for some time, come in contact with the South African Boers and having

161 Kennedy, Islands of White, 168.

162 Quoted in M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, 242.

Ainsworth’s objection seems rather hollow, however, given his own authorship of the

infamous 1919 Circular instructing government officials to coerce Africans into laboring

on European farms.

73

unwittingly absorbed the complexion prejudice which was invented by the Boers many

years back, have set on foot an anti-Indian agitation.”163 Kenyan Indians (as well as

domestic Indians) viewed South Africa as having uniquely discriminatory policies

towards Indian British subjects; they therefore resisted the introduction of policies similar

to those practiced in South Africa into other colonies.

As World War II loomed, a new conversation began which debated the merits of

incorporating immigrants from southern and eastern European countries into the “white”

community. Both white settlers and Kenyan Asians objected to a plan proposed by Lord

Winterton at the Evian-les-Bains Conference to resettle Jewish refugees in Kenya.164 The

settlement committee in Kenya were willing to allow “a comparatively small number of

Jews of a nordic type” to settle on Kenyan farms, but sought to exclude lower-class

Jews.165 Kenya’s Indian population responded still more strongly. Kenyan-Indians were

banned from owning land in the White Highlands; now Lord Winterton was proposing to

settle European Jews in land that was denied to Indians. The East African Indian National

Congress opposed the measure; Indians in Nairobi held a hartal, closing down all shops

163 RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon]. Box 3, File 1. Interestingly, this document

appears in the files of Kenyan Governor Robert Coryndon, who was himself South

African born.

164 This was not the first attempt to create a Jewish homeland in British East Africa. In

1903, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain responded to pogroms in Russia by

suggesting that Jewish refugees settle in the Mau escarpment. The so-called Uganda Plan

(misleadingly named since the territory offered was, in fact, in Kenya) failed, however,

after an investigating committee determined that the land was unsuitable-- in part because

it was already occupied by Maasai.

165 Quoted Kennedy, Islands of White, 87.

74

and businesses to protest the move. The Imperial Indian Citizenship Association

summarized their position thus:

The Jews of the world would appear to be better placed as compared to poor

Indians abroad. If they are driven out of Germany, the British Empire and

America is thrown open to them for settlement. The tragedy of the situation is that

Indians, who are subjects of the British Crown, are being turned out form

territories within the British Empire, which they have materially helped to

develop. Now, they are asked to make room even for the German, Austrian and

Italian Jews in the Highlands of Kenya.166

This statement is even more intriguing when one considers that Kenyan Indians had

consistently been racialized in Kenya according to anti-Semitic tropes; faced with the

prospect of Jewish settlement in the Highlands, Kenyan-Indians revised these discourse

and redeployed them against a still more marginal population. Kenyan Indians also

complained about the presence of southern European immigrants in the colony. In his

Presidential address to the Kenyan Indian National Congress in 1954, N.S. Mangat

complained that even while Europeans opposed Indian migration, they encouraged

Indiscriminate immigration from ex-enemy countries . . .They are in the process

of promoting that direst of social diseases to themselves, the poor white class.

Even today when one walks the streets of Nairobi one hears strange noises which

are supposed to be a language spoken by people whose names are as unspellable

as they are unpronounceable.” 167

166 University of Syracuse, Bird Library [BL]: Asian Records in Kenya. Miscellaneous.

Film 2174, Roll 1. Papers of Zafrud Deen, President, East Africa Muslim League. “A

Representation made by The Imperial Indian Citizenship Association to The Government

of India Regarding the Reservation of the Kenya Highlands for Europeans,” March 1939.

167 RH: MSS Afr. s596 [Elector’s Union/EEMO]. Box 47 File 1: Indian Affairs, 1922-

1954. The Presidential Address, by N.S. Mangat to The Kenya Indian National Congress,

given at 23rd session 31July-2 August 1954.

75

As in the case of South Africans, Mangat constructed marginal whites as a threat--a

“social disease” with all that term’s sexual connotations—which would contaminate the

colony by fostering a class of poor whites.

It is worth noting economic roots of the tensions between poor whites and

Indians; since the latter group dominated the colony’s class of artisans, clerks, and store-

owners, there was little room for poor whites to establish themselves economically. The

case of a Cypriot Greek man Y.R.168 is an interesting illustration of this tension. Y.R. was

a hat and dress maker who had come to Kenya from the bordering colony of Tanganyika.

In 1941, he wrote a letter to the Governor (at that time Sir Henry Monck-Mason Moore)

complaining that he was unable to obtain work “for the simple reason that preference is

given to Indians.” “I fail to see,” he continued, “why almost all the contracts should be

given to Indians thereby depriving others of earning a living. Apart from the question of

competition I feel I have the same rights as a British subject,169 and moreover of

European nationality.” He concluded with the observation that “Your Excellency will

doubtless agree that it is indeed very sad for me (a European professional man) and I am

sure I am not the only one, to be out of work in Nairobi at the present moment and

deprive myself of the most essentials of life, though my Indian competitors enrich

themselves.”170

168 Given the sensitive nature of this archival material, I refer to him by initials only.

169 Y.R. was born in Cyprus, which had been under British administration since 1878. He

was therefore a British subject.

170 Kenya National Archives [KNA]: ARC (MD) 4/2/31 Distressed Persons, European

1939-44.

76

The Director of Intelligence responded to Y.R.’s complaint in a memo to the

Colonial Secretary, explaining that his difficulties in obtaining work were largely due to

the fact that he possessed “insufficient capital and equipment,” and pointing out that

Indians were also British subjects. The Director may have had an ulterior motive for

ignoring Y.R.’s complaint: the memo noted that Y.R.’s

moral character would not appear to be above reproach. In January, 1941, reports

were received of apparently improper advances made by him to military

personnel, while in March, 1941, he was arrested and charged with committing an

act of gross indecency with another male. There was, however, insufficient

evidence to support committing the accused for trial and he was discharged.171

The memo concluded with the recommendation that Y.R. be declared a prohibited

immigrant and deported from the colony, noting “In addition to his doubtful moral

character, it seems likely that he may become a public charge.” 172 The case of Y.R.

shows how concerns about class, national origin, and sexual deviance blended together in

the creation and maintenance of Kenyan whiteness.

Even within the population of British-born Kenyans, there was a significant and

continuous tension between settlers and civil servants. This struggle is best encapsulated

by the ongoing struggle by the settlers to obtain an “unofficial majority” (i.e., a majority

of elected settlers and a minority of government officials) on the Legislative Council.173

171 KNA: ARC (MD) 4/2/31 Distressed Persons, European 1939-44

172 Ibid.

173 For more on settler demands for an official majority, see Ghai and McAuslan, Public

Law and Political Change in Kenya. 47, 56-60. Berman provides a very practical

explanation for administrators’’ hostility to white settler claims for self-government—if

the settlers succeeded in removing the colony from British control, administrators would

77

In part this was a competition between settlers and officials over who was best suited to

craft Native Policy. In a 1928 meeting of the Convention of Associations, the wealthy

Welsh settler E. Powys Cobb argued that the settlers, having established homes in the

colony, had more experience with Native Affairs than the administrators.174 Likewise, the

President of the Convention of Associations C.K. Archer and Governor Griggs concurred

that unofficials were “the men in the trenches.”175 The Convention of Association was

itself formed in order to give a voice to the (nominally singular) “White Unofficial

Community,” who felt that their interests were not being served by the Colonial Office or

the local Government. In the most extreme cases (notably during the Indian Crisis of

1923) settlers threatened to overthrow the Colonial Government if their demands were

not met. Officials had to tread carefully to avoid conflict. An undersecretary in the

Colonial Office lamented that “The existence of a powerful body of European thought,

not by any means anti-native but strongly pro-European, has, there is little doubt, had its

effect in limiting the Governor’s efforts for native advancement.” However, he continued,

“Any Governor of Kenya has (I quote Sir Robert Coryndon) to “live with” the settlers,

and they are both exasperated by the criticism which they read in the home papers, and

be out of a job. However, administrators also viewed themselves as trustees of African

welfare, and believed that to hand over control to the white settlers would be to violate

this duty. Berman, “Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence,” 153-4.

174 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations] Box 1, File 2. Minutes of meeting

Feb, 7, 1928.

175 RH: MSS Afr. s 594 [Convention of Associations]. Box 1A. “Report of The Session

of the Convention of Associations held in The Memorial Hall, Nairobi on October 25th,

26th, 27th, 28th, & 29th. 1926.”

78

fully conscious of the enormous contribution which they make in wages, not only to

native taxation, but also to native well-being.”176

Yet the division between settlers and officials is easily overstated. Several of the

colonial Governors allied themselves flagrantly with the settler faction; Sir Charles Eliot

(1900-1904), Sir Edouard Percy Cranwill Girouard (1909-1912) and Sir Edward Northey

(1919-1922) all resigned or were recalled from their positions due to their “pronounced

European sympathies,” indicating that men in the highest echelons of the administrations

sometimes identified with settler ambitions to such an extent that the Colonial Office

deemed them unsuitable for service.177 Governor Girouard had also attempted to quell

conflict between Kenyan officials and settlers by hiring civil servants of a higher social

class; as Kennedy explains Girouard intended “to match the social credentials of the

leading settlers, thereby improving the notoriously poor relations between the two

groups.”178 Additionally, many former officials purchased farms in Kenya upon their

retirement; by 1938 at least 100 had transitioned from civil servant to Kenya settler.179

Officials therefore had an inherent motive to support the interests of settlers while in

office.

176 BNA: CO 533/396/5 W.E. or C. B. 12.3.30.

177 Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa; Labour’s Experiment with the

Doctrine of Native Paramountcy, 20.

178 Kennedy, Islands of White, 46.

179 This trend was enabled when, in 1919, Governor Northey convinced the Secretary of

State for the Colonies to lift the ban on civil servants purchasing more than 10 acres of

land in Kenya. Kennedy views this as part of a deliberate plan to ease tensions between

settlers and officials. Ibid, 72.

79

Perhaps what most united Kenyan whites was their chagrin at their bad reputation

at home in Britain; somewhat ironically, given the tendency of Kenyan whites to present

themselves as more humane than South Africans, the British press and particularly

British humanitarian organizations viewed Kenyan settlers as abusers of “native” welfare.

The archives of the Convention of Associations display a continuous concern with this

public relations crisis; for example, in 1922 the Convention responded to criticism of the

use of compulsory labor in Kenya by unanimously passing a motion opposing assertions

made in the British press that the settlers were cruel to their labor.180 Kenyan settlers

often expressed a sense of persecution, emphasizing that domestic Britons had

insufficient knowledge to appreciate conditions in a “primitive” country like Kenya.

In fact, over the course of the colony’s history, a number of high-profile cases of

the abuse of “natives” had sullied the reputations of Kenyan whites; the Gailbraith Cole

and Jasper Abrahams cases were two of the most infamous. In 1911 Cole, who had

married Lord Delamere’s sister Lady Eleanor Cole, murdered a Maasai man who Cole

believed to have stolen his imported Merino sheep. Although Cole was acquitted of the

murder, he was deported from the colony, only to be quietly let back in just two years

later.181 The case was reported in the domestic press; the Times of London wrote that the

180 RH: MSS Afr. s594[Convention of Associations]. Item 11: Minutes Feb. 1920-Oct.

1922. The papers of the Provincial Commissioner of the Coast District include a telegram

from 1914 explaining that the deportation order against Cole had been cancelled; it read

“There is no objection his landing in the Protectorate whenever he desires to do so.”

KNA: PC/Coast/1/17/83

181 Bertram Francis Gordon Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles (London: Macmillan, 1939),

64.

80

case, and particularly the settlers’ opposition to the deportation, “reveal a contempt for

native life and native rights which is, it is to be feared, far too common among English

settlers.”182 Fascinatingly, the Times asserted that the shooting of “natives” with impunity

is “neither more nor less than a reversion to savagery”183—a reversal of the narrative of

the civilizing mission which hinted at the degenerative potential of white colonial life.

The case of Jasper Abraham was even more notorious. In 1923, Abraham, the son

of the Bishop of Norwich, discovered that one of his African laborers, a man named

Kitosh, had disobeyed his orders by riding a mare back to the farm rather than walking it.

Abraham was outraged, and ordered several other employees to flog Kitosh and lock him

in a storeroom overnight. In the morning, Kitosh was discovered dead.184 Abraham was

subsequently tried for murder, but the all-white jury found him guilty of the lesser crime

of committing “grievous hurt.” They were influenced partly by medical evidence

presented at the trial, which suggested that Kitosh had died not as a result of his injuries,

but due to a conscious “will to die”—an interpretation that was famously echoed by

Karen Blixen in Out of Africa.185

182 "The Deportation of Mr. Cole." Times (London, England) 16 Sept. 1911: 3.

183 Ibid.

184 The case is discussed at greater length in Chapter 7, Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on

Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge University

Press, 2008). and in David M. Anderson, “Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’:

Settler Society and Kenya’s Flogging Scandals, 1895-1930,” Journal of Southern African

Studies 37, no. 3 (September 2011): 479–97.

185 Kennedy, 166. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa, 2nd Modern Library ed. (New York:

Modern Library, 1937).

81

The case sparked considerable controversy in Britain. The papers of the Anti-

Slavery and Aboriginal Protection society contain a number of letters protesting the

verdict in the case. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, for example, sent a letter to the Society,

comparing the case to the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.186 Another letter from a Mr. John

Hooper May suggested the use of corporal punishment in the colonies reflected the

sexual depravity of the Kenyan settlers.187 The Abraham case received sufficient bad

press to inspire the Duke of Devonshire (then Colonial Secretary) to suggest the

abolishment of jury trials in Kenya—a recommendation that was not, however, adopted.

There was one group of Kenyan whites who frequently found themselves at odds

with both settlers and administrators. Missionaries in Kenya had profoundly different

goals than either of the other two groups—they wished to convert and educate Africans

along Western lines. Not surprisingly, they were much more willing to intervene in

African traditions and practices than the two other groups. Missionaries were, for

instance, at the heart of the circumcision crisis of the 1930s. They tended to have a

profoundly different set of motivations than settlers or administrations, both of whom

understood the preservation of “traditional” African lifestyles to be an essential part of

their duties as trustees of African welfare. For instance, Chloe Campbell points out that

there is no evidence of missionary involvement in the colony’s major eugenic

organization, the Kenya Society for the Study of Race Improvement (KSSRI); Kenyan

186 RH: MSS Brit. Emp S22 G136 [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society].

B.E.A. Kenya 1920-26, 1923-25.

187 Ibid.

82

eugenicists tended to view missionaries as a threat to African well-being because they

advocated “detribalizing” influences like education and development.188 Given their

rejection of the idea that “detribalization” represented a threat to African well-being, it is

not surprising that missionaries tended to reject the discourse of African “normative

primitivity.” Meghan Vaughan has highlighted this difference in stereotypes of African

sexuality:

For some, including many missionaries, African sexuality was, and always had

been, ‘primitive’, uncontrolled and excessive, and as such it represented the

darkness and dangers of the continent. For others, the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of

pre-colonial African sexuality was reassuringly ‘innocent’; the danger lay rather

in the degeneration of this sexuality which was seen to have come about through

the social and economic changes of colonialism.189

Unfortunately, in this dissertation, missionary views of African sexuality are only

occasionally discussed. I hope to conduct more research on missionary views of African

sexuality, and incorporate them into future iterations of this project.

With the notable caveat of the missionaries, then, the notion of a holistic “white

settler” community was articulated by both domestic Britons and the settlers themselves.

Never more than a tiny minority, settlers needed to minimize internal divisions and

present themselves as a united political force. As Dane Kennedy has put it, while there

were tensions between various segments of the white community, "much more attention

must be given to the remarkable manner in which social divisions among settlers were

188 Campbell, Race and Empire, 229.

189 Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, 129.

83

commonly superseded by a general sense of racial solidarity."190 The boundaries of

whiteness were maintained in part by the implementation of economic policies which

discouraged the presence of marginal, poor whites. The dominance of British settlers (and

their Kenyan-born children) in the major settler organizations, notably the Convention of

Associations and the European Elected Members organization, and the insularity of South

African Kenyans helped maintain the image of homogenous whiteness. As this

dissertation will show, the establishment of a particular narrative of white sexual

personality was a key part of this larger homogenizing tendency.

Conclusion

While Kenyan whiteness was constructed in relation to the particularities of the

Kenyan colonial experience, it was also informed by larger discourses about race,

sexuality, and colonialism. In the next chapter, I examine the most significant of these

discourses and show how they contributed to the growth of a discourse of African

normative primitivity in colonial Kenya. In the late 19th and early 20th century,

administrative policy, anthropology, and sexology all began to stress the need to preserve

the “primitive.” Protecting colonized peoples from contamination served the colonial

mission, but it also signaled wider anxieties about the sexual and moral degeneration of

the most “civilized” peoples.

190 Kennedy, Islands of White, 190.

84

Chapter 2: Administration, Ethnology, and Psychology: The intellectual roots of African sexual normativity

In my introduction, I’ve argued that Kenyan colonial discourses developed a

narrative of African “normative primitivity.” Although this narrative articulated African

sexuality as a primitive precursor to the sexuality of more fully “civilized” Europeans,

both colonial administrators and settlers stressed the need to preserve and protect these

cultures from contamination. In particular, they opposed the attempts by colonial

missionaries to reform certain indigenous sexual practices, most notably polygamy and

clitoridectomy, which missionaries viewed as backwards and immoral. White settlers and

administrators argued instead that when Africans were prematurely exposed to

“civilization,” they were exposed to deviant sexual practices which were entirely absent

from indigenous societies. “Detribalization,” or the alienation of Africans from rural,

“traditional” societies, thus led to both the moral and physical ruin of sexually naïve

Africans. Yet even while white Kenyans presented their own culture (and the culture of

other major “immigrant” populations like Kenyan Arabs and Indians) as a source of

contamination and vice, they continued to assert their cultural and racial superiority, and

their right to govern African peoples. How was it possible both to extol the virtues of

African normative primitivity, and to use it as a buttress for white supremacy?

The answer to this question lies in a much broader intellectual tradition which

revised the image of the colonized “Other.” Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries,

85

the notion that “primitive” populations ought to be preserved and protected emerged in

several fields. First, by the mid-19th century, British imperial policy had begun to move

away from the discourse of a colonial “civilizing mission.” While earlier imperialists had

viewed colonized cultures as backward and in need of reform, the new philosophy of

indirect rule used indigenous institutions and leaders as instruments of imperial

governments. Because of its reliance on indigenous social structures, the philosophy of

indirect rule sought to preserve rather than reform “native” cultures. Yet indirect rule

developed in tandem with the notion of trusteeship, which envisioned colonized peoples

as wards in the care of benevolent colonial guardians. As trustees of “native welfare,”

colonial powers had a responsibility to both protect indigenous societies and prepare

them for eventual self-rule.

These new approaches to imperialism were in turn tied to the development of

anthropological thought over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many

anthropologists of the mid-nineteenth century were invested in proving the essential

biological differences between the races. By the 1930s, however, most anthropologists

embraced a philosophy which attributed variations between societies to cultural

differences rather than biological race. Increasingly, they viewed indigenous cultures as

intrinsically valuable and valid. Furthermore, because anthropologists hoped to collect

data on “untouched” societies, they had an implicit motivation to protect “primitive”

cultures from contamination. Despite a new valuation of indigenous cultures,

anthropologists did not directly challenge colonization. In fact, in order to gain funding

for their research, anthropologists consistently presented their work as relevant to

86

effective colonial administration. Thus, even while anthropologists increasingly viewed

indigenous cultures as worthwhile in their own right, they also framed their research as

essential to the colonial project.

To understand the extension of these imperial and anthropological ideals to the

realm of sexuality, we need to turn to a third intellectual trend. Sexologists borrowed

heavily from the anthropological discourses of the 19th century; in turn, many of the most

prominent anthropologists of the early 20th century incorporated sexological and

psychoanalytic theories into their work. I look especially at Freud’s vision of sexual

development, which paralleled the idea (championed by evolutionary anthropologists)

that cultures progressed through various stages of development on their way to maturity.

Importantly, this stadial view of sexual development meant that sexual practices that

would be deemed deviant or perverse in an adult European were not problematic in

children or in “primitive” peoples; a practice was only perverse when it was engaged in at

an inappropriate developmental stage.

Previous studies have focused on each of these groups of scholarship in isolation.

Work on colonial administrative policy notes the desire to preserve indigenous

institutions (largely in order to rule through them, but also to prevent anticolonial

tensions), but does not connect this privileging of the “traditional” to contemporaneous

trends in anthropology. Likewise, scholarship on the history of anthropology notes a new

idealization of the “primitive” in the interwar period, but does not generally highlight the

fact that these Functionalist anthropologists were influenced by work of sexologists. By

showing how administrative, anthropological, and sexological discourses borrowed from

87

and built upon each other, I am able to demonstrate why a fetishizing of the “primitive”

was such a persuasive narrative.

Furthermore, by situating the Kenyan colonial encounter within this inter-

referential intellectual framework, we begin to see why it was rhetorically effective for

Kenya settlers positioned themselves as trustees of African sexuality. Presenting African

societies as vulnerable to contamination from “immigrant” cultures allowed settlers to

position themselves as benevolent guardians of African welfare even while opposing the

mandate to “civilize” African peoples. The notion that African societies must remain

pristine and untouched challenged the teleology of colonialism; while the civilizing

mission implied that colonized peoples would eventually be ready for self-rule, this

valorization of untouched “primitive” cultures supported settlers’ demand for minority

rule over a permanently “backwards” population. However, the discourse of African

normative primitivity created the possibility for an alternative reading. In the final part of

this chapter, I examine the work of the Kenyan-African ethnographer Jomo Kenyatta. By

presenting Gikuyu sexuality as superior to that of Westerners, Kenyatta turned the

discourse of African normative primitivity on its head, using it to support an agenda of

African self-rule.

Indirect Rule and Trusteeship

As discussed in the introduction, the colonial Kenyan government instituted a

number of mechanisms designed to restrict Africans to rural, “tribally” segregated spaces.

As Matthew Carotenuto writes, the establishment of native reserves, kipande pass laws,

88

and the forced “repatriation” of poor or unemployed urban Africans all emanated from “a

paternalistic state view that African colonial citizenship should be limited to the confines

of rural life and carefully managed under the disciplinary oversight of static institutions

of "tradition" and gerontocracy.”191 “Detribalization” occurred when Africans ceased to

be under the control of these institutions, and lost touch with the indigenous norms which

supposedly governed rural “tribal” life. Exposed to the vices of the Westernized urban

spaces of the colony, the detribalized African engaged in criminal activities including

theft and prostitution: as E.B. Hosking stated in a report on the slums of Nairobi in 1930,

“It is generally held that though the native in his own reserve is an estimable person of

many virtues his detribalised cousin that haunts the towns is the scum of the Colony.”192

The solution to the dangerous detribalization of Africans lay in the preservation of

“traditional” rural lifestyles: as Meghan Vaughan writes, “the disruptive changes wrought

191 Matthew Carotenuto, “Repatriation in Colonial Kenya: African Institutions and

Gendered Violence,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45, no. 1

(February 2012): 9–28.

192 Hosking felt, however, that Nairobi might prove to be an exception to this evil

provided that better housing was provided for them. Although he admitted that “Existing

conditions are dangerously bad and apt to breed bad citizens in the dark and evil abodes

of vice and diseases,” he noted that “The native is however indomitable and rises superior

to the conditions which have been forced upon him. The villages are wonderfully clean

considering their constituents, the inhabitants are cheerful land friendly and there is every

hope that, when housed under really decent conditions, there will be in Nairobi a stead,

healthy and happy population that will taka pride in their location and so in their town

and Colony.” Rhodes House Library, Oxford [RH]: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert

Coryndon] Box 5, File 1 Memorandum on the Native Locations of Nairobi, E. B.

Hosking, c. 1930, 10.

89

by colonialism and capitalism could, so it was argued, be contained if only people obeyed

their ‘traditional’ leaders and followed ‘traditional’ norms.”193

This preoccupation with the preservation of tradition can be seen in the two major

administrative policies practiced in colonial Kenya: indirect rule and trusteeship. The

basic outlines of indirect rule and trusteeship have been discussed in the introduction.

Indirect rule sought, to the greatest extent possible, to govern colonized people through

existing institutions and social structures. While some scholars have suggested that

indirect rule was adopted as a cost-saving mechanism, since ruling through existing

institutions meant that the government needed fewer “men on the spot” to govern, others

have pointed to the larger utility of indirect rule: as Mahmood Mamdani argues,

indirect rule was never just a commonsense, pragmatic, and cost-efficient

administrative strategy that utilized local personnel to fill its lowest tiers. Its point

was to create a dependent but autonomous system of rule, one that combined

accountability to superiors with a flexible response to the subject population, a

capacity to implement central directives with one to absorb local shocks.”194

In theory, indirect rule was viewed as a strategy to reduce the risk of anticolonial

agitation by honoring indigenous norms. In practice, however, such norms were often

invented through the colonial encounter. Furthermore, the policy of indirect rule’s

tendency to fetishize “traditional” lifestyles often accommodated policies that limited the

mobility and independence of African peoples.

193 Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Repr.

(Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), 109.

194 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of

Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 60.

90

Likewise, the philosophy of trusteeship tended to idealize “traditional” African

lifestyles even as it was premised on the need to prepare Africans for eventual self-rule.

As noted in the introduction, trusteeship in Kenya was particularly indebted to Lord

Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, which envisioned “Britain as a

trustee to civilization for the development of resources, and to the natives for their

welfare.”195 Lugard viewed these two goals as compatible; the metropole would benefit

from the extraction of wealth and resources from the colonies, while colonized peoples

would gradually be prepared to inherit self-rule. In Kenya, the dual mandate was

reworked into a “dual policy” which asserted that both the interests of white settlers and

Africans must be attended to

The tension between the idea that “civilization” was a threat to the moral and

mental health of colonized peoples and the colonial civilizing mission, which presented

colonization as the means by which “primitive” peoples would be exposed to the benefits

of “modern” science and culture, was thus reflected in the contradictory goals of

trusteeship. On the one hand, trustees had a duty to protect the wellbeing of colonized

peoples; because of the prominence of the discourse of detribalization, this duty was

often interpreted as the need to protect the morals and manners of colonized peoples from

civilizing forces. Yet trusteeship was also premised on the notion that the whole purpose

of colonization was to prepare “primitive” peoples for eventual self-rule. The

contradictions inherent in the notion of trusteeship worked to stretch the telos of

195 Ronald Hyam, “Bureaucracy and ‘Trusteeship’ in the Colonial Empire,” in The

Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Judith Brown and Wm Roger Louis, vol. 4

(OUP Oxford, 1999), 268.

91

imperialism to infinite limits; while trusteeship ostensibly prepared “primitive” peoples

for self-rule, part of the trustee’s duty was to protect those peoples from the very forces—

education, urbanization, Christianization—which would supposedly usher them into

modernity.

Of course, the fetishization of “tradition” was complicated by the fact that

administrators often misidentified or invented indigenous norms; thus, there was

considerable disparity between British perceptions and indigenous realities. While

colonial administrators set up “Native Law Courts” to enforce traditional laws, in its

application, customary law developed into an entirely new legal order. As Thomas Spear

puts it, “customary law was neither traditional nor modern, African nor European, but

quintessentially colonial.”196 Also “quintessentially colonial” were the concepts of the

“chief” and the “tribe.” Chiefs were often plucked from social obscurity in order to carry

out official policy, and as their power often derived solely from the colonial government,

it was easily cut off. As Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale have pointed out, “Chiefs in

British Africa were free to act only in ways the British approved, were ordered to carry

out policies whether they liked them or not, and were deposed and replaced with more

pliant men when they were found incompetent, corrupt or insubordinate.”197

196 Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial

Africa,” The Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 14.

197 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa,

Eastern African Studies (London : Nairobi : Athens: J. Currey ; Heinemann Kenya ; Ohio

University Press, 1992), 160.

92

The colonial government also played an important part in the construction of

tribal identities, elaborating, expanding, or consolidating existing identity categories to

create a convenient unit through which to administer indigenous populations. The

creation of distinct tribes, constructed as insular and antagonistic to other tribal groups,

provided the rationale to segregate the colonized not only from white colonizers, but also

from each other. These divisions in turn helped defer the emergence of a united anti-

colonial opposition, and allowed British administrators to play various groups against

each other. As Mamdani states, “Direct rule tended to generate race-based political

identities: settler and native. Indirect rule, in contrast, tended to mitigate the settler-native

dialectic by fracturing the race consciousness of natives into multiple and separate ethnic

consciousnesses.”198 Of course, in both South Africa and Kenya racial/ethnic

constructions were complicated by the presence of a third group, the Indian settlers who

occupied an ambiguous intermediate space between citizen and subject. As Chapter

Three shows, white settlers portrayed these intermediaries as hostile to African interests,

presenting themselves as a benevolent alternative to the despotic rule of Indians.199

198 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers : Colonialism, Nativism, and the

Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 23.

199 This concept of tribe and ethnicity as invented has been challenged by Thomas Spear,

who argues that scholars like Terence Ranger and Mamdani have emphasized the power

of colonial authorities to manipulate “tradition” at the expense of African agency. In this

scholarship, Spear argues, “Colonial duplicity overwhelms African gullibility.” While

Spear’s contention that colonial inventions “had to be perceived as legitimate to be

effective” arguably underestimates the coercive power of imperialism, his argument that

indigenous people and discourses helped shape and reinterpret tradition is well-taken. In

fact both Ranger and Mamdani discuss such reinterpretations; Mamdani notes that the

“tribe” became the central organizational unit for anticolonial movements, while Ranger

suggests that many African authorities adopted invented traditions in order to ensure the

93

Clearly, then, there was a tension inherent in the approach to administration in the

late-colonial period; the mandate to protect and preserve indigenous cultures existed

alongside a continuing urge to “civilize” colonized peoples. This tension was particularly

stark in Kenya, where the government tended to defer to settler interests.200 In fact, the

discourse of detribalization facilitated settler interests. A number of policies which

directly benefited white settlers—including pass laws, the banning of African political

organizations, and the establishment of Native Reserves—were all legitimated as means

of protecting “traditional” African lifestyles from the threat of detribalization.

These pro-settler measures did not, however, go unquestioned; the Kenyan settler

state came in for a good deal of criticism in liberal metropolitan circles. This was

particularly true in the late 1920s, when the government shifted to Labour control. The

new Secretary of the State for the Colonies was Sidney Webb, an ardent Fabian Socialist.

Webb was subsequently known as Lord Passfield—much to his chagrin, he was created a

control of men over women, elders over young, elites over peasants, and indigenous

peoples over migrants. In a much earlier essay, Archie Mafeje concedes “the existence of

tribal ideology and sentiment in Africa” but argues that “societies that have been

effectively penetrated by European colonialism, that have been successfully drawn into a

capitalist money economy and a world market” cannot be equated with precolonial social

structures. Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British

Colonial Africa,” The Journal of African History 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 4. Eric

Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge

University Press, 1992), 607. Archie Mafeje, “The Ideology of ‘Tribalism,’” The Journal

of Modern African Studies 9, no. 2 (August 1, 1971): 258.

200 Susan Pedersen singles out Kenya as a particularly salient case of “trusteeship”

bowing the pressures of a vocal settler population: "'Trusteeship' did not mirror British

colonial practice tout court, which was anything but uniform and in many territories

(notably Kenya) submissive to settler interests." Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The

League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, 1 edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2015), 137.

94

peer of the realm in order to be eligible for the position.201 Importantly, the Labour Party

had not been able to obtain a clear majority, and thus had to rely on the votes of the

Liberals to outvote the Conservatives. This meant that the Labour Party could not be as

authoritative as it might have wished, and indeed it would give way to Ramsey

MacDonald’s National Government in 1931. 202

Even before WWI, the Labour Party had raised questions about the utility and

morality of imperialism; in the Dual Mandate Lord Lugard disapprovingly summarized

Labour’s belief that “material development [of the colonies] benefits only the capitalist

profiteer; and that British rule over subject races stands for spoliation and self-

interest.”203 This critical view of imperialism was informed by the activism of a set of

British humanitarians who drew attention to injustices perpetrated in the colonies. Two of

the most prominent were Norman Leys and William McGregor Ross. Both were former

colonial servants in East Africa, and wrote treatises decrying the exploitation and abuse

of Africans by the colonial government at the behest of white settlers.204 Many of these

201 There was a constitutional requirement that two of the Secretaries of States in the new

government sit in the House of Lords. Since Webb had no children, and hence would not

be able to pass the title to any offspring, King George V agreed to create a new peerage

for him. Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa ; Labour’s Experiment with the

Doctrine of Native Paramountcy., University of California Publications in History ; v. 72

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 77.

202 Ibid. My discussion of Kenya’s relationship with the Labour Party is drawn largely

from Gregory’s work.

203 Sir F. D Lugard (Frederick Dealtry), The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa

(Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922).

204 Norman Leys, A Last Chance in Kenya (London: Hogarth Press, 1931); Norman Leys,

Kenya / by Norman Leys (Fulani Bin Fulani) ; with an Introduction by Gilbert Murray,

95

treatises were published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which

specialized in publishing Fabian socialist tracts. The prominent humanitarian group, The

Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society205 (headed during this period by John H.

Harris) also sought to expose and end colonial abuses, in Kenya and elsewhere. Several

missionaries with experience of Kenya also influenced Webb, including Dr. Joseph

Oldham, Archbishop W.E. Owen, and Canon Harry Leakey (father of the anthropologist

Louis Leakey).

Together, these humanitarians focused on the abuse of Africans by their white

settler employers and the colonial government, drawing on the notion of trusteeship to

describe the responsibilities of the British towards their colonial subjects. The outcry

against the Kenyan government’s use of compulsory labor provides a salient example. As

discussed in the introduction, the use of compulsory labor in Kenya was justified as an

extension of a “chief’s” traditional authority to compel his subordinates to work for him.

In his book on The Race Problem in Africa, MP Charles Roden Buxton maintained that

3rd Edition (London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,

1926); Norman Leys, The Colour Bar in East Africa (London: Hogarth Press, 1941);

William McGregor Ross, Kenya from within ; a Short Political History. (London: GAllen

& Unwin ltd, 1927).

205 The Society had been founded in 1830s as an abolitionist group. After emancipation,

their focus shifted to the colonies, where they advocated against abuses of indigenous

peoples. As Zoë Laidlaw has noted, however, the Society was not anti-imperialist:

“Reflecting its solidly middle-class professional membership, APS zeal was almost

always directed towards reforming the governance of empire rather than overthrowing

British rule. On occasion it even advocated – if on defensive, humanitarian grounds – the

extension of empire.” Zoë Laidlow, “‘Justice to India - Prosperity to England - Freedom

to the Slave!’ Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and

American Slavery,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society; Cambridge 22, no. 2 (April

2012): 303.

96

the notion that compulsory labor was part of African tradition was merely "the means by

which the African is made to work for the White man on terms which he would not

readily accept, if he were a perfectly free agent, bargaining on equal terms." 206 He argued

the weakness of the Native places him in a position where he requires special

care. Until he is able, thanks to the benefits of education, to guard his own

interests from attack, we must fulfill our duty as trustees, and regard his interests

as paramount, in the sense of being the first charge on the territory

concerned. This I take to be the meaning of the much-abused term

'paramountcy.'207

Humanitarians adapted the idea of trusteeship to present themselves as the paternal

guardians of vulnerable Africans. Rejecting the “dual policy,” figures like Leys and Ross

argued that the British public and government had a responsibility to protect Africans

from the greed and violence of white settlers.

During his short tenure as Secretary of State, Webb produced two command

papers on Kenya, both of which managed to alienate the majority of white settlers by

reasserting native paramountcy.208 Webb’s last significant achievement was the creation

206 Charles Roden Buxton, The Race Problem in Africa (London: Hogarth Press, 1931),

29.

207 Ibid, 40.

208 The first paper was on the topic of “Closer Union,” the name given to the proposed

joining of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nyasaland, and Northern Rhodesia. The most vocal

proponent of the Closer Union was Lord Delamere, the spokesman for Kenya’s white

settler population; he viewed Closer Union as an important stage to gaining self-

government, by which he meant the government of Kenya and other British African

colonies by the white settlers. Webb was unsympathetic to this plan, rejecting it in favor

of more direct control of the colony by a High Commissioner, appointed by and

subordinate to the Colonial Office. He also advocated a common roll (which would allow

literate Asians, Arabs, and Africans to vote for the same group of candidates as their

white peers, rather than each race voting for a representative from its own people). He

supported the enfranchisement of all educated people, regardless of race, and opposed the

97

of a committee to investigate the question of Closer Union, an attempt (strongly

supported by the settler community) to join together the territories of Uganda,

Tanganyika, and Kenya with the ultimate goal of achieving white minority rule. Although

the humanitarian members of the Committee succeeded in preventing the establishment

of a Closer Union, the conservative members209 neutralized any serious commitment to

native paramountcy. Instead, the Committee asserted that “the doctrine of paramountcy

means no more than that the interests of the overwhelming majority of the indigenous

population should not be subordinated to those of a minority belonging to another race,”

a statement which Robert Gregory summarizes as “reduc[ing] the doctrine of native

paramountcy to a doctrine of equal rights.”210 Shortly afterward, the Labour Government

collapsed, and James Henry Thomas replaced Webb as Colonial Secretary. In the

following years, British humanitarian attention shifted away from East Africa (with the

notable exception of the Circumcision Crisis of the 1930s) and the Labour Party largely

abandoned its anticolonial platform.

As a method of protecting the welfare of indigenous peoples, then, the doctrine of

trusteeship was a prodigious failure. In fact, trusteeship embraced the premise that

settlers’ demand for a majority of representatives on the colony’s Legislative Council.

The second Command Paper, on “Native Policy,” reaffirmed the Doctrine of Native

Paramountcy. See Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa ; Labour’s

Experiment with the Doctrine of Native Paramountcy, 108-109.

209 These included Lord Lugard, Sir Edward Hilton Young, Kenyan Chief Native

Commissioner G.V. Maxwell, eugenicist Julian Huxley, and Margery Perham,

recognized as an expert on African issues. In addition to rejecting white minority rule, the

Committee also rejected Kenyan-Indian demands for a common electoral roll.

210 Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa; Labour’s Experiment with the

Doctrine of Native Paramountcy, 136.

98

colonized peoples were vulnerable, underdeveloped, and in need of protection. As

humanitarians, administrators, and both white and Indian settlers jockeyed for a position

as the guardians of African welfare, the possibility that Africans might advocate for

themselves was erased. Both indirect rule and trusteeship locked colonized peoples in a

moment of perpetual political immaturity; the protection of “primitive” societies thus also

guaranteed that colonized peoples would never be viewed as ready for self-government.

However, the emphasis on trusteeship meant that white settlers could attempt to

avoid criticism by framing their actions as an extension of their duties as trustees. The

increased emphasis on the need to preserve “traditional” lifestyles was adapted by

settlers, who argued that isolating Africans in circumscribed, rural, “tribal” spaces was a

form of protection. They borrowed from the language of detribalization to highlight the

threat the “civilization” posed to their colonial wards. These “trustees” premised their

arguments on the understanding that they possessed intimate knowledge of the “native,”

and were best suited to act in his/her best interest. It is not surprising, then, that

anthropological studies played an important role in elaborating the fetishization of the

primitive in colonial policies. The next section examines shifts in interwar anthropology.

In particular, I highlight a turn away from the narrative of “primitive” sexual excess and

debauchery, and towards a vision of “primitive” sexual health which contrasted strongly

with the degenerate and deviant sexual behaviors that seemed to plague the metropole. I

show how anthropology worked alongside imperial administration, and was both

influenced by and influential upon sexological discourses.

99

Preserving the Primitive in Anthropology

In 1931, the “Report of the East African Committee” articulated the importance of

accurate knowledge of the indigenous cultures in the proper execution of colonial

administration.211 Under the heading “Social Anthropology,” the report asserted that

since colonized peoples were under the guardianship of their European trustees

the trustee must study the native mind and understand the tribal life. This

understanding is necessary to achieve a real contact between ruler and ruled. It

should be possible to build on existing tribal institutions a structure

comprehensive to the native mind and suitable to his ability, which will lead the

native through the necessary stages of development.”212

The Report presented intimate knowledge of the “native mind” as an essential component

of the colonial project. As the heading indicates, anthropology was viewed as the

appropriate means of identifying the indigenous institutions which would be exploited for

indirect rule.

In fact, anthropology played a key role in creating the epistemic conditions

necessary for the emergence of indirect rule and trusteeship. As we will see, colonial

officials in Kenya were deeply influenced by a school of anthropology that depicted

colonized peoples as existing in an earlier stage of development than their colonizers; this

school remained dominant in local political discourses well after it had gone out of

fashion in the metropole. Yet even the later group of anthropologists who stressed

cultural rather than racial differences articulated their usefulness for the application of

211 The report was compiled by the Joint Select Committee on Closer Union.

212 RH: MSS Brit. Emp. S22 G147 [Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society].

Dec. 1931- May 1934.

100

indirect rule. Starting in 1890s anthropologists argued that the government should give

them research support since their work was necessary for the application of indirect rule.

They needed access to “primitive” societies in order to recreate the history of more

evolved peoples, but missionaries, traders, and administrators would also benefit from

their knowledge of local mores.213 Like the concepts of trusteeship and indirect rule

themselves, anthropology embraced a complicated and often contradictory discourse

which both fetishized and devalued indigenous cultures.

The idea that “primitive” peoples occupied an earlier stage of development than

their European peers was particularly associated with the Evolutionist school of

anthropology. The Evolutionists, led by Sir Edward Tylor, believed that all human

societies progressed through various stages of development until they arrived at the

civilized ideal.214 The Evolutionists favored the comparative method, which held that

since all societies passed through the same stages in the same order, data gathered from

“primitive” peoples in the present day could be used to reconstruct the past of more

“civilized” peoples. As Celia Brickman explains, for evolutionists "Human life was seen

213 George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 381. One practical application of this is the

Anthropological Institute's "Notes and Queries" distributed by the Colonial Office,

designed to give missionaries and administrators access to anthropological research and

methods.

214 It was not until 1884 that the first university post in anthropology was created for Sir

Edward Tylor at Oxford. Henrika Kuklick notes that the amateur archaeologist General

Pitt-Rivers had made his donation of his collection of anthropological objects to Oxford

conditional upon Tylor’s appointment. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage within: The Social

History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), 52.

101

as evolving through time (if it was not to be weeded out by extinction) toward its

evolutionary telos, the European masculine subject; the implication, so important for

developments in anthropological and social theory, was that deviations from this

normative end were represented as prior in evolutionary time."215 The comparative

method had a built in motivation for the preservation of “primitive societies”; in order to

be useful as data, they needed to remain uncontaminated by more “advanced” cultures.

With World War I, anthropologists began to turn away from evolutionist

narratives and question the innate superiority of Western cultures. In her study of the

historical context of British anthropological thought, Henrika Kuklick notes that this next

generation of anthropologists grew up in a culture that was deeply concerned about the

degeneration of the

British population.216 As Andrew and Harriet Lyons put it, at the turn of the century

A current of pessimism about urbanization, industrialism, and social instability

was reflected in the belief that modern society could unwittingly defeat the forces

of natural selection and allow the undesirable elements that flourished in its

unhealthy cities to reverse the tide of progress.217

Perhaps most significantly, many began to question the value of technology and

modernity during World War I, as Europe’s young men returned home psychically and

215 Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in

Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 47.

216 Kuklick, 75.

217 Andrew Lyons and Harriet Lyons, Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology

and Sexuality, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 2004), 104.

102

psychologically broken.218 As Kuklick writes, “The generation who lived through these

changes regarded human nature as fundamentally irrational, and considered individual

and social degeneration as just as natural as progress.”219

The turn of the century also saw a drastic revision in anthropological visions of

sexuality. For most of the 19th century, anthropologists had argued that the sexuality of

“primitive” peoples was characterized by “primitive promiscuity,” characterized by a

lack of restrictions on sexual behavior and, hence, a hypersexual and excessive sexual

culture.220 However, at the turn of the century, a new vision of “primitive sexuality”

emerged which evinced “a tendency to replace fictive images of lascivious savages with

representations of primitives as either less highly sexed

than civilized men and women, less imaginative in their exercise of the sexual function,

or blocked by taboo or environmental restraints from the full exercise of their libidos."221

Andrew and Harriet Lyons highlight the role of three thinkers, the British sexologist

Havelock Ellis, the Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck, and the English

anthropologist Ernest Crawley, in this

218 For more on the cultural effects of the Great War, see Paul Fussell, The Great War

and Modern Memory, [25th anniversary ed.]. (New York: Oxford University Press,

2000).

219 Kuklick, The Savage within, 23.

220 Even during the 18 and 19th centuries, however, there were some nuances within the

discourse of primitive promiscuity. Native Americans were, for instance, sometimes

portrayed as sexually excessive, but also sometimes seen as lacking “sexual ardor.”

Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections, 20.

221 Ibid, 103.

103

shift. Westermarck maintained that the notion of primitive promiscuity was based on

faulty evidence collected by missionaries and travelers rather than trained scholars. When

promiscuous behaviors did appear in “primitive” societies, he hypothesized that it was

the result of contact with “civilization” in the forms of slavery and colonization.

Furthermore, Westermarck argued that because Europeans married later than their

“primitive” peers, they were more likely to become promiscuous: "Irregular connexions

between the sexes,” he wrote, “have on the whole established a tendency to increase

along with the progress of civilization."222 Ellis and Crawley both read Westermarck’s

work, and produced studies that emphasized sexual restraint in “primitive’ societies

rather than excess. This rejection of the “primitive promiscuity” hypothesis did not,

however, undercut claims to European superiority. While “primitive” peoples might have

a healthier sexuality than Europeans, the association of deviance and degeneration with

civilization actually meant that the association of natural sexuality with primitive peoples

was evidence of their backwardness.223

The work of these thinkers, especially Ellis, was deeply influential on one of the

most important anthropologists of the 20th century. Bronisław Malinowski was one of the

leading figures of the Functionalist School of anthropology, which tended to account for

222 Quoted in Lyons and Lyons, 111.

223 This is evidenced by the belief, embraced by all three thinkers, in the hypothesis of

sexual “periodicity,” ie. the idea that “primitive” women experienced a period of “heat”

in which they were fertile. Abstention from sex outside of these periods of “heat”

indicated sexual restraint, but also the animalistic nature of less “evolved” peoples. Lyons

and Lyons, Irregular Connections, 114.

104

differences between peoples in terms of culture rather than race. Lyons and Lyons have

noted certain commonalities between the writings of Malinowksi and Ellis: in the work of

both,

Savage sexuality is free, healthy, and somewhat monotonous. Civilization,

affecting the pliant individual in many ways, has brought with it better maternal

care, more variation, and more passion, but this sophistication has clearly exacted

a toll in the form of unsuccessful and unhappy experiments.224

The idea of a “monotonous” sexuality underscored the belief that certain kinds of deviant

sexual acts did not occur amongst the most “primitive” peoples: the sex lives of

“primitive” peoples was thus restricted to procreative sex between opposite-sex partners.

Yet Malinowski believed that the peoples he studied enjoyed greater sexual freedom, in

that they were able to engage in (heterosexual) sex from an earlier age, and had greater

knowledge of sexuality than their European peers—this freedom, he believed, accounted

for the rarity of homosexuality among the Trobrianders. He paraphrased his belief in his

notes: “when great freedom perversion ? [sic] doesn’t’ exist.”225 Thus, Malinowksi

agreed with Ellis that it was possible to 'Learn a great deal of healthy stuff from

savages.'"226

224 Ibid, 166.

225 Qtd in Ibid, 165.

226 Quoted from Malinowski’s notes on Ellis’s work. Ibid. This idea that “civilized”

societies needed to learn from the healthier sexual mores of “primitive” peoples was also

reflected in the work of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, who argued

Samoans benefitted from the sexual freedom and openness of their society. Lyons and

Lyons note that Mead was "only to delighted to draw lessons for her own milieu from the

cultures she studied" and that her work was "full of diagnostic and prescriptive asides."

Ibid, 190-191.

105

Malinowksi also echoed discourses of the danger of “detribalization,” seeing it as

a threat to the sexual health of “primitive” peoples. He advocated for the preservation of

“traditional” societies, and was particular opposed to missionaries’ attempts to reform the

sexual practices of colonized peoples.227 He suggested, for instance, that the segregation

of boys and girls in Melanesian missionary schools had the effect of promoting

homosexuality; interference with indigenous sexual and gendered norms might have the

unfortunate effect of introducing previously unknown forms of deviance.228 As George

Stocking notes, Malinowski believed that “the passage from savagery from civilization

was also a passage away from a relatively easy and harmonious genital sexuality.”229

While Malinowski believed that the study of “savages” could yield dividends for

European sexual health, he did not reject colonialism. On the contrary, he argued that

anthropological research was necessary for the proper execution of indirect rule.

Malinowski read with great interest Lord Lugard’s Dual Mandate, determining that

functionalism was uniquely suited to the project of indirect rule. Quoting Stocking,

Malinowski argued that functional theory made it possible ‘to collect in a few

weeks all the fact necessary to answer the practical questions’ regarding such

matters as land tenure. Had Lugard ‘wanted to control scientific Anthropology to

fit his imperial idea—he couldn’t have done anything but to create [the]

Functional School’; ‘Indirect Rule,’ indeed, was a ‘Complete Surrender to the

Functional Point of View.’230

227 Ibid, 175.

228 Ibid, 176.

229 Stocking, After Tylor, 266.

230 Ibid, 413.

106

Functionalists could produce the detailed studies that would help colonial administrators

understand the structure of indigenous societies and craft indirect rule policies

accordingly; such studies were also necessary for the protection of these vulnerable

peoples. Malinowski and the missionary Joseph Oldham successfully relayed these

arguments into substantial funding for their African Institute; in April 1931 the

Rockefeller Foundation awarded the Institute $250,000, indicating “a major commitment

to functionalist anthropology.”231

Because anthropologists of all schools of thought needed funding from the British

government and philanthropic organizations for their research, they tended to articulate

their work as essential for the effective execution of indirect rule. Although officials in

the Colonial Office and leading missionaries like Oldham tended to embrace the

Functionalist point of view, the staff on the ground in British Africa “developed a

distinctive variant of Evolutionist anthropology to rationalize and guide their consistent

managerial practices.”232 In part, this was because of its utility: as Kuklick writes,

“Colonial officials were able to use evolutionist arguments to resist whatever innovations

they saw as threatening to their authority; primitive peoples would suffer cultural

degeneration unless their progress was negotiated very gradually.”233 Colonial authorities

thus used anthropology to present the “deculturation” caused by exposure to civilization

as a threat to the well-being of “native” peoples. Indeed, Seligman went so far as to

231 Ibid, 401.

232 Kuklick, The Savage within, 183.

233 Ibid, 222.

107

suggest that attempts to “raise them [primitive peoples] to a higher cultural level . . . have

generally led to their disappearance." 234

Thus, the reevaluation of “primitive” societies as in need of protection and

preservation accompanied a concern about the potential dangers of detribalization. Both

administrative and anthropological discourses presented urbanization, education, and

Christianity as threats to both the purity and the survival of “primitive” peoples.

However, a contemporaneous discourse increasingly stressed the potential that

“civilization” might be damaging the health, well-being, and even morality of European

peoples: indeed, in 1935 the anthropologist R. R. Marett raised the question of “whether

it is possible to be both civilized and good.”235 The parallels between new

anthropological visions of “primitive” sexuality and anxieties about European

degeneration were not coincidental. In fact, Malinowski was an ardent reader not only of

the sexologist Havelock Ellis, but also framed several works as a revision of the theories

234 C. G Seligman (Charles Gabriel), Races of Africa. (London: TButterworth, ltd, 1930),

64. Seligman believed that this danger was caused by basic differences in the brain

structures of “civilized” and “primitive” peoples. To support this point about the racial

differences in brain function, he cited articles including F.W, Vint, "The Brain of the

Kenya Native." Journal of Anatomy, Vol. lxviii, (1934). Vint was a Kenyan doctor and

one of the predominant eugenicists in the colony. Chloe Campbell, “Juvenile

Delinquency in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1939,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002):

129–51. Vint also served as the medical examiner in the Hilda Stumpf case, the infamous

rape and/or circumcision of an American at the Kijabe mission in 1930. Kenya National

Archives [KNA]: AG/52/395

235 Qtd. in Kuklick, The Savage within, 265-6.

108

of Sigmund Freud.236 In the next section, I take a closer look at Freud’s application of

anthropological theories to the study of European psychology. Most significant for this

dissertation is Freud’s embrace of the recapitulation hypothesis, which analogized

between the evolutionary stage and mental development of “primitive” adults and

European children. The colonial notion of European trustees guarding the interests of

child-like wards was tied in to this idea of Africans as sexual and psychological children.

Stadial sexuality: Freud and Evolutionism

In his study Faces of Degeneration, Daniel Pick explores the "interlocking

languages of progress and degeneration" which characterized medical and biological

discourses during the nineteenth century.237 Increasingly concerned with the eugenic

consequences of urbanization and poverty, "Evolutionary scientists, criminal

anthropologists and medical psychiatrists confronted themselves with the apparent

paradox that civilisation, science and economic progress might be the catalyst of, as

much as the defence against, physical and social pathology."238 Nowhere was this

paradox illustrated more clearly than in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud echoed the

236 The influence is perhaps most clearly seen in Malinowksi’s attempt to provide an

alternative theory of the Oedipal complex among Triobriand Islanders in his 1927 study

Sex and Repression in Savage Society. In fact, Stocking notes that Malinowski

encountered Freud’s work as early as 1902, when he was just 18 years old. Stocking,

After Tylor, 244.

237 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration : A European Disorder, c.1848--c.1918, Ideas in

Context ; 15 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3.

238 Ibid, 11.

109

preoccupation of anthropologists and administrators with the nature and value of

“primitive” societies. This was because, in developing psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud

drew extensively upon Evolutionist anthropology. In turn, during the 1910s and

particularly the 1920s anthropologists of a variety of schools applied psychoanalytic

theory to their work. The connections between Freud’s vision of sexual development and

Evolutionist notions of cultural development are crucial to understanding the concept of

“primitive normativity.” By analyzing Freud’s ambivalent view of civilization, we begin

to see how colonial discourses could present “primitive” sexuality as simultaneously

aberrant and ideal.

As several studies have pointed out,239 Evolutionist anthropology provided the

foundation upon which Freud built his theories of human sexuality. In particular, there

was a strong parallel between Freud’s idea that individuals transitioned through a

prescribed series of sexual stages on their way to maturity, and the Evolutionist narrative

of a universal progression through civilizational stages. Freud borrowed ideas from

several major nineteenth-century evolutionist and eugenicist thinkers, notably Sir Edward

Burnett Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Ernst Haekel. From Tylor,

he adopted the comparative method and the doctrine of survivals. As discussed above, the

comparative method proposed that, since all human societies progressed through the

same civilizational stages in the same order, observations about the lives of “primitive”

peoples in the modern era could be extrapolated back to the history of “civilized

239 Notably Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal, First Edition edition

(New York: Intl Universities Pr Inc, 1983); Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the

Mind.

110

peoples.” Data about 20th-century Africans, for example, could tell anthropologists about

how pre-Roman Britons lived. The comparative hypothesis informed Freud’s belief that

the psyche of the “modern” European subject represented a more advanced evolutionary

stage than that of a “primitive” subject, either in the European past or the non-European

present.

The second concept Freud borrowed from Tylor, the doctrine of survivals,

suggested that even when a society progressed out of a lower stage of development, some

of the remnants of the earlier stage lived on in their culture. Tylor cited the presence of

superstitions in modern cultures as “survivals” from an earlier era; superstitions indicated

that “the civilization of the people they have been observed among must have derived

from an earlier state, in which the proper home and meaning of these things are to be

found.”240 Freud applied this doctrine of survivals to his conception of the subconscious,

arguing that under certain conditions a subject stepped back into more primitive mode of

being which lingered in the subconscious. Regression was thus a historical action, one

which moved the subject back in evolutionary time.

Freud was also influenced by two other pre-Darwinist evolutionary thinkers;

Lamarck and Spencer. Lamarck had presented the (false) hypothesis that traits acquired

over the course of an individual’s lifetime could be passed down to its offspring. His

favorite illustration of the heritability of acquired traits (described in his 1809

Philosophie Zoologique) was the evolution of the giraffe’s long neck. He proposed that

240 Quoted in Margaret T. Hodgen, “The Doctrine of Survivals: The History of an Idea,”

American Anthropologist 33, no. 3 (July 9, 1931): 307.

111

over the course of their lifetimes giraffes stretched out their necks by repeatedly reaching

for leaves on the high branches of trees. The giraffes would then produce offspring that

inherited these stretched-out necks, which they in turn would stretch further as they

reached for leaves. Likewise, Spencer—whose work Darwin drew upon extensively in

producing his own theory of evolution241—believed that not only physical but also moral

and cultural traits were inherited. As Celia Brickman puts it, “social and cultural

differences were understood by Spencer as biological endowments arranged along a

racially ordered evolutionary scale that culminated in the moral outlook of the educated

Englishman.”242 Importantly for Freudian theory, Spencer argued that progress was made

possible through the expression of self-control: he stated that “the repression of

immediate impulsive response was the essential mechanism of evolutionary progress in

both the intellectual and the moral sphere.”243

Building on both Spencer and Lamarck, the zoologist Ernst Haekel outlined a

concept that would prove essential to Freudian psychoanalysis: the recapitulation

hypothesis. In his study of Generelle Morphologie, first published in 1866,244 Haekel

241 Spencer for instance coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”- often falsely attributed

to Darwin. George W Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press ;

London, 1987), 135.

242 Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 44.

243 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 227.

244 Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Generelle morphologie der organismen.

Allgemeine grundzüge der organischen formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet

durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte descendenztheorie (Berlin, G. Reimer, 1866),

http://archive.org/details/generellemorphol01haec.

112

proposed that the embryo of an individual organism repeated the history of its species

during its development. The gills present in a human embryo, therefore, were not only

fish-like, but in fact indicated that the embryo was passing through the fish-stage of

human evolution. In keeping with the idea of the heritability of acquired traits, Haekel

suggested that “each newly acquired characteristic would be added on to, and henceforth

preserved in, the ontological development of the next generation.”245 Embryos thus

possessed the cumulative intellectual heritage of their species.

The recapitulation hypothesis is key to understanding how Freud tied the

“primitive” to infant sexuality. As a child passed through the stages of sexual

development, he or she reenacted the sexual development of its culture, thereby

recapitulating the past. Provided that the individual progressed successfully through the

oral, anal, phallic, and latent stages of sexual development, the individual would finally

arrive at mature genital sexuality. As the child passed through these sexual stages, he/she

was simultaneously passing from a primitive to a civilized worldview; Freud maintained

that the psychic arrangement of a “primitive” adult was analogous to that of a European

child. In some cases, a subject regressed to an earlier stage of sexual (and therefore

civilizational) development, becoming neurotic. Applying anthropological theories to

sexual development, Freud developed his own comparative hypothesis: as Brickman

writes,

Once it could be taken as established that neurotics = children = primitives, taboo and

other cultural expressions of so-called primitive societies could be explained with

recourse to data from neurotic patient and children and vice versa, so that

245 Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind, 45.

113

anthropological data concerning children and neurotics could each provide solutions

to the questions posed by the other.246

Importantly, although an oral fixation, for instance, would be a sign of regression and

psychic ill health in a European adult, an oral fixation was entirely appropriate for an

infant; in fact, the oral fixation was necessary not only for the child’s survival (since it

needed to focus its energies on breastfeeding) but also for its sexual development. A

sexual practice, therefore, was rarely objectionable in itself; it only became problematic

when the practice was engaged in at a stage when the subject should have progressed

beyond it.

Thus, while Freud clearly believed that “primitive” peoples possessed a less

advanced sexual personality, he did not necessarily see this as problematic. For this

reason, I would contest Brickman’s statement that, in Freudian thought, “because

pathology and perversion, too, were defined as regressions to or arrests at earlier stages

on the developmental scale, racial/cultural difference could become psychoanalytically

legible only as perversion or pathology” [emphasis mine].247 I make this point not to

minimize the racial implications of Freudian thought; clearly Freud believed deeply in the

superiority of European cultures to those of non-Western peoples. But this belief in

European supremacy did not stop Freud from questioning the effect of “civilization” on

the sexual health of his patients.

246 Ibid, 67.

247 Ibid, 87.

114

In fact, in his 1908 essay “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous

Illness.” Freud suggested that “civilized” sexual morality was actually damaging to the

health of the individual and, ultimately, of Europeans as a racial group.248 The essay drew

on a number of earlier thinkers, including the sexologists Havelock Ellis and Richard von

Krafft-Ebing, and the neurologists Wilhelm Elb and Otto Binswanger. Freud began the

essay by summarizing Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels’1907 book Sexual

Ethics, which compared “natural” and “civilized” sexual morality:

By natural sexual morality we are to understand, according to him, a sexual

morality under whose dominance a human stock is able to remain in lasting

possession of health and efficiency, while civilized sexual morality is a sexual

morality obedience to which, on the other hand, spurs men on to intense and

productive cultural activity.249

Von Ehrenfel depicted sexual health and civilization as oppositional; one could have

either one or the other, but not both.250 Freud elaborated on this hypothesis, focusing in

particular on the connection between civilization and the development of nervous illness.

Freud outlined three stages of civilization:

a first one, in which the sexual instinct may be freely exercised without regard to

the aims of reproduction; a second, in which all the sexual instinct is suppressed

248 Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.”

Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 181-

204. 249 Ibid, 181.

250 Von Ehrenfel was particularly concerned about the requirement in “civilized”

societies that men abide to the same moral and sexual standards as women, specifically

monogamy. Van Ehrenfels invoked a Darwinist argument that the practice of monogamy

prevented men from breeding with women of the best stock, and thus contributed to the

degeneration of the population.

115

except what serves the aim of reproduction; and a third, in which only legitimate

reproduction is allowed as a sexual aim.251

Freud agreed with von Ehrenfel that progress was only possible when subjects redirected

their sex drive to cultural production—what Freud called sublimation: he explained that

“The forces that can be employed for cultural activities are thus to a great extent obtained

through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual

excitation.”252

However, civilization came at a cost; either perversion or neurosis. Perversion

occurred when a subject failed to pass through the stages of sexual development,

becoming stuck on an earlier stage. Interestingly, in this essay Freud distinguished

between perverts and inverts (homosexuals), even suggesting that "The constitution of

people suffering from inversion--the homosexuals--is, indeed, often distinguished by

their sexual instinct's possessing a special aptitude for cultural sublimation."253 In other

words, inverts were uniquely skilled at redirecting their sexual energies towards cultural

production—making them, perhaps, uniquely civilized. Freud blamed civilization for "the

harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes) through the

'civilized' sexual morality prevalent in them."254

251 Freud, 189.

252 Ibid [emphasis orig.].

253 Ibid, 190.

254 Ibid, 184.

116

In particular, Freud worried about the impact of the moral standard which

demanded sexual abstinence outside of marriage. While he admitted that “for a few

specially favourably organized natures” the efforts to remain abstinent might “'steel' the

character,” Freud maintained that in general abstinence tended “to produce well-behaved

weaklings who later become lost in the great mass of people that tends to follow,

unwillingly, the leads given by strong individuals."255 Paralleling the fear of

“detribalization” in African societies, Freud believed neurosis was particularly likely to

occur in cases where the subject was too rapidly exposed to civilization: "the physician

finds food for thought,” he wrote, “in observing that those who succumb to nervous

illness are precisely the offspring of fathers who, having been born of rough but vigorous

families, living in simple, healthy, country conditions, had successfully established

themselves in the metropolis, and in a short space of time had brought their children to a

high level of culture."256 Freud cited several other scholars who concurred with him on

the dangers of civilization: for instance, Erb blamed telegraphs and telephones, party-

politics, trade-unionism, the “highly-spiced pleasures” of city life, and modern literature

for destroying mental health—the latter factor was particularly responsible for

“bring[ing] before the reader’s mind pathological figures and problems concerned with

psychopathic sexuality.”257

255 Ibid, 197.

256 Ibid, 182.

257 Ibid, quoted 184.

117

Freud was not alone in this belief about civilization’s negative effect on sexual

health. The historian Marc Epprecht has discussed the larger context of this narrative in

his study Heterosexual Africa?258 Both Carl Jung and Marie Bonaparte believed that the

study of “primitive” peoples could be used to cure the sexual dysfunctions of Europeans.

As Epprecht puts it, Bonaparte believed that psychoanalysts could “reveal the innate

human sexual instinct unencumbered by the niceties of etiquette, guilt, or repression” by

studying “primitive” peoples, thereby helping “to make civilized people happier and

more fulfilled in their sex and emotional lives.”259 In fact, as Bodil Folke Frederiksen has

shown, she applied this theory to herself in a rather extreme fashion. Bonaparte, who had

been a patient of Freud’s in the 1920s, believed herself to be a sexual dysfunctional and

“masculine” woman, unable to achieve the mature vaginal orgasm.260 (The fact that her

husband, the Prince George of Greece and Denmark, was gay probably didn’t help

matters).261 In 1935, Malinowski (who had taught Bonaparte’s son Peter) arranged a

meeting between Bonaparte and his student Jomo (Johnstone)262 Kenyatta, a leading

258 Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of

Exploration to the Age of AIDS, New African Histories Series (Athens: Ohio University

Press, 2008).

259 Ibid, 74-5.

260 Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw

Malinowski on Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality,” History Workshop Journal 65, no.

1 (2008): 23–48.

261 Ibid, 28

262 Kenyatta was born as Kamau s/o Ngengi, at later baptized as Johnstone Kamau at the

Church of Scotland Mission. He chose to publish Facing Mount Kenya under the more

118

defender of the practice of clitoridectomy among certain East African communities,

including his own. Bonaparte was intrigued by clitoridectomy, but not for the nationalist

reasons which inspired Kenyatta. Rather, she theorized “that because of African free

sexuality and possibly because of the prevalence of clitoridectomy, African women might

be better ‘vaginalized’, as she expressed it, and thus more feminine than European

women.”263 Bonaparte subsequently underwent several operations to move her clitoris

closer to her vaginal canal in an effort to cure her supposed sexual dysfunction, before

ultimately deciding that psychoanalysis was a more effective treatment.264

As the case of Marie Bonaparte shows, the discourse of primitive normativity was

so compelling that “primitive” sexual practices could be envisioned as a cure for modern

sexual disorders. It is particularly striking that Bonaparte embraced clitoridectomy, a

practice targeted by missionaries as emblematic of the “barbarity” of East African

cultures. Psychoanalysis’ focus on the potentially damaging effect of “civilization” on

sexual health created room for the possibility that “primitive” sexuality might be healthier

and more natural than that of evolutionarily “advanced” peoples. As this dissertation

shows, white settlers and administrators in Kenya propagated this vision of African

“normative primitivity” in order to maintain white supremacy in the colony. They

mobilized the discourse of dangerous “detribalization” to limit Africans’ access to

Afrocentric name Jomo. He subsequently went by Jomo for the rest of his life—although

he was given the affectionate nickname Mzee (old man) as President.

263 Frederiksen, “Jomo Kenyatta, Marie Bonaparte and Bronislaw Malinowski on

Clitoridectomy and Female Sexuality,” 26.

264 Ibid, 39.

119

potential sources of power. Yet, in the final section of this paper, I explore one alternative

narrative that this discourse of normative primitivity made possible. In his ethnography of

the Gikuyu people, Facing Mount Kenya (1938), Malinowski’s student Jomo Kenyatta

depicted Gikuyu sexual norms as uniquely suited to the production of the sexually

normative subject.

Kenyatta and Gikuyu sexual normativity

Although colonial administrators and settlers generally adopted the narrative of

normative primitivity, one significant group of Kenyan whites did not. Missionaries in

East Africa consistently rejected the notion that detribalization was a threat to African

morality: not surprisingly, they insisted that African societies must be reformed along the

lines of Western Christianity. Thus, as Megan Vaughan notes, missionaries held a very

different vision of African sexuality than settlers or administrators: while for the latter,

“the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of pre-colonial African sexuality was reassuringly

‘innocent,’” for others “including many missionaries, African sexuality was, and always

had been, ‘primitive’, uncontrolled and excessive, and as such it represented the darkness

and dangers of the continent.”265 Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya responded directly to

the missionaries’ depiction of African sexuality, rejecting their claims to authority and

paternalism. He did so by borrowing from the anthropological discourses that contrasted

“primitive” sexual health with the deviance produced by civilized restraint. While

articulating a vision of Gikuyu sexual normativity, Kenyatta rejected the colonial

265 Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, 129.

120

argument that trusteeship was needed to protect Africans from contaminating forces.

Rather, he crafted an anticolonial rhetoric that asserted the value of Gikuyu society and

the ability of Gikuyu people to govern themselves.

Kenya had a special significance for anthropologists in the interwar period, due in

part to the careers of several notable Kenyans taught by Malinowski. The novelist Elspeth

Huxley and Africanist scholar Margery Perham both took Malinowski’s seminars, and

went on to produce important anthropological texts. Huxley’s 1939 Red Strangers was a

fictionalized account of the experience of Kenyan colonialism, told from the perspective

of several generations of Gikuyu men.266 (Her husband, Gervais Huxley, was the

grandson of the famous eugenicist T. H. Huxley, a figure who was profoundly influential

to the development of anthropology as a discipline.)267 Perham authored an impressive

number of books, including a biography of Lord Lugard and several studies of colonial

administration.268 She also contributed to the Hailey Survey of 1938, "an investigation of

major problems, current research, and future needs" in African administration—indeed,

she was originally considered to head the project, but ultimately rejected on the basis of

266 Elspeth Huxley, Red Strangers (London: Penguin Books, 2006).

267 Kuklick, The Savage Within, 2.

268 Some of her works include Margery Perham, Lugard (London: Collins, 1956);

Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London, New York Oxford

University Press, 1937); Margery Perham, “A Re-Statement of Indirect Rule,” Africa 7,

no. 3 (1934): 321; Margery Perham, “Supplement: Some Problems of Indirect Rule in

Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 34, no. 135 (1935): 1–23.

121

her sex.269 But Malinowksi’s most famous student was Jomo Kenyatta, a mission-

educated Kenyan African who would become a prominent nationalist and ultimately

serve as the first president of independent Kenya.

Kenyatta and Malinowski first met in 1934 when Kenyatta was in London serving

as a representative of the anticolonial Kikuyu Central Association.; a year later, Kenyatta

matriculated at the London School of Economics.270 Kenyatta viewed Functionalist

anthropology as an effective method to defend indigenous culture; as Stocking puts it,

"Kenyatta was able to find in functionalism a justification for the value of traditional

cultural practices that Europeans deemed 'savage and barbaric, worthy only of heathens

who live in perpetual sin,'" especially the practice of clitoridectomy.271 As Bruce Berman

has argued, Facing Mount Kenya was an explicitly political text (despite Malinowski’s

contention that the “definite political bias” that characterized Kenyatta’s early work had

been almost “entirely eradicated by the constant impact of detached scientific method on

his mental processes”).272 Berman focuses especially on Kenyatta’s representation of

269 John W. Cell, “Lord Hailey and the Making of the African Survey,” African Affairs

88, no. 353 (1989): 489, 492.

270 Malinowski had pulled some strings to get Kenyatta, who had no college or secondary

school diploma, enrolled as a graduate student. Kenyatta did, however, have a certificate

in English composition from Quaker Woodbrooke College; the prominent liberals

Norman Leys, William McGregor ross, and the MP C. R. Buxton paid for his tuition.

Bruce Berman, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski,

and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue

Canadienne Des Études Africaines 30, no. 3 (January 1, 1996): 313–44. 314, 320.

271 Stocking, After Tylor, 413.

272 Quoted in Berman, “Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography, ” 328-329.

122

Gikuyu land ownership, his construction of the Gikuyu as a homogenous, united people,

and his presentation of himself as the appropriate representative of the Gikuyu

community.273 More significantly for our purposes, he argues that Kenyatta’s description

of the importance of irua (the coming-of age rite of which circumcision was a part) and

clitoridectomy was a “direct response to missionary attacks on their supposed barbarity

and encouragement of sexual promiscuity by claiming instead that they actually turned

children into socially and sexually responsible and disciplined adults.”274

During the Female Circumcision Crisis, missionaries began to demand that their

parishioners abandon the practice of excising the clitoris of adolescent girls during the

irua ceremony. Those who refused were banned from Church, and could not send their

daughters to mission schools. In the colony, the Crisis helped catalyze the establishment

of Independent Schools, which were generally associated with African nationalist

political movements like the Kikuyu Central Association. Gikuyu nationalists interpreted

the anti-clitoridectomy movement as an attack on their cultural autonomy: as Susan

Pedersen writes, “As a defense of clitoridectomy became entangled with long-standing

Kikuyu grievances about mission influence and access to land, clitoridectomy . . . came

to be seen as a mark of loyalty to the incipient, as yet imaginary, nation.”275

273 Ibid.

274 Ibid, 334.

275 Susan Pederson, Susan Pederson, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual

Politics of Colonial Policy-Making,” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (1991):

651.

123

The Crisis also drew attention in the metropole, due largely to the activism of the

Duchess of Atholl and Eleanor Rathbone who (along with Josiah Wedgwood) had

founded the Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women in the Crown Colonies.276

Significantly, Rathbone and her ilk conceptualized the task of “protecting coloured

women” as one of trusteeship, suggesting that part of the government’s duty as trustees of

African interests in general was to defend the rights of African women in particular.277

Opposition to female circumcision, particularly among Kenyan missionaries, was also

based in eugenic and moral concerns. An article in the Scots Observer from 13 Feb. 1930,

written by Agnes E. Brown278 of the Church of Scotland Mission in Tumutumu, typifies

these missionary narratives. The article, entitled “Facts from Kenya. Breaking down

Pagan Rites,” quoted the testimony of the medical missionary H. R. A. Philip on the

effects of the operation.279 Philip stressed the negative consequences of the operation for

women’s health, claiming especially that it increased the likelihood of maternal mortality

276 Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Yale University

Press, 2004), 246. On Rathbone and Atholl’s role in the Circumcision Crisis, see also

Chapter 2 of Brett Lindsay Shadle, Girl Cases (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).

277 Susan Pederson, “National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial

Policy-Making,” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (1991): 647–80.

278 Agnes Brown was likely one of the women missionaries at Tumutumu who formed

Ngo ya Tũirĩtu (the Shield of Young Girls) in 1928, an organization which took in girls

who wanted to avoid circumcision. See Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing:

Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya, Social

History of Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), 105.

279 RH: MSS. Brit. Empr. s. 22 G145 [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society]

124

during labor.280 Philip also articulated another common concern, that the initiation rites

were morally compromising. For women, the operation was “grossly immoral and does

damage to mind as well as body” but it also inspired a contempt for women among men:

“As long as crowds of young boys and lads can go and have an afternoon’s enjoyment

witnessing these terrible orgies,” he claimed, “their attitude to sexual questions and to

women generally can never be a right one.”281 Philips’ statements thus echoed the larger

resistance of missionaries to the narrative of African normative primitivity.

Kenyatta’s defense of clitoridectomy (and irua more generally) thus had a two-

fold purpose: to demonstrate the cultural significance of the practice, and to counter

accusations that it led to illness or immorality. To accomplish the first goal, he adopted

the ethnopsychiatric language favored by his mentor Malinowski; clitoridectomy, he

argued, was central to the “tribal psychology” of the Gikuyu, “the very essence of an

institution which has enormous educational, social, moral, and religious implications.”282

In particular, he emphasized irua’s importance to Gikuyu historical memory. Each group

of youths who were circumcised together formed an age-group which would be named

for an important contemporaneous event. Interestingly, he illustrates his point about the

280 This is a point which Kenyatta specifically refuted. He conceded that in a few cases,

girls acquired a septic infection as a result of clitoridectomy which would cause

complications when they later gave birth. However, he claimed that doctors

overestimated the prevalence of this conditions since “very few cases of the normal cases

of childbirth ever come to the notice of European doctors.” Facing Mount Kenya, 153

281 RH: MSS. Brit. Empr. s. 22 G145 9 [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society]

282 Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, 1st AMS ed

(New York: AMS Press, 1978), 133.

125

historical importance of irua age-groups by noting that “the Gikuyu have been able to

record the time when the European introduced a number of maladies such as syphilis into

Gikuyu country, for those initiated at the time when this disease first showed itself are

called gatego, i.e. syphilis.” Kenyatta’s (correct) description of syphilis as a European

import is particularly significance given the prevailing colonial discourse that

characterized syphilis as endemic to African communities;283 Kenyatta inverted this

discourse by emphasizing the European origins of venereal disease. This Gikuyu

historical methodology meant that “any Gikuyu child who is not corrupted by

detribalization” held in his [sic] mind the whole history of the Gikuyu people.284

Kenyatta also countered the accusation that irua was an immoral practice which

promoted promiscuity; instead his chapter on “Sex Life among Young People” argued

that irua was the time when young people learned “the matters relating to rules and

regulations governing sexual indulgence.” In particular, initiates learned an intimate

practice which protected their sexual and mental health:

In order not to suppress entirely the normal sex instinct, the boys and girls are told

that in order to keep good health they must acquire the technique of practicing a

certain restricted form of intercourse, called ombani na ngweko (platonic love and

fondling). This form of intimate contact between young people is considered right

and proper and the very foundation stone upon which to build a race morally,

283 This discourse was due in part to the frequent misdiagnosis of yaws, a disease

associated with poverty which was caused by the same spirochetes as syphilis, but which

was not sexually transmitted. For a detailed discussion of this confusion, and for a

broader history of race and sexuality during an outbreak of syphilis in early 20th century

Uganda, see Chapter 6 in Vaughan, Curing Their Ills : Colonial Power and African

Illness.

284 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 135.

126

physically and mentally sound. For it safeguards the youth from nervous and

psychic maladjustments.285

As Keguro Macharia has pointed out, Kenyatta produced a form of “counter-discourse”

which “indicts Europe's degeneration, all the while praising unassailable black sexual

propriety."286 The influence of psychoanalytic theory is clear in Kenyatta’s description of

ngweko as a practice which prevents “psychic maladjustments” by providing an outlet for

sexual instincts.287

Importantly, Kenyatta also presented self-control as key to the practice of ngweko.

He noted that many missionaries viewed ngweko as sinful due to their mistaken belief

that it must involve sexual intercourse. Non-Christianized Gikuyu, however,

find it difficult to understand this sort of European puritanism, for a Gikuyu man

has been taught from childhood to develop the technique of self-control in the

matter of sex, which enables him to sleep in the same bed with a girl without

necessarily having sexual intercourse.288

“Since a white man would not be able to restrain himself under similar circumstances,”

he continued, they falsely assumed that Africans could not either. Here Kenyatta

presented Gikuyu men as possessing that quintessential characteristic of “civilization”—

self-control—and possessing it in greater measure than their European peers.

285 Ibid, 155.

286 Keguro Macharia, “Queer Natives” (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, 2008), 243.

287 However, he seems to contradict this belief a few pages later, when he asserts that,

while some may experience “sexual relief” through ngweko, the primary purpose is “the

enjoyment of the warmth of the breast.” Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 158.

288 Ibid, 159.

127

In keeping with Freudian stadial sexuality, Kenyatta described Gikuyu sexual

development as the stately progression through a number of stages, culminating in a

universal reproductive heterosexuality. In his discussion of masturbation, for instance, he

emphasized that it was acceptable only during a specific stage of development. While he

noted that “before initiation it is considered right and proper for boys to practice

masturbation as a preparation for their future sexual activities,” after irua masturbation

was taboo. A boy who continued masturbating after initiation “would be looked upon as

clinging to a babyish habit, and be laughed at, because owing to the free sex-play which

is permitted among young people, these is now no need to indulge in it.”289 Kenyatta

described masturbation as “preparation” for heterosexual reproductive intercourse, a

practice that was helpful and healthy at a particular stage of sexual development. Yet

once a new form of sexual play (ngweko) is opened up, any boy “clinging to a babyish

habit” would be mocked. Again, Kenyatta stressed the ways in which Gikuyu sexual

culture facilitated the progression through sexual stages, and prevented regression to an

earlier stage through social disapproval, but also by offering another outlet for sexual

energies. While the European passed through a latency stage, repressing sexual instincts

with potentially disastrous results, the Gikuyu male attained heterosexual maturity by

progressing through a series of culturally sanctioned sexual outlets.290

289 Ibid, 162.

290 Macharia also points out that Kenyatta’s gendered and aged description of

masturbation neutralizes any potentially homosexual taint, focusing “on the ritually

imposed distinction between boyhood and manhood to remove group masturbation from

a homosexual economy.” Similarly, (unlike his rival Leakey) he avoids mention of the

practice of ngweko between girls. Macharia, “Queer Natives,” 249, 238-9.

128

Importantly, Kenyatta specified a male subject in his discussion of masturbation:

he noted, in fact, that the Gikuyu frowned upon masturbation in girls, and even suggested

that one motive of “trimming the clitoris [is] to prevent girls from developing sexual

feelings around that point.”291 Like Bonaparte, Kenyatta suggested that clitoridectomy

prevented female frigidity by restricting sexual pleasure to the vagina rather than the

clitoris; however, while Freudians like Bonaparte would see clitoral orgasm as a

precursor to vaginal maturity, Kenyatta suggested that clitoridectomy prevented the

development of clitoral sexuality at all.292 However, in his earlier discussion of irua,

Kenyatta noted that before the clitoridectomy, a girl was closely questioned to verify that

she never had sexual intercourse or indulged in masturbation”—if she admitted to such

practices, she had to be purified.293 Read against the grain, this is an admission that

Gikuyu women did sometimes engage in masturbation despite the cultural

disapprobation.

When Gikuyu men and women did reach the stage of life in which sexual

intercourse was permissible, Kenyatta maintained that they practiced a sexuality which

was strictly heterosexual and geared towards reproduction. As Marc Epprecht has pointed

291 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 162.

292 Jesse Kariuki, the Vice Chairman of the KCA, claimed that uncircumcised girls were

more likely to become prostitutes, echoing the negative moral and sexual consequences

of both “detribalization” and, possibly, female sexual desire. Peterson, Creative Writing,

109.

293 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 136.

129

out, Kenyatta “categorically denies the existence of same-sex sexuality in Gikuyu

tradition.”294 Kenyatta emphatically maintained that

In the Gikuyu community any form of sexual intercourse other than the natural

form, between men and women acting in the normal way, is out of the question. It

is considered taboo even to have sexual intercourse with a woman in any position

except the regular one, face to face.295 [emphasis mine]

Epprecht is right to note that Kenyatta describes Gikuyu sexuality as strictly

heterosexual: later in the ethnography, Kenyatta notes that “the practice of homosexuality

is unknown among the Gikuyu” because “The freedom of intercourse allowed between

young people of opposite sex makes it unnecessary, and encourages them to acquire

experience which will be useful in married life.”296 Like Kenyan white settlers and

administrators, Kenyatta suggested that there was no need for homosexuality in an

environment where the sex drive was not repressed. Yet Kenyatta also asserted a broader

Gikuyu sexual normativity even within heterosexual practice; his insistence on the

normal, natural, regular nature of sexual intercourse (to the extent that he claimed

Gikuyu only had sex in the missionary position) echoed the broader narrative of primitive

normativity described in this dissertation.

Kenyatta also responded to missionaries’ criticism of the practice of polygyny in

Gikuyu culture, presenting it as a way of ensuring reproduction and protecting women.

While he maintained that the purpose of Gikuyu courtship was to foster “mutual love and

294 Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?, 102.

295 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 161.

296 Ibid, 136. Macharia has pointed out that this explanation of homosexual as a product

of isolation from female sexual partners was borrowed from the work of Ellis and

Malinowksi. Macharia, “Queer Natives,” 251.

130

gratification of sexual instinct between two individuals,” after marriage “it becomes a

duty to produce children, and sexual intercourse is looked upon as an act of production

and not merely as a gratification of a bodily desire.”297 Polygyny allowed men to have

more children, another nod to his claim that Gikuyu sexuality was purely reproductive.

He also countered the missionaries’ belief that “African women are regarded as mere

chattels of the men” who were purchased by their future husbands with a detailed

description of Gikuyu courtship, emphasizing the fact that girls had to consent to be

married.

Contradictorily, however, Kenyatta also advocated polygyny as a method of

social control over women’s bodies and desires, using it as evidence of the value of

Gikuyu culture. Because polygyny “provide[d] that all women must be under the

protection of men,” it prevented the problem of surplus women; “there is no term in the

Gikuyu language,” he wrote “for ‘unmarried’ or ‘old maids.’”298 Early marriage had an

additional advantage: he claimed “in order to avoid prostitution (no word exists for

‘prostitution’ in the Gikuyu language) all women must be married in their ‘teens, i.e.

fifteen to twenty.”299 Claiming that the idea of prostitution was so foreign to Gikuyu that

they did not even have a name for it, Kenyatta again stressed the absence of deviant

practices in Gikuyu culture.

297 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 157.

298 Ibid, 167-8.

299 Ibid.

131

As an ardent defense of the value of Gikuyu culture, Facing Mount Kenya was a

critique not only of missionary attempts to reform African cultures, but also an attack on

their claim to be the legitimate representatives of Africans. Kenyatta introduced his

ethnography with the observation that

I could not do justice to the subject without offending those ‘professional friends

of the African’ who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a

sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of an

ignorant savage so that they can monopolise the office of interpreting his mind

and speaking for him.300

Ironically, however, Kenyatta’s attempt to “interpret” and “speak for” the African echoed

the rhetoric of primitive normativity exploited by white settlers and administrators. While

resisting the attempt of missionaries to reform Gikuyu sexual practices like polygyny and

clitoridectomy, Kenyatta crafted a definition of Gikuyu identity that tied cultural

authenticity to adherence to a set of sexual norms.301

Finally, Kenyatta’s description of Gikuyu sexual practices expressed a brand of

cultural conservatism that echoes more recent African denunciations of “deviant” sexual

practices as essentially un-African. By joining cultural authenticity to sexual normativity,

Kenyatta anticipated current statements by Robert Mugabe and others that exclude sexual

300 Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, xviii. This was also probably meant as a critique of

another anthropologist Louis Leakey, who claimed to be a “white Kikuyu” with intimate

knowledge of “the African mind.” See Ch. 6 for more on the battle between Leakey and

Kenyatta.

301 He noted, for instance, that the “system of mutual help and tribal solidarity” had

declined “among those Gikuyu who have been Europeanised or detribalised. The rest of

the community look upon these people as mischief-makers and breakers of tribal

traditions, and the general disgusted cry is heard: ‘Mothongo ne athogonjire borori,’ i.e.

the white man had spoiled and disgraced our country. Ibid, 120.

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“deviants” from the imagined community. Because the discourse of primitive normativity

defined the worth and value of indigenous societies in relation to a set of sexual practices,

even an explicitly anticolonial text like Facing Mount Kenya ultimately fails to extricate

African “authenticity” from a Western rubric.

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the intellectual framework which made the discourses of

“primitive normativity” and sexual trusteeship possible. While I have argued that

Kenyatta reworked the idealization of “primitive” sexuality to frame a nationalist

argument, this was an exception. By and large, the discourse of primitive normativity was

exploited by those with power (white settlers and administrators and, to a lesser extent,

Kenyan Indians) to argue for the continuation of colonial policies.

The next chapter examines one of the earliest cases where we can see the

narrative of sexual trusteeship emerging. In 1908, a colonial administrator named Hubert

Silberrad came to the attention of both Kenyan and metropolitan authorities after he took

three African girls to live with him as his mistresses. Silberrad and his defenders adapted

the rhetoric of indirect rule to his own sex life, arguing that since he had supposedly

followed local protocols in acquiring the girls, he had committed no great offence.

Critics, however, argued that Silberrad had violated his duties as a trustee of the moral

welfare of African subjects, and exposed the girls to new forms of “civilized” vice.

Occurring at the very earliest stages of European settlement, the Silberrad case reveals

133

important insights about the relationship between colonialism and sexuality at the

beginnings of Kenyan colonialism.

134

Chapter 3: “A Canker in Imperial Administration”: Consent, Morality, and Modernity in the Silberrad Scandal of 1908”

In December of 1908, The Times of London printed a letter from an outraged

resident of the East African Protectorate (EAP)1: “I have for long felt,” he wrote “that the

interests of this country were suffering from the demoralization of native women by

British officials, and the misuse of their position under the Government for this

purpose.”2 W. Scoresby Routledge and his wife Katherine had learned of one such case

involving the Assistant District Commissioner at Nyeri. The ADC, Mr. Hubert Silberrad,

had taken several young African girls as mistresses, one of whom was already married to

an African askari (policeman) under Silberrad’s command. When the askari, M.,3

complained about Silberrad’s involvement with his wife, he was jailed for

insubordination. In his letter, Routledge explained that he had refrained from publicizing

the issue in the hope that the colonial Government would act decisively to end such

abuses of power. However, he decided to report the incident to The Times after learning

the terms of Silberrad’s punishment: namely, that he would lose a year of seniority, and

not be put in charge of a district for two years.

Declaring this punishment to be “utterly insufficient,” Routledge asked his

readers to consider the larger implications of Silberrad’s actions: “The question at issue”

1 The East African Protectorate became the Colony of Kenya in 1920.

2 W. Scoresby Routldge, "An East African Official and Native Women," The Times

(London, England) 3 Dec. 1908: 10.

3 Given the sensitive nature of the case, I refer to the three women and this askari by their

initial only.

135

he wrote “is whether the representatives of the Crown are to be allowed to withdraw

ignorant girls committed to their charge from the well-defined lines of tribal life, and to

lead them into courses of which the inevitable tendency is to end on the streets of

Nairobi.” The girls had been alienated from traditional African life through their

seduction by Silberrad; as ruined women, they would be forced to seek a living as

prostitutes in the urban centers of the colony. The Routledges presented Silberrad’s

actions as a violation of principle of trusteeship; rather than protecting vulnerable

Africans, and preserving their cultures, Silberrad had corrupted innocent girls and caused

them to become separated from their communities.

Although many contemporary observers joined Routledge in his outrage, another

cohort suggested that Silberrad’s behavior was neither particularly unique nor especially

detrimental. During a discussion of the scandal in the House of Commons, for instance,

the Scottish Member of Parliament [MP] Cathcart Wason offered a sort of warped

cultural relativism: “African morals are not ours,” he stated. “In some respects they may

be better than ours, in other respects, worse; at any rate, they are not the same. What

would be deplorable in any country is not in Africa the very serious offence it has been

made out to be.”4 In fact, Silberrad’s primary defense lay in his assertion that he had

followed African moral standards by “purchasing” them from their male guardians—just

as an African man looking for a wife would supposedly do. Applying the principles of

indirect rule to the sexual realm, Silberrad attempted to legitimize his relationships with

4 Parliamentary Papers [PP]: 27th July, 1909, p. 1054.

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the three girls by arguing that he had tapped into indigenous networks of authority and

followed local protocol.

The debates surrounding the Silberrad scandal raised a number of questions about

the degree to which European moral standards could or should be exported to colonial

spaces. Should British officers be expected to follow British moral and sexual norms

when stationed in the colonies? Or was morality a spatially specific concept—should

Silberrad’s actions be judged not by the standards of his own community, but of the

community in which he committed the offence? Of course, this discourse of a

geographically-dependent morality rested on several assumptions: first, that there was

such a thing as a singular East African sexuality morality, second, that such a morality

was vastly different from that held in “civilized” Europe, and third, that colonial

authorities knew and understood what that morality looked like. Closely mirroring the

discourse of indirect rule, this debate thus premised successful colonial administration on

a deep understanding of “native” cultures, an understanding which, as we will see,

depended on ethnographic knowledge.

This chapter offers a prehistory of the discourses of sexual trusteeship and

normative primitivity that emerged more fully in the 1910s and 20s. The scandal occurred

at a moment when Kenyan settler culture was just developing: in 1908, there were likely

fewer than 3,000 whites living in Kenya—a figure which included missionaries, colonial

137

administrators, and settlers.5 As such, the construction of Kenyan whiteness was still in

its nascent stages.

However, the Silberrad scandal is useful as a pre-history of later discourses of

sexuality in Kenya for several reasons. First, the discourses surrounding the Silberrad

scandal reflect tensions surrounding trusteeship and indirect rule in the Kenyan colonial

project, and the significance of sexuality to the theorization and application of these

policies. In order to execute Indirect Rule, colonial administers had to identify and

preserve African cultures, institutions, and norms. The notion of trusteeship presented

Africans as the vulnerable wards of their British guardians; they were to be protected

from abuse and exploitation until a time (always in the distant future) when they would

be prepared to govern themselves. Interracial sex complicated the divisions between

administrator and administered, between guardian and ward. As such, it called attention

to the ambiguities of a colonial policy premised at one upon the intimate knowledge of

indigenous cultures, and the mandate to protect those cultures from contamination by

outsiders.

Importantly, both Silberrad’s defenders and his critics premised their statements

on the belief that they possessed accurate and informed knowledge of indigenous norms.

Silberrad’s defense hinged on his belief that he understood and followed local protocol in

obtaining the girls. Furthermore, indigenous women were often viewed as important

mediators between cultures, the so-called “sleeping dictionaries” whose sexual labor was

5 The 1911 census gives the figure of 3,175 for the total white population. Yash P. Ghai

and Patrick McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal

Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press,

1970), 36.

138

intertwined with their value as instructors of language and culture;6 Silberrad could (and

did) present his affairs as facilitating his effectiveness as an administrator by helping him

to “know” his subjects. The couple who exposed Silberrad’s actions, the Routledges, also

claimed special knowledge of East Africans; in fact, they were the authors of the first

ethnography of the Gikuyu people. As documenters of a “primitive” society, they had a

clear incentive to protect this culture from the contamination of outsiders. Their self-

presentation as the guardians and protectors of African morals hinged on their self-

presentations as experts on the “native mind.” As much as Silberrad, their claims to

special knowledge hinged on intimate relationships with African subjects.

The debates also recirculated a common trope that would persist throughout the

colonial period; the notion that Africans mistreated women. This trope was another

source of tension between the imperatives of indirect rule and the ideology of trusteeship:

if African societies abused women, was it the duty of the colonizer to protect female

wards by reforming African cultures? Or should African societies be preserved from the

interference of outsiders, particularly missionaries, who wished to alter them? This

tension was implied in the so-called “doctrine of repugnancy,” which held that customary

law should be followed in all cases, except where such a law was deemed “repugnant to

any valid principle of English common law, equity or statute,"7 and would be tested most

notably in the Female Circumcision Crisis of the 1930s (see Introduction).

6 Charles Allen, Tales from the Dark Continent (London: Futura Publishing Co Inc,

1981), 14. 7 T. Olawale Elias, British Colonial Law: A Comparative Study of the Interaction

between English and Local Laws in British Dependencies (London: Stevens & Sons

Limited, 1962), 51.

139

However, while presentations of Kenyan-African women as the chattel property

of men were in keeping with larger stereotypes about black/African sexuality, the women

themselves were not depicted as lascivious or oversexed. On the contrary, during the

Silberrad affair, the issue of female sexual desire was entirely evacuated from the

discourse. Precisely because African girls/women were presented as property owned and

exchanged between men, their own sexual desires (or lack thereof) were viewed as

entirely irrelevant; they were simply passive receptacles of male sexual desire.

However, it was not only African women as who appeared as passive receptacles

of male desire: the Silberrad scandal mobilized a similar discourse about the role of white

women in colonial spaces. If colonized women served the colonial project as “sleeping

dictionaries” who would help officials learn local languages and norms, white women

facilitated the transition to a mature settler colony by providing an alternative sexual

outlet for British men. Like African women, they were the embodied bearers of culture:

their presence supposedly prevented officials from “going native” by embodying British

cultural standards. In the case of both white and African women, women’s value was

defined through their ability to help British men function in colonial spaces. As we will

see, in the wake of the Silberrad scandal many authorities advocated for the introduction

of white women into the colonies with the explicit intention of preventing interracial sex.

Such discourses simultaneously constructed British men as sexually uncontainable,

culture as disseminated through sex, and women (both African and white) as the safety-

valve of imperial sexual tensions.

140

The Silberrad scandal thus anticipates many of the key debates which

characterized the construction of race and sexuality during the later colonial period. It

shows how African cultures could be depicted as both troublingly primitive and in need

of preservation and protection from contamination. It mobilizes the idea that trusteeship

had an important sexual element; a key part of the responsibility towards colonized

peoples was protecting them from the sexual threat of colonial whites. Finally, it reveals

surprising commonalities between the vision of white and colonized women; both were

defined through their sexuality yet evacuated of sexual desire, and both were cast as the

bearers of culture and tradition, an association which, as we will see, positioned them as

the embodiment of interracial conflict.

Historiography

The existing historiography on the Silberrad scandal is in fact deeply preoccupied

with the question of women’s function as facilitators (in the case of African women) or

obstacles to (in the case of white women) interracial harmony. The historian of imperial

sexuality Ronald Hyam discussed Silberrad in several of his works, most notably in a pair

of articles published in two consecutive issues of the Journal of Imperial &

Commonwealth History in 1986.8 Hyam viewed the scandal as important largely because

of its role in prompting the release of the “Crewe Circular” in January of 1909. 9 The

8 The case is also very briefly discussed in Jeremy Paxman’s popular history Empire:

What Ruling the World Did to the British (London: Penguin, 2012), 144.

9 Henrika Kuklick cites the Crewe Circular as prompting a major shift in colonial

cultures, stating that “it is possible to mark the emergence of self-contained colonial

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Circular, named for the Colonial Secretary Lord Crewe, discouraged colonial officials

from engaging in sexual relationships with local women, glossed as “concubinage.” Two

editions of the Circular were produced; the first, sent to new recruits, warned civil

servants that such dalliances would cost them their job, while the version of the Circular

distributed to experienced officers merely expressed the government’s disapprobation of

concubinage.10

Hyam’s first article on the subject, “Empire and Sexual Opportunity,”11 laid out

his thesis (later revised and elaborated in his monograph12) that the success of the British

empire lay in part in its ability to satisfy the sexual urges/needs of British men, needs that

societies by an official act: on January 11, 1909, the colonial secretary, Lord Crewe,

warned all of the colonial employees within his jurisdiction that any of them who had

sexual relationships with local women would suffer ‘disgrace and official ruin.’” Henrika

Kuklick, The Savage within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945

(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 285. This is, however,

something of an overstatement; the Crewe Circular certainly did not end all relationships

between officers and colonized women, nor did it prevent settler men from engaging in

such relationships.

10 The distinction was based in the notion that existing officers would likely have already

established sexual relationships with colonized women, and thus could probably not be

convinced to abandon the practice entirely. In fact, the circular was not sent to some

colonies where interracial sex was deemed to be too common a practice; these included

the West Indies, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. A note in the Colonial Office papers that

“There is a very strong feeling in the West Indian Department that to send it to those

Colonies where black and white live together and often intermarry, and where you have

every shade of colour living side by side in social union, would be a great blunder.”

British National Archives [BNA]: CO 533/52/44293 Colonial Office: Kenya Original

correspondence. Note to Antrobus from Macnaughton, 6 Jan 1908.

11 Ronald Hyam, “Empire and Sexual Opportunity,” Journal of Imperial &

Commonwealth History 14, no. 2 (January 1986): 34–90.

12 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester University

Press, 1990).

142

could not be met in the increasingly Puritanical environment of the Victorian metropole.

“[A]lthough sexual opportunity was generally reduced in Britain,” he claimed, “the

empire continued to provide for traditional expectations, at least where white wives had

not penetrated.”13 The opportunity to penetrate the empire benefitted not only the British

men who travelled overseas, but also the empire itself since “Running the empire would

probably have been intolerable without resort to sexual relaxation.”14 Additionally, sex

between British men and colonized men and women “soldered together the invisible

bonds of empire”15 and promoted understanding between the races. Hyam’s second

article, “Concubinage and the Colonial Service,”16 offered up the Silberrad scandal as a

case-study, showing how the misguided sexual prudery of the metropole forced colonial

leaders to crack down on interracial sex, with concomitant damage to race-relations in the

colonies.

Hyam’s rather blatant sexism, racism, and particularly Orientalism were roundly

criticized by a number of contemporaries. Scholars like Margaret Strobel and Mark

Berger pointed out (more or less immediately) that Hyam left unspoken the significant

power imbalance between colonizers and colonized, ignoring entirely issues of rape

and/or coercion, the effects of VD and pregnancy, and the vulnerable position of the men

and women who “serviced” colonial men as concubines, mistresses, prostitutes, or even

13 Ibid, 51.

14 Ibid, 53. 15 Ibid. 75.

16 Ronald Hyam, “Concubinage and the Colonial Service: The Crewe Circular (1909),”

Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 14, no. 3 (May 1986): 170–86.

143

wives.17 Another critic, Richard Voeltz, pointed out that “Hyam paid no attention to any

of the accounts of the sexual experience of the colonised, even those which may have

been in the reports of official commissions.”18 In fact, such testimony does exist in the

Colonial Office archive, and will be discussed here.

Hyam was not, however, the only person to advance the so-called “memsahib

hypothesis,” the notion that the introduction of white women in large numbers to settler

colonies resulted in the enforcement of racial boundaries. As Beverly Gartrell has pointed

out, in novels, memoirs, and historical accounts of colonial spaces,

Officials’ wives are portrayed as narrowly intolerant, more prejudiced and

vindictive towards the colonized than their men, abusive to servants, usually

bored, viciously gossipy, prone to extra-marital affairs destructive to peaceful

social relations, and cruelly insensitive to women of the colonized races.19

Yet such descriptions of white colonial women ignore the degree to which the colonial

project actually relied on the presence of white women to create and enforce racial

boundaries. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “by controlling the availability of European

women and the sorts of sexual access condoned, state and corporate authorities controlled

17 Mark T. Berger, “Imperialism and Sexual Exploitation: A Response to Ronald Hyam’s

‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity,’” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

17, no. 1 (October 1988): 83–89; Strobel Margaret, European Women and the Second

British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). More recently, Carina

Ray has critiqued Hyam in her comparative study of interracial sex across multiple

empires: see her chapter ““Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire” in A Companion to

Diaspora and Transnationalism, eds. Quayson, Ato, and Girish Daswani (John Wiley &

Sons, 2013), 190-211.

18 Richard A. Voeltz, “The British Empire, Sexuality, Feminism and Ronald Hyam,”

European Review of History-Revue Europeenne D Histoire 3, no. 1 (1996): 41–45.

19 Beverley Gartrell, “Colonial Wives: Villains or Victims?,” in The Incorporated Wife,

eds. Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (London ; Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1984), 165.

144

the very social geography of the colonies, fixing the conditions under which European

populations and privileges could be reproduced.”20 In an operation very similar to the

“angel of the house” of industrial England, the colonial wife cultivated a domestic space

which served as a cultural and moral touchstone for her husband. For this reason, white

women were viewed as key to the health and well-being of colonial officials and settlers:

as Janice Brownfoot writes with reference to colonial Malaya, “If a man had begun a

degenerative decline, however, popular opinion endorsed that his best means of salvation

was to go ‘Home’ and find a suitable European wife.”21 Furthermore, the presence of

white women created a perceived need to protect white women from the attentions of

brown and black men; this proved to be a convenient rhetoric used to police the behavior

of both white women and brown men.22 Finally, by providing both a sexual outlet and by

facilitating racial distance, the presence of white women discouraged the growth of a

multiracial population, a population whose “cultural sensibilities, physical being, and

political sentiments called into question the distinctions of difference which maintained

the neat boundaries of colonial rule.”23

20 Ann L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality

in 20th-Century Colonical Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1,

1989): 638. 21 Janice, Brownfoot, “Memsahibs in Colonial Malaya: A Study of European Wives in a

British Colony and Protectorate,” in The Incorporated Wife, eds. Hilary Callan and

Shirley Ardener (London ; Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1984), 190.

22 For more on this, see Chapter 5.

23 Ann Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural

Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and

History 34, no. 3 (1992): 514. Of course, interracial sex did not entirely cease with the

development of a segregated settler culture.

145

Yet while white women clearly played an essential role in the establishment and

maintenance of racial boundaries, Indira Ghose has argued that “memsahib myth” was

actually cultivated in order to displace male anxieties about white women’s power in the

colonies. As in Kenya, the presence of cheap domestic labor in India allowed memsahibs

to inhabit a higher class status than they would have at home. As supervisors of a large

team of servants, memsahibs exercised power and authority in their own homes.

Furthermore, Ghose (following Mary Procida and Antoinette Burton) points out that

white women in India were able to claim a place in the public sphere by presenting

themselves as the advocates of oppressed Indian women. Because white women framed

their political interventions as essential to the imperial project, it was more difficult to

silence them. She concludes that “The myth of the memsahib served as a convenient

means to defuse male anxieties about women’s access to authority in empire.”24

The question of white women’s role as guardians of racial hierarchies, particularly

in the fraught environment of the home will be discussed at greater length in Chapter

Four. The Silberrad scandal occurred prior to the growth of a significant white settler

population, and particularly of a population of white women. Yet the discussions

concerning the potential role of white women in Kenya during the Silberrad affair are

particularly valuable precisely because they occur before the emergence of “a distinct

colonial morality” in Kenya.25 While Hyam argues that racial segregation was an

24 Ghose, Indira. “The Memsahib Myth: Englishwomen in Colonial India” Celia R

Daileader, Rhoda Barge Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz, Women & Others : Perspectives

on Race, Gender, and Empire, 1st ed.. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 122.

25 The phrase is borrowed from Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable,” 645.

146

unfortunate consequences of the entrance of white women into the colonies, at the time

domestic Britons argued that white women must be brought to the colonies to preserve

the morality of colonial administrators—and thereby prevent interracial sex from creating

resentments among African men that would threaten the imperial project.

The Silberrad scandal, and particularly Silberrad’s claim that morality was a site-

specific phenomenon, thus offers insight into how sexuality intersected with race and

place in early colonial Kenya. By attending to the connections between the debate and

larger discourses of imperial rule, a much more complicated picture of the cultural

valence of interracial sex emerges. This was not simply a clash between the puritanical

values of domestic Briton and the permissive environment of the colonial spaces. Rather,

it was a nuanced debate about the ways in which sex complicated and facilitated colonial

rule, and about the degree to which the principles of colonial rule could be applied to the

sexual and moral realms.

The Scandal at the Periphery

The Silberrad scandal unfolded in two stages, each corresponding to a different

geographical sphere. Between February and December of 1908, the scandal was largely

restricted to the local level. Silberrad’s behavior was evaluated by local organs of the

Kenyan government, which was in turn in communication with the Colonial Office in

London; the scandal had not yet been exposed to the broader public. These records reveal

several common themes. First, in evaluating Silberrad’s conduct, his adjudicators felt it

was more significant to establish whether or not Silberrad had acted in accordance with

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indigenous norms surrounding sex and courtship than to determine if the girls had

consented to live and sleep with him. This privileging of supposed “tribal traditions” over

individual experiences is in keeping with the philosophy of British rule in colonial Africa,

which colonized Africans “in their capacity as collections of people and not as

individuals.”26 While authorities did express concerns about how interracial sex might

lessen the prestige of British officials, the notion that Silberrad had acted in accordance

with customary law was indeed viewed as a mitigating factor.

In order to determine whether Silberrad had followed customary law, his

superiors mobilized an ethnographic discourse which characterized both African women

themselves and the labor they performed as property owned by male guardians. In

particular, the dowry given by a bride’s family to that of her new husband was glossed as

the “purchase” of a woman. By attending closely to the language surrounding payment

and property, we can see how these documents reveal a consistent blurring of the lines

between the affective, sexual, and cultural dimensions of African women/girls’ labor.

Because he supposedly consumed this labor in culturally-sanctioned ways, Silberrad

consistently positioned himself as an advocate for the welfare of African women and as

an enforcer of African tradition.

26 Wambui Mwangi, “The Order of Money: Colonialism and the East African Currency

Board” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 85. For other descriptions of this

phenomenon see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the

Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Megan

Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Oxford: Polity Press,

2004), 11.

148

The events at Nyeri first came to the local government’s attention in February of

1908, when W. Scoresby Routledge wrote to the Governor of the East African

Protectorate, Sir James Hayes-Sadler. Routledge and his wife Katherine Pease Routledge

had arrived in Mombasa, Kenya in 1906.27 The Routledges settled in Nyeri and began

research for an ethnography of the Gikuyu people. This was published as With a

Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu28 of British East Africa in 1910.29 W. Scoresby

Routledge had perhaps a dubious claim to expertise; although he was a member of the

Royal Geographic Society, his formal training was mostly in medicine. His wife

Katherine, however, had studied archaeology at Oxford, although her degree was

withheld since women would not become full members of the University until 1920.

According to the standards of the time, Katherine Pease Routledge was rather

exceptionally well-trained in ethnography. As the title of their study suggests, the

Routledges were firmly entrenched in the tradition of evolutionary anthropology, which

placed all peoples on a spectrum from most primitive to most civilized; in fact, the book

27 Routledge had trained as a medical doctor but never received a degree: he had already

visited Kenya in 1902 and conducted preliminary ethnographic research on the Gikuyu.

His wife, Katherine, was herself an amateur ethnographer and a graduate of Somerville

Hall (later a College of Oxford). Her cousin, Sir Alfred Edward Pease, was a world-

renowned big-game hunter who owned land in the EAP. JoAnne Van Tilburg, Among

Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter

Island (New York: Scribner, 2003), 54-65. 28 The preferred spelling is now “Gikuyu.”

29 W. Scoresby Routledge and Katherine Pease Routledge, With a Prehistoric People:

The Akikuyu of British East Africa (London: Edward Arnold, 1910).

149

was dedicated to Edward Tylor, the father of evolutionary anthropology.30 The book is

however distinctive in that it contains extensive information about women; this was data

collected by Katherine Routledge.31

While living in Nyeri and collecting information for their study, the Routledges

learned of the misconduct of their District Commissioner, Hubert Silberrad. Mr.

Routledge explained the circumstances of his discovery his letter to Hayes Sadler. He

30 As W. Scoresby Routledge explained in his portion of the introduction, “The great

interest of the subject lies in the fact that the Agikúyu of to-day are, in their civilisation

and methods, at the point where our ancestors stood in earliest times. Present at trial by

ordeal, the life of our Saxon forefathers becomes a living reality; watching the potmaker

and the smith, the hand of the clock is put back yet farther, and the dead of Britain’s

tumuli go once more about their daily avocations.” Ibid, xvii. Here, the influence of the

comparative method, the idea that information about the past of more “civilized” peoples

could be garnered through examinations of present-day “primitives,” can be clearly seen.

31 Katherine Routledge explained how she was able to convince Gikuyu women to talk to

her: “I frequently induced my native friends to give me information by telling them that

‘when we were back in England the white women would wish me to tell them about the

women of Kikúyu, for we all now belonged to the same great white Chief.’” Ibid, xvii.

Katherine Routledge offered a contradictory vision of African womanhood; while she

maintained that Gikuyu women had no legal status and performed much of the hard labor

necessary for maintaining a family, she also maintained that a woman was “protected by

her initial value and by tradition.” Ibid, 121. At several points in the text, she compared

the lot of African women favorably to that of European women. She claimed that the

position of Gikuyu woman “is in many ways preferable to that of her white sister. What it

loses in breadth of interest, it gains in the increased certainty of the natural joys of home

life, and with rare exceptions in the absence of wearing anxiety as to ways and means.”

Ibid, 120. Furthermore, since “No spring cleaning has to be faced, no washing day appals

[sic], no children have to be got ready for school. … their lot is incomparably easier than

that of the ordinary working man’s wife at home.” Ibid, 123. This vision of the pleasures

of African domesticity is countered by her own life; she was one of the first women to

study anthropology at Oxford (although, as a woman, her degree was withheld), she

travelled the world conducting ethnographies, and eventually separated from her husband

and lived alone. He eventually had her placed in an institution for schizophrenia, where

she died in 1935. For more on the rather tragic life of Katherine Routledge, see Van

Tilburg, Among Stone Giants.

150

reported that he had been told by locals “whose confidence I have” that “their women

were being brought to the Government ‘boma’ [enclosure or compound] here for immoral

purposes.”32 Routledge reported that both Silberrad and his predecessor, District

Commissioner C. W. Haywood, had procured African girls and lived with them. The two

Gikuyu girls, Nb. and W., had also lived with Haywood; at the time the scandal broke

out, W. was about 13-14 years old, while Nb. was described as being of “more mature

years.”33 Nk., a Maasai girl of about 12-13 years, was only involved with Silberrad.34 The

complaints from local men appear to have been catalyzed by Silberrad’s decision to jail

Nk.’s husband after a dispute over her. Upon learning of the situation, Routledge’s wife

Katherine went to the government house and retrieved the two girls living there,35

bringing them back to the Routledges’ home.

32 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from W. Scoresby Routledge to Sir James Hayes-Sadler, Feb. 29, 1908.

33 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Report on evidence from enquiry by Judge J.W. Barth, 13 April 1908.

34 Ibid. The evaluations of the girls ages, which come from a report written by Judge

Barth, were most likely based on his own visual assessment as his consistent use of the

phrase “she appears to be ___ years old” would indicate. Judge Barth’s inability to

accurately state the girls’ ages is not actually reflective of a lack of oversight or interest;

rather, it is unlikely that the girls themselves or their families would have an accurate idea

of their age in years, as East Africans more generally understood age in terms of age

grades, groups of peers who underwent certain developmental rites (particularly

circumcision) at the same time. Individuals were understood to be members of a certain

age cohort, but were not generally described in terms of years of age. The question of the

girls age, and its relationship to consent, will be explored more thoroughly in Chapter 5.

35 The third girl had already returned home.

151

In response to Routledge’s allegations, Gov. Hayes-Sadler sent Judge J. W. Barth

to Nyeri with the task of conducting an enquiry into the issue. The enquiry was

accomplished in March, and in April of 1908 Barth (who was at that time stuck in the

European Hospital in Nairobi, recovering from a bout of dysentery) submitted a rather

lukewarm report to the Governor. This report includes a record of the testimony of

witnesses given during the enquiry: unfortunately, unlike other portions of the file, which

are generally typewritten, Barth’s report is handwritten, and quite badly at that.

Elsewhere in the archive, we discover why: noting that the report on Silberrad’s case is

nearly illegible, one of the undersecretaries in the Colonial Office explains that “the

authorities did not like to hand over a report of this kind to the Goanese Clerks for

typewriting, and that no one else was available to undertake the job.”36 Presumably,

colonial officials didn’t want the details of a British officer’s misconduct to reach the

eyes and ears of non-whites, and since the lower levels of the colonial administration

were dominated by Kenyan Asians, the report lands in the archive in a condition which

often censors the material from the eyes of the modern researcher as well.

Several other factors complicate these records. The African witnesses would have

testified in their native languages (Gikuyu or Maa) or possibly in Swahili; their answers

would have been translated and then recorded by a clerk, or perhaps Barth himself. The

testimony is thus twice filtered. Their evidence is also constrained by the questions that

were asked, questions which clearly indicate that those who led the inquiry felt that the

36 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Intra-office memo, June 26, 1908.

152

girls’ own interpretation of events was only marginally relevant. Much more energy was

devoted to establishing if Silberrad had obtained the girls through culturally sanctioned

channels.

In addition, the adjudicators’ understanding of what those cultural norms were

was often deeply flawed. The question of the status of women and girls in African

societies is a case in point. Various witnesses reported (or were recorded as reporting)

that Silberrad had “paid” the local “chief” Wambugu for the girls with livestock as a form

of bridewealth. At the time, many communities in East Africa, including the Gikuyu and

Maasai, exchanged livestock as part of the process of courtship and marriage. After

obtaining consent from both the prospective bride and her family, a Gikuyu bridegroom

would present the bride’s family with a negotiated number of livestock known as the

bridewealth. These livestock were understood to reimburse the family for the loss of the

bride’s labor, but they also served as a form of insurance: if the bride proved unsuitable

or wished to leave her husband, the bride and her bridewealth could be returned to her

natal family and the marriage dissolved. In the case of the Maasai, the cattle given by the

brides’ family would be managed by the bride and ultimately be inherited by her male

children.

However, the nuances of this practice disappeared when the British translated

bridewealth into the “sale” of a woman by her family and the “purchase” of a wife by

husband. British interpreters discussed the payment of bridewealth using language deeply

imbricated in a capitalistic framework. One rather striking example of this confusion

occurs in an intra-office memo that circulated among Lord Crewe’s undersecretaries in

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the Colonial Office files. At one point, Mr. Harris, rejecting the askari M.’s contention

that Nk. was his wife, states that M. “had previously cohabited with the girl, and

considered he had a lien upon her.”37 In using the language of liens, Harris invokes

concepts of debt and credit that simply would not make sense in a society that did not use

capitalist standards of value and exchange. Similar language is used in the Executive

Committee’s review of the other administrator involved, C.W. Haywood. After acquiring

Nb., Haywood supposedly wished to contract another woman as a companion to her,

particularly because at the time Haywood spoke no Gikuyu and hence could not speak

with her at all. Lizo wa Ndegwa, a local headman working under the authority of “Chief”

Wambugu, apparently then offered W., saying “that he knew of a girl whom he had a sort

of option over” since he had already paid for her in goats. Haywood then paid Lizo back

with a heifer calf and then “took the girl to live with me in the usual way.”38 (The last

selection has been underlined.)

Here, language borrowed from capitalist discourses is used to emphasize

women’s status as property in African societies; having “paid for” women with livestock,

men supposedly believed they had an “option” or a “lien” over their purchases. The point

is not that African women were equally doomed by patriarchy within their own cultures

and the imperial one; while debates continue about the status of women in pre-colonial

37 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Intra-office memo, June 26, 1908.

38 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Report by the Committee of the Executive Council appointed to enquire into

charges against Mr. Haywood.

154

East Africa,39 colonial officials clearly did not possess an accurate or nuanced

understanding of women’s status. Rather, I emphasize the use of this language of trade

and ownership here because it is a place where we see colonial officials making claims to

ethnographic knowledge, and applying that knowledge to their evaluation of Silberrad’s

behavior. This indicates that, at least to some extent, they accepted his argument that the

principles of indirect rule should be applied to the moral and sexual sphere.

Although Silberrad positioned himself as the legitimate mate and guardian of the

three girls, he also sometimes treated the girls as domestic servants. For instance,

Silberrad paid at least one of the women (Nb) monthly wages in exchange for her labor.40

At this time, East African communities (with the exception of coastal communities) did

not generally handle cash; the currency they used was livestock. The idea that a woman

would receive monthly wages reproduced European norms about labor and

reimbursement that would have been deeply foreign to Nb. Furthermore, a comment

during the debate in the House of Commons revealed that Mr. Haywood had supplied Nb.

with a letter of introduction to give to Mr. Silberrad.41 The practice of providing a

prospective employer with a “character” was common amongst British domestic servants;

Haywood seems to have borrowed from this tradition and applied it to Nb’s sexual labor.

Although African domestic servants would eventually be required to carry a kipande, a

39 See for instance Wipper, Audrey. “Kikuyu Women and the Harry Thuku Disturbances:

Some Uniformities of Female Militancy.” Africa: Journal of the International African

Institute 59, no. 3 (January 1, 1989): 300–337.

40 She confirms this in her own testimony.

41 PP: 27th July, 1909, p. 1034.

155

small document listing their employment history, this practice was not established until

the Native Registration Act of 1920, and even then women were exempted from the

requirement.42 Furthermore, even in Britain women selling sex were not accustomed to

providing references! This seemingly small detail is significant because of the insight it

gives us into the way Haywood and Silberrad viewed the sexual labor provided by

African girls, absorbing into a framework of domestic service, neutralizing it and

presenting sex as a form of domestic care.

The girls’ own testimony clearly indicates that they experienced their involvement

with Silberrad as coercive; yet there is evidence that authorities read this testimony as

further evidence of Silberrad’s adherence to local social norms. W., for instance, stated

that Lizo wa Ndegwa, a local headman working under the authority of “Chief”43

Wambugu, had propositioned her for sex. When she refused, he retaliated, saying “You

have refused me I will go and tell a mzungu [white person] to take you.” W. stated that

she only agreed to go live with the mzungu and act “as his wife” because she had been

42 See Introduction for more on the kipande.

43 As explained in the introduction, there was no such position in pre-colonial East

Africa, where communities were led by councils of elders. Because the philosophy of

indirect rule required that the colonized be organized into “tribes” headed by “chiefs”, the

British modified local power structures to produce these identities. Those appointed as

“chiefs” were predominately men who the British perceived as powerful and/or amenable

to British rule; their legitimacy in African eyes is therefore questionable. Interestingly, in

their ethnography the Routledges acknowledge this fact, stating “though only six years

have elapsed since the English conquest, the new order has already laid its hand on the

old… The student looks sadly at the pages of his notebook, filled with information

seriously given, about the power and position of the chief, when he realises that the

chieftanship itself in its present form is an English creation.” Routledge and Routledge,

With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of Britist East Africa, 195.

156

threatened that her family would be imprisoned if she did not go.44 In a rare piece of

testimony where the affective dimension of her testimony comes through, W. was

questioned about whether she cried when taken away to live with Silberrad. She stated

that she did cry in front of Lizo and her brother “on the occasion of the shauri [business]

with the other mzungu. I did not cry about Mr. S’s shauri.” Yet, W. also is recorded as

saying that she “was bought by the [illegible] mzungu according to Kikuyu custom.”45

The last portion of the quote has been underlined by another hand, presumably someone

in the colonial office or the governor’s office. Of course, W.’s “purchase” by Silberrad

most definitely did not transpire “according to Kikuyu custom” since the fee (of 40 goats

44 In her testimony, it is sometimes unclear whether W. is referring to Silberrad or his

predecessor Haywood; it appears that she was taken by local headman to live with both

officials on separate occasions.

45 The language in which W.’s testimony is recording is significant. The document is

written in English, except for certain Swahili words, eg. boma, shauri, mzungu. What

may not be apparent to a reader unfamiliar with materials from colonial Kenya is that

these words are part of the lexicon of “Ki-Setla” used by officials and settlers to

communicate with Africans, especially employees. It is not likely that W. would have

been a native speaker of Kiswahili; she probably spoke the Gikuyu language, and the few

words she knew in Swahili would have been acquired in the course of her contact with

whites. W.’s testimony was likely filtered through a translator; the use of these Swahili

terms may have been introduced by her, or by her interlocutor. What is significant about

their use is that Ki-setla was a Creolized language native to neither whites nor Africans;

even native Swahili speakers would have had to adapt to the peculiar grammar of kitchen

Swahili, which applied English-language plurals and often dropped letters which proved

troublesome to pronounce. (For example, settlers almost universally refer to African

children as “totos,” an Anglicization of the Swahili watoto, meaning children). The use of

Ki-setla in this testimony may indicate that either the translator or W. were attempting to

describe their experiences in words that their white observers would understand. The

retention of these words in the translation indicates that local whites like Judge Barth and

Governor Sadler took a certain pride in their comprehension of the colonial lingo. Their

status as insiders with special knowledge of the conditions on the ground is indicated by

these unglossed words.

157

and cattle) was paid to Wambugu, the “chief,” rather than to W.’s own family. More

significantly, in Gikuyu tradition, a potential suitor would have had to obtain the bride’s

consent before entering negotiations with her family over bridewealth.46 However, the

idea that Silberrad had followed local protocol was clearly important to the arbiters of the

Affair, as indicated by the anonymous underlining of this portion of her testimony.

Silberrad’s conduct with Nk. was considered to be the most egregious, since in

this case he had interfered with a girl who already belonged to another man, and not just

any man, but an askari under Silberrad’s command. Silberrad defended himself in this

regard by again asserting the importance of indigenous tradition: he claimed that the

marriage between Nk. and M. had not been conducted according to local protocol and

was hence illegitimate. Silberrad claimed that Nk. told him that “she was free and no man

owned her beyond her brothers.”47 Upon discovering that M. claimed her, Silberrad states

that he encouraged Mugalla to ratify the marriage by paying “mali” [wealth] to her

brothers; here he presents himself as a guardian of African tradition, insisting that M.

follow the rules of courtship. Nk.’s own testimony differs vastly from this account. She

stated that she had been collected by an askari, and taken to the government boma. “I

cried when I was taken to the bwana [Silberrad],” she recalled. “He said if I cried I could

46 Gikuyu women seem to have been aware of this discourse presenting them as abused

chattel, and were critical of it: when Katherine Routledge asked her female informants

what she should tell white folks about, they made two points: “One is, that we never

marry any one we do not want to; and the other is, that we like our husbands to have as

many wives as possible.” Routledge and Routledge, With a Prehistoric People: The

Akikuyu of British East Africa, 124.

47 BNA: CO/533/43/21793. Letter from Silberrad to Governor, May 14, 1908.

158

not go to my husband” so she agreed to sleep in his bed where he “had connection”48

with her. Her husband’s testimony adds an important detail to her story: he stated that

Nk. was a Maasai who had been captured by the Gikuyu as a little girl. After Nk. told M.

(also Maasai) that she was unhappy living in the Gikuyu community and would prefer to

live on the police lines with him, he recalls that he “paid 4 goats and R [Rupee] 3 for

her.” Given that Nk. was isolated from her family and living amongst a community with

vastly different traditions than her own, it is likely true that she did not have a wedding

that accorded with Maasai protocols. However, neither she nor Mugulla seem to have

considered their union to be less official as a consequence. We can more accurately state

that Nk. was uniquely vulnerable, having no access to her natal family or ethno-linguistic

community and being compelled to arrange a marriage for herself.

But Silberrad had an answer for this too. In a letter written to Governor Hayes-

Sadler, he claims that M. was an uncircumcised Maasai, and therefore Nk’s brothers49

considered him to be an inappropriate spouse for her. (In his discussion of the Silberrad

affair, Ronald Hyam accepts Silberrad’s testimony on this topic at face-value and

presents it as a key motivating factor: he writes that it was “unfortunate for Silberrad that

the askari, Mugalla, was an uncircumcised Maasai, and, as a result, peculiarly touchy

about his sex life.”50) Silberrad never contested that he had brought the girls to live with

48 Again, the characteristically British phrasing used here seems to indicate the heavy

hand of a translator or interlocutor.

49 It is not clear whether these are biological or adopted brothers.

50 Hyam, 161. This discourse also closely resembles the discussions of the psychosexual

motivations of Shaka Zula in the 1920s that Marc Epprecht has analyzed. These

159

him. Instead, he presented himself as an advocate for their interests. He stated that he had

originally sent away W. because she had appeared to be unwilling to live with him, and

only called her back to be a companion to Nb. He also implied that he paid W. more

money than she actually earned: “She was at Nyeri exactly 28 days,” he writes, “half of

which time I was on safari and for the first five days I was in the boma she had her

courses. I gave her R. 5 a week’s pay while she was ‘indisposed’ and [two?] sets of

clothes; she gave R2 or 3 to her brother and I told her not to let him sponge on her.”51

Silberrad argued for his generosity in paying her even when she was not available to

perform sexual labor, either because she was menstruating or because he was away from

headquarters. Additionally, he painted himself as her financial protector, trying to

convince her not to give away her money to her “sponging” brother. Although he

admitted to sleeping with all three women, he also explained that this was not his primary

motive in obtaining W., writing that “I got her as I wanted her to talk Kikuyu to me, and

when she would not talk I told her to return.”52 This of course conflicts with his earlier

statement, as W. would have doubtless been able to converse with him in the Gikuyu

language whether or not she was menstruating at the time.

discourses proposed that the Zulu rebellion was prompted by Shaka Zulu’s anxiety over a

too-small penis, and his repression of homosexual tendencies. See Chapter 3, Marc

Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the

Age of AIDS, New African Histories Series (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 65-99.

51 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Silberrad’s statement to inquiry. 52 Ibid.

160

While presenting himself as a protector of African women, Silberrad attacked the

morals of his accuser Mr. Routledge, saying that Routledge’s “collection of ‘bandas’

[huts] was a disgrace to the place, the wives [?] of his porters being little better than a

collection of prostitutes keeping open house for the Swahilis and King’s African Rifles,53

and supplying them with ‘tembo’ [beer].”54 By accusing Routledge of fostering

drunkenness and illicit sex on his property, Silberrad presented him as a moral threat to

his African employees. He also suggested that Routledge had reported his behavior to the

government out of a desire for revenge: shortly before Routledge made his accusations,

Silberrad claimed he had gone to Routledge’s property and arrested two of his African

employees under the Liquor Ordinance.55 Silberrad’s predecessor C. W. Haywood also

maligned Routledge’s morals in his own letter to Governor Hayes-Sadler, claiming “Mr.

Routledge is scarcely in a position to set himself up as a censor of such an alleged

practice, as he himself used to have intercourse with native girls, and not only he but also

the other settlers at Nyeri.”56 In fact, Silberrad claimed, local Africans did not trust or

respect Routledge but rather “are disgusted at his meanness, as they themselves have told

53 The King’s African Rifles was an army made up of African and Asian subalterns and

British officers.

54 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from H. Silberrad to Governor Hayes-Sadler, May 14, 1908.

55 The East Africa Native Liquor Ordinance of 1907 established that persons wishing to

sell “native intoxicating liquor” (palm wine, beer, etc.) to purchase a license from the

District Commissioner, and limiting this license to “person[s] of African extraction.”

Presumably, his employees did not have a license. See Kenya Gazette, Jan. 1, 1908. 56 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from C.W. Haywood to Governor Hayes-Sadler, May 13, 1908.

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me, when they brought a civil action against him to recover wages.”57 Drawing again on

the concept of trusteeship, Silberrad thus emphasized his own role as a guardian of

African interests; while Routledge corrupted and cheated Africans, Silberrad defended

them from abuse.

The local government was ultimately sympathetic to Silberrad’s argument that he

had acted in accordance with indigenous norms. In mid-May, Governor Hayes Sadler and

a committee of the Executive Council58 met to discuss the enquiry’s findings. Judge

Barth’s report had been lukewarm: though he was not convinced that the girls had been

unwilling to sleep with Silberrad, in the case of Nk. he nevertheless believed that

Silberrad could not be justified in “exercising his authority in sending the girl away from

the man with whom she was living-- an Askari under his command--in order that he

might enjoy her himself”59—a statement that once again depicted African women as

sexual property to be “enjoyed” by men. The Executive Council did explicitly object to

57 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from H. Silberrad to Governor Hayes-Sadler, May 14, 1908. Although

here Silberrad used the (purported) views of Africans to support his argument against

Routledge, elsewhere he stated that Africans couldn’t be trusted: he told the Governor

Hayes-Sadler that Africans would say whatever they thought the person questioning them

wanted to hear, and concluding his letter with an appeal to the Governor and Executive

Council “to give at least no less weight to the statements which I have made on my

honour as an officer and an English gentleman, than to the garbled and tainted evidence

given by native witnesses.” Ibid.

58 The Executive Council consisted of members nominated by the local government to

advise the Governor. They were separate from the Legislative Council, which included

both appointed and elected members. See the Introduction for more information on the

structure of colonial government.

59 BNA: CO/533/43/21793 Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches. May 14- June

19 1908. Report on evidence from enquiry by Judge J. W. Barth, 13 April 1908.

162

the practice of concubinage as something that “must be emphatically condemned” since,

in addition to its being immoral, “they consider that an English Officer who act thus

descends from the position that every whiteman should occupy in this country.”60

However, they also believed that “Mr. Haywood’s transactions were those ordinarily in

use in the Kikuyu country when a man wishes to live with a woman” and that Silberrad

“also acted according to the native custom.”61 As such, they recommended relatively

lenient punishments: Haywood should be told he could not have any more mistresses,

while Silberrad’s name should go to the bottom of the promotion list, and he should not

be put in charge of a district for 2-3 years. Hayes Sadler felt that even this punishment

was too severe, noting that enquiry had found that Silberrad “did not buy these girls as

slaves and that they came and lived with him perfectly freely.”62 Thus, the Governor

advised Lord Crewe that “a warning should suffice” to discipline Silberrad.63

60 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Minute of the proceedings of a meeting of the Executive Council, held on the

18th day of May 1908 at Nairobi.

61 Ibid.

62 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from Hayes-Sadler to Lord Crewe, May 21, 1908.

63 Even Routledge agreed to some extent with this point of view, writing to the Governor

that “you should not deal further with the case of Mr. Silberrad until I have had the

opportunity of showing you how much he has been led into doing what he has done by

common official thought and custom.” CO/533/43/21793

Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches. May 14-June 19 1908. Letter from W.

Scoresby Routledge to Sir James Sadler Feb. 29 1908.

163

Perhaps even more strikingly, the Colonial Office tended to agree that Mr.

Routledge had acted out of personal malice and an undue sense of his own importance.

The file on the scandal described Mr. Routledge as a “youngish man who was out in the

Protectorate for some years doing nothing in particular.” 64 He had “finally” purchased

some land in Silberrad’s district and brought out his wife to live with him. Harris

continued that “Both Mr. and Mrs. Routledge have set themselves up to be authorities on

native customs and native questions: they have given some [trouble?] to the Gov’t by

putting their [oar?] in unduly in native affairs-- indeed they seem to have attempted to

‘boss’ the natives of the district and to usurp the functions of the representative of the

Gov’t. Mr. Monson [the secretary to the Governor of the EAP] is inclined to think that

jealousy of Mr. Silberrad’s Authority may have had something to do with their

intervention in the case.”65 Hyam echoes this assessment of Routledge, writing that he

64 In fact, as mentioned above, the Routledges were quite actively engaged in research for

their book. Furthermore, it was quite common for both settlers and officials in East Africa

to claim specialized knowledge of the African communities they came into contact with:

the Colonial Government in fact relied on information provided by these self-trained

ethnographers when making decisions regarding native administration. One suspects

therefore that Harris was not outraged by the Routledge’s claim to expertise so much as

by the conclusions they came to.

65 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Intra-office memo, June 26, 1908. Interestingly, Katherine Pease Routledge’s

biographer makes a similar claim, writing that Mr. Routledge “knew perfectly well that

[W], like all native African females, was regarded within her culture as property” and that

his behavior during the scandal “was arrogant, aggressive, and self-righteous and created

profoundly personal enemies who haunted him for many years. . . The Silberrad incident

is only one of several well-documented instances in which Scoresby attempted to control

the sexual behavior of younger men, and the impression is inescapable that he repressed

and projected upon others what he found most shameful in himself.” Van Tilburg, Among

Stone Giants, 66-68.

164

“was a settler who had lived in Nyeri for six years, enjoying the sport and claiming to

study African life and interests; he was an Oxford graduate, but at best a self-styled

anthropologist. More obviously, he was a Purity-minded, interfering busybody, who

appeared to be jealous of Silberrad’s authority.”66

In a letter to Lord Crewe from May of 1908, Governor Hayes-Sadler also

characterized Routledge as a busy-body. Hayes-Sadler noted disapprovingly that

Routledge “was inclined to look upon himself as the trustee of the British nation for the

morals of officers in this Protectorate; this I told him could safely be left to the

Administration.”67 The language used here is significant: Hayes-Sadler criticized

Routledge adopting a position as “a trustee of the British nation”—an act which implied

that the colonial state itself was in need of guidance from a more evolved public.

In fact, by exposing the scandal in the metropolitan press, the Routledges did

indeed appeal to the British public not only as guardians of the moral well-being of

colonized subjects, but also as active participants in the colonial project. As I show in the

next section, the metropolitan discourses which appeared in the press and in the two

parliamentary debates on the scandal extended the duties of trusteeship to the larger

British public, and placed particular emphasis on the role of white women in protecting

66 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester University

Press, 1990), 161. The reference to Social Purity is more a reflection of Hyam’s belief in

the repressive sexual environment of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain than a

reflection of realities. The Social Purity movement was not particularly active in Kenya;

rather, as I show later in this dissertation, Kenyan whites tended to be concerned that the

repression of sexual instincts bred sexual dysfunction.

67 BNA: Co/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Letter from Hayes-Sadler to Lord Crewe, May 21, 1908.

165

the morality of the colonies. In order to prevent the abuse of power by colonial officials,

white women must be encouraged to settle in Kenya. The suggestion that the presence of

white women was necessary to keep the sexual urges of colonial white men in check

implicitly challenged the association self-control with “civilized” European maleness.

Just as in the earlier debates within the EAP, these metropolitan debates presented white

men as overwhelmed by sexual urges, and women as valuable in their capacity to absorb

these urges.

The Scandal in the Metropole

The Colonial Office clearly hoped to prevent the Silberrad scandal from reaching

the general public: shortly after receiving Governor Hayes Sadlers’ recommendations, an

undersecretary commented in an intra-office memo that “It is much to be hoped that Mr.

Routledge will not have any of these matters brought up in Parliament.”68 Unfortunately

for the Colonial Office, the Routledges were both persistent and well-connected.

Katherine Routledge, in particular, exploited her considerable family connections in her

pursuit of justice. The Pease family, who had made their fortune in railroads and woolen

goods, had been politically prominent since 1832, when Katherine Routledge’s

grandfather Joseph Pease had become the first Quaker elected to Parliament. At the time

of the scandal two of her cousins served as Members of Parliament (hereafter MPs).69

68 BNA: CO/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches, May 14-June

19 1908. Intra-office memo, June 26, 1908.

69 We know that K. Routledge wrote to at least one of these cousins, as a letter from MP

Joseph Alfred “Jack” Pease to Colonel Seely (an Undersecretary in the Colonial Office)

166

The Routledges were successful in bringing the issue to the attention of metropolitan

politicians; shortly after their letters, the Undersecretary of State for the Colonies Colonel

Seely was forced to field questions from eight MP’s in the House of Commons regarding

the case.70 Even the distribution of the Crewe Circular in June of 1909 did not quash the

scandal: it was discussed again in the House of Commons the next month.

While Silberrad’s defenders suggested that the girls’ consent was irrelevant, those

MPs who actively criticized him tended to argue that it would have been impossible for

the girls to give consent, due to the power disparities between themselves and colonial

officials. Arguing that Silberrad had abused his position as a colonial officer, these

commentators understood consent in much more nuanced terms that we might expect

from an early 20th century audience. Mr. Lyttelton pointed out that although the girls did

seem to eventually yield to the advances of Mr. Silberrad, “I should imagine that such

yielding would be natural to the most powerful man in the district, seconded by one of

the most powerful chiefs”.71 Mr. Stuart Wortley put the question more directly, stating

that since it was illegal for an official to use his position to obtain sex, “There is no

appears in the Colonial Office papers. Jack Pease referred to a letter he had received from

his cousin Katherine, “alleging indecent behaviour by officials in East Africa to native

women.” BNA: CO/533/56/25633. Colonial Office: Kenya Original Correspondence.

Individuals, R-Z. Letter from Joseph Pease to Colonel Seely July 16, 1908. PP: 1127.

70 The eight MPs in question were Sir C. Hill, Sir G. S. Robertson, Mr. Cuthcart Wason,

Mr. Pike Pease (another of Mrs. Routledge’s cousins), Mr. Wedgwood, Mr. Fell, Mr.

Bennett and Sir H. Cotton. Mr. Cathcart Wason’s question was notable in being

explicitly sympathetic to Silberrad and the colonial government.

71 PP: 27th July, 1909, p. 1079.

167

question of consent. Consent is a matter that is immaterial.”72 Another MP, H. J. Wilson,

went further, suggesting that the African men who facilitated the relationship had also

been coerced. While accused the officers of using “native pimps” to “procure and bring

an assortment of girls for his selection,” he argued that even they could not be held totally

responsible for his actions since “It is very possible that the chief could hardly refuse the

demand of a man in such a position.”73

For these MPs, a disparity in power between a man and his sexual partner negated

the possibility of a consensual encounter. Katherine Routledge agreed, entering the

ongoing debate in the “letters to the editor” pages in The Spectator: “At best,” she wrote,

“all native women, thus confronted with power, education and wealth, are in the

condition of girls at home under sixteen years” and declared that “Noblesse oblige is a

lesson which still requires to be learnt in British East Africa.”74 Positioning herself as an

advocate for African women, Routledge ascribed all African women with a status as

adolescents in questions of sex and consent; her comparison of African adult women to

European girls evoked the evolutionary narratives which situated all “primitive” peoples

as children. Her reference to noblesse oblige translates this racial language into terms of

72 PP: 27th July, 1909, p. 1119. Mr. Pike Pease disputed Colonel Seely’s claim that the

girls ages could not be determined, stating that, from reading Judge Barth’s report, “it is

perfectly plain that one of the girls was 13 and the other 12.”72 The girls’ age, however,

was not particularly relevant since “age in that part of the world is different to similar age

in this”; the real offence was that Silberrad “took advantage of his official position to

procure these women.” PP: 27th July, 1909, p. 1036.

73 PP: 27th July, 1909, p. 1036.

74 Katherine Routledge, “Letter to the Editor of The Spectator,” The Spectator (London)

December 26, 1908.

168

class; like the old lord of a landed-estate, the benefits of wealth and status came with an

obligation to care for those lower on the social scale. Silberrad’s detractors rightly

acknowledged the operation of power in interracial relationships. However, in presenting

themselves as trustees of voiceless and perpetually immature African women/girls, they

too viewed the girls’ own experience as irrelevant.

In making these arguments about the meaning of age and consent, metropolitan

commentators were drawing on a larger discourse. In the late 19th century, anxieties about

“white slavery,” the prostitution of young girls, led to the passage of new age of consent

legislation in Britain. This was part of the broader Social Purity movement, which sought

to reform the morals and sexual behaviors of Britons. Social Purity activists—many of

whom were women—sought to reduce prostitution, encourage temperance, and

discourage behaviors like masturbation or homosexuality, and promote healthful

practices like exercise and religiosity.75

Several aspects of Social Purity rhetoric were particularly salient in the Silberrad

debate. First, the social purity movement focused on the necessity for men to control their

sexual desires. This was particularly true of the agitation against the CD Acts.

Established in the 1860s, the CD Acts attempted to reduce the threat of venereal disease

by giving police the authority to arrest women who were suspected of being prostitutes

and submit them to forced medical examinations. Those who were found to be infected

were placed in lock hospitals, where they were treated for their infection and received

75 For a fuller discussion of the Social Purity movement, see Lucy Bland, Banishing the

Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914, Penguin Women’s Studies

(London: Penguin, 1995), 95-123.

169

moral instruction. Social purity feminists, notably Josephine Butler, were enraged at the

double-standard inherent in the legislation, which punished female “victims” of men’s

sexual desires.76 They succeeded in getting the CD Acts repealed in 1886—although, as

Philippa Levine has pointed out, the laws continued to be enforced in British colonies.77

In focusing on the need to protect women from men’s sexual predation, the social

purity movement also endorsed a vision of female asexuality and victimhood. While

raising legitimate concerns about the power imbalances between female sex workers and

male Johns, the movement’s call for the abolition of prostitution ignored the fact that

selling sex was an important part of many working-class women’s survival. As Lucy

Bland explains, the efforts of social purity feminists to protect innocent girls and women

from sexual exploitation had the effect of “denying other’s [sic] women’s agency—their

ability to act in the world.”78 Julia Laite echoes this concern about the real effects of

social purity campaigns on women’s lives: despite the social purity feminists’ claim to be

working on behalf of their working-class sisters, the increased criminalization of

prostitution which their movement produced meant that “the vast majority of prostitutes

76 Judith R Walkowitz and Council of Learned Societies American, Prostitution and

Victorian Society Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1980).

77 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the

British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).

78 Bland, 123.

170

were far more likely to experience arrest, fines and imprisonment than rescue and

reform.”79

Finally, it is significant that moral reform was viewed as necessary for the

maintenance of the British empire. Venereal disease was seen as a particular threat to the

well-being of Britain’s soldiers and sailors, the very men who would be called upon to

defend the empire. Likewise, “deviant” sexual practices like masturbation and

homosexuality were seen as a threat to the reproductive abilities of the middle-class. In

the Silberrad scandal, we see all of these threads come together: Silberrad’s critics argued

that the sexual misbehavior of a colonial administrator posed a threat to the ability of

Britain to control its empire. Likewise, they depicted the African girls involved in the

scandal as passive victims; their eagerness to advocate for colonial wards meant that the

girls’ own experiences were silenced. Finally, the solution proposed for the problem of

interracial sex—the importation of white women into the colonies—suggested that

British men abroad were not able to exercise sexual self-control on their own. Rather, the

presence of women was necessary to redirect problematic male sexual desires.

Thus, as members of the British parliament and the press considered whether

African women could freely say yes to sex, a parallel question emerged; could white men

say no? Could white officials, isolated from women of their own race and living in

tremendously stressful conditions, be expected to abstain from sex? The debate in The

Spectator increasingly honed in on this question, beginning with the rather colorfully

79 Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London,

1885-1960, Genders and Sexualities in History (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ;

New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4.

171

named article “A Canker in Imperial Administration.” 80 “We fully recognise,” it wrote

“that in an Empire as great as ours there must often be cases in which men living under

the very trying conditions that result from isolation, from the absence of a healthy public

opinion, and from the special temptations which surround the possessors of unlimited

power over a naturally slavish population, yield to those temptations.”81 (The reference to

an “absence of a healthy public opinion” anticipates the key role that white women were

seen to play in importing British sexual morals to the periphery.) However, it continued,

if “we were once to allow the notion to get abroad that men charged with the duties of

administration can be permitted to exercise the tremendous powers placed in their hands

to gratify their animal passions” it would “mean nothing short of ruin to the Empire” and

represent “a prostitution of the trusteeship” with which Britain had been entrusted.82 The

focus on “animal passions” is revealing, as it is applied not to the African wards, but to

the European (male) guardians. The notion that such abuses of power amounted to a

“prostitution of the trusteeship” obligations incurred by the British explicitly tied the

realm of sexuality to administrative policy.

A few days later, The Spectator printed a letter to editor signed “One Who

Knows” which elaborated upon the “canker” metaphor. The author warned “Britons at

home must not allow themselves to rest content with the thought that the ‘open sore’ so

80 “A Canker in Imperial Administration,” The Spectator (London) December 12, 1908,

980.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

172

much lamented by Livingstone has been permanently healed when it has, in fact, broken

out in a more virulent and malignant manner in the form of a different, but far more

insidious, slavery.”83 The open sore that Livingstone had referred to (supposedly as he

lay dying in Central Africa) was that of the slave trade; in fact, one central legitimization

of the British colonial presence in late colonial Africa was that they supposedly played a

key role in ending this trade. One Who Knows borrows Livingstone’s phrase to portray

concubinage as a kind of syphilis spreading its malignant cankers across British imperial

Africa. The implicit threat was that sexual intercourse with African women would impair

and weaken the body of the empire itself. One Who Knows continued by condemning

“such a state of affairs as that which permits a British official to exercise his prerogative

of passing judgment upon natives accused of adultery and theft, when he has himself a

harem within a stone’s-throw of his judgment seat,” a statement which evoked the much

hated figure of the “Oriental despot” whose sexual excess was seen to symbolize a more

general tyranny. The danger of such a practice was clear:

when one considers that the native is a keen observer of human nature, that he is

possessed of a natural proclivity for imitation, and that, in the absence of any

literature, his sole evening occupation is to sit round the fire and gossip (chiefly

about the European who may happen to live near him), it is only too apparent

what a far-reaching effect the example and conduct of his administrators will have

upon the natives in that and neighbouring districts.84

Here, One Who Knows suggested that African observers would not only lose respect for

white officers who engaged in illicit relationships with African women, but might even

83 Letter to the Editor from “One Who Knows,” The Spectator (London) December 19,

1908, 1053.

84 Ibid, 1052.

173

be inclined to imitate them. Since many East African communities practiced polygamy,

One Who Knows was worried not about the likelihood that an African ‘imitator’ would

establish his own harem of African wives, but rather that he might be inspired to seek out

sexual relationships with white women.

How could this canker be healed, thus preserving the prestige and security of the

imperial project? Many commentators agreed that the best solution was to increase the

salaries of colonial officials. In part, this salary rise was intended to ensure that men from

a higher social class would enter the service. In its original “Canker” column, The

Spectator had advised that colonial administrators must be paid more, so as to attract a

better “stamp of men”: they argued that “it is impossible for a white man, and an

Englishman living in Africa, to be what we want him to be--a mixture of benevolent

despot, upright Judge, and high-minded official-- at a salary of from £200 to £300 a

year.”85 In a statement which foreshadows later concerns about the growth of “poor-

white” population in Kenya, the paper suggested that living in less-than-English

conditions would lower the moral standards of colonial civil servants. In fact, at this time

the colonial service was beginning to actively recruit officers with more training and

from a higher class background.86

Most importantly, increased salaries would allow colonial officials to bring their

wives out to live with them; these women would provide both a sexual outlet, and serve

as the embodiment of domestic British morality. A letter to the editor of The Spectator on

85 Ibid, 980.

86 By 1926, every cadet in the Colonial Service was required to undergo a year of training

at Oxford and Cambridge. Allen, Tales From the Dark Continent, 41.

174

Dec. 26, written by a man identifying himself as a former official in Nyasaland (now

Malawi), stated that

A married man gives up much in accepting an official appointment in these

outposts of the Empire, even if he takes his wife out with him, has infinitely more

at stake, and is much more likely, from a health point of view, to prove an

efficient public servant than a single man, who, often young, in full vigour, and

without any control, finds full vent for the play of his animal passions in the

tropics, with very often attendant disastrous results to his health, and consequent

efficiency.87

He noted that his own wife had happily accompanied him to his rural outpost, proof that

“even women of refinement and culture are not to be deterred from accompanying their

husbands where duty calls them to the uttermost parts of the earth, as you say, to ‘face

hardships, solitude, and the risk of life from dangerous climates’ little known to those

who remain in the homeland.”88 Yet “Without help, either in the way of increased salaries

or what amounts to the same, assisted passages for wives both ways, it is a very heavy

call on the poor pay meted out to junior officials in our Protectorates to take out a wife.

Many cannot afford to; hence in great measure the ‘canker.’”89 Again, the “canker”

metaphor works on multiple levels; just as monogamous marriage to a chaste woman

would protect white men from venereal disease, it would also prevent the outbreak of

moral ailments in the colonies.

87 “Letter to the Editor signed ‘Nyasaland,’” The Spectator (London) December 26,

1908, 1094.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

175

Although self-control was seen as a distinguishing feature of the “civilized men,”

such discourses suggested that such discipline was perhaps not possible without the

presence of white women. T.F. Victor Buxton, who was himself a settler in the EAP,

wrote a letter to The Times on January 9, 1909 in which he stated “All honour is due to

those members of the service who by self-control are proving their fitness to exercise

authority over uncivilized peoples; but the conduct of others, to which recent

correspondence has drawn attention, merits the strongest reprobation.”90 Buxton

suggested that the presence of white women facilitated this “self-control” by providing an

approved outlet for the sexual appetites of white officials and bringing the moral

environment of the metropole to the colonies. Buxton praised the example given by

Governor Hayes who along with his wife “is doing his best, by the wholesome influences

of English family life, to promote a high tone among his subordinates, and to help those

who, away from home and friends, have to face the temptations of life in the tropics.” He

noted that “The refining influence of ladies’ society has already done much for our East

African Protectorates, but it might with advantage be greatly extended.”91 His references

to “high tone” and “wholesome influences” suggest that women because of their ability

to reproduce English families and the moral ideologies that surrounded them in the

empire. White women served the empire not only by redirecting the amorous advances of

90 BNA: CO 533/52/45005. Colonial Office: Kenya Original Correspondence. 1908.

Letter from T.F. Victor Buxton to the editor of The Times (London), 9 Jan 1909.

91 Ibid.

176

officials away from local women; they were far more important in their capacity as a

metonym of British cultural norms as a whole.

Another letter to the editor, published in The Spectator on December 19,

elaborated upon this point: the author, “D.S.S.” inquired “Will you believe one who has

spent long years in such places, there would be less drink and immorality among men in

the outlying parts of the Empire, deprived of the refining influence of their country

women, if only some of the latter would go there too?” Introducing British women would

‘refine’ the morals, manners, and habits of British men, and even promised an extra

benefit: D.S.S. believed “there would be less ultra-feminist unrest among our women at

home if the surplus went abroad.”92

In fact, Silberrad did manage to acquire a white wife, a fact that his advocates

viewed as a sign of his successful reformation. One of Silberrad’s strongest defenders in

Parliament, the Scottish MP Mr. Cathcart Wason, noted that Silberrad “has come home

after this reprimand, and not only has he laid his sins at the foot of the Throne, but he has

gone to an English lady and told her the whole story, and she has consented to be his wife

and to go out to Africa with him, there to help him lead a higher and purer life.”93

Colonel Seely had also emphasized Silberrad’s marital status when he responded to

92 “Letter to the Editor from D.S.S., “The Spectator (London) December 19, 1908, 1053.

The paper’s editor appended a note to this letter, asserting “We do not think that there are

any signs of unwillingness on the part of Englishwomen to do their share of Imperial

work by going out to distant parts of the Empire as the wives of officials. The pluck with

which delicately nurtured girls face hardships, solitude, and the risk of life in dangerous

climates is beyond all praise” but salaries need to be raised so that officers could afford

them.” Ibid.

93 PP: 27th July, 1909, p.1038.

177

questions in Parliament, suggesting that that Silberrad had acted honorably since “he told

all to his future wife.”94 The new Mrs. Silberrad promised to guard over the morals of her

husband once he was returned to an imperial outpost, and her forgiveness of Silberrad’s

misbehavior was viewed by certain of his supporters as a sufficient form of absolution. In

fact, some of the MPs seemed rather sorry for the young couple: J.D. Rees stated “I

personally deplore the fact that this gentleman, who committed a fault and was punished

and went back to his duties a married man, absolved from all his past transgressions,

should be haled [sic] before the House to-day as a malefactor, and that all these

circumstances should be raked up to the pain and ignominy of himself and his wife.”95

Even Lord Balfour, who strongly believed that Silberrad had abused his position and used

his authority to procure mistresses, felt the need to assure the House that “I am really not

trying to impose upon officials everywhere a code of morality and purity, whatever it

may be called, which, no doubt, is violated in our own country and in our own society . . .

On the contrary, I admit the fact of their isolated life and all the rest of it. We know there

are special difficulties.”96

If African women, then, were constructed as always already available for sex,

these discourses suggested that male officials could not be held responsible for their

actions. Placed in a situation in where they had limited access to the company of white

women, these officials required an outlet to express their biological imperatives—a

94 PP: 7th December, 1908, p. 71.

95 PP: 27th July, 1909, p.1055.

96 PP: 27th July, 1909, p.1122.

178

discourse which challenged the primacy of self-control in the “civilized” sexual

personality. In part, white women in their role as wives would provide such a sexual

outlet, but even more significantly, the company of other whites, both male and female,

would encourage officials to maintain certain cultural standards, including those which

insisted on a strict segregation between Africans and whites. These discourses established

an interesting relationship between the duties performed by colonial men and women: the

colonial “man on the spot” served to convey information about a foreign territory back to

the metropole. The “woman on the spot,” meanwhile, reversed this directionality,

bringing metropolitan values to the periphery. The languages of gender and geography

come together in this discourse; colonial men and women played a complementary role in

knitting the colonies together with domestic Britain.

Conclusion

Despite the extensive publicity surrounding his actions, Silberrad suffered few

long-term consequences. Officials in the Colonial office actually reduced the punishment

proposed by the government of the EAP: Silberrad lost only one year of seniority and

was not to be put in charge of a district for two years.97 Some felt even this reduced

97 Mr. Morrow and Mr. Harris of the Colonial Office both argued in favor of reducing

Silberrad’s punishment, stating that “It must be borne in mind that the practice of

cohabitation with native women has been and is extremely common throughout the

Colonies and Protectorates of West and East Africa; indeed I am informed that of the

unmarried white officials there is only a small percentage who have abstained entirely

from the practice. Mr. Monson tells me that he is satisfied that there are many officers in

the E.A.P., who have lived more loosely than Messrs Silberrad and Haywood, and he

urges that it is hard that they should be made scapegoats.” Although Silberrad’s decision

to lock up M. had “brought about a most awkward situation, and one pre-eminently

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punishment was too severe. MP Sir Clement Hill noted that the publicity surrounding the

scandal amounted to a very strong punishment “whatever the nominal weight of the

punishment, the publicity given to it must seriously affect, if it does not ruin, the career of

the official implicated.” He would be surprised if such punishment did not act as a

deterrent to future crimes.98 In a letter printed a few weeks later, Mr. Routledge pointed

out that had he not written in to The Times and provided Silberrad’s name, the publicity

surrounding the scandal would not have had any effect on Silberrad’s career prospects; in

effect, the punishment had been meted out by himself and not the colonial office.99

In fact, Silberrad’s career seems to have survived intact; in December of 1908, he

was given a position as the Assistant District Commissioner of Kiambu, just 50 miles

away from the site of his indiscretions at Nyeri. He was later moved to Nyasaland (now

Malawi) where he served as a District Commissioner.100 A notice in the Nyasaland Times

reported the birth of a child to Silberrad and his wife in February of 1912.101 W., Nb.,

calculated to bring the Gov’t into discredit” Harris nevertheless believed that his actions

were not motivated by malice, and that Silberrad should merely be censured and passed

over twice for promotion. Now that “better class of white official is being introduced” to

the colonies, Harris expected that morals would tighten and the practice of concubinage

would decline. BNA: Co/533/43/21793, Kenya Original Correspondence. Despatches,

May 14-June 19 1908. Colonial Office Intra-office memo.

98 Sir Clement Hill, “Letter to Editor of the Spectator,” The Spectator (London) January

2, 1909, 13

99 W. Scoresby Routledge, “Letter to the Editor of The Spectator,” The Spectator

(London) February 6, 1909, 218.

100 “Town and Personal,” The Advertiser of East Africa (Nairobi), July 16, 1909.

101 Nyasaland Times (Blantyre, Nyasaland), Feb. 22, 1912.

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and Nk. drop out of the archival record at this point; we can only speculate about the

long-term effects that the Silberrad Affair had on their lives. The scandal did live on in

the work of Norman Leys, an anti-colonial author and former colonial official in Kenya:

in 1924 Leys referenced the Silberrad case in his book Kenya as an example of the

corrupt nature of British imperialism in East Africa.102

The Silberrad scandal is important to this dissertation in two ways. First, these

discourses suggest that sexual morality was site and space specific. Although sexual self-

control was a defining feature of European cultural/sexual superiority, Britons worried

that these traits would dissolve in the distant corners of the empire. As bearers of

tradition, white women were viewed as a panacea to this dangerous disorder; by

importing domestic morality to colonial spaces, they prevented sexual disorder. In fact, as

we will see, when a significant settler population did develop in Kenya, they crafted their

own site-specific discourses surrounding sex and race. Anglo-Kenyan settlers did not

simply import a moral sphere; rather, they constructed one in relation to events at the

periphery.

Second, the Silberrad scandal mobilized the language of indirect rule and

trusteeship in ways that indicate the inherent tension between them. Silberrad’s rather

ingenious defense was premised upon the logic of indirect rule: if customary law held

sway in colonized spaces, how could Silberrad be punished for following it? This

argument was countered by those who invoked the trustee duties of the colonizer. The

102 Norman Leys, Kenya / by Norman Leys (Fulani Bin Fulani); with an Introduction by

Gilbert Murray, 3rd Edition (London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the

Hogarth Press, 1926), 207.

181

language of ward and guardian conjured a relationship of dependency, parentage, and

even kinship. Interracial sex blurred the lines between ward and guardian, creating an

incestuous relationship that discredited the guardians claims to act in the interest of the

dependent.

Finally, we see the first suggestions of East Africa as a space of white sexual

deviance, and African sexual vulnerability. While one strand of discourse characterized

African women as property to be exchanged at will between men of any race, an equally

prominent thread presented Silberrad as the corruptor of innocent African women and

girls. The total absence of any language about female sexual desire contrast strongly with

the broader presentation of African women as lascivious and sexually excessive. Rather,

the Silberrad foreshadows the association of whiteness with sexual excess and disorder

which would come to predominate in colonial Kenya.

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Chapter 4: "Stoop Low to Conquer”: Race and Sexual Trusteeship in the Kenyan “Indian Crisis” of 1923

In 1923, the Kenyan-Indian newspaper editor Sitaram Achariar caused a near-riot

when he published a column, entitled “Stoop Low to Conquer,” impugning the chastity of

European women. Achariar’s paper, The Democrat, was responding to anti-Indian

statements made in a white-owned paper, The East African Standard.1 Specifically,

Achariar wished to dispute the claim that Indians should not be granted equal political

status in Kenya since they kept their wives in purdah, married child brides, and refused to

allow widows to remarry. “We are not going to support either the custom of child

marriage or of purdah which obtains amongst certain sections of our countrymen,”

Achariar wrote. Yet:

If the earth of India is soaked with the tears of her child-widows, the very atmosphere

of England is poisoned by the sobs of the unmarried. It is no exaggeration to say that

the great majority of Englishwomen have usually one or two ‘abortions’ before some

one comes along to conduct them to the holy alter.2

If child-marriage was not an ideal system, Achariar implied, neither was the European

trend of late marriage since it led to extramarital sex and the aborting of unwanted

offspring.

1 For an excellent study of the racial politics of Kenyan newspapers, see Bodil Folke

Frederiksen, “Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian

Improvement, Protest and Connections,” Africa 81, no. 1 (2011): 155–72.

2 Rhodes House Library, Oxford [RH]: Mss. Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3,

File 4 Indian Questions, The Democrat, edited by Sitaram Achariar, Mombasa, Friday 16

Feb. 1923, no. 14: Stoop Low to Conquer!”

183

The Democrat article appeared at the height of the so-called “Indian Crisis,” a

period in the early 1920s when Kenyan-Indians demanded a more equal position with the

colony’s white settler population. The debate quickly became a referendum on which of

the two “immigrant races” were more suitable guardians of African wards. Each side

presented their opponent as the enemy of the African. Whites accused Indian traders of

cheating and overcharging rural Africans, Indian clerks and artisans of stealing jobs that

would otherwise go to Africans, and Indian households of posing a sanitary threat to the

health of cities. Indians, meanwhile, pointed out the hypocrisy of whites who claimed to

serve the best interests of Africans while demanding that they government supply them

with cheap African labor to work their farms--farms which had previously been occupied

by Africans now removed to “Native Reserves.”

Historians who have looked at the Indian Crisis have generally overlooked the

sexualized rhetoric used by Achariar and others. Scholars like Christopher Youé, Robert

Gregory, Dane Kennedy, Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, and Sana Aiyar have written

insightfully about the political and racial implications of the Indian Crisis, but without

attending to its gendered and sexual dimensions.3 Aiyar, in an otherwise excellent

3 Christopher P. Youe, “The Threat of Settler Rebellion and the Imperial Predicament:

The Denial of Indian Rights in Kenya, 1923,” Canadian Journal of History 12, no. 3

(February 1978): 347; Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa ; Labour’s

Experiment with the Doctrine of Native Paramountcy., University of California

Publications in History ; v. 72 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Dane

Kennedy, Islands of White : Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia,

1890-1939 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Bruce Berman and John

Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Eastern African Studies

(London : Nairobi : Athens: J. Currey ; Heinemann Kenya ; Ohio University Press, 1992);

Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora, Harvard Historical Studies ; v.

185 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015); Sana Aiyar, “Empire,

184

discussion of Indians in Kenya, goes so far as to claim that "Indian political discourse

was largely unconcerned with sexuality, religious practices, and other cultural

preoccupations."4

In fact, as I argue below, both whites and Indians centered their rhetoric upon issues

of gender and sexuality. In their efforts to discredit each other, each side presented its

opponent as a threat to the sexual purity and morality of vulnerable Africans. In doing so,

they mobilized a rhetoric of “sexual trusteeship--” a term I use in this dissertation to

signal the adaptation of a philosophy of rule to the realm of the sexual and the moral.

The imperial philosophy of trusteeship characterized the British state and its agents as

benevolent guardians who held land and resources “in trust” for a colonized population

that was not yet sufficiently modern for self-government. As Brett Shadle has noted, the

language of trusteeship reached an apex during the Indian Crisis, with both Indians and

whites positioning themselves as the most suitable guardians of indigenous peoples.5

Sexual trusteeship extended that guardianship to the task of protecting the sexual

practices and health of African people—and, as such, implicitly built upon the discourse

of normative primitivity described in the introduction. During the Indian Crisis, sexual

Race and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere, 1919–

1923,” Africa (Cambridge University Press) 81, no. 1 (03/01/2011 2011): 132–54.

4 Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 16. One exception to this rule is Brett Shadle, whose recent

book contains a brief discussion of both the Achariar article. He characterizes the white

reaction to Achariar’s article as an extension of white “chivalry,” the protection of white

women from assaults, real or imagined, by non-white men. Brett Lindsay Shadle, The

Souls of White Folk, 89-90.

5 Shadle, The Souls of White Folk.

185

trusteeship bore an additional weight, as Kenyan Indians tied their community’s ability to

enjoy the full rights of British subjects to their (suit)ability to protect the morality of less

‘civilized’ colonial wards. To be clear, historical figures at the time did not ever invoke

the term “sexual trusteeship”; rather, I invent the term here to underscore the ways in

which sexuality served as a key marker of modernity, and thus political maturity.

By paying attention to the sexualized dimensions of trusteeship, we begin to see how

both white and Indian settlers connected African sexual innocence to their unreadiness

for self-rule. White settlers re-circulated discourses of Indian sexual deviance which had

originated in the Raj, claiming that Africans would be contaminated by contact with

Indian sexual cultures. As Achariar’s column indicates, Indians responded to this rhetoric

by attacking the morals of white settlers, asserting that they were more suitable trustees

of African sexual welfare. While domestic Indians increasingly rejected imperialism in

the interwar period, in Kenya elite Indians argued that they should be allowed to serve the

empire as civilizers of a colonized (African) population. Drawing on larger

anthropological and sexological narratives which idealized the sexual “purity” of

primitive peoples, the language of sexual trusteeship argued that Africans must be

protected from sexual contamination by more civilized, and hence more deviant,

colonizers.

The Indian Crisis

As discussed in the introduction and Chapter one, the early 20th century saw a

revision of prominent anthropological views of the sexuality of “primitive” peoples—

186

previously pathologized as practicing “primitive promiscuity,” leading figures like

Malinowski began to suggest that “primitive” peoples were actually more sexually

healthy than their more “civilized” peers. Sexologists like Havelock Ellis picked up on

this rhetoric, claiming that the requirement that “civilized” peoples repress their sexual

drives created the potential for sexual disorder. Ideally, these repressed sexual energies

would be redirected towards outlets like art and learning, and thus drive the course of

human progress, but there was an equal possibility that those drives would manifest in

sexually dysfunctional behaviors like onanism (masturbation), homosexuality, or general

nervous decline. This is not to say that negative characterizations of African sexuality

disappeared; Africans continued to be characterized as immodest, promiscuous, and

backwards in their treatment of women and girls.6 However, this new anthropological

framework—which extended into the realm of colonial administration--created an

association between sexual deviance and dysfunction and civilization, and parallel

association between primitivity and sexual health.

It also opened up the possibility for a discourse of sexual trusteeship which

legitimated colonial rule as a way of protecting the sexual well-being of the colonized. If

Africans were ignorant of sexual vice, it was the duty of the trustee to protect them from

6 Meghan Vaughan highlights this tension between the two modes of viewing African

sexuality in the context of colonial East Africa: two stereotypes of African sexuality “For

some,” she writes, “including many missionaries, African sexuality was, and always had

been, ‘primitive’, uncontrolled and excessive, and as such it represented the darkness and

dangers of the continent. For others, the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of pre-colonial African

sexuality was reassuringly ‘innocent’; the danger lay rather in the degeneration of this

sexuality which was seen to have come about through the social and economic changes of

colonialism." Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, 129.

187

contamination. One colonial observer summarized the popular attitude well with his

statement that “the average native is simply an unmoral creature, and as a general rule he

becomes immoral only after contact with certain forms of civilization, either Eastern [ie.,

Indian or Arab] or Western.” 7 Significantly, such rhetoric constructed both Western and

Eastern forms of civilization as sexually immoral; the supposed sexual innocence of

Africans, meanwhile, signaled their political immaturity and incapacity for self-rule. The

language of sexual trusteeship enabled white settlers to oppose processes like education,

urbanization, and political inclusion that they deemed threatening to their position in the

colony. Importantly, it also enabled them to oppose the presence and influence of

Kenyan-Indians in the colony.

Indians first began to settle in inland Kenya in the 1890s, when the British

government imported laborers to work on the Uganda Railway: by the time in the railway

was completed in 1901, just under 32,000 Indians had been imported as laborers,

primarily from the Punjab, but also from Sind and the Bombay Presidency. 8 About 7,000

Indians remained in the Protectorate, most becoming traders, artisans, owners of small

7 Kenya National Archives [KNA]: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5), Indecent Assaults,1920-1944:

Memo or report, “East Africa Prot: Cont.” no author no date, possibly from Major,

General Staff Officer Intelligence KAR for inclusion in Intelligence Report circa April-

May 1920.

8 The local African populations, who existed outside of a waged economy and showed

little desire for Western trade-goods, could not be induced to join up. Even those few

Africans who did agree to work on the railroad insisted on leaving periodically to

cultivate their fields. Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A History of Race

Relations within the British Empire, 1890-1939, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971), 51.

188

shops (dukas), and clerks.9 The importation of railway laborers was not, however, the

only period of Indian migration; as Sana Aiyar points out, Indians in Kenya retained a

connection to their homeland, participating in circular migratory patterns which sent them

back and forth across the Indian ocean.10 These migrants came from a wide range of

regional, religious, and social backgrounds. Punjabis and Gujaratis were prominent, but

migrants also came from Goa and Bombay. The Indian community included Hindus,

Muslims (including a sizable community of Ismaili Muslims), and Christians. The

Indians imported to work on the railroad had include both unskilled laborers and artisans,

but the most prominent figures in the Kenyan-Indian community tended to be wealthy

merchants. Because Kenyan-Indians were not allowed to own land in the most fertile

parts of the colony, there were relatively few farmers. Indians were, however, very

prominent in the lower-levels of the colonial administration (they were not allowed to

serve in the upper-levels).11

The Indian population continued to grow throughout the colonial period, always

outnumbering whites. In 1921, for example, there were 9,651 Europeans compared with

9 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya, 24.

10 Sana Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the

Indian Diaspora in Kenya, Ca. 1930-1950,” American Historical Review 116, no. 4

(October 2011): 987–1013.

11 In 1919, there were about 15,000 Indians living in Kenya. Sana Aiyar provides a break-

down of their occupations “3,942 were large-scale merchants and petty shopkeepers,

while 3,024 were skilled workers, particularly artisans, carpenters, masons, drivers, and

mechanics, and 2,500 were government employees in low-level jobs, serving

predominately as clerks and policemen.” Indian clerks were paid less than Europeans.

However, once Africans were allowed to join the civil service (beginning in the early

1920s) they were paid less than the Indians. Ibid, 58, 222, 231.

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25,253 Asians, 10,102 Arabs, and roughly 2.5 million Africans.12 Yet despite their

comparatively small numbers, Europeans dominated Kenyan politics. In 1905, the EAP

ceded to settler demands for representation in the colony by creating a Legislative

Council and an Executive Council.13 While the Executive Council was made up

exclusively of government officials, the Legislative Council included two nominated

“unofficials” (ie., non-administrators) in addition to the six official members (all of

whom were European). In 1919, a Legislative Ordinance granted the white settlers the

right to elect eleven members of Legislative Council; it therefore also had to establish

who was eligible to vote. The Ordinance granted full suffrage to any adult “British

subject of European origin or descent,” including women.14

In addition to establishing elective representatives for whites, the Legislative

Ordinance of 1919 appointed members to the Legislative Council to represent the other

communities: the Indian community could elect two members and an additional

unofficial member was nominated to speak for the Arab community.15 African “natives”

12 The figure for Europeans and Asians (the latter included both Indians and Goans) are

taken from Yash P. Ghai and Patrick McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in

Kenya: A Study of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the

Present (Oxford University Press, 1970), 36. The estimates of Arab and African

populations are from R.R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial

Empire, vol. II (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press (Issued under the

auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs), 1949), 156.

13 Ghai and McAuslan, 45.

14 Kenya was the first area of the empire outside of Britain to establish (white) women’s

suffrage. Ibid, 46.

15 Arabs were not actively involved in the agitation surrounding the Indian Crisis. Robert

Gregory has noted that the two Arab representatives who testified in front of the Joint

190

were represented by a nominated European missionary. The legislation established an

electorate based on a “communal roll,” with each enfranchised racial community

(Europeans, Asians, and Arabs) voting exclusively for representatives from their own

race.

Racial divisions were reflected not only in the electorate, but in the colony’s land

policies. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1903 set the stage for an appropriation of

African lands by white settlers, allowing Crown Lands to be leased to European settlers

for a period of 99 years.16 The fertile area known as the “White Highlands” became the

exclusive preserve of Europeans as Africans were removed to Native Reserves. African

laborers were recruited to work on European-owned farms as “squatted labor”—they

were allowed to live and cultivate on this land in exchange for their work for the

European employer.17 Another Crown Lands Ordinance in 1915 gave the Governor the

power to veto the sale or lease of land in the highlands to non-whites—notably, Kenyan

Committee on Closer Union in 1930 opposed the establishment of a common electoral

roll “because of fear of being swamped by other communities.” Presumably, they had

also opposed the common roll in 1923. Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: A

History of Race Relations within the British Empire, 1890-1939, (Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1971), 365.

16 Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 27.

17 The Resident Native (Squatters) Ordinance of 1918 required squatters to perform 180

days of labor per annum, and the Resident Native Labourers Ordinance of 1937 expanded

the requirement to up to 270 days in 1937. For a more detailed discussion of this

legislation, see David M. Anderson, “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939,”

Journal of African History 41, no. 3 (November 2000): 465-466. Bruce Berman and John

Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya & Africa, Eastern African Studies

(London : Nairobi : Athens: J. Currey ; Heinemann Kenya ; Ohio University Press, 1992),

104-122.

191

Indians.18 Thus, both Africans and Indians were excluded from owning the most desirable

land in the colony.

Kenyan-Indians responded to these racial inequalities by establishing several

organizations to advocate for their position in the colony. One of the most prominent of

these organizations, the East African Indian National Congress, was formed in 1914 by

several wealthy and influential Indian traders.19 From the beginning, the EAINC

represented only those Indians who had proved—by virtue of their wealth and

education—that they had attained a comparable “civilizational status” to the British; as

Aiyar notes, elite Kenyan-Indians “highlighted their civilizational progress to demand

rights for themselves, not for the poorer and uneducated working-class Indians whom the

Congress did not represent.”20

In their pursuit of “equal rights for all civilized men”21 Kenyan-Indians made a

specific set of demands. First, they sought the right to own land in the “White-

Highlands,” not only because this was the most desirable land for farming, but also

18 Gregory, India and East Africa, 180. Although not explicitly banning Indian ownership

of land in the Highlands, in practice the Ordinance ensured that the Highlands would

remain in white hands.

19 Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 54.

20 Ibid, 59.

21 This phrase is attributed to Cecil Rhodes, and was repeated by Winston Churchill in his

speech at London’s East African Dinner in January 1922. In his speech he also urged East

African governments not to adopt policies that will cause them “needlessly to inflict an

invidious distinction upon those who may be held in some way to represent the enormous

mass of subjects of the British Crown in the land of Hindustan.” RH: MSS Afr. s594

[Convention of Associations] Box 1, File 14. Churchill’s words would often be repeated

by Kenyan-Indians as they sought to legitimize their struggle for civic inclusion.

192

because they viewed segregation as an insult to educated middle and upper-class Indians.

Indians opposed restrictions on immigration, but stressed that they supported only the

immigration of a certain class of their countrymen and women; in a meeting with

Governor Coryndon, M. A. Desai reassured him “there is no influx of Indians likely; we

do not want the coolie class in this country.”22 Finally, they objected to the “communal”

voting roll, advocating instead for a “common roll” with Indians, Arabs, and Europeans

forming a single multi-racial electorate. They did not, however, advocate that all Kenyan-

Indians be allowed to vote, only those who were educated property owners.23

Wider shifts in imperial politics abroad also shaped the Indian Crisis. Mrinalini Sinha

has argued that the First World War brought significant changes in British imperial

policy. In 1917, India was rewarded for its contribution to the war effort with a

declaration in the House of Commons favoring “the progressive realization of responsible

government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”24 The meaning of

22 RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, File 1. Memo from meeting

between Governor and Indian representatives, 10 Jan 1923.

23 In fact, Kenyan-Indians advocated a very limited enfranchisement—the correspondent

of the London Daily News H. Wilson Harris estimated that the Churchill Memorandum

(which had proposed the vote for all ‘civilized’ peoples) would have enfranchised only

3,500 Indians. They would therefore be easily outnumbered by white voters.

Furthermore, as Harris noted, “since the vote itself is merely for an unofficial minority

which could be beaten on any division by the nominated official majority; and since the

whole Council is merely advisory, the charge that the Indians are scheming to control the

Government through an inflated electorate collapses at sight.” RH: MSS Brit. Emp. S22

G 135 [Indians in East Africa, Antislavery and Aboriginal Protection Society] Daily

News (London), May 7 1923.

24 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire,

Radical Perspectives.; Variation: Radical Perspectives. (Durham: Duke University Press,

2006), 29.

193

“responsible government” was left deliberately vague; few British politicians actually

supported granting India dominion status akin to that enjoyed by white settler-ruled

spaces like Australia or South Africa.25 The postwar period also saw new waves of

activism, including Gandhi’s noncooperation movement. As Sinha has shown in her

analysis of the controversy surrounding American journalist Katherine Mayo’s book

Mother India, the accusation that Indians mistreated women served as a powerful rebuttal

to Indian demands for political influence—even at a time when Indian women were

becoming increasingly involved in political movements.26 As in Kenya, then, domestic

Indian demands for equality were rebutted with accusations that the “backwards”

treatment of women in Indian societies meant that Indians could not be allowed to govern

themselves.

As the non-cooperation movement began to gain steam, lobbying by metropolitan

organizations like the Indian Overseas Association and the Imperial Indian Citizenship

Association connected the plight of Indians in the diaspora to the fate of domestic

Indians.27 Kenya was considered to be a particularly important site in this debate because

it was a Crown Colony, and hence under the direct control of the Colonial Office. It was

bad enough for Indians to be discriminated against in territories with responsible self-

25 Ibid, 32.

26 On the “women’s question” in India, see Sinha, 42-65

27 For an excellent summary of the international context of the Indian Crisis, see Aiyar,

Indians in Kenya, 76-87.

194

government like South Africa,28 but for Britain to allow racial discrimination against

Indian subjects in a Crown Colony gave the lie to British claims to preparing Indians for

“progressive realization of responsible government.” A document published by the

Kenya Indian Delegates in 1923 explained that allowing Indians to be placed in inferior

status in a Crown Colony like Kenya “would deal the death-blow to the hopes of Indians

and their trust in the good faith of the Imperial Government and the British people.”29

Meanwhile, back in Kenya the frenzied white settlers were threatening to take “direct

action” in the colony should the Indian demands be met; they even devised a plan to

kidnap Sir Robert Thorne Coryndon, the Governor of Kenya, and deport all the Indians in

the colony to Mombasa, from whence they could be shipped back to India.30 Christopher

Youé has argued that it was the prospect of a white settler rebellion that caused the Duke

of Devonshire to change his mind. The Colonial Office was eager to avoid a situation in

28 Gandhi’s anti-colonial activism was famously sparked by his distaste for being treated

like African “natives” during his time in South Africa. For more on how Gandhi’s time in

South African shaped his anti-colonial politics, see Surendra Bhana, The Making of a

Political Reformer: Gandhi in South Africa, 1893-1914 (New Delhi: Manohar :

Distributed in South Asia by Foundation Books, 2005); Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi

before India (New York: Alfred AKnopf, 2014).

29 Kenya National Archives [KNA]: MAC/EAI/29/7 [Murumbi Papers] Indian

Delegations from Kenya to London. Document published by Kenya Indian Delegates,

London, July 18 1923.

30 The settlers crafted this plan with considerable attention to detail. In a letter to the

Governor of Kenya summarizing the colonists’ position from a military perspective, the

author notes that white women would be recruited to look after “purdah women” and

serve as nurses. RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, File 2. For a detailed

analysis of the plan, and some of its leaders, see C. J. D. Duder, “The Settler Response to

the Indian Crisis of 1923 in Kenya: Brigadier General Philip Wheatley and ‘Direct

Action,’” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History XVII, no. 3 (May 1989): 349–

373.

195

which African soldiers in the Kings African Rifles would be called upon to shoot at white

Kenyans; such an order, Youé argues, would be “political suicide for the Conservative

government.”31 The Colonial Office was put in a difficult position; if they conceded to

the Kenya-Indians demands, the settlers might revolt, yet they also needed to avoid

stoking anticolonial discontent in India.

The solution the Colonial Office found for this problem was “the doctrine of native

paramountcy.” In 1923, the Duke of Devonshire, then Secretary of State of the Colonies,

released a White Paper introducing a new philosophy of administration in colonial

Kenya. The so-called “Devonshire Declaration” rejected the demands of Kenyan-Indians

for civic inclusion on the basis that in colonial Kenya “the interests of the African natives

must be paramount, and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the

immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.”32 The Declaration neatly

side-stepped the issue of Indian equality by asserting the primacy of African interests, i.e.

“native paramountcy.”

31 Christopher P. Youe, “The Threat of Settler Rebellion and the Imperial Predicament:

The Denial of Indian Rights in Kenya, 1923,” Canadian Journal of History 12, no. 3

(February 1978): 347. Interestingly, in a letter to the Undersecretary of State of the India

Office in February of 1924, the Colonial Office declined a request for the release of

materials related to the Indian Crisis in East Africa, on the basis that “Their publication

would tend to confirm the impression already existing in some quarters that the

settlement was a surrender to the threats of violence on the part of Europeans in Kenya,

and that the standpoint of native interests was adopted as an expedient to justify that

surrender.” Colonial Office [CO]: CO 533/322 [Records of the Colonial Office,

Commonwealth and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, Empire Marketing Board, and

related bodies] Letter from the CO to the Undersecretary of State, India Office, Feb. 8

1924.

32 The Kenya Gazette, Aug, 17, 1923.

196

Scholars who have written about the Devonshire Declaration have been rightly

cynical about the motivations of the Colonial Office in declaring native paramountcy.

What appears on the surface to be a commitment to prioritizing the welfare of colonized

people was in fact the outcome of careful maneuvering by a Colonial Office determined

to appease white settlers without offending mainland India. “The press in India had

assumed a threatening tone, Africans in Kenya were restive, and Europeans there were

laying plans to kidnap the Acting Governor,” concludes Robert Gregory. “In this tense

situation native paramountcy appeared to be the only plan acceptable to all parties.”33

Interestingly, as Gregory has pointed out, the concept of native paramountcy was

first elaborated in the colony itself.34 In Kenya, pamphlets, government reports, minutes

of colonial organizations, and especially colonial newspapers consistently framed the

“Indian Crisis” as a question of which group, the Indians or the white settlers, would

better serve the interests of indigenous Africans. Full civic inclusion in Kenya, then, was

premised on inclusion in the “civilizing mission.” But why would Kenyan-Indians, who

had themselves migrated from a colonized country, adopt a vision of inclusion that was

premised on the disenfranchisement of another group?

We can begin to understand the vexed relationship of Kenyan Indians to civic

inclusion by investigating the multiple meanings of the term “subject.” To be a British

subject was to be subject to the Crown, that is, to recognize and defer to its authority. The

true patriot would even take pride in that deference, since loyalty to the Crown marked a

33 Ibid, 44.

34 Robert G. Gregory, Sidney Webb and East Africa, 37.

197

particular kind of conservative British-ness. But the figure of the individual liberal

subject, a thinking, doing agent, was also deeply imbricated in the idea of British-ness; in

fact, one could argue that the imperial project rhetorically depended upon the opposition

of the (largely white) colonizing subjects with the (largely brown and black) colonized

objects. For Indians in Kenya, was it possible to be both a loyal subject in the first sense,

and an active subject in the second?

The stakes of this question are neatly stated by Wambui Mwangi in her work on the

East African Currency Board.35 By placing the Indian presence in Kenya in the context of

broader transnational politics, Mwangi shows why Indian demands produced so much

anxiety to the white settler community. Because Kenyan-Indians were so crucial to the

colony’s economy, it became “possible for colonized Indians to presume an equality that

extended to a desire for the particularity of the positions reserved for the British.”36 That

is, Kenyan-Indians began to equate equality with the right to colonize more “primitive”

peoples. However, as Mwangi explains, the notion of Indians serving as “sub-

imperialists” would be both the logical conclusion of the colonial “civilizing mission,”

and an outcome that would undermine the distinctions which structured the colonial

enterprise:

For Indian colonialism to have quite literally represented British colonialism would

have meant that British colonialism in India had succeeded in producing the essential

colonized subject—a pure subject constituted only by the fact of having been

35 Wambui Mwangi, “Of Coins and Conquest: The East African Currency Board, the

Rupee Crisis, and the Problem of Colonialism in the East African Protectorate,”

Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 04 (October 2001): 763–787.

36 Ibid, 774.

198

colonized and existing only within the terms of reference of this colonization.

Paradoxically, the requisite degree of faith in such re-creation, and the attendant

sanguine acceptance of the notion of the Indian colonizer, would inescapably have led

to the surrender of the crucial distinctions between colonizer and colonized. It would

have suggested that Indians could be mimetically representative of, equal to and

indistinguishable from the British in East Africa.37

The idea that Indians were fit to rule others would also imply their fitness to rule

themselves-- thus undermining the legitimacy of British rule in the Raj. Conversely, if

Indians were proved unsuitable to hold authority over Africans, then they could not be

accepted into the ranks of colonizers.

Daniel Gorman and Sukanya Banerjee have both discussed the unique situation of

Indians with reference to the concept of “imperial citizenship.” Colonized peoples were

subjects, not citizens, of the British empire. As Daniel Gorman notes, the lack of

definitive legislation on British imperial citizenship meant that it acquired an “informal”

meaning that was based more on allegiance to the sovereign than legal status. In turn,

“this unofficial, rhetorical, and localized nature of citizenship gave rise to great

discrepancies amongst imperial subjects in rights, benefits, and duties."38 Yet, as

37 Ibid, 774. 38 Daniel Gorman, “Wider and Wider Still?: Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration

and the Absence of an Imperial Citizenship in the British Empire,” Journal of

Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 3 (2002). Np. Gorman offers “a provisional

definition” of the concept of imperial citizenship: “(the argument for/ideal of) a unified

imperial polity in which the individual’s allegiance to the sovereign (subjecthood) was of

principal importance, and concomitantly sought to maintain and/or develop such

allegiance through the encouragement of political liberties, where deemed appropriate,

based upon British values of morality and character, for the purpose of creating a

cosmopolitan political community.” Ibid, n.p.

199

Banerjee points out, the informal definition of citizenship also enabled colonized Indians

to “la[y] claim to universal ideals of citizenship."39

In Kenya, Kenyan-Indians argued that to be included as full imperial citizens

meant to be recognized as fellow colonizers (along with, or even in place of, European

settlers) of Africans. White settlers, however, viewed trusteeship as a duty exclusive to

the colony’s Europeans. During the Indian Crisis, both Kenyan-Indians and white settlers

focused on sexuality as a metonym of colonial trusteeship. White settlers used tropes of

Indian sexual depravity to oppose Kenyan-Indian demands, arguing that they were acting

in the interest of vulnerable African wards. Kenyan-Indians, meanwhile, mobilized the

language of sexual trusteeship to discredit white settlers without critiquing the larger

colonial project which they were, after all, seeking to join. Both claimed to be protecting

African sexual mores from contamination by a more deviant population. The unstated

logic undergirding the competition between Indians and whites was that Africans were

not yet ready for self-governance; their vulnerability to sexual contamination from

outsiders mandated their need for colonization.

Indian-Kenyan Deviance

The construction of Indians as sexually deviant and immoral has a long history. In

India, imperialists pointed to the supposed sexual immorality of Indians as evidence that

they required the benevolent intervention of British guardians. As scholars Mrinalini

Sinha, Antoinette Burton, Tanika Sarkar, and Padma Anagol-McGinn have shown

39 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire,

Next Wave (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.

200

(mostly with reference to Age of Consent legislation), nineteenth-century imperialists

frequently justified colonialism as a means of protecting vulnerable Indian subjects—

particularly women—from practices like purdah, sati, and child-marriage.40 Such

traditions were viewed as symptomatic of a larger culture of sexual degeneration in India:

as Mrinalini Sinha explains, proponents of imperialism tied “the alleged sexual obsession

of the Hindus that was manifest in practices such as child marriage and premature

maternity, as well as in rampant masturbation and homosexuality” to the unsuitability of

Indians for self-rule.41

The characterization of Indians as culturally backwards and sexually deviant

travelled relatively intact across the Indian Ocean; in East Africa, however, it was used

not to discredit Indian self-rule, but to demonstrate their incapacity to rule others. The

report of the 1919 Economic Commission of Enquiry into Post-War Development, for

instance, characterized Kenyan-Indians as unsanitary and criminal. Significantly, the

Economic Commission also opposed the “decadent civilisation of India,” noting that

40 See Padma Anagol-McGinn, The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s

Perspectives and Participation in the Child-Marriage Controversy in India, 1992;

Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire,

Radical Perspectives.; Variation: Radical Perspectives. (Durham: Duke University Press,

2006); Antoinette Burton, “From Child Bride to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the

Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain,” The American Historical Review

103, no. 4 (1998): 1119–1146; Tanika Sarkar, “A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of

Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal,” Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 601–622; Tanika

Sarkar, “Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a

Child-Wife,” Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 36 (1993): 1869–1878.

41 Sinha, Specters of Mother India, 5.

201

“The moral depravity of the Indian is equally damaging to the African, who in his natural

state is at least innocent of the worst vices of the East.”42

By presenting Indians as a threat to the well-being of indigenous Africans, white

settlers sought to establish trusteeship as a sacred duty exclusive to whites. The Mombasa

Times opined that “To allow participation in the administration of a race distrusted by the

aboriginal inhabitants would lower the status of the whites, and not raise that of the exotic

black, the sum total result would probably be the loss of the colony and its reversion to

heathenism of a worse type than ob[t]ained before the advent of civilisation.”43 In a 1923

interview with the Manchester Guardian, the prominent Anglo-Kenyan missionary Dr.

John W. Arthur44 asserted that “Our responsibilities and our trusteeship for the natives

could not [be] carried out if there was unrestricted immigration from India and if the

influences of Eastern civilisation and morality were to become paramount.”45 White

settlers argued that, in order to fulfill their duties as the trustees of vulnerable Africans,

they must protect them from contamination by “Eastern” cultures.

In particular, white settlers recycled the trope, already used to great effect in the

Raj, that Indians mistreated women and girls. This was viewed as an indication of their

low evolutionary status and their unreadiness to take on the burden of either self-rule or

42 RH: Mss. Afr. s 382 [John Ainsworth] File 2. Report of the Economic Commission,

1918, Ch. VII General Native Policy.

43 Mombasa Times, Feb. 24, 1923: 2.

44 Arthur also served as the representative for African interest on the colony’s Legislative

Council.

45 East African Standard [EAS] (Nairobi), April 26, 1923.

202

the rule of others. Critics pointed, for example, to the practice of polygamy amongst

some Kenyan-Indian communities as evidence of their unsuitability for civic inclusion. In

a Letter to the Editor of the East African Standard, Elizabeth Coxoni offered some

“Knotty Points to Consider” in relation to Indian franchise. For example, she asked,

“how many wives of Indians of Mahomedan faith would be entitled to vote? If only one

then who settles the knotty question of the owner of the vote; if the head of the harem,

quite obviously he will chose [sic] the wife of the least mutinous and rebellious

disposition!” But Coxoni also objected to the idea of granting the vote to all the wives,

saying “the experience of the average Indian woman does not, as yet, entitle her to take

part in public life. That a few Indian women have become more or less emancipated is

true but they are so very few in number that they do not affect the bulk of the population,

nor is it easy to see how they can do so even in the distant future unless the main tenants

of their religions are forsaken and the status of Asiatic women is entirely altered.”46

Coxoni’s concern about the dangers of granting suffrage to Indian women is particularly

interesting when we consider that European women had only gained the vote in Kenya

four years earlier, in 1919. A letter to the editor of the East African Standard extended

Coxoni’s critique, suggesting that for the sake of all women Indians must not gain

authority either in Kenya or at home. “The Indian,” it claimed, “by the demoralising

influence of “Dasturi” [custom] for thousands of years has become morally unstable. . .

46 EAS Feb. 26, 1923: p.1.

203

the cry goes up ‘India for the Indians,’ yes, but would any woman’s virtue be respected in

a month?”47

As the above examples indicate, white settlers argued that granting Kenyan-

Indians civic equality would threaten the well-being of white women. More interestingly,

however, they also suggested that Kenyan-Indians would corrupt and contaminate

Africans. The East African Women’s League (an organization formed by white women,

mostly the wives of settlers)48 explained the unsuitability of Kenyan-Indians for

enfranchisement by contrasting them with the more “primitive” indigenous population:

The customs of the average African are far more wholesome and sanitary than

those of the low caste Indian, who is so conservative that he will not learn decent

habits even when he comes in contact with uplifting influences.49

The EAWL juxtaposed the more ‘wholesome’ African customs with those of their Indian

peers, driving home the point that Indians could not gain access to equal rights unless

they proved themselves to be morally superior to those they wished to colonize.50

47 EAS, Feb. 12, 1923: p. 7. Similar accusations about the backwardness of Indian views

of women would be mobilized with great effect a few years later in Katherine Mayo’s

Mother India. Sinha, Specters of Mother India.

48 For more on the role of the EAWL in Kenyan politics, see Deanne van Tol, “The

Women of Kenya Speak: Imperial Activism and Settler Society, c.1930,” Journal of

British Studies 54, no. 02 (April 2015): 433–56.

49 RH: MSS Brit. Emp. S22 G 135 [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society:

Indians in East Africa] East Africa Women’s League, “The Indian Question in Kenya.

The Kenya Women’s Point of View.” (Nairobi: Swift Press, 1923).

50 The remainder of the quote, however, brought the focus back the threat posed to white

womanhood: “How could white women continue to reside here under such conditions?

How could they attempt to rear and educate their children in a British Colony where the

British were no longer the ruling race? It is unthinkable. The attitude of the average

204

To this familiar rhetoric of Indian misogyny, however, the EAWL added a

particularly Kenyan spin by claiming to be acting in the capacity of trustees of African

welfare. “The native has on the whole taken very kindly to the rule of the white woman,”

they claimed.

The Native has learned to look on the British Woman as his friend and to turn

naturally to her in times of trouble, and sickness. The Indian woman by the

limitations of her Eastern education has not been trained to cope with the

everyday emergencies that arise on farms in out-lying districts.51

The League questioned Indian women’s ability to provide medical care to ill Africans, a

task they associated closely with their role as colonial women.52

The “Memorandum on the Case against Indians in Kenya” (written by prominent

settlers Lord Delamere and C. K. Archer) also highlighted the sexual threat posed by

Kenyan-Indians. The memorandum quoted Dr. Burkitt, a private MD and former medical

officer in India, who claimed that “Venereal disease, in peoples following such debasing

religious customs [as Indians do], I need hardly say, is rampant, more rampant probably

than anywhere else . . . The same may be said of bestial sexual offences, also generated

by these religions and which are almost unknown among primitive peoples.” (emphasis

Indian towards women is too well known to require comment here.” EAS, Feb. 12, 1923:

p. 7.

51 Ibid.

52 Similar sentiments were expressed by a meeting of white women in the town of Ruiru:

a cable sent to the Governor’s office opposed the inclusion of Indians in the government

on the basis that they were unfit to treat sick Africans, both because of a lack of skill and

a surfeit of “humanity.” RH: MSS Brit. Emp. S22 G 135 [Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

Protection Society: Indians in East Africa] Cable to Governor from meeting at Ruiru,

August 25, 1921.

205

mine)53 Dr. Burkitt’s attribution of “bestial sexual offences” to Indians is particularly

interesting since he claimed such offences were non-existent amongst primitive peoples;

he excluded Indians from the category of the “primitive” by virtue of their deviance, and

consigned Africans to primitivism based on their inability to veer from the sexual norm.54

A settler named Spencer Tryon also made a distinction between the sexual habits

of Indians and Africans in his 1921 letter to the Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection

Society, a London-based humanitarian group which had taken an interest in the Indian

Crisis. Tryon suggested that Indians spread both plague and venereal disease to Africans,

and that relationships between Indians and African women were responsible for not only

the spread of disease but also the corruption of previously morally upstanding Africans.55

Even as whites attacked the morals of Indians, they also rehearsed the

paternalistic position of whites as the protectors of effeminate and weak Orientals. In a

53 RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations] Box 1, File 18. Memorandum on the

Case Against the Claims of Indians in Kenya (Nairobi: Swift Press, Sept., 1921), 8.

54 For a detailed discussion of the association of deviance with civilization in early

twentieth century psychology, see Epprecht, Marc, Heterosexual Africa? The History of

an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. New African Histories Series.

Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. The “Memorandum” also worried that “the

breaking down of the barrier of segregation [between whites and Indians] will inevitably

lead to the establishment of mixed schools, with the undesirable consequence of English

children sitting alongside Indian children who are in all probability married and initiated

into the mysteries of sex.” Whites conceptualized the perils of integration by asserting an

essential difference between white and Indian sexual mores, and raising the specter of

what prematurely sexualized Indian children might teach their own innocent youngsters.

RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations] Box 1, File 18. Memorandum on the

Case Against the Claims of Indians in Kenya (Nairobi: Swift Press, Sept., 1921), 8.

55 Ibid.

206

letter to the Standard, Lionel Lawford, a Commander in the Royal Navy, recalled a visit

to an estate where 140 African men were working. After asking one worker for his

opinion about Indians, Lawford claimed to have been told “Master, if the white men

forsake the native and leave the Indian here to rule us there will be very few Indians left

in a weeks time.” 56 Lawford concluded that the British were not only the protectors of

Africans, but

we are also the protectors of the Indian community who at the moment we

oppose, for remove the Government of this country, the white man as the holders

of justice and peace and leave the Indian as the ruler of this country and I stake

my reputation of ten years experience of the native and Indian relationship of this

Colony that a rising will be seen which will shake this country to the core. . . 57

Indians were merely “the pretenders of the moment,” he continued, “who unable and

untried in the art of Government, seek to take from a nation of tried colonists the reins of

emancipation of a race which they are entirely incapable of handling.”58

The notion of the effeminate “Oriental” was also exploited in a lecture entitled

““The Thermopylae of Africa. Kenya Colony’s Responsibility in the Conflict of the

Primary Races” given by E. Powys Cobb, a prominent settler and member of the

Legislative Council and the Convention of Associations.59 Cobb wrote that “it is difficult

56 EAS, Feb. 21, 1923: p.7.

57 Ibid.

58 EAS, Feb. 21, 1923: p.7.

59 The copy in the archives of the Colonists’ Association has no author, but a review of

“Thermopylae of Africa” in the Mombasa Times, July 17, 1923 lists the author as E.

Powys Cobb. RH: MSS Afr. s594 [Convention of Associations] Box 1, File 18. “The

Thermopolyae of Africa. Kenya’s Responsibility in the Conflict of the Primary Races,”

31.

207

to picture so grotesque a thing as the timid Indian ruling the manly war-loving African

native. Certain it is that his rule would be corrupt and oppressive, for his veneer of

Western democracy would soon wear off leaving exposed the Eastern despot.” 60

Furthermore, it was likely that the Indian would intermarry with Africans “as he did with

the negroid tribes of Southern India, so adding a bastard breed to the horrors of his

misrule.”61 Not only did their supposed effeminacy render Indians unfit to govern

Africans, but they also posed a sexual threat to African’s racial purity. The Indian

threatened the African; the African threatened the Indian; only the benevolent white

colonist stood in the way of their mutually assured destruction.

By contrasting the Oriental decadence of Indian culture with the primitive purity

of Africans, white settlers sought to prove that Kenyan-Indians were unfit to serve as

trustees of African sexual welfare. What is perhaps more surprising is the degree to

which Kenyan Indians also adopted the language of sexual trusteeship. As Aiyar as

noted, Indians in the imperial diaspora "straddled the discursive division between

colonizer and colonized."62 They were therefore less likely to oppose the British colonial

project than Indians on the subcontinent. Instead, they viewed their full recognition as

British subjects as contingent on their inclusion as fellow colonizers of Africans.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 4.

208

In their argument for civic inclusion, Kenyan-Indians often depicted themselves

as essential to the success of the colonial project in Kenya. In 1912, the wealthy merchant

Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee published “An Appeal on Behalf of the Indians in East Africa,”

in which he argued forcefully that Indians were far more suited for imperial rule in Kenya

than white settlers. Jeevanjee asserted the primary role of Indians in establishing the

colony, asking

is it right, that those very British subjects who cleared the way for Great Britain to

enter the country, who have done the pioneer work, who have converted the

hopeless desert into a fertile field and a useful mart for the world’s wares, should

be regarded by the microscopic minority of the white settlers as undesirables and

niggers to be boycotted and got rid of?63

Jeevanjee’s “Appeal” rejected anti-Indian racism, but did not extend his critique to

colonialism in general. Positing Kenyan-Indians as “British subjects,” Jeevanjee made a

claim to a brand of imperial citizenship which envisioned all those who were loyal to the

British monarch as entitled to free movement and basic rights within the empire.64

63 A.M. Jeevanjee, An Appeal on Behalf of the Indians in East Africa (Bombay: Bombay

Gazette, 1912), 9.

64 Daniel Gorman has fleshed out some of the complications of this notion of imperial

citizenship, offering a provisional definition: “imperial citizenship might be defined as

(the argument for/ideal of) a unified imperial polity in which the individual’s allegiance

to the sovereign (subjecthood) was of principal importance, and concomitantly sought to

maintain and/or develop such allegiance through the encouragement of political liberties,

where deemed appropriate, based upon British values of morality and character, for the

purpose of creating a cosmopolitan political community.” Daniel Gorman, “Wider and

Wider Still?: Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration and the Absence of an Imperial

Citizenship in the British Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 3

(2002), np. Sukanya Banerjee has examined imperial citizenship in late colonial India,

where she argues that the absence of a definitive definition of citizenship opened up

possibilities for Indians to articulate forms of inclusion and “[laid] claim to universalist

ideals of citizenship. Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-

Victorian Empire, Next Wave (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.

209

During the Indian Crisis, Kenyan-Indians expressed frustration that this vision of

imperial citizenship was being rejected. A column titled “The White Peril in Kenya,”

printed in a pro-Swaraj Indian paper, claimed that racial prejudice was so entrenched in

white Kenyans that “the only solution which they can think of in respect of the race-

problem in Kenya, is the extermination of the natives and the expulsion of Indian settlers

therein.” 65 Characterizing the situation as a “challenge to Indian manhood,” the paper

suggested that Kenyan-Indians would be forced to take violent action to defend their

“sense of honour, self-respect and the righteousness of their cause” (and—implicitly—

their masculinity).66

Perhaps the most outspoken critic of white claims to sexual trusteeship was

Sitaram Achariar. His article “Stoop Low to Conquer,” with which this chapter opened,

was penned as a response to letters published in the East African Standard, in particular a

letter in which Reverend W.H. Shaw67 asserted that Indians were unsuited for citizenship

as they were “alien in mind, colour, religion, morality.” Achariar pointed to the

deviousness of white settler tactics as a way of impugning their claim to higher

65 Extracts from the paper were reprinted in the settler paper the East African Standard

under the sarcastic heading “Gems from India.” EAS March 26, 1923. 109

66 “Gems from India.” EAS March 26, 1923. 109

67 Shaw also created great controversy in the colony when he wrote a letter to the EAS

comparing the prophet Mohamed to the devil. The letter prompted outcry from the

Indian, Arab and Swahili communities. Indians were blamed for exploiting this situation

for their own interests: a note in the files of then Governor Robert Coryndon laments that

“One meeting of 10,000 Swahilis was held at which Indians took pains to inflame their

already angry feelings.” RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, File 5

210

civilizational status. The statement “alls fair in love and war,” he claimed, must have

been coined during “the dark days in England when the people wore hides like the

highlanders of Africa and had their bodies tottooed [sic].” Although most of the British

had since “outgrown these medieval ethics,” he noted that

there are still some “’black sheep’ who would not be civilized, and who to-day

exhibit the same frame of mind and follow the same school of ethics which

characterized their ancestors in the dark ages. True, they no longer wear skins and

hides but their mentality is awfully behind the times they live in. Unfortunately,

there are quite a few white people in Kenya who come under this category- the

scum of England and Europe … 68

Achariar’s characterization of Kenyan whites as atavistic and primitive—analogous, in

fact, to “the highlanders of Africa”—fit into a larger civilizational discourse

characterizing the “primitive” as politically immature. It also tapped into fears of white

degeneration, suggesting that those whites who migrated to Kenya represented “the scum

of England and Europe,” people whom the European march towards civilized modernity

had left behind. Accusing the Europeans of using malicious tactics to resist Kenyan-

Indian demands, Achariar noted that “The Indians could do the same if they want to stoop

so low, but as it happens they have much longer and more civilized traditions behind

them and it is therefore difficult for them to make up their minds to resort to such

medieval and barbarous tactics.”69 Realigning the hierarchy of civilizations, Achariar

placed Indian civilizations on top, and the “medieval and barbarous” culture of white

Kenyans well below.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

211

In denigrating European claims to civilizational perfection, Achariar turned

specifically to the question of sexuality. “Sexual morality has reached such a lowered ebb

in Europe, particularly in England,” he wrote,

that thinking people are striving the best to devise ways and means to minimise it

… Syphilis and other venereal diseases are fairly common and although there are

a number of hospitals maintained by the State and by the Public to cleanse the

nation of this poison, the demand always exceeds the supply. [ellipses mine] 70

Responding to criticisms of child-marriage and purdah, Achariar suggested that delayed

marriage among white women resulted in premarital sex and abortions. “We say this in

no vindictive spirit,” he assured the reader, “but only to show that marriage several years

after puberty is just as bad as the Indian child marriage” both for the women themselves

and for the unfortunate babies that the wealthy aborted or abandoned, while “the poorer

classes consign their product of shame and infamy to the tender care of the Thames.” 71

He concluded his attack with the assertion that “Incest is fairly common in England-a

crime which is unheard-of in Oriental countries.”72 In these few sensational paragraphs,

Achariar assembled a compendium of European vices, from indiscriminate sex to

infanticide. Perhaps most strikingly, Achariar countered the characterization of sodomy

as an “Oriental Vice” by insisting that the crime of incest is an Occidental Vice unknown

in the East.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

212

As Brett Shadle has noted, the settlers’ response to Achariar’s column was largely

framed as a defense of the prestige of white women.73 In the days following the column’s

publication, local settler-owned newspapers filled up with letters from outraged whites,

advocating Achariar’s arrest and deportation on the grounds that he “has overstepped the

bounds of decency” and “attempt[ed] to sully the fair name of the white women of

Kenya.”74 Authorities did arrest Achariar, but claimed that they did so to protect him from

white mobs that were out to lynch him.

Indians in Mombasa responded to Achariar’s arrest with a hartal, closing all

shops and parking all taxis, effectively shutting down business in Mombasa in protest. A

Nairobi Barrister named K.S. Chowdhury wrote a letter to the East African Standard

pointing to the injustice of Achariar’s imprisonment: white papers had published

accusations about the treatment of Indian widows that

was all provoking and painful lies, but no step was taken because the writer

happened to be an European, and above all because it was against Indians. But if

an Indian spoke some truth based purely on Historical facts and figures, I can not

understand why the European people should be . . . so much upset as, to apply for

Deportation.75

He concluded his letter: “I pray to the Almighty God to give us 20 new Editors like the

one of the “Democrat” who is now in the clutch of those persons who wrongly do not like

him.”76 The East African Standard responded to Chowdhury’s letter by suggesting that

73 Shadle, The Souls of White Folk, 89-90.

74 EAS Feb. 23, 1923.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

213

Achariar’s letter had been pornographic, and Indians supported him out of a desire to

read illicit material; the Standard claimed Indians “may even enjoy reading what can

only be termed indecent literature of this description. To judge indeed from the letter of

an Indian barrister which we print in this issue, it would appear that they would like more

of it.” The paper concludes with the outraged observation that “these are the people who

wish to assist in governing Kenya. These are they who would guide the Native mind and

character.” 77 The idea that Indians might teach Africans to view white women as

sexually loose and to take erotic pleasure in stories of their licentiousness represented the

ultimate threat, the specter of “Black Peril.”

Achariar was freed in early March, largely due to the activism of the Indian

community, and the government made the unpopular decision not to deport him. It seems

that the Colonial Office instructed Governor Coryndon how to proceed; a letter from

Major E. A. T. Dutton, the Governor’s private secretary referred to Achariar’s

“deliberate, malicious and false attack on the honour of our women and, by the release of

Achariar without any suggestion that he should withdraw, the attack has been justified;

and this in a native country, Good Lord!” 78 The settlers agreed with this contention that

Achariar’s release represented an invitation to the sexual harassment and violation of

white women by men of other races. In response to his release from jail, white settlers

77 Ibid, 6.

78 RH: Mss Afr. S 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3 File 1. Letter from Major E. A. T.

Dutton to Leftwich, March 8, 1923. His correspondent, C. G. Leftwich, head of the

Office of Indian Trade Commission in East Africa, apparently offered his resignation

because of the handling of the Achariar situation.

214

held a public meeting at Mombasa Club, on March 10, 1923 to decide whether or not to

resort to direct action against Achariar. Ultimately, they decided against it, but advised

the Government more strictly to police the press. The Mombasa Times reported this

decision against direct action with outrage: the meeting had resolved

to take the advice of His Excellency to let the matter drop. In other words,

European women may be libelled; but because politics are supreme, their honour

must be subservient to political exigencies. It is on such an occasion that one hails

the Suffragette movement. After all, women appear to be chattels, where men

rule. 79

An un-avenged attack on the morals of white women rendered them “chattels,” the very

word used so often to criticize the position of Indian and African women. A column in

the East African Standard suggested that Achariar’s libel of European women was in fact

designed to provoke whites into violence, thereby gaining the sympathy of the Colonial

Office: “Our Indian friends are ready to make any sacrifice whether of truth, or even

decency, to enable them to goad some European into taking ‘direct action’, so that they

may find an excuse for fresh inflammatory cables [to India and the Colonial Office], or

confirmation for those already sent.” 80

In the event, neither Kenyan-Indians nor white settlers resorted to violence. Nor

was Achariar scared away from politics; he continued to publish The Democrat, and

when Jomo Kenyatta established his Gikuyu-language paper Muigwithania in 1928,

79 Mombasa Times, March 15, 1923: p.2

80 EAS, Feb. 21, 1923: p. 6

215

Achariar served as his printer.81 Although the furor over Achariar’s column ultimately

died down, an examination of the column and its context gives us important insight into

how racial discourses worked as social hierarchies of power in 1920s Kenya. As the

controversy evolved, spokespersons on each side made their arguments within an

increasingly restrictive framework. It became impossible to discuss Indian civic inclusion

without making a claim about the effect, positive or negative, that such inclusion would

have on the moral and sexual lives of Africans. Achariar titled his article “Stoop Low to

Conquer” as a way of indicting whites for the lengths they would go to discredit their

Indian peers; however, he framed his own response in accordance with the discursive

framework established by settler papers, that is, a framework which translated the

question of colonial belonging into a language of sexual morality.

By restricting the terms of the debate to which population would make better

colonists, the discourse of sexual trusteeship implicitly foreclosed the idea that Africans

might be capable of representing themselves: the possibility of Africans participating in

the democratic process was only held up as a disastrous possible consequence of the

battle between Indians and whites. Thus, although Africans were largely excluded from

the debate, they were the vital node around which it centered. Ironically, while the

language of sexual trusteeship tied sexual morality to civic inclusion, it also characterized

those who practiced the most “natural” sexuality as the least fit to rule. Importantly, then,

the language of sexual trusteeship was a way of defining not only colonial guardians but

81 Achariar later served as editor of a Bombay-based paper called the Sun. Robert G.

Gregory, Quest for Equality: Asian Politics in East Africa, 1900-1967 (Orient

Blackswan, 1993), 170.

216

also wards in relation to their sexual evolution. Ironically, by correlating sexual

innocence to political immaturity, sexual trusteeship suggested that because Africans

were sexually uncontaminated, they were also destined to be ruled by more corrupted

cultures.

It would not be accurate, however, to say that African voices were completely

silenced. Over the course of the crisis, there were several letters and telegrams published

in the press and widely discussed which purported to be authored by Africans. In the final

portion of this article, I examine these few African interventions, all of which raise

important methodological questions about the politics of representation. Given the

tendency of the discourse described above, it is tempting to recuperate these sources as

evidence of an ‘authentic’ African viewpoint. However, as we will see, the degree to

which such sources can be considered to be representative of general Kenyan African

opinion (if such a thing even existed) is highly questionable. Like the Indian and white-

authored sources analyzed above, African-authored sources followed a highly restricted

discursive framework which largely limited them to a discussion of which population

would make a preferable colonial authority. Those sources which did not fit with the

needs of the white establishment were likely to be dismissed as non-representative. The

very nature of trusteeship positioned Britons as representatives of an African population

that was not yet able to articulate its views, or to form opinions that aligned with their

best interests. For this reason, it is useful to examine the processes by which colonial

arbiters-- especially editors of newspapers and colonial officials-- judged the

representativeness of African-authored texts.

217

Representing Africans

During the Indian Crisis, African voices were co-opted or ignored depending on

their usefulness for a particular side of the conflict. Neither Indians nor whites were

interested in Africans’ self-representations, preferring to perform the kind of colonial

ventriloquism with which scholars of colonialism are so familiar. The sources which have

survived into the written archive cannot be considered as representative of African

opinion of the debate; for one thing, very few Africans were literate at the time, and as

will be discussed below those Africans with access to political power were also those

most likely to be sympathetic to the colonial regime.

We have very little information about how Africans responded to the Indian

Crisis; few contemporaries cared to record their opinions. However, there is no reason to

expect that the diverse African communities in Kenya agreed with each other regarding

the “Indian Question.” Surely the views of Kenyan Africans differed widely, between

city-dwellers, those who lived on Reserves, those who farmed on white-owned land,

those who worked for Indian artisans, and those who worked as domestic servants in

Indian or white households. Kenyan Africans of different political-linguistic

communities, those from the highlands or the coast, those of different religious

backgrounds, would have held different opinions; the Gikuyu, for example, are

disproportionately represented in the extant sources, most likely due to the fact that

Gikuyu worked for white settlers, attended mission schools, and converted to Christianity

at higher rates than other African groups. Attitudes must have varied according to gender,

218

age, and individual experience. Yet, in their championship of some African voices and

their dismissal of others, white settlers advanced the thesis that there was such a thing as

an authentic African opinion. Furthermore, they considered this opinion to be relevant to

the debate only to the extent that it bolstered white claims to the exclusive right to serve

as trustees of African welfare. An analysis of the sources allowed to enter the debate, and

of the mechanisms used to exclude the remainder, thus becomes an important piece of

evidence about the nature of colonial belonging.

Unsurprisingly, African sources which echoed the contention that Indians were

the enemies of Africans were those most readily accepted; even better were those which

explicitly stated the superiority of white rule. The African source most widely discussed

in the secondary literature on the Indian Crisis appeared in a special supplement to

Sekanyolya, a Luganda-language paper edited by Z.K. Setongo, a Ugandan expatriate

living in Nairobi. As Michael Twaddle explains in his article on Setongo, a sizable

community of educated Ugandans lived in Nairobi at the time, where they took advantage

of the higher wages available to them.82 The supplement in question had been translated

from Luganda to English “for the benefit of the many European subscribers to this paper”

indicating that the message was tailored to appeal to a settler audience.83 Sentongo

claimed that Indians had done nothing for the education of Africans, and asserted that the

82 Michael Twaddle, “Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa,” History in

Africa 24 (January 1, 1997): 309–36.

83 RH: Mss Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, file 1. Supplement to Sekanyolya,

July 1, 1921. Twaddle suggests that this was in response to a call from the Convention of

Associations asking Africans to help defeat the Indian platform. Twaddle, 321.

219

influence of two civilizations (British and Asian) upon Africans would lead to “to a

confusion of ideas on conduct, morals, etc.”84 It continues:

if the current rumour of equal rights for Indians with Whites in Kenya Colony

materialises, then the educated Africans in Kenya and Uganda will have to press

for similar rights. It is true that we educated Africans recognise the great

superiority of Whites over Africans and are willing to learn and obey their laws,

but the idea of being subjected to a race whom we do not admit to be our

superiors, who would then come to our shores in their thousands and prevent us

from learning trades and useful work, and therefore robbing us of our livelihood,

and ever keeping us in the dark, would be an unjust, intolerable law and opposed

to our sense of justice, because it is our wish to learn from the White man and to

form a big African Nation.85

On one hand, the article asserts Africans’ rights to equal citizenship, and even refers to

the creation of a Pan-African state. However, the supplement also reproduces

paternalistic arguments about the role of whites in the colonial “civilizing mission.” It

also echoes anti-Indian propaganda, particularly playing on white settlers’ fears that

enfranchising Indians would lead to the extension of rights to Africans. Sana Aiyar

dismisses the supplement as the product of a Muganda expatriate who was hostile to

Indian business interests.86 She adds that the Young Buganda Association repudiated the

claims, as did a statement composed by the East African Association, discussed below.

84 RH: Mss Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon], Box 3, file 1. Supplement to Sekanyolya,

July 1, 1921.

85 Ibid.

86 Baganda expatriates were in direct economic competition with Indian merchants and

artisans both at home and in Nairobi. Additionally, Twaddle notes that Sentongo was

educated at King’s College, Budo by the Church Missionary Society, where he would

have imbibed negative opinions about Indians in Africa. “Indian traders,” he notes, “were

frequently considered by Christian missionaries, as well as by other Europeans, also to

have been responsible for introducing a wide range of illnesses, including syphilis” and

for “moral ruin to the unsophisticated Baganda women and girls.” Twaddle, 323-4.

220

While Aiyar is correct to contextualize the Sekanyolya source, it is nonetheless important

to recognize that no source is more “authentically African” than another. Rather, all

represent viewpoints that emerged out of the complicated and varied engagements of

Africans with colonialism. For the author of Sekanyolya, the decision to reiterate the

rhetoric of white paternalism may have been a strategic one.

There were, of course, also some Africans who genuinely supported colonial rule

because of the privileged and powerful positions they gained through it. The so-called

“chiefs” (a political form that was not in fact indigenous to Kenya, but rather introduced

by the British87) were invested in the status quo which had granted them a real authority

based on artificial “traditions.” A memo written for Sir Robert Coryndon, then Governor

of Kenya, refers to a document signed by 56 chiefs and headmen and sent to the

government March 17, 1923, stating African opposition to the Indian claims. It asserted

that Indians refused to train Africans in skilled occupations and took jobs that would

otherwise go to Africans. The document also accused Indian traders of cheating Africans,

and of sending all of their earnings back to India.88 The arguments against Indians, and

87 East African communities tended to be governed by a council of elders, rather than a

single “chief.”

88. RH: Mss Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, file 1. Memo from EAT Dutton to

Gov. Coryndon, October 26, 1923. The document read: “In regard to the matter of the

Indians in this country, we wish to state that we do not desire Indians to come here and

do not look on their presence as helpful to us. Our people have no fondness for them they

on their part despise us and are lacking sympathetic feeling towards us. It appears to us

that they have not come to this land for our good, but solely for their own gain, and we

see that the money they make out of us goes to India. We never find Indians wishing to

teach us Natives trades or to help us to become wise or skilful [sic] and better off: they do

not wish us to learn. Their presence is hindering to the Natives because the Europeans

employ them to do their skilled work, but if there were no Indians the Europeans would

221

particularly the accusation that the money earned by Indians did not stay to circulate in

Kenya and improve the local economy, fitted closely to anti-Indian settler propaganda.

The Governor’s secretary Major Dutton also recorded “shorthand notes” of his

conversation with Kinyanjui, Paramount Chief of the Gikuyu. During this interview

Kinyanjui is recorded as stating “We would not help the Indian in any way and would

like to burn him. With one voice the Kikuyus would never seek Indian help or help

Indians. The White Man is the father of the Kikuyus and we will do anything he wants us

to do.”89 Kinyanjui expressed a strongly antagonistic attitude towards Indians, and

seemed to unquestioningly accept the colonial civilizing mission. Kinyanjui was a deeply

contentious figure, a go-between who arranged for Gikuyu squatters to rent land on the

farms of white settlers; post-colonial critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o characterizes him as a

traitor for his role in aiding the British in the detention and later assassination of early

Gikuyu nationalist Waiyaki wa Hiinga.90 As a chief, his interests differed widely from the

broader Gikuyu community, and his anti-Asian sentiments may not, therefore, be

representative. However, it is certainly true that the Gikuyu community interacted more

teach more natives and employ them. The Indians are always ready to overreach us and

make profit from us, as, for example, when they buy our maize for the purpose of selling

it again at a high price when food is scarce. We have stated on a previous occasion that

we do not wish Indians to build shops in our country; we would rather have our own

shops established by Kikuyu. We do not wish to have Indians living in our reserves.”

89 RH: Mss Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, file 1. Memo from EAT Dutton to

Gov. Coryndon, October 26, 1923. Dutton claimed that several other chiefs signed the

notes of this conversation.

90 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Nairobi: East African

Publishers, 1981), 45.

222

frequently with Indian merchants and shopkeepers than some other African communities,

due to their disproportionate employment as farm laborers on white-owned farms and the

predominance of Gikuyu in the area of the country most heavily colonized by whites. The

generalizability of this source is further called into question by the fact that Kinyanjui’s

words are mediated through a colonial official, captured in shorthand notes, and most

likely translated into English. Given these qualifications, the importance of this source for

our purposes lies in the way it re-mobilized a form of rhetoric popularized in the white

press. The debate over the Indian Crisis excluded the participation of African subjects by

consistently representing Africans as incapable of advocating for themselves. Despite this

framework, Kinyanjui found a way to enter the debate by adopting anti-Indian rhetoric.

The source which most explicitly echoed white settler rhetoric appeared as a letter

to the editor of the East African Standard. The author, Obner Owyo son of Obiero,

objected to the enfranchisement of Indians on the basis that they were untrustworthy and

sent all their money back home to India. While these objections were a familiar part of

anti-Indian propaganda, the author does contribute a more unique objection, noting that

Indian “women cannot look after hospitals nor touch a sick person, while the English

ladies are doing all this sort of things without saying that she being a European lady

cannot attend to a black man, as the European lady sees the sick person feels very pity on

him just the same as he was one of her own child.”91 Notice the editors of the Standard

made no effort to correct the grammar of this letter, presumably because the inaccuracies

contributed to the authenticity of the letter as authored by an African. In contrast, the

91 Reprinted in EAS, Feb. 7, 1923: 7.

223

Standard tended to point out gleefully grammatical mistakes in letters authored by

Indians, and mocked the supposedly pretentious word-choices of “Babus” (members of

the Indian middle-class) when writing in English.92 The white editors of the Standard

likely viewed this letter with approval since it re-circulated settler discourses privileging

white women as the source of charity and maternal care, the very image that

organizations like the EAWL hoped to convey. Articulated by an African pen, this

discourse took on added significance. It was not necessary for whites to gain African

approval for their political supremacy; however, in a colony where whites were vastly

outnumbered by Africans (in 1921 there were under 10,000 Europeans, and an estimated

2.5 million Africans)93 the appearance of African approval would certainly be

comforting.

A few African-authored sources, however, explicitly rejected the notion that

Africans were incapable of representing themselves. The East African Association, an

92 For more on the figure of the “babu,” see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity : The

“manly Englishman” and The “effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 14-18. Achariar had critiqued this

tendency in an earlier issue of The Democrat. When the editors of a white-owned Nairobi

paper (likely The Critic) referred to Achariar as a “Babu,” he replied “It was therefore

necessary for us to repudiate the fatherhood attributed to us.” Citing the meaning of

“Babu” as “father” in Hindi, Achariar turned the accusation of linguistic ignorance back

against his accuser. RH: MSS. AFr. s. 2304 [C.K. Archer] Box 2, File 3. Democrat, No. 6

Dec. 1922.

93 The figure for the European population is from Yash P. Ghai and Patrick McAuslan,

Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal Framework of

Government from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press, 1970), 36. No

official census of Africans was taken until 1931. Until that time, the colony relied upon

estimates—and various sources recorded different estimates. I have used the data

reported in the Colonial Office List, from the Demographic Survey, 145.

224

early African nationalist organization led by Harry Thuku, sent a telegram to the colonial

office at the end of May 1923, which reads as follows (for the sake of clarity, I have filled

in the words that were left out in the original telegram):

[The] East African Association consisting [of] Young Kikuyu Kavirondo Nandi

[and] other natives wish [to] represent grievances [by] sending [our] own

delegation. [We have] No faith [in] Dr. Arthur [and] believe he [will] harm our

cause [and] favour white settlers our troubles emanate [from] white settlers only.

We [are] afraid [to] declare our mind here [and] fear imprisonment transportation

or hanging. [We] Request [to be] afford[ed the] opportunity [to send]

representative natives [and] wait upon you before taking [a] decision regarding

[the] fate [of] our country [We] want [to] remain [a] Protectorate not [a] white

colony. [We] Understand chiefs [were] influenced [or] coerced [to] sign certain

documents [and we] disassociate ourselves [from the] contents thereof.”94

Here, the members of the East African Association identify themselves as the appropriate

representatives of African opinion; they stress their multi-ethnic composition, and

express their lack of faith in both Dr. Arthur, the missionary appointed to represent

Africans during the discussions in London, and in the chiefs who attested (apparently

under duress) to their antipathy to Indian enfranchisement. The Colonial Office dismissed

the telegram as being “unofficial” and therefore regretted it could not possibly consider

its proposal to send African delegates. A cable from Nairobi to the Colonial Office read

“GOVERNMENT AUTHORISE STATEMENT THAT ONLY CABLE SENT WAS

FROM PROMINENT SUPPORTER OF THUKU NAMED ABDULLAH______95

WHO JUST RELEASED FROM GOAL IN CONNECTION LAST YEARS RIOTS

94 RH: Mss Afr. s 633 [Sir Robert Coryndon] Box 3, file 3. Copy of telegram of May 25,

1923 from The East African Association to Colonial Office. Aiyar notes that the

statement was also printed in the East African Standard.

95 The telegram had been signed by Abdullah Karioki, the Secretary of the East African

Association.

225

AND WAS SENT IN ASSUMED NAMES.” The telegram had supposedly been sent to

the Colonial Office “WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OR APPROVAL [of] CHIEFS”; rather

the “EXECUTIVE INDIAN CONGRESS HAVE DISTORTED THESE FACTS TO

SUGGEST NATIVE REPUDIATION OF DEPUTATION AND THIS DOUBTLESS

ORIGIN CABLE.” 96 The cable reported that Indians were now organizing a meeting

with 600 Gikuyu in an attempt to gain belated support for their claims."97 Ironically, the

Colonial Office rejected African demands for meaningful representation by claiming that

the telegram had not been authored by Africans at all. Rather, Indians had manipulated

the East African Association into representing their case, and were continuing to rile-up

otherwise docile colonial subjects.

The local press was similarly dismissive of these claims. In an article somewhat

ironically titled “The Voice of Africa,” the East African Standard insisted that, while

most Africans were illiterate, they would surely side with Europeans if they could.

“Natives to-day are for the most part inarticulate,” the Standard claimed, “but they will

not always be so. There will come a time when they will judge us for our actions to-day,

and thank us for doing the right thing, or blame us bitterly for betraying their interests.”98

Here, the white settler paper proclaimed the impossibility of Africans speaking for

themselves, even as its own claim to represent Africans effectively silenced them.

96 RH: MSS. AFr. s. 2304 [CK Archer] Box 3, File 3. Translation of cable received from

Nairobi, June 8 1923.

97 Ibid.

98 EAS, Feb. 7, 1923: p. 6.

226

One final source, a letter to the editor of the Mombasa Times, also advocated for

African inclusion in the decision-making process in London. The letter, signed “ONE OF

THE COAST NATIVES,” says that Africans should be allowed to elect six to eight of

their own delegates to travel to London and present their case to the Duke of Devonshire.

The author also felt Arabs should be allowed to elect two delegates. S/he continues “The

public should remember that the Europeans and Indians have taught us enough as to what

to do when agitating, and should not the matter be nipped in the bud, this country will

sooner or later have again to mark time in its developments and await a settlement.”99

The nod to white agitation is somewhat puzzling-- is the author calling to mind the liberal

agitation of working-class Britons, or (more likely) the deeply conservative activism of

the white proponents of “direct action”? The idea of Indians instructing Africans in the

art of protest is suggestive of the mobility of nationalist languages across different

regions of the empire. It is also, of course, the very thing that Europeans were constantly

accusing Indians of doing; stirring up the otherwise supposedly placid Africans. A

response printed in the next day’s edition makes this point clear, claiming that the writer

is not representative since “we can confidently assert that probably only a few hundreds

of the vast native population of Kenya take the slightest interest in the matter” of Indian

citizenship. The author added “the Arab population is quite au fait with all that is going

on, and are quite capable of defending their own interests.” He mocked the idea of

sending African delegates to London: “surely he [that is, A COAST NATIVE] does not

anticipate any good results from a mob of natives (it is not stipulated they be educated)

99 Mombasa Times, June 7, 1923.

227

interviewing the Colonial Secretary.” In general, the author contended, Africans were

happy and well off: “A few discordant voices are heard here and there, of the Thuku type,

but little heed is paid to agitators except by a few ill-balanced semi-civilised subjects.”100

Again, we see that the designations of primitive/civilized are double-edged swords; it is

only the “semi-civilized,” alienated from the control of their home communities and

exposed to the vices of modernity, who are not content with the status quo. For an

African to be civilized, then, was to be a troublemaker.

Even when African voices did make it into the discourse of the Indian Crisis, they

were always mediated through the rubric of “authenticity.” Unsurprisingly, those

statements which aligned most closely with a colonial vision of white paternalism were

those most likely to be deemed authentic. Indeed, settlers believed that part of their

obligation as “trustees” of African welfare was to determine which African voices could

be considered authentic.

Conclusion

During the Indian Crisis, Kenya’s two “immigrant races” argued over which

group was more suited to serve as trustees of African welfare. Significantly, sexuality

became a central metaphor of fitness to rule. Both Indian-Kenyans and white settlers

accused their opponents of sexual depravity; both suggested that this depravity could be

spread to vulnerable African wards. The duties of sexual trusteeship were mobilized in

this debate in ways that presented Africans as childlike, vulnerable, and incapable of self-

100 Mombasa Times, June 8, 1923: p. 24.

228

representation. African voices were included in the debate only to the extent that they

supported the colonial civilization mission; any more trenchant critiques of colonialism

were dismissed as fraudulent or inauthentic.

While this chapter has examined a discourse where two competing populations

accused each other of sexual deviance, the next chapter explores a rhetoric of white

sexual dysfunction that emanated from within the white community. An outbreak of

alleged assaults on European and Asian children by African men produced a surprising

rhetorical response; both administrators and settlers blamed white women for generating

deviant sexual desires within their African employers through their own lewd behavior.

Through an analysis of the intersecting languages of age, race, and consent, I show how

the language of sexual trusteeship was applied to the intimate space of the settler home.

229

Chapter 5: “No Modesty to Offend: Childhood, Consent, and Race in “Black Peril” Cases, 1907-1952”

Part I: White Peril

In 1920, what appeared to be a spree of assaults upon white children by African

domestic servants prompted outcry from within the Kenyan settler community. The

colonial government responded by appointing a “Special Committee on Sexual Assaults

of Natives upon Europeans” to investigate the problem.1 As part of their study, the

Committee compiled all the available data on sexual assaults of white and Indian girls

and women by African men. Despite widespread concern about the alleged assaults

within the settler community, the committee’s report, completed on July 22, 1920,

determined that “sexual offences by natives upon European women and children, so far

from being prevalent, are quite exceptional in this protectorate and that there is no reason

to think they are on the increase.”2 The Committee determined that no further legislation

was needed to deter such crimes.3 Instead, the Committee placed the onus for the

1 The Special Committee was composed of the Chief Native Commissioner, the Principal

Medical Offer, the Commissioner of Police and three members of the colony’s

Legislative Council, Sir. Northrup MacMillan, Mr. W. J. Moynagh, Mr. T.A. Wood,

MBE and the Chairman, Mr. H.W. B. Blackall.

2 Kenya National Archive [KNA]: AM/1/5 Indecent Assaults. Report of the Special

Committee on Sexual Assaults of Natives on Europeans. July 22, 1920.

3 A decade later, the opinion that Kenya was relatively safe from Black Peril was also

expressed in an exchange between J.H.F. Murray, Lieutenant-Governor of Papua New

Guinea and Nairobi’s Commissioner of Police in July of 1930. Murray explained that

“We have been much troubled of late years by offences, mostly trivial but at the same

time very exasperating against white women” and asked for advice on how rape was

deterred in Kenya. The Commissioner’s reply stated that “serious indecent assault on

white women by Africans have been comparatively rare in this country, and with the

230

prevention of sexual assault on white parents--and particularly mothers. These mothers

had been negligent in leaving their children in the care of young male African servants.4

The public press went even further—suggesting that white women had fostered sexual

desires in otherwise innocent domestic servants. A letter to the editor published in the

East African Standard in June of 1920, entitled “The Black Peril. Appeal Issued to the

Women of B.E.A [British East Africa],” chastised white women who

even when half dressed, have been known to allow these savages to enter their

bedrooms to fasten up their dresses, and even to bath and dress their baby girls as

if the natives had no more feeling than a machine. It is not to be wondered at then

that such familiarities lead first to lack of respect, and later by easy stages to the

horrors which have been occupying our Law Courts lately.5

In short, while the Committee and the white settler public disagreed about the degree to

which “Black Peril” existed in the colony, there was widespread agreement that white

women were to blame for those cases which had allegedly occurred.

In his discussion of “Black Peril” scares in Kenya, David Anderson states that

"whites were urged to guard against the polluting influence of black sexuality--African

men were widely presented as a diseased and degenerate menace, African women as

wanton, lustful symbols of uncontrolled sexual behavior."6 Yet my examination of the

exception of one pending case, the accused have been detected and convicted.” He

recommended that white women in Papua should be advised not to live by themselves or

walk alone at night, and that domestic servants should be registered. KNA: AM/1/5 (or

1/1/5) 4 KNA: AM/1/5 Indecent Assaults. Report of the Special Committee on Sexual Assaults

of Natives on Europeans. July 22, 1920.

5 KNA: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5) Indecent Assaults. 1920-1944. The East African Standard,

circa 26 Jun 1920.

6 Ibid, 48.

231

Kenyan archival collections indicates just the reverse. Even at the height of ‘Black Peril’

panics, both settlers and officials agreed that Africans did not practice rape in their

indigenous communities--but not because they possessed self-control and discipline.

Whites viewed those virtues as characteristic of higher levels of civilization, and hence

absent from ‘primitive’ societies. Rather, both white settlers and administrators

maintained that in African societies there was no need for rape, because Africans were

consistently allowed access to age-appropriate sexual partners and activities; they agreed

with predominant sexology/psychological theories that sexual deviance only occurred in

those cultures where sexuality was repressed. Thus, it was only those Africans who had

been contaminated by contact with “civilization”—either European or Asian—who

developed deviant sexual desires, including the desire to commit rape. Rapes allegedly

committed by African men were therefore constructed as anomalous, and as the result of

greater contact with outsiders.

In this chapter, I argue that cases of interracial sexual assault in Kenya were

conceptualized using a language of “White Peril.” Unlike the term Black Peril, which

appeared frequently in primary sources, White Peril was not a term generally used by

colonial Kenyans. Rather, I use this term to describe the widely-held belief that white

settlers, and particularly white women, were responsible for creating an environment of

sexual danger in their own homes.7 This rhetoric held that white women who promoted

7 Carina Ray has also written about “White Perils” on the Gold Coast, although she uses

the term to refer to sexual assaults committed by European men upon African women.

Carina E. Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial

Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (February 2014):

78–110. The term “White Peril” was also used in a report from Rhodesia in 1915 to refer

232

excessive “familiarity” with their African servants created a desire for the white female

body that was entirely absent in the “uncontaminated” African mind.

This chapter is divided into two parts, each of which considers how the discourse

of African “primitive normativity” influenced interpretations of interracial rape cases.

The first part examines how the discourse of White Peril fit into the larger ideology of

sexual trusteeship. As trustees of African sexual welfare, white settlers had an obligation

to protect their domestic servants from sexual contamination. Those women who failed in

this obligation were blamed for creating an environment of sexual danger in the colony.

The settler home became a central area of concern because of the kinds of interracial

intimacy that took place there.

In the second part, I take a closer look at several cases involving the alleged

assault of white or Indian children. Surprisingly, the judges in these cases expressed a

vision of childhood sexuality that negated the impact of such assaults. Because African

men and European children were both conceptualized as “primitive,” judges dismissed

cases of alleged assault as a form of sexual play between two evolutionary equals. By

examining these cases, I demonstrate how the notion of African sexual “normative

to sex between white men and “coloured” women. Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White

Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935 (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2000), 70. I use the term more broadly: in Kenya, the anxieties which I

term White Peril did include alleged assaults of African women/children by European

men, but extended also to consensual interracial relationships, and, most frequently, to

behaviors which, although not inherently or clearly sexual in nature, were perceived as

promoting undo “familiarity” in African servants and thereby creating desires for sexual

contact with white women or girls. The discourse of White Peril also overlapped

considerably with the notion that Africans would be “contaminated” by too rapid contact

with “civilization,” and thus the normative primitivity that supposedly characterized

African sexuality would be replaced by various “civilized vices.”

233

primitivity” supported a vision of Africans as children in need of the supervision of a

parental colonial race.

Historiography

There is a rich literature on the discourse of “Black Peril,” which has emphasized

the discourse’s utility as a method to control both black men and white women. In the

US, scholars have described how discourses of “Black Peril” were used to keep a newly

emancipated black population under control in the years following the Civil War. Crystal

Feimster has outlined the dual purpose of the Black Peril rhetoric in the post-Civil War

US. First, “the portrayal of black men as beastly and unable to control their sexual desire

served to justify the practice of lynching, segregation laws, and disfranchisement of black

men.”8 Second, the discourse controlled the behaviors of women, circulating the narrative

that “the New South was a dangerous place for women who transgressed the narrow

boundaries of race and gender.”9 Furthermore, the focus on the (often fictional) assaults

of white women by black men helped deflect attention from the sexual abuse committed

by white men against black women.10

Yet in her examination of cases of interracial sexual assault in Virginia, Lisa

Lindquist Dorr has shown that accusations of sexual assault were not universally or

8 Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and

Lynching (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

234

unquestioning accepted: while “being accused of an assault by a white woman placed a

black man in considerable jeopardy,” the cases she examined indicated that a number of

factors influenced whether or how severely the accused was punished.11 These factors

included the social class and sexual reputation of the white woman in question: “Not only

did some women bring their assaults on themselves, some whites seemed to believe, but

some white women’s characters were already so compromised that their having been

violated did not represent a threat to the social order.”12 Black men who had connections

to prominent white men, or who were perceived to “know their place” within the racial

order were also less likely to suffer harsh punishment. Thus, “Black Perils” were as

important to controlling the behavior of white women as that of black men.

The work on “Black Peril” cases in colonial Africa supports this contention. In a

study of the 1938 election in South Africa, Jonathan Hyslop has noted that Afrikaner

nationalists exploited the specter of interracial marriage to discredit their opponents. This

rhetoric was particularly appealing because the 1920s and 30s saw trends (like

urbanization and industrialization) that increased the independence of white women.

“The Nationalists' apparent hysteria about 'mixed marriages',” he notes, “in fact

performed an important role in re-establishing gender hierarchy. By portraying white

women as sexually threatened by black men, Afrikaner males claimed the role of

11 Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-

1960 (Chapel Hill; London, Chapel Hill, Getzville, New York]: The University of North

Carolina Press, University of North Carolina Press, William SHein & Company, 2004),

5.

12 Ibid, 11.

235

protectors of women, thereby reasserting their patriarchal control.”13 Likewise, Joch

McCulloch has argued that “In Southern Rhodesia discourses about sexual pathology

helped to decide the most fundamental of bourgeois rights: the legitimate claims of men

to property, which included control of the bodies of women, headship of a family, and

citizenship.”14

A number of scholars have focused particularly on the relationship between white

settler women and their African domestic servants, showing that contemporaries blamed

the excessive “familiarity” of white women for cases of assault. In an analysis of a “rape

scare” in Natal in 1886, Jeremy Martens notes that “the panic firmly laid the blame for

‘outrages’ on female settlers who failed to conform to the domestic ideal expected of

white women in a racist and patriarchal society, and on African men who subverted

accepted gender norms.”15 As in Kenya, the scare was also used to extend control over

the movement of African men; the colonial government responded to settler demands by

establishing a system of “native registration” and by establishing the death penalty for the

13 Jonathan Hyslop, “White Working-Class Women and the Invention of Apartheid:

‘Purified’ Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against ‘Mixed’ Marriages,

1934–9,” The Journal of African History 36, no. 01 (1995): 60.

14 McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue, 12.

15 Jeremy C. Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys’: An Analysis of

Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886,” Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (June 1,

2002): 397. Likewise, Norman Etherington has argued that an 1870s rape scare in Natal

was tied to fears about a loss of economic control over white women. Norman

Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of Southern African

Studies 15, no. 1 (1988): 36–53.

236

crime of rape.16 In keeping with the broader rhetoric of the threat of “detribalization,”

African men who “were independent of ‘tribal’ restraints and had put on ‘a spurious

veneer’ of civilization” were believed to be the most likely to assault white women.17

Consensual interracial sex between white women and African men was also seen

as a contaminating force. Diana Jeater has shown that settlers in Southern Rhodesia

believed that “sex across the colour bar brought out the inherent perversity of African

male sexuality and led to assaults on other European women.”18 Poor whites in African

colonies were viewed as particularly prone to engaging in interracial sex.

Interestingly, the closest resemblance to the situation in Kenya can be found not

in Africa, but in British colonial Papua. Amirah Inglis has examined the White Women’s

Protection Ordinance, which made the rape or attempted rape of a European woman or

girl a capital offense, in 1926—the same year that Kenya adopted a similar amendment to

their Criminal Law. (In fact, the papers of the Kenyan National Archives reveal that

officials from the two colonies corresponded about the issue of “Black Peril” in their

respective jurisdictions.)19 As in Kenya, the anxiety focused on the relationship between

16 Martens, “Settler Homes, Manhood and ‘Houseboys,’” 380-381.

17 Ibid, 395.

18 Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse

in Southern Rhodesia, 1894-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 89.

19 The opinion that Kenya was relatively safe from Black Peril was also expressed in an

exchange between J.H.F. Murray, Lieutenant-Governor of Papua New Guinea and

Nairobi’s Commissioner of Police in July of 1930. Murray explained that “We have been

much troubled of late years by offences, mostly trivial but at the same time very

exasperating against white women” and asked for advice on how rape was deterred in

Kenya. The Commissioner’s reply stated that “serious indecent assault on white women

237

white women and their domestic servants, and often blamed white women for inculcating

sexual desire in their servants through thoughtless behavior. As the Lieutenant Governor

Hubert Murray noted in a letter to his sister in law, “the real reason [for the attacks] was

the carelessness of the white women themselves, who do not seem to realise that a native

is a man with a man’s passions, and commonly very little self-control.”20 Again, as in

Kenya, indigenous men who had been “detribalized” were seen as most likely to commit

assaults. In a letter to the Sydney Bulletin, one writer from Papua blamed cases of sexual

assault on the colonial missions, which “by abolishing that sexual freedom which

traditionally young Papuans had enjoyed, had left them frustrated and constantly in need

of sexual gratification.”21

Three studies deserve special mention, because they rely on many of the same

sources I examine here. The first is David Anderson’s 2010 article “Sexual Threat and

Settler Society: ‘Black Perils’ in Kenya, c. 1907-30,” which examines three separate

episodes of “Black Peril” in the colony: in 1907, 1920-22, and 1924-26.22 Despite relying

on the same archival documents, Anderson arrives at several conclusions that I will

by Africans have been comparatively rare in this country, and with the exception of one

pending case, the accused have been detected and convicted.” He recommended that

white women in Papua should be advised not to live by themselves or walk alone at

night, and that domestic servants should be registered. KNA: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5)

20 Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics

in Papua (New York: StMartin’s Press, 1975), 80.

21 Ibid.

22 David Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society: ‘Black Perils’ in Kenya, C. 1907-

30,” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 38, no. 1 (March 2010): 47–74.

238

dispute here. First Anderson argues that in Southern and Eastern Africa23 “whites were

urged to guard against the polluting influence of black sexuality—African men were

widely presented as a diseased and degenerate menace, African women as wanton, lustful

symbols of uncontrolled sexual behaviour.”24 Although this vision of African sexuality

did sometimes appear in “Black Peril” discourses, it was less prominent than the

contention that only “contaminated” Africans committed assault. Furthermore, the idea

that African women were hypersexual was not especially prominent in Kenya; rather, as

Brett Shadle points out, Kenyan African women were more often portrayed as asexual

and non-agential victims of sexual and economic exploitation.25 Anderson also argues

that

unlike Rhodesia, in Kenya sexual assaults of mature white women were rarely a

feature of the ‘black perils’, the East African cases thus provoking less discussion

of white morality and sexual behaviour. Instead, it was the sexual assault of the

innocent and helpless—children and the elderly—that sparked the most

vociferous of Kenya’s ‘black peril’ debates.26

23 The comparison between the two spaces (as I will discuss further in the next

paragraph) often produces unwieldy/untenable generalizations. It is not clear why

Anderson decided to make a comparison in this place, as the remainder of the article

focuses exclusively on Kenya.

24 Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society,” 48.

25 “While whites in other times and places often portrayed black women as

hypersexualized,” he notes, “white stereotypes of African women in Kenya focused more

on their exploitation by African men. Rather than a temptress of loose morals, the African

woman in Kenya was a slave sold off as a girl to some toothless old man, the rest of her

life a monotony of childrearing and field work.” Brett Lindsay Shadle, The Souls of White

Folk : White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s-1920s, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester,

England) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 102.

26 Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society,” 49.

239

Cases involving children did attract the most attention in Kenya, but I will argue here that

issues of white morality and sexual behavior were in fact essential to the discourses

surrounding cases of alleged child rape.27 Furthermore, my research indicates that

children, even those as young as 3 years old, were not universally perceived as

innocent—indeed, in several cases, they were blamed for inviting sexual assaults.

A second important source is Dane Kennedy’s comparative study of settler

societies in Rhodesia and Kenya, Islands of White.28 While Kennedy usefully points out

parallels between the two African colonies, his comparative approach sometimes

minimizes differences between the two spaces. For instance, Kennedy suggests that

"Most settlers were convinced that, as one Rhodesian legislator proclaimed, 'the male

native more or less has a tendency to commit rape"29—while a few pages later he

discusses the prevalence of the belief in Kenya that “the blame for black assaults lay with

the ignorant impropriety of some white women.”30 While a full discussion of the

differences between the two spaces is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to

27As Anderson himself notes, white mothers tended to be blamed for assaults committed

against their children. Ibid, 58.

28 Kennedy’s book predated much of the other work on Black Peril in Africa. as Jock

McCulloch notes, Kennedy was writing in the 1980s when “the history of settler societies

was an unfashionable subject.” McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue. 7 One exception is

the work of Charles van Onselen, whose 1982 work Studies in the Social and Economic

History of the Witswatersland touched on the subject. Charles Van Onselen, Studies in

the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, Vol. 2 (Harlow,

Essex ; New York: Longman, 1982).

29 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White : Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern

Rhodesia, 1890-1939 (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987).

30 Ibid, 141.

240

note that “Black Peril” scares were both more frequent in Rhodesia than in Kenya, and

occurred at an earlier date, reflecting differences in patterns of settlement.31 Settlers in

Rhodesia were also more successful in attaining white self-rule in Rhodesia.32 Kennedy

conceptualizes “Black Peril” scares as a response to new waves of immigration, or

periods of economic downturn; “when pressures set white setters at odds among

themselves, when circumstances frayed the racial threads that bound them into a cohesive

community, the specter of black peril arouse to instruct and remind white settlers of their

common needs and their common fears.”33 Yet the fact that cases of “Black Peril” in

Kenya were blamed on particularly subsets of the white settler community—women and

poor whites—suggests that such discourses were actually divisive, in that they separated

the responsible, knowledgeable settlers from those who, by virtue of their ignorance or

carelessness, created an environment of sexual danger for everyone.34

31 For instance, as early as 1903 Rhodesia passed a law which made even attempted rape

punishable by capital punishment (which, as McCulloch notes may well have been the

most severe law of its kind anywhere in the British empire). McCulloch, Black Peril,

White Virtue, 4. Meanwhile, the legislation making rape a capital offence in Kenya, was

not passed until 1926, and did not extend to cases of attempted rape. McCulloch notes

that “the major Black Peril panics [in Southern Rhodesia] occurred between 1902 to 1905

and 1908-1911”—at a time when the Kenyan settler community had not yet been

established. Ibid, 20.

32 For instance, Rhodesian settlers obtained a majority of seats on the colony’s legislative

council in 1908—while Kenyan settlers agitated for an “unofficial majority” on their

Legislative Council for almost the entire colonial period. Ibid, 14.

33 Kennedy, Islands of White, 146.

34 Kennedy’s research is also limited by his almost exclusive focus on the Grogan

incident of 1907 as an example of “Black Peril” --apart from a brief mention of the

Semini case, this is the only case of Kenyan case that Kennedy discusses. The Grogan

incident was atypical both because it took place at a very early date of settlement, when

241

The latest work on settler culture in Kenya is Brett Shadle’s 2015 The Souls of

White Folk. Shadle includes a discussion of “Black Peril” in Kenya which supports many

of the conclusions of this chapter.35 In particular, he notes that white women and whites

who were marginal because of ethnicity or economic status were blamed for creating the

threat of “Black Peril.” Shadle centers his discussion around the notion of white prestige,

the idea (prominent among settlers) that the superior civilizational status of whites

ensured the wary respect of indigenous people. Such respect could, however, be impaired

by the misbehavior of individual whites; “In Kenya,” Shadle notes, “prestige was

connected to race such that any white person’s individual failure to maintain prestige

threatened the prestige of all white people.”36

Shadle’s focus on prestige is useful to understanding why settlers were so

concerned with policing the behaviors of errant whites. Yet my research reveals that

Kenyan settlers focused not just on loss of prestige, but also on the idea that Africans had

to be taught to desire white women, and that they had to be sufficiently contaminated by

white “civilization” to turn to sexual assault. As I will demonstrate here, loss of

“prestige” was not viewed as enough to inspire an African man to rape a white girl or

woman; rather, he had to be taught to desire white females. Placing Kenyan “Black Peril”

scares into the broader context of the discourse of sexual trusteeship reveals some of the

the settler culture of Kenya had not yet been solidified, but also because it was a case that

did not actually involve sex—Grogan accused two rickshaw drivers of insulting the

prestige of two white women passengers by jostling them excessively.

35 Shadle, The Souls of White Folk, 96-108.

36 Ibid, 5.

242

complexities of interracial intimacies in Kenya. By shifting the focus from the threat of

“Black Peril” to the danger of “White Peril,” we begin to see how anxieties about the

sexual contamination of African domestic servants fit into the larger rhetoric about the

duty of whites to preserve the morality of Africans.

Archives and Sources

A study of sexual assault in colonial Kenya is, of course, limited by the available

archives, and shaped in significant ways by the construction of that archive. Readers of

this piece will likely be frustrated by the range and numbers of questions that simply

cannot be answered—among these are questions about the representativeness of the

available cases, the outcome of these, the social class or backgrounds of the parties

involved, the diagnostic tools used to determine whether sexual assault had occurred,

and, often, the age of the accused. In the next section, I provide a brief summary of the

kinds of sources consulted for this chapter, and the structure of the archives in which they

appeared. While the limitations of the archive dictate certain blind spots in our

understanding of sexual assaults (particularly assaults committed on non-white women),

paying attention to the structure of the archive reveals important information about when

and why sexual assaults became a matter of public concern.

A key document for this study is a chart, entitled “Record of Black Peril Cases

Reported to Police,” included in the collection of files from the Attorney General’s Office

243

in the Kenyan National Archives.”37 This chart appears to have been submitted to the

“Special Committee” as part of their investigation. It outlined all known cases of assaults

between 1910, and December of 1920, and included the place and date of the alleged

assault, the name and age of the victim, the name and “tribe” of the accused (all of whom

were African, with the exception of one Indian man38), the punishment given if the

accused was convicted, and a brief description of the offence. The age of the accused was

sometimes also given, although often limited to a characterization of the accused as an

“adult” or “mtoto” (Kiswahili for child). Because this chart contains only the records of

cases reported to the police, and only cases where the assailant was of a different race

than the victim, the chart is necessarily limited in scope. Assaults committed by white

men upon women of any race are not included; likewise, no assaults of African (or Arab)

women appear.

Most of the data discussed here are from the Kenya National Archives, and

primarily from the papers of the Attorney General’s Office .39 Sometimes, however,

37 KNA: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5) Indecent Assaults, 1920-1944. “Record of Black Peril Cases

Reported to Police,” referred to hereafter as “Black Peril Chart.”

38 This was the first case listed, from April of 1910. The accused was sentenced to 6

weeks of Rigorous Imprisonment (i.e., imprisonment with hard labor) under Section 352

of the Indian Penal Code, which punished the crime of “assault or criminal force

otherwise than on grave provocation.” The accused, whose age is not listed, had allegedly

got off his bike, approached a ten-year-old European girl, and told her “he would have a

kiss.” Ibid.

39 I also include sources from the Rhodes House Library at Oxford, and from the digitized

edition of the East African Standard—which is, however, only available for a limited

number of years. I was not able to find much relevant data on sexual assaults in the

British National Archives.

244

relevant files were located in the collections from a particular district or province. Due to

this somewhat haphazard organization of these files, it is probable that there are more

data on sexual assaults included in files on other subjects; likewise, there is one file that

was clearly relevant that I was not able to gain access to.40

Each of these files include a variety of documents, from government reports and

memos (often with no listed author), to newspaper clippings (primarily from local

Kenyan papers) describing alleged assaults, or outlining opinions on the issues of “Black

Peril.” Often the clippings were cut in such a way that there is no way of determining

which publication they came from, although the content of these clippings indicates that

they were usually from local papers and usually from papers geared towards a settler

readership. Whoever compiled the papers was likely tasked with adding news coverage

relevant to the file’s subject (either a particular case, or all cases within a given time

frame); we have no way of knowing, however, how many papers the collector reviewed,

or whether s/he did a particularly thorough job. In some cases, clippings were sent to the

office by settlers or administrators who were corresponding with authorities.

We also have no way of knowing how many cases of assault occurred and were

never reported, or which were reported, but were ignored by Kenyan authorities. As

mentioned above, these files were almost exclusively concerned with cases of assault

committed by Africans upon white or Asian children. It is very unlikely that African

40 This is listed as KNA: Ag/1/609, Indecent Assaults on Women and children 1935-

1942. I was told that the shelf on which it was housed was stuck, and could not be

moved.

245

women or girls who experienced sexual assault would report them to the police.41 As will

be discussed below, the belief that white women had prompted assaults on their children

through neglect or “familiarity” probably discouraged many white parents too from

reporting suspected assaults. Likewise, given the inequities involved in the Kenyan legal

41 A very few cases of sexual assaults committed upon African victims appear in the

KNA files. One case from 1943 was included in the same file was the Report of the

“Special Committee.” where a fifteen-year old African girl, employed as a domestic

servant at the Kijabe Inland Mission, was found lying unconscious beside a railroad track

about 2 miles away from Kijabe Station. The woman, when revived, reported that she had

been raped by seven soldiers. She was examined for “seminal stains,” but none were

found. Although the file does not indicate the outcome of her complaint, at least some of

the police suspected her of making up the story; they suggested she had jumped off the

train in order avoid having to walk a longer distance home from the station, and then

made up the story about the assault to explain her injuries. Such a reception underscores

the likelihood that many African women who experienced assaults would have avoided

reporting them to the police; and, indeed, the authorities might not have ever known

about this case had the victim not been found unconscious. KNA: AM/1/5 (or 1/1/5)

Several more cases involving both African victims and African assailants appear in the

files of the Provincial Commissioner for the District of Nyanza, bordering Lake Victoria

in the southwest part of Kenya. All of the listed cases involved child victims. Despite the

name of the file, “Death Penalty for Rape,” not all of those found guilty were actually

sentenced to death. A 1926 Amendment to the colony’s Criminal Law established that all

cases of rape were punishable by the death penalty—and all the cases listed in this file

occurred after 1926. However, the judge was allowed to use his discretion to “enhance”

the sentence or not. It is difficult to tell how many rape cases were included in this file—

several documents seem to be referring to the same case—but in the only case where the

accused was clearly sentenced to death he was found guilty of not only raping but also

murdering his victim. A letter from the Senior Commissioner [probably of Native

Affairs] of Nyanza expressed his fears that the imposition of the death penalty might

encouraged rapists to kill their victims—presumably, so they could not report the

offences. KNA: PC/NZA 3/17/18/2. “Death Penalty for Rape.” 1926. Letter Sept. 30

1926. A file titled “Native Rape Questions” to concerned an inquiry sent out by the Chief

Native Commissioner (at that time, John Aisworth) to all the Provincial Commissioners

asking whether Africans believed that sex with a virgin could cure VD. Only one PC

responded: the PC from Kismayu reported that this was indeed a belief held among the

“WaGosha,” an ethnic group from the Northeast Kenya/Somalia. KNA: PC/JUB/1/4/9.

Native Rape Cases, 1920

246

system, we should not assume that all reported cases of assault occurred, or were

committed by the accused. (These same inequities do, however, make it all the more

remarkable that the accused was found not guilty in several cases of alleged sexual

assault.)

There are therefore a number of things we simply cannot know about the

incidence or impact of sexual assault in colonial Kenya. However, the very partiality of

this archive can give us valuable information. The structure of the archive tells us that

both settlers and administrators were most interested in sexual assaults where the victim

and assailant were of different races. They were furthermore most interested in cases

where the alleged assailant was an African man or boy, and particularly where he was in

the employ of a white family. Cases which became a subject of scandal or debate in the

colony (for instance, the two so-called “Kijabe Outrages”42) tended to be much more

thoroughly documented; these cases, in turn, tended to involve victims who were either

very young or very old. Age seems to have been almost as central a concern for colonial

authorities and settlers as race when adjudicating cases in the courts or the colonial

press—an issue that I will return to in Part II of this chapter.

The Kenyan Legal System

42 There were two cases of assault that were given this moniker. The first occurred in

1926, when a elderly British South African woman living in Kijabe was allegedly raped

by her “house-boy.” The second, and even more infamous case, occurred at the height of

the “Circumcision Crisis” in January of 1930, when an American missionary woman was

assaulted and murdered. There was some suspicion that she had also been forcibly

circumcised. Both cases were discussed widely in the colonial press.

247

A description of the legal system which received and handled these cases is also

necessary for understanding what follows. Until 1930, Kenya used the Indian Penal Code

[IPC], originally developed in the 1830s and imported intact when the British East

African Protectorate was established in 1895.43 In Section 375, the IPC defined rape as a

crime committed exclusively by men against women. While the IPC did invoke the

language of consent, it did a poor job defining it. For instance, a man committed rape if

he had sex with a woman “against her will” or “without her consent”-- the distinction

between the two concepts was not elaborated. A man also committed rape if he had sex

with a woman “with her consent, when her consent has been obtained by putting her in

fear of death, or of hurt” or “with her consent, when the man knows that he is not her

husband, and that her consent is given because she believes that he is another man to

whom she is or believes herself to be lawfully married.”44 From this clause we can intuit

that for a woman to give consent to a sexual act involved not only her desire for or

willingness to participate in that act, but also required her to have an accurate

understanding of the context of that act. In the case of women who falsely believed

43 The Indian Penal Code (IPC) was developed by Thomas Babington Macaulay between

1835-1837 (although not enacted until 1860). It was the first Criminal Law Code in the

British Empire; despite a vigorous codification movement in the 1800s, domestic Britain

continued to use Common Law, which relied on Judges to rely on legal precedents rather

than a written code when making their decisions. Wing Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and

Stanley Meng Heong Yeo, eds., Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The

Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform, International and

Comparative Criminal Justice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). After 1930, Kenya switched to

a penal code based on the Nigerian model.

44 In this case, the rapist must also have been aware that he was not legally married to the

victim.

248

herself to be married, for instance, agreeing to have sex with a man on the basis of that

false belief did not amount to legal consent: her consent was negated by her false

understanding of her relationship to the man in question.

The IPC also established an age at which sex was illegal, “with or without [the

person’s] consent.”45 The phrasing suggests that a child younger than ten could consent to

a sexual act, but that consent would not be considered valid. This age of consent had been

set after a vigorous debate in India: the original code, enacted in 1860, set the age of

consent at 10 and only raised it to 12 in 1891, after many years of advocacy by opponents

of the practice of “child-marriage” among high-caste Hindus. Scholars have shown that

conflict surrounding the Age of Consent in India was part of a larger debate over the

woman question. The meaning of consent, as envisioned through these debates, will be

discussed further below.

Interestingly, the section of the IPC which dealt with “unnatural offences,”

defined as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or

animal,” did not even mention consent.46 In practice, this would criminalize sex between

men, but also bestiality. It defined “carnal intercourse” in terms of penetration, which

presumably negated the potential for a woman to commit an “unnatural offence” with

45 The “Age of Consent” Reforms were a major node of struggle between British

reformers and progressive Indians, and culturally conservative traditionalists. See Tanika

Sarkar, “A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal,”

Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 601–22; Tanika Sarkar, “Rhetoric against Age of

Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child-Wife,” Economic and Political

Weekly 28, no. 36 (1993): 1869–78; Mrinalini Sinha, “Reading Mother India: Empire,

Nation, and the Female Voice,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (1994): 6–44.

46 Section 377 of the IPC.

249

another woman.47 As legal scholar V. Dhagamwar has noted, "where sodomy,

homosexuality or any other unnatural sexual practices were under consideration, mutual

consent was no protection and the age of the parties was irrelevant."48 Illicit sex was

defined, then, as sex between partners who were inappropriate either because of their age

or their gender, or sex where the woman did not possess an accurate understanding of her

relationship to her partner.

Several crimes not listed under the general heading of “rape” were nevertheless

used to prosecute sexual crimes. The most common of these was Section 354 of the code,

listed under the heading of “Criminal Force and Assault,” which concerned the “assault

or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty” or its corollary Section

509, “Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman.” (In the IPC, the

500’s referred to attempted crimes). The text of this section specified that “Whoever

assaults or uses criminal force to any woman, intending to outrage or knowing it to be

likely that he will thereby outrage her modesty, shall be punished with imprisonment of

either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.”49

The “Records of Black Peril” chart described above shows that defendants accused of

“Black Peril” were also prosecuted under Sections 352, or “assault or criminal force

47 One could imagine a case in which instrumental penetration by a woman would meet

the criteria of the law, but no such case has come to my attention.

48 Quoted in Barry Wright: "Macaulay's Indian Penal Code: Historical Context and

Originating Principles", in Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The

Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform, International and

Comparative Criminal Justice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 50. 49 IPC Section 354

250

otherwise than on grave provocation,” 325, “voluntarily causing grievous hurt,” 506,

“criminal intimidation,” and 394, voluntarily causing hurt “in committing or in

attempting to commit a robbery.” Unfortunately, I don’t have sufficient evidence to

determine how authorities differentiated between these different crimes; I would

speculate that these “non-rape” offences may have been used where the evidence was

insufficient to prove a rape, or where the parents or victim involved preferred not to

define the act that had allegedly taken place as rape in order to preserve the victim’s

reputation. What we can tell from the evidence is that cases might be judged to have a

sexual content even if the defendant was not charged with rape or attempted rape. As

David Anderson notes, “ ‘[a]ttack’, ‘assault’, ‘peril’, and ‘outrage’ were all terms

deployed in relation to offences committed against European women, without specific

distinction between a simple act of insubordination, a robbery or attempted robbery (with

or without actual violence), common physical assault, indecent suggestion, indecent

exposure, attempted rape, or actual rape.”50

The colony’s legal structure was premised on the notion that each racial group

must have a separate judicial system. There was also a split between lower “Native

50 Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society,” 50. Similar ambiguity about the

“sexual” nature of offences can be found in the laws of Southern Rhodesia. The

Immorality and Indecency Suppression Act of 1903 criminalized “acts of indecency”

between white women or girls and indigenous men. The Act defined acts of indecency to

include “in addition to the ordinary acceptation of the term [i.e., sexual intercourse], the

raising or opening of any window, blind, or screen of any room, or the trap-door or flap

of any privy for the necessary purposes of nature. Both white women/girls and

indigenous men could be imprisoned for up to five years (plus a punishment of 25 lashes

with a whip) for violating the act. T. Olawale Elias, British Colonial Law: A Comparative

Study of the Interaction between English and Local Laws in British Dependencies

(London: Stevens & Sons Limited, 1962), 191.

251

Courts,” governed through customary law, and the High Courts governed through

English law. The notion that cases involving indigenous peoples should be adjudicated

through “customary law”—e.g., according to indigenous values, and adjudicated by

indigenous peoples—was an extension of the doctrine of indirect rule, the notion that as

far as possible colonies should be governed through existing institutions.51 The exception

to this rule was the so-called “repugnancy clause,” which asserted that customary law

would be followed as long as it was not “repugnant to the general principles of humanity,

recognized throughout the whole civilized world.”52 The repugnancy clause ensured that

colonial governments would have the authority to overrule customary law where deemed

necessary.53 In practice, however, “customary law” often differed significantly from

indigenous practices. For instance, the Village Headman Ordinance of 1902 established

that administrators could appoint “headmen” to hear disputes. As Ghai and McAuslan

point out, “The importance of this legislation was that these official headmen were not,

51 In the districts of coastal Kenya, where the population was predominately Muslim,

“Native Courts” governed according to the principles of Islamic law. Yash P. Ghai and

Patrick McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal

Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press,

1970), 131.

52 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject : Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of

Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 63. As Mamdani

points out, “Because the colonial power held itself to be the representative of the

‘civilized’ world and the custodian of the ‘general principles of humanity,’ this

proclamation--reproduced in some form in every colonial context-- underlined the

legitimacy of its claim to modify and even remake the customary.” Ibid.

53 According to Elias, practices deemed “repugnant” by British colonial administrations

included “slave-raiding and slavery, witchcraft, trial by ordeal and the destruction of

twins at birth.” Elias, British Colonial Law: A Comparative Study of the Interaction

between English and Local Laws in British Dependencies, 106.

252

generally, traditional office holders but persons chosen by the administration, and

therefore owing their authority to the administration.”54 Not only did they not have

legitimacy among indigenous communities, but their indebtedness to colonial authorities

meant they had an implicit motive to adjudicate cases in ways that supported the colonial

mission.55

Not all crimes committed by or against Africans were, however, adjudicated

under customary law. As Brett Shadle explains,

African courts handled customary law disputes, involving matters such as bride-

wealth, adultery, elopement and land. They also heard select offenses under the

Penal Code (for example, assault and, from 1950, indecent assault) and African

District Council bye-laws (such as controlling beer-parties or keeping paths

clear). Disputes involving whites or Asians, and the more serious Penal Code

infractions (rape, murder) were heard by magistrates and could be appealed up to

the Supreme Court.56

Certain offences, then, were deemed too severe to be handled via customary law,

including any offences or disputes involving a non-indigenous person. Additionally, the

High Courts also had the right to overrule any decision of the lower courts upon appeal.57

54 Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 134.

55 Headmen were also used to enforce non-customary law: as Ghai and McAuslan note,

“As [the headmen’s] non-traditional functions increased, so did the power of the non-

traditional members, as also did the lack of respect of the community for them.” Ibid,

147.

56 Brett L. Shadle, “‘Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions’:

Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930-60,”

The Journal of African History 40, no. 3 (1999): 417.

57 Ghai and McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 138.

253

Yet even when jurisdiction was removed from the African courts, the judicial

system still gave a nod to customary law. In the higher Kenyan courts, Judges hearing a

case involving an African defendant were assisted by three native assessors, who were

appointed to provide insight on customary law; for this reason they were generally of the

same race and “tribe” as the accused. In their legal history of Kenya, Ghai and McAuslan

explain the two purposes of assessors. First, assessors gave their opinion of the guilt or

innocence of the accused. Such opinions, however, were not binding; a Judge could

overrule them, the only caveat being that if he opposed a unanimous decision by all three

assessors he should explain his reasoning. As Ghai and McAuslan write, "The views and

opinions of African and Asian assessors had to be stated and could then be, and often

were, dismissed by the trial judge as worthless through bias or prejudice, or as irrelevant

for the purpose of ameliorating the rigours of the alien criminal law."58 The assessors also

acted as "a kind of expert witness, assisting the judge to evaluate local customs and

customary law where relevant. In this guise, they might give evidence of local customs,

and be subject to cross-examination as are other expert witnesses, and other evidence on

the same customs may be called."59

The Kenyan legal system was also structured in ways that discriminated in favor

of Europeans. Europeans had the right to a jury trial in any case where they could be

sentenced to more than 6 months of imprisonment if found guilty. British colonists did

not automatically have the right to a jury trial in British Protectorates. Rather, the

58 Ibid, 169.

59 Ibid.

254

introduction of trial by jury for Europeans was a concession to settler demands; a trial by

jury “would mean a great deal to [the settlers], but it would in no way alter the balance of

political power between them and the colonial authorities in Kenya."60 Furthermore, the

(all white) jury had to make a unanimous verdict in order to convict a European

defendant, meaning that Europeans were fairly impervious to punishment for crimes,

particularly crimes where the victim was non-European.61 In fact, Kenya did not execute

a European for the murder of an African until 1960, when Peter Poole was convicted for

killing a man who had thrown stones at his dog.62

The colony also adopted several laws regarding sexual offences that were racially

specific. The first of these was the Criminal Law Amendment of 1913. Sections 4 (1) and

(2) of the Amendment made it illegal for a white woman to have sex with a ‘native’ --

defined as “any Native of Africa not being of European or Asiatic origin or descent”63--

or even to solicit such sexual contact. The white woman in such cases could be punished

with up to two years’ imprisonment, while the “native” man could be sentenced to up to

five years. Section 5 of the Amendment also raised the age of consent for white woman

60 Because Kenya was a Protectorate until 1920, British colonists were not automatically

eligible for a jury trial as they would be in the metropole. Rather, the introduction of trial

by jury for Europeans was a concession to settler demands; as Ghai and McAuslan note,

trial by jury “would mean a great deal to them, but it would in no way alter the balance of

political power between them and the colonial authorities in Kenya." Ibid, 170.

61 Ibid, 169.

62 Brett Shadle sees this case as marking the end of “settler inviolability” in Kenya.

Shadle, The Souls of White Folk, 149.

63 Criminal Law Amendment of 1913, Kenya Gazette, July 1, 1913.

255

only to 16 years of age-- four years older than for any other women in the colony.64

Furthermore, offences under Section 354 (outraging the modesty of a women) and

Section 376 (rape) which involved a native defendant and a non-native woman (i.e.,

white or Indian women) would be heard in the High Court.65

The Amendment contained ambiguous language regarding consent. Section 4 (3),

which prohibited native men from having sex with white women read as follows:

Any native having or attempting to have unlawful carnal connection with a white

woman under circumstances which do not amount to rape or attempted rape shall

be punished with imprisonment of either description [i.e., with or without hard

labor] for a term which may extend to five years.66 [emphasis mine]

As the legislation specifies that such a crime “does not amount to rape,” it would seem to

acknowledge a white woman’s ability to desire sex with a “native” man. The legislation

was intended to control the behavior not only of “native” men, then, but also the behavior

of white women; indeed, the Amendment established a two-year prison term for any

woman “who entices or solicits by words, signs or in any other way whatsoever, any

native to have unlawful carnal connection with her.”67

Only one case involving a violation of Section 4 (3) of the Criminal Law

Amendment Ordinance survives in the archives. In April of 1915, just two years after the

Criminal Law Amendment was passed, I.V., 16-year-old European girl described in the

police report as “a girl of weak intellect” gave birth to a child of mixed parentage. I.V.

64 Criminal Law Amendment of 1913, Section 354 (5) Kenya Gazette, July 1, 1913.

65 Ibid, Section 4 (6)

66 Ibid, Section 4 (3)

67 Ibid, Section 4 (2)

256

identified the father as an African boy, aged about 16, and claimed that he had raped her.

The accused, meanwhile, asserted “he had been compelled by complainant to have

unlawful carnal connection with her under threats of rape.”68 His defense highlights the

vulnerability of African (and Arab) men to sexual abuse by white women; even in

consensual cases, African men could be imprisoned for 3 years more than their female

counterparts, and rape could be punished by up to 14 years imprisonment.69 Evidently,

however, the authorities in this case believed the accused, convicting him not of rape but

of the lesser violation of Section 4 (3). In other words, they believed that I.V. had

consented to sex with the accused. They did not, however, take into account his own

statement that he had not consented to sex with I.V. Rape was definitionally a crime

committed by men upon women. Although it is possible that the relevant material is no

longer available in the archive, there is no indication that I.V. was charged with a crime

under Section 4 (1), that is, the crime of soliciting or permitting sex with a native man.

Racially specific legislation like the 1913 Ordinance mollified the white settler

community, who had been agitating for the greater protection of white women since the

earliest days of settlement. However, not all Kenyans were equally pleased. In March, of

1913 (while the bill was still being considered) the Provincial Commissioner of the Coast

District Mr. C.W. Hobley sent a letter to the Chief Secretary in Nairobi notifying him of

the objection of coastal Arabs to the proposed legislation, and specifically to their

classification as ‘natives.’ "[A]s they are of Asiatic origin and descent,” the PC

68 KNA: AM/1/5

69 Section 3 (a) of the Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance 1913.

257

summarized, “they submit that the differentiation is unfair and far from complimentary to

their race."70 The Arab desire to be classified as Asiatic was not one of semantics, since

the legislation criminalized sex with white women for an Arab man, but not an Indian

man. The Arab community also called attention to the hypocrisy of the colonial

government in protecting the innocence of white women, noting that

if the Government desires to place heavy penalties upon an Arab for consorting

with a white woman it is the duty for Government to make strict regulations to

prevent European prostitutes from carrying on their calling. They point out that if

such a prostitute invites an Arab to consort with her no crime has been committed

it is merely a bargain between two parties and no harm occurs to either and it is

very hard for an Arab who has been placed in this position to be liable to 5 years

imprisonment.71

Furthermore, should the government choose to criminalize sex between Arab men and

white women, they should also "make it a serious offense for Europeans to procure Arab

girls for carnal purposes as cases of this nature do occur and are the cause of serious

annoyance to them and sometimes result in the girl becoming an outcast from her

people."72

Several aspects of this letter deserve attention. First, the Arabs’ claim that they

were “of Asiatic origin and descent” was clearly recognized by the colonial government

in certain situations. Arabs were, for instance, categorized separately from both ‘natives’

70 KNA: PC/Coast/1/10/72 Letter to Chief Secretary from Provincial Commissioner C.W.

Hobley 14 March 1913.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

258

and “Asians’ when apportioning representation on the colony’s Legislative Council.73

They were also exempt from certain legal restrictions applied to Africans, such as the

kipande pass law. Indeed, PC Hobley agreed that the Arabs should be classified as

Asiatic, and urged the authorities in Nairobi to consider their case. The Arabs’ contention

that the comparison between themselves and African ‘natives’ was ‘far from

complimentary to their race” hints at indigenous racial/ethnic hierarchies in coastal East

Africa, what Jonathan Glassman has described as “situations of ‘ranked’ ethnic

stratification [which] parallel the Western experience of race.”74 In general, both coastal

Arabs and Britons agreed that Arabs were of a higher civilizational order than Africans.

Their inclusion here as “natives” of Africa is therefore somewhat out of place within

broader racial discourses.

The statement also provides some interesting insight into how the Arab

community understood consent. In the case of Arab men purchasing sex from white sex

workers, they contended that “no crime has been committed it is merely a bargain

between two parties and no harm occurs to either.”75 The following year, 1914, saw a

73 For instance, in 1920 two Indians were chosen (by an exclusively Indian electorate) to

serve on the Legislative Council, while one Arab member was nominated by the

Governor. At that time, only male Arabs who could write in Arabic were eligible to vote

(for Arab candidates), whereas Indians had no literacy requirement. Ghai and McAuslan,

Public Law and Political Change in Kenya, 52.

74 Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in

Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Jonathon Glassman,

“Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,”

American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 720–54.

75 KNA: PC/Coast/1/10/72 Letter to Chief Secretary from Provincial Commissioner C.W.

Hobley 14 March 1913.

259

further Amendment of the Criminal Law which sought to discourage the solicitation of

prostitutes.76 Luise White notes that the IPC criminalized solicitation, but not prostitution,

concluding that such a distinction suggests "the IPC acknowledged that prostitution was

not a vice but a relationship between men and women."77 The language of the 1914

Amendment indicates that this is true to the extent that it primarily sought to prevent the

corruption of women who were not already prostitutes rather than eliminating prostitution

altogether: for example, Section 2 (1) made it illegal to procure a woman under the age of

21 provided that she was not “a common prostitute, or of known immoral character.”

Importantly, this legislation was also racially and age specific; the clause defining the

crime of unlawful detention for immoral purposes notes that “A woman shall be deemed

to be unlawfully detained for immoral purposes” if she

(a) Either is under the age of twelve years; or,

(b) If she is a white woman, is under the age of sixteen years; or

(c) If she is not a white woman, is of or over the age of twelve years and under the

age of sixteen years and is so detained against her will or against the will of her

father or mother or any person having the lawful care or charge of her; or,

(d) If she is a white woman, is of or over the age of sixteen years and under the

age of eighteen years and is so detained against her will or against the will of her

father or mother or of any person having the lawful care of her; or,

(e) If she is not a white woman, is of or over the age of eighteen years and is so

detained against her will.78

76 Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance of 1914, Sections 4 and 5, Kenya Gazette, July

22, 1914.

77 Luise White, The Comforts of Home Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1990), 65.

78 Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance of 1914, Section 7, Kenya Gazette, July 22,

1914.

260

By establishing an age limit after which a woman was able to consent to live and work in

a brothel, the law implicitly suggested that children/adolescents are not able to provide

such consent. Significantly, this legislation submitted that white children remained in this

period of minority for four years longer than their Indian, Arab, or African peers.

Likewise, the law established different periods of parental authority depending on race;

parents could object to the detention of their daughter in a brothel if she was younger than

sixteen if Indian, Arab, or African, or younger than eighteen if white. Given the broader

intention of the law to prevent the corruption of innocent girls and women, the law

established that white girls ought to experience a longer period of childhood than girls of

color.

In the 1926, the colonial government passed a Criminal Law Amendment which