The Luo people at the center of this novel live in western Kenya, around Lake Victoria, and are part of the third-largest of the forty ethnic groups that make up contemporary Kenya. The Kikuyu form the largest single group and live in the central highlands. Both communities combined subsistence agriculture with raising cattle and small stock. Their societies were governed on a fairly small scale: Members lived in scattered settlements organized around men related by lineage ties and ruled by councils of elders. The senior man in the extended family had the right to control land and other resources and to reallocate them when necessary. A new bride came to live in her husband’s homestead, often from a considerable distance, and was given fields to farm from lands claimed by the lineage. The husband’s relatives paid “bridewealth” to her family in recognition of the loss of her productive and reproductive value. These were polygamous societies, and when a wife failed to produce children within a few years, the husband’s family would exert pressure on him to marry a second wife. When a married man died, the new widow was expected to marry one of his brothers and keep the man’s children and his property within the patrilineage.
These were by no means isolated societies in the precolonial period, even if they were small in scale. Regular patterns of trade and intermarriage forged links between neighboring peoples; ceremonies of blood brotherhood created fictional kinship ties across ethnic lines to stimulate trade. Ethnic identities thus tended to be rather fluid, as changing patterns of trade, rainfall, drought, or enemy raiding parties might prompt families to move away and join a different group. Colonial political and economic
structures later tended to freeze these rather loose associations into more permanent ethnic identities and often to pit them against one another.
The British ruled Kenya for sixty-eight years, from 1895 to 1963 —a period covering only two or three generations—but their long-term impact on African societies was substantial. For the Luo, the two aspects of colonial rule with the greatest effect on their lives were the constant demand for cheap labor and the active presence of Christian missionaries. They were not faced with the large-scale alienation of their land to white settlers, as were the Kikuyu.
British interests in East Africa were originally commercial and strategic. Thus, one of the first colonial projects in Kenya was the construction of a railway from Mombasa through the central highlands to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria to provide regular access to Uganda and a transportation route for products grown there, especially cotton. Begun in 1896, the Uganda Railway ultimately shaped the economic geography and greatly affected the social and political history of the Kenya colony. Alarmed by the ongoing expenses connected with railroad construction, colonial officials hoped to generate revenue by using the railroad to carry more and more agricultural products for export. They assumed that only white farmers could adquately develop the territory and set out immediately to attract immigrants from Britain and from South ATrica. More than five thousand settlers had come by 1914; they were rewarded with large tracts of the best agricultural land, the so-called White Highlands of central Kenya, at very low cost. The White Highlands covered roughly 7.5 million acres of the most fertile land in the colony, including many areas that had been farmed by the Kikuyu and their neighbors. At its height in 1950, white settlement in Kenya probably included some twenty thousand people.
In addition to attracting white settlers and giving them access to land, British colonial officials helped provide the cheap African labor that settlers demanded through a set of government
policies which restricted land available for African use, imposed “hut taxes” on the African population, and instructed to local colonial officials to “encourage” men in their area to meet the labor needs of local white settlers and businessmen—encouragement that sometimes involved the use of force. A formal labor registration system was developed in 1921, whereby all African men over sixteen were required to carry a kipande, a labor pass, which listed the dates and terms of their current employment. Especially in the early years, men who were found without their pass or whose card showed they were not currently employed could be rounded up and forced to work on white- owned plantations. African farmers were also prevented from growing the most profitable cash crops, particularly coffee and tea, keeping these firmly in the hands of white farmers until the mid- 1950s.
White settlers who had difficulties obtaining regular supplies of labor for their plantations often solved the problem by allowing Kikuyu “squatters” to live on their farms—to build temporary huts, plant small gardens to feed their families, and keep a number of livestock—in exchange for working a specified number of days during the year. It has been estimated that by 1945 nearly one-fourth of the Kikuyu population was living and working as squatters on white land.
Africans living near the Mombasa area were able to work for white employers on a daily basis, as “casual labor,” at the port of Kilindini and elsewhere, allowing them to remain actively involved witih their their own farms and families. But men from central and western Kenya, particularly the Kikuyu, Luo, and Luyia peoples, were forced to travel long distances and to work on contracts that usually lasted from three to six months. Wives were generally left behind in the rural areas and were expected to maintain the same levels of agricultural production despite the withdrawal of male labor. In later years, a number of men began working year-round in cities, on the railroad, or on white plantations. Wives left in the rural area protected their husbands’ interests by keeping up a viable farming operation to which the men could return if necessary. In the absence of their wives, some
men developed informal liaisons with single women in town, and sometimes these relationships lasted for years.
There had been a small European missionary presence on Kenya’s Coast since the mid-1800s, and by the early 1900s small mission stations had appeared throughout western and central Kenya. Christian missionaries poured into Kenya from Europe and North America, representing many different denominations. In the early years they were often members of the Church Missionary Society (Anglicans), the White Fathers (Roman Catholics), or the Church of Scotland Missionary Society (Presbyterians). Despite the importance of African lay teachers in the spread of Christianity, mission churches kept key positions within their hierarchy firmly in in the hands of white missionaries, a tendency that later sparked the growth of many separatist African churches.
In addition to propagating the faith, missions were critical suppliers of education, health care, and social services in rural areas. WTiile government efforts in both education and health care were oriented toward the needs of the white population, mission stations operated schools, rural clinics, and orphanages for Africans. Africans who persevered in mission educational systems had access to better-paying white-collar jobs, but African families knew the mission schools would turn their children away from traditional beliefs. Despite African demands, a network of government-supported schools free of missionary control did not become a reality until the 1950s, and by the time of independence, the majority of both Luo and Kikuyu families were Christian.
Girls were much less likely than boys to have had more than just a few years of elementary education, and there were few job opportunities for women in the urban areas. Most white families preferred to hire men, even for domestic service, and for much of the colonial period few women had the training for semiskilled or clerical jobs. Those women who moved to Nairobi, Kisumu, or other cities looking for work to support themselves — or to escape an unhappy marriage—sometimes had few alternatives to informal prostitution, and women living on their own faced a great deal of criticism and suspicion about their activities.
The demand for African labor escalated dramatically in 1914 when World War I came to East Africa. Despite a few German raids across the border, most of the actual fighting took place in neighboring Tanzania—then called Tanganyika and controlled by Germany—and in Mozambique. Some 250,000 Kenyan men were conscripted into military service for the war. While a few served with the prestigious Kenya African Rifles (KAR, or “Keya”), the great majority served as porters in the Carrier Corps. Neighborhoods in East Africa still named “Kariakor” reflect the location of these wartime barracks. About one-fifth of the Kenyan men conscripted for wartime service never returned home, dying more often from malnutrition and disease than from bullets. Those who survived came back to Kenya with a new willingness to demand political and economic change. Colonial officials feared these new attitudes and determined to attract more white settlers to maintain the status quo. An official “soldier-settler” scheme offered qualified British veterans a chance to take up substantial farms at nominal cost, and more than twelve hundred additional farms were allocated under the scheme.
Despite the increased settler presence and demands for labor, many African farmers prospered during the 1920s as they grew cash crops for local markets and for export. The Great Depression greatly reduced those chances for prosperity, however, as worldwide demand for agricultural exports declined, jobs for Africans dried up, and white employers slashed wages. Meanwhile, European settlers demanded and got a series of measures giving them increased control over African squatters. A 1937 ordinance, for example, allowed settlers to limit the number of acres that squatters could cultivate on their own, eliminate squatter livestock, and increase the number of working days per year from 180 to 270. The interruption of the Second World War gave the squatters a certain grace period, but settler pressures for control resumed with a vengeance after 1945, forcing many squatters back to the reserves and provoking their participation in the resistance movement known as Mau Mau.