FOREWORD1
An official life
Historians who work in the Kenya National Archives, housed in Nairobi's old National Bank of India, sit up when they see a report from S. H. Fazan. He is always worth reading, one of the most interesting of colonial Kenya's officials. As a fellow historian has put it, ‘clever and determined, […] diligent, serious and scholarly, he had little time for colleagues who refused to grapple with the complexities of African life.’2 He had that irritating habit, hard to forgive, of reaching the right conclusion before his seniors. In the opinion of a colleague he could speak Swahili and ‘do nearly everything else better than most’.3 Some complained that his memoranda were too long but they could not ignore his intellect. At critical moments in colonial history it was indispensable. Unusually, he was appointed to the Order of the British Empire, OBE, in 1930, when not yet a senior district commissioner (DC); and no civil servant was better suited – by ability, stamina and moral courage – to be secretary to the Colony's most controversial official enquiry, the Kenya Land Commission of 1932–3, the Carter Commission, chaired by Judge Morris Carter. Fazan's labours in this task, which aimed to secure agreement to the allocation of land between black and white, got him promoted to CBE, a Commander of the Order. Kenya's white settlers came to regard the commission's report as their Magna Carta, a pun difficult to avoid; 20 years later Mau Mau's African insurgents, most of them members of the Kikuyu people of central Kenya, saw it as a charter of injustice. They had lost about 7 per cent of their land to white settlement; the commission had failed to give all but a tiny fraction back, and its other forms of compensation were scarcely satisfactory. The counterinsurgent war against them, under ‘emergency’ laws that abrogated many legal protections, was the bloodiest of Britain's several wars of decolonisation. Fazan, now in retirement, advised on this counterinsurgent campaign and then recorded one of its key aspects in his last report, the History of the Loyalists.4
If this Foreword is to do justice to Fazan the man, it must range as widely as his own intellectual interests and manifold career. Nonetheless, if his memoir of a life's work spent in Kenya colony's progress has a core, it is found in his reflections on these two reports. The first, the report of the Carter Commission, was almost entirely his own enormous labour, within terms of reference set by British politicians. Fazan instigated the search for evidence, collated it for the commissioners' consideration, and arranged for its publication in three fat volumes before then drafting the commission's recommendations.5 The second, his history of the Kikuyu who, under British command, fought Mau Mau, their kinsfolk, was little more than a compilation of other men's work. With hindsight – but it was argued by many at the time – one may say that the failure of the first report to secure African consent, in particular the consent of Kenya's most politically alert people, the Kikuyu, had made the second inevitable, a record of counterinsurgency against angry rebels. Fazan never publicly admitted to that connection nor did it occur to him to openly blame the commission's contradictory instructions, to which he had objected confidentially at the time. Carter's first five terms of reference had all been concerned with African needs and the ‘adequate settlement’ of their claims to land previously alienated, or not yet alienated, to white settlement. In an afterthought a sixth term had been added, the one to which Fazan objected, to define the Highland area in which whites enjoyed a privileged position. This instruction had been secretly reinforced by colonial office ‘advice’ for the commissioners to accept the ‘facts’ of white settlement. The land commissioners started to take evidence from Kikuyu, in well-attended public meetings, in November 1932. A month earlier Fazan had advised one of their district commissioners to warn his people not to entertain any ‘extravagant expectations’.6 Expectations of restitution were scarcely extravagant but were dashed all the same.
Within its contradictory and restrictive terms the commission, Fazan always maintained, had been more than fair to Africans; so in his view Mau Mau insurgents were later recruited less by legitimate grievance than by exaggeration, intimidation and superstition. But they were not solely to blame for the tragedy of the Mau Mau war. In Fazan's reflections one finds rumination on the character of Kenya's white colony, how its members might have changed and why they did not do so. Why did not more of them come to see when (quite when is not clear) their racial privilege, possibly the colony's necessary foundation stone, had become both an intolerable injustice to Africans and a hindrance to Kenya's general progress? This memoir represents, among its other merits, an extended meditation – summarised in Appendix I – on the practical compromises demanded of all executive power, especially colonial power, when pursuing policies favoured by some major civil interests, but to which others, less influential but with an acute sense of injustice, are bitterly opposed. An outline discussion of Fazan's professional career is required before such a meditation can be properly understood.
The colonial government needed Fazan; historians of the colonial period need him too. We use his data, learn from his insights and quote his reports; we trust him. This memoir helps us to know him better, especially his stringent sense of what made the politically practicable morally desirable in a context where official powers of persuasion were laughably lacking. Scholars of the pre-colonial era have found him equally valuable as an alert and curious observer. In his classic history of the Luo people before 1900 the doyen of Kenya's historians, Bethwell Ogot, relied at several points on what the young district officer, an ‘indefatigable recorder of traditional history’, had noted in his district record book in 1913, only two years after arriving in Kenya.7
Fazan's sharp mind, clear prose and calm judgment mean that this memoir, finished in 1969 when he was 80 years old, remains a fascinating and important read. A senior official's history of colonial Kenya, it is a remarkable tribute to its author's wide experience and intellectual grasp. When he had finished writing, however, no publisher could be persuaded to take the manuscript; the mood of that Beatles era was too guiltily anti-imperial. His family has now resurrected it and with today's greater distance from events we can be more objective. We can be more like Fazan. He could understand both the African native subjects of his day and the often more troublesome, certainly noisier, minority of white settlers. He could blame white intransigence as well as African sedition for the horrors of Mau Mau. Such balance was unusual; Kenya's turbulent history tended to divide white opinion between the ‘pro-native’ and the ‘pro-settler’. Readers whose letters were published in the settlers' paper, the East African Standard, sometimes sheltered under the pseudonym ‘non-pro-native’ when criticising their fellow whites. Fazan's even-handedness is all the more valuable, a product of the official's often unenviable position as ‘man in the middle’.
Fazan brings a uniquely well-informed perspective to Kenya's colonial history. A sceptical younger generation may also meet here a wiser, more humane, economically and sociologically literate imperial servant than they may have been led to expect. Fazan was not afraid to condemn abuses of the system he was proud to serve, but as a civil servant he also knew when to keep silent. Never a sentimentalist, he was one of the Empire's practical intellectuals, a thinker but also a doer, duty-bound to steer a responsible way through the moral maze of an imperial enterprise that was mixed in motive, practice, and effect – generous and greedy, authoritarian and liberal, humane and brutal, culturally self-confident to the point of racial hubris but often and increasingly assailed by self-doubt. His family have done well to bring the manuscript of such a man, in his time, once again to light.
Sidney Herbert Fazan, CMG, CBE, 1888–1979, was a doctor's son from the southern English home county of Sussex. Schooled at Epsom College, he won a Classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, an early indication of his intellectual distinction, although his college thought him still better at cricket. Before 1900 colonial officials had been a motley crew, often picked up locally from a range of adventurous backgrounds. Early in the twentieth century, the Colonial Office in London turned to the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge in order to recruit field administrators from the professional middle class, more able to manage the complexities of peaceful and productive overseas rule. Fazan responded to this opportunity soon after graduating. Choosing to serve in the new East Africa Protectorate, he sailed out in 1911, aged 23, with little further training.
Kenya Colony, as the Protectorate became in 1920, was notorious as the most excitable and one of the least profitable territories of British Africa. Its government provided African land, labour and revenue to support a tiny, vocal, white minority whose farmers and planters, with few exceptions, failed to find profitable markets before the 1940s. London sent out repeated commissions to enquire into the equity of this relationship; these did more to ease the imperial conscience than to reach a more sustainable political economy. Public controversy centred on whether the settlers – of whom never more than a quarter were farmers – were a benefit to the native population as tutors in industrious civilisation; or a hindrance, in absorbing public attention and expenditure; or mere parasites, sapping African energies by denying them resources and opportunity. One's answer to that question answered the next: how far was it justified to make Africans work for white profit after the state had expropriated much, if not always the best, African land for white farms? Before 1930 this coercion was sometimes direct, by force; normally, and later, it operated indirectly through the gross racial imbalance that existed, before the 1940s, between the taxes paid by Africans and the value of public services performed for settlers.
A third argument followed, and continued in various forms from the early 1920s until 1960. How far, if at all, could white settlers be allowed to share the responsibility of rule with the Crown's overseas civil servants, Fazan among them? After settlers had won a share of responsibility in the 1920s, on the plea that that was their right as propertied, free-born Englishmen, the question widened: how far should the much larger South Asian immigrant community or even the overwhelming majority of African subjects be associated with this power? As late as the 1940s some settler leaders dreamed of inheriting a white minority ruling power at independence, following the earlier example of their counterparts in South Africa. That was always a fantasy, although the British government could seem to waver from its policy, stated in 1923, that Kenya was ‘primarily’ an African territory. Kenya's whites had neither numbers nor wealth. White South Africans were one fifth of their country's total population around 1950; Kenya's settlers were never more than 1 per cent. South Africa also had, as Kenya did not, a mining sector that needed and could finance an industrial economy that was able to employ a growing African population.
Fazan spent most of his career in the all-African areas of the Colony; he rarely had charge of white farmers. His life in the ‘native reserves’ clearly gave him a respect for Africans, based on his astonishing knowledge of their way of life, learned as an observant junior official when away from his desk, on foot, ‘on safari’. Historians owe much to the percipience of district officers whose interest in African lives was every bit as attentive as our own. Fazan did not condemn white settlers; they brought a welcome social energy– but they were also too reluctant, once they had achieved economic success, to share it with Africans. They should, in his view, have been more ready to open up inter-racial access to the ‘white’ land that the Carter Commission, his commission, had guaranteed them. At what date he came to this conclusion it is difficult to say. Towards the end of his story can one see a growing sympathy for them as Britain seemed intent on denying their children an African future; wearied by war, by the 1950s it wanted to drop the increasingly unpopular burden of empire. In the view of many of Fazan's class and generation, the hurried exit from imperial responsibility broke faith with both white citizens and African subjects, and its pension arrangements were as mean as only the British Treasury knew.
Fazan served his formative first years in the almost entirely African province of Nyanza, Kenya's western region, on the shores of Lake Victoria. His provincial commissioner (PC) was John Ainsworth, one of the founders of modern Kenya. A Manchester man, he had first come to Africa to trade in African products, an experience that shaped his later outlook. With little social grace or standing but possessed of great energy, also given to writing over-lengthy reports, Ainsworth was convinced that Kenya's future lay in a combination of African peasant cultivation and white commercial farming, each compatible with the other. Cadet Fazan clearly absorbed his PC's ‘pro-native’ vision. New officials had no training manuals; they learned by observing their seniors. In this, his official's history, the best evidence for Fazan's loyalty to his mentor is seen in his resort to anonymity when telling how Ainsworth's humane principles – which had always required Africans to work their own salvation – appeared to give way to settler demands for more African labour after the First World War.8 Fazan does not confide in us to the extent of criticising named colleagues. He does, however, sometimes reveal his feelings, as when remembering that his first major move, in 1915, to the desert frontier district of Turkana, only recently and ferociously conquered, led to a sense of isolation and frustration that made him ill.9
After the war Fazan endured short-term postings in different districts – a failing for which the government was often censured but of which it was never cured. There was some perverse logic at work too: officers who spent too long in one district might become more ‘their natives’ champion, and less the government's agent; but it also reproduced much ignorance and personal idiosyncrasy in policy that was difficult for Africans to predict, faults that Fazan seems to have avoided.10 From 1918 to 1925 he helped to rule the largely Muslim Coast province, with an interlude in Central Nyanza in 1921–2. Staff shortages in a pauper colony meant that he was repeatedly transferred between three of the coastal districts, Malindi, Tana River and Mombasa town. He witnessed what was widely seen as the demoralised torpor of a previously slave society, with its former Arab masters and former black slaves. The experience must surely have stimulated his later thoughts about what policies made for economic growth and social vitality.11
Fazan spent the rest of his career ‘upcountry’. In the late 1920s he had almost three years with the Kamba people, mixed farmers and herders, in both the Machakos and Kitui districts, important recruiting grounds for police and army – the King's African Rifles.12 In December 1928, aged 40, he became DC of the northernmost Kikuyu district, Nyeri – later a core area of Mau Mau insurgency. Within the year he moved to southern Kikuyu, to Kiambu, fast becoming a suburb of Nairobi and the centre of African politics, with its market gardeners, commuting clerks, and women traders.13 Proximity to Nairobi meant that he could at last join a cricket club – the Kenya Kongonis. Fazan's first official task here, however, was scarcely cricket; it was to calm both Kikuyu and white opinion over the ‘female circumcision crisis’ when some Protestant missions tried to get their married converts to renounce the practice of clitoridectomy for their pubescent daughters. It was the most dramatic clash of cultures in colonial Kenya. Conventional Kikuyu opinion regarded the surgery and its rituals as a necessary initiation into the painful responsibilities of womanhood; whites thought it revolting, cruel, and often dangerous to future mothers. As DC, however, Fazan could not allow cultural revulsion to overrule administrative judgment.14
Fazan was also plunged into the no less contentious question of Kikuyu land tenure. Land was Kenya's key political issue then, as it is today. Government wanted to put an end to the endless argument over how far white settlement had expropriated which Africans and what remedy, if any, was called for. Fazan calculated that Kikuyu had lost 7 per cent of their land, almost all of it from Kiambu. The question of how much land had been expropriated, however, was the least of the issues. More difficult to answer was the question ‘from whom?’ It needed an understanding of African tenures. Did individual Africans own property or did they merely enjoy the use of communal land by virtue of their tribal membership? Most whites believed the latter to be the case: ‘primitive’ people could surely never conceive of private ownership. Kikuyu protested, to the contrary, that family groups or individuals did indeed own land, that the British had stolen from known persons, that these deserved specific compensation for private loss, and that the remaining land they still possessed needed the protection of legally-secure title deeds.
As DC, Fazan was appointed to a committee of enquiry. Disagreeing with the other two committee members, one being the young Dr Louis Leakey, white Kenya's most famous intellectual, he submitted a minority report. Both Leakey and Fazan understood the underlying principle of Kikuyu land law to be ‘seigniory’. They used this term, a dubious borrowing from feudal England, to characterise the authority that lineage elders – not the Kikuyu people as a whole – held over the usage and disposal of their extended families' land. Leakey accepted that change was needed but called for more research before there was any attempt to reform this social web of entitlement to property. Fazan – hearing frequent land cases between Kikuyu – wanted greater urgency: government must register individual title when asked and, in due course, encourage an African market in land, with little regard for the historical accidents that, in his view, protected unequal indigenous power over property. Only such reform could, he believed, promote the more efficient use of what would always be limited land – even had there been no white settlement – and so fight the spectre of destitution in a rapidly growing population.15
Four years later Fazan got the Carter Commission to adopt his view. Politically daring, it was the conventional agrarian wisdom – inasmuch as agricultural officers, charged mainly with the health of white farming, were able to spare thought for the ‘native reserves’. The commission recommended, accordingly, that while African land tenure rules should respect local ‘custom’, this should ‘be progressively guided in the direction of private tenure, proceeding through the group and the family towards the individual holding.’16 Even such a gradual revolution was beyond Kenya's administrative capacity or official courage at the time. Little was done to implement Fazan's views until a more drastic reform, jumping straight from ‘customary’ to private tenure, was adopted in response to the Mau Mau rising.
Whether Fazan's step-by-step privatisation of land would have bought off rebellion with increased productivity is doubtful; it might have provoked resistance all the sooner. It would have widened the already apparent gulf between a comfortable upper peasantry, even a ‘gentry’, with full lineage rights, and a growing landless class among the ever more numerous poor. The latter were often dependent clients, and a land market would turn protective patrons into exacting landowner employers. The Mau Mau movement, directed against British rule, derived its anger from the despair of men whose entitlements were repudiated by patrons who were already converting property from a support for dependants into a source of profit.17 Awareness of that anger from below stimulated the bitter criticism that Kikuyu leaders mounted against the Land Commission's recommendations and against its secretary, Fazan.18
The relation between reform and rebellion is an unanswerable question. How Fazan collated 3,500 pages of evidence from 736 oral witnesses and the 507 memoranda submitted, and composed the commission's 600-page report, while serving as the coast's PC in 1933–4 is another daunting question, one that inspires awed respect. Nor did interruptions cease there. Even his last administrative responsibility, as PC of Kenya's most populous region, Nyanza – a return to his cadet province – was cut across by some months in charge of the Maasai ‘extra-provincial district’ in 1935.19 Despite this Fazan, now in his early 50s, enjoyed five uninterrupted years in Nyanza from 1937 to 1942. The province had become a labour reserve, no longer a pioneer of African cash-crop farming. Mission schools and the path they opened for skilled employment elsewhere had improved faster than the cultivation of soils that were far from the best in Kenya. Fazan must have been proud that Nyanza, nonetheless, possessed Kenya's most progressive African local governments.20
In the Second World War, possibly to atone for his unwilling absence from the trenches of the First, in which a brother and many friends had been killed, Fazan acted as political liaison officer with East Africa's armed forces in their various theatres of operation in Africa and Southeast Asia. While calling for discipline in the African ranks, he also spoke out on their behalf and championed the cause of army education, knowing full well that educated men would be more critical of their rulers.21 After the war he served in the Allied Control Commission in occupied Germany when, as it appears from a remark at the end of Chapter 15 of his memoir, he helped to administer the process of ‘denazification’ – the screening, internment and release of Nazi Party members other than ‘hard core’ and those arrested on suspicion of war crimes.
A working retirement
Fazan retired to Kenya in 1949 to become, as he puts it, a settler. He had lived there 30 years; it was his home. Many of the English friends of his youth and a brother had died in war; Kenya had given him a family. His pension was meagre; Kenya was cheaper than Britain and offered more chance of a job. He would never be a farmer – now still more of a minority in the white community as commerce and the professions expanded in post-war Nairobi. In his 60s, fit and active with unrivalled local knowledge, he could reasonably look forward to some managerial position. Other officials, both working and retired, provided his society at his home at Tigoni, uphill from Nairobi.22 Fazan knew the area well from his time as DC of Kiambu and then as secretary to the Carter Commission. It had been a Kikuyu island, surrounded by white farms, a source of bickering since 1920. On the commission's recommendation, as advised by Fazan – but only after heated Kikuyu debate on what compensation should be accepted – the Tigoni Kikuyu had been moved, some of them to the nearby Lari Forest Reserve. Fazan can have decided to live at this disputed spot only because he was convinced of the justice with which he had tidied up the local border between black and white. He must have been deeply shaken when, in March 1953, nearly 100 members of the families who had first agreed to move were massacred in their new homes at Lari in the most dreadful atrocity of the Mau Mau war. Under pressure from British decisions in which Fazan had played a major part, Kikuyu property disputes had become homicidal.23
For Fazan, employment came soon enough. The Mau Mau insurgency recalled him to government service, to sit on two official committees. One was asked to enquire into the social composition of the movement; the other heard appeals from detainees, the tens of thousands of Mau Mau suspects held behind wire without trial. Most British opinion saw these as psychologically deluded rather than justifiably aggrieved; colonialism was still widely thought to be a civilising mission that ‘disturbed’ rather than exploited indigenous peoples.24 On the first committee Fazan argued that land-hunger could not be accepted as a legitimate grievance; government, following Judge Carter's recommendations, had amply compensated Africans who were dispossessed by white settlement.25 On the second committee he interviewed detainees, securing better conditions in at least one case and commending the sincerity of a man's ‘fanaticism’ in another.26 He also acted as special magistrate, trying Mau Mau offences and, as a final service to the colony, compiled the official history of the so-called ‘loyalists’ – Kikuyu who had fought their Mau Mau neighbours under British command but in their own cause.27 The clarity of his History of the Loyalists shows that, in his 70s, Fazan's mind was as sharp as ever; but its silences pose a difficult question.
When may one's personal knowledge of official misdeeds, learned in government service, be denied public communication? It happens all the time, of course, and can sometimes be justified as a defence of national security. It is also how officials protect themselves from scrutiny, saving themselves embarrassment at the cost of proper accountability and even, at times, of rank injustice. In 1960, when compiling his History from accounts submitted by different DCs, Fazan must have pondered such editorial questions; his 1969 memoir gives proof of this rumination. In Chapter 15 he summarises his account of the Kikuyu Guard (KG), the militia raised from the ranks of chiefs' retainers and led by young white men, most of them Kenya-born. It is a faithful summary; it gives the authentic flavour of the 1961 History. We learn that the KG served without respite for two years on the Mau Mau war's front line – never a line but a knotted web of private rivalries. The British use of local auxiliaries had, as officials must have known was inevitable, cemented local feuds into an imperial conflict. While Kikuyu fought Kikuyu in their own internal cause, one must doubt if their rivalries, which were largely over land, would have reached so lethal a level had they not also been fighting for or against the British. The KG killed more insurgents, often their neighbours, than any other military unit, numbering nearly half the total recorded Mau Mau dead; it also suffered the heaviest casualties. Fazan's History and, eight years later, his memoir tell of loyal courage, crucial to British victory. In 1969 the original work was at his elbow. When he came to finish Chapter 15, however, he had to admit that its heroic tale was not the full story.
As Fazan acknowledged by 1969 but not in 1961, the KG – along with the other security forces – had not only fought bravely in open combat but had also perpetrated private abuses, often in revenge for Mau Mau atrocity, even at times murdering captives. Knowing how difficult it was to fight a ‘clean’ counterinsurgency war when the enemy was difficult to distinguish from a sullen but unarmed civil population, the British general in charge, George Erskine, tried to confine his British and Kenyan army units to operations against Mau Mau fighters in the mountain forests of central Kenya, ‘prohibited areas’ where it was permissible to shoot on sight. The KG was given chief responsibility for the densely-populated Kikuyu ‘reserves’ where high officials admitted that, even with the best will in the world, and best discipline – neither of which conditions applied – murderous mistakes were all too likely.28 A general amnesty given by the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, to Mau Mau and KG alike in early 1955 had put both their criminal records beyond further legal scrutiny but not out of mind. Fazan made no mention of this in his 1961 History. Did his silences, like those of other official statements at the time, cover up criminal deeds that were best forgotten?
That suggestion raises in acute form the issue of the historian's responsibility to the past and its people. Before levying such a charge in this case he or she must first not only know, but also feel, the political and moral dilemmas of the colonialism that Fazan had served long, loyally, and well. He will have been pulled in different directions by conscience and duty, as most of us are from time to time. Looked at with these considerations in mind, and remembering his official loyalties – but lack of official responsibility – his editorial rather than authorial role, and the governor's amnesty, his History prompts a rather different question: when, why and how far may one expect any individual to dissent from the conventional thought and behaviour of his or her friends and colleagues? How far might one then expect him or her to go in trying to expose or change that behaviour? Public dissent used to be almost unthinkable for civil servants, duty-bound to air any doubts through ‘official channels’ rather than in public. Fazan was a pensioner civil servant, steeped in this tight-lipped culture. Like any other official in Kenya he was no stranger to controversy, to a conflict of loyalties. He had not publicly aired his doubts about the Carter Commission's contradictory task in the 1930s. He was the same man 30 years later, facing a similar dilemma.
When he compiled his official history, the war against Mau Mau had been won; notorious crimes on both sides had been pardoned. Two battles for the meaning of the war remained to be decided. First, had its ethnic terror disqualified any claim for Mau Mau to be included in a legitimate Kenyan nationalism? Second, had Mau Mau, no matter what its barbarity, proved that a ‘white man's country’ was no longer sustainable? Fazan's History was, inevitably, a weapon in both battles of interpretation. In the first contest, the British attempt to incriminate a militant nationalism, Fazan questioned the official view; in the second, in which settlers faced the inconvenient truth that the war could not have been won without the British Army and its Kikuyu allies under the administration's command, he stood by his friends in that administration, black and white. Both these points require elaboration, so that readers may begin to appreciate the moral tensions beneath Fazan's apparently calm detachment.
First then, the provincial administration, Fazan's old service, was determined to pin the blame for a terrible war on a Kikuyu political leadership that could never be accepted as nationalist. The Carter Commission, so their argument went, had met all legitimate African claims to restitution; post-war prosperity had benefited Africans as well as whites; most black Kenyans seemed content; only the Kikuyu had turned to violence. Bewildered by social change, they must have been manipulated into rebellion by their leaders' lies and a play on their superstitious fears. In the second battle for Mau Mau's meaning, however, many white settlers – particularly those too old to have fought alongside them – were equally determined to demonize Kikuyu ‘loyalists’. However helpful they may have been in war, they must not be allowed to win the peace; after all, the KG could have done nothing without white leadership and its barbarous excesses proved that even the best of Africans could not be trusted with power. Fazan, despite his official status in the first instance and because of it in the second, wrote against the grain of both these popular white views. His portrayals of both Jomo Kenyatta, alleged ‘manager’ of Mau Mau, and of the Kikuyu ‘loyalists’, must be understood in context as the acts not only of a loyal pensioner but also of an independent moral agent.
The times were difficult to read for Kenyan whites, the audience Fazan had most in mind. Hitherto British rule had seemed secure in well-doing. Mau Mau proved otherwise. After the first critical months there was no risk that the insurgents would win in battle. The risk, rather, was that unbridled counter-terror would forfeit British rule any remaining legitimacy. By 1959 the colonial regime was indeed twice disgraced. Many white settlers thought it culpably weak, not least in relying on the ‘loyalists’. The locally recruited Asian Home Guard seemed equally dangerous to them; sacrifice in war represented far too potent a political claim.29 In contrast, many British politicians, not only of the Left, were appalled by the vengeful ferocity of colonial self-defence. This was where official abuses had ‘political consequences’, to use Fazan's own words.30 Harold Macmillan's Conservative government accepted both the Empire's moral weakness in the face of African nationalism and the political impossibility of further violent resistance to its wind of change. Britain decided, accordingly, to negotiate an African exit as soon as decently possible – in the view of Kenya's settlers and officials, with indecent haste.31
Fazan, then, was writing in changing times; previous conceptions of right and wrong, justifiable and unjustified force, were in question. This volatility perhaps gave him greater freedom to exercise independent judgment. At all events, he broke ranks, discreetly, with the highest official in Kenya (the governor) in his assessment of Kenyatta, but stuck to the line his juniors (the DCs) had given him over the KG. He had good reason in both cases.
First then, the official struggle to bar Mau Mau's alleged leaders from the right to be called legitimate nationalists reached its height in 1960, precisely when Fazan was compiling his History. Early in the year a constitutional conference in London had ended all prospect of multi-racial power-sharing and set Kenya on the path to African majority rule. Despite this, high colonial officials recoiled from having to negotiate terms with the supposedly satanic Kenyatta, still in detention, and were determined to exclude him from Kenya's future. That was an unstated purpose of the authorised history of Mau Mau, published in May. Its author, Frank Corfield, another retired official but from the Sudan, had concluded, without any qualification, that ‘Kenyatta and his associates’ had callously imposed the horrors of Mau Mau on the Kikuyu and Kenya.32 A new governor, Sir Patrick Renison, pressed the message home on the radio, calling Kenyatta the ‘leader to darkness and death’. Despite such announcements, British control over the future was evaporating; in 1961 they had to concede that Kenyatta must soon be released.33 He would almost certainly assume the nationalist leadership (as indeed he did) and so become the man with whom the British would have to deal.
In his only original contribution to the History, its introductory pages, Fazan softened Corfield and Renison's verdict on Kenyatta with deliberately less excited prose, perhaps with an eye to this changing political weather. Equally possibly (we do not know) Fazan may have recalled his opinion of 30 years' earlier, during the comparable ‘female circumcision crisis’ – to the effect that Kikuyu leaders had been shaken by the mass enthusiasm they had aroused. He had had experience of how easily protest could gather a crowd. Fazan scarcely mentioned Kenyatta in his analysis of Mau Mau origins and, while not absolving him of responsibility, hinted that he too might have been swept along by popular anger.34 This substantial modification of the official line, incidentally, made it easier to talk to a man who had no longer led but had been hustled by others along the path to darkness and death.
Fazan's approach to the second battle for meaning, for the honour of the KG was, by contrast, true to his official culture of silence, to his British colleagues – some of them his former juniors – and to the chiefs on whom they all relied. The provincial administration had used its emergency powers to regain the authority it had lost to the government's technical departments in the years of post-war development.35 The fight against Mau Mau ‘brought all the house captains to the top’.36 These, the DCs in the thick of the fight, had written their own district histories of the KG.37 Fazan, a house captain himself, knew where his loyalties lay: with his chaps. It was not up to him to query his successors' accounts but to stitch them together in a single intelligible story. Chiefs, deputy school prefects, had been among the first of Mau Mau's victims. Their retainers, the Tribal Police, always under the administration, not the Kenya Police, had also suffered terrible losses and in self-defence had formed the nucleus of the KG. All whites knew that Mau Mau could not have been defeated so quickly without them. That the Tribal Police should have been ‘the rallying point’ was in Fazan's view ‘a source of the greatest gratification to the several generations of the officers of the district administration’.38 Not all settlers shared Fazan's gratification; some hardliners had publicised KG atrocity, comparing one case to the Nazi death-camp Belsen39 – just the sort of thing to expect if Africans should ever gain power. Fazan would have none of that racial meanness. His History was, above all, an uncomplicated tribute to brave men, the provincial administration's men, his men, to whose ‘high courage’ not only settlers but also Kikuyu owed a debt. By resisting Mau Mau's ‘brutality, terrorism and atrocity’ the ‘loyalists’ had rescued their fellow tribesmen from the ‘depth of ignominy’, so redeeming ‘the name and prestige of their tribes from oblivion’. That was one reason why government had raised the ‘loyalist’ force in the first place. Had there been no KG, how could Kikuyu ‘ever again be trusted or respected after the horrors and bestialities Mau Mau had committed? Or how could one endure to live among them?’40 A tribute was no place to ask awkward questions.
In any case KG atrocities were, as Fazan says in Chapter 15, ‘common knowledge’. In 1961 there was nothing to hide. There had been legal prosecutions, even if many had been abandoned, that were reported in the press and raised in question time at Westminster. As a magistrate Fazan will also have known more than most about the outrage in police and legal circles over the complicity of officials who betrayed the rule of law by covering up, in court or before trial, the KG's ‘crimes of punishment’.41 It was no defence to say that Mau Mau had been the first to enter this ‘competition in crime’ and so, when scores were settled by the KG, deserved little sympathy.42 Mau Mau was not committed to uphold the rule of law; the administration, in contrast, had no higher – and in Kenya's history often no more irritating – duty.43 Fazan said nothing of this dark side of the war. It was already known to his most likely readers; the governor's amnesty had deleted KG crimes from the legal agenda; the DCs' accounts had written them out of history. It was not up to him to reopen cases that had been closed five years earlier and on which his sources were silent.
He had two further reasons for selective silence that had nothing to do with either legal or editorial obstacles. First, the ‘loyalists’' story simply deserved to be told; an account of gallant sacrifice and hard-won success. The sort of men whom he had trained and on whom he had relied throughout his career should not be forgotten ‘in the surge of progress and development’ to come,44 in which – as Fazan did not say – a settler fear of too strong an African ally might well be replaced by a nationalist desire to punish black traitors. No one else was going to tell their story. Settlers found it hard enough to argue their own case for consideration; African politicians could not yet be certain that that future was theirs. Neither had reason to speak up for ‘loyalists’ – least of all any among the rising nationalists who owed their educational advantage to ‘loyalist’ fathers or uncles. But Fazan need not have worried. Poorer ‘loyalists’, it is true, probably fared no better than poorer insurgents. Younger, educated men, however, were recruited into the provincial administration, the instrument of future nationalist rule as much as it had been of past colonial control.45 Second, a simple record that his DC contributors had created by silencing its intimate complexities was also needed to make the Mau Mau war intelligible. Fazan set out to create a readable narrative rather than a confusing medley of episodes, and one that was fit to be told. Like all wars, much of what went on in Kenya's Emergency was unspeakable in the opinion of both the British and the insurgents.46 Fazan had his own reasons for thinking some things unmentionable. Judging by the rarity of their mention in his memoir, he found it difficult – and it was not easy for any British officer – to understand African beliefs in witchcraft or magic, which were deliberately exploited on both sides of the Mau Mau war.47 Also, as he emphasises, he was personally distressed by the way in which Mau Mau – but also, he might have added, the British use of the KG – had divided Kikuyu whom he had known and liked, even to the point of murder.48 All civil wars reproduce intimate violence many times over; loyalist atrocity was often retaliation for Mau Mau atrocity.49 To recall such unspeakable local, even familial, complications would make the story incomprehensible and re-open wounds that were better left to heal – especially at a time, although he did not say so in 1961, when the rise of nationalism and its inherent competitions might well have re-opened those wounds, causing them to fester.
Those who might be expected to have most resented Fazan's partisan picture should have the last word. After the Emergency was ended and their freedom of movement restored, a party of former Mau Mau detainees came unannounced to his Tigoni home. Mrs Fazan was nervous: were they seeking revenge? Fazan went out to meet them. They had come, they said, to thank him, a special magistrate during the Emergency, for his even-handed justice.50 For one who had steered as straight a course as any through Mau Mau's moral minefield, this was a healing gesture indeed. A cricketer, he had played a straight bat.
As a Cambridge research student, looking into the history of the Nyanza Province, I was fortunate to interview Fazan in 1963, two years after his History of the Loyalists had appeared and a few months before independence. He was hoping that the outgoing colonial regime would repatriate him to England because of his roles in the Carter Commission, which most Kikuyu saw as an imperial betrayal, and in the subsequent inter-Kikuyu politics that had led, among other bitter disputes, to the Lari massacres, the bloodiest twin episode of the war.51 Fazan was thought to be at risk from an independent government that, under Kenyatta, would surely seek revenge. He lent me another of his reports, written in the 1930s, on relations between central and local government in Britain and how these might be adapted for Kenya.52 This research lay behind his encouragement of Nyanza's African local councils. It was my first encounter with his formidable mind. It is a pleasure to meet it again in the pages that follow. Here one can read, among much else, of his admiration for the forgiving nature of Jomo Kenyatta's post-colonial rule. Fazan was not to know that the new regime had deliberately destroyed an achievement for which he had been partly responsible, Kenya's emerging tradition of strong local government.53
Fazan's Kenya
Fazan tells little of his personal story in this quasi-official history. Anyone who has had read him in the archives, however, will recognise his analysis as very much his own. It stems directly from what we know of his observations in the field. No other official could have told the story with greater intellectual grasp. This is particularly true of the three appendices. The first two were written at the same time as the memoir, long after retirement. In one he reflects on the difference between colonial theory and administrative practice; in the other he dissects the complexity of African laws and customs, especially those relating to marriage and property. These alone make his memoir essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the colonial official's mind and the dilemmas that district officers faced daily. Readers will soon recognise Fazan's respect for the intellect of the Africans he and his colleagues thought they ruled. After explaining the moral economy of bride price he exclaims: ‘Tribal custom could seldom be faulted on a point of logic!’54
Appendix III is still more important, as it was composed during his active service. Fazan did not include it in his memoir. It has been added here to reinforce the value of this publication. All economic histories of Kenya rely on his ‘Economic Survey of the Kikuyu Reserves’, written in 1932 with the help of fellow officers, to guide the Carter Commission's thoughts on land allocation and usage. No other attempt to analyse an African agricultural economy at this date can rival Fazan's attention to detail and the range of his enquiry – into what a family needed to earn in order to meet its growing needs and ambitions, what knowledge and tools it commanded, how far its land could meet its needs with those techniques, and so on. The original memorandum ran to nearly 70 closely-printed pages. Here there is room only for a heavily edited version. Fazan's account of the situation in his own time, which he admitted to rest on informed guesswork in the absence of reliable statistical data, has been kept largely intact; his predictions of the future are summarised.
The clarity of Fazan's prose means that there is little need for further comment. It may, however, be helpful to draw attention to three broad characteristics of the memoir: the change and continuity he observed, the official perspective with which he did so, and the striking modernity of much of his thought.
He is particularly acute in observing how Kenya changed and did not change during his time. Conditions of travel, health, and education improved, but racial prejudices did not. He saw this changing and unchanging history in the course of an official life, through official eyes, in his generation. Three points suggest themselves. First, there is Fazan's keen interest in practical solutions rather than in grand political theory. Second, one gets a good sense of what it was to be a ‘man in the middle’, caught between the duty of trusteeship for African interests and a natural but critical sympathy for white settlers, few of whom were the envied, detested, aristocratic hedonists of ‘Happy Valley’. Most were people of moderate means who risked, and could lose, their family inheritance in taming the tropics.55 Third, however, Fazan was a man of his generation. In his 50 years of service before and after retirement he had known no less than 15 years of war – the First and Second World Wars and then the Mau Mau war with its horrific questions levied against his professional career, fought in the shadow of a global Cold War that made colonialism seem an ideological antique.56 What may be of least interest to modern readers – his accounts of military operations – may have been of the greatest significance to his colleagues. Unavoidably absent from the field of battle, they would want to believe they had built the imperial loyalties that enabled a colony to ‘do its bit’. The final element in Fazan's account may surprise those unfamiliar with his official correspondence: this is the modernity of his thought. As early as 1969 he reached much the same conclusions as have more recent, much younger, historians on the origins of Mau Mau or on the moral economy of ‘tribalism’, what today we call ‘ethnicity’.
First then, what does Fazan tell us about how Kenya changed or did not change that we might not otherwise notice? He is particularly graphic on the question of travel. Before the First World War official journeys depended on pedestrian porterage. To be on foot was fun but porters were inefficient: on a 30-day journey they could each carry nothing more than their own rations. Even when local oxen were trained as draught animals they needed mile-wide road reserves for their fodder supply. Settlers, similarly, had to leave large acreages uncultivated – until in the 1920s tractors arrived, which were not fuelled by grass. Travel by road remained ‘adventurous’, as Fazan understates it, with ‘unroadworthy cars on uncarworthy roads’.57 Public health, too easily forgotten, was as essential as transport for development. Again in the 1920s, scourges like yaws, bubonic plague, dysentery and sleeping-sickness were beginning to be controlled, even if malaria remained a menace. In one of his rare personal comments, Fazan confesses to being ‘astonished at the magnitude of the change’; he ‘sometimes wondered how one had survived to see it’.
Perhaps he is at his best, and rarest, in commenting on economic change, whether at the local level, as among the almost unknown Pokomo people of the Tana River or when taking Kenya as a whole. Appendix III shows how much effort Fazan put into such understanding. It was shrewd of him to notice, for instance, in Chapter 7, the growth of inter-racial commerce in the 1930s, so that white businessmen with an interest in multi-racial markets were becoming more important than white farmers who still needed the subsidised protection of race. He also notices how the Second World War diversified Kenya's economy. This attracted a varied immigrant population after 1945, giving Kenya something like an economic basis for nationhood. In Chapter 16 one can see how, in the mid-1950s the East African Royal Commission and the Swynnerton plan could recommend the non-racial liberalisation of the property and produce markets. Investment in African smallholder farming gave substance to ideas that Fazan had advocated 20 years earlier. Kenya began to decolonise internally before formal independence. In recording such colour-blind market reform, however, Fazan also continues to meditate on what changed least: the fierce white settler attachment to protected property that turned his Carter Commission's pragmatic proposals into a sacred text not open to critical reinterpretation.58
Second, this is change and continuity seen through official eyes, and very keen Fazan's were. He can explain the otherwise puzzling rise in the number of ‘punitive expeditions’ (PEs) that took place, even as the British succeeded in ‘pacifying’ more of Kenya in its early days. The reason is obvious enough to an official: for as one acquired more African allies, so one gained more local enemies. He may have had a particular sequence of ‘PEs’ in mind, in the northern part of the Nyanza Province, what is now Western province or Buluyia. While still learning his trade, two years after his arrival, Fazan recorded local memories of a PE less than 20 years earlier, on the border between the Luyia and Luo peoples. The British had intervened in 1896 to protect their main local ally, the Luyia chief Mumia, against a colonising Luo clan, the JoKager. In Luo memory the British Maxim gun ‘quickly despatched 200 of the Luo’. The remainder fled, all save their chief, Gero. In a passage that makes one wish all district officers had been Oxbridge classicists, Fazan recorded, in an analogy not known to his Luo informant, that Gero ‘sat outside his house, alone, in his bracelets and ornaments and waited, like a Roman Senator, for death’. The British only took him hostage, releasing him when the refugee Luo returned to their homes and so assented to British rule.59
Official eyes had to be trained to see through African eyes, but it was by watching one's seniors, men like Ainsworth, that one learned how to apply such knowledge. By the same rule of thumb, one had to allow for the different executive capacities of African chiefs; some had hereditary authority behind them; others did not. Such practical wisdom had its drawbacks, however, as Fazan admits, in sometimes obscuring the need for change – such as the desirability of paying chiefs larger salaries as the economy diversified and as educated men, who might have become more progressive chiefs than their fathers, found better paid opportunities elsewhere. But some problems seemed beyond solution: like the complications of African land tenure set out in Appendix II.
Fazan's perspective was coloured by an official self-interest that saw itself as entirely disinterested. His was a life called to be a work in progress for all Kenya's peoples, regardless of race. The pursuit of what officials saw as the common good can be seen in three different aspects of his account. Like many officials, first, he found some aspects of Christian missionary work too otherworldly in pressing for cultural changes that Africans resisted, so making difficulties for their white rulers. One consequence, already discussed, was the greatest cultural clash in colonial Kenya, the ‘female circumcision crisis’, found in Chapter 7. Like all whites, Fazan thought clitoridectomy – today counted by many as female genital mutilation – cruel and degrading. For an administrator charged with keeping the peace, however, it was something Kikuyu would have to decide for themselves, in due course.
For much of his career, next, Fazan felt that his colleagues' work of progress in the African lands, the ‘reserves’, was not appreciated in the white settler community among whom many officials looked for off-duty recreation, friendships and, indeed, wives. This racial ignorance contributed to the settler determination to hang on to what privileges they could, a matter to which Fazan returns again and again, especially in relation to land, the core issue on which he had exercised more influence than most. This sense of being undervalued by white Kenya is as nothing to Fazan's anger against British policy at the end of empire. London's haste to get out put at risk all that the Kenya administration felt it had achieved in 70 short years. In Chapter 18 he finds it contemptible that, because Britain ‘anticipated ticklish problems’ between different local communities, it seemed ‘advisable to hurry on with independence’. London was following what Fazan deplored as ‘Kashmir lines’ – that unresolved problem created by the partition of the British raj into India and Pakistan in 1947. In East Africa, similarly, Britain was leaving Africans to sort out problems for which they themselves were scarcely responsible, with some created and others aggravated by British rule. Fazan the colonial official despised the abdication of imperial responsibility.
As a third and final characteristic of this memoir, Fazan's judgment is stern, not reactionary. Indeed, one is struck by the modernity of his thought. He never reduces ‘tribal’ or ‘racial’ characteristics, as many did, to some unchanging cultural essence. This comes across most clearly in Appendix II, on African laws and customs. Here his analysis focuses on the moral and ethical relations between Africans and the dilemmas they faced, rather than, as conventional European opinion would have done, on their supposedly superstitious fears. One finds the same appreciation of the variety of human rationality and energy, responsive to circumstance, throughout his memoir – often subversive of conventional colonial wisdoms. He is uncertain, for instance, as are today's academic anthropologists, how far the various Dorobo or Okiek groups were Kenya's aboriginal peoples, as was a common colonial view, or more recent refugees from other, stronger, ethnic groups. He points out – contrary to the prejudicial pamphleteering that settler leaders engaged in after the First World War – that not all Kenya's South Asian immigrants were descended from low-caste railway-building ‘coolies’ but often, also, from intrepid traders who were the hardy pioneers of the African crop and livestock markets. He recognises that the hardships suffered by African porters in the First World War, without whom German East Africa (now Tanzania) could not have been conquered, constituted a ghastly rebuke to any British claim to conduct a ‘civilising mission’. Later on Fazan acknowledges that the African way of interplanting different crops together, so offensive to tidy-minded Britons, was ecologically sounder than any monoculture. Most historians would also agree, in broad terms, with his analysis in Chapter 14 of the often tense relationship between the legal politics of the post-1945 Kenya African Union and the secretive Mau Mau movement. The official line in the 1950s and early 60s had been very different, as we have seen: the former was little more than a wickedly deceptive cover for the latter. Fazan had begun to have doubts in his History of the Loyalists; further reflection and, possibly, new reading, seems to have confirmed them.60
Fazan's sober account of the subsequent ‘Emergency’ in Chapter 15, better termed internal war, is in marked contrast to some white hysteria of that recent past. And there was no need for him, as he did in 1969, to face up to the atrocities committed by government personnel, white and black, during the counterinsurgent campaign. Ten years after the Emergency ended, they were fading from British consciousness; independent Kenya's own policy was one of national amnesia; and historians had no access to the relevant archives so soon after the event. Despite this, memory clearly nagged. Furthermore, and still more worthy of note, he could understand how a British emergency played out in an African trauma of civil war, being personally distressed ‘that of the two leading Africans I knew best and, perhaps, respected most, one should have been allegedly implicated in the plot to kill the other’.61
Above all, Fazan is readable. This Oxford Classics scholar has a delightful wit, often at the expense of official pretentions, as when he sums up the meagre government effort at the coast in the 1920s: ‘it was possible at least to keep up appearances, if not to make progress.’ He attributes to his African subordinates an equal keenness of mind. At some point in the same decade he warned a Kamba chief that a reservoir, which would have to be built with unpaid communal labour, might not solve the local water shortage. The chief nonetheless agreed to cooperate with his district commissioner: ‘If a man has a barren wife, does he refuse to sleep with her? We will try.’
Conclusion
A personal conclusion is needed. I have tried to understand the most difficult aspect of Fazan's career, the perspective from which he wrote his History of the Loyalists. Many historians would blame the Mau Mau war in the 1950s on the failure of the Kenya Land Commission in the 1930s to deal justly with African complaints of ‘stolen lands’. Fazan believed, he had to believe, that within his contradictory terms of reference substantial justice had been done. If policy was to blame for Mau Mau, it was the fault of later white intransigence, not of the pragmatic realism of the Carter Commission, Fazan's commission, in trying to deal justly with two opposing interests.
I have focused on these core tensions in Fazan's text so that readers of this official's history, this memoir of a life's work in progress, may see more clearly some of the strains beneath the reflective calm of his Oxford-trained prose. But what of my own perspective? How has that shaped my attempt to understand him? Historians rightly admit the need to explain ‘where they come from’. I would not have agreed to introduce and annotate his memoir were I not already fascinated by the man, by his rigour and complexity. He had a forbidding sense of the ‘severity’ with which alien rule must at times pursue what it believes to be beneficial measures; but he could also be angry at the injustice this could cause. Equally, he took a companionable pleasure in learning how other people lived, people he seems not to have thought of as subjects; he also researched into social conditions in all their detail before proposing changes in policy, intended for his subjects' benefit.
The man Fazan, however fascinating, can be understood only in the imperial context in which he lived and worked: one of extreme inequality in which personal relations, with all their mutual respect and sense of honourable obligation, were nonetheless possible between rulers and ruled. The calls on personal integrity were all the more severe. The challenges met by his generation might well have tested my own – and can be as gripping for us, therefore, as histories of the Second World War. How, we ask, would I have done? As a young man, between school and university, I briefly experienced the closing years of Fazan's Kenya. I did my British national service in the King's African Rifles in 1956–8, shortly after the regiment, white-officered with black other ranks, had been withdrawn from fighting the Mau Mau. My ‘active service’, in which not a shot was fired, was to defend northern Kenyan pastoralists from cattle rustlers and testicle raiders (so it was rumoured in the ranks) from across the Ethiopian frontier. Fazan had served in a neighbouring area 40 years before. My schoolboy command of a platoon of battle-tested Africans was in reality an extempore piece of theatre in which they coached me in how to act and speak my leading role. Hierarchical structure dissolved into joint enterprise, a tacit negotiation of what was permissible to both.
Fazan was made of sterner stuff than me but also knew the need ‘to keep up appearances’. The British Empire was as much accident as design, both weak and strong, a mix of bluff and determination, dialogue and dictation, a performance as well as an intention, full of mixed motives and consequences – like any other human enterprise, especially one so vast and varied in its social and economic jigsaw.
Above all, the Empire was lived by real people, whether rulers or ruled, who tried to live justified lives in testing situations. Only propaganda – whether imperial, anti-imperial, or nationalist – can pretend to simplify the morality or immorality of the colonial situation. It could be as hard to justify one's rule over native ‘others’ as to be a native, subject to alien rule. An occupational hazard of the first role was fury at failure, at loss of face; and of the second, anger or shame at one's humiliation. Individual lives were built within sometimes horrifying contexts that individuals could rarely choose or hope to alter. Considered lives were built nonetheless and with self-reflective discipline, even behind a detention camp's wire, in a refusal to be defeated, or haunted by the violence of war.62
Both sides of the imperial divide hungered for conversation; life was intolerable without it. Rulers could not bear their natives to be silently sullen. Native subjects could not bear to be unheard; to make their rulers accessibly human they gave them shrewdly apposite nicknames. Blanket condemnation or praise for imperial rule are both too simple and the counterfactual – what would Africa be like had there been no European imperialism? – does not convince. In any case, the texture of colonialism differed greatly over space and time; no two colonies were the same, least of all in their degree of racial tension. Not many British officials in West Africa had to face the sort of tests that confronted Fazan and his colleagues in Kenya.63
Still fewer historians have been tested with the severity that could be a daily ordeal for imperial rulers or colonial natives. We cannot claim any moral superiority. To try to understand humanity in face of all its bewildering tests is our more modest vocation.
John Lonsdale
1 I am indebted to Dr Juliet McMaster and Gillian Fazan, daughters of S. H. Fazan, for much detailed help in producing this edition of their father's memoir. I also owe much to my colleagues David Anderson and Richard Waller, and friends who were there, Peter Fullerton, Chris Minter and Ian Parker, for comment on an earlier draft. They will all, for different reasons, disagree with some of the use I have made of their advice.
2 David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 143.
3 H. E. Lambert to T. H. R. Cashmore, 6 April 1964: Rhodes House Library, Oxford: Mss.Afr.s.919.
4 Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, History of the Loyalists (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1961).
5 Colonial Office, Report of the Kenya Land Commission (London: HMSO, Cmd 4556, 1934); hereafter Carter Commission, Report. In 1972 Fazan told Dr Breen that he had drafted most of the report apart from sections on the Rift Valley and the chapter on African livestock. The Report, of over 600 pages, has 45 chapters; Fazan may have drafted 37 of them, depending on how one interprets ‘Rift Valley’. See Rita M. Breen, ‘The politics of land: The Kenya Land Commission, 1932–33, and its effects on land policy in Kenya’ (Michigan State University: PhD thesis, 1976), p. 61, footnote 3.
6 Carter commission, Report, pp. 1–2; Breen, ‘The Politics of Land’, pp. 61–6, 74–8.
7 B. A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo, Volume 1: Migration and Settlement 1500–1900 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), pp. 229–33.
8 Robert M. Maxon, John Ainsworth and the Making of Kenya (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1980); idem, Struggle for Kenya: The Loss and Reassertion of Imperial Initiative 1912–1923 (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), pp. 145–58, 193–9. See Chapter 12 of this book.
9 For the conquest of Turkana, see John Lamphear, The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
10 For the Kenya administration's official culture, see Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990), Chapter 3. Data for Fazan's postings are derived from district and provincial annual reports and handing-over reports, located in the Kenya National Archives.
11 For this era of the Kenya coast's agrarian history, see Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1890–1925 (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1980).
12 Timothy H. Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King's African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999). For Kamba colonial history, see J. F. Munro, Colonial Rule and the Kamba: Social Change in the Kenya Highlands, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Myles Osborne, Loyal Sons of Kenya: Virtue, Ethnicity and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Katherine Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
13 For Nyeri in Fazan's time, see Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of the Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004); for Kiambu, Marshall S. Clough, Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918–1940 (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1990).
14 This crisis has generated a large literature. For an account that notices that Fazan appreciated that Kikuyu feelings were ‘primarily and consciously nationalist’ – a calmer perspective than that of some missionaries – see Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba. Kikuyu, and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Chapter X. A fuller bibliography and discussion are given in the notes to Chapter 7 of the memoir.
15 M. P. K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 30–31; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, pp. 144–7.
16 Carter Commission, Report, p. 420, paragraph 1650.
17 John Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), pp. 265–504.
18 Joint Kikuyu Association to Secretary of State, April 1936, quoted in Breen, ‘The Politics of Land’, p. 134.
19 Charles Chenevix Trench, Men who Ruled Kenya: The Kenya Administration 1892–1963 (London; New York, NY: The Radcliffe Press, 1993), pp. 102–3. Sadly this is the only reference to Fazan in a book that celebrates Kenya's British rulers.
20 Monone Omusule, ‘Political and constitutional aspects of the origins and development of local government in Kenya 1895–1963’ (Syracuse University: PhD thesis, 1974).
21 Parsons, African Rank-and-File, pp. 189–93, 207, 244.
22 Here I am indebted to family information.
23 See Carter Commission, Report, paragraphs 380–402, pp. 115–18. For the Tigoni-Lari story and Fazan's part in it, see Anderson, Histories, Chapter 4; also Chapter 15 of the memoir.
24 John Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the mind: Making Mau Mau and remaking Kenya’, Journal of African History 31 (1990), pp. 393–421.
25 Anderson, Histories, pp. 281–4. The adequacy of the commission's recommendations is discussed in the notes to Chapter 11.
26 See further in the notes to Chapter 15.
27 The use of inverted commas for the term ‘loyalist’ reflects that these Kikuyu fought not so much to save British rule as to regain from Mau Mau the initiative in leading the Kikuyu contribution to African politics, but ‘loyalist’ has stuck in the literature. In the 1950s African majority rule became an increasingly feasible alternative to the British policy of ‘multi-racial’ power sharing. Fazan acknowledged this self-interest, inadmissible in 1961, when he came to write his memoir in 1969.
28 Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 129–33, 158–9, 223, 225, 248–52, 260, 261, 269.
29 Gerard McCann, ‘Sikh communities in Southeast Asia and East Africa, c. 1870–1970’ (Cambridge University: PhD dissertation, 2010), p. 246.
30 In Chapter 15.
31 Ronald Hyam, Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Britain was well advanced in decolonising its West African territories, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, none of which were colonies of white settlement.
32 32 Colonial Office, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (London: HMSO, Cmd 1030, May 1960), p. 28, and many similar passages, especially 284 – but it is not true (p. 317) that Kenyatta's name ‘appears on almost every page’ of the Survey, which was Corfield's excuse for not including his name in the index.
33 33 For narratives of this period, see Keith Kyle, The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) and B. A. Ogot, ‘The Decisive Years 1956–63’, in B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’ (eds), Decolonization and Independence in Kenya 1940–93 (London: James Currey, 1995), pp. 48–79.
34 34 History of the Loyalists, Chapter II. For Fazan's earlier view of Kikuyu leadership in crisis, see ‘Political situation report by District Commissioner Kiambu’, 12 January 1930: Kenya National Archives, DC/MKS.10B/12/1.
35 35 Berman, Control and Crisis, Chapter 8. Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 34–6, qualifies this argument by concluding that Kenya administration and British army co-operated as equals.
36 36 The late Tom Colchester, retired official, in conversation, 9 February 1977. House captains are senior prefects in British private schools with considerable disciplinary power including, in Fazan and Colchester's (and your editor's) day, the authority to administer, with a bamboo cane, corporal punishment on their fellow pupils.
37 37 For the Fort Hall (Murang'a) story, see David Lovatt Smith's edition of Jock Rutherford, A History of the Kikuyu Guard, 1953–1955 (Herstmonceux: Mawenzi Books, 2003, second edition 2006). For the role of Kenyan-born white officers in the Kikuyu Guard, see Ian Parker, The Last Colonial Regiment: The History of the Kenya Regiment (T.F.) (Milton Brodie: Librario Publishing, 2011), pp. 207–8, Chapters 13, 25 and 26.
38 38 Fazan, History, p. 13; Fazan thought Kenyatta nursed a particular hatred for the tribal police.
39 39 Anderson, Histories, p. 305.
40 40 History of the Loyalists, Foreword and p. 79. Fazan refers all too briefly (in Chapter 15) to another Kikuyu claim to redemption, in European eyes at least, in the way in which ‘pseudo gangs’, composed increasingly of ‘turned’ Mau Mau alone, helped to destroy insurgent morale at the end of the war; see Parker, The Last Colonial Regiment, pp. 183–4, 230–1 (Mau Mau recruited into Kenya Regiment), 288–314, 331–2.
41 41 Anderson, Histories, Chapter 7.
42 42 To adopt Lord Lytton's description, in The Desert and the Green (London: Macdonald, 1957), p. 93, of acts by Irish republicans and their ‘Black and Tan’ opponents in the Irish War of Independence, 1922. As a young officer he asked himself questions (p. 74) that a younger generation must have pondered when fighting the Mau Mau: ‘What was a just war? Could both sides be waging a just war at one and the same time? Were the laws and usages of war morally binding? Was it right to make war on savages because one British official was murdered?’ For the settling of scores, see Parker, Last Colonial Regiment, p. 171.
43 43 For the often acerbic relationship between ‘administrative justice’ in which district commissioners used ‘local knowledge’ and the impersonal assessment of evidence proven in court required by the colonial judiciary, see H. F. Morris and James S. Read, Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays in East African Legal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), especially pp. 98–103, 295–301.
44 44 Fazan, History, Foreword.
45 45 Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapters 5 and 6.
46 46 Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, pp. 167, 168.
47 47 Ibid., Chapter 7. More generally, see Richard Waller, ‘Witchcraft and the law in colonial Kenya’, Past & Present 180 (2003), pp. 241–75.
48 48 See note 61.
49 49 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Chapter 2.
50 50 Gillian Fazan, personal communication, 7 June 2013.
51 51 Anderson, Histories, Chapter 4.
52 52 Report on the Relations between Government and Local Native Councils (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1938).
53 53 For a firsthand account, see B. E. Kipkorir, Descent from Cherang'any Hills: Memoirs of a Reluctant Academic (Nairobi: Macmillan Kenya, 2009), Chapter 7.
54 54 See below, Appendix II.
55 55 For the generally forgotten, least fortunate of Kenyan whites, see William Jackson, Madness and Marginality: The Lives of Kenya's White Insane (Manchester University Press, 2013).
56 56 This thought first occurred to your editor in late 1957 when, on returning to Langata army barracks outside Nairobi on horseback, he saw a Russian sputnik satellite streak across the evening sky.
57 57 Fazan's own driving style was adventurous according to Margery Perham, then Oxford's leading authority on imperial issues. On her visit to Kenya in 1929, Fazan, then district commissioner of Kiambu, took her to the provincial show at Nyeri. Calling him ‘an important, anthropologically minded, and able’ district commissioner, she was disconcerted by his ‘simple and expeditious, if not very reassuring’ behaviour behind the wheel. ‘He simply set his foot on the accelerator,... kept his foot there and went straight forward’, jumping chasms in the road that others skirted, so as to devote his attention to his passenger. Margery Perham, East African Journey: Kenya and Tanganyika 1929–30 (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), pp. 182–3. Thanks to Dr Juliet McMaster for reminding me of this passage.
58 58 The East African Royal Commission of the 1950s, with its advocacy of non-racial free markets, was deeply critical of the Carter Commission's ‘tribal standpoint’ – just as Fazan was critical, in his 1969 memoir, of racial protectionism. When the commission's chairman, Sir Hugh Dow, interviewed Fazan in Nairobi on 19 December 1953, he found him ‘a very discursive witness’. The interview transcript, of only about 320 words, records Fazan's criticism of particular decisions taken by the earlier commission, but no comment on its overall tribal (and racial) premises. See East Africa Royal Commission 1953–1955 Report (London: HMSO, Cmd 9475, 1955), Chapter 6 and, for Fazan's interview, UK National Archives: CO.892/7/3/27.
59 59 Quoted from Central Nyanza Political Record Book Vol II by Ogot in Southern Luo, pp. 232–3.
60 60 See Chapter 14. Carl G. Rosberg and John Nottingham's The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (New York, NY; London: Praeger & Pall Mall, 1966) appeared in 1966, three years before Fazan completed his memoir. His revised interpretation of the pre-Emergency years was similar in many respects but it is not now possible to say if he read this book. Nottingham did not know Fazan, so much more senior to him in the administration (personal communication, 24 June 2013).
61 61 Fazan refers to the murder of Waruhiu, a senior Kikuyu chief, in October 1952. As the most dramatic in a series of Mau Mau murders of fellow Kikuyu it persuaded the new governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, to ask London's permission to declare a state of emergency. Ex-Senior Chief Koinange was among those charged with conspiracy to commit the murder, on evidence that, in the deeply divisive atmosphere of the time, was bound to be partisan. While not convicted he was nonetheless detained. Fazan was instrumental in getting his conditions of detention improved. See Kenya National Archives file JZ. 7/17: Advisory Committee on Detainees, courtesy of Daniel Ostendorff, now working on his Oxford DPhil dissertation ‘The Koinange dynasty and the development of Kenyan politics’.
62 62 For reflective self-conduct under stress by a Mau Mau detainee and a Zimbabwean community, see Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Chapter 10, and Heike I. Schmidt, Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe: A History of Suffering (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013), Chapter 7.
63 63 As Richard Rathbone, historian of the Gold Coast–Ghana, has reminded me.