7
Principal Events and Politics
A most valuable feature of the influx of new settlers to Kenya at the end of the First World War was that a large proportion consisted of young and keen men who came either newly married or shortly to be married, and eager to settle on the land. They were home-builders and a welcome addition to the vigour of the colony. Land for them was made available at low rental and stand premium charges under a soldier settlement scheme. Some of it, for instance the Trans-Nzoia, had already been set apart and demarcated for farms before the war and had not been taken up. Other land was surveyed for them in the Kipkarren and Kaimosi areas on the Nandi border and in the Kericho and Sotik areas bordering the Kipsigis. The last considerable alienation was in 1919. After that it was declared that, to all intents and purposes, no further land was available for settlement except by subdivision of existing holdings. Not all the newcomers bought farms. Many thought it advisable to take employment as managers or even as learner-apprentices before entering upon land of their own. And, of course, the new immigrants were not entirely confined to would-be farmers. There was a small professional and business element. To provide for medical attention in rural areas, farms were granted free to doctors who were willing to take them up.
It was not a particularly good time to begin farming, because there were, as yet, no established markets for export produce except coffee and sisal. One large soldier-settlement cooperative made an unfortunate venture in flax but the members were eventually able, through the good offices of the director of agriculture, to offload the property without loss and to find openings in other areas or take employment with the tea company that had succeeded to their land. In one way or another, most of the soldier settlers made good, in spite of hard times ahead.
One particularly hard stroke of fortune was the change in East African currency which had until then been a rupee currency linked to the Indian at 15 rupees to the pound sterling. With the increase in the price of silver during the war, however, the Indian rupee had risen in value until it reached something like Shs. 2/3d. The Kenya currency was then changed and linked to the pound sterling. Rupees were called in at the exchange rate of one florin note for 1 rupee, and shortly afterwards an East African currency was introduced at 20 shillings to the pound. The effect was that mortgage debts increased overnight to the tune of 50 per cent. This obstacle was eventually surmounted, but it was a drag on development for several years.1
In 1920 Kenya was proclaimed a Colony in recognition of the fact that British people had made their homes there in considerable numbers. At about the same time the composition of the Legislative Council was changed so that the unofficial members had henceforth to be elected, although the nominated official element still held the majority. The elections were to be on a community basis with 11 seats for Europeans. Originally there were only two seats assigned to Indians, both nominated, but this was later increased to an elected five, plus one nominated and one elected for the Arabs. The representation of Africans was entrusted primarily to the chief native commissioner and to one European non-official, later two, nominated by the governor.
During the ensuing ten years or so the European population increased at an average rate of barely a thousand a year, although the extent of the alienated land could have accommodated many more; there was room on the farms for subdivision, bearing in mind that the lorry and the tractor did not require acres of grazing land to be kept for their depasturage as their oxen forerunners had done. After 1931 the increase, in which children born in the country were a significant factor, was a little faster, and the probable total figure for European residents in 1939 was around 25,000.
There were not wanting among other races objections against the privileged treatment of European soldier settlers and, indeed, against the whole policy of the White Highlands. Although the Africans showed little resentment over the soldier-settler scheme as such, it gave a new argument to the growing political element who were casting their eyes on empty spaces in the Highlands on the fringes of their own reserves. They could now claim that, while white ex-servicemen were given land, the African's only reward for his war service was the widely resented kipande, a combined identity and registration card bearing fingerprints, which all adult males were obliged to carry under the terms of the 1920 Native Registration Ordinance. There was also suspicion about the change-over from Protectorate to Colony, as there was about the currency change, the depression and the temporary reduction of wages that had followed. As a special issue among the Kikuyu, a demand was also being put forward for registration of clan and family right-holdings within the area of the Kikuyu reserve, as well as for the demarcation of its boundaries.
The prime mover in voicing these grievances on behalf of the Kikuyu was the newly-formed Young Kikuyu Association with a handsome young man named Harry Thuku at its head. Through Kikuyu agents and, indeed, through Thuku himself, who made a visit to Kisumu, the discontent spread to Nyanza Province among the Luo and Abaluhya.2 These latter tribes had not lost any appreciable area of land to white settlement, but with the Kikuyu there was a genuine issue deserving investigation.3 Meanwhile the Indians, with the support of the government of India, were claiming the right to purchase land in the Highlands. They had not liked the policy from the start and common cause was made between them and Kikuyu agitators in an attempt to form a militant East African Association. In subsequent proceedings against Thuku, evidence was adduced by the chief native commissioner purporting to show that the main theme of the movement was ‘to stimulate enmity between black and white and to get people to consider that they are in a state of slavery which had been imposed upon them by the Europeans’. The result was that the governor, convinced that Thuku's activities were prejudicial to peace and good order, had him placed under restriction in a remote part of the colony. The immediate outcome of his detention was a serious riot in Nairobi.4
While all these issues – and particularly the Indian claim to the right to buy land in the White Highlands – were awaiting the secretary of state's ruling, feelings were running very high in Nairobi. There was great apprehension among the settlers' leaders, and much scheming and hot-headed talk, but the restraining influence of the imperturbable governor, Sir Robert Coryndon, prevented anything very serious from occurring. And, as it happened, there was no need for their alarm. The decision of the secretary of state, conveyed in the ‘Devonshire white paper’ of 1923, reaffirmed the existing administrative practice of restricting land grants in the Highlands to Europeans and ordained its continuance both in initial grants and transfer.5
There was great relief among the settlers at this decision and it is doubtful if even the Indians were seriously disappointed. Their complaint was largely political, for when given the opportunity to farm in lower-lying areas, they showed little inclination to do so. The fear among European settlers, however, had not been so much that local Indian tradesmen would rush to take up farms as that, if the Highlands were opened up to Asiatics, the colony would be swamped by an influx from India. It was widely believed that the Indian government, besides supporting the present claim, had, during the war and after, asked for Tanganyika as an area for the relief of India's expanding population, and Kenya was not felt to be safe. Some, too, remembered that, when Joseph Chamberlain had been secretary of state, the British government had offered the Kenya highlands as a national home for the Jews.6
As part of a general statement of policy in the White Paper of 1923 it was declared that: ‘Primarily Kenya is an African territory and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of African natives must be paramount, and that, if, and when, their interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.’ The European settler community was not too happy about this but accepted its general purport. The conception of partnership rather than conflict would have made more appeal but, nevertheless, a real effort was made to proceed on these lines.
After this dispatch tempers cooled down. Explanatory barazas took place in the Kikuyu and Nyanza districts on all questions of substance that had been raised, including the question of clan or family group rights and the gazettement of the native reserves. The boundaries of the latter were ready for gazettement in 1926 but legal enactment was delayed, presumably to allow time for objections. On the question of private rights inside the reserves, it soon became evident to all parties that the matter required much more study, both as to what the Africans really wanted and how far it was practicable. District commissioners in Kikuyuland and Nyanza made investigations and, in 1929, a committee appointed by the governor reported on The Kikuyu System of Land Tenure. This inquiry was well received by the Kikuyu and they gave useful cooperation.7
Just as the horizon appeared serene, another trouble broke out. Traditionally among the Kikuyu, both boys and girls were circumcised after reaching puberty. This ceremony had profound significance, both religious and civic, as admitting the initiates to full membership of the tribe. To interfere with it would be an extremely rash act, only justified if the effects of the practice could be shown to be wholly evil.
To European eyes, the practice of circumcising girls seemed revolting and barbarous. It was represented with truth by those who wished government to interfere, that the female operators were often in such a state of religious or alcoholic frenzy that they sometimes caused grievous harm, rendering their victims unfit for child-bearing. It was also sincerely, though wrongly, represented that these cases were so frequent as to threaten the tribe with slow extinction. Suddenly the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM), without any warning or consultation, announced that parents who allowed their daughters to be circumcised would not be admitted to Holy Communion. The Gospel Mission and the African Inland Mission joined them in condemning female circumcision, but the CMS and the Roman Catholics held aloof.8
The result of the CSM action was that they lost most of their mission outschools, and a number of their African pastors seceded. Seeing that the outschool churches had been built and furnished from Sunday School collections at those outschools, the local elders were in a strong position in claiming the property and asserting that it was the Mission station and not they who had introduced a new doctrine.
In the midst of this furore the government found itself in the position of a mediator and slowly straightened the position out. The local native councils in two of the three Kikuyu districts passed resolutions requiring the licensing of operators and their restriction to a comparatively mild form of operation. To the extent which these resolutions took effect the CSM may have done some good by their protest, but it started a secessionist movement both among the churches and the schools. Those who broke away on the religious side became known as the Karing'a or Orthodox. They broke into two sections, the more extreme of which sponsored an association of independent schools known as the Kikuyu Karing'a Education Association (KKEA), which was anti-government and anti-mission from the start. The more moderate section, although continuing to be independent, maintained a comparatively friendly liaison with the CMS and became known as the Pentecostals. They started, with others, another and more genuinely educational association of independent schools known as the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA). Both KKEA and KISA were destined to play a prominent part in the formative period of the Mau Mau rising some twenty years later.9
The Young Kikuyu Association, which had been the chief organ for the expression of Kikuyu political opinion under Harry Thuku, had ceased to exist after his detention and had been succeeded, in 1925, by the Kikuyu Central Association. On his release from detention, Thuku had no difficulty in getting himself elected president but, disapproving of their intransigent course, he resigned and formed the Kikuyu Provincial Association, which sought to achieve aims by peaceful negotiation. The move was not a success, and after the failure of his new association, he settled down to farm his own land and became a most respected citizen and a wise and moderate counsellor in times of trouble.10
By now a new figure had appeared on the political scene. He was a man in his mid-30s, an ex-employee of the Nairobi town council named Johnstone Kenyatta, but better known by the name of Jomo which he afterwards assumed. Jomo Kenyatta became vice-president of the Kikuyu Central Association in 1928 and, later, its president. He was away in Europe during the time of the circumcision issue and probably had no part in it, for it was to the land question and political equality for Africans that his energies were devoted.11
Towards the close of 1929 the industrial depression first made itself felt in Kenya through a steep fall in prices for export produce and difficulty in finding markets. Government revenues fell disastrously and it was difficult to find money even for essential services. Recovery, following that in Europe, came slowly, but by the end of 1934 the colony was back to normal. The gold rush to Kakamega in Nyanza Province, which began in these years and soon dwindled, gave a little relief to the economic strain. It brought a certain amount of capital from speculators and introduced a much-needed element of hope. A small number of settlers made a little by panning alluvial gold, although pegging claims and selling prospects was more lucrative. About a dozen real mines were started, of which I believe not more than four were still working after a decade.12
The question of the closer union of the three East African territories of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika together with Zanzibar was engaging close attention both locally and in Britain. It was increasingly becoming a commercial reality and it seemed that political union must follow.13 The Hilton Young Commission of 1927–8 got as far as recommending the immediate appointment of a high commissioner, to be succeeded in due course by a governor-general. Meanwhile, Kenya had acquired a new Government House which was completed in about 1928 when Sir Edward Grigg was governor. Its proportions were so imposing as to leave no doubt in anybody's mind that it was meant for a governor-general, but the tendency to let things slide or pass them on from one commission to another kept the question rolling slowly on for a number of years until initial enthusiasms had cooled off. By the time it reached the Joint Select Committee of Parliament in 1931, the most favourable moment for any decisive steps had passed.
The report of the Joint Select Committee was a most important document,14 for it covered not only the immediate issue of federation but also the principal questions of policy involved, such as the relations between races, the principle of trusteeship, the composition of the Kenya legislative council, the encouragement of native African councils, questions of the burden of taxation as between the races, and so on. It passed in review the previous reports and White Paper pronouncements on these subjects: the Ormsby-Gore report of 1925, the Hilton Young report of 1929, Sir Samuel Wilson's report of 1929, and the secretary of state's White Paper entitled Future Policy in East Africa – and explained away, or modified expressions in them which sometimes, being quoted out of their contexts, had caused resentment and misunderstanding.
To the disappointment of some and the relief of others they advised against federation in existing circumstances but recommended extended functions for the Governors' Conference, with closer organisation and a permanent secretariat. It is possible that the committee might have gone much further and at least recommended a high commission, but for the apprehensions of the African witnesses with whom I had travelled to London, especially those from Tanganyika and Uganda, who were worried about the influence of the Kenya settlers.15 It was unfortunate, however, that the question of Kenya settler influence should have weighed so heavily, for, with the increasing power of commerce and industry, which was bound up with black interests as well as white, the voice of the Kenya settler farmer in politics was already finding its own more appropriate level.16
Apart from inter-territorial jealousy, the essential issues before the committee were as follows. Would the countries in combination have a greater attraction for the investment of outside capital than any of them would have separately? What would be the advantages or disadvantages of unifying essential services, and what services, if any, should be embraced besides those such as currency, which had been unified already? Thirdly and lastly it had to consider how far unification should go and under what form of central structure. The question of what would be the result of not settling these matters firmly before independence was granted was not considered. The possibility that these countries, disunited, might one day become Balkans for the Great Powers to exploit and contend for in a renewed and more subtle scramble for Africa is not after-wit, for it was mentioned by Lord Hailey many years ago.
The Joint Select Committee finally decided against federation because of the wide differences in the composition, degree of development and aspirations of the respective territorial populations. They recommended that the Governors' Conference, with its extended functions, should be regarded as in perpetual session and should deal principally with the subjects of transport, customs and administration, post and telecommunications, scientific and technical research, commercial law and defence. They contemplated that, when in the process of time the value of the organisation should have proved itself in respect of the transferred subjects, further functions might be added and a greater degree of unification emerge by consent.
This decision went about as far as it could have been expected to go in the circumstances for, while official opinion was divided, scarcely any of the unofficial witnesses had wanted federation. The fact that Tanganyika was a mandated territory may also have weighed with the committee for, although one article of the mandate expressly allowed administrative union, another forbade political union. Thus, while a high commission dealing only with transferred subjects would have been constitutionally acceptable, any association closer than that would certainly have invited protest.
These proposals were implemented almost in their entirety. The time came more quickly than the committee had imagined when the organisation proved itself. When war broke out in 1939 the secretariat of the Governors' Conference became, in effect, the central secretariat of the War Council. It remained a compact body and proved competent to shoulder an astonishing amount of work in the coordination of the war effort in all its aspects in the East African territories. It was also the principal instrument of liaison with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In fact, by the end of the war it had become so indispensable that a high commission and a central legislative assembly seemed inevitable.17
As well as its constitutional proposals, two inquiries were recommended by the Joint Select Committee as a matter of urgency. The first was upon the burden of taxation as between the races and financial matters generally. This was entrusted to Lord Moyne.18 The broad conclusions, contained in his report of 1934, were that Africans were contributing more than their fair share to the revenue and receiving less than their fair share of services. He, therefore, recommended the introduction of income tax, the burden of which would fall almost exclusively on Europeans and Asians, and a readjustment of expenditure so that a greater proportion should go to African advancement. The Income Tax Ordinance passed legislative council after protracted debates and became law in 1937. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act, although not enacted by the British Parliament until 1940, also stemmed from Lord Moyne's report, for he insisted that young undeveloped colonies could not provide from their own resources the basic services which were essential for their own development, nor could they cope, unassisted, with economic slumps.19
The other inquiry which the committee advised was on the question of land. The recommendation was expressed as follows: ‘in view of the nervousness among the native population as regards the land question, a full and authoritative enquiry should be undertaken immediately into the needs of the native population, present and prospective, with respect to land, within or without the reserves, held either on tribal or on individual tenure.’20
The Kenya Land Commission was accordingly appointed by the secretary of state under the chairmanship of Sir Morris Carter with corresponding terms of reference, but with one extra term added, namely: ‘to define the area, generally known as the Highlands, within which persons of European descent are to have a privileged position in accordance with the white paper of 1923.’21
It was obvious from the first that the way in which the commission dealt with these matters would profoundly affect the development of the colony.22 In the end it recommended that land in the permanent occupation of tribes having historical rights thereto – and also land which the commission recommended to be given to them in compensation for land, formerly theirs, which had been alienated – should cease to be Crown Land and become ‘native land’ to be held by the occupant tribes, groups, families, or individuals in accordance with their customary methods of tenure. It also recommended that the integrity of the boundaries of the African Lands should be entrusted to a specially appointed Lands Trust Board whose approval would be necessary for any agreed modifications or exchanges, but that the direction of development inside the boundaries should rest with the government. The commission was also emphatic that development of land tenure practices must not be left to unguided evolution, but that government must have power to make rules. This, in the long view, was its most important recommendation.23
Besides the land awarded as native lands on grounds of historical right, the commission considered that, in some cases, there was need for extra land beyond the boundaries to provide for economic needs. They recommended that such land should continue to be Crown Land but should be earmarked as ‘native reserve’, permanently or impermanently according to need. The total area so set apart was 1,555 square miles, so that the total of ‘native lands’ and ‘native reserves’ combined was 52,095 square miles. Besides this, the commission recommended that native tribes should have prior rights in the Northern Frontier and Turkana districts, but, in view of the sparseness of the population, not exclusive right.
In determining the boundaries of native lands and reserves the commission made allowance for the requirements of isolated African families who had been found to be living on land subsequently alienated and for compensation for loss of land and disturbance.24 Also, for the benefit of Africans who might not wish to live in the tribal lands, they recommended that land totalling 939 square miles be set apart as African leasehold areas. This was without prejudice to their right to obtain leases in any part of the colony (e.g. Coast province) in which there was no special privilege. In order to palliate, as far as possible, the rigidity inherent in the allocation of specific land to tribes, the commission made proposals for tribal leases and did not exclude the possibility of such leases in the Highlands, subject to safeguards.
The commission then set itself to define the boundaries of the White Highlands which, together with the 3,950 square miles of forest reserves contained therein, were found to comprise 16,700 square miles. Well over 90 per cent of this land had been either previously uninhabited by any permanent population or only intermittently grazed over by Masai herds. Most of it was open savannah plain but where it was arable its over-all quality was generally not first rate.25
The recommendations of the commission were accepted26 and the boundaries of the Native Lands and the Highlands were safeguarded by Order of the King in Council. The succeeding years were for Kenya a period of peaceful and orderly progress. In 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia but in spite of the gathering war clouds daily lives were not much affected until 1938.
1 These were critical years for colonial Kenya. The future of white settlement was in question, thanks to the difficulties that Fazan relates, added to which there were imperial controversies over the use of forced African labour for private white profit and the civic status of Indian immigrants. There is a large literature. See especially, Maxon, Struggle for Kenya, Chapters 5–7; Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour, Chapter 4; Berman, Control and Crisis, Chapter 4; Huxley, White Man's Country, Chapters XVI–XX; C. J. Duder, ‘“Men of the officer class”: Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya’, African Affairs 92 (1993), pp. 69–87.
2 Thuku never visited Nyanza but one of his associates, James Beauttah, did. Fazan almost certainly picked up this minor factual error from Bennett, Kenya, a Political History, p. 45, although we cannot now know to what reading matter Fazan referred when writing this memoir.
3 Again, it is impossible for Fazan not to return to the issue of land.
4 The government admitted to 25 killed by police rifle fire; African estimates were much higher. The African politics of these years have also generated a large literature. See especially, Carl G. Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (New York, NY; London: Praeger & Pall Mall, 1966), Chapters II and III; 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; John Spencer, KAU: The Kenya African Union (London: KPI, 1985), Chapter 2; Marshall S. Clough, Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918–1940 (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1990), Chapters 2–5.
5 The phrase ‘existing administrative practice’ is important here, referring to the ‘Elgin pledge’ of 1906, for which see Chapter 2, note 12. One of the most contentious outcomes of the Carter Land Commission was the translation of ‘administrative practice’ into the legal protection of white privilege in the Highlands under the Highlands Order in Council of 1939.
6 For which see Robert G. Weisbord, African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa Protectorate, 1903–1905 (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968).
7 Fazan leaves much unsaid here – but see further below, Chapter 11. As district commissioner of Kiambu, he was a member of the three-man committee of enquiry, the others being Chief Native Commissioner G. V. Maxwell, who knew almost nothing about the Kikuyu, and the 26-year-old Louis Leakey. Leakey had been born at the Kabete Anglican mission station near Nairobi and was now at the start of his famous palaeontological career; he was considered by himself and by other Europeans to be the leading white expert on Kikuyu life. The ‘useful cooperation’ given by Kikuyu included much invented history, designed to promote their unchallengeable claim to the land. The enquiry's majority report, by Maxwell and Leakey, was indeed ‘well received’ since it supported the authority of lineage elders to continue to allocate land usage while acknowledging that ‘rules’ would be needed in future. Fazan thought that the relationship between complex African land tenures and poor productivity was sufficiently urgent for government to undertake measures to grant individual title to improving smallholder farmers, to guard against both undue land concentration in the hands of lineage elders and uneconomic fragmentation. Chief Koinange, whom Fazan much respected, later denounced this proposal for greater government intervention as ‘communist’. Fazan returned to the argument again soon after, as Secretary of the Kenya Land Commission. See further discussion in the Foreword and John Lonsdale, ‘Contests of Time: Kikuyu Historiographies, Old and New’, in Axel Harneit-Sievers (ed.), A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 201–54.
8 Again, the ‘female circumcision crisis’ of 1929–30 has generated a large literature. As district commissioner, Fazan did all within his professional power to maintain the peace in a highly emotive situation – not least in his capacity as resident magistrate when investigating the murder and forced circumcision of an elderly female missionary (for which see David Anderson and Richard Waller, Colonial Crimes, forthcoming). Fazan was misinformed, however, if he thought the Church of Scotland's decision ‘sudden’: the CSM and other Protestant missions had been discussing the matter for many years, and the official Local Native Councils had been trying, ineffectually, to reduce the physical reach of the operation. The CSM blamed the crisis on a court decision not to press a charge of grievous bodily harm on a circumciser for operating on a young Christian woman – to the consternation of many white missionaries and some Kikuyu Christians; see Church of Scotland, Memorandum Prepared by the Kikuyu Mission Council on Female Circumcision (Kikuyu, 1931), pp. 34–8. In an extraordinarily interesting analysis written in January 1930 (copy in Kenya National Archives, DC/MKS. 10B/12/1) Fazan conceded that hasty missionary action was not entirely to blame. He thought that educated young Kikuyu were in any case increasingly opposed to authority, whether British or African, thanks to ‘primarily and consciously nationalist’ motives, and that the circumcision issue was therefore a catalyst for action rather than its cause. Recent scholarship agrees with Fazan here, since parental authority over young women – concerned to see that they were rendered marriageable by initiation and circumcision – was closely linked to control over land, a never-ceasing Kikuyu concern. See Strayer, Making of Mission Communities, Chapter VIII (with Jocelyn Murray); John Lonsdale, ‘The moral economy of Mau Mau’ in Berman and Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley, pp. 386–95; Peterson, Creative Writing, pp. 103–12; and Tabitha Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya 1900–50 (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), Chapter 3.
9 Independent Kikuyu Christianity in fact pre-dated the ‘female circumcision crisis’, being first inspired by the publication of the vernacular New Testament in 1926. Reading scripture for themselves gave some Kikuyu their own theology. Otherwise Fazan's summary account is correct; he could have added that the Church of Scotland mission soon recovered its pre-crisis numbers, thanks both to divided Kikuyu opinion on the significance of clitoridectomy and to the advantages conferred by mission education. Karing'a means unmixed or pure. See John Lonsdale, ‘Kikuyu Christianities: A history of intimate diversity’, Chapter 6 in David Maxwell and Ingrid Lawrie (eds), Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 157–97.
10 Harry Thuku, with Kenneth King, An Autobiography (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970) is one of the few autobiographies of Africans active in this inter-war period.
11 Yes, Kenyatta – general secretary rather than vice-president of the Kikuyu Central Association, and never its president – almost certainly played no part in stirring up opposition to the missions. In public he looked to education to change attitudes in due course. He was guarded in his book, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), Chapter VI, not only emphasising the cultural importance of the rite of initiation but also appealing for educated Kikuyu to be allowed to decide for themselves whether to continue the practice. Kikuyu opinion remains divided to this day.
12 Fazan was correct; see Hugh Fearn, An African Economy: A Study of the Economic Development of the Nyanza Province of Kenya 1903–1953 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), Appendix D.
13 Apart from underplaying the obstacle of Tanganyika's legal status as a League of Nations’ Mandated Territory, Fazan's account of the ‘closer union’ controversy accords with recent research, see Callahan, Mandates and Empire, Chapter 9.
14 House of Commons (HC) Paper 156 and House of Lords (HL) Paper 184 (1931).
15 For Fazan's role as guide to the African delegation to London, see Clough, Fighting Two Sides, pp. 155–6.
16 This is an important observation. After the Second World War British commerce became increasingly interested in the African produce and consumer markets, and accustomed to African trades unionism. British businessmen were therefore less perturbed than settler farmers at the prospect of African political advance.
17 This, again, is a fair account of the process that gave birth to the East African High Commission after the Second World War, the administrative core of a potential (as yet unrealised) East African Federation.
18 Assassinated in 1944 by Zionist terrorists when he served as the British minister of state in the Middle East.
19 See further, Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984).
20 Joint Select Committee, Report (HC Paper 156), 44, paragraph 105 (ii).
21 As secretary to the commission Fazan was deeply worried by this added term of reference. It contradicted the Joint Select Committee's recommendation that any proven African need for land might be met ‘within or without the reserves’. The committee must have had in mind the possibility of returning some White Highland land to African cultivation since almost all land that was neither in the White Highlands nor in the ‘native reserves’ was unsuitable for agriculture, being too low, hot, and dry or too high, cold, and wet. This restriction on the Carter Commission's freedom of action was reinforced by secret instructions that effectively transformed privileged white access to the Highlands from convenient administrative practice to a legal right, as affirmed by the Highlands Order in Council 1939. See Breen, ‘The Politics of Land’, pp. 74–8 and Chapter VI.
22 In this account of the (Carter) Kenya Land Commission's enquiry and report, Fazan scarcely does justice to his own role as secretary in what historians think to be the most significant and controversial of the many official enquiries conducted in colonial Kenya, the colony's Domesday Book. The published Evidence amounted to over 3,400 pages, in three volumes; the Report, published as a Command Paper (Cmd 4556, 1934), added a further 600 pages. Fazan was the driving force in organising and presenting this huge amount of data. The evidence of 487 African witnesses, heard in public meetings from August 1932 to February 1933, represents one of Africa's most important collections of oral history. The Commission's terms of reference assumed racial and tribal segregation and, as explained in the previous footnote, were contradictory – both to preserve the privileged position of white farmers in Kenya's highlands and to do justice to African land claims and provide for future population growth. White settlers thereafter felt justice had indeed been done – and therefore saw the later Mau Mau rising as ungrateful black treachery. Africans, especially Kikuyu, felt to the contrary, that they had been betrayed by the imperial government, since almost no individual African claimants had their land returned. Moreover, the additional land allocated to ethnic groups whose land had been expropriated for white settlement was available for settlement only because its higher altitude or lack of water or presence of human or cattle disease had made it unattractive for earlier human habitation. Fazan's discussion of the Commission's findings continues in Chapters 11, 12 and 16.
23 This statement is a modest blast of triumph. It means that Fazan had persuaded the Commission to adopt his view of the need for government action ‘to make rules’, against the view of Maxwell and Leakey, on the Kikuyu Land Tenure Committee of three years earlier, that more research on African tenures was first needed. It took the later crisis of Mau Mau for the government to summon up the political will to act on Fazan's recommendation in anything more than a piecemeal fashion. Agricultural officers shared his view for technical reasons but the provincial administration, Fazan's own service, was reluctant to push the policy through because of the anticipated African hostility to any challenge to their family control of land. See further, Chapter 11, and M. P. K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1967).
24 This appears to be a reference to the fate of the several thousand Kikuyu ‘right-holders’ living on land that had been alienated under them but from which they had not subsequently moved. This turned out to be far more contentious than Fazan indicates here, and is discussed further in Chapter 12, footnote 11.
25 Maasai grazing was not so much intermittent as seasonal, determined by the suitability of different altitudes and vegetations in the alternation of rainy and dry seasons. Fazan is correct that most of the White Highlands had been under pastoral use, largely by the Maasai and Kalenjin peoples, being too dry for reliable peasant agriculture. Less than 2 per cent of the land under settler farms had previously been owned by Kikuyu cultivators, a major factor in Fazan's – and others' – belief that the Carter Commission's recommendations for their compensation had been just. Kikuyu had lost less than 7 per cent of their land to whites, about 125 square miles, almost all of it from Kiambu district. While these figures were historically true, policies based on them failed to take account of new realities, particularly population growth and the Kikuyu colonisation of what had been Maasailand, as labour-tenants of the new white owners. By the mid-1930s nearly two generations of Kikuyu ‘squatters’ (in their own eyes, pioneer colonists, as white settlers also saw themselves) had made large areas of the supposedly ‘White’ Highlands their own – something that no British official seems to have understood. For Fazan's discussion of the remedial land allocations made to Kikuyu, see Chapter 14.
26 Not by Kikuyu and only reluctantly by the colonial office, which was especially criticised by the India Office for the now legal exclusion of Indian ownership on the Highlands. Settlers, also, as already noted, felt betrayed by being denied expansion on to the Leroghi Plateau, ‘the promised land’. That the Commission had displeased all the contending claimants could be said to be its chief merit – but the settlers were well placed to derive the maximum benefit.