Kenya: Nineteenth Century: Precolonial
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East African interior was still a very secluded region in comparison with other areas of Africa. With its focus on the Eastern trade, neither the Swahili Arabs nor the Portuguese ventured beyond the small stretch of land along the Indian Ocean. The latter had ruled from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century but by the early eighteenth century Arabs from Oman had taken over the coastal zone near the equator. They started slowly to penetrate the interior, moving toward the Buganda kingdom near Lake Victoria, albeit by a southern route. They mostly shunned the northern stretch of land that in the twentieth century would become known as Kenya.
Kenya.
During the nineteenth century, Kenya underwent tremendous changes and yet also retained a degree of continuity. While the period witnessed the end of the relative isolation of African societies in the interior, it marked the reduction of the relative significance of the cosmopolitan Islamic coast. Both areas experienced a process of evolution, expansion, and differentiation that facilitated the emergence of practices and institutions which would be interrupted by colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century. However, neither the interior nor the coast showed any reduced dependence on agriculture and trade as a means of survival and stimuli for change.
Several ethnic groups varying in size, internal organization, and language, such as the Bantus, Cushites, and Nilotes, constituted nineteenth century Kenya. Patterns of life among these groups demonstrated a strong relationship between the environment and internal evolution and extra-ethnic relations. Broadly, crop production and pastoralism shaped ethnic distribution, power, and influence. They determined not only group survival and expansion but also whether a community was sedentary or nomadic. Thus, land was to crop producers what pasture and water were to pastoralists, significant aspects of group life and class differentiation on the one hand, and sources of internal and external disputes on the other.
The Bantu-speaking groups monopolized crop production since they inhabited some of the richest agricultural lands in central and southwestern Kenya. With adequate rainfall and its loam fertile soils central Kenya nurtured one of the largest Bantu groups, the Kikuyu, who with their Mount Kenya neighbors, the Embu and Meru, were fairly self-sufficient in food production. All three groups grew beans, peas, sweet potatoes, sorghum, arrowroot, and millet besides taming goats, sheep, and cattle, albeit not on a similar scale to their pastoral neighbors, the Maasai.
Agriculture fundamentally influenced the internal evolution and external relations of the Mount Kenya Bantu throughout the nineteenth century. Internally, agriculture enhanced population increase and strengthened sedentary life, the two distinct features of farming communities as compared to pastoral ones in precolonial Kenya. Also, social organization, political leadership, religious rites, and technological innovation revolved around agriculture and land. Among the Kikuyu, for example, the “office” of the Muthamaki (the head of the extended family) evolved mainly to oversee land allocation, distribution, and arbitration over land disputes.
Externally, agriculture nurtured constant trade links between the Mount Kenya Bantu and their southern neighbors, the Bantu-speaking Akamba, and the Maasai due to the semiarid conditions and the overdependency on the cattle economy. The Akamba constantly imported food from the Mount Kenya areas. This led to the creation of strong regional networks of interdependency sustained mainly by the Akamba Kuthuua (food) traders. They exchanged beer, animal skins, honey, and beeswax for the Mount Kenya staples of beans, arrowroot, and yams. Indeed, for most of the nineteenth century the Akamba played a prominent role not only as regional traders but also as long-distance (especially ivory) traders. They were intermediaries between the coastal Mijikenda and the Kenyan hinterland. From the second half of the nineteenth century their position weakened when the Zanzibar traders became involved in direct commerce in the Lake Victoria region and northern regions such as Embu, as elephants had become depleted in the more central areas. They exchanged cloth and metal rings for ivory and occasionally for slaves.
In western Kenya the Nilotic Luo and Bantu-speaking Luyhia practiced mixed farming, rearing animals, and cultivating crops. The Luo were originally pastoralists but gradually changed to mixed farming as a result of their migration to the Lake Victoria region and its attendant effects on their predominantly cattle economy. During a significant part of the nineteenth century their social, economic, and political institutions, like those of the Mount Kenya people, revolved around the importance attached to land. Increased pressure on land and subsequent disputes orchestrated the evolution of Pinje, quasipolitical territorial units, among the Luo. The Pinje enhanced corporate identity besides protecting corporate land rights. External aggression toward their neighbors, particularly the Nilotic Nandi, Luyhia, and Gusii, added further impetus to the Luo identity in the nineteenth century. Kalenjin inhabitants (Sebei groups) of the Mount Elgon area were similarly involved in intensive intertribal warfare throughout the nineteenth century with neighboring groups, mostly Karamojong, Nandi, and Pokot pastoral groups. The Luyhia, like their Luo and Kalenjin counterparts in western Kenya, were also characterized by internal rivalry and external confrontation with neighbors over land and pasture. Among the major causes of the fighting were periodic droughts and famine; the latter occurring at least once every decade.
Some sections of the Luyhia, such as the Bukusu, kept animals while others such as the Kisa, Maragoli, Banyore, and Marama practiced farming. The less numerous and isolated Bantu-speaking Gusii further up the highlands of southwestern Kenya underwent similar economic changes to those of the Luo and Luyhia. Once avowed pastoralists when living on the Kano Plains of the Lake basin, they gradually lost their affinity with cattle with their migration to the present-day Gusii Highlands. They turned to crop production and reduced the numbers of animals they kept. Regional trade that involved the exchange of goods produced by different groups provided interethnic linkages and coexistence that mitigated against land-based conflicts among the various ethnic groups of western Kenya in the nineteenth century.
Providing an economic contrast to the Bantu-dominated agriculture were the Nilotic-speaking ethnic groups such as the Turkana, Nandi, and Maasai, who practiced pastoralism. They controlled large chunks of territories in nineteenth century Kenya partly because of the requirements of the nomadic pastoralism they practiced and their inherent militarism. Of all the pastoral groups in Kenya the Maasai were a power to be reckoned with. Their force had risen since the eighteenth century and culminated in a complex southward movement by Maa-speakers from the area to the west and south of Lake Turkana south to present-day Tanzania. By doing so they conquered, assimilated, and pushed aside other groups in the Rift valley.
However, unlike the Kikuyu who enjoyed increased prosperity and demographic increase, Maasai power declined tremendously during the nineteenth century in the face of climatic disasters that annihilated their predominantly cattle economy, internal strife that led to the partition of the Maasai into contending groups, and human and animal epidemics that reduced their population and cattle stocks. The Maasai were weakened by the succession disputes of the last years of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of colonialism they had been replaced by the Nandi who emerged as the dominant power in western Kenya and resisted European penetration. In the northeast a similar change of power occurred. Since the sixteenth century Galla pastoralists had aggressively expanded southward from southern Ethiopia and Somalia. They finally reached Mombasa and occupied the lowland areas behind the coastal strip. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Galla, weakened by disease, had suffered several defeats at the hands of the Somali and gradually withdrew. Drought and rinderpest epidemics that swept through their cattle in the last decades of the century weakened them still further. This allowed the Mijikenda, although they suffered periodically from cattle raids by Maasai groups, to move slowly outward from the coastal zone in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The Kenyan coast, unlike the interior, had experienced historical links with the outside world long before the nineteenth century. The Arabs dominated the area from the tenth century onward with an interlude of-Portuguese rule and economic monopoly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the ousting of the Portuguese, the nineteenth century saw the reestablishment of the Oman Arabs’ rule that for economic and political reasons was consummated by the transfer of their headquarters from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840.
The politically semiautonomous settlements and trading posts such as Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Pate, Faza, and Siu remained as much an enduring feature of the Kenya coast in the nineteenth century as it had been in the previous century. The towns had strong ties between themselves based on religious, linguistic, and economic homogeneity. Islam was the dominant religion in the same way that Swahili was the prevalent lingua franca. Agriculture and trade remained the backbone of the coastal economy. Mainly practiced by the rich Arab families, agriculture's economic significance continued apace with demands for agrarian produce in the Indian Ocean trade. Local trade between the hinterland and the coast was in the hands of interior middlemen and the coastal Bantu-speaking Mijikenda.
Despite the above developments, the resurgence of Zanzibar as the heart of commercial traffic and activity stimulated the gradual decline of the economic and political significance of Kenyan coastal towns. The dawn of colonialism in the 1890s added further impetus in that direction. The establishment of various colonial administrative posts in the interior, the building of the Uganda Railway (1896–1901) and the shifting of the colonial headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi diverted attention from the coastal towns in the opening years of the twentieth century.
One of the most important discoveries that made the interior of Kenya known to the Northern hemisphere had been the confirmation of the existence of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. A German missionary Johann Rebmann saw Mount Kilimanjaro in 1848. He had arrived in Kenya to assist Johann Krapf in Rabai Mpia, a small village to the northwest of Mombasa. Both worked for the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of London, a Protestant mission founded in 1799. The work of the CMS and other Christian missionaries was the main European activity in East Africa before partition.
Although Christian missionaries pioneered European entry into Kenya, they were not responsible for the establishment of European political control that came about mainly as a result of happenings outside East Africa. French-British rivalry, both in Europe where Napoleon's defeat transferred the Seychelles and Mauritius among others to Britain, and in Africa especially due to interests in Egypt, should be mentioned. This triggered a scramble for the East African interior, in particular to control the source of the river Nile. The rising power of Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, resulting in claims for the Dar es Salaam region, forced Britain to act. British and German chartered companies divided mainland territories that formerly belonged to the sultan of Zanzibar. Soon Britain took over from the Imperial British East Africa Company and a boundary stretching from the coast to Lake Victoria was drawn between British and German East Africa in 1895. Thus, it took until the end of the nineteenth century for Kenya to be explored, evangelized, and finally conquered by Britain.
The arrival of European colonizers put an end to the dynamic spheres of influence and changing fortunes of the African groups. Settlers were encouraged to come to East Africa to recoup some of the costs incurred in the construction of the Uganda railway. Soon Kenya was to be transformed from a footpath a thousand kilometers long into a colonial administration that would redefine internal power.
See also: Kenya: East African Protectorate and the Uganda Railway; Religion, Colonial Africa: Missionaries; Rinderpest, and Smallpox: East and Southern Africa.
Further Reading
Beachy, R. W. A History of East Africa, 1592–1902. London: Tauris, 1996.
Krapf, J. L. Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labors during an Eighteen Years’ Residence in Eastern Africa. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860.
Ochieng’, W. R. A History of Kenya, London: Macmillan, 1985.
Ogot, B. A., ed. Kenya before 1900. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1976.
Oliver, R., and G. Mathew. History of East Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
New, C. Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa. 3rd ed. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1971.
Salim, A. I. Swahili-speaking Peoples of Kenya's Coast. Nairobi: East African Publishing Bureau, 1973.
Willis, J. Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Kenya: East African Protectorate and the Uganda Railway
The early history of the East African Protectorate (after 1920 the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya) was intimately linked with the construction of the Uganda railway. The completion of the railway had an immense impact on the protectorate.
The decision of the British government to formally annex Uganda as a British protectorate in 1894 necessitated the building of a railway to connect the area around Lake Victoria with the Indian Ocean coast. Nevertheless, it was not until July 1, 1895, that British authority was formally proclaimed over the territory stretching from the eastern boundary of Uganda, then approximately fifty miles west of present day Nairobi. It was called the East African Protectorate (EAP).
Having formally claimed this part of East Africa, the imperial government undertook to build the railway through the EAP for strategic and economic reasons. It was believed that a railway would help foster British trade in the interior as well as provide the means for maintaining British control over the source of the Nile. Politicians in Britain also justified the construction of the railway by arguing that it would help to wipe out the slave trade in the region. Construction of what became known as the Uganda railway began on Mombasa Island with the laying of the ceremonial first rail in May 1896. The British parliament approved a sum of £3 million for construction in August, though not without opposition from critics who claimed that the railway “started from nowhere” and “went nowhere.”
Construction began on the mainland in August, and the railhead reached Nairobi, which became the railway headquarters, in 1899. The line reached Uganda in the following year and was completed to Port Florence (later Kisumu) on Lake Victoria in December 1901. From Mombasa to Kisumu, the railway was 582 miles in length. At £5,502,592, actual expenditure far exceeded the initial provision of funds by Parliament. The cost of the line was borne by the British taxpayer. The bulk of the labor used for construction, on the other hand, was provided by “coolies” recruited in British India. Slightly more than 20 per cent of these remained in Kenya following completion of the line; they formed a portion of the Asian (or Indian) population that took up residence in the EAP.
During the period of construction, railway building preoccupied colonial officials. Conquest of the peoples occupying the EAP was not as high a priority as the completion of the rail line. The colonial conquest was thus gradual and accomplished in piecemeal fashion, beginning in earnest only after the railway's completion. The Uganda railway facilitated military operations and was indeed the “iron back bone” of British conquest. By the end of 1908, most of the southern half of what is now Kenya had come under colonial control.
When completed, the Uganda railway passed through both the EAP and Uganda Protectorate. Imperial authorities quickly recognized potential difficulties in this situation. In order to place the railway under a single colonial jurisdiction, the Foreign Office, which was responsible for the EAP until 1905, transferred the then Eastern Province of Uganda to the EAP in April 1902. This brought the Rift valley highlands and the lake basin, what later became Nyanza, Rift valley, and Western provinces, into the EAP, doubling its size and population.
A substantial portion of Rift valley highlands was soon afterward opened to European settlement. Here also the construction of the Uganda railway played a significant part. The heavy cost of construction was compounded so far as the EAP and imperial governments were concerned by the fact that the railway initially operated at a loss and the EAP generated insufficient revenue to meet the cost of colonial administration. Thus the British government was forced to provide annual grants to balance the EAP's budget. In seeking to find the means to enhance the EAP's exports and revenues, its second commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, turned to the encouragement of European settlement. From 1902 he drew European farmers to the protectorate by generous grants of land around Nairobi and along the railway line to the west with little thought to African land rights or needs. London authorities acquiesced in Eliot's advocacy of European settlement, which eventually led to the creation of what became known as the “White Highlands,” where only Europeans could legally farm. It meant that land and issues relating to African labor played a huge part in colonial Kenya as European settlers played a significant role in its economic and political history.
Ironically, the advent of white settlers did little immediately to solve the EAP's budget deficits. Only in the 1912–13 financial year was the annual imperial grant-in-aid terminated. The EAP's improved revenues were mostly the result of increased African production for export via the Uganda railway. European settler-generated exports accounted for the bulk of those of the protectorate only after World War I.
It cannot be denied, however, that the Uganda railway played a huge part in the early history of the EAP, from paving the way for conquest of the southern portion of the protectorate to helping to determine its physical shape and the character of its population, in the form of its Asian and European minorities in particular.
See also: Asians: East Africa.
Further Reading
Hill, M. F. Permanent Way: The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway. 2nd ed. Nairobi: East African Railways and Harbours, 1961.
Lonsdale, J. “The Conquest State, 1895–1904.” In A Modern History of Kenya 1895–1980, edited by William R. Ochieng’. Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Lonsdale, J., and B. Berman. “Coping With the Contradictions: The Development of the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895–1914.” Journal of African History. 20 (1979): 487–505.
Mungeam, G. H. British Rule in Kenya, 1895–1912: The Establishment of Administration in the East Africa Protectorate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
Sorrenson, M. P. K. Origins of European Settlement in Kenya. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Kenya: Mekatilele and Giriama Resistance, 1900–1920
The Giriama (also spelled Giryama) were one of the most successful colonizing societies of nineteenth century East Africa. From a relatively small area around the ritual center called the kaya, inland from Mombasa, Giriama settlement spread during the nineteenth century to cover a great swath of the hinterland of Mombasa and Malindi, crossing the Sabaki River in the 1890s. It was a process of expansion driven by a conjuncture of circumstances. Long-standing tensions over resource control within Giriama society were accentuated by the new opportunities for accumulation created by the rapidly expanding coastal economy and the growing availability of servile labor, female, and male. The northward expansion took the form of a constant establishment of new homesteads by men who sought to accumulate new dependents of their own, and to assert a control over these dependents that could not be challenged by others—either their own kin, or the “gerontocracy” of other elders who claimed power through association with the kaya. The ambitions and the northward expansion of these pioneers were encouraged through engagement with coastal society. This was similarly undergoing a period of northward expansion, driven by the growth of a trade with the hinterland in ivory, aromatics, and other products, and by a growing regional demand for foodstuffs that encouraged the opening up of new areas of slave-based grain cultivation.
In the early years of British rule this expansion continued, and early administrators struck an accommodation with the most successful accumulators of the Giriama society that served the very limited needs of the early colonial state. But by the second decade of the twentieth century the demands of British rule had begun to conflict with the pattern of expansion and individual accumulation on which the nineteenth-century expansion had relied. The supply of slaves and runaway slaves from the coast had dried up after the abolition of slavery. British officials at the coast were increasingly concerned over the state of the coastal economy and sought to foster new plantation ventures, as well as supplying labor for the growing needs of Mombasa. Evidence taken for the Native Labor Commission in 1912–13 identified the Giriama as an important potential source of waged labor. In October 1912 a new administrator, Arthur Champion, was appointed to improve the supply of labor from among the Giriama, partly through the exercise of extralegal coercion and bullying, which was commonly used in early colonial states to “encourage” labor recruitment, and partly through the collection of taxes, which would force young men to seek waged work. Champion tried to work through elder Giriama men but demands for tax and for young men to go out to work struck directly at the pattern of accumulation on which these men relied: they sought to acquire dependents, not to send them away to work for others. British restrictions on the ivory trade were equally unwelcome. Champion found himself and his camp effectively boycotted.
The boycott was encouraged by the activities of a woman called Mekatilele (also spelled Mekatilili) who drew on an established tradition of female prophecy to speak out against the British and who encouraged many Giriama men and women to swear oaths against cooperation with the administration. This was a complex phenomenon, for it drew on an established accommodation between women's prophecy and the power of kaya elders, and exploited tensions between old and young and between kaya elders and the accumulators who pioneered the expansion to the north, as well as on resistance to colonial rule. Mekatilele was soon arrested and sent up-country; she escaped and returned to the coast but was rearrested and removed again. Meanwhile, in reprisal for the oaths and for some rather mild displays of hostility, the colonial administration first “closed” the kaya in December 1913 and then burned and dynamited it in August 1914. British officials were quick to understand Giriama resistance as inspired by oaths, prophecy, and the power of the kaya, but this probably reveals less about Giriama motivations than it does about colonial perceptions of male household authority as essentially good and stable, and magical or prophetic power as fundamentally subversive. In truth, Giriama resistance to British demands resulted from the disastrous impact of British policies and demands upon the authority of ambitious household heads.
The destruction of the kaya coincided with the outbreak of World War I, which immediately led to renewed efforts to conscript Giriama men, this time as porters for the armed forces. Giriama resentment was further inflamed by a British plan to evict Giriama who had settled north of the Sabaki, as a punishment for non-cooperation and to deprive them of land and so force them into waged labor. In an act of routine colonial brutality, one of Champion's police, searching for young men, raped a woman and was himself killed in retaliation. Thrown into panic by the fear of a Giriama “rising,” and finding themselves in possession of an unusually powerful coercive force, British officials launched a punitive assault on the Giriama, using two full companies of the King's African Rifles. As a result, 150 Giriama were killed, and hundreds of houses burned; officials found it difficult to bring the campaign to an end since there were no leaders with whom to deal and British policy had largely eroded the power of elder men. The campaign was finally called off in January 1915. There were no military fatalities. A continued armed police presence and the threat of further military reprisals ensured the clearance of the trans-Sabaki Giriama, the collection of a punitive fine, and the recruitment of a contingent of Giriama porters for the war.
Mekatilele returned to the area in 1919, and she and a group of elder men took up residence in the kaya. This continued to be a much-contested source of ritual power, but the idealized gerontocracy of early nineteenth century society was never reconstructed, and ritual and political power among the Giriama has remained diffuse. The trans-Sabaki was settled again in the 1920s, but Giriama society never regained the relative prosperity of the late nineteenth century.
See also: Kenya: World War I, Carrier Corps.
Further Reading
Brantley, C. The Giriama and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, 1800–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Spear, T. The Kaya Complex: A History of the Mijikenda Peoples of the Kenya Coast to 1900. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1978.
Sperling, D. “The Frontiers of Prophecy: Healing, the Cosmos, and Islam on the East African Coast in the Nineteenth Century.” In Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History, edited by D. Anderson and D. Johnson. James Currey: London, East African Educational Publishers: Nairobi, Fountain Publishers: Kampala, Ohio University Press: Athens.
Willis, J., and S. Miers. “Becoming a Child of the House: Incorporation, Authority and Resistance in Giryama Society.” Journal of African History. 38 (1997): 479–495.
Kenya: World War I, Carrier Corps
Despite its strategic and commercial importance to the British Empire, the East Africa Protectorate (EAP, now Kenya) was unprepared for the outbreak of World War I. The King's African Rifles (KAR) were ill-prepared to sustain conventional military operations, as until that point it had been used largely as a military police force in semipacified areas. Moreover, the KAR possessed minimal field intelligence capabilities and knew very little about the strengths and weaknesses of the German forces in neighboring German East Africa (GEA, now Tanzania). Most importantly, the KAR lacked an adequate African carrier corps, upon which the movement of its units depended.
Hostilities began on August 8, 1914, when the Royal Navy shelled a German wireless station near Dar es Salaam. General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of the Schütztruppe, which numbered only 218 Germans and 2,542 askaris organized into 14 companies, opposed the German governor, Heinrich Schnee, who hoped to remain neutral. Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck wanted to launch a guerrilla campaign against the British, which would pin down a large number of troops and force the British to divert soldiers destined for the western front and other theaters to East Africa.
On August 15, 1914, Lettow-Vorbeck defied Schnee and captured Taveta, a small settlement just inside the EAP border. Lettow-Vorbeck then launched a series of attacks against a 100-mile section of the Uganda Railway, the main transport link in EAP that ran almost parallel to the GEA border and about three days march from the German bases near Kilimanjaro. Relying largely on raids, hit and run tactics, and the skillful use of intelligence and internal lines of communication, Lettow-Vorbeck wreacked havoc upon the British by destroying bridges, blowing up trains, ambushing relief convoys, and capturing military equipment and other supplies. By using such tactics, Lettow-Vorbeck largely eluded British and allied forces for the first two years of the campaign.
Meanwhile, the British sought to resolve problems that plagued their operations in the early days of the war. A military buildup eventually resulted in the establishment of a force that numbered about 70,000 soldiers and included contingents from South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, (now Zimbabwe), and India. There also were Belgian and Portuguese units arrayed against the Germans. Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, who became chief of allied intelligence in December 1914, created an intelligence apparatus that quickly earned the reputation of being the best in the East African theater of operations.
In December 1915, the port of Mombasa received a great influx of military personnel and equipment such as artillery, armored vehicles, motor lorries, and transport animals. Many of the troops deployed to Voi, a staging area on the Uganda railway some sixty miles from the German border. General Jan Smuts, who became allied commander in February 1916, sought to launch an offensive from Voi against Kilimanjaro to “surround and annihilate” Lettow-Vorbek's forces. Rather than commit himself to a major battle, which would involve substantial casualties, Lettow-Vorbeck resorted to hit and run attacks while slowly retreating southward. During the 1916–1917 period, Smuts fought the Schütztruppe to a stalemate. In late 1917, General J. L. van Deventer assumed command of British forces in East Africa and eventually forced the Germans to retreat into Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). On September 28, 1918, Lettow-Vorbeck crossed back into GEA, but before he could launch a new offensive, the war ended.
Formed a few days after the outbreak of hostilities, the Carrier Corps, East African Transport Corps played a significant role throughout the East African campaign by supporting combat units in the EAP, GEA, and Portuguese East Africa. Its history began on September 11, 1914, when the Carrier Corps commander, Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Ferris Watkins, announced that he had recruited some 5,000 Africans organized into five 1,000-man units, which were subdivided into 100-man companies under the command of native headmen. Initially, enlistment in the Carrier Corps was voluntary. On June 21, 1915, however, growing manpower requirements forced the colonial authorities to pass legislation that authorized the forcible recruitment of men for the Carrier Corps.
In February 1916, the colonial government created the Military Labor Bureau to replace the Carrier Corps, East African Transport Corps. By late March 1916, this unit reported that more than 69,000 men had been recruited for service as porters. When the East African campaign moved to southern GEA at the end of that year, the demand for military porters again increased. On March 18, 1917 the colonial government appointed John Ainsworth, who had a reputation for fair dealing among the Africans, as military commissioner for labor to encourage greater enlistment. During the last two years of the war, his efforts helped the Military Labor Bureau recruit more than 112,000 men.
Apart from service in the EAP, the Carrier Corps accompanied British and allied forces into GEA and Portuguese East Africa, where they served in extremely trying circumstances. Chronic food shortages, inadequate medical care, pay problems, and harsh field conditions plagued all who participated in the East African campaign but Africans frequently suffered more than non-Africans. Agricultural production also declined because of labor shortages on European and African-owned farms.
Nearly 200,000 Africans served in the Carrier Corps; about 40,000 of them never returned. Thousands received medals or other awards for the courage with which they performed their duties. On a wider level, the Carrier Corps’ contribution to the war effort was crucial to the allied victory in East Africa; indeed, without that unit's participation, the campaign never could have been fought. In the long run, many Carrier Corps veterans became important members of society. Some used the skills learned during wartime to become successful businessmen or community leaders. Others became politically active: Jonathan Okwirri, for example, served as a headman at the Military Labor Bureau's Mombasa Depot for eighteen months, then as president of the Young Kavirondo Association and as a senior chief. Thus, the Carrier Corps not only played a vital role in the East African campaign but also facilitated the emergence of a small but influential number of economically and politically active Africans.
See also: World War I: Survey.
Further Reading
Greenstein, L. J. “The Impact of Military Service in World War I on Africans: The Nandi of Kenya.” Journal of Modern African History. 16, no. 3 (1987): 495–507.
Hodges, G. W. P. “African Manpower Statistics for the British Forces in East Africa, 1914–1918.” Journal of African History. 19, no. 1 (1978): 101–116.
——. The Carrier Corps: Military Labor in the East African Campaign, 1914–1918. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Hornden, C. Military Operations, East Africa. Vol. 1. London: HMSO, 1941.
Miller, C. Battle for the Bundu. London: Macdonald and Jane's, 1974.
Moyse-Bartlett, H. The King's African Rifles: A Study in Military History of East and Central Africa, 1890–1945. Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1956.
Savage, D. C., and J. Forbes Munro. “Carrier Corps Recruitment in the British East Africa Protectorate 1914–1918.” Journal of African History. 7, no. 2 (1966): 313–342.
Kenya: Colonial Period: Economy, 1920s–1930s
Land, labor, and production were strongly contested arenas for the political economy of Kenya, firmly based in agriculture, during the 1920s and 1930s. The contestation revolved around the basic nature of Kenya's outward-looking economy: were its exports and revenue to be generated by European settlers or African peasants? The most important contestants were Kenya's European, Asian, and African populations, the colonial state in Kenya, and the Colonial Office in London.
Land was a bitterly contested issue in interwar Kenya as a result of the colonial state's decision to encourage European settlement in the highlands through the appropriation of large amounts of land. By the start of the 1920s, the colonial state and the metropolitan government had accepted the principle that the region known as the white highlands was reserved exclusively for European occupation. This segregated principle of landholding was challenged by Kenya Asians and Africans during the two decades. Kenya Africans not only protested against the reservation of the highlands for whites, they objected to the loss of African occupied land taken for settler use. They also complained about the land shortage in many of the African “reserves” created by the colonial state and expressed fears regarding the security of land in those reserves. Despite protests throughout the two decades, neither the colonial state nor the Colonial Office managed to appease African land grievances. The 1932 appointment of the Kenya Land Commission represented a major attempt to do so, but it failed. Its 1934 report endorsed the segregated system of land holding in Kenya, and this was enshrined in legislation by the end of the decade. It did little to reduce African land grievances. In fact, the contestation of the 1920s and 1930s made certain that land continued to be a volatile element in Kenya politics.
Labor was likewise an area of conflict as a result of the European settler demands for assistance from the colonial state in obtaining cheap African labor for their farms and estates. The state was all too willing to subsidize settler agriculture in this way, as through the provision of land. This reached a peak at the start of the 1920s, with the implementation of a decree in which the governor ordered state employees to direct Africans to work for settlers and the initiation of the kipande (labor certificate) system as a means of labor control. Protest, particularly in Britain, forced the alteration of this policy, called the Labor Circular, but the colonial state continued throughout the 1920s to encourage African men to work for settlers. This mainly took the form of short-term migrant labor or residence on European farms as squatters. However, the impact of the Great Depression altered Kenya's migrant labor system. With settler farmers hard hit by the impact of the depression, the demand for African labor was reduced and state pressure no longer required at past levels. Squatters, in particular, faced increasing settler pressure by the end of the 1930s aimed at removing them and their livestock from the white highlands.
Pressure from settlers formed a part of the broader struggle over production that marked the two decades. The end of World War I found European settler produce (especially coffee and sisal) holding pride of place among Kenya's exports. This caused the colonial state to direct substantial support to European settler production in the immediate postwar years in the form of tariff protection, subsidized railway rates, and provision of infrastructure and extension services in addition to land and labor for the settlers. The postwar depression exposed the folly of ignoring peasant production, as the Kenya economy could not prosper on the strength of settler production alone. Pressed by the Colonial Office, the colonial state turned to what was termed the Dual Policy, which aimed to provide state support and assistance to both settler and peasant production after 1922. Nevertheless, the Dual Policy was never implemented as settler production held pride of place for the remainder of the decade, particularly after the return of a favorable market for settler produce from 1924.
The Great Depression brought an end to the strength of settler production as most settlers and the colonial state itself faced bankruptcy by 1930. The colonial state sought to save settler agriculture by a variety of measures ranging from crop subsidies and a reduction in railway charges to the setting up of a Land Bank to provide loans to European farmers. At the same time, the colonial state sought to stimulate African production for domestic and external markets during the 1930s as a means of saving the colonial economy and the settlers, a course that enjoyed strong support from London. Thus the decade witnessed a greatly expanded role of the state in African agriculture from a determination of crops to be planted to attempts to control the market for African produce. The decade was characterized by the consolidation of the commercialization of peasant production in central and western Kenya in particular while settler farmers continued to pressure the state for protection of their privileged position (e.g., removal of squatter stock from their farms and directing the sale of African grown maize through the settler-controlled marketing cooperative). The state introduced coffee, previously a crop grown exclusively by whites, to African farmers, though on an admittedly minute scale. By 1939 the state's role in African production had expanded dramatically, but the contradiction between peasant and settler production had not been resolved. This and the contestation it provoked continued to characterize Kenya's political economy over the succeeding two decades, just as was the case with land and labor.
Further Reading
Brett, E. A. Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa. London: Heinemann, 1973.
Kanogo, T. “Kenya and the Depression, 1929–1939.” In A Modern History of Kenya 1895–1980, edited by W. R. Ochieng’. Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Kitching, G. Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1905–1970. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Maxon, R. “The Years of Revolutionary Advance, 1920–1929.” In A Modern History of Kenya 1895–1980, edited by W. R. Ochieng’. Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Stichter, S. Migrant Labour in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response, 1895–1975. London: Longman, 1982.
Talbott, I. D. “African Agriculture.” In An Economic History of Kenya, edited by W. R. Ochieng’ and R. M. Maxon. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1992.
Zeleza, T. “The Colonial Labour System in Kenya.” In An Economic History of Kenya, edited by W. R. Ochieng’ and R. M. Maxon. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1992.
Kenya: Colonial Period: Administration, Christianity, Education, and Protest to 1940
As in many other parts of Africa, the establishment of colonial administration formed the prelude for the spread of Christianity in Kenya. Christian missionaries, such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS), had enjoyed little success prior to the establishment of formal colonial control in 1895. It was only after the conquest and the establishment of a colonial administrative structure that Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary societies gained a foothold. Just as the process of establishing an administrative structure for the protectorate was gradual and incremental, so also was the introduction of Christianity. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, colonial control had been established over much of the southern half of Kenya, and missions had gained converts as well in the region under British rule. In those areas in particular, missionaries were pioneers in introducing Western-style education in Kenya. Christians who had experienced Western education became part of a new elite that gained salaried employment with the missions as teachers and pastors, or with the colonial state, as chiefs and clerks, and took the lead in economic innovation.
Moreover, Christians with Western educations played a significant part in the protest movements that emerged to challenge the policies and practices of the colonial state in Kenya prior to 1940 and to demand improved status for themselves within colonial society. Such protest movements, which did not seek an end to colonial rule, but rather reform within the system, came to the fore following the end of World War I and were most active in the areas where the missions had established the largest numbers of schools, namely central Kenya and the Lake Victoria basin. The war and its aftermath produced a number of hardships for Kenya's Africans, including higher taxes and greatly increased demands for labor from the colonial state and the colonial European settlers and for enhanced control over African workers, reduced market opportunities for African produce, and, in central Kenya in particular, heightened insecurity with regard to land. Many Kikuyu in that region had lost access to land as a result of European settlement, and in addition to a demand for the return of those lands, mission-educated men sought to pressure the colonial state so as to ensure their access to, and control over, land in the area reserved for Kikuyu occupation.
Protest emerged first in central Kenya with regard to the land issue. It was articulated by the Kikuyu Association (KA), formed in 1919 by Kikuyu colonial chiefs, and by the Young Kikuyu Association, quickly renamed the East African Association (EAA), formed in 1921 by Harry Thuku and other young Western-educated Kikuyu working in Nairobi, to protest against high taxes, measures initiated by the colonial state to force Africans into wage labor, reduction in wages for those employed, as well as land grievances. The EAA challenged the position of the KA and colonial chiefs as defenders of African interests. The organization had gained sufficient support by March 1922 for the colonial authorities to order Thuku's arrest. The latter produced serious disturbances in Nairobi and led to the banning of the EAA and the detention of Thuku for the remainder of the decade.
Nevertheless, another protest organization soon emerged in central Kenya to champion the interests of educated Christians and challenge the KA. This was the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), formed in 1924. It was concerned with the land issue (e.g., shortage and insecurity of tenure), but the KCA also took the lead during the interwar decades in demanding a greater voice for its members in local affairs and demanding enhanced access to the means of modernization, including more schools and planting high value cash crops. In western Kenya also, the postwar period witnessed the emergence, during 1921, of a protest organization led by educated Christians in the form of the Young Kavirondo Association (YKA). It also articulated grievances such as increased taxation, low wages, and the oppressive labor policies of the colonial state. As with the KCA, leaders also advocated more schools and greater economic opportunities directly challenging the colonial chiefs as political and economic leaders in their home areas.
In addition to the forceful suppression of the EAA, the colonial administration responded to activities of these protest organizations by some concessions, such as the lowering of taxing and ending officially sanctioned forced labor for European settlers, by the introduction of Local Native Councils in 1924 where educated Africans might play a part, by making sure that such protests were confined to a single ethnic community, and by putting pressure on the missionaries to keep the political activities of their converts under control. In western Kenya, this led to recasting the YKA as the Kavirondo Taxpayers Welfare Association (KTWA) under the leadership of the CMS missionary William Owen, and the KTWA's focusing on welfare activities rather than political protest. The colonial state also co-opted some of the protest leaders; as a result some protest leaders of the 1920s became colonial chiefs by the 1930s.
Nevertheless, Western-educated men continued to take the lead in protest to 1940. As a result, some gained influence within the state structure as well as economic advantages, such as in trade licenses and crop innovation. Overall, however, these protest movements provided no real challenge to the colonial system itself. Such political and economic gains as resulted were limited. Despite consistent advocacy by the KCA, for example, little had been done by 1940 to address the increasingly serious Kikuyu land problem. Thus it is not surprising that after that date, many educated Africans turned to different forms of protest in an attempt to address African grievances and improve living conditions.
See also: Thuku, Harry.
Further Reading
Berman, B. Control – Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination. London: James Currey; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990.
Clough, M. S. Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918–1940. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1990.
Kanogo, T. “Kenya and the Depression.” In A Modern History of Kenya 1895–1980, edited by W. R. Ochieng.’ London and Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Maxon, R. M. “The Years of Revolutionary Advance, 1920–1929.” In A Modern History of Kenya 1895–1980, edited by W. R. Ochieng.’ London and Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Strayer, R. W. The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa: Anglicans and Africans in Colonial Kenya, 1875–1935. London: Heinemann, 1978.
Kenya: Mau Mau Revolt
The Mau Mau peasant revolt in colonial Kenya remains one of the most complex revolutions in Africa. It was one of the first nationalist revolutions against modern European colonialism in Africa. Unlike other subsequent nationalist revolutions in Africa, the Mau Mau revolt was led almost entirely by peasants. The majority of its supporters were illiterate peasants who fought against the British military with courage and determination. Although the revolt was eventually defeated militarily by a combination of British and Loyalist (Home Guard) forces, its impact on the course of African history was significant. It signaled the beginning of the end of European power in Africa and accelerated the pace of the decolonization process.
The roots of the revolt lay in the colonial political economy. The colonization of Kenya by Britain led to the alienation of fertile land for white settlers from peasant farmers in Central Kenya, the home of the Kikuyu. This loss of land and the subsequent proclamation of “native reserves” sealed off possible areas of Kikuyu expansion. There arose a serious land shortage in Central Province that led to the migration of landless Kikuyu peasants to live and work on European settlers’ farms as squatters in the Rift valley.
In the Kikuyu reserve, there were social tensions over land as corrupt chiefs and other landed gentry proceeded to acquire land at the expense of varieties of landless peasants. Some of these displaced peasants migrated to the expanding urban areas: Nairobi, Nakuru, and other townships in Central and Rift Valley provinces.
After World War II, there was widespread African unemployment in urban areas, especially in Nairobi. There was inflation and no adequate housing. A combination of these factors led to desperate economic circumstances for Africans who now longed for freedom, self-determination, land, and prosperity. The level of frustration and desperation was increased by the colonial government's refusal to grant political reforms or acknowledge the legitimacy of African nationalism. Even the moderate Kenya Africa Union (KAU) under Jomo Kenyatta failed to win any reforms from the colonial government.
From October 1952 until 1956, the Mau Mau guerillas, based in the forests of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares and equipped with minimal modern weapons, fought the combined forces of the British military and the Home Guard. Relying on traditional symbols for politicization and recruitment, the Mau Mau guerillas increasingly came to rely on oaths to promote cohesion within their ranks and also to bind them to the noncombatant “passive wing” in the Kikuyu reserve. Throughout the war, the Mau Mau guerillas sought to neutralize “the effects of the betrayers.” The guerillas relied heavily on the “passive wing” and hence could not tolerate real or potential resisters to their cause. In order to control the spread of Mau Mau influence, the British military and political authorities instituted an elaborate “villagization policy.” Kikuyu peasants in the reserve were put into villages, under the control of the Home Guards. The aim was to deny the guerillas access to information, food, and support. The “villagization policy” led to corruption and brutality toward the ordinary civilian population by the Home Guard, whose actions were rarely challenged by the colonial government so long as they “hunted down Mau Mau.” At the end of the war, the colonial government stated that 11,503 Mau Mau and 63 Europeans had been killed. These official figures are “silent on the question of thousands of civilians who were ‘shot while attempting to escape’ or those who perished at the hands of the Home Guards and other branches of the security forces.” It had been a brutal bruising war that was destined to have long-term repercussions in Kenyan society.
The British government's response to the Mau Mau revolt aimed to strategically reinforce the power of the conservative Kikuyu landed gentry while, at the same time, proceeding to dismantle the political power of the resident white settlers. This was achieved through a combination of the rehabilitation process and a gradual accommodation of African political activities and initiatives. The overriding aim of the rehabilitation of former Mau Mau guerillas and sympathizers was to “remake Kenya” by defeating radicalism. Radical individuals detained during the period of the emergency had to renounce the Mau Mau and its aims. This was achieved through a complex and elaborate process of religious indoctrination and psychological manipulation of the detainees.
The Mau Mau revolt forced the British government to institute political and economic reforms in Kenya that allowed for the formation of African political parties after 1955. Most of the former guerillas were not in a position to influence the nature of these reforms nor to draw any substantial benefits from them. The conservative landed gentry who had formed the Home Guard had a significant influence on the post-emergency society. Since the start of counterinsurgency operations, these conservatives and their relatives had been recruited by the police, army, and the civil service. They were best placed to “inherit the state” from the British while the former guerillas and their sympathizers desperately struggled to adjust to the new social, economic, and political forces.
In postcolonial Kenya, the Mau Mau revolt has remained a controversial subject of study and discussion. The failure of the Mau Mau to achieve a military and political triumph has complicated discussions about its legacy. Former guerillas, without power and influence in the postcolonial society, have been unable to “steer the country in any direction that could come close to celebrating the ‘glory of the revolt.’” There is controversy over the role that the Mau Mau played in the attainment of Kenya's political freedom. The ruling elite in Kenya have been careful to avoid portraying the revolt as a pivotal event in the struggle for independence. This has been done while continually making vague references to Mau Mau and the blood that was shed in the struggle for independence. Related to this is the emotive issue of the appropriate treatment (and even possible rewards) for former guerrillas.
The rising social and economic tensions in Kenya after 1963 have politicized the legacy of the Mau Mau revolt. Former guerillas have been drawn into the postcolonial struggles for power and preeminence by the ruling elite. The result has been a tendency by many of the former guerillas to adapt their positions to the current political situation. Both the governing conservative elite and the radical leftist opposition have invoked the memory of the revolt to bolster their positions.
Further Reading
Barnett, D., and K. Njama. Mau Mau From Within. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.
Buijtenhuijs, R. Essays on Mau Mau. The Netherlands: African Studies Centre, 1982.
Clayton, A. Counter Insurgency in Kenya. Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers, 1976.
Furedi, F. “The Social Composition of the Mau Mau Movement in the White Highlands.” Journal of Peasant Studies. 1, no. 4 (1974).
Gikoyo, G. G. We Fought for Freedom. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1979.
Kanogo, T. Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau. London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987.
Lonsdale, J., and B. Berman. Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. London: J. Currey; Narobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992.
Maloba, W. O. Mau Mau and Kenya. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Tarmakin, J. “Mau Mau in Nakuru.” Journal of African History. 17, no. 1 (1976).
wa Thiong'o Ngugi. Detained. London: Heinemann, 1981.
Troup, D. W. Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1988.
Wachanga, H. K. The Swords of Kirinyaga. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975.
Kenya: Nationalism, Independence
In June 1955 the internal security situation in Kenya had improved sufficiently to enable the government to lift its ban on African political organizations. But colonywide parties remained illegal, and the Kikuyu of Central Province were excluded, except for a nominated Advisory Council of “loyalists.” The government hoped that by fostering political participation among Kenya's other African ethnic groups progress would be made by nonviolent means, and some counterbalance to Kikuyu dominance of African politics would be achieved. Equally important, the possibility of “radical” African politics and violent protest being organized at a countrywide level was minimized.
By the end of 1956, as the withdrawal of the last British soldiers on counterinsurgency duty began, so too did registration of African voters for the first African elections to Kenya's Legislative Council (LegCo). Based on the Coutts Report of January 1956, the complicated qualified franchise, and the intricacies of electoral procedure meant that African elections did not take place until March 1957, six months after those for Europeans. The European candidates had been divided into two groups, six seats being won by those who approved of African political participation, against eight won by those who did not, led by settler politicians Michael Blundell and Group Captain Llewellyn Briggs, respectively. But they soon united to consolidate their numerical advantage over the eight newly arriving African Elected Members (AEMs).
Having unseated six of the government-appointed African members and thus assured of their mandate, the AEMs, led by Mboya, had different ideas. They rejected the Lyttelton Constitution as an irrelevancy imposed under emergency conditions, demanded fifteen more African seats, and refused to take ministerial office. The European members recognized that without African participation in government there would be little chance of future stability and agreed that they would accept an increase in African representation. Accordingly, in October, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, accepted the resignations of the Asian and European ministers. This enabled him to present a new constitution: the AEMs would gain an extra ministry and six more elected seats, giving them parity with the Europeans.
The Africans, including those elected in March 1958, rejected what they saw as the disproportionate influence that the provisions for the elections to special seats left in European hands. Following the largely unsuccessful prosecution of Mboya's group for denouncing as “traitors” the eight Africans who did stand for election to the special seats, in June 1958 Odinga sought to shift the political focus by referring to Kenyatta and others as “leaders respected by the African people” in debate in LegCo. Not to be outdone in associating themselves with this important nationalist talisman, the other African politicians soon followed suit. Thus began the “cult of Kenyatta.”
Keen to emulate political advances in recently independent Ghana, the African leaders pressed for a constitutional conference to implement their demands for an African majority in LegCo. Lennox-Boyd refused to increase communal representation, insisting that the Council of Ministers needed more time to prove itself. In January 1959, as the colonial secretary and the East African governors met in England to formulate a “gradualist” timetable for independence (Kenya's date being “penciled in” as 1975) the AEMs announced a boycott of LegCo. With the prospect that the two Asian members of the government would join the AEMs, undermining the veneer of multiracialism, Governor Baring demanded a statement of Britain's ultimate intentions for Kenya. Lennox-Boyd responded in April, announcing that there should be a conference before the next Kenya general election in 1960.
But in order for the conference to take place (scheduled for January 1960) with African participation, the state of emergency had to be lifted. By the time this occurred, on January 12, 1960, the Kenya government had enacted a preservation of public security bill that, beside enabling the continued detention and restriction of the Mau Mau “residue,” and measures to preempt subversion, deal with public meetings, and seditious publications, also empowered the governor to exercise controls over colonywide political associations in accordance with his “judgement of the needs of law and order.” This was not simply a political expedient. The defeat of Mau Mau led the Kenya government's Internal Security Working Committee to conclude in February 1958 that future challenges to stability would take the form of “strikes, civil disobedience, sabotage, and the dislocation of transport and supplies rather than armed insurrection.” An Economic Priorites Committee “to study supply problems in such an eventuality” had been set up in April 1957; that same year saw some 4,000-plus strikes of varying intensity, and Mboya made frequent threats that if African demands for increased representation were not met, “the results would be far worse than anything Mau Mau produced.”
Kiama Kia Muingi (KKM), or “Council/Society of the People,” which emerged from the Mau Mau “passive wing” in March 1955, became so widespread, and too closely resembled Mau Mau, that it was proscribed in January 1958. Only political solutions to Africans’ grievances were to be allowed. But, by December 1958, Special Branch had discovered contacts between KKM and Mboya's Nairobi Peoples’ Convention Party. Only by the end of 1959, following a concerted campaign of repression, did the “KKM crisis” appear to be resolved. As a precaution, however, Britain took the unprecedented step of resuming War Office control of the East African Land Forces, thereby removing the military from “local political interference.” The measure was announced at the constitutional conference and presented as a means of freeing up local revenue for development projects.
At the January 1960 Lancaster House Conference, the African delegates presented a united front, the result of collaboration since November. Again, the Africans pressed, unsuccessfully, for Kenyatta's release. The outcome of the conference and subsequent negotiations was the concession by Iain Macleod of an effective African majority in LegCo, plus an increase in the number of Africans with ministerial responsibility. But the fissures in the African front resurfaced over the issue of whether to accept office, Mboya rejecting the constitution as “already out of date.” By June 1960 the two major pre-independence political parties had been formed: the Kenya African National Union (KANU), principally Kikuyu, Luo, Embu, Meru, Kamba, and Kisii orientated, which boycotted the government, and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), representing an alliance of the Kalenjin, Maasai, and Coast peoples.
In the February 1961 general election KANU won 67 per cent of the vote but refused to take its place in the government without Kenyatta's release, leaving KADU to form a coalition with Blundell's New Kenya Party and the Kenya Indian Congress. But the expansion of yet another Kikuyu subversive movement, the Kenya Land Freedom Army (KLFA)—many members of which also carried KANU membership cards—led the governor, Sir Patrick Renison, to press Macleod to reverse his decision on Kenyatta. It would be better, Special Branch advised, to release Kenyatta and gauge the impact of his return to Kenyan politics on the security situation while Britain was still “in control.”
Although the African politicians had used “land hunger” and the presence (since 1958) of a British military base as political sticks with which to beat the colonial authorities over the issue of “sovereignty,” a further constitutional conference in September 1961 broke down over access to the “White Highlands” because KADU rejected KANU's proposals for a strong central government, favoring instead a majimbo (regional) constitution. The “framework constitution,” settled in London in February 1962, provided in principle for regional assemblies, and appeared to ameliorate tensions. But the coalition government, formed in April 1962, served as a thin veil over KADU-KANU ethnic tensions. The KLFA had spread: its oaths became increasingly violent; “military drills” were reported; over 200 precision weapons and homemade guns had been seized; and civil war seemed imminent.
It was no mere coincidence that, within weeks of KANU's June 1, 1963, electoral victory, and Kenyatta becoming prime minister and appointing an ethnically mixed government, the British Cabinet agreed to December 12, 1963, as the date for Kenya's independence. The apparent desire of the three East African governments to form a federation meant that to maintain its goodwill, and for procedural reasons, Britain could no longer prohibit Kenya's independence.
But the prospects for a federation soon collapsed and civil war seemed likely. At the final constitutional conference in September, Sandys therefore backed KANU's proposed amendments to the constitution, making it easier to reverse regionalism at a later date, as the best means to prevent chaos.
Nevertheless, on October 18, 1963, Britain began to make preparations to introduce troops into Kenya for internal security operations and the evacuation of Europeans. The victory of the “moderates” in the KADU parliamentary group and the defection of four KADU members to KANU a week later seem, on the face of it, to have been enough to ensure a peaceful transition to independence.
See also: Kenya: Kenyatta, Jomo: Life and Government of.
Further Reading
Kyle, K. The Politics of the Independence of Kenya. London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Percox, D. A. “Internal Security and Decolonization in Kenya, 1956–1963.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History [forthcoming].
——. “British Counter-Insurgency in Kenya, 1952–56: Extension of Internal Security Policy or Prelude to Decolonisation?” Small Wars and Insurgencies. 9, no. 3 (Winter. 1998): 46–101.
Tignor, R. L. Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963. Princeton: Princeton University Press, and Chichester, 1998.
Kenya: Kenyatta, Jomo: Life and Government of
Jomo Kenyatta (c.1894–1978) was born in Gatundu, Kiambu district, probably in 1894. His childhood was quite difficult due to the death of his parents. Early on, he moved to Muthiga where his grandfather lived.
Muthiga was close to the Church of Scotland's Thogoto mission. Missionaries preached in the village and when Kamau (Kenyatta's original name) became sick, he was treated in the mission hospital. Mesmerized by people who could read, he enrolled in the mission school. He accepted Christianity and was baptized Johnstone.
Leaving Thogoto in 1922, he was employed by the Municipal Council of Nairobi as a stores clerk and meter reader. The job gave him ample opportunity to travel extensively within the municipality. The allowed him to interact with his African peers, as well as Indians and Europeans. With his motorcycle, a novelty at the time, and wearing a beaded belt (kinyata) and big hats, he became a familiar figure in the municipality. Moreover, he established a grocery shop at Dagoretti, which became a meeting place for the young African elite.
Becoming acutely aware of the plight of Africans, he decided to throw his lot with the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). He became its secretary general at the beginning of 1928 and editor of its newspaper, Muiguithania (The Reconciler). The future of Kenya was also being hotly debated in the 1920s, with Indians being pitted against the settler community. European settlers demanded responsible government, restriction of Indian immigration into Kenya, upholding of racial discrimination, and the creation of a federation of the East and Central African British colonies. Under these circumstances, the African voice needed to be heard. KCA decided to send an emissary to England for this purpose. Kamau became their choice due to his charisma, eloquence, and education. By then, he had assumed the name Jomo Kenyatta.
Kenyatta went to England in 1929–1930 and made presentations to the Colonial Office and other interested parties. The British government appointed the Carter Land Commission to investigate the land problem that had become the bane of Kenya's political life. Again KCA dispatched Kenyatta to London in 1931, where he remained until 1946.
Life in London provided Kenyatta with many opportunities for self-improvement. He enrolled at the London School of Economics to study anthropology. He traveled widely across Europe. He met with the African diaspora in Britain, gave public lectures, and wrote to newspapers about the inequities of the colonial system. He also found the time to write his major work on the Kikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya (published 1938).
The peak event of his time in Britain was probably his participation in the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. The participants committed themselves to fighting for the independence of their respective countries.
Upon returning to Kenya in 1946, he immediately became president of the Kenya African Union (KAU), which had been formed in the same year. His return initiated a new era in Kenyan politics. Here was a man who had lived in Britain for fifteen years and married a white woman, Edna Clarke. To many Kenyans, Kenyatta knew the white man's secrets and would use this knowledge to liberate them from the colonial yoke. His tour of the rural areas to popularize KAU attracted huge crowds.
As the clamor for uhuru (independence) gained momentum, two camps emerged within KAU. Kenyatta was a constitutionalist, while a faction of younger, more radically minded members, advocated for armed struggle. They began to prepare for a war of liberation by recruiting others into their movement, called the Land and Freedom Army, although it soon acquired the name Mau Mau. Initially, recruitment was through persuasion but increasingly it was carried out by force. Hence, violence escalated, and the colonial government declared a state of emergency on October 20, 1952, after the murder of Chief Waruhiu Kungu in broad daylight. Kenyatta, together with ninety-seven KAU leaders, were arrested. KAU leadership was accused of managing Mau Mau, a terrorist organization. Kenyatta was convicted, in what turned out to be a rigged trial, and jailed for seven years. He was interned in Lodwar and Lokitaung, in the remotest corners of Kenya. His release came only in 1961, after a swell of national and international outcry against his detention.
By 1956 the British and local military forces, supported by Kikuyu Guards, had contained Mau Mau. Nevertheless, Britain was forced to assess its role in Kenya and begin to meet some of the African demands. A series of constitutional changes were mounted and African representation in the Legislative Council gradually increased. Furthermore, the ban on political parties was lifted from 1955, albeit at the district level. These amalgamated in 1960 into the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). The former was predominantly supported by the Kikuyu and Luo, while the latter attracted the smaller tribes, such as the Kalenjin and the coastal peoples.
Upon his release, Kenyatta unsuccessfully tried to reconcile the leaders of the two parties. He eventually joined KANU, becoming its president. KANU and KADU engaged in protracted constitutional negotiations centered on whether Kenya should be a federal or centralized state. Eventually KADU, which espoused federalism, was victorious. A semifederal system, majimbo, was accepted. In 1963 general elections were held which KANU won, ushering Kenya into independence on December 12, 1963, under Kenyatta's leadership (he was named president in 1964).
Kenyatta's government faced enormous problems. The formation of KANU and KADU was a glaring manifestation of tribalism, which threatened to tear Kenya apart as had happened to Congo. The economy was under the control of expatriates. It was also in shambles due to the flight of capital. There was rampant unemployment aggravated by landlessness. There were few well-trained and experienced indigenous Kenyans to man the civil service.
From the outset, Kenyatta preached the gospel of reconciliation and urged all Kenyans, irrespective of tribe, race, or color, to join together to work for the collective good. Thus he coined the national motto, Harambbee (pull together). In this regard, he encouraged KADU to disband, which it did in 1964, its supporters joining KANU. This reduced tribal tensions but produced an unexpected development. There emerged ideological divisions within KANU: a pro-Western wing that believed in capitalism, and a pro-Eastern cohort that sought to align Kenya with socialist countries. The former was led by Kenyattta and T. J. Mboya while the latter was led by Oginga Odinga, the vice president. This culminated in the ousting of Odinga as vice president in 1966. He then formed his own party, the Kenya Peoples Union, which was predominantly supported by the Luo.
To consolidate his position, Kenyatta embarked on a series of constitutional changes. He scrapped the majimbo constitution and increased the power of the presidency, including the power to commit individuals to detention without trial. He also increasingly relied on the provincial administration for managing government affairs and this led to the decline of KANU and parliament. So long as his authority and power were not challenged, he tolerated some measure of criticism and debate.
He eschewed the socialist policies that were in vogue in much of Africa. He vigorously wooed investors and courted the Western world. His policies paid dividends in that the economy grew by more than 6 per cent during his time in office. In late 1970s, this rate of growth contracted due to the vagaries of the world economy, such as the oil crisis of 1973–1974. Equally, he made efforts to indigenize the economy by establishing bodies that offered assistance to Kenyans. These include the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation, Kenya National Trading Corporation, and Kenya Industrial Estates, among others. This assistance has a produced a class of local entrepreneurs that is playing a significant role in the Kenyan economy.
Critical to the survival of Kenya was the problem of squatters and ex-Mau Mau. In order to gain their support, the government settled them and the squatters in former settler-owned farms. In the first ten years, 259,000 hectares of land were bought and distributed to 150,000 landless people, who were also provided with development loans and infrastructure.
Kenyatta's government abolished racial discrimination in schools, introduced curricula and exams in secondary schools to prepare children for university entrance, and made efforts to increase the number of Kenyans in universities, both local and overseas. For example, between early 1960s and late 1970s university and secondary students increased from 1,900 to 8,000 and 30,000 to 490,000 respectively. And adult literacy jumped from 20 per cent to 50 per cent in the same period.
Kenyatta died on August 22, 1978. By then, he had provided Kenya with peace and stability for fifteen years. In a continent ravaged by war and coups, this was no small achievement. But one should not ignore the fact that corruption started to show its ugly face during his term. He relied heavily on his kinsmen, a factor that fuelled tribalism. He had fought very hard for freedom and yet became an autocrat, albeit a benign one. Few can deny that he laid a firm foundation for Kenya. He is thus referred to as mzee (respected elder) or Father of the Nation. In short, he was an exceptionally formidable and complex man.
Biography
Born Gatundu, Kiambu district, about 1894. Named secretary general of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), and editor of its newspaper, Muiguithania (The Reconciler), 1928. Goes to England, 1929–30. Returns the following year. Publishes Facing Mount Kenya, 1938. Participates in the Pan-African Congress in Manchester, 1945. Returns to Kenya, named president of the Kenya African Union, 1946. Convicted for the murder of Chief Waruhiu Kungu, 1952. Released due to national and international pressures, 1961. Named first president of Kenya, 1964. Died on August 22, 1978.
Further Reading
Barkan, J. D. “The Rise and Fall of a Governance Realm in Kenya.” In Governance and Politics in Africa, edited by G. Hyden and M. Bratton. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992.
Kenyatta, J. Suffering Without Bitterness. Nairobi: Government Printer, 1968.
Murray-Brown, J. Kenyatta. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972.
Widner, J. A. The Rise of a Party-State in Kenya: From ‘Harambee’ to ‘Nyayo’. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Kenya: Independence to the Present
At the attainment of independence in 1963, Kenya inherited an economy that was symptomatic of most African colonial economies: a predominantly agricultural economy, a manufacturing sector whose cornerstone was import-substitution financed by foreign capital, and a transport infrastructure that was insensitive to the internal economic needs of the majority of the population. In the social arena, literacy levels were fairly low and disease patrolled the majority of households.
The government of Kenya under the first head of state, Jomo Kenyatta (1963–1978), cogently identified and declared war on the three major enemies of economic development in postindependence Kenya: illiteracy, disease, and poverty. Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, titled “African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya,” was promulgated as the government's blueprint for eradicating poverty, raising literacy levels, and providing health care services to the citizenry. But Sessional Paper No. 10 was more than just an economic document. It had the political taint of the Cold War era, when socialism and capitalism were struggling for economic and political space in the countries that were emerging from the womb of colonialism. Thus, besides its economic agenda, the document was also meant to appease both the radical and moderate wings of the ruling party, Kenya African National Union (KANU), by emphasizing private and government investment, the provision of free primary education as well as health care services.
Between 1963 and 1973 Kenya witnessed the smooth expansion of African-owned businesses as well as the growth of smallholder peasant agriculture, particularly in foreign exchange earning crops such as coffee and tea. Since 1967 smallholder production has invariably made up more than 50 per cent of Kenya's coffee output. While in 1964–1965 there were 22,343 growers of coffee with a total 5,133 hectares (12,684 acres); by 1987–1988 the number of growers had increased to 151,860 with the number of hectares having jumped to 57,688 (142,550 acres). This marked growth of smallholder peasant agriculture was evident in other crops such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco as well. Out of these developments in the agricultural sector, the cooperative movement became a significant instrument in handling the processing and marketing of cash crops. In sum, the GDP growth rate in the 1964–1974 period stood at an average of 6.60 per cent. But this economic growth was also a function of the political and economic developments in the region of eastern Africa.
Kenya benefited from flawed economic policies of the neighboring countries: Tanzania and Uganda. In Tanzania mass nationalization of private companies and banks scared away foreign investors. The policy of “villagization” in the rural areas also adversely affected the development of agriculture in Tanzania. Uganda, particularly under Idi Amin Dada, instituted the policy of indigenization that led to confiscation of Asian property. Amin's rule resulted in the breakdown of law and order in Uganda. These regional economic and political developments left Kenya as the only premier nation in the eastern African region with a sound economic policy as well as political stability to attract foreign investment.
However, the Kenya of the 1990s was quite a different political and economic terrain from that of the 1963 to 1974 period. After the economic prosperity of the first decade, Kenya faced a number of political and economic challenges, both from within and outside, that resulted in widespread poverty in a country that at the time of independence had the most developed economic infrastructure in the eastern African region and one of the most often cited as a showcase of economic success. With a population of about 30 million, the 1997–2001 Kenya National Development Plan put the level of absolute poverty in rural areas at 46.4 per cent, while the rate in the urban areas was estimated at 29.3 per cent. These official figures show that 75 per cent of the Kenyan population live in poverty. The GDP growth rate has been on the decline since 1974. While in the subsequent two decades, the GDP was at an average of 5.20 and 4.10 per cent, respectively, between 1994 and 1999 the country has witnessed an average growth rate of 2.50 per cent.
The causes of this decline are many, varied, and complex. The quadrupling of oil price in 1973; inflation in the developed countries and the accompanying high interest; the heavy borrowing of the 1970s; the unfavorable terms of trade; widespread corruption; internal political instability, particularly the ethnic conflicts that coincided with political multipartyism in the early 1990s which adversely affected the tourist industry; and the World Bank and IMF policies, particularly the structural adjustment programs, have in one way or another contributed to the current state of economic decline. The economic challenges of the 1990s are closely tied to the developmental as well as political policies that have been pursued since independence.
In industry and manufacturing, for example, the government used high tariffs and import licensing to encourage investment in the import-substitution industries. While this strategy yielded some success, it denied export promotion a viable economic space and stifled competition through protectionist policies. By the mid-1970s, all was not well in sections of the tariff-protected import substitution industries because they used more foreign exchange than they generated. As the pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund intensified in the 1980s with the Kenyan leadership being advised to warm up to a competitiveness in the manufacturing sector and exit the industrial protectionist strategy, the industries began to feel the pinch brought on by the more open import liberalization regime. Company closures, retrenchment, and the state's forced retreat from subsidizing social programs such as education, and health care services have coalesced to force many people into the poverty trap.
The repayment of the national debt against the economic backdrop of the structural adjustment programs has been a painful experience. Due to widespread corruption, which started during the Kenyatta presidency and reached its apogee in the Moi era, international loans were spent on programs that did not benefit the poor. The loans were directed to private projects benefiting government officials and a small elite. By the late 1980s, the repayment of the debt was a burden borne by poor people, who did not have a voice in contracting the debt, but who bore the consequences of repaying it. The problem is not so much the size of the debt as the huge share of a country's income it takes to service it. In this regard, Kenya's case mirrors that of many other countries in Africa grappling with the challenges of economic growth, indebtedness, and the search for economic and political stability in the wake of structural adjustment programs and the resurgence of political pluralism. Of the forty heavily indebted poor countries identified by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1996, thirty-two are located in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But the problem of economic development is also a function of politics and governance. Although Kenya's economy under the presidency of Jomo Kenyatta was quite healthy, it was deeply enmeshed in the cobweb of ethnicity, nepotism, and regional preferences. Nowhere is this manifested as in the case of land settlement schemes in the immediate postindependence era. Land has been a critical factor in Kenya's politics as well as economic development dating back to the onset of colonial governance. It was at the very heart of the Mau Mau revolt. In the post-independence period, it has been one of the major divisive issues whose repercussion has on occasions been expressed in bitter ethnic conflicts leading to death of thousands and displacement of many more over the last decade.
With funds provided by Great Britain at independence, the government of Kenya bought out European planters and then subdivided the land into relatively smaller portions, which were then sold to an emergent African elite who were provided with loans at low rates of interest, or turned to settlement schemes for the landless. On the positive side, the government's handling of land ensured smooth transition from the era of large-scale planters to the epoch of a majority small peasant holdings. It is this smooth transition that partly explains the expansion and economic vibrancy of the small-scale peasant holdings in Kenya. Through settlement schemes, hundreds of thousands of landless people were settled in various parts of the country, particularly in the Rift Valley, Central, Coast, and to some extent parts of Nyanza and Western provinces.
While the Jomo Kenyatta regime sought to distribute land, it became quite evident that the distribution of land to the landless Africans was not based on need alone. In fact, ethnicity was a major determinant. The “Africanization” of the former European settled areas was, by and large, reduced to the “Kikuyunization” of those lands with the members of the Kikuyu ethnic group being given large chunks of land in the Rift valley, with the tacit approval of the then vice president Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin, and much to the chagrin of the local communities. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, also appointed members of his ethnic group to key positions in the government, as well as parastatals. These policies that accorded ethnicity and patronage a pride of place in the allocation of resources resulted in the marginalization of most ethnic groups, regions and those who questioned the economic and political iniquities of the Kenyatta regime.
Kenyatta, while allowing regular presidential and National Assembly elections, was quite reluctant to allow competitive multiparty politics. In his last few years in office, he nurtured authoritarian tendencies that saw critics of his regime detained without trial. Under Kenyatta, Kenya became a de facto one-party state after the banning of the Kenya People's Union in 1969. Moi's first few years in office after his accession to power in 1978 was quite promising. He released all political detainees and prisoners, focused on an all-inclusive government, and exhibited populist policies that endeared him to the majority of the population, at least in the short run.
But behind these official exhibitions of compassion, openness, politics of inclusion, and populism, Moi, like his predecessor, Kenyatta, silently embarked on empowering his Kalenjin ethnic group. Internal dissent intensified leading to the 1982 abortive coup attempt by a section of the armed forces. Within a decade of his accession to power, Moi had presided over the making of Kenya a de jure one-party state, compromising of the independence of the judiciary and the legislature, unprecedented corruption, and decline of the economy. As the decade ending 1989 wore on, Moi was under intense political and economic pressure, both from within and outside, to allow multipartyism and embrace economic reforms on the pain of losing economic aid. Moi reluctantly succumbed to the pressure and presided over the repeal of the de jure one-party clause in the constitution and allowed multipartyism much to the chagrin of his close political and economic cohorts.
On the eve of the multiparty elections of 1992, ethnic clashes erupted in the Rift Valley, Nyanza, and Coast provinces aimed at the so-called non-indigenous people who would tilt the election in favor of a candidate from one of the major ethnic groups. Moi had presented himself as the only viable candidate who would protect the interests of the minority ethnic groups. In fact, the strategies of divide and rule and scare tactics have been the most portent and indispensable weapons of Moi's presidency and political survival. A parliamentary commission of inquiry into the clashes implicated the government. In the two multiparty elections conducted in 1992 and 1997, Moi emerged the victor because of a divided opposition. Although Moi was reelected in 1997 to serve his last term as the president of Kenya, he had to contend with two major challenges: economic stagnation and agitation for constitutional reform. Most international creditors remained reluctant to release aid because of the massive corruption in the country. The government's poverty eradication schemes failed to yield meaningful results. As a result, the unemployment rate spiraled and poverty continued to afflict the majority of the population.
In the midst of the foregoing economic problems, agitation for constitutional reform intensified with the civil society calling for drastic changes aimed at strengthening institutions as well as devolving powers from the office of the president. Moi reluctantly acceded to the demands, and after lengthy negotiations, a constitutional review commission was established under the leadership of Y. P. Ghai. Meanwhile, Moi proceeded to reorganize the ruling party, both with a view to identifying a potential successor as well as ensuring that the KANU emerged victorious in the 2002 general election. To further these two objectives Moi's KANU merged with National Development Party (NDP) led by a leading opposition politician, Raila Amolo Odinga in early 2002. KANU was transformed into a formidable political party destined to win the general election. But that was not to be. Moi's open and active support for Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president of Kenya, to be the KANU's nominee as the party's presidential candidate split the party.
Raila Odinga and other leading party officials, including Joseph Kamotho, Kalonzo Musyoka, and George Saitoti led those who disagreed with Moi, over the undemocratic way he settled on Uhuru Kenyatta as the preferred party's candidate, to decamp from KANU. They joined the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which Raila Odinga transformed into a major political party within a relatively short period of time. On the eve of the 2002 general election, LDP forged an alliance with the National Alliance of Kenya (NAK) led by Mwai Kibaki, Michael Kijana Wamalwa, and Charity Ngilu. The two parties formed the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in which they agreed on a power-sharing formula as well as common election platform, which included completing the constitutional review within the first one hundred days in office, providing free primary education, eradicating corruption, stimulating economic growth, creating jobs, and enhancing national unity. To show unity of purpose, NARC leadership nominated Mwai Kibaki as its presidential candidate. NARC emerged victorious in the 2002 election, with LDP faction bringing in more votes and members of parliament than NAK, thereby ending nearly four decades of KANU rule. Moi handed over power peacefully to Mwai Kibaki.
NARC's victory under the leadership of Kibaki ushered in an era of optimism and expectation. International creditors expressed willingness to provide aid. The implementation of free primary education by the new NARC government convinced the people that the government was committed to its pre-election pledges. However, the hope, expectation, and goodwill that NARC victory brought began to wane barely after six months of Kibaki's presidency. The unwillingness on the part of the leadership to implement some of the election promises such as completing the constitutional review exercise within the promised time period, slow pace at which anticorruption campaign was being waged, use of ethnicity as a basis of appointing people to key positions in the civil service and reluctance to honor the MOU combined to dim the hope and expectation of Kenyans. Internal squabbles gained momentum with the LDP wing of NARC led by Raila Odinga demanding radical changes in governmental structure, immediate completion of the constitutional review and creation of the office of prime minister, full implementation of the MOU, and an aggressive anticorruption campaign. In contrast, the NAK faction insisted on effecting minimal reforms and suspending the radical reorganization of governmental structure until after the next general election scheduled for 2007. The postelection intracoalition conflict bedeviling NARC is instructive of the dilemma African leaders face in forging viable and working political coalitions based on clear and defined ideology of governance, the absence of which encourages nepotism, ethnicity, and regionalism.
See also: Mboya, Tom J.
Further Reading
Anyang’, P. Nyong'o, and P. Coughlin, eds. Industrialization at Bay: African Experiences. Nairobi: African Academy of Sciences, 1991.
Anyang’, P. Nyong'o, ed. 30 Years of Independence in Africa: The Lost Decades? Nairobi: Academy Science Publishers, 1992.
Haugerud, A. The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Human Rights Watch/Africa. Divide and Rule: State Sponsored Ethnic Violence in Kenya. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993.
Maxon, R. M., and P. Ndege. “The Economics of Structural Adjustment.” In Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993, edited by B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’ Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1995, London: James Currey, 1995
Ochieng’, W. R. “Independent Kenya, 1963–1986.” In A Modern History of Kenya, edited by W. R. Ochieng’. Nairobi: Evans Brothers, 1989.
Odhiambo, E. S. A. “Reconditioning the Terms of Fact: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Democracy as Political Vectors.” In Ethnicity, Nationalism and Democracy in Africa, edited by B. A. Ogot. Maseno, Kenya, IRPS, 1997.
Ogot, B. A. “Transition from Single-Party to Multiparty System, 1989–1993.” In Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–1993, edited by B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1995; London: James Currey, 1995.
Van Der Hoeven, R., and F. Van Der Kraal, eds. Structural Adjustment and Beyond in Sub-Saharan Africa. London: James Currey, 1994.
Kenya: Islam
The story of Islam in Kenya is venerable one. The islands of the Lamu archipelago appear to have harbored some of the earliest discovered Muslim communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, Islamic scholarship, both in Arabic and Swahili, reached notably high levels at Pate and Lamu, and it was from there that a new, more literate, brand of coastal Islam radiated southward during the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries. Immigrant Arab ulama (Muslim scholars) from southern Arabia largely were transmitters of this new scholarship.
Coastal Kenya met with fresh external influences in the nineteenth century. Scholars from Barawa introduced new methods at Siyu in the 1840s and trained a new generation of local Swahili shaykhs able to compete successfully with dynasties of Arab ulama who had monopolized scholarship until then. In addition, Somali shaykhs helped popularize Islamic teaching through the Qadiriyya brotherhood. Due to opposition from the influential Mazrui shaykhs, however, the Qadiriyya largely skipped Pate, Lamu, and Mombasa and experienced more success in Zanzibar and along the Tanzanian and Mozambique coasts.
The nineteenth century also witnessed significant penetration of Islam inland for the first time, though this success was notably less decided in Kenya than farther south due to the relative failure of the brotherhoods there. Rather, other developments accounted for this in the case of Kenya. By the 1840s and 1850s, coastal Muslims were brought into more frequent and intense contact with non-Muslims of the immediate coastal hinterland. The general cause was the expanding economy of East Africa, but the immediate reasons included growing agricultural production and expanded trade. New farming areas, including some slave plantations, were opened around the Shimoni Peninsula, Gasi, Mombasa, Takaungu, Malindi, and the Pokomo Valley. Muslim trading posts appeared among the Mijikenda by mid-century and later. The result of these expanded contacts by the third quarter of the century has been termed “rural Islamization.” As Muslims advanced inland among traditionally non-Muslim peoples, conversions occurred individually and for a wide variety of reasons. However, much of this had to do with the growing presence of Muslim teachers who proselytized and taught useful new literary skills.
By the 1860s and 1870s, caravan trade for ivory became a more crucial factor linking coastal Muslims and peoples of the farther interior. Two major routes developed in Kenya. One was up the Pokomo Valley. The second went inland from Mombasa to Mt. Kilimanjaro or Kamba country; from thence it traversed the Rift Valley to the region east and north of Lake Victoria. Slowly, settlements of Muslims appeared along these routes. The most important was at Mumia's in northwestern Kenya, but others appeared at locations like Machakos, Kitui, Baringo, and Eldama Ravine.
The absence of an official policy toward Islam during the colonial era initially fostered its continued success upcountry. In the early days of colonial rule, Muslims were favored for posts as government agents. Early administrators like Arthur Hardinge thought coastal “Arabs” to be more “civilized” than other Kenyans, so many (especially Sudanese) were employed as soldiers in the “pacification” of inland areas. Afterward, others were employed at administrative centers as policemen, clerks, translators, surveyors, tax collectors, and headmen. The prestige attached to these positions in the eyes of local peoples provided fertile soil for proselytization by the individuals who filled them.
By the twentieth century, however, Islamization in Kenya lost its earlier momentum. The causes of this were the greater prestige attached to Christianity as the religion of the colonial masters and the specific role played by missionary Christianity. As most Kenyans quickly realized, the key to advancement in the new order was education, and the Christian missions largely were the providers of that key. In many cases, a pre-requisite to admission to schools was conversion, but even where it was not, Muslims, fearing conversion of their children, refused to send them to these schools. Inevitably, Muslims were left behind and were replaced in most positions by mission-trained Africans.
Such marginalization has continued in the postindependence era. The wealthiest and most influential members of Kenya's elite are those who have benefited most from Western-style educations. Generally, this has meant those who are Christians. At times, ethnicity and regionalism have been factors weighing against Muslim advancement, particularly coastal Muslims. The Kenyatta regime favored Kikuyus, most of whom were Christian and educated. President Moi has downplayed ethnicity, but until 1992 all members of his cabinet were Christians with Western-style educations.
Over the years, Kenyan Muslims themselves have been splintered in responding to these challenges. Some, like Shaykhs al-Amin Ali Mazrui, Abdallah Saleh Farsy, and, more recently, Nasoro Khamisi, have tried to reconcile Islamic teaching with the requirements of modern life. Their efforts against saint veneration, costly burial rites, and other innovations have aroused opposition from the Jamal al-Layl shaykhs of Lamu's Riyadha Institute. The coastal ulama also have experienced increased challenges of leadership from upcountry, non-Swahili shaykhs in the past two decades. This appears to have been due partly to efforts by the government to divide the Muslims of Kenya.
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a growing radicalization of Muslims all over East Africa. Some local shaykhs have received training in Saudi universities and have returned exhibiting a greater awareness of international Islam and its dilemmas. Some have expressed open sympathy with the Iranian revolution. Preaching by such individuals has helped galvanize Kenyan Muslims into greater political awareness, especially over issues of concern to the entire community (such as the reaction that followed passage of the Law of Succession). Widespread opposition to KANU and the return to multiparty politics in 1992 allowed the creation of the Islamic Party of Kenya to give a voice to community concerns in national politics for the first time. The government countered, however, by refusing to recognize the IPK and to support a rival party, the United Muslims of Africa. Relations between Kenyan Muslims and the government have continued deteriorating in the aftermath of the bombing of the United States Embassy by Islamic terrorists in August 1998.
See also: Religion, Postcolonial Africa: Islam.
Further Reading
Anderson, J. N. D. Islamic Law in Africa. London: Cass, 1970.
Chande, A. “Radicalism and Reform in Modern East Africa.” In The History of Islam in Africa, edited by N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels. Athens, Ohio University Press, forthcoming.
Sperling, D. “The East African Hinterland and Interior.” In The History of Islam in Africa, edited by N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels. Athens, Ohio University Press, forthcoming.
Strobel, M. Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890–1975. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Kérékou, Mathieu: See Benin, Republic of (Dahomey): Kérékou, Mathieu.
Kerma and Egyptian Nubia
The roots of the Kerma culture extend back into the late Predynastic period in Upper Nubia at least north of the Debba Bend, contemporaneous with the later (Classic and Terminal) phases of A-Group culture in Lower Nubia. Little evidence for its continuity has yet been found, but what there is indicates a social and political development of fewer but larger “statelets” and small “kingdoms.” Egyptian control over Lower Nubia during the Old Kingdom (which effectively erased all traces of the A-Group) allowed it to trade directly with the “Pre-Kerma” peoples who controlled the Upper Nubian Nile corridor. At the type site and probable capital of Kerma itself, just south of the Third Cataract, a major and densely populated “Pre-Kerma” settlement with circular houses up to 5 meters in diameter was revealed directly beneath the Middle Kerma period cemetery.
In the absence of written Kerma texts and with only a few Egyptian records, four developmental phases of the Kerma culture are recognized archaeologically through ceramic typology. The Early, Middle, Classic, and Late (or Post-) Kerma periods correspond roughly in Egypt to the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, the Middle Kingdom, the Second Intermediate period, and finally the brief final phase in early Dynasty XVIII. The history of Kerma still must be viewed in relation to Egyptian history: power and control alternated between the two and was dominated by their need to control the river traffic in trade goods, and the gold mines of the Wadi Allaqi in the eastern desert were exploited first by Egypt in the Old Kingdom. The Nile was still, at this time, much farther east than today.
Tall pottery vessel. Predynastic. Egyptain Museum, Cario. © Wener Forman/Art Resource, New York.
By the end of the Old Kingdom, a recognizable “Early Kerma” culture is visible archaeologically from the Batn el-Hajar at least as far south as the Debba Bend. It is distinct from other contemporaneous cultures nearby, the “C-Group,” which appears to be the successor of the A-Group in Lower Nubia and the nomadic pastoralist “Pan-Grave” peoples, mostly in Nubia's Eastern desert. Even further south, and possibly in some form of trading relationship with Early Kerma although not (directly) with Egypt, are the nomadic herders of the Western Butana (identified at the site of Shaqadud) and, even farther, the “Gash Group” (“Middle Kassala”) of the Southern Atbai. Other areas are insufficiently understood for comment, although cattle-keepers occupied the Wadi el-Howar.
“Kerma” is an entirely modern identification for this civilization, taken from the major city and its adjacent cemetery excavated in 1913–1916 by G. A. Reisner and until the 1950s virtually the only Kerma site known. The ancient Egyptian name for the Kerma territory appears to have changed over time. It probably was (at least in part) “Yam” in the late Old Kingdom, and perhaps later “Irem.” The designation “Kush,” usually cited in pejorative terms, begins to appear in the Egyptian records in Dynasty XII, and most likely this is the Egyptian name corresponding to the powerful and centralized Upper Nubian “Kerma” state by that time. Two Middle Kerma kings, Awa'a and Utatrerses, are named on these texts, and those of other Kushite rulers also are attested.
During the Old Kingdom, Egypt controlled access along the Lower Nubian Nile as far as the Second Cataract but, at its end, was forced to retreat down to Aswan. Late Old Kingdom traders such as Harkhuf had traveled beyond the Second Cataract to conduct their business with the emerging Kerma state, but such expeditions are not evident later. The power vacuum thus created was filled by Kerma cultural and political expansion northward almost to Aswan throughout the Early Kerma/First Intermediate period in Egypt. The pastoralist C-Group peoples also became culturally distinct in Lower Nubia, but their relationship to the Kerma intruders is as yet not entirely clear. The increased power and importance of Kerma (both city and state) by the early Middle Kingdom may have been the reason why its Dynasty XI founder, Nebhepetre Montuhotep II, initiated a military campaign to regain control of Lower Nubia.
Eventually, the powerful Dynasty XII kings constructed a series of massive mud-brick military fortresses at strategic points along the Lower Nubian Nile, which controlled all access north of the Second Cataract by the time of Senwosret I. The other known major Kerma settlement and cemetery guarded this main Upper Nubian/Kerma frontier at Sai Island just south of the Batn el-Hajar, which Egypt did not breach until Dynasty XVIII. The Egyptian army recruited entire contingents of Nubian mercenaries, most famously archers, who seem to have been mainly Pan-Grave and known as the “Medjay.” Its success, bypassing the C-Group population, is indicated in part by the much increased quantity of Egyptian goods from Early to Middle Kerma graves. Other features (including hieroglyphic writing and much iconographical adoption) suggest some overlying Egyptian acculturation, with Egyptian traders, craftsmen, and advisers resident at Kerma itself. Nontheless, the unique character of the Kerma culture was retained.
The decline of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt followed the pattern at the end of the Old Kingdom, with Egypt withdrawing to Aswan and Kerma again wresting control of all Lower Nubia at the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period/Classic Kerma phase. The Egyptian fortresses continued to be manned by both Egyptian and Nubian soldiers, but they now served the king of Kush, not of Egypt. This is the apogée of Kerma civilization, during which the largest of the royal burial tumuli were constructed, the capital expanded considerably and massive quantities of exotic imported Egyptian goods (mostly originating in Upper Egypt and often heirloom pieces) are found throughout Kerma. The kingdom also expanded southward beyond the Debba Bend at least to the Fourth Cataract at Napata. It was as powerful at this time as Egypt had been in the Middle Kingdom. In Egypt, Kamose (the last king of Dynasty XVII) at Thebes complained he sat “between an Asiatic (the Hyksos king at Avaris) and a Nubian (the Kushite king)” who were politically allied against him. He and his Dynasty XVIII successors successfully campaigned in both directions for the next century, expelling both the Hyksos and the Kushites and regaining territorial control. This time they followed an entirely different policy, penetrating into the Near East as far as the Euphrates River and, in the relatively brief late or post-Kerma phase, into Upper Nubia itself.
See also: Egypt, Ancient: New Kingdom and the Colonization of Nubia; Kush; Meroe: Meroitic Culture and Economy; Napata and Meroe.
Further Reading
Bonnet, C. “C-Group,” and “The Kingdom of Kerma.” In Sudan: Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile, edited by D. Wildung. Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1997.
Davies, W. V., ed. Egypt and Africa: Nubia from Prehistory to Islam. London: British Museum Press and Egypt Exploration Society, 1991.
Kendall, T. Kerma and the Kingdom of Kush 2500–1500 B.C. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Lacovara, P. “The Internal Chronology of Kerma.” Beitrage zur Sudanforschung. 2 (1987): 51–74.
O'Connor, D. Ancient Nubia, Egypt's Rival in Africa. Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1993.
Khama III (c.1835–1923)
Botswana King
Boikanyo Khama, otherwise popularly known as Khama III, Khama “the Good,” or Khama “the Great,” was born in 1835 at Mosu near the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, not very far from the Boteti River in the Central District of Botswana. He was the son of Kgosi Sekgoma I, credited for having reorganized the Bangwato Batswana, one of the major ethnic groups of the Central District of Botswana, into a formidable kingdom.
Khama III grew up in Shoshong. Like most Batswana youths, he looked after goats and calves before he graduated to herd cattle as an adolescent. He was exposed to Christian teachings by a Botswana evangelist known as Kgobati. In 1860 Khama III and his brother Khamane were baptized by Heinrich Schulenburg of the German Hermannsburg Missionary Society, who had been among the Bangwato at Shoshong since 1859. Two years later, Khama married Elizabeta, a convert and daughter of Tshukudu, a prominent member of the Ngwato royalty. Khama III became a staunch, almost fanatical, Christian. Adhering to Christian ideals, he refused to marry other wives as demanded by local tradition. As a result, Khama III and his brother fell out with their father, who saw his sons as shunning the traditions of their own people.
The London Missionary Society (LMS), which replaced the Hermannsburg in 1862, supported the actions of the two heirs against their father. Successive LMS agents (the Reverends John Mackenzie, Roger Price, and James Hepburn) saw Sekgoma as a villain bent on halting Christian progress. The Bangwato town of Shoshong became divided into two factions, Christian and pagan. The two factions entered a civil war in 1866 that culminated in the defeat, albeit temporarily, of the Christians.
Meanwhile, an uncle, Macheng, supposedly the legitimate heir apparent, became the Kgosi (chief) twice before he was ousted by Khama III in favor of his father, Sekgoma I. In 1875 Khama III, with the backing of the Christian community, ousted his father and became the Kgosi of the Bangwato until his death in 1923.
Khama became Kgosi at a time when white traders, travelers, and missionaries from the south were entering his country. Shoshong, his capital, became an important link to the interior where ivory and ostrich feathers, important commodities of the time, could be obtained and exchanged for money and manufactured goods.
Khama III reformed his kingdom along Christian ideals. From 1876 he banned initiation ceremonies, all Bangwato were to observe Sunday as the Sabbath and no wagons were allowed to pass through Shoshong on that day. Christianity became the official religion of Bangwato. Polygamy was prohibited, and payment of bogadi (bride price) was ended. He allowed daughters to be entitled to inheritance, a practice hitherto unheard of in the Bangwato society. He abolished payment of tribute by conquered peoples and allowed them to use their cattle and land the way they saw fit. He opened kgotla (traditional assembly) meetings with prayer and above all banned both European liquor and traditional beer. Some of these reforms caused dissension as some members of the Bangwato were banished for criticizing the Kgosi for banning traditional brew, and being too stern in implementing these reforms. Raditladi, Mphoeng, the Kgosi's own son Sekgoma II, and their respective followers were exiled for opposing the Kgosi and his reforms.
From 1876 Khama III was plagued by white encroachment into his country. The Boers of the Transvaal in South Africa, notorious for their practice of land domination, were threatening to take Khama III's land. With the advice of missionaries who became his secretaries and advisers in foreign matters, he appealed for British protection against the Boers.
The British protectorate over Botswana, which was welcomed by Khama III, came in 1885 through a British soldier known as Charles Warren and Rev. Mackenzie, former missionary in his country. The British were intent on securing “the road to the north” to prevent Batswana country from being taken over by the Boers and Germans in South West Africa (Namibia). This arrangement suited Batswana, and Khama III pledged to be always a British ally.
In 1893–1894, Khama ensured his loyalty to the British by supporting Cecil John Rhodes's British South Africa Company's (BSA) invasion of Matebele-land. A year later Khama was shocked to learn that the British government was to hand over Batswana country to be annexed to Rhodes's newly founded colony of Rhodesia.
With the help of the LMS missionary W. C. Willoughby and two other chiefs, Sebele of Bakwena and Bathoeng of Bangwaketse, the three leaders journeyed to England in 1895 to protest against being handed over to company rule. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain was at first unwilling to listen to their pleas but changed his mind when they had mustered enough support from religious movements in Britain to sway British opinion in their favor. The protectorate would not be handed over to the BSA Company, and the chiefs would continue to rule their people as before.
From 1900 until his death, Khama III continually clashed with the protectorate administration and the missionaries. The latter wanted to buy land, while the former invented laws for the protectorate without consultation. He suspected the protectorate administration of trying to hand over the Batswana country to the Union of South Africa, which was formed in 1910. Khama III died of pneumonia in 1923 and was succeeded by his son, Sekgoma II, father of the first president of Botswana.
See also: Botswana.
Further Reading
Dachs, A. Khama of Botswana. London: Heinemann, Educational Books, 1971.
Hepburn, J. D. Twenty Years in Khama's Country. C. H. Lyall (ed.) 3rd ed. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1970.
Parsons, Q. N. “The ‘Image’ of Khama the Great 1865–1970.” In Botswana Notes and Records. Vol. 13. 1971.
Parsons, N. King Khama Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain Through African Eyes. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Tlou, T. “Khama III: Great Reformer and Innovator.” In Botswana Notes and Records. Vol. 2. 1969.
Khartoum
Camel racing in Khartoum, Sudan, 1960s. © SVT Bild/Das Fotoarchiv.
Located at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, Khartoum was originally a small fishing village. When the Turco-Egyptian forces of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt, invaded the Sudan in 1821, it became a small outpost of the army. In 1824 the military governor, Uthman Bey, a Circassian, realized the strategic importance of Khartoum. He constructed a fort garrisoned by a full regiment, but the headquarters for the Turco-Egyptian administration in the Sudan remained at Sennar until 1825 when Mahu Bey, a Kurd, was appointed in command of the province of Sennar. He resided, however, at Khartoum rather than Sennar and stationed his troops across the Blue Nile at Qubbat Khujali.
In 1826 Ali Khurshid Agha was appointed “governor of Sennar” but moved the administrative capital to Khartoum, which he devoted much energy to developing. Settlers were given land grants. The original mosque built in 1829 was demolished in 1837 and one that could accommodate the faithful was built in its place. Barracks, a military storehouse, and a dockyard were constructed by the Nile. Townspeople were encouraged to replace their tents with houses of brick and mortar. The market (suq) prospered, the trade routes were protected, and the population increased.
After the opening of the White Nile through the Sudd to the verdant and populous lands of the upper Nile a small but influential community of European traders settled in Khartoum. Led by the Savoyard, Antoine Brun-Rollet, they traded in ivory and supported the Roman Catholic mission to Central Africa that established its headquarters in the capital. In 1854 the new viceroy, Muhammad Sa'id (1854–1863) under pressure from European governments and bankers, closed the profitable public slave market in Khartoum and appointed the first Christian governor of the Sudan, Arakil Bey. His tenure (1856–1858) was cut short by his death in 1858.
During the reign of the khedive Isma'il (1863–1879), Khartoum expanded to accommodate his imperial ambitions in the Upper Nile and northeast Africa. Muslim merchant princes now organized large expeditions in Khartoum to proceed up the White Nile, through the Sudd, to the fertile grasslands and forests of the Bahr al-Ghazal and Equatoria. Isma'il employed the services of Sir Samuel Baker in 1869 to expand his khedivial empire from Khartoum to the great lakes of equatorial Africa. The administrative offices, military barracks, and the dockyard were expanded to accommodate the need for troops and steamers.
In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi revolted against the Turco-Egyptian government in the Sudan, rallying the Sudanese in a jihad that swept all before them to besiege Khartoum and the new governor general, Major General Charles George Gordon sent by the British government to resolve the Sudan question and the revolt of the Mahdi. Gordon had previously served in the Sudan as governor of Equatoria under the khedive Isma'il. He arrived in Khartoum on February 18, 1884, realizing that there could be no accommodation with Muhammad al-Mahdi whose Ansar besieged the capital in September. The Mahdi arrived before Khartoum in October, and Gordon, a military engineer, organized the long siege of the city behind its walls. By the new year 1885 the garrison and public, despite Gordon's efforts, could no longer sustain themselves.
Upon the approach of a British relief expedition, the Mahdi ordered the assault on January 26, 1885, during the month of low Nile. The exhausted garrison was overwhelmed, Gordon was killed, the populace massacred or enslaved, and the city reduced to ruin and deserted. The capital of the Mahdists state was removed across the confluence of the White and Blue Niles to Omdruman.
Upon the reconquest of the Sudan by the Anglo-Egyptian forces under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener in 1898, Khartoum became the capital of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Like Gordon, Kitchener was a military engineer who took personal command in its reconstruction, laying out its grid, according to legend, in the form of the British flag but with broad boulevards presumably that could be easily enfiladed by the machine guns of the conquerors.
During the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Khartoum gradually evolved into a modern city dominated by the government buildings and the Gordon Memorial College, which became the University of Khartoum in 1956. There was light manufacturing, printing, food processing, technical schools, and the Sudan National Museum and the Ethnographical Museum. Upon independence its population was 476,218.
See also: Sudan.
Further Reading
Arkell, A. J. A History of the Sudan from the Earliest Times to 1821. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974.
Holt, P. M. A Modern History of the Sudan: From the Funj Sultanate to the Present Day. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
Holt, P. M., and M. W. Daly. A History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day. 5th ed. London: Longmans, 2000.
Stevenson, R. C. “Old Khartoum, 1821–1885.” Sudan Notes and Records. Vol. 47. 1966.
Khayr al-Din: See Tunisia: Khayr al-Din and Constitutional and Administrative Reform, 1855–1878.
Khoi-Dutch Wars: See Cape Colony: Khoi-Dutch Wars.
Khoisan Resistance: See Cape Colony: Khoi-Dutch Wars.
Kibiro: See Great Lakes Region: Ntusi, Kibiro, and Bigo.
Kilimanjaro: See Upare, Usambara, and Kilimanjaro.
Kimbangu, Simon, and Kimbanguism
Simon Kimbangu was born on September 24, 1889, at Nkamba, near Thysville (now Mbanza-Ngugu), in the Lower Congo. Kimbangu, which literally means in the Kikongo language “the one who reveals what is hidden,” was the member of a group, the Bakongo, that had long experienced Christianity and Christian revivalist movements. Due to the Christian heritage of the Lower Congo, colonial missions, including the British Missionary Society (BMS), established their first centers there. Kimbangu was brought up within the religious realm of the BMS. He became a Christian as a young man. In July 1915, after being thoroughly instructed by the missionaries, he was baptized along with his wife, Marie Mwilu. For a short period he was a teacher at the mission school in Mgombe Lutete where he further familiarized himself with the Bible of which he gained a strong command. He also ministered as an evangelist at Nkamba and enjoyed a particularly favorable reputation among the white missionaries who described the young Kimbangu as a good and thoughtful man who read his Bible and performed his tasks conscientiously.
Kimbangu received his first call to “tend Christ's flock” one night in 1918. After declining the call he finally sought refuge in Kinshasa where he worked at various menial jobs without ever finding peace of mind, for even in Kinshasa the voice that called him to minister for the Gospel reached him. He returned to Nkamba and, on the morning of April 6, 1921, performed his first healing by laying his hands in the name of Jesus Christ on a critically ill woman. The second miracle was the raising to life of a dead child, and many more followed from healings of sick people to prophecies. At first, people thought Kimbangu was using charms but he eventually managed to convince people by insisting, “It is Christ who has performed these miracles through me. I have no power to do these myself.” From then on, pilgrims started flocking to Nkamba to seek healing and instruction.
Kimbangu's message summoned people to renounce their non-Christian ways. It combated polygamy, profane dances, and fetishes. Kimbangu and the movement he initiated represented a Christian African reaction against colonization and colonial evangelization, although, it is worth noting, Kimbangu never opposed the authorities but championed obedience to the powers to be, which in the case of the Lower Congo also meant for the people to yield to forced labor and continue to pay a burdensome poll tax.
Faced with a staggering desertion of workers and servants who flocked to Nkamba, the colonial administration branded Kimbangu an illuminé (visionary) who was seeking popularity that later might coalesce into an organized rebellion in a region particularly prone to such outbursts. A state of emergency in the districts of Mbanza-Ngugu and Luozi was declared and Kimbangu, after hiding for a few months, gave himself up and was arrested in September 1921, after only less than six months in the ministry. A military court charged him with sedition and civil disobedience, and he was sentenced to death in what seemed to be a legal travesty, but the sentence was soon commuted by King Albert to life imprisonment. Kimbangu was transferred to Elisabethville (Lubumbashi) where he spent thirty years in solitary confinement.
In the absence of the leader and in the face of a relentless colonial repression that took the form of destruction of places of worship (Nkamba was totally destroyed by the Belgians) and massive deportations, the movement went underground and, not surprisingly, branched out into various independent splinter groups, such as Nguzism, Mpadism, and Kakism. It later and quickly spread into French Congo and Gabon.
In 1959, after several decades of concealed activities, Kimbanguism was finally recognized by the Belgian colonial administration and placed on the same footing as the Catholic and Protestant churches. Under the leadership of Joseph Diangienda, Kimbangu's second son who claimed his father's mantle, the movement organized itself into an official church known as the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu (Église de Jésus-Christ sur Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu, EJCSK). EJCSK represents an attempt at forging a typically African Christian church against the backdrop of the “colonial mission” and the postcolonial dictatorship.
During the long reign of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Kimbanguist movement became one of the regime's clients and its most fervent defender. The church went from an explicit policy of no interference with politics to safeguarding Mobutu's regime and promoting Mobutisme. In return, when in December 1971 Mobutu decided to ban all the “sects” in the country, EJCSK was not only granted a privileged status but also benefited from the repression of dissident religious groups that were forced either to disband or join EJCSK. Mobutu's regime guaranteed the church's financial prosperity and political protection as well.
Today, EJCSK enjoys a status as the third largest organized religious denomination in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It has become a powerful financial institution with hundreds of Kimbanguist schools and temples across the country, an imposing Institut pédagogique et théologique (Institute of Education and Theology) in Kinshasa, and a mausoleum in Nkamba, called the New Jerusalem (where Kimbangu's remains had been transferred), which attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims every year. In addition, EJCSK has extensive social services in agriculture, youth work (including several boy scouts troops), and cooperatives.
Since the promotion of EJCSK under Mobutu, one important feature in the social life of the church has been the leading role played by Kimbangu's three sons, especially Joseph Diangienda. Until his death, which occurred in 1992, he was considered a zimvwala, a title that confers prophetic and royal authority within the church. He was also called tata mfumu'a nlongo (sacred head). Diangienda's veneration by Kimbanguists reached such heights that after his burial a few devoted followers spread the word that he would resurrect within three days as Christ did. To the the disappointment of many followers, Diangienda never rose from the dead and his confirmed death, mirroring that of Mobutu a few years later, intensified doctrinal as well as political divisions within the Kimbanguist church that threaten the church's destiny.
See also: Congo (Kinshasa), Democratic Republic of/Zaire: Mobutu, Zaire, and Mobutuism.
Further Reading
Anderson, E. Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower-Congo. Upsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1958.
Martin, M.-L. Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church. Translated by D. M. Moore. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976.
Kimberley, Diamond Fields and
The year 1870 is widely regarded as a turning point in South African history, for it marks the beginning of the mineral revolution upon which South Africa's industrial transformation was to be based. On the eve of this mineral revolution, the territory that constitutes the modern state of South Africa consisted of a mixture of British colonies, Boer (Afrikaner) republics, and independent African states. Economically, the region was largely based upon pastoralism, hunting, and subsistence agriculture. The rapid expansion of white settlement, characteristic of earlier decades, had slowed as Africans became better armed with guns and better organized so as to resist further encroachment. The political balance of power between black and white in South Africa, however, was about to be transformed by the impact of mineral discoveries at Kimberley.
The first diamond was picked up north of the Cape Colony near the confluence of the Vaal and Orange Rivers in 1867 and sold to a trader from the Cape. Over the next two years, increasing numbers of diamonds were found and traded by local Batlhaping (Tswana), Griqua, and Kora along the lower reaches of the Vaal. Large numbers of black and white speculators, adventurers, and traders converged upon the spot, eager to find the source, and during 1870 diamond “mines” were found both at “river diggings” on the Vaal and at “dry diggings” further south. Politically, the territory was disputed between Waterboer's Griqua, Batlhaping, Orange Free State, and South African Republic (Transvaal). The British government at the Cape put the matter to arbitration at Bloemhof and, despite evidence to the contrary, decided territorial claims in favor of Waterboer, who by then had been persuaded to seek British “protection.” Thus, by the end of 1871, the British, who had started the year with no claims to the region at all, had annexed the whole of the diamond fields as the Crown Colony of Griqualand West. By then the “dry diggings” had been shown to contain the largest and richest mine of all, “New Rush,” which was renamed Kimberley after the British secretary of state for the colonies. Griqualand West remained a separate Crown Colony until 1880 when it was appended to the Cape Colony.
In the early days of the diamond fields, black and white alike had staked claims and dug and traded for diamonds alongside and in direct competition with each other, both employing black laborers to do the actual digging. But when the flood of diamonds onto the world market led to falling prices, white claim-holders organized themselves into “mutual protection” associations and enforced racist exclusivity over the right to hold diamond claims. Claim-holders were the only ones legally allowed to sell diamonds to the merchants who had set up shop at Kimberley. Part of the white claim-holders’ paranoia was due to the belief that black laborers were the most likely people to conceal diamonds found at the bottom of the shafts and they were most likely to sell those stolen gems through black claim-holders. In practice, all claim-holders were equally likely to trade in stolen gems, but competition was fierce and, in the politics of a colonial society, the white claim-holders pressured the British authorities to impose tighter restrictions on the movement and activities of Africans on the diamond fields. Thus emerged the notorious “pass” system in early South African industrial society—a remnant of Cape slavery from the early nineteenth century.
As the diamond mines were dug more deeply, industrial machinery was required for haulage and for pumping out floodwater, and the individual claim-holdings gave way to capitalized companies. Competition between companies, however, still stimulated overproduction and unstable prices. The logic was amalgamation and, eventually, monopoly, an objective achieved by Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Consolidated Mining Company in 1888–1889. Then production and labor was cut, the market was stabilized, and capital investment and long-term profitability was secured. By then the African role in diamond mining had become restricted to that of unskilled migrant laborer, mostly on short-term contract, during which they were confined, controlled, and searched in fenced company compounds.
Beyond the confines of the Kimberley mines, the impact of the mineral revolution was profound. In a hitherto lightly populated dry part of the southern African interior, there grew up, almost overnight, a city of some 30,000 people. Besides the loss of political control by the various claimants to the diamond fields, the initial impact was mostly one of opportunity. Kimberley needed food and fuel, and local farmers, African and Afrikaner, responded with enthusiasm to the openings of production for market rather than for subsistence. Local Batlhaping cattle-owners sold surplus milk and cattle and bought ploughs and wagons with the proceeds, while Afrikaners from the Transvaal and Orange Free State, and Basotho from Basutoland (Lesotho), found a market for greater grain production. The most profitable marketable item through the1870s and early 1880s was firewood to fuel the mines’ steam-driven pumps, crushers, and haulage gear. “Wood riding” only declined as a profitable activity after 1885 when the extension of the railway from the Cape enabled the importation of cheap Welsh coal to the diamond fields.
The widest-felt impact of the diamond mines, however, was as a market for migrant labor. Africans came from as far away as Mozambique and the northern Transvaal to work on short-term contracts at the diamond fields. Competition between claim-holders meant that initially wages were relatively attractive: pay for one month's work could purchase a muzzle-loading gun, or several suits of second-hand clothing and domestic pots and pans. Although migrant labor later became a means of survival for the dispossessed, initially it was an opportunity to purchase firearms for hunting and defense of land.
The collective impact of all these factors was greater competition for access to land and labor, and its potential resources. Combined with a greater proliferation of firearms, this resulted in heightened potential for armed conflict. It is no coincidence that the late 1870s and early 1880s was a period when southern Africa experienced greatly increased level of warfare—wars of rebellion, resistance, and conquest.
See also: Labor, Migrant; Rhodes, Cecil J.; South Africa: Confederation, Disarmament and the First Anglo-Boer War, 1871–1881
Further Reading
Marks, S., and R. Rathbone, eds. Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930. London: Longman, 1982.
Mathews, J. W. Incwadi Yami. London, 1887.
Roberts, B. Kimberley: Turbulent City. Cape Town, 1976. Shillington, K. The Colonisation of the Southern Tswana, 1870–1900. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985.
Trollope, A. South Africa. 2 vols. London, 1878.
Turrell, R. “The 1875 Black Flag Revolt on the Kimberley Diamond Fields.” Journal of Southern African Studies. 7, no. 2 (April 1981): 194–235.
——. Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Worger, W. South Africa's City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly—Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.
Kinshasa
In 1881 the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, acting on behalf of King Leopold of Belgium, founded what was to become the city of Leopoldville on the banks of the Congo River. Geography determined the location. Leopoldville was established at the downstream end of an extensive network of river transportation in the Congo Basin, dominated by the thousand-mile stretch of the Congo River navigable up to what is now Kisangani, and just before an extensive series of rapids (the Cataractes) renders the river nonnavigable as it heads to its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean.
A remote outpost for most of its first twenty years, Leopoldville was connected to the Atlantic and ultimately to the rest of the world in 1898, when the railway linking it to the inland seaport of Matadi was completed. Establishment of the railway allowed Leopoldville to develop as a commercial center, in particular as a transit point for rubber and other products from the interior of the Congo bound for Europe, and for goods imported from Europe and headed for the interior. Thus, for example, between 1910 and 1930 the volume of goods passing through the river port of Leopoldville each year grew from 19,000 tons to nearly 275,000 tons, representing almost a doubling every five years.
Leopoldville (Kinshasa), 1955; the capital of the Belgian Congo with 400,000 inhabitants. © Lode van Gent/Das Fotoarchiv.
In 1923 Leopoldville became the capital of the Belgian Congo, and by the end of the 1920s the city had become an important administrative center. The growth of the city was rapid. Like many other emerging cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, Leopoldville was not located where human resources were plentiful, and hence it was necessary to import workers to meet the growing demand for labor. Recruitment of workers in rural areas served to attract Congolese men to employment in the emerging modern economic sector. The Great Depression of the 1930s slowed the city's growth briefly: 6,000 men were sent back to their rural areas of origin in 1930 and 7,000 more were sent back in 1932 in response to the corresponding sharp decline in demand for labor. This incident reflected the considerable control over labor and unemployment exercised by the colonial authorities, and it also emphasized the sensitivity to external events of this new urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The importance of external events was further highlighted with the onset of World War II. Supplies to Leopoldville were cut off, and as a consequence the city was obliged to develop rapidly its industrial base so as to become more self-sufficient. Labor recruitment, as before, was focused on finding men to work in the city's growing modern economy, and the colonial government strictly controlled migration to Leopoldville. Hence, the city was characterized by relatively small proportions of women and children. The addition of considerable industrial activity to the city's existing commercial, transportation, administrative, and industrial activities resulted not only in substantial diversification of the city's economy but also in a doubling of the population between 1940 and 1945 and a doubling again between 1945 and 1950.
By 1960 Leopoldville had a population of roughly 400,000. When the Belgian Congo became independent in mid-1960, the controls on migration were effectively eliminated, and, fueled by the internal political strife of the early 1960s, the city began another period of rapid growth. This growth was accompanied by a variety of economic and social changes, including rapid expansion of the informal or unstructured sector of the economy, and continuation of the substantial extension of schooling to women that had just begun near the end of the colonial period.
From 1965, when General Joseph Désiré Mobutu seized power in a coup d'état, until the mid-1970s the city (now named Kinshasa, after one of the villages that existed near the site where Stanley first established Leopoldville) and the country experienced a period of political stability and economic growth. In the early 1970s, on the heels of this political and economic success, President Mobutu announced a policy to promote “Authenticity.” To further “Authenticity,” the President required citizens to abandon their European names in favor of African ones, he changed the names of many other cities throughout the country from their colonial designations to African names, and he changed the name of the country from Congo to Zaire. However, following the implementation in 1973 and 1974 of ill-conceived policies of “Zairianization” and radicalization (which essentially expropriated most businesses owned by foreigners and typically turned them over to unqualified Zairians, with very harmful and long-lasting adverse consequences), and the sharp decline in world copper prices that took place at roughly the same time (copper was the main source of export earnings and government revenue), the economy entered a period of protracted crisis from which it has not yet emerged.
The chronic crisis that began in the mid-1970s was accompanied by stagnation in the modern sector of employment and continued growth of the informal sector. Despite these problems, the population of the city continued to grow rapidly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Economic growth and development were further hindered by a notoriously corrupt and poorly functioning public sector (some political scientists described the governance system as one of “kleptocracy”). During the 1980s, the country's government attempted, with assistance from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to implement a series of structural adjustment programs aimed at improving efficiency of operation of the public sector and encouraging the growth and development of the private sector. A number of economic reforms were adopted, but political support for structural adjustment was unsteady and had an “on-again, off-again” character.
Beginning in the latter half of 1990, the chronic economic crisis became acute. After a number of years during which inflation had averaged 40 to 50 per cent per year and real incomes declined substantially, suddenly very rapid inflation of 2,000 to 3,000 per cent per year emerged, as the monetary authorities effectively abandoned any efforts to adhere to the structural adjustment program. The ensuing economic crisis, occurring in the midst of a political crisis characterized by increasingly vocal calls for democracy and the ouster of President Mobutu, came to a head in late September 1991. Initiated by soldiers who had seen the real value of their salaries shrink to almost nothing, rioting, looting, and generalized civil disorder broke out in Kinshasa and then spread to other urban centers throughout the country. This resulted in the withdrawal of foreign donors and in a considerable shrinkage of the Congo's and Kinshasa's fragile modern sector. A second round of looting and pillaging, this time solely by the military, took place at the end of January 1993.
Inflation continued at an accelerated pace after late 1991, reaching as high as 500 per cent in one month in Kinshasa at the end of 1993 and averaging 10,000 per cent and more on an annual basis for much of 1993 and 1994. In 1995 and during the first half of 1996, inflation slowed to less than 20 per cent per month, corresponding to well under 1,000 per cent per year.
By 1997 Kinshasa's economy was in shambles. Manufacturing activity nationally, which is heavily concentrated in Kinshasa, was cut in half from 1990 to 1993–1994. There was slight improvement in 1995 and early 1996, but by mid-1996 industrial production was at only 50 to 60 per cent of its 1990 levels. Transportation from the countryside to the cities became increasingly difficult, food prices skyrocketed, and malnutrition became increasingly prevalent.
In brief, the chronic crisis that characterized the Congo's and Kinshasa's economy since “Zairianization” in the mid-1970s became an acute crisis in the early 1990s. The political situation remained deadlocked until May 1997, when a rebellion begun in late 1996 with assistance from neighboring countries and led by Laurent Désiré Kabila succeeded in taking power from President Mobutu.
Not long after declaring himself president, Mr. Kabila changed the name of the country back to Democratic Republic of Congo. While his government showed early success in slowing inflation, changing the economy so as to replicate the relative prosperity of the early 1970s will be a far more difficult task. President Kabila now presides over a country rich in mineral wealth and with substantial agricultural potential but one also with a badly deteriorated transportation and production infrastructure, ruined by years of neglect, governmental corruption, and more recently, extreme economic instability and civil war.
Exacerbating the difficulties confronting the Kabila government is the fact that a rebellion broke out in eastern Congo in early August 1998. For a brief period, there was fighting in Kinshasa and elsewhere in the western part of the country. With considerable assistance from several other Sub-Saharan nations, the Kabila government was able to defeat the rebels in Kinshasa and western Congo, but the rebels have succeeded in capturing a significant share of eastern Congo. At present, Kinshasa is the second-largest city in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a population estimated at six million in 2003. However, in view of the country's ongoing political difficulties, its capital city faces an uncertain future.
See also: Congo, Democratic Republic of/Zaire.
Further Reading
Baeck, L. “Léopoldville, phénomène urbain africain.” Zaïre. 10, no. 6 (1956): 613–636.
Capelle, E. La Cité Indigène de Léopoldville. Elisabethville: Centre d'Etude des Problèmes Sociaux Indigènes, 1947.
Denis, J. “Léopoldville: Etude de géographie urbaine et sociale.” Zaïre 10, no. 6 (1956): 563–611.
Houyoux, J., and K. Niwembo. Etude démographique de Kinshasa, 1977; reprinted in 1986 as Kinshasa 1975. Kinshasa: Bureau d'Etudes, d'Aménagement et d'Urbanisme and Brussels: ICHEC.
Maton, J. and A. Van Bauwel. “Zaïre 1996: Analyse des chiffres mensuels et trimestriels: La politique macro-économique au premier semestre 1996.” Ghent: Ghent University, 1996.
Shapiro, D. “From Leopoldville to Kinshasa.” In Women's Education, Employment, and Fertility in Kinshasa, Congo, 1955–1990: A Descriptive Overview. Unpublished monograph. University Park, Pa.: Department of Economics, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997.
Whyms, Léopoldville, 1881–1956. Brussels: Office de Publicité, S. A., 1956.
Kitara: See Great Lakes Region: Kitara and the Chwezi Dynasty.
Kongo, Teke (Tio), and Loango: History to 1483
Archaeological evidence of material culture and linguistics combine to suggest that west-central Africa was settled by farming populations after about 1,000BCE. At present, the archaeological work is scattered and sketchy, and new work, especially in areas like Angola where very little systematic work has been done, is likely to modify any conclusions. The early settlers probably spoke languages of the western Bantu family and formed a part of the Bantu migration that originated a millennium earlier in Cameroon. Within five hundred years, knowledge of ironworking had also spread to the region, so that by 200BCE the region was making iron and steel tools.
At present the earliest evidence of complex society comes from Kayes and Madingo-Kayes, located in modern Congo-Brazzaville, where two large settlements located only approximately two miles apart seem to form the center of an interacting group of sites covering a larger area. Such a complex corresponds quite well with the polity that was called a wene in seventeenth-century Kongo, whose rulers bore the title mwene, derived from a personal form of the noun, though the archaeological evidence could not confirm such a pattern of authority.
A finely made and uniform pottery over a larger area suggest the presence of a trading network, and perhaps some consolidation of political authority, which flourished in the period 100–350. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of what activity took place in the following period, and most of these early sites were abandoned after 400.
The kingdoms that covered the region north of the Kwanza and east of the Kwango, and extending northward along the Zaire River and the coast up to Gabon when the first Portuguese arrived in the area in 1483, can be correlated with an archaeological culture known as the Mbafu group, whose earliest manifestation seems to be around 1400. Unfortunately, the absence of systematic investigation of the main settlements of this culture and any preceding culture makes it unlikely that archaeology can add much more to our understanding of the region at the present time.
Oral traditions, written down in the sixteenth century, help fill in the gaps between the archaeology and the earliest eyewitness written documents. Kongo traditions of the origin of the country, which have been periodically written down since the late sixteenth century, were constitutional documents intended to establish the basis for government by anchoring political customs of the time of writing in allegedly ancient precedent. The stories of origin have changed over the years as the constitution of the country changed, so that the foundation tale of the seventeenth century reflects the specifics of Kongo in that period, while the traditions of the nineteenth century and today relate to yet another constitutional arrangement. For this reason, it is best to focus specifically on the earliest traditions for understanding the earliest periods, while recognizing that even these might distort events of earlier periods for purposes of constitutional precedent.
The earliest traditions describe the origins of the kingdom of Kongo as a federation of several earlier and smaller polities such as Nsundi, Mpangu, and Mbata in the valley of the Inkisi River, or Soyo along the coast south of the Zaire River. Genealogies written in the seventeenth century point to a foundation around 1390 and credit one Nimi a Lukeni with it. Kongo probably was one of several federations of smaller polities at the time, such as the “Seven Kingdoms of Kongo dia Nlaza,” a rival confederacy situated between the Inkisi and Kwango Rivers south of the Tio Kingdom that fell under Kongo's control in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
In sixteenth-century versions of Kongo tradition, the original state seems to have allowed for an elected monarchy within a royal family by the hereditary rulers of the relatively independent provinces of the federation, especially Mbata, which had a special relationship with the king. However, Kongo's constitution was changing by the time the first Europeans arrived, and in particular, early sixteenth century Kongo had a number of royal provinces (Mbamba to the south, for example, or Nsundi to the northeast) in which independent rulers had been defeated and were replaced by appointees of the king.
In addition to allowing for the appointment for limited terms of rulers of some provinces by the king, the provinces of both the federation and its subordinate sections were expanding, particularly Mbamba in the southwest, Nsundi in the northeast, Soyo on the north coast, and Mbata on the east, and incorporated other smaller entities into them. The kings of Kongo further strengthened their own position by concentrating population in or around their royal city of Mbanza Kongo, which was described by the earliest visitors as already being as large as the Portuguese city of Évora (10,000–15,000 inhabitants). The concentration of demographic and economic resources around his capital allowed the king of Kongo to overshadow the provinces and increase his authority. This had thus led to the consolidation of a kingdom of considerable centralization, and had already laid the groundwork for further centralization of authority by the early sixteenth-century kings.
The Tio Kingdom probably was just as old as Kongo, although we have no traditions before the nineteenth century that can trace its origin and hence no details concerning its early government. It is mentioned in early sixteenth century documents around the Maleba Pool region. North of Kongo the emerging kingdom of Loango is not mentioned at all by the earliest visitors to the coast, and only appears in the later sixteenth century. Traditions set down in the seventeenth century relate its origin to Kongo, although these probably only reflect the southern kingdom's prestige and not a real relationship of origin and authority. Loango was not mentioned, for example, in royal titles of the sixteenth-century kings of Kongo, though some states north of the Zaire, like Vungu (mentioned only in the seventeenth century, but then as the origin of Kongo itself) probably predated Kongo.
Further Reading
Hilton, H. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford, 1985.
Thornton, J. “The Kingdom of Kongo, ca. 1390–1678: History of an African Social Formation.” Cahiers d'études Africaines. 22 (1982): 325–342.
Vansina, J. Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison, 1990.
Kongo Kingdom: Afonso I, Christianity, and Kingship
The arrival of the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão at the mouth of the Zaire in 1483 took the Kongolese by surprise. Although it was a large, growing, and powerful kingdom, Kongo had no contacts with the world beyond its immediate neighbors and the extent of its regional trade routes before the Portuguese arrived. Nevertheless, Kongo rapidly accepted the newcomers and quickly moved to integrate itself into the Atlantic and European world. Kongo's earliest relationship with Portugal is studied with the intention of understanding a pristine encounter between African and European, akin to the meeting of the Tainos with Columbus less than a decade later.
The initial contact involved an exchange of hostages, and then the decision by Kongo's ruler, Nzinga a Nkuwu, to enter into formal relations with Portugal and to accept baptism. In 1491 King João II of Portugal sent a small fleet to Kongo to accomplish this purpose. The atmosphere was charged as the Portuguese and Kongolese jointly celebrated the baptism first of the mwene (ruler) of Soyo, the coastal authority of Kongo, and then the king himself, who was baptized on May 3, 1491, with the name João I in honor of the king of Portugal.
This first expedition of Portuguese to Kongo, and several others that followed in the next twenty years, were conceived as an exercise in cultural change. In addition to the spiritual help in guiding the new Christians, Portuguese colonists, including farmers and crafts people, also came to Kongo to teach new ways of doing things and living.
Only a few days after the baptism of João I, Portuguese armed forces left with the royal army to assist in the suppression of the rebellion of a small province located near the Zaire River. The campaign was a success, and the combined forces returned to Kongo's capital of Mbanza Kongo in triumph before the Portuguese leaders left for Portugal.
There are almost no historical records of the next fifteen years, during which time João I died and was succeeded by his son, Afonso Mvemba a Nzinga, sometime between 1506 and 1509. A very large portion of the next period of Kongo history, up until the middle of the sixteenth century, is known to historians almost entirely through the letters of Afonso to the kings of Portugal, Manuel I and João III. Thus, this critical period in Kongo history is illustrated primarily by sources of African authorship, which elucidate the relationship with Portugal and Portuguese resident in Kongo, and also political structures in the early Kongolese state.
Afonso's correspondence, and some collaborating evidence, reveal him to be literate, fervently Christian, and anxious to learn as much as possible about Portugal and Europe. Afonso claimed that he took power in a succession struggle with a pagan half-brother, Mpanzu a Kitima, in a cataclysmic battle that Afonso won with the help of an apparition of Saint James. He established the Roman Catholic Church in Kongo, provided for its funding, and moreover, studied the religion carefully himself and along with his own advisers and those from Portugal. He sent numerous children to Portugal and Europe to study, including his son Henrique Kinu a Mvemba, who was made a bishop in 1518 and returned to Kongo in 1521. Afonso also created an educational system that made the upper classes literate in Portuguese.
The end result was the development of a uniquely Kongolese form of syncretic Christianity, revealed in the vocabulary of early catechisms, and the observations of priests, such as the Jesuits who came to Kongo shortly after Afonso's death. It combined Kongo's older religious norms, with their emphasis on territorial spirits and ancestors, with the cult of the saints in such a way that Kongolese religion was enhanced rather than replaced. This work was so effective that it remained the Kongolese faith until the twentieth century.
Afonso was also anxious to acquire Portuguese skills, and encouraged Portuguese carpenters, stonemasons, and other craftsmen to live in Kongo. He constructed a palace, a city wall, and numerous churches of stone and developed a corps of Kongolese craftsmen who had mastered this craft. Other Portuguese techniques, like agriculture and making of bread were less successful in Kongo.
Afonso's relations with Portugal and the resident Portuguese have often been studied through his correspondence, especially letters of complaint issued in 1514 and 1526, and occasionally at other times. In these Afonso complained that the Portuguese in his service were immoral, lazy, and sometimes incompetent, at other times that some Portuguese conspired with his subjects to destabilize the kingdom or promote the slave trade. He was particularly concerned that Portuguese, especially those resident in the island of São Tomé (in the Gulf of Guinea), traded with his neighbors without his permission or control. These neighbors included Mpanzulumbu, located near the mouth of the Zaire, Kiangala on the coast north of Luanda, and probably also the kingdom of Ndongo to his south. In all these areas, Kongo had limited control in precontact times, and the growing Portuguese trade represented both assertions of independence on the part of the African partners and tax evasion on the part of the Portuguese. At one point, in 1526, Afonso proposed stopping all trade with Portugal because he claimed that his own subjects, including members of the nobility had been seized.
Whatever the specific events he alluded to, there is little evidence that Kongo's sovereignty was substantially undermined, or that Afonso's reign was a noble failure to transform the country, as some scholars have contended. When Afonso died in 1542, he passed on a country that was stable, expanding its influence and authority, and committed to continuing the Christian faith. It would be over a century before the debilitating civil war that actually did destroy the country would begin.
Further Reading
Hilton, A. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford, 1985.
Thornton, J. “The Kingdom of Kongo, ca. 1390–1678: History of an African Social Formation.” Cahiers d'études africaines. 22 (1982): 325–342.
——. “Early Kongo-Portuguese Relations, 1483–1575: A New Interpretation.” History in Africa. 8 (1981): 183–204.
Vansina, J. (with T. Obenga). “The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbours.” In B. A. Ogot (ed.). General History of Africa. Edited by B. A. Ogot.Vol. 5. UNESCO, 1981.
Kongo Kingdom, 1542–1568
When King Afonso I (1509–1542) died at an age of over eighty, he left a multigenerational set of successors behind him to struggle over the throne. His son Pedro I Nkanga a Mvemba ruled briefly, before being forced to take refuge in a church by Afonso's half brother, Francisco I Nkumbi a Mpudi, whose equally brief reign ended in 1545 when Afonso's grandson Diogo I Mpudi a Nzinga overthrew him. In 1550 Diogo put Pedro on trial for plotting treason against him; the legal process of this trial is an important source for understanding how succession was undertaken in Kongo in the mid-sixteenth century.
The nature of this struggle reveals how far the country had moved toward centralization of authority since the early sixteenth century. When Afonso came to the throne, the kingship was effectively elective, probably through an original constitution of Kongo that called for the selection of the ruler by the powerful independent nobility of Kongo's original loose federation. Afonso owed his own power, he wrote in 1514, to the good offices of the Mwene (ruler of) Mbata, the most powerful member of the federation. Later, shortly before 1529, Afonso had written to Portugal explaining that he could not name a successor without the consent of the Mwene Mbata. Yet if Mbata, or Soyo, probably another early member of the federation played a role in selecting kings earlier, they played no apparent role in the mid-sixteenth century.
Kongo kingdom, c.1500.
Instead, Diogo relied largely on his ability to appoint officials to those provinces of the kingdom that were in his power: Vunda, Mpemba, Nsundi, Mpangu, and other smaller ones. Yet it was not always easy to make the appointments that were technically in his gift, for he moved very slowly to replace his predecessors’ appointed officials and even five years after ascending the throne had not completely filled these positions with his supporters. Pedro's plot, in fact, revolved around getting one or another of these appointed officials to rebel against Diogo in his favor. In the end, however, Diogo managed to force all to swear that they would never support anyone of Pedro's geração, a Portuguese term that probably translated the Kikongo word kanda, which in turn referred to a large and complex faction united by kinship, clientage, and other bonds for political means.
By the mid-1550s, however, Diogo was firmly in control of Kongo and its establishment. He had steered the church out of the hands of Jesuits, whose mission between 1548 and 1555 had sought to place both the church and the Portuguese resident community under their (and the Portuguese crown's) control. In 1553 he won the right to appoint a captain of the Portuguese against rights of the Portuguese throne. He was troubled, as was Afonso, with growing Portuguese trade with Ndongo, but he expanded the country. Southward he consolidated control over Kiangala along the coast, and under his guidance Kongo gained control all along the south border of the country and into the east as well.
When Diogo died in 1561 there was a brief succession dispute between two of his sons. One son, named Afonso II, ruled before being overthrown by his brother Bernardo I (1561–1567). During Bernardo's reign, members of rival kandas, perhaps connected to Afonso II, plotted against him, and he faced one open rebellion led by a discontented nobleman who started out in Mpangu and also seized Nsundi. Some of the Portuguese community also joined in this rebellion but were slaughtered and their property seized. Not all the Portuguese joined in, and those who remained loyal were still secure.
Bernardo took an interest in expansion to the east, for early seventeenth-century tradition maintained that he died fighting the “Jagas,” who seem to have resided in the region of the Kwango. The fact that his successor, his uncle and Diogo's son, Henrique I, also died in the east (fighting against the Tio kingdom) the very next year, 1568, clearly suggests a strong movement towards the Kwango, and equally strong opposition.
Henrique's death appears to have set off a succession dispute of great significance. Henrique left the capital and civil government of Kongo in the hands of Alvaro Nimi a Lukeni lua Mvemba, the son of his wife by a previous husband when he went to the east. After Henrique's death, Álvaro managed to be proclaimed king Álvaro I, on the basis that Henrique left no issue of his own. At this point, the “Jagas” invaded Kongo.
The origin and nature of the Jagas is a disputed point in Kongo historiography. The most detailed account places their origin along the Kwango, though historians have posited other locations. They were described as rootless cannibals who stormed the country through Mbata, sacking Mbanza Kongo and driving Alvaro to an island in the Zaire River. Some historians have taken this story literally and maintain that they were from the Kwango region, displaced by fighting there. Others see a local revolt behind the Jaga movement, perhaps in support of the Mwene Mbata, who had a claim to Kongo's throne should the royal dynasty ever die out. Since contemporary documents suggest that Álvaro's succession to the throne represented the end of one dynasty and the start of another, a rebellion from Mbata is not out of the question.
Whatever the cause, Álvaro's desperate plight inspired him to seek Portuguese help to restore him to the throne, help that came from São Tomé under the guidance of Francisco de Gouveia Sottomaior in 1571. He and his force of six hundred men did eventually place Álvaro back on the throne, but at a price. The price was, among other things, permitting Portugal control of the mines of precious metal (none was found), to colonize Luanda island, and probably to collect tribute from the shell money (nzimbu) mines there, and the submission of the Portuguese residents in Kongo to an official appointed by the king of Portugal. Álvaro apparently also swore a symbolic vassalage to the Portuguese crown, though this carried very little significance.
See also: Kongo, Teke (Tio), and Loango: History to 1483; Kongo Kingdom: Jaga Invasion to 1665; Kongo Kingdom: Afonso I, Christianity, and Kingship; Portugal: Exploration and Trade in the Fifteenth Century.
Further Reading
Hilton, A. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford, 1985.
Thornton, J. “The Kingdom of Kongo, ca. 1390–1678: History of an African Social Formation.” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines. 22 (1982): 325–342.
Vansina, J. (with T. Obenga). “The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbours.” In General History of Africa, edited by B. A. Ogot. Vol. 5. UNESCO, 1981–1992.
Kongo Kingdom: Jaga Invasion to 1665
Kongo's King Álvaro I Nimi a Lukeni lua Mvemba (1568–1587) took power under irregular circumstances upon the unexpected death of his predecessor. He was not descended directly from Henrique, being the son of his wife by a previous husband. Later, apologetic genealogists made him a descendant of Afonso I's (1509–1542) second daughter, Isabel Lukeni lua Mvemba, when the issue of the first daughter, Nzinga a Mvemba, had finished, an approach that oversimplifies the real descent of the kings after Afonso. Challenges to his claim may have lay behind the Jaga invasion, which temporarily drove him from the throne and forced him to ask Portugal for assistance.
What Alvaro's success really illustrates, however, is the degree to which the electoral system had been bypassed by kings who could more or less choose their successors from either children or clients. Kongo's administrative centralization had increased, especially now that the appointment and dismissal of the governors of the major provinces was primarily in the hands of the kings and drawn from his clients and family (together making up his kanda). Once the Jaga threat was removed, and the Portuguese expedition of Francisco Gouveia de Sottomaior had been withdrawn in 1576, Álvaro consolidated his control over the country.
When Paulo Dias de Novais arrived to colonize Angola for Portugal in 1575, Álvaro had had to accept this as the price of Portuguese support, and in fact sent some forces to assist the Portuguese governor. When Dias de Novais's small force was nearly destroyed in Ndongo in 1579, Álvaro dispatched an army to help. While unsuccessful, the attempt effectively removed claims that Portugal might have had over Kongo.
Álvaro extended Kongo eastward, and in the 1580s began a campaign to have his capital, which he renamed São Salvador after its principal church, designated as an episcopal see. He died before he saw these projects to their conclusion, but his son, Álvaro II Mpanzu a Nimi (1587–1614) continued them.
Álvaro II's succession was contested by his brother and by members of the kanda his father had displaced, and it was at least five years before he was secure against revolts. Once secure, however, he began moving, through strategic marriages and appointments, to bring the hereditary ruling elites of Soyo and Mbata, the traditional electors of Kongo, more fully under his control. The process he initiated would be a long one, successfully completed in Mbata but strongly resisted in Soyo, which thanks to its participation in international trade boasted a large urban capital, Mbanza Soyo, and ready access to the wealth of the Atlantic.
Álvaro II continued making conquests in the east, bringing Kongo to its fullest extent by around 1610. In 1596 he won the right from Rome to have his own bishop, but Portugal claimed the right to name the bishop. The Portuguese bishops favored Angolan interests over Kongolese ones and sought to extend church control beyond what Álvaro considered acceptable bonds.
The process of centralizing the powers of the king that had taken place during the reigns of Álvaro I and II, while it had changed Kongo's constitution, created new problems. The powerful provincial nobility could support rival claimants to the throne and might rebel when the victor sought to remove them. Álvaro III Nimi a Mpanzu (1614–1622), who won the crown over a rival shortly after Alvaro II's death, faced constant rebellion from his predecessors’ appointees, who refused to yield their places to his own appointees. When he died in 1622, they forced the election of a compromise king, Pedro II Nkanga a Mvika, from a client lineage (said to be descended from Afonso's third daughter, Ana Zumba a Mvemba).
The compromise only complicated matters, for Pedro's son Garcia I Mvemba a Nkanga (1624–1626) tried unsuccessfully to force his own appointees into these offices, and was overthrown by one of them, Manuel Jordão, duke of Nsundi in favor of Ambrósio Nimi a Nkanga (1626–1631), one of Álvaro II's descendants.
After short reigns by several kings unable to consolidate their control, various provinces were held by members of two kandas, one, the Kinkanga a Mvika established by Pedro II, and the other, the Kimpanzu from the descendants of Alvaro II. Soyo was also involved, for its rulers not only resisted integration into Kongo, but thanks to interlocking marriages with both kandas, provided a refuge for losing kandas.
The Kimpanzu king Álvaro IV Nzinga a Nkuwu took over from Ambrósio in 1631. In 1633 when he sought to remove Daniel da Silva, related to Soyo's ruling house, as duke of Mbamba, he was strongly resisted, eventually calling on two brothers from a client family (later called the Kinlaza) Álvaro Nimi a Lukeni and Garcia Nkanga a Lukeni. When Álvaro IV died in 1636, and his Kimpanzu successor Álvaro V sought to remove them, they rebelled and took over the kingship, first as Alvaro VI (1636–1641) and then as Garcia II (1641–1661).
Garcia's reign was marked, first by the suppression of all Kimpanzu officeholders, and then by the elimination of those from the Kinkanga a Mvika, completed by 1657. He was less successful in several sustained military efforts against Soyo, the last holdout against consolidation of royal control. Not only did Soyo resist and defeat Garcia's armies, but the Kimpanzu managed to take refuge there to continue to nourish their hopes of returning to power. Despite this failure, though, Garcia was in other ways Kongo's strongest king, presiding over a powerfully centralized kingdom at the height of its territorial extent.
When Garcia died in 1661, his son António Vita a Nkanga easily succeeded him to the throne and quickly eliminated potential rivals. António, however, was drawn into a border dispute with Portuguese Angola over control of the small state of Mbwila. In the Battle of Mbwila (or Ulanga as it was known in Kongo) in 1665, Kongo's army was defeated, leaving António dead on the battlefield and no clear-cut successor. The stage was set for a disastrous civil war.
Further Reading
Hilton, A. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: 1985.
Thornton, J. “The Kingdom of Kongo, ca. 1390–1678: History of an African Social Formation.” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines. 22 (1982): 325–342.
——. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718, Madison: 1983.
Vansina, J. (with T. Obenga). “The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbours.” In General History of Africa, edited by B. A. Ogot. Vol. 5., UNESCO, 1981–1992.
Kongo Kingdom: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
When King António I Vita a Nkanga died at the Battle of Mbwila-Ulanga (1665) a succession struggle ensued, with both Kinlaza and Kimpanzu kanda's candidates. Fighting was as much Kongo against Soyo as between rival branches, Soyo supporting Kimpanzu kings and nobles of Kongo supporting Kinlaza ones. The Kinlaza Álvaro VII Mpanzu a Mpandu (1665–1666) was ousted by the Kimpanzu Álvaro VIII Mvemba a Mpanzu (1666–1668), who in turn was overthrown by the Kinlaza, Pedro III Nkanga a Mpanzu (1668–1670). Pedro, in turn, was driven out by Kimpanzu Álvaro IX Mpanzu a Ndbwila (1669–1970), and fled with his followers to the mountainous region of Mbula, south of the Zaire, to build a rival capital at Lemba, where he remained until his death in 1683.
Meanwhile, another Kinlaza contender, Rafael I Nzinga a Nkanga, sought the aid of Portuguese Angola, not only to place himself on the throne but to conquer Soyo. Rafael's gambit threatened Kongo's sovereignty, but the Portuguese army sent to assist him was decisively defeated by Soyo's forces at the Battle of Kitombo (October 18, 1670). Rafael reoccupied São Salvador, and the Kimpanzu, rebuffed, set up a dynasty in exile at Luvota, in southern Soyo, where a line of short-lived kings, including Afonso II and III, ruled under the tutelage of the elderly Dona Suzanna da Nóbrega, effective head of the Kimpanzu kanda. Daniel I retook São Salvador for the Kimpanzu in 1674 but was driven out by the Kinlaza forces of Pedro III in 1678. Pedro III did not reoccupy the city, but sacked and abandoned it, leaving the once proud capital depopulated, too vulnerable to be defended or reoccupied.
A series of regional powers had now emerged, each headed by someone with a claim to the throne established through a kanda. The Kimpanzu continued in Luvota with Soyo's support, while Kinlaza contenders were found in Lemba, headed by Pedro III, and his son João II (1683–after 1716) after his death. Another Kinlaza branch ruled in the southwest at Nkondo headed by Dona Ana Afonso de Leão and her nephews. Yet another kanda, composed of people of mixed Kimpanzu-Kinlaza descent occupied the mountain of Kibangu in the east with would-be kings André I (1689), Manuel I (1690), Álvaro X Agua Rosada (1690–1695), and his brother Pedro IV Agua Rosada (1695–1718) as their claimants. The province of Nsundi to the north, meanwhile, fell under the control of Kimpanzus appointed in the 1660s and remained under their hereditary control, maintaining a nominal loyalty to Kongo, but no longer a participant in its politics.
The politics of the late seventeenth century revolved around attempts to reoccupy São Salvador, the spiritual capital of the country, first by Manuel in 1690, and then briefly by both João II and Pedro IV in 1696. No one could hope to restore the country without occupying the capital, and yet no one was prepared to risk the occupation without forces more sizable than could be mustered by any of the pretenders. At the same time, missionaries of the Capuchin order, who had worked in Kongo since 1645 and were much respected, attempted to broker a negotiated restoration.
Pedro IV achieved this restoration by persuading his rivals that he could be king while respecting their rights to hereditary control in their respective areas. After winning nominal recognition from Ana Afonso de Leão's faction, Pedro moved to reoccupy the capital in 1701.
The reoccupation and repopulation of the capital was slowed by two factors. First, the head of the colonizing expedition, Pedro Constantinho da Silva, who had interests in Soyo as well as at Kibangu, rebelled. Second, a popular antiwar movement, headed by Beatriz Kimpa Vita, temporarily disturbed the process. Beatriz, who claimed to be possessed by Saint Anthony, spoke to the desire of the common people for an end to the wars and a restoration of the capital. When political leaders rebuffed her, she founded a mass movement and became the first to reoccupy the capital. Constantinho da Silva joined the movement to occupy the capital in his own name and allied with the Kimpanzu of Luvota, whose candidate Manuel joined him and supported the Antonians.
Pedro IV and Ana Afonso de Leão countered by managing to capture, try, and burn Beatriz as a heretic. In 1709 Pedro stormed São Salvador, later beating off an attack from João II. Pedro's restoration rested on allowing the regional rulers to retain hereditary control in their own realms in exchange for promises that their lines rotate as king.
When Pedro IV died in 1718, he was succeeded by Manuel II, from the Kimpanzu of Luvota. As unpublished documents in Rio de Janeiro reveal, Manuel's long reign helped to stabilize Pedro's peace. He faced challenges from Kinlaza of Nkondo, with fighting in 1733–1734. When Manuel died in 1743, he passed the crown on to Garcia IV (1743–1752) of the Kinlaza of Mbula (now in Matari) in accordance with Pedro's compromise.
Garcia met with opposition from those who did not wish to honor the compromise. Manuel's widowed queen, who returned to Luvota, fostered the ambitions of that faction while fearing Garcia. Garcia was succeeded by Nicolau I (1752–post 1758), probably from the Kimpanzu faction of Luvota, and he was succeeded by Sebastião I from the Kinlaza of Matari. In 1763 or 1764, Pedro V, of the Luvota faction became king but was forced to withdraw to Luvota by Álvaro XI (1764–1779), a Kinlaza from Matari.
When Álvaro died a new struggle developed, between his heirs, Pedro V's from Luvota, and the Kinlaza of Nkondo, who had not had a chance to rule since Pedro IV's compromise. José I, from Nkondo, emerged the victor in 1781 and passed power on to his brother Afonso V when he died in 1785, putting Pedro IV's settlement in full disarray. The Agua Rosadas of Kibangu, Pedro IV's descendants, established a regency to determine the succession. Although several kings (Álvaro XII, Aleixo I, Joaquim I) were elected, the regency became a new constitution involving participation of both Kinlaza factions and the Agua Rosadas. Henrique I (1794–1803) emerged from the regency, but when he sought to end it, he was overthrown by Garcia V Agua Rosada, whose long rule (1803–1830) established a new system.
Further Reading
Broadhead, S. “Beyond Decline: The Kingdom of Kongo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” International Journal of African Historical Studies. 12 (1979): 615–650.
Hilton, A. The Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: 1985.
Thornton, J. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. Cambridge and New York: 1998.
——. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: 1983.
Vansina, J. (with T. Obenga). “The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbours.” In General History of Africa, edited by B. A. Ogot. Vol. 5 of 8. UNESCO, 1981–1992.
Kouyate, Tiémoko Garan (1902–1940?)
Teacher, Journalist, Political Activist
A nearly forgotten pioneer of African nationalism, Tiémoko Garan Kouyate was prominent in the small left-wing anticolonial movements in France in the 1920s and 1930s. These movements had for a time a close but troubled relationship with the Communist International and the French Communist Party, the only powerful force totally opposed to Western colonialism in that period (1920–1935), and Kouyate was one of the first African communists. He came from the first generation of Western-educated Africans in French Soudan (now Mali), where he was born on April 27, 1902, at Segou. He went to the Ecole Normale William Ponty, a celebrated teacher training college founded by the French at Goree in Senegal, and worked as a teacher in Côte d'Ivoire from 1921 to 1923.
He was awarded a scholarship for further studies in France (something very rare then) and went to the Ecole Normale at Aix en Provence. He soon ceased his advanced teacher training there, possibly being expelled, and went to join in the radical political movements started by a few people from the French colonies living in France: Algerians, West Indians, Vietnamese, and some Africans. Some organizations and newspapers were founded by those “colonials” in the 1920s with help from the French Communist Party (PCF), but with both radical and more “reformist” individuals sometimes working together, as in the Ligue Universelle de la Défense de la Race Noire (LUDRN) and the companion journal Les Continents in 1924. Later a more radical Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN) was set up on July 4, 1926. The dominant figure in this was Lamine Senghor from Senegal (1889–1927), a communist who sought to keep his organization an independent one for black people. Senghor (no relation of Léopold Senghor, Senegal's first president) attended the Brussels Congress of 1927, which led to foundation of the League Against Imperialism (LAI) by communist and other anti–colonial campaigners. Soon afterwards the CDRN spilt up, and in May 1927 the more militant Black anti-imperialists formed the new and radical Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN), again headed by Senghor until his early death a few months later. Kouyate became the leading figure in this anticolonial group, whose ideas were spread particularly through its newspaper La Race Nègre.
Kouyate told the famous African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois (on April 29, 1929) that the LDRN's aim was “the political, economic, moral, and intellectual emancipation of the whole of the Negro race. It is a matter of winning back, by all honorable means, the national independence of the Negro peoples in the colonial territories of France, England, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal . . . and of setting up in Black Africa a great Negro state.” The French colonial authorities regarded the LDRN as a dangerous subversive organization and banned La Race Nègre in the colonies. Meetings were reported by police spies and the alleged proceedings were described in regular circulars on “revolutionary activity” sent to colonial governors.
The communist connection added to the colonial rulers’ concern. It was always there, but for a time Kouyate rejected communist subsidies and control, maintaining contact with noncommunist black personalities. However, after 1928 the Comintern and PCF exerted closer control, all the more easily as the LDRN had no other source of funds than the communists. After Kouyate spent four months in Moscow in 1930 he called for fuller submission to Comintern direction. The Africans and West Indians in the LDRN had resented communist control and now a split occurred in 1930–1931. Emile Faure, a half-Senegalese activist, took control of the LDRN under that name, and asserted independence of the communists. Kouyate and his followers stuck with the communist paymasters and created a new organization in 1932, the Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN), a name reflecting Kouyate's energetic work to organize black workers, especially seamen, in France; in 1932 he attended the Altona (Hamburg) conference of the International of Seamen and Harbor Workers, organized by George Padmore, secretary of the communist-sponsored International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Kouyate and the Trinidadian activist Padmore were prominent in radical black organizations linked to the Comintern and Moscow for some years.
The Kouyate group's newspaper in Paris was renamed Le Cri des Nègres and was subsidized by communist funds. But Kouyate still resisted complete communist control, and he was expelled from the PCF in October 1933 and from the UTN the following month.
Remaining in Paris, Kouyate helped organize protests among black people and others against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In December 1935 he started a monthly magazine, Africa, initially with help from the LDRN, still active, and the North Africans’ party in France, the Etoile Nord Africaine (ENA). Apart from fierce attacks on Italy, the magazine's tone was far from Kouyate's earlier militancy; like many other anticolonial campaigners, and like the PCF after 1935, Kouyate now concentrated on calling for reforms for Africans’ benefit. After the Popular Front government came to power in France in 1936, Kouyate tried to start a “federation of African youth” based in Dakar and in 1937 wrote to the governor general of French West Africa proposing a federal-style association of France and its colonies. But the tamed radical had no further influence with the colonial authorities who had once feared him as a firebrand. For a time in the late 1930s he received money from the French ministry of the colonies.
Tiémoko Garan Kouyate met a mysterious death during the Nazi occupation of France. According to one story he was entrusted by the Germans with money for propaganda and was executed for pocketing the money; but this has not been confirmed. It is likely that Kouyate had always been ready to take money from any source available, while simultaneously trying to maintain his independence from external influences. He was clearly wrong if he thought he could try this with the Gestapo; but earlier he had, despite compromises, been able to maintain campaigning activity on behalf of Africa for years, as one of the few active campaigners against imperialism in Africa in the interwar period.
See also: Mali (Republic of): Nationalism, Federation, Independence; World War II: French West Africa, Equatorial Africa.
Biography
Born in French Soudan (now Mali) on April 27, 1902, at Segou. Attended the Ecole Normale William Ponty in Senegal, and worked as a teacher in Côte d'Ivoire from 1921 to 1923. Awarded a scholarship for further studies at the Ecole Normale at Aix en Provence. Became involved in radical politics. In 1927 became head of the radical Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN). Spent four months in Moscow in 1930, thereafter encouraged further loyalty to the Communist Party abroad. In 1932 formed a new organization, the Union des Travailleurs Nègres (UTN). Organized protests against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Started a magazine, Africa, in December 1935. Died under uncertain circumstances during the Nazi occupation of France.
Further Reading
Dewitte, P. Les mouvements nègres en France 1919–1939 (Black Movements in France, 1919–1939. Paris: Harmattan, 1985.
Langley, J. A. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa 1900–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Kruger, Paul (1825–1904)
South African Statesman
Stephanus Johannes Paulus (“Paul”) Kruger was born at Bulhoek, Eastern Cape, on October 10, 1825, the descendant of a German soldier employed by the Dutch East India Company. At the age of ten, he and his family took part in the Potgieter trek to the Transvaal. Like many of his peers he married early, in 1842, and again, on the death of his first wife, to her cousin Gezina du Plessis, by whom he had sixteen children. His bush skills, physical prowess, and leadership qualities were early recognized: in 1852, he was appointed deputy commandant for the expedition against Sechele, and after a period in which he successfully negotiated his way around and through the internecine squabbles that characterized the infant Transvaal republic, he was elected commandant general (in effect, the second highest office of state) in May 1864.
The final step on the political ladder beckoned in 1871, when Marthinus Pretorius resigned, following the Keate Award against the Transvaal. However, maintaining that he lacked the education required, he declined to stand, and the Cape Afrikaner Thomas Burgers took office instead. Relations between the two men soon deteriorated, the extreme Calvinist Kruger suspecting Burgers of religious unorthodoxy.
In May 1873 Kruger stood down and his post was immediately abolished. After a short period of withdrawal, he returned to active political life but pointedly turned down Burgers’ offer to head the punitive expedition against Sekhukhune in 1876, declaring that it lacked God's blessing. Meanwhile, the Transvaal was rapidly drifting toward political and financial bankruptcy. Burgers attempted to mend fences by appointing Kruger vice president in March 1877, but within weeks, Theophilus Shepstone had annexed the republic on behalf of Britain, claiming that he had the support of the majority of Transvaal Boers. Kruger immediately challenged this assumption, thereby staking his claim to future leadership. He headed a deputation to London later that year requesting a plebiscite; when this was refused, he organized an independent referendum that came out strongly in favor of independence, which was again refused when he returned to London in 1878. Mass protest meetings were then held, culminating in the Paardekraal (later, Krugersdorp) gathering in December 1880, at which independence was proclaimed on December 16. A short conflict then ensued (the First Boer War) marked by a British military reverse at Majuba Hill (February 1881). Fearing a wider confrontation with the Boers, comprising a majority of whites in South Africa as a whole, William Gladstone conceded a limited independence, which included an assertion of British suzerainty over the new state (Pretoria Convention, August 1881).
Kruger was inaugurated president in 1883, after an easy electoral victory over his main rival Piet Joubert. His first term of office saw success with Britain's removal of some of the restrictions of the Pretoria Convention, including the deletion of the suzerainty claim in the revised London Convention (February 1884). But the principal event of his first presidency was the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1886, which in a decade transformed the republic and increased its revenue twenty-fold, making it the primary economic power in South Africa.
During Kruger's second term of office (to 1892), a large, mainly British immigrant population (the “Uitlanders”) established itself on the goldfields. Kruger sought to protect the Boers’ and his political position by imposing a fourteen-year residence period for the franchise, building a railway to Delagoa Bay (completed in 1894) to lessen his dependence on Great Britain, and boosting his state revenues by granting monopolies over such vital commodities as dynamite, actions that imposed further burdens on the mining industry. Kruger's growing obduracy on this issue (and the narrowness of his victory over Joubert in the 1892 presidential election) was instrumental in inspiring the notion of a coup against his administration, supported by military assistance from outside. This was set in motion by Cecil Rhodes, who used the pretext of Kruger's oppression of the Uitlander community to organize the disastrous Jameson Raid in December 1895. The raid represented the high point of Kruger's career, winning him widespread international sympathy, enhanced by his shrewd decision to return Jameson and his men to the British authorities for punishment.
Thereafter, Kruger's status within the republic was unassailable: he was returned with a large majority over Joubert's “Progressive” platform in 1898, a victory that considerably strengthened his hand in his dealings with Alfred Milner, the South African high commissioner. The Uitlander franchise was again the main point at issue between the two sides, with the British claim to suzerainty being revived by Milner when Kruger was persuaded by his advisers to compromise on the franchise issue. Kruger's eventual decision to initiate war in October 1899 was based on the expectation that a quick Boer military victory would induce Britain to negotiate a settlement, as in 1881.
The South African War instead became a prolonged conflict in which Britain sought to regain its prestige as the leading imperial power, and the Boers reverted to traditional commando methods of fighting after the loss of Pretoria in mid-1900. Kruger himself left for Europe in September 1900 to rally support for the Boer cause. However, widespread public sympathy failed to translate into anything material. Disappointed, Kruger sought sanctuary in Holland, and died in the Swiss town of Mentone on July 14, 1904.
Kruger's reputation has suffered at the hands of both hagiographers and vilifiers. To older Afrikaner historians he was the God-fearing, incorruptible, and legendary folk hero; to many British observers, he was an ignorant, corrupt, obstinate, bigoted, and essentially hypocritical figure. Both of these views are essentially propagandist. Kruger seems to have encouraged the spread of probably mythical stories about his hunting adventures, and like many elderly statesmen who have enjoyed long periods of office, behaved in an increasingly autocratic and idiosyncratic fashion. On the other hand, despite his firmly Calvinist beliefs, he had good personal relations with non-Calvinists, and indeed, people with no religious faith. His “illiteracy” (certainly exaggerated) was moderated by a phenomenal memory that gave him obvious advantages in negotiation. And in the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, he embarked upon the modernization and reform of his administration, appointing among others the future South African leader, Jan Smuts, as state attorney in 1898. His personal attitude to the black majority was at least marked by an honesty often lacking in the practice of individuals such as his main rival, Cecil Rhodes.
See also: Afrikaans and Afrikaner Nationalism, Nineteenth Century; Boer Expansion: Interior of South Africa; Jameson Raid, Origins of South African War: 1895–1899; Rhodes, Cecil J.; South Africa: Confederation, Disarmament and the First Anglo-Boer War, 1871–1881; South Africa: Gold on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1899; South African War, 1899–1902.
Biography
Born Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger at Bulhoek, Eastern Cape, on October 10, 1825. Took part, with his family, in the Potgieter trek to the Transvaal in 1835. Married in 1842. Later remarried upon death of his first wife; had sixteen children with his second wife. Appointed deputy commandant for the expedition against Sechele in 1852. Elected commandant general in 1864. Stood down in 1873. Appointed vice president in 1877. Inaugurated as president in 1883. Died in Mentone, Holland, on July 14, 1904.
Further Reading
Davenport, T., and C. Saunders. South Africa: A Modern History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Fisher, J. Paul Kruger: His Life and Times. London: Secker and Warburg, 1974.
Marais, J. The Fall of Kruger's Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Meintjes, J. President Paul Kruger: A Biography. London: Cassell, 1974.
Nasson, B. The South African War, 1899–1902. London: Arnold, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kuba: See Kasai and Kuba: Chiefdoms and Kingdom.
Kumasi
Kumasi is the capital of Asante in the Republic of Ghana in West Africa. Today, Kumasi is the second most important city in Ghana and covers a total area of fifty-seven square miles with a population of about one million. Kumasi has tremendous importance as a political, cultural, and commercial center. Much has been written about this historic city based on both oral and literary sources. The origin of this city is traced to the activities of the descendants of Ankyewa Nyame, the great ancestress of the royal Oyoko clan that has ruled Kumasi and presided over Asante since approximately the seventeenth century. Through a series of migrations, Ankyewa Nyame and her descendants settled first at Asantemanso then moved to Kokofu, all in the southwestern part of the present day Ashanti Region. One of her descendants, Oti Akenten, allegedly moved and settled at Asaman in the Kwaman forest. According to oral traditions, the newcomers from Kokofu purchased the land from the original settlers in the Asaman area. This position is contrary to popular notions about traditional land acquisition and ownership among the Asante. It was this site that evolved into the modern day Kumasi.
Significantly too, before the Oyoko migrants from Kokofu moved into the present area of Kumasi, there were several independent settlements each with its own head. Among them were Amakom, Kaase, Suntreso, and Tafo. At this stage, the main significance of the Kwaman area of which Kumasi became a part was based on its commercial role. From the end of the seventeenth century, it assumed increasing political significance when Osei Tutu succeeded Obiri Yeboa as ruler of Kwaman. Through a series of shrewd moves involving dynastic marriages and political alliances, Osei Tutu, with the advice of his close friend and spiritual guide, Okomfo Anokye, was able to forge a strong political-cum-military union involving independent neighboring states like Mampon, Nsuta, and Bekwai. Osei Tutu headed this union that became known as Asante. With it the Asante in 1701 defeated Denkyira, their traditional enemy and overlord. Afterward, Osei Tutu ceased to be merely ruler of Kumasi (Kumasihene) but became that of Asante (Asantehene). Consequently, Kumasi began its meteoric rise to cultural and political eminence. Under Kumasi leadership, Asante had virtually conquered the entire region that came to constitute the British Colony of the Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana) by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
As the traditional political capital, Kumasi was the residence of the Asantehene. All important Kumasi officeholders and functionaries who performed services associated with the Kumasi court and their families were also resident there. The court had the responsibility of maintaining political order and expanding Asante territory. The national assembly met in Kumasi. Thus, all important officeholders throughout Asante also had temporary residence there, or at least visited occasionally to attend to official business. From the time of the Asantehene, Osei Tutu, Kumasi became the cultural capital. In this capacity, it was the venue for such important national festivals like the annual Odwira, which was an occasion for affirmation and renewal of personal allegiance to the Asantehene by officeholders.
In the precolonial period, the core of Kumasi population was made up of the Oyoko royals, their spouses, officeholders, and functionaries. There was also a small, carefully controlled settler community of “strangers,” mainly coastal Fante and Muslim clerics from the northern Savanna region. They were usually involved in the commercial life of the city. Kumasi was at the center of trade routes radiating to the north, south, east, and west that linked the Gold Coast to the outside world via the Western Sudan and the Atlantic coast. Kumasi residents themselves often did not engage in direct agricultural production. Rather they depended on producers from the outlying villages for their food supplies. The main economic activity in Kumasi involved the production and distribution of goods like imported commodities, gold ornaments, and services in the court that ensured the maintenance of the sociopolitical order.
Asante desire to participate in and control the maritime trade in the Gold Coast frequently led to confrontations with her southern neighbors and indirectly with the British, who by the nineteenth century had emerged as the most important European power there. It was as part of this saga that British forces invaded Asante in 1873–1874, burned the city, and unilaterally imposed the debilitating Treaty of Fomena on Asante. Between 1874 and 1883 there was relative peace and attempts were made to rebuild Kumasi. In 1883 there was a disputed succession that degenerated into a civil war (1883–1888). In 1888 Kwaku Dua III, later Agyeman Prempe I, was installed Asantehene. He renewed efforts to regenerate Kumasi. By 1896 the British had developed more fully their imperial strategy known as “the forward policy.” Under it the British attempted to undermine the integrity of Asante by abducting Agyeman Prempe I and sending him, together with his principal advisers and close relatives, into exile in the Seychelles, and imposing British hegemony on Asante.
From this period, the modernization of Kumasi began. The British continued to use it as their administrative headquarters for their new political creation of “Ashanti.” In this new capacity, modern buildings were constructed to house government offices. A Western judicial system was introduced along with Western concepts of local government. In 1925, the Kumasi Public Health Board was established as the basis of a modern local government. By 1989, it had evolved into the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly.
The communication system was also modernized with the construction of motor roads, railway, postal, and telegraphic systems. Christian organizations, like the Basel and the Wesleyan Methodist Missions, moved in to proselytize. At the same time they began to establish schools and to construct church buildings and dwelling houses for themselves that were emulated by their converts. European firms also established branches there. The genesis of the modern banking system was also in this era. Competitive house building in Kumasi was a characteristic of this period, as house ownership was a means of asserting wealth and status in modern Kumasi society.
Despite attempts at innovation, the hallmark of Kumasi continues to be the coexistence of modernity and tradition that is likely to persist well into the twenty-first century.
See also: Asante Kingdom: Osei Tutu and Founding of; Ghana, Republic of.
Further Reading
Abloh, F. A. Growth of Towns in Ghana: A Historical Study of the Social and Physical Growth of Towns in Ghana. Kumasi: Department of Housing and Planning Research, Faculty of Architecture, University of Science and Technology, 1967; rev. 1972.
Arhin, K., and K. Afari-Gyan, eds. The City of Kumasi Handbook: Past, Present and Future. Cambridge: Faxbooks/Hart-Talbort Printers, 1992.
Brown, J. W. Kumasi 1896–1923: Urban Africa During the Early Colonial Period. Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972.
Donkoh, W. J., N.V. Asare's History of Asante in Tshi with Introduction, Birmingham: M Soc Sc Dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1990.
Garlick, P. C. African Traders in Kumasi. Accra: Economic Research Division, University College of Ghana, 1959.
McCaskie, T. C. State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Schildkrout, E., ed. The Golden Stool: Studies of the Asante Centre and Periphery. New York: Anthropological Papers, American Museum of Natural History, 1987.
Tipple, A. G. The Development of Housing Policy in Kumasi, Ghana, 1901 to 1981: With an Analysis of the Current Housing Stock. Newcastle: Centre for Architectural and Development Overseas, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1987.
Wilks, I. Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan Kingdom of Asante. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993.
Kumbi Saleh:See Ghana, Empire of: History of.
Kush
The term “Kush” was used by ancient Egyptians to designate one of the states to the south of their frontier at the First Cataract. Modern scholars have equated the Kingdom of Kush with the culture based at the town of Kerma in northern Sudan. This Kingdom of Kush coexisted with the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and during the Second Intermediate Period rivaled it in power. The beginning of the New Kingdom saw a resurgence of Egyptian power allied with an aggressive foreign policy which led, around 1500BCE, to the conquest of the Kingdom of Kush and the occupation of its territory. Egyptian control of this area waned during the eleventh century BCE, and into the resulting power vacuum arose another polity, also called the Kingdom of Kush, but frequently referred to today as the kingdoms of Napata and Meroe.
There is much debate as to the origins of this second Kingdom of Kush centered on the question of whether there was continuity from the New Kingdom into the early Kushite period, or whether there was a complete break of several centuries. Most of the evidence hinges on the necropolis at el-Kurru, located slightly downstream of the Fourth Cataract. The el-Kurru cemetery was excavated by George A. Reisner in 1918 and 1919. He was able to document a developmental sequence in the burials, from simple pit graves covered by small tumuli, to rock-cut tombs decorated with painted wall plaster, entered by descending a stepped dromos and covered by pyramids. He believed that the earliest of these burials was of the first ruler of Kush; the nature of the grave and the date assigned to it, in the ninth century BCE, indicate that there was discontinuity between the Egyptian New Kingdom and the rise of the Kushites. Excavations at the nearby site of Hillat el Arab, where contemporary, but richer, graves to the early graves at el-Kurru have been found, open a whole new debate that has yet to be developed.
By the mid-eighth century BCE, the Kushites were already a major power. Their kings had adopted Amun as their state god, and they were in a position to interfere in Egyptian affairs as champions of that god. Kashta was the first Kushite king to enter Egypt, but it was his successor Piye who conquered the whole country and ruled over an empire stretching from central Sudan as far north as the Mediterranean. Although Kushite control of Egypt lapsed as a result of conflicts with the Assyrians in the mid-seventh century BCE, the Kingdom of Kush survived for another thousand years.
The main religious center of the Kushites was at Jebel Barkal, which they called the “Pure Mountain” and believed to be the dwelling place of Amun. Barkal was one of a number of important sites at Napata that included a large complex of temples and palaces at the foot of the mountain, a temple, palace, massive storerooms, and cemetery at Sanam Abu Dom across the river, and the royal burial grounds at el-Kurru slightly downstream and Nuri slightly upstream. The political capital was probably moved regularly, the king progressing annually from his palace at Meroe far to the south to the major temples of Amun at Napata, Krtn, Gematon (Kawa), and Pnubs (Tabo or Kerma).
At the end of the fourth century BCE, the royal cemetery at Nuri was abandoned and, after a brief return to the ancestral cemetery at el-Kurru, thereafter almost all royal burials were at Meroe. In funerary culture, as in many other aspects of Kushite civilization, the influence of pharaonic Egypt was considerable, although the Kushites did not slavishly borrow from their northern neighbor. Rather, the Kushites selectively adopted religious ideology and artistic and architectural styles, and modified them to suit their own needs. In the architectural field, the pyramid is one of the most distinctive borrowings from Egypt (although the Kushite pyramid is derived from the nonroyal pyramids of the New Kingdom, which were a feature of Egyptian sites south of Aswan, rather than from the royal pyramids of the Old and Middle Kingdoms). Temples of the state god, Amun, were also of Egyptian type, although temples of local gods were distinctively Kushite.
The early Kushites used Egyptian as their written language but probably spoke an entirely unrelated language known as Meroitic. There is evidence that, early in the second century BCE, this language was committed to writing using two alphabetic scripts, one with characters borrowed from Egyptian hieroglyphs, the other a “cursive” script with some characters derived from Egyptian demotic. Almost all later inscriptions are written in one or another form of Meroitic, a language that remains untranslated at this time.
The withdrawal from Egypt does not seem to have had any serious repercussions for the Kingdom of Kush although the retention by the kings of the title “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” brought them into conflict with their northern neighbor on more than one occasion. In 593 BCE, Psammetik II invaded Kush and may have sacked Napata. Relations thereafter, with the latest Egyptian pharaohs and the Ptolemies, were largely peaceful or confined to small-scale military activities in the frontier zone. The arrival of the Romans in Egypt brought a renewed bout of fighting which may have culminated once again in the sack of Napata, although the frontier was drawn far to the north at Maharraqa.
There was much mutual benefit for Kush and Egypt from peaceful coexistence. Kush stood athwart one of the main trade routes from central Africa to the Mediterranean world and profited handsomely from its position as a middleman in that trade. The trade was probably entirely in the hands of the monarchy, and the wealth generated from it was of fundamental importance for the coherence of the state, it being used as patronage by the ruler to guarantee the support of the regional elites. The loss of the monopoly over this trade, which shifted eastward to the Red Sea, coupled with the increasing impoverishment of the later Roman Empire, may have been one of the causes of the dissolution and collapse of the Kushite state in the fourth century.
See also: Kerma and Egyptian Nubia; Napata and Meroe.
Further Reading
Adams, W. Y. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. London and Princeton: Allen Lane, 1977.
Shinnie, P. L. Meroe: A Civilization of the Sudan. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967.
Török, L. The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Welsby, D. A. The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires. London: British Museum Press, 1996.
Kwarafa: See Benue Valley Peoples: Jukun and Kwarafa.
L
Labor: Cooperative Work
Cooperative labor, in the form of work parties or other forms of voluntary collaboration, is historically widespread in Africa, and continues to play an important role in many areas. Two basic types of work group have been identified, though the distinction between them is blurred and many work groups had (and have) elements of both. The first is exchange labor or the “reciprocal work group,” a small group of households that worked for each other regularly and in rotation, usually performing agricultural tasks. These were often relatively permanent groups, with fixed leaders and membership, though changes in the composition of the group could occur. Typically, the organizer provided everyday food and drink for the workers but the occasion was not associated with any kind of festivity. The second and larger type is referred to as the “festive” work group; food and drink were prepared and people came along on an appointed day to work, on the basis of either a public or private invitation. The work was concluded by the festive consumption of beer or other alcoholic drink. Reciprocity was not as strictly defined as in the former type, since these were ad hoc groups, disbanding after the task has been completed.
The basis of recruitment into work parties varied widely and could use ties of kinship, political unit, or locality, though in practice it was usually neighbors or people from the same territorial unit who collaborated. The morality involved was almost universally based on notions of reciprocity and mutual helpfulness, and the pool of potential workers was large. Those who contributed labor did so on the basis of close relationship, mutual interest, friendship, reciprocal obligation, or some other kind of preexisting link. In some areas, such as parts of Malawi and Zambia, extradomestic forms of labor cooperation were historically rare. In other cases cooperative labor was an aspect of formal, villagewide associations. Among the Wolof, for example, these associations were organized partly on an age and gender basis and were called kompin, after the French compagnie. They had established leaders, cut across kinship and class lines, and had a variety of functions aside from cooperative agricultural work, much like an age-set organization.
Although the homestead was the basic unit of production in most African societies, relying primarily on its own members, larger labor combinations were necessary for certain heavy or time-consuming tasks. Work parties were in demand at crucial points in the agricultural cycle that affected everybody (ploughing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting) but fields were not all ready for a particular task at precisely the same time, allowing collective labor inputs to be staggered. There were considerable benefits accruing from this if it enabled land to be planted, hoed, or harvested at the optimum time. Apart from breaking labor bottlenecks, cooperative work groups had another advantage in that they were not specialized. They could be called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks and reciprocity was usually reckoned in terms of labor time spent rather than the task performed.
Some writers maintain that it would have been economically more efficient for people to do the work themselves rather than expending energy and other resources on brewing beer for a work group. Others estimate the amount of labor devoted to beer brewing as being about half of the labor gain from a work party. Economic surveys in East and West Africa showed that there was little reliance on indigenous forms of cooperative work among “progressive” farmers, and it seems that work parties were in fact not suited to the constraints of more modern, cooperative production instigated by an external agency, whether of a capitalist nature or in terms of an ideology such as ujamaa.
Many commentators feel that festive labor was undertaken by poorer people, to the benefit of wealthier households or political leaders, and that exchange labor was found mainly among households of relatively equal economic status. However, the evidence on this is not conclusive, due to the many different forms of cooperative labor, the uncertain nature of the distinctions between them, and the variable conditions under which work parties operated in different parts of the continent. Many work groups operated under a general assumption of reciprocity and mutual helpfulness, in that people helped each other without expectation of immediate return, but in the knowledge that the receiver could be asked to provide labor, grain, or something else, in the future. The sanction for nonparticipation confirmed the principle of reciprocity, with those not working as expected being refused assistance when they themselves needed help. It has also been claimed that cooperative work was a means of redistributing wealth from richer to poorer households and that without it the latter would not have been able to manage certain vital tasks.
A number of writers have pointed out that cooperative work groups cannot be seen simply as indigenous or traditional responses to the need for collaborative effort, as something persisting from an unchanging past, and different from more modern forms of work. Instead, work parties are often responses to particular historical situations where labor was scarce, where poverty created a shortage of resources such as draught animals or agricultural implements, and where cash or hired labor were in short supply. Cooperative labor often survived, facilitated, or developed in reaction to, radical economic and cultural change. For example, in some cases cooperative work of the large, festive type may have arisen where labor shortages resulting from slavery coincided with the introduction of commercial export crops. Cooperative work may therefore be quite recent in some places, and one cannot make assumptions about its lineal development from, or into, other forms of work, including wage labor. In some of the documented cases work parties arose or intensified as a result of the introduction of cash cropping; in other cases similar circumstances led to the development of wage labor and a decline of cooperative forms.
Where homesteads became smaller due to factors such as population decline, a lower incidence of polygyny, missionary influence, growing individualism, and the independence of younger people, labor combinations sometimes became more widespread as a means of ensuring production. Urbanization and the absence of migrant workers exacerbated rural labor shortages in many places and work parties were a way of overcoming this problem. Changes in the nature of rural production, and the introduction of new technologies such as the plough, were also important, because they created new labor demands. Where production became more intensive due to the adoption of new crops or the introduction of cash crops, or where production was expanded due to new technology, cooperative work was sometimes one of the innovative responses that facilitated this.
Further Reading
Donham, D. L. Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Englund, H. “The Self in Self-Interest: Land, Labour and Temporalities in Malawi's Agrarian Change.” Africa. 69, no.1(1999): 139–159.
Erasmus, G. J. “Culture, Structure and Process: The Occurrence and Disappearance of Reciprocal Farm Labour.” South Western Journal of Anthropology. 12, no. 4 (1956): 444–469.
Geschiere, P. “Working Groups or Wage Labour? Cash-Crops, Reciprocity and Money Among the Maka of Southeastern Cameroon.” Development and Change. 26, no. 3 (1995): 503–523.
Moore, M. P. “Co-operative Labour in Peasant Agriculture.” Journal of Peasant Studies. 1, no. 3 (1975): 270–291.
Saul, M. “Work Parties, Wages, and Accumulation in a Voltaic Village.” American Ethnologist. 10, no. 1 (1983): 77–96.
Worby, E. “What Does Agrarian Wage Labour Signify? Cotton, Commoditisation and Social Form in Gokwe, Zimbabwe.” The Journal of Peasant Studies. 23, no. 1 (1995): 1–29.
Labor: Decline in Traditional Forms of Exploitation
While some assert that colonialism was accompanied by systematic abuse of African labor, European colonial rule in Africa ultimately produced major changes in the traditional labor regime as it launched an attack on slavery and pawning and, consequently, on chiefs’ rights in these areas.
Slavery in Africa, as elsewhere, was essentially an economic system although it was also justified on religious and social grounds. The nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous increase in slavery in Africa. Attempts to build new states or reform existing ones formed the basis for the increase in slavery. Abolition of external slave trade and the attempt to develop a “legitimate trade” in African raw materials stimulated slavery's growth across the continent, particularly in coastal societies and their hinterland. Zanzibar's emergence as an entrepôt and major clove producer stimulated slavery's growth in East Africa. In the savanna regions victorious Islamic jihad movements promoted increased production and trade that were both heavily dependent on slave labor. Thus, the Sokoto caliphate in northern Nigeria emerged as Africa's largest slave society by the end of the nineteenth century. Traditional forms of exploitation fell heavily on women. Women dominated the slave and pawn populations in Africa as they were highly regarded for their productive and reproductive functions.
Closely interwoven with pawning and slavery was the issue of chiefs’ rights. Chiefs could, and did, call on labor assistance for community projects (such as clearing paths and streams) and for work on royal properties, but as chiefs also became active slave masters, this brought the question of forced labor to the attention of European colonizers. European interest in nineteenth-century Africa was heavily influenced by economic and humanitarian concerns. Europeans professed an antislavery ideology for much of the nineteenth century, and their conquest of Africa was justified on this ground. Merchants and Christian missionaries called for the abolition of slavery (although for different reasons) that had increased as a concomitant of the state-building revolution which swept across Africa. Yet European colonial administrators found that immediate abolition of slavery was against their own interests. They needed the support of the chiefs, who were major slave-owners, to install the colonial system, and this made them less inclined to abolish slavery. Initially, therefore, it was something of a paradox that the erection of colonial rule witnessed the continuation of pawning and slavery, and the strengthening of the power of chiefs.
Opposition to slavery was dictated by colonial economic considerations. Surpluses from slave labor would not accrue to European capitalists, and this was contrary to the expectations of colonialism. Slaves were not consumers, and the prevailing doctrine held that slave labor was unproductive; consequently, both would adversely affect European industry. Simultaneously, colonialism made huge demands on labor and aimed to develop a wage-labor market in Africa. These could only be accomplished by an attack on slavery. Further, slavery was a moral wrong that would be righted by abolition. Generally, Europeans thought that slavery had to be abolished as part of the process of establishing European political control. Initially, however, European administrators (Belgian, British, French, German, and Portuguese) were reluctant to abolish slavery immediately for fear of undermining the chiefs and inducing economic dislocation. Yet the establishment of European rule and the economics of colonialism did produce an assault on the traditional labor regime and on the rights of chiefs therein.
Slavery was abolished by a combination of economic, administrative, and legal measures effected by Europeans as well as by a flight from the estates on the part of the slaves themselves. African slaves abolished slavery and broke the power of the chiefs when they deserted their masters in large numbers, often in the wake of the European military conquest. The conquest and subsequent pax Europeana ended the numerous wars that had stimulated the supply of slaves in places like Yorubaland where warfare had been endemic throughout the nineteenth century. Conquest undermined the basis of political power of some chiefs by reducing their ability to acquire slaves and utilize them as followers or dependents. Europeans, however, emphasized the prevention of new slavery. This was a consequence of the 1890 Brussels Conference, which concluded that cessation of the slave raid and slave trade were priorities in the antislavery campaign. If there was no new slavery, ran the argument, slavery would die a natural death.
European officials introduced various moderate antislavery devices. The French freed the slaves of their enemies but allowed their allies to retain their slave population; while the British tended to abolish the legal status of slavery in British courts but not in the Native Courts that were based on Islamic law or “native law and custom” and dominated by the slave owners. Colonial administrations passed laws abolishing slavery. In French West Africa a judicial code introduced in 1903 gave no sanction to slavery, and two years later new enslavement and slave trade were outlawed there while the Portuguese outlawed slavery in 1910. Germany and Britain passed laws to abolish slavery in their colonies by the turn of the twentieth century and began to enforce these laws a decade later. However, slavery continued to operate in Ethiopia and elsewhere where abolition was circumscribed by various devices. Thus, for example, all slaves in southern Nigeria were freed on March 31, 1901, but in northern Nigeria only those persons born or brought there after this date were free. Reform of the traditional labor regime was a slow process. Administrative reluctance apart, the demand for slaves did not disappear overnight and slave markets continued to operate. In addition, pawning remained prevalent during the adverse economic conditions of the 1930s.
The decline in traditional forms of exploitation stemmed partly from international pressure, particularly from League of Nation agencies. The League focused on slavery across Africa including Ethiopia and Liberia, which were independent states and members of the League. It set up a Temporary Slavery Commission that produced a Slavery Convention (September 25, 1926) which outlawed pawning, slavery, and slave raiding but which also recognized the existence of “voluntary slavery.” In the 1930s the League appointed an Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery, which examined the extent to which pawning and slavery were declining and strongly opposed continued “voluntary slavery.” It is best remembered for pushing Britain into finally abolishing slavery in northern Nigeria (1936).
However, the League's general examination of global labor conditions also helped to undermine African traditional labor practices. Investigations by the International Labor Organization (ILO), particularly in the realm of forced labor, intertwined with the antislavery campaign. ILO observations frequently questioned, even challenged, the rights of African chiefs to utilize labor and called for reforms to limit their powers. Indeed, the 1926 Slavery Convention banned the use of forced labor except for paid labor on public works, and in 1930 the ILO Convention on Forced Labor prohibited the use of forced labor “except for limited public purposes.” Across Africa forced labor ordinances or similar measures were implemented to define and regulate the duties and rights of chiefs under colonial rule.
Pawning, slave trade, and slavery continue to exist in Africa. It represents the last vestiges of a complex system of labor exploitation that developed significantly in the nineteenth century but was undermined by European colonial control in the twentieth century.
Further Reading
Austen, R. A. African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency. London: Currey, and Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1987.
Cooper, F. From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925. London: Heinemann, 1997.
Lovejoy, P., and J. Hogendorn. Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Manning, P. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Miers, S., and M. Klein, eds. “Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa.” Special issue of Slavery and Abolition. 19, no. 2 (August 1998).
Labor, Migrant
The expansion of European capitalism and the process of colonization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a complex interaction between preexisting social formations and the emergent colonial order. The colonial system was characterized by a new administration that revolved around the colonial state. The system also brought new economic changes, which included monetization of the economy, taxation, and the development of wage labor. Migrant labor in colonial Africa was a distinct system of wage labor that entailed the migration of the worker to and from the workplace, often for a defined period of time, which was usually outside the rural area from where the worker was recruited and to which he returned after the expiry of the contract.
Migrant labor emerged as an integral part of the colonial economy. It was a brought on by the interaction between the preexisting African social formations and the newly instituted colonial economic system. In order to construct roads to facilitate colonial administration, work in the mines or settler plantations, and other colonial establishments the state required the supply of cheap labor. The demand for labor became intense during the formative years of colonial governance in Africa because many people were unwilling to leave their homes to go and work hundreds of miles away in colonial establishments. The demand became even more acute in the settler colonies, such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, where Europeans established huge plantations. Because of the labor-intensive nature of colonial plantation agriculture, demand often exceeded supply. As a result the colonial governments often resorted to a variety of methods ranging from outright force to legislation in order to procure labor for colonial establishments as well as private European plantation owners.
During the initial stages of colonial rule, the mobilization of labor was done through government-appointed chiefs, who were accountable to the local European administrator. Usually the chiefs were given wide-ranging powers including punishing those who evaded work in colonial establishments. The delegated authority was often used arbitrarily.
Demand for work among Africans was also created by the introduction of the poll tax, which had to be paid in cash. This made some Africans work for the purpose of getting money for the poll tax. As a result, once they had got enough money to meet their tax needs these workers would return home. In a sense they kept on moving to and from the workplace depending on their basic needs as well as tax obligation. However, some peasants could avoid going out to work so long as they could grow cash crops and raise money for their taxes. This was acceptable in the nonsettler colonies such as Uganda and Ghana where a vibrant African peasant sector was crucial in sustaining the colonial economy. However, in the settler colonies peasants were discouraged from growing cash crops on the grounds that it would lead to competition for labor between Africans and European planters. Thus as the colonial period wore on, the poll tax as a method of producing workers was found to be not entirely effective in producing the workers.
Besides the poll tax, therefore, the colonial governments often resorted to legislation. Able-bodied men were compelled by law to work for a certain number of months in one year. They were free to return home after discharging their responsibility as required by law. However, the migrant worker had to carry a work pass as a testimony of having fulfilled the required obligation.
The colonial state cherished the notion of migrant labor because it was fairly cheap to maintain. The workers did not have strong attachment to the workplace. They were there for brief periods of time. Also, in most cases their families did not accompany them to the workplace. Hence housing projects for African migrant laborers were developed to cater for only the worker and not his entire family. Migrant laborers had few, if any, medical and retirement benefits. Low wages, economic security, and harsh working conditions made workplace as well as colonial labor establishments unfriendly environments. Workers tried to create a conducive environment where they had temporarily migrated, especially in the cities, to provide for their economic and social comfort. They formed social welfare associations, usually along ethnic and regional lines, which helped members of the group during times of need.
In some cases migrant labor had to contend with reprimands, flogging, and beating. Indeed, brutality was sometimes carried to the extreme in some countries, particularly in Belgian Congo where worker rights violation were not uncommon. Sadistic punishment, including dismemberment and murder, was widespread much to the chagrin of the citizenry and civilized world.
However, the workers often fought back in a variety of ways. Go-slows, defections, demonstrations, and violent confrontations were employed to force the colonial state as well as private employers to accede to worker's demands. While many colonial governments established a number of commissions of inquiry into the question of labor and attendant benefits as well as workplace safety, there was hardly any major improvement in the condition of the workers until after World War II. It is against this backdrop that for the migrant laborer, the workplace was not considered “home.” The comforts of home were rare in the workplace. Home was where they were recruited from and to which they returned after the expiry of their contracts. It was at home where they lived in dignity and enjoyed the support of the immediate as well as extended family.
The inability of the colonial state to provide for the welfare of labor made the worker's allegiance to rural residential home an obvious necessity. This loyalty to the rural home delayed the development of the urban working class. The worker split his active working life between the city and other colonial establishments on the one hand, and rural home on the other. Sometimes proceeds saved from the workplace were invested in rural areas by establishing retail businesses or purchasing and accumulating livestock. Migrant laborers also fostered social change. In the way they dressed, few items they bought in towns and cities, and general topical conversations about the colonizer, the migrant laborers were instrumental in the movement of ideas from urban to rural areas and vice versa. They constituted a major link between the two geographical locations and, in some cases, countries. In the context of southern Africa, the Mozambican workers traveled to and from South Africa to work in the mines. Migrant labor was therefore mobile and expansive in geographical setting.
The departure of the migrant laborers (who were invariably men) from rural areas to the colonial workplace impacted rural household division of labor as well as production patterns. African women farmers took over responsibilities that were hitherto held by the migrant male laborers. The result was increased roles for women in the management of the household economy and the rise of female-headed households. As a result, the intensification of women's labor led to the generation of wealth through small-scale agriculture and local trade in rural households where men had left for work in the colonial establishments. Since the colonial state hardly encouraged women's participation in the economy as migrant laborers, those women who made their way into the towns were not readily absorbed into the mainstream economy. Instead, they engaged in petty trade, selling agricultural produce such as vegetables, corn, and potatoes to the workers and other urban dwellers. Furthermore, the emergence of sex commercial workers during the colonial period has been partly attributed to the colonial state's encouragement of male migrant labor and the inability to provide work for the females who migrated to the colonial townships.
While the history of labor unrest in Africa predates the 1930s, strikes and violent protests increased in number and intensity after that period. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that migrant labor began to stabilize with increased numbers beginning to identify with the townships and the workplace. The number of workers increased substantially outstripping demand. Coercion and legislation were no longer enforced vigorously. This shift can be explained by a number of factors. First, the monetization of the economy had stabilized and cash had become an important aspect of daily transactions. Hence the need to get money had become a necessity that could not be easily wished away. Also, the development of Western education particularly at the pre–high school levels was producing enough literate workers for colonial establishments. Third, the Depression of the early 1930s and near collapse of the colonial economy left many people jobless. Also, after World War II the urban population increased in numbers. Although the colonial powers made a major shift in their investment policy by establishing import-substitution industries, the demand for jobs far outstripped the available opportunities.
The post–World War II period constitutes a major divide in the history of labor activism. Although there was massive investment of capital and social reform in Africa undertaken by the colonial powers, there was a gap between expectation and achievement. Throughout the continent the strikes not only became more widespread, but they increased in intensity as well. Besides strikes by workers in private companies, there were strikes by public employees such as railway workers, dockers, telegraphists, and postal workers. Contemporaneous with the unrest was the decolonization wave that began to gain momentum in the 1940s and peaked in the 1950s. The long record of colonial state's reluctance to effectively address labor issues was quickly turned into a commentary on the undesirability of colonial governance. Nationalism and labor activism coalesced and led to the demand for independence.
Further Reading
Cooper, F. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Harries, P. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, 1860–1910. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994.
Hotchschild, A. King Leopold's Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Robertson, C. Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Stichter, S. Migrant Labor in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response, 1895–1975. London: Longman Group, 1982.
White, L. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990.
Labotsibeni (c.1858–1925)
Queen Mother of Swaziland, 1890–1899; Queen Regent of Swaziland, 1899–1921
Queen Labotsibeni was born about 1858 at Luhlekweni homestead in the Hhohho region in northern Swaziland. She was born when her father, Matsanjana Mdluli, was part of a Swazi regiment fighting a Pedi chief named Tsibeni near the present day town of Barberton in South Africa. Despite the circumstances of her birth, she lived a life dedicated to avoiding war.
Gwamile, her popular name, was a name of honor meaning the “indomitable one.” This accolade was given to her by her Swazi subjects; it was also recognized by the British colonial administration. The name was bestowed in recognition of Gwamile's ability to contain colonial encroachment and to protect Swazi sovereignty and culture. Labotsibeni restored most of the country's political and economic power between 1902 and 1921. Subsequent Swazi generations have acknowledged Labotsibeni's greatness. Economic, social, and political stability in Swaziland during the precolonial era were an enduring legacy of Queen Mother Labotsibeni's moral stature, radical anticolonialism, and political shrewdness. A measure of her popularity among the Swazi is that she is acknowledged as one of the greatest rulers and queen mothers or queen regents in Swazi history. She transcended the status generally assigned to women in Swazi society.
Labotsibeni came from a distinguished family and clan. The Mdluli are divided into two branches and both have played an important role in the evolution of modern Swaziland since the eighteenth century. She came from the northern Mdluli clan, which was distinguished by its expertise in skills for military intelligence. The southern branch of the Mdluli's were trusted with the responsibility of producing an insila, a fictional blood brother to Swazi rulers. The Mdluli's are regarded as right-hand office bearers in Swazi society. Her lineage may have destined her to political fame, but it was more her personality—brave and assertive—that made her a distinguished Swazi ruler.
She was courted by Prince Mbandzeni, whom she initially rejected. A few years later, when he became king in 1875, Labotsibeni became his wife. She bore three sons, Bhunu, Malunge, and Lomvazi, and a daughter, Tongotongo.
Swazi succession law states that a king should not be succeeded by blood siblings. Therefore, none of Labotsibeni's children could be king. Yet another Swazi tradition provides that a king is king by the blood of his father through his mother. This conflict in traditions and principles of succession could have caused unusual turmoil. Labotsibeni had the knowledge and experience, based on her background, to justify and account for her manipulation of these traditions.
Following the death of King Mbandzeni on October 7, 1889, Labotsibeni was designated Indlovukati (Queen Mother) on September 3, 1890, when Bhunu was selected as the future king. Bhunu's reign was the shortest in Swazi history. When Bhunu died in December 1899, he left behind six widows, each with a single child, and one widow was pregnant. Three of the children were easily disqualified from competing for the kingship because they were female, and Swazi tradition only allows male succession to that rank. Although guided by succession principles, the elders failed to find an heir acceptable to all royal factions. One interpretation of this event was that this was an expression of deference to Labotsibeni; they sought her involvement by creating the impression that they had failed to reach a decision because the problem was so difficult that it could only be resolved by someone of Labotsibeni's stature. Her choice was Nkhotfotjeni, son of Lomawa Ndwandwe. The boy was only about three months old, yet the decision was welcomed with great acclaim. Labotsibeni became queen regent until Nkhotfotjeni's coronation as Sobhuza II on December 22, 1921.
Many of her contemporaries acknowledge that she was a shrewd and clever politician. T. R. Coryndon as resident commissioner, with a wide colonial experience in southern Africa remarked in 1907 that as “woman of extraordinary diplomatic ability and strength of character, an experienced and capable opposition which it (the colonial administration) was for some time incapable of dealing with” (Jones, p.402).
Chris Youé (1985) explained how the local colonial administration, led by Coryndon from 1905 to 1917, plotted but failed to dethrone Labotsibeni. She challenged Coryndon's approach to the land question in Swaziland. Her husband had parceled away virtually the whole country through a complicated system of assigning land, grazing pasture, and mining rights. The whole arrangement had the potential that the Swazi king would control resource rights and adjudicate in any subsequent conflicts. Through the Concession Proclamation of 1909, Corydon granted freehold title in land and gave Swazis on settler land five years in which to move to land set aside exclusively for them. Labotsibeni accepted this capitalist dispensation but challenged it by mobilizing her people donating cattle in order to buy back the land the Swazis had lost. This approach was modified to in-value the colonial administration in 1913 and has remained the operational policy in postcolonial Swaziland when addressing landlessness.
In the context of the Swazi power structure, Labotsibeni faced major challenges. First, she had to contain power struggles and to unite the Swazi nation during the rule of the young crown prince, Nkhotfotjeni. In terms of Swazi tradition, the youngest son who has no blood brothers or sisters is the one usually chosen to succeed his father. There was a feeling that Nkhotfotjeni's appointment as crown prince was rushed, because LaMavimbela was pregnant at the time of Bhunu's death. Selection should have waited for her to give birth. As it transpired, LaMavimbela delivered a son, Makhosikhosi, whose candidature was as good as, and probably better than, that of Nkhotfotjeni. However, the clan status of LaMavimbela attracted more questions than could explain the clan's contribution to the long history of the Swazi monarchy. On consultation, Labotsibeni recommended Nkhotfotjeni, because of his mother's background. The anti-Mona factions considered Labotsibeni's decision as calculated to prolong her reign or as designed to install her favorite son, Malunge.
At the turn of the century, the Swazi population increased its hostility toward Labotsibeni because of frequent droughts between 1902 and 1907. Tradition assigned the queen mother the power to make rain and the Swazis were angry at the frequency of droughts. The droughts at the turn of the century led the Swazi to believe that it was wrong for Labotsibeni to be queen mother when her grandson was designated as the future king. People felt that her capability to make rain was undermined because she defied and defiled tradition. Meetings of the Liqoqo, the inner council or cabinet, became irregular, and in 1904 Labotsibeni had to fine her subjects to compel them to attend national ceremonies.
The local British officials also helped LaMdluli's cause. The Swazi rallied behind Labotsibeni because the British had systematically alienated most of the land to white settlers. This was finally consolidated in the Land Partition Proclamation of 1909 that left the Swazis in control of only about one-third of their country.
Labotsibeni acknowledged that she could not get back the land militarily and that land had become a commodity to bought or sold in an open market. She subsequently set up a Lifa Fund to which her people contributed money for buying back the land from the colonial government and white settlers. Although discontinued in 1915, Sobhuza revived it in the late 1940s resulting in Swaziland repossessing about 60 per cent of the country at the end of the 1960s. Labotsibeni had ensured support from her people. In the presence of 2,000 Swazis armed with traditional weapons, Labotsibeni condemned the British land policy.
Labotsibeni's distinguished political and economic achievements acquire further significance when related to Labotsibeni's contribution in the field of education. Labotsibeni insisted that her grandson, crown prince Nkhotfotjeni, should receive a modern education. There was strong opposition from the Swazi chiefs and royalty. Labotsibeni strongly believed that the power of white people lay in “books and money” (Matsebula, 1987), and the Swazi could appropriate some of that power for themselves by appropriating the tools of white people, and using those tools to empower themselves. Labotsibeni recognized the importance of literacy for a twentieth-century head of state. Over the opposition of the elders and aristocracy, she arranged that a school be established at Zombodze, where Sobhuza completed early education. He later moved to Lovedale in South Africa for more education. Thus, due to Gwamile's insight, Swaziland had a monarch in 1921 who had received more formal education than several African heads of state at the end of the colonial era in the 1960s.
Labotsibeni played a critical role in the making of the Swazi nation. Clearly, the role of individuals in the making of a nation is a complex one; but there is no doubt that Labotsibeni provided much needed leadership to the Swazi nation and that the British colonial officials met their fair match in her. She died December 5, 1925, at Embekelweni, then the Swazi national capital.
See also: Swaziland.
Further Reading
Crush, J. The Struggle for Swazi Labour, 1890–1920. Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987.
Jones, H. W. Biographical Register of Swaziland. Durban, University of Natal Press, 1993.
Kanduza, A. M. “Ambiguities in Women History: The Case of Swaziland.” Eastern Africa Social Science Research Review. 12, no. 1 (1996).
Matsebula, J. S. M. A History of Swaziland. 3rd ed. Cape Town: Longman, 1987.
Youé, C. P. Robert Thorne Corydon: Proconsular Imperialism in Southern and Eastern Africa, 1897–1925. Buckingham Shire: Colin Symithe, 1986.
Lagos
For most of the twentieth century, Lagos was the capital of Nigeria, and it remains the major hub of economic activities, as well as the home of the country's principal harbor, roads and rail terminal, the international airport, a large population, and a high number of schools and colleges. A new educated elite emerged here during the nineteenth century, which dominated politics until 1960, when Nigeria obtained independence. Demands for major reforms and anticolonial resistance occurred in Lagos, thus making the city a center of administration, politics, and media. The tradition of protest continues, either in violent street demonstrations or in a peaceful manner, daily reported in the newspapers and magazines that are concentrated here.
With an annual population growth rate close to 15 per cent, Lagos grows at a pace faster than most African cities and is always receiving a large number of permanent settlers and floating migrants. From the 1870s to 1963, the administrative territory of Lagos expanded from 4 square kilometers to 65 square kilometers, while the population increased from 28,500 to almost a million.
Lagos retains all the attractions and dynamism of a modern city, including the presence of leading hotels, nightclubs, and criminal syndicates. A crowded population of over three million people lives in the Lagos Island, a small area, with the mainland connected to it by three bridges.
Lagos is part of the Nigerian coastal belt that separates the mainland from the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the maze of swamps, lagoons, river estuaries and creeks, settlement patterns are fragmented. Heavy rainfall, low topography, and bad drainage conditions limit farming activities and impose constraints on city planning. Although it has a small land area, it is one of the most densely populated cities in Africa.
The city's historical origins lie in a very distant past. Originally settled by the Aware, the people interacted with their neighbors and became connected with the economic network of the Yoruba, Bini, and Egun regions in what are now the southern parts of modern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. As could be expected, the sea, river, and lagoons served as waterways, while an economy based on fishing and salt making also developed. The ecology was peculiar, and Lagos was able to manipulate this to its advantage in trade relations with its neighbors, although the need to control the waterways generated warfare and intense competition for power. When Euro-African relations began developing in the fifteenth century, places located along the sea, such as Lagos, became centers of commerce and European gateways to Africa. Lagos became a major slave port: its kings, chiefs, and merchants profited by playing the role of middlemen, obtaining goods from Europeans in exchange for slaves from the Yoruba hinterland.
Following the abolition of the slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, many liberated slaves, known as Saro and Amoro, migrated to Lagos from such places as Liberia and Sierra Leone and the West Indies. A new cosmopolitan culture emerged, reflecting ideas from Brazil, the United States and England. As Lagos became more important to British trade and strategic interests, it was occupied in 1851 and governed as a consulate for ten years. It is from Lagos that the British encroached on the hinterland to establish a Protectorate later incorporated into the modern country of Nigeria. Lagos remained a dominant seat of British rule throughout the first half of the nineteenth