The souls of white folk

White settlers in Kenya, 1900s–1920s

Brett Shadle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719095344
• eBook ISBN: 9780719098284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

A striking new interpretation of white settlement in early colonial Kenya

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: The souls of white folk

The sun rose at quarter to seven on 14 March 1907. Ewan Reginald Logan prepared for another unexceptional working day. At thirty-eight years old, he found himself Town Magistrate of Nairobi, a sad collection of tin shacks and dirt roads far from his England home. Each day, he heard a dreary litany of assault and theft cases, mostly involving Africans. He suffered abuse in the press from white settlers who (with ‘all deference’) were ‘woefully disappointed’ with his supposed leniency on African offenders.¹ A thankless job, and about to get worse. For as he entered his office just after ten o’clock, he beheld a gang of white men barreling down Government Road toward his court. Then murmurs, then shouts, in British and Anglo South African voices. Logan sent out his Goan clerk to investigate, but the crowd ignored him. And so E. R. Logan, Town Magistrate of Nairobi, capital of British East Africa, stepped out of his front door.

This is what he saw. Some forty or fifty white men, shoulder to shoulder, filled the courtyard. In the centre stood three well-known settlers, Ewart Grogan, Russell Bowker, and Captain Thord Gray. On the ground lay three young African men. Grogan fondled a kiboko, a hippopotamus-hide whip. This did not bode well. Logan tried to intervene, he insisted that, whatever the complaint, the law must be followed. Scoffing, Grogan replied that he was going to thrash the men. Why? ‘Because I want to.’ They had been impertinent to two white women. A defeated Logan returned to his office and sent for the police. He heard the crack of the whip. Had he been so inclined, Logan could have counted the number of times the kiboko sliced the air. Seventy-five. Twenty-five times by Grogan. Twenty-five times by Bowker. Twenty-five times by Gray. Twenty-five on each black back.

The image of the settler

Since the late nineteenth century, Kenya has held a special place in the hearts of Britons, Americans, and others in the West. The geography of Kenya is exceptional, to be sure. The animals, too, are rightly renowned for their size and their variety, for their killing and their being killed. But aside from glossy photo spreads, it is the histories of Kenya’s white settlers – Grogan included – that continue to populate bookshelves.² Brave men and women seeking adventure or escaping strait-laced Edwardian England, falling in love with the flora and fauna (always under an ‘African sun’),³ becoming emotionally close to their exasperating but deeply loyal ‘noble savage’ domestic servants. They pioneered untamed (and supposedly unoccupied) lands and created a new country. They were lords and ladies who loved Africa, worked in the sun and drank on the veranda, swapped lovers, and created something from nothing. Settlers appear to have lived life to the fullest in an gorgeous, exotic land. Far indeed from the drab succession of days suffered through by contemporary suburbanites. These are the stories that continue to be told about what was, and is, seen as ‘the fun colony’.⁴

Settlers’ ideas about themselves, about Africans, about the government are repeated uncritically in popular works. In this stream of books, settlers are exceptional, all in good ways: ‘They played hard and worked hard, never excusing or regretting … They all possessed a common bond: independence, tenacity, ambition, and fearlessness.’⁵ Settlers understood Africa better than any outsider, yea, they even became indigenous: Beryl Markham was ‘almost more African than European in her thinking and attitudes’.⁶ Colonization brought the rule of law, though with some difficulty: ‘The European notion of impartial justice is incomprehensible in Africa where revenge is all’.⁷ Settlers were the doting paternalists of their adoring, appreciative workers: ‘The farm wife was called Mama … by the Africans, who turned to her to help solve their problems’.⁸ Administrators did nothing to assist their more well-informed and well-intentioned fellow whites: ‘official policy was to defer to native rights in all areas of conflict’ with settlers.⁹ Maasai, Somali, and other pastoralists deserve admiration: ‘fierce, handsome, and shrewd East African trading and cattle-raising people’.¹⁰ Those who adopted European ways of life, the Christian Africans, are comical: ‘the parody of the white man’.¹¹

Such fawning works – and there are many – too often ignore the seamier side of European settlement in Kenya. Another image of the white settler came from the pen of J. M. Kariuki, a leader in the anti-colonial struggle and a champion of the worker and the peasant. ‘As a tribe’, he wrote in 1963, ‘the Europeans had certain characteristics which were, perhaps, not pleasant’. Perhaps, an understatement. Whites were

Quick to anger, inhospitable, aloof, boorish, and insensitive, they often behaved as if God had created Kenya and us for their use. They accepted the dignity of man as long as his skin was white … Many Europeans refused to talk to educated Africans in any language but their deplorably bad Swahili; old men were addressed as boys and monkeys; Africans were barred from hotels and clubs; Africans with land near European farms were not allowed to plant coffee; there was a wholesale disregard for human dignity and little respect for anyone with a black skin.¹²

Historians of Kenya have tended more toward J. M.’s views.

What are we to make of such widely divergent images of Kenya’s white settlers? How do we square the romantic, benevolent settler with the brutal, exploitative settler? In part, it is a matter of what we wish to see. Some consider Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa a classic love story. It is also the story of a smug woman who sees herself as a mother to ‘her [adult African] children’. Settler memoirs, taken uncritically, can sweep one up in the adventure: brave men and women bringing progress to the wilds, bringing gifts of peace, justice, and modern medicine to Africans. Read more sceptically, and alongside court transcripts, government files, and African-authored sources, we find the racism, the violence, the infantilization of Africans.

How can we write a history that is revealing of settler lives, of the white men and women who claimed Kenya as their home? We should take seriously settlers’ assertions (if not the reality) of their civilizing mission and their benevolent paternalism. We should listen to their complaints of colonial officials meddling in (what settlers claimed to be) mutually beneficial relations with Africans. Settlers, after all, believed this. But we must also dig more deeply. We must inquire into the origins of these attitudes, and their implications for settlers and Africans.¹³

Through a reading of settler memoirs, letters, and diaries, government reports and court transcripts, and locally owned, pro-settler newspapers, we can see the issues which settlers daily reflected on and debated. We can witness the creation of a settler self-image. We hear their foundational ideas about the settler project. We can find the emotional core of white settlement in their (real and imagined) relations with Africans, state officials, and one another.

The souls of white folk

Within the souls of white settlers, I argue, we find a series of interlacing ideas. White settlement was based on the equation of civilization with (a difficult to define) whiteness; was emotionally enriched through notions of paternalism and trusteeship; appeared constantly under threat from Africans, colonial administrators, the judiciary, and fellow settlers; and was shored up daily through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. These ideas help explain ‘black peril’, the recurrent settler fear of African men raping white women. Such rape posed an existential threat, in that it targeted each part of the settler soul: paternalism paid back with ingratitude, white prestige and the inviolate white body brushed aside, violence by rather than against the dominated, white women and their impotent white male defenders humiliated. These are the issues I explore in this book.

Settlers, like administrators, were supremely confident that civilization, race, and fitness to rule could not be pulled apart. Whites in general, and Britons in particular, had achieved the highest level of civilization ever the Earth had witnessed. Not hampered by cultural relativism, settlers had no qualms about insisting that the civilized world must enlighten the darker corners of the globe. As bearers of civilization, whites had not just a right but a duty to rule the uncivilized, to guide them toward a better existence. Settlers admitted that two thousand years had passed before the spark of Roman and Christian innovations had fully bloomed into the civilization they carried with them to Kenya. Africans would advance more quickly under white tutelage, but it would still take them hundreds of years to catch up.

The civilizing mission contributed to settlers’ being emotionally enriched through ideas of paternalism and trusteeship. In their newspapers, books, and letters, many settlers (from famed Karen Blixen and Beryl Markham to near-impoverished farmers) demonstrated a deep belief in their burdens toward Africans. In often gory detail, they related the time they spent in their very intimate doctoring of their African servants and squatters. They described episodes of protecting their servants from arrest. They waxed lyrical about their African workers-cum-serfs, their domestic servants-cum-retainers. Far from cynical rhetoric, the white man’s burden took a very personal, emotional meaning for many white settlers. In their own eyes, settlers were parents, guardians, and lords over their African children, wards, and serfs. This paternalism would become one of the defining features of settler thinking: it was both a duty to civilize Africans and emotionally and psychologically pleasurable to do so.Paternalism might create bonds between whites and a few Africans.

Paternalism might create bonds between whites and a few Africans. What, settlers wondered, about the millions of anonymous Africans amongst whom they lived? How could all those Africans be controlled? The Maxim gun could end but not prevent an uprising. Settlers instead invested enormous faith and energy in what they called prestige, a kind of protective barrier surrounding them.¹⁴ Settlers argued (or fervently hoped) that Africans naturally held whites to be superior, almost godlike. This, whites believed, permitted them to travel, work, and live in almost total security despite their being fantastically outnumbered by Africans. So long as settlers had prestige, Africans could not conceive of rebellion. So long as the white race had prestige, every individual white was safe. The sign of prestige: deference. Africans must tip their hats, step off a path to let a white person pass, say ‘bwana’ or ‘memsahib’. Lack of deference in the most minor way suggested that prestige was fraying. Accordingly, settlers constantly, obsessively, monitored Africans for any sign of ‘insolence’.

The burden Africans were told to bear – deferring to every member of the white race – placed a burden on whites as well. As the sociologist Erving Goffman points out, to retain prestige requires a certain public ‘demeanour’. An elite must always act as an elite should. To do otherwise would encourage the dominated to question the need for deference. Why, the inferior would wonder, should I defer to a drunkard, a libertine, a fool, a cheat? In Kenya, prestige was connected to race, such that any white person’s individual failure to maintain prestige threatened the prestige of all white people. Keeping up appearances was thus a matter of public concern. Whites demanded that each among them lived and behaved in certain ways, lest they all lose prestige. Most thought this meant abiding by bourgeois norms. Settlers who fell into penury, became vagrants, turned to crime, or ‘went native’ failed miserably to possess the demeanour necessary to inspire prestige. For their part, white working men demanded economic protection from their white employers so that they could keep up white prestige. White prisoners expected segregated cells for the same reason.

What complicated matters further is that ‘white’ was not – is not – self-evident.¹⁵ Race is not a biological category, but one we humans have invented. What race means, and how many races there are, and how individuals are categorized are all matters for ongoing debate. Settlers described Kenya as a ‘white man’s country’, a land that whites – not Africans or Indians – could dominate. Depending on whom one asked, however, ‘white’ could have different meanings. For in the thinking of many English-speakers around the world in the early twentieth century, there were multiple white races: Anglo-Saxon, English, Irish, Dutch, Afrikaner, and so on. Settlers believed that whites were superior to non-whites, and that some white races were superior to other white races.

For most settlers, the English, or British, or Anglo-Saxon race could claim the highest civilization, a particular genius of rule, a robust adventurous spirit. But what of the other, somewhat inferior, white races? Kenya...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Swahili terms
• 1 Introduction: The souls of white folk
• 2 Race, civilization, and paternalism
• 3 Prestige, whiteness, and the state
• 4 Chivalry, immorality, and intimacy
• 5 The law and the lash
• 6 Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index