Government and Labour in Kenya 1895-1963

Anthony Clayton, Donald Cockfield Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136275067
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in the year 1974, Government and Labour in Kenya is a valuable contribution to the field of History.

Chapter 1

THE EARLY YEARS, 1895–1901

…and we want every freed slave to be turned not into an idle vagrant but into a free labourer working for a recognised wage.

The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, G. N. Curzon, House of Commons, 10 February 1898.

The earliest years of British colonial rule are notable for three entirely separate labour issues, slavery and its abolition, the labour needed for the construction of the Uganda Railway, and the state of porter labour.

Slavery and its Abolition

The abolition of slavery had been an aim of British policy in East African waters for very many years, an aim pursued by both the British government and the Imperial British East Africa Company. The aim had not been fully achieved by 1895 when the British protectorate was declared and could not be immediately implemented on account of one major difficulty. A strip of land at the Coast ten miles wide remained under the authority of the Moslem Sultan of Zanzibar and many of the inhabitants were Moslems whose law permitted slavery. This permission was qualified; the slave should not be a Moslem (though a number were), the Koran taught kindness to slaves, their liberation was an act of piety, house-born slaves could not be sold, nor could families be split by sales. A further complication to abolition was that Islam would not permit borrowing money from infidels, which made a change to wage payment difficult as capital to start a business could not be borrowed.

As a legacy of previous British pressure on the sultans of Zanzibar, the first British administrator of the protectorate, Arthur Hardinge, inherited a complex legal situation. On the hinterland side of the ten-mile strip, slavery had no legal status. Within the strip, earlier decrees had declared all who entered the sultan’s dominions before 1 November 1889 and all born after 1 January 1890 to be free; that the status of slavery was totally abolished at Kismayu; that members of fourteen hinterland tribes were under I.B.E.A. Company protection and could not be held as slaves; that slaves of a master who died without child were free and that slaves could both purchase their freedom and complain to the courts in case of ill-treatment. These legal limitations, however, were disregarded in many coastal areas where the company’s authority lacked reality.

The slave, man or woman, was the absolute property of his master. He could neither own nor dispose of property, nor give evidence in a court of law, nor sue his master or any other person. He could neither marry without his master’s permission nor engage in trade. Theoretically there was no legal restriction on either the work or the punishments a slave-owner might impose. Many female slaves were concubines, a practice permitted by the sharia. Children of such unions were legitimate and when children arrived the concubine became in effect an extra wife.¹ The slavery status, severe in law and in practice in Zanzibar and Pemba was by this time very much moderated on the mainland. The administration believed that the mild Coast slavery of 1895 was dying a natural death with the majority of the slaves content with their lot, and past abuses checked by the work of the missions, the Royal Navy and the general presence of Europeans. Officials asserted there was little real demand for emancipation as many slaves had entered slavery as a result of earlier famines and had therefore no particular envy of freedom; they also pointed out that any slave had only to cross the ten-mile border to be free.

This claim appears generally true, particularly in the area around Mombasa, but at Malindi and in Tanaland some estates were owned and slaves supervised by harsh Arab landowners, as in Zanzibar, and there some demand for emancipation existed. Hardinge stated the total number of slaves in 1897 to be 26,259, out of a total population of 275,000 for the region.² The work performed varied greatly. A certain number were purely domestic retainers, cooks, messengers and carriers; these in general were the most content with their lot, though for a few the status could be precarious with a capricious master. A much larger number were agricultural slaves, living partly for protection in villages of 50 to 300, the property of several absentee masters whose patches of land they tilled. Some masters had no idea of the number of slaves they owned and their hold on the slaves was often very weak. The crops were divided between slave and master. In a coconut plantation the slave might give the coconuts to his master but keep all else he grew, or elsewhere keep the maize and give the millet to his master; such slaves usually tilled a patch they called their own for two days a week.

Another large category of slaves was the petty artisan or non-agricultural labourer—the dhow captain, sailors, tailors, masons, carpenters, small traders and porters. These paid to their masters a percentage of their earnings or profits, between one-third and two-thirds depending on the cost of their tools which the master had to supply. A large percentage of porters in caravans of the eighteen-nineties were slaves; they might pay their master one-half of their earnings for the journey. Lastly there was a special category of military slaves, armed retainers of the Arab chieftains.

Tolerable though these conditions may have been the institution of slavery was a pernicious one. The master was demoralized, little interested in efficient work or development and the slave lacked ambition, any real pride in his work, or enterprise. Further, its continued survival gave encouragement to wishful thinking that the great days of slavery might return, an encouragement reflected in occasional illicit enslavement. The company and its officials had made some physical efforts to reduce slavery. Inland slaving caravans and raiding parties had been dispersed; at the Coast a number of slaves had been assisted to purchase or gain their freedom. The company’s work, however, had aroused suspicion and hostility among the Arabs, which led Hardinge, who came from a landowning family and had some sympathy for them, to a belief that abolition must be an aim to be approached slowly and with caution, and must be accompanied by compensation.

Such a view was highly unfashionable in Britain where the Anti-Slavery Society, missionary and other interests were constantly exerting parliamentary and other pressures on the Foreign Office for immediate abolition. Their chief spokesman was Bishop Tucker of Uganda, who immediately after the proclamation of the protectorate directed his missions that since they were now on British territory, they were no longer to return runaway slaves either to the authorities or to their owners, a move resented by the Arabs.

The new administration was almost immediately faced with a military crisis, the revolt of the leading Mazrui chiefs. This revolt had as its aim the breaking of the British administration, resented and feared for its views on slavery and its association with the missions, before it became too powerful. The revolt, in which large numbers of slaves both military and agricultural supported the Mazrui, was put down in the following year, but it served to strengthen the views of both sides in the controversy. Hardinge saw his preference for caution confirmed and Tucker the reverse.

The next four years saw a spectacular series of battles, fought in the House of Commons and the courts, over the status of slavery. Each year abolitionist Members of Parliament headed by Sir Charles Dilke mounted a full-scale attack on the protectorate administration during the supply debates, moving a reduction of Hardinge’s salary; the government found its position of an apparent defence of slavery both embarrassing and confusing.³ The Foreign Office tried to urge Hardinge to abandon his caution, Salisbury and Curzon taking him to task on certain individual cases and local court judgements. In one of these cases, that of Heri Karibu, a runaway slave girl, Bishop Tucker successfully conducted the defence himself; in another the court ruled that three runaway slaves who had taken refuge ten years previously at the Ribe mission station should be returned to their master, a ruling which aroused passionate debate in the House of Commons.⁴ With much courage considering the harm such unpopular views might do to his career, Hardinge continued to assert that slavery as an institution was in any case dying, and repeated his forecast that abolition of slavery and concubinage would reduce aged slaves to destitution, concubines to prostitution, and their children to illegitimacy. The views of Sir Charles Eliot and Sir Donald Stewart, who followed Hardinge, were identical to those of Hardinge, and the evident reduction in both numbers and hardship as the system died served to reduce parliamentary criticism after 1900.

On the return of the Liberal government in 1905, however, the new Colonial Secretary, the Earl of Elgin, and his Under-Secretary, Winston Churchill, both decided that the status of slavery must end. The Colonial Office, to which the protectorate had been transferred in 1905, held a more critical view of slavery than the Foreign Office. The Liberals had been criticizing conditions in the Congo and felt that slavery in a British possession weakened their case, and there was a general feeling that slavery should be ended in the hundredth anniversary year of 1807. Perhaps most important of all the government feared defeat on the issue from a rebellion of its own back-bench supporters; Stewart’s estimate of the cost, an average of £4 per head for the 10,000 slaves was one that could reasonably be met.⁵

Elgin decided that in general the pattern of Zanzibar should be followed—initially the abolition of the legal status of the slave, which he thought should be followed by a more complete abolition in four or five years, though what he meant by this is not clear. The purpose of the abolition of legal enforceability was two-fold. Firstly it confined argument to relationships that could be ascertained, and secondly it provided for gradual adjustment, as often neither slave nor master wished for hurried change, although the slave under the ordinance was free from the moment the ordinance became effective. As a final garnish it was decided the Abolition of Slavery Ordinance should be the first to be debated and enacted by the protectorate’s new Legislative Council.

The ordinance abolished the legal status of slavery from 1 October 1907 and provided for district or special courts to decide compensation for the owners, subject to a maximum of 100 rupees and with penalties for fraudulent claims.⁶ Sick or aged slaves could also claim and receive compensation, the master receiving none in these cases as they had lost no labour. Concubines were specifically exempt from the ordinance to the fury of Bishop Tucker and of the missions; their legal status was preserved though they were given rights to appeal to the courts in cases of cruelty.

The Arabs, resigned to their fate, made not even a show of resistance. The Governor, Lieut-Col. J. (later Sir James) Hayes Sadler, addressed a meeting of Coast Arab dignitaries and explained to them that he had been instructed to legislate for abolition, but that compensation would be paid. The meeting indicated that the Arabs were content with the arrangements. A circular was issued by the government on the procedure to be followed in the courts—the average compensation for a fit slave was to be 64 rupees, with additions or deductions for age and poor health. The maintenance procedure for old slaves was set out, and if a slave could prove cruelty by a master no compensation was to be paid. Slaves could then work for anyone on any basis they chose.⁷ A register of freed slaves was kept, each slave being given a brass badge with a registered number on it as proof of his freedom.

The process began slowly but accelerated later. For the period from 1 October 1907 to 31 March 1908 the total sum paid in compensation was only £938 and in the next twelve months again only £8,378, against the £34,000 estimated. But in the next financial year, 1909–10, for which £6,000 had been estimated £13,595 was in fact spent; thereafter the amounts declined each year, with Stewart’s estimate of £40,000 proving to be very nearly the correct sum at his valuation of a slave.⁸

In 1909 the Abolition of Slavery Ordinance was amended to provide a terminal date, 1 January 1912, for the payment of compensation claims, and its scope extended to cover concubines.⁹ These women were now to be free, but they and their children could continue to enjoy their rights and privileges under Islamic law unless they left their master without his consent. This satisfied nearly all the abolitionists except Bishop Tucker in Uganda who regarded it as shocking.

The Arabs kept their best slaves to the end if they could, and appeared passively to give up as their slave labour departed. They either let the land revert to waste or sold the land; some were ruined and many suffered severely. There does not seem to be any evidence to suggest that the liberated slaves replaced their former loyalties with any new or wider one, though some remained on their former masters’ land paying a small rent in kind.

So ended a form of labour in East Africa, one with a terrible history but made mild in its latter years. The end had two consequences. A substantial number of men, possibly 20,000 between 1895 and 1912, were released for the labour market where many must have wished for the old days. Their liberation for men like Elgin, Churchill and Tucker was a matter of principle, but a wise observer later remarked, ‘The sudden substitution of slavery by freedom seldom benefits the first generation of freed men’.¹⁰ Secondly, affairs in the East Africa Protectorate came under close parliamentary and mission scrutiny, a scrutiny often hostile to the local officials, but establishing a British interest in the territory. This interest served to alert these groups to future developments.

Fifty years later the word huru, meaning a liberated slave, formed the basis for the word uhuru, political freedom.

Porters

East Africa contains no navigable rivers. At this time flies killed donkeys, the wheel had never been seen inland, oxen were not used and horses were known only to the Somalis. Merchandise was transported on the heads and shoulders of porters. Porter labour had had a miserable history of bad preparation, overloading, incompetent and cruel headmen and enforced recruitment.

Hardinge, newly arrived in Zanzibar in 1894, had established a registry of porters and had issued regulations for their welfare, which technically applied to the ten-mile strip but were neither enforced nor observed there. In 1894 some badly prepared caravans had met with disaster due to famine conditions inland, and in 1895 a Uganda government caravan under two incompetent Swahilis returned with 44 out of its 111 porters dead or missing, most of the latter apparently abandoned sick. This scandal led to a parliamentary question in 1896 but by this time a worse disaster had occurred...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map: Kenya in 1954
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Currency and Exchange Rates
• Chapter 1 The Early Years, 1895–1901
• Chapter 2 The Establishment of the Labour System, 1902–1914
• Chapter 3 The First World War, 1914–1918
• Chapter 4 Crisis and Consequences, 1918–1930
• Chapter 5 Depression and Unrest, 1930–1939
• Chapter 6 Confrontation in Nairobi and Mombasa, 1937–1939
• Chapter 7 The Second World War, 1939–1945
• Chapter 8 The Rise and Fall of the African Workers' Federation: Mombasa 1940–1950
• Chapter 9 Brave New World, 1945–1952
• Chapter 10 The Squatters' Revolt
• Chapter 11 The Age of Tom Mboya
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index