A History of Modern Africa by Richard J. Reid

Author:Richard J. Reid [Reid, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119381778
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

White Settlement

In those territories where production was not in the hands of African farmers, communities of white settlers were positioned at the center of colonial economies. In the settler zone – as in the industrial zone, as we see below – Africans were politically marginalized, and fulfilled the role of cheap wage labor feeding economic systems over which, again, they had little control, at least until they discovered that they did indeed have a certain amount of muscle. In a number of territories – for example Uganda, which had initially been earmarked as an area for possible European settlement – African peasant farmers succeeded in keeping white farmers at bay because the latter could not compete with the highly efficient, small‐scale productive units of the former, but elsewhere – Kenya, or Southern Rhodesia – white settlement was systematically encouraged, and indeed subsidized by colonial government. These territories had very different paths of economic, social, and political development.22

In Kenya, the implications of white settlement were profound. Again, the Mombasa– Kisumu railway was crucial, as it shifted the center of political gravity from the coast to the highlands, and facilitated the emergence of a distinctive community around a railway junction that would in time become the sprawling metropolis of Nairobi. Initially, built at the British taxpayer' expense, the early colonial administration sought to create a viable economy in the territory to recoup the costs; in this respect, it was faced with two principal concerns. First, there was the issue of Kenya's geography. Much of the territory was arid savannah, with low rainfall and a sparse, dispersed population. The exception was the southern zone, the Rift Valley and surrounding highlands, which had a healthy, temperate climate and good rainfall, and which was quickly identified as an attractive area for European settlement. Second, in terms of the sociopolitical organization of the peoples of the area, there was a stark contrast between Kenya and neighboring Uganda. Buganda, as we have seen, had a centralized monarchical system which had been “opened” to Christian influence; Ganda chiefs played a crucial role in the development of cash‐crop farming, acting as the agents of commercial agriculture. But the Kenyan interior was sparsely populated by mostly “stateless” groups, and thus there were no natural intermediaries with whom business could be done and who might act as the agents of change; moreover, the bulk of the territory's indigenous population, including the Maasai, the Kikuyu, and the Luo, was more pastoralist than that of, say, neighboring Uganda; Kenyan economies were characterized by the keeping of livestock alongside a comparatively small agricultural base. Early administrators thus saw little prospect of peasant agriculture developing, and from 1903, the administration encouraged settler farming by providing financial incentives. Initially piecemeal and haphazard, nonetheless by the time of the First World War a small but significant settler community had emerged; they were a motley bunch, including Afrikaners ironically seeking a new life away from aggressive British imperialism in South Africa, and British aristocrats who staked out huge areas of land, and who enjoyed both political influence and financial backing.

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