Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963. Tabitha Kanogo

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СКАЧАТЬ [who was to hire them] was at location 2 at Chief Njiri’s. We were told by the Askari Kanga [the chief’s soldiers] to wait for the European who would give us money for travel. We refused the money and went back. I left Kikuyu due to the chief’s trouble. I went to Nightingale’s place where I was employed.³¹

      Other reasons, such as fear of witchcraft, hostile neighbours and family feuds also played a part in making individuals move to the Rift Valley,³² but, in most cases, the move was the result of a combination of reasons.

Early labour recruitment

      Naivasha and Nakuru, where the bulk of the work-force was Kikuyu, were among the districts least affected by labour shortages in the period before 1918. By 1918 there were about 8,000 squatter families in the Nakuru District alone. Of a population of 9,116 Africans in the Naivasha District, 6,600 belonged to almost exclusively Kikuyu squatter families.³³ Although salaries were low, between three and six rupees per month, because land was plentiful the two areas were exceedingly popular among Kikuyu squatter-labourers and attracted a number of illegal squatters. Incidentally, by 1905, one rupee was equivalent to l/4d, or 15 rupees to one pound sterling. However, by 1920, one rupee was valued at two shillings (2/-).

      The first settlers to recruit labour in Kikuyu country promised their prospective squatters large tracts of land for grazing and cultivation. An initial quantity of livestock, including cows and goats, was also promised and actually given to some of the pioneer Kikuyu ‘labourers’. This all helped towards starting them off on a sound footing towards their ultimate goal of amassing wealth. In return, the Kikuyu were required to herd the settlers’ livestock.³⁴ Later, especially after the First World War, this obligation was extended to jobs relating to the commercial cultivation of settler crops, but in the meanwhile the labour demands imposed on pioneer immigrants were minimal.

      The early settlers capitalised on the depleted state of Kikuyu lands by offering prospective immigrants larger and more productive plots in the Rift Valley than were available in certain parts of Central Province. As a number of ex-squatters pointed out, it was not actual landlessness that made them decide to move to the Rift Valley, but rather the inadequate size and infertility of their own lands. Some of the Kikuyu who migrated to the Rift Valley in the period before and after 1918 were, however, completely landless, either as a result of direct land loss through land alienation or because they had been evicted by their Kikuyu landlords.

      Unlike the Luo, Luyia and Abagusii contract workers, the Kikuyu labour-force brought their women and children to the settler farms, as well as certain items such as livestock and beehives, which could be regarded as indications of the permanent nature of their migration.³⁵

      Prospective migrants were initially offered free transport and this continued until the outbreak of the First World War. The Kikuyu, Limuru and Kijabe stations served as departure points, especially for squatters from the southern Kiambu area. One of my informants, Kiiru, who was among them, spoke about these journeys as follows:

      People began coming to the Rift Valley in 1909. Most of them were brought by Delamere. People would be put in a ‘bogie’ with their beehives, livestock and skins (ndarwa) for sleeping on. All alighted at Njoro where they would be taken to places where they could graze and cultivate freely without restriction. They were shown large fields which belonged to Delamere, who wanted them to look after his stock.³⁶

      Although Delamere’s name was the one most frequently quoted by the ex-squatters, other settlers also made labour-recruiting journeys to Central Province and elsewhere.³⁷ Njoro was clearly not the only terminus for squatters thus recruited. The destinations of such labourers were as varied as the extent of European settlement.

The squatter system

      As the squatter system evolved, it began to show a number of characteristics that revealed weaknesses in the settler community and colonial government’s attempts to create an African work-force. For a start, not all the squatters were settler employees. Illegal squatting and what was rather derogatorily referred to as ‘Kaffir farming’ were integral to the squatter system and persisted until the settler presence in Kenya drew to a close in the early 1960s. It was largely from Kaffir farming that Kikuyu squatters acquired the socio-economic values of independent production, which they strove to maintain in the inter-war years amidst intensive opposition from the settlers and colonial administrators.

Kaffir farming

      Kaffir farming, which like the squatter system derived its name from South Africa, referred to the practice whereby a large European landowner would allow Africans to use his land for grazing and cultivation in return for payment in cash or kind, the latter in the form of milk, manure, stock or crops.³⁸ As we shall see later on, various versions of Kaffir farming coexisted alongside the squatter phenomenon and evaded the scrutiny of the administration. By 1910, there were about 20,000 Kikuyu Kaffir farmers representing approximately 5,000 families.

      In Kenya, the development of Kaffir farming was blamed on the small impoverished European settlers who, through financial impecuniosity, were prevented from engaging in productive agriculture on their farms.³⁹ But some forms of Kaffir farming seem to have been practised by a majority of European farmers throughout the colonial period.⁴⁰ The Ukamba Quarterly Report of December 1910 noted 67 villages of African tenants on one farm in the Province. For the right to use land, these tenants either paid between 8 and 30 rupees, or handed over part of their crop or the profits from its sale. These squatters did not normally work for the European landowners.⁴¹ Even after the institution of the 1918 Resident Native Labourers Ordinance (RNLO), which was set up to convert squatter residence in the Settled Areas from a tenancy into a labour contract, some European settlers continued to demand a certain amount of squatter maize crop, milk or manure as part of their labour contract. Njoroge Mambo, Gacheru Manja, and Bethuel Kamau, all spoke of how their settler employer had demanded a minimum of six gunias (gunny-bags) of maize per year from each of his employees.⁴² This was despite traders from Central Province offering better prices for maize than the settlers to whom they were forced to sell their crop.⁴³

      Many European Kaffir farmers were absentee landlords. The Africans who utilised their lands grew and marketed their produce both within and outside the White Highlands. The more successful European settlers and colonial administrators saw Kaffir farming as negating the whole purpose of European settlement. Since the White Highlands had been alienated for a European commercial agriculture dependent on African labour, the emergence of a flourishing peasant economy in the area was seen as an obvious and undesirable threat to settler hegemony. Interestingly, as will be illustrated later, the squatters’ analysis of the plantation economy portrays a similar but opposite observation. As Kimondo, an ex-squatter observed: ‘When the Europeans saw that people [squatters] were becoming rich, they began to reduce the size of the shamba.’⁴⁴

      It was feared that cultivation by Africans of large parcels of land in the White Highlands would, in time, create de facto African rights to land under their use.⁴⁵ Colonial administrators were concerned that settlers who did not engage in any production on their farms were failing in their obligation to contribute to exports, which were necessary for the economic development of the country.⁴⁶

      The settler Kaffir farmers, on their part, considered the practice a good way of building up settler stock, while at the same time keeping pasture under control and bringing in an income. Also, land that had already been worked by squatters was much easier to cultivate once the settler was ready to expand his own production.

      Kaffir farming involved a landlord-tenant relationship between the European settler and the African squatter, and some settlers were almost entirely dependent on the African producers who resided on their farms.⁴⁷ When settler agriculture СКАЧАТЬ