Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963. Tabitha Kanogo
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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 came to a standstill during the First World War, the squatters virtually took over responsibility for agricultural production in the Settled Areas.48
The administration found Kaffir farming difficult to control. Since the tenants could not be classified as employees, they were protected from prosecution under the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1906, and the authorities were reluctant to prosecute the European Kaffir farmers.49 The tenants who did provide labour to the European settlers did so intermittently and under vague verbal agreements which lasted for only three months in any one year.50 Administrative personnel did sometimes confiscate stock from the Africans on the European Kaffir farmers’ land, but the government complained of inadequate personnel and insufficient finances to maintain a close watch on Kaffir farming.51
Kikuyu migration to the Rift Valley
Kikuyu migration to the Settled Areas was initially looked upon by the colonial administration as a good opportunity for harnessing labour. Though Kaffir farming was thought to stifle the flow of labour, squatting was believed to have the opposite effect. The 1912/13 Naivasha Annual Report, for example, stated that ‘squatting . . . might mitigate the labour difficulty’.52 A year later, the 1914/15 report of the same district could boast that, ‘there was no shortage of labour in the district’,53 and that ‘80 per cent of it was Kikuyu’.54 The rest was Maasai, Kipsigis, Luo, Luyia and Baganda.
Unlike Naivasha, where the Kikuyu had established themselves as farm-labourers from an early period, in Nakuru District, the ‘kavirondo [sic.] as farm hands were [initially] much preferred by the settlers’.55 It did not take long for this situation to change, however, as the figures in table 1.1 indicate.
TABLE 1.1
Source: KNA, Nakuru District Annual Report, 1915–16, pp. 2, 3.
This early Kikuyu movement to the Settled Areas was initially profitable for both parties, the settlers and the Kikuyu squatters. The settlers were supplied with minimal but much needed labour, while the Kikuyu immigrants, for a period of at least two decades, evolved a lucrative peasant economy in the White Highlands. Both the squatters and the settlers anticipated continuous and permanent residence of the ‘squatter’ labour-force in the White Highlands. The government was especially concerned that the settlers should provide favourable conditions to encourage the workers to accept permanent employment. To this end, on 18 May 1910 the Governor, Sir Percy Girourd, issued a confidential memorandum to all Provincial and District Commissioners stating that: ‘It is . . . in the interest of the employer to make him [the labourer] as comfortable as possible and try to persuade him to settle down and accept permanent employment’.56
Before 1918, the Kikuyu squatters had been able to withstand any pressures that threatened to thwart their endeavours. For example, any attempts by a settler to control the amount of ‘squatter’ cultivation, or the size of their herds, or even demands for more labour hours than the squatter considered necessary, were counteracted by the withdrawal of the squatters’ labour. The squatters would simply move on to the next farm to continue their virtually independent existence. By changing ‘masters’, the squatters were thus able to establish and operate the labour pattern best suited to their major activities, namely extensive cultivation, herding and trading in crops and livestock. During this period, the Kikuyu ‘labour-force’ had thus created a beneficial socio-economic system, which they sought to retain in the wake of shifting relations in the economy of the Settled Areas.
Also during this laissez-faire period, the Kikuyu community began to feel very much at home in the Settled Areas: a feeling generated and reinforced by the relative prosperity that accrued from cultivation and livestock keeping in the region. And, in that this initial period was characterised by unregulated squatter production, squatter self-assertion was also enhanced.
Whatever notions the settlers held about their position in relation to the squatters, both groups were driven by the same dream of achieving a better life style through exploiting the rich Highland areas. But, to realize this dream, each group needed to