Chapter 4 Kenya then: the architecture of dispossession

Kenyan societies on the cusp of colonisation

If we can better understand the nature and form of social and ethnic groups before contact with colonial forces, we can better understand the varying impacts of European expansion and its correlate, settler-colonial relations of genocide on the essential foundations of Kenyan social formations, and why some Kenyan societies were better able to adapt to settler capitalism. As before, the objective is not to write a comprehensive history or anthropology of all pre-contact Kenyan societies but rather to illuminate the relations between multiple ethnic and social groups within a single field of life. In Kenya, societies varied in their production relations as well as culture, a distinction that would prove devastating to those forced to inhabit a rung on the civilisational ladder imposed on them by their colonial occupiers. Unlike Australia, where Indigenous societies varied in their particulars but could be said to possess features of social and cultural life, including their production relations, held in common by all, in Kenya there were qualitative and marked differences between their production relations and forms of property. As we will see shortly, this will have existential consequences for the social and ethnic groups concerned. Indeed, I have chosen to focus on the Kikuyu and Sengwer, precisely because their history under British settler colonialism, and the impact of settler colonialism post-independence, helps illuminate the uneven nature of relations of genocide in the Kenyan colony and beyond and in so doing reveals the structural contours and causal relations between the former and the political economy of genocide.

Prior to the arrival of British colonists, what would become known as the British East Africa Protectorate until 1926 (from which time it would become known as the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya), was a culturally and ethnically diverse landscape. In fact, as many as forty-two separate ethnic groups existed in precolonial Kenya, all with their distinct histories and political and social structures and historical intercommunal relations (Agbese and Kieh Jr, 2007, p. 128). Moreover, invariably, the social structures were broadly ordered according to egalitarian principles, unlike their Ugandan neighbours, whose societies were characterised by hierarchical kingdoms and chieftainships (Agbese and Kieh Jr, 2007). Social collectives in Kenya were predominantly clans and lineages based on common descent, organised vertically according to age sets which, though by and large equal, had distinct rights and duties (Berg-Schlosser, 1994, p. 249). The generational system was the preeminent social and political institution. Finally, precolonial ethnic groups lacked any centralised bureaucracies, and certainly a centralised state (Ochieng, 1985, p. 44).

The Kikuyu were predominantly a horticultural and agricultural people, as were the majority of Indigenous Kenyans, such as groups like the Kamba, Luo or Nandi, herding livestock on land they had cleared from forests in the Kikuyu plateau. Such groups would be ‘granted’ land on reserves and coerced into furnishing labour for the settler farms. Their mode of life not only made them compatible with the demands, disciplines and rigours of settler agriculture but they would be deemed sufficiently ‘civilised’ according to the racial taxonomy of the colonial elites. The basic unit of social organisation of the Kikuyu was the family or nyumba, consisting of the father, mother and children (Muriuki, 1974, p. 110). This could extend into the ‘joint’ family if the father was wealthy enough to support another wife and furnish another hut for her to occupy with her children. Families who had the same provenance aggregated into sub-clans or mbari, clans or moheregu and ultimately the tribe as a whole (Jackson, 1969, p. 14). The Kikuyu reproduced themselves through fission, growth and population dispersal, what Sahlins (1961) described as a segmentary lineage system, where the reproduction and the stability of the social relations of the Kikuyu depended on succession into subgroups and expansion into newly settled lands. With polygamy being the rule, the larger the clan the more sons there were, meaning in turn more livestock, wives and offspring. This was the principal measure of wealth and influence. In fact, the manipulation of family relationships, especially through marriage, was a key mechanism that facilitated expansion by providing access either to more cattle in exchange for daughters, or through marriage, sons who could provide labour, both necessary when seceding from existing clans, venturing forth into new lands and establishing a new settlement (Bates, 1987, p. 6). There is dispute among scholars about the degree to which egalitarianism existed within the Kikuyu (Kershaw, 1997, pp. 26–8, 61–8), the debate hinging on the nature and distribution of property and production relations, suffice to say that there were degrees of inequality. A large and wealthy clan (or particular mbari and in turn nyumba or family within it) would augment its authority by attracting non-clan or alien elements to their fold, in the fashion of a magnet, some eventually being completely absorbed and thus enlarging the clan, while others would remain ahoi or simply tenants of the respective property-owning clan or mbari (Muriuki, 1974, p. 114). Since the number of your offspring was in part a function of the size of your mbari or kin group and that in turn determined access to land and cattle, which in turn secured the material means to offer ‘bridewealth’ for the forging of wider kin networks, wealth, as measured in livestock, wives and offspring, was dialectically constituted through this ‘virtuous circle’.

Within what is known as the kiama system (Gathigira, 1952, pp. 63–8; Benson, 1964, pp. 6–7); Lambert (1965, ch. 9), the highest authority in Kikuyuland, vested with judicial and executive powers, those families with significant land holdings and thus formidable capacities to furnish cattle and other food stuffs would be accorded greater access and influence on the kiama councils, with the need to pay fees to ascend the ranks of the kiama system being an obligatory precondition (Kershaw, 1997, pp. 65–6). The kiama system fulfils key political, social and judicial functions and can perhaps be better characterised as the social relations of kinship. Therefore, the social relations of kinship can be seen by the end of the nineteenth century to possess in embryonic form certain class characteristics. What we have here is the mode of production shaped by the conditions of social production determining the social relations of kinship in the kiama system.

The purpose of this brief exposition of the ethnography of the Kikuyu is to help us better understand the nature of the genocidal structuring dynamics: if the Kikuyu suffered any attenuation, restriction or deprivation of land ownership, then their ability to rear cattle and other foodstuffs, to expand out into new fresh virgin territories, and ultimately to operate as a segmentary lineage system, what Kanogo (1987) termed the ‘Kikuyu expansionist dynamic’, is undermined. This in turn would lead to the stymieing of the ability of Kikuyu tribesmen and women to perform initiation ceremonies, progress through the various status grades, rear a family and of course ultimately enter the stage of elders and partake in the political and social organisation of their society (Kenyatta, 1938, p. 26; Routledge, 1910, p. 154). In other words, it would inflict a fatal blow on their ability to practise their culture (Kilson, 1955, p. 104). Jackson (1969, p. 103) concurred when he asserted ‘[a]ny significant loss of land by the Kikuyu people, in addition to threatening their basic means of subsistence would threaten a fundamental aspect of the foundation of their socio cultural system’ [emphasis added]. It is the obstruction and interdiction of the reproduction of the segmentary lineage system with the arrival of white settlers (Jackson, 2017 p. 237), what Bates (1987, p. 8) described as a massive exogenous shock, and I describe as the unleashing of genocidal structuring dynamics, that would drive a radical reconstitution of the factors of production on land, giving rise to acute shortages of the former that would fuel the anticolonial resistance against British occupation. By the same token, it is this same radical reconstitution of the political economy of Kenya to meet the imperatives of the metropole that would unleash genocidal structuring dynamics on forest-dwelling peoples like the Sengwer, orchestrating their removal from their ancestral dwellings and their forcible assimilation on the reserve system.

The unevenness with which genocidal structuring dynamics impact the various ethnic groups in Kenya will come into sharper focus once we examine the fates of those who were disparagingly labelled as ‘Dorobo’. The fate of the Sengwer would be qualitatively different to that of agriculturalists like the Kikuyu. The Sengwer, like the Ogiek, would be deemed by the colonial authorities as not compatible or conducive to the extraction of surplus value and not civilised enough to warrant continued existence as a social collective in its own right. These were the hunter-gatherer societies, who would arguably, from a Lemkian perspective, suffer the most devastating and comprehensive social death, since their mode of life was not deemed fit for incorporation, in any form, into the political economy of the colony.

The archaeological and anthropological sources show there existed precolonial contact place-based forest-dwelling communities that possessed a forager/hunter-gatherer mode of production (Sutton, 1973; Lunn-Rockliffe, 2018). The Sengwer, like the Ogiek, who they have sometimes been confused with, have a predominantly hunter-gatherer economy and society with a subsistence strategy orientated around beekeeping, honey storage, hunting in the forest and herbal medicine (Kenrick, 2020a, p. 238), taking advantage of various altitudes to exploit different ecological niches in the forest glades of the Embobut Forest in the Cherangani Hills in different seasons. Although towards the end of the nineteenth century the Sengwer would begin to (re)adopt elements of food production, or farming, through contacts with Arabs and the Maasai, testifying to the fluid and historical nature of group life (KNCHR, 2018, p. 23). Today, in fact, the Sengwer still rely to some extent on food production or ‘mixed economies’ in the form of family gardens in the forest glades and keeping of cattle (Kenrick, 2020a, p. 238). Furthermore, the evidence points to their occupation of their land for at least 250 years, long before the period of colonisation began, a historical reality that is overlooked or ignored by those who adopt an ‘instrumentalist frame’, perhaps most notably Lynch (2016). By instrumentalist, Lynch and her acolytes suggest that Indigenous group identity, like that of the Sengwer’s, is strategically forged to curry favour with the British colonial authorities. Oral testimonies taken form Kalenjin populations, including the Marakwet (Davies and Moore, 2016), Pokot and, most pertinently, the Sengwer, attest to their arrival in the Cherangani Hills at least 250 years ago (Lunn-Rockliffe, 2018, p. 54), though my own interviews date it as far back as 500 years (anonymous Sengwer, author interview, 15/12/2020).

As already stated above, like all the other forty-two ethnic groups before colonial contact, their social structure was ordered according to egalitarian principles, lacking any centralised bureaucracies, with their social formation organised around clans and lineages based on common descent, organised vertically according to age sets with distinct rights and duties (Berg-Schlosser, 1994 p. 249). The Sengwer are made up of twenty-one clans in the Embobut Forest (Kenrick, 2020a, p. 238). The descent group (the kinship system) would, as it did with Australian Indigenous societies, play an important superstructural function. Their superstructure would mediate inter-clan, biological, environmental and ecological tensions. In pre-capitalist societies, particularly hunter-gatherer figurations, production (and procurement) relations were embedded within kinship networks and their corresponding obligations and commitments. The kinship system determined your relation to others and the corresponding obligations to them, the land and natural resources. For instance, each clan or extended family lineage had a designated forest territory, usually marked out by topographical features like hilltops in glade clearings, named after founding elders (Lunn-Rockliffe, 2018, p. 156). Within Embobut, three glades, Koropkwen, Kaptirbai and Kapkok, are recognised as the ancestral homes of the Sengwer (Lunn-Rockliffe, 2018, p. 127; anonymous Sengwer, author interview, 28/12/2020), though according to today’s political geography, the Sengwer reside predominantly in three administrative districts of modern-day Kenya: Trans-Nzoia, West Pokot and Elgeyo-Marakwet (Kenrick, 2020a, p. 238). This practice of using topography to mark out clan territories is a widespread practice documented among other neighbouring ethnic groups such as the Marakwet and Pokot (Moore 1986; Davies, 2009). These territories contained valuable animal and plant resources crucial to material subsistence strategies. The clan system ensured that hunting, foraging and bee keeping could only take place within your clan’s designated forest territory (anonymous Sengwer, author interview, 28/12/2020), further ensuring ecological sustainability.

In fact, their relationship with the bee population is described by Lunn-Rockliffe (2018, p. 165) as a ‘companion species’ meaning that they have a symbiotic relationship, as part of a larger forest ecosystem, ensuring that the forest is protected and habitats are created for the beehives, which in turn promotes pollination. Here, in an analogous way to that which we found with Indigenous superstructural relations in Australia, the ascription of supernatural forces to nature, or the biome in which they inhabit, is the backbone of the Sengwer religion. The Sengwer lifeway also reproduces itself in accordance with ecological cycles and environmental rhythms, a sustainable relationship that is regulated through its religion and spiritual ontology. What is sometimes referred to as ‘animism’, the belief that spirits inhabit and animate all living things including flora and even the abiotic environment, accounts for the existence of taboos and totems which help preserve the life of species native to their forest dwellings. For the Sengwer, spirits inhabit the trees themselves, so that whenever a tree is felled for cultural or religious reasons they must first pray (Mamati, 2018, p. 38). In the case of totems, this involves the designation of special status and even membership of the tribe to certain animals, which contributes to environmental conservation (Mamati, 2018, p. 28). For one participant and member of the Sengwer, the interviewee stated that their clan totem was a hawk or sirere (anonymous Sengwer, author interview, 28/12/2020).

A key component of the religious world view is the belief in ancestors as living dead members of the community who still play a key role in the life of the community as spiritual guides. Not conserving the resources of the forests can anger the spiritual ancestors, or Assis (the Sun), the divine creator or God, and Illat the god of thunder and rain, and so it was the duty of the community to live in sustainable co-existence with the environment (Mamati, 2018, p. 37; anonymous Sengwer, author interview, 09/12/2020). Ultimately, it was the council or clan elders who were sanctioned by deities to ensure their forest dwellings were looked after, though there was a strong emphasis on communal or collective decision-making responsibility, for instance the requirement to share the proceeds of a hunt. This collectivism was in part derived from their shared belief that they all descended form a common ancestor called ‘Sengwer’. Through oral literature and initiation practices, Sengwer from an early age were initiated into and taught environment management practices, which stressed that they were custodians of the forests, mandated by Assis (Mamati, 2018, p. 34). Aside from the oral historical and anthropological evidence presented above of the residence of the Sengwer within the Embobut Forest in the Cherangani Hills as hunter-gatherers for at least 250 to 500 years, which would of course predate the arrival of the British colonists, we also have British colonial records which testify to the Sengwer status as hunter-gatherer societies at the eve of the twentieth century. It is to those early records that we will turn in the discussion of the Sengwer’s tragic and fateful entanglement with settler-colonial relations and their corresponding genocidal structuring dynamics in the following section. What the above analysis has shown is fascinating parallels with Indigenous groups in Australia who also possessed a fusion of hunter-gatherer production and superstructural relations, with an emphasis on collectivism and reverence and respect for nature. Given the intimate socio-cultural and economic attachment to the forests that the above has illuminated, the severance of the Sengwer from their forest dwellings would induce social death, the sine qua non of the crime of genocide.

The genesis of relations of genocide

The genocide of the Sengwer, Kikuyu and other ethnic groups in Kenya would not have taken place but for the operation of socio-economic and geo-political structures that extended far beyond the boundaries of Kenya itself. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse those structures that led to the British government’s involvement in and colonisation of Kenya and established the situation coloniale. Ergo, an analysis that illuminates the global dimension will be outlined in order to draw attention to the larger socio-economic and political forces that conditioned the colonisation of Kenya and the resultant genocidal process. This provides a mechanism that can demonstrate Lemkin’s assertion that genocide and colonisation are ineluctably bound up with each other. More specifically, this latter connection will help explicate the imposition of the foreign economic system on Kenya’s Indigenous population.

Once again, as with the establishment of the Australian colony explored in Chapter 2, there are two ‘logics of power’ dialectically interacting but distinct. Firstly, economic competition or the politics of production, exchange and accumulation and secondly, the logic of geo-political competition or the territorialist logic of state, dialectically interacting but distinct (Callinicos, 2009; Harvey, 2003b). Between 1873 and 1896 the world economy experienced what is commonly known as the ‘Great Depression’, the first great economic contraction in the life of the capitalist global system (Callinicos, 2009, p. 153). Arrighi (2007, pp. 116–20) compares this to what he describes as the ‘long downturn’ of the twentieth century, both periods characterised by intensified competition and stagnation. In the last few decades of the nineteenth century Marxist economists have argued that the global economy suffered from a system-wide crisis of profitability determined by the rising organic composition of capital and a consequent deleterious effect on the rate of profit (Harman, 1984, pp. 51–4). The response of Britain was distinct. Unlike the ‘organised capitalisms’ of Germany and the US, where a state-led process of cartelisation and rationalisation took place, Britain preserved the relatively decentralised business structures that had arisen during the industrial revolution and instead embarked on a phase of overseas investment, from £700 million in 1870 to £2 billion by 1900, upwards of £4 billion by 1913 (Callinicos, 2009, p. 153). Critically, the growing expansion of US manufacturing exports and increasing competition from the US and Germany in Latin America, and a consequent relative decline in Britain’s competitiveness, compelled Britain to abandon its ‘imperialism of free trade’ and foster its growing surpluses with India, Australia and the new colonies in Africa (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). Moreover, the areas that would eventually be annexed in the African continent would broadly coincide with those regions that were the recipients of European capital (Good, 1976, p. 602). What we see here at work is the operation of the structural logic of a socio-economic system shaping the world economy, forging a world division of labour that ensnared agricultural suppliers of food and raw materials. This is precisely what we saw unfold in the Australian colonial space in Chapter 2, where Australia became a key exporter of wool to the British textile factories and later beef and other foodstuffs.

The global economic context was set for Britain’s intrusion into the west African region that would come to be known as Kenya. This was the beginning of what has become known as ‘the scramble for Africa’ (Pakenham, 1991), so called because it entailed the movement of the great powers of Europe to carve up Africa (Elkins, 2005a, p. 5; Whittlesey, 1953, p. 81; Robinson, and Gallagher, 1961, p. 308). This began at the Congress of Berlin 1884–5 where the division of Africa into forty-odd colonies and protectorates that paid no heed to ethnic groupings would later serve the template for the modern states of present-day Africa. Britain would assume control of the East African Protectorate in 1886 in a deal concluded with Germany and the Sultan of Zanzibar (Moon, 1973).

But why did Britain annex what was known at the time as the East African Protectorate, in addition to all of its other colonial dependencies? Britain at the time was concerned that French inroads into Eastern Africa towards the Nile and German encroachment south of the British foothold of Mombasa on the coast would ultimately pose a risk to its control of the Suez Canal, which was pivotal to Britain’s access to the trade routes to India and more specifically the captive market for British industrial goods that India represented (Cain and Hopkins, 1993, p. 334; Jackson, 2017, p. 232; Good, 1976, p. 602). If the Suez was choked off or, worse still, annexed by a rival power, then access to the markets of India and the Far East would be cut off. According to one chargé, British officials told French diplomats, ‘take all you want in Africa, provided that you keep off the valley of the Nile’ (Robinson and Gallagher, 1961, p. 333). The logic, according to British state planners, was their rivals, especially the Germans, might dam up the Nile head waters to desiccate Egypt and eventually force the withdrawal of British troops around the Suez Canal area due to the resulting ecological disaster (Elkins, 2005a, p. 2). This paranoid logic would entail a foreign invading power importing the necessary manpower and equipment to not only dam the White Nile but all of its tributaries. A railway stretching from the coast to Uganda was therefore proposed; quite a considerable engineering and logistical feat for the time, given the topography of that region, not to mention an onerous burden on the purse strings of the British government, to the tune of £5 million (Jackson, 2017, p. 233). This would provide the means for the British army to quickly mobilise its forces in response; a sceptical British public would dub the railway, and by inference, the British government’s convoluted logic, the ‘Lunatic Express’ (Miller, 1971). In an effort to keep hold of the territory, the British government encouraged immigration, namely white settlers, and thus, wittingly or otherwise, set in train a series of events that led to the formation and imposition of a foreign or ‘settler/estate’ economic system. Once again, we see a striking parallel with the Australian settler-colonial space, in that both can trace their origins to geopolitical imperatives.

And so, we see the intersection of economic and geo-political competition in the context of a global economy that by the last third of the nineteenth century may not have been fully capitalist but nonetheless was knitted together through an interlocking nexus of trade and investment under the hegemonic sway of the capitalist mode of production (Hobsbawm, 1975) located in the western hemisphere with Britain standing at its apex (Saul, 1960). This was facilitated by the rise of key technologies such as rail and steam power and most importantly driven by the ceaseless competitive drive to accumulate, the raison d’être of capitalism (Marx, 1967a, ch. 25). It is at this intersection that we find the global mechanisms that conditioned Britain’s intervention in East Africa, which would have disastrous genocidal consequences for those Indigenous denizens of what became known as Kenya.

Architectures of dispossession then: land and labour

As with the establishment of the Australian settler colony, in order to establish the colony, British forces would first have to embark on a war of conquest akin to the frontier wars explored in Chapter 2. Although the East Africa Protectorate was declared in 1895, the war of conquest lasted from 1894 till 1912, a period coterminous with fortress building and survey mapping (Marx, 1967a). In order to develop the land between Imperial British East African Company (IBEAC)-controlled Uganda and the coast, with ultimately a view to protecting the head waters of the Nile, work began in 1896 on the 582-mile Uganda railway (Good, 1976, p. 602), called so because it linked landlocked Uganda with the rest of the world, financed and directed by the British government. It would eventually span 582 miles from the coastal port of Mombasa all the way to Lake Victoria (Elkins, 2005a, p. 1). Once the railway neared completion and the final cost of the railway became clear, the drive to establish an economically viable colony would in part be motivated by the necessity to pay off the debt incurred by the British taxpayer (Elkins, 2005a, p. 3; Brett, 1973; Wolff, 1974, p. 134).

The geography of the Eastern African Protectorate was laid down in embryo by the IBEAC, to whom British commercial activities had been delegated prior to the construction of the railway. As they moved deeper inland, driven by a desire to secure the Swahili caravan trade to Uganda, IBEAC built a series of fortifications strategically placed running all the way back to the coast. As Jackson (2017, p. 232) observed ‘these would form the geography of the embryo settler state. Fortifications provided the necessary facility for safety and replenishment in the days when it took a month to get from Mombasa to where Nairobi now stands and a full ten weeks to reach Lake Victoria’. It was from these fortifications that punitive raids were launched by the IBEAC in an effort to secure the trade routes, put down resistance and ensure access to supplies when they were not forthcoming. This extended to burning down entire villages, stealing livestock and massacring hundreds of men, women and children at a time (Jackson, 2017). But this strategy also involved building alliances with agreeable Africans brought under the patronage of the corporation. In this initial phase of the colonisation of Kenya therefore, we see the beginning of the colonial authority’s ‘pacification’ programme and war of conquest against recalcitrant ethnic groups (Ogot, 1968, p. 259), and through its alliance-building, what would become a core component of the colonial state’s administrative logic of co-option of local ‘tribal’ leaders. The pacification programme would continue as the railway reached completion, reordering the demographic landscape, displacing those who lived near it, particularly the Kikuyu, and unleashing a pattern of racial violence that would endure for the lifetime of the colony (Elkins, 2005a, p. 2).¹

The formation of the colonial state in Kenya was a volatile, contradictory and haphazard one (Berman, 1990, chs. 1–2). In essence, it involved, and played a crucial part in (Berman and Lonsdale, 1980, p. 56), the drive to link metropolitan capital with Indigenous societies and seize effective control of African labour and production, restructuring them to meet its needs (Berman, 1990, pp. 34–5; Berman and Lonsdale, 1992, pp. 101–22; Brett, 1973; Wolff, 1974). This, the global connection and its role as an economic adjunct of the metropole, was not unique to Kenya but common to the political economy of colonialism in Africa more generally (Amin, 1974; Wallerstein, 1976), and indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, the formation and territorialisation of the Australian settler-colonial state. It was a process of articulation, very similar to the one we witnessed in the Australian context, where two different and often inimical and incompatible economic systems and modes of life are weaved together, leading to the uprooting, dislocation, transformation and, paradoxically, destruction and partial preservation of the figurations of Indigenous societies. In essence, as with the Australian colony, it was a logic of elimination, driven by a logic of accumulation. Only, what distinguished the Kenyan case was that the articulation and partial preservation of the Indigenous mode only occurred with those Indigenous groups considered, in today’s parlance, ‘developed’ enough. Whereas those who were at the very bottom of the civilisational ladder, were forcibly subsumed into other social groups.

In order to furnish the needs of land and cheap labour that settler production so desperately needed, the colonial state, as it did in Australia, embarked on a form of primary accumulation and its corollary, the creation of a ready supply of cheap black labour. To achieve these aims the colonial state had to ‘destroy the cycle of simple reproduction of the Indigenous domestic economy via the monetization of at least some elements of material reproduction’ (Berman, 1990, p. 37), by introducing a complex set of laws and regulations. The policies and regulations discussed below materially obliged African peasants to either seek work on the settler farms or sell or supply agricultural commodities. Here we see a process remarkably redolent with that which occurred in Australia, where the Indigenous mode of life was partially destroyed and made ready for a forcible process of what Lloyd (2010, p. 33) described as ‘hybridisation’, in which after a war of pacification, and a state sponsored land grab, the Indigenous societies would be ‘made ready’ for fusion with settler capitalist or market relations. This corresponds with two of Hartwig’s (1978, p. 129) three modes of articulation of the settler-colonial and Indigenous figuration, first discussed in Chapter 2, namely the extraction of commodities in different ways and the extraction of labour power. For the vast majority of the Kikuyu, the latter was the predominant form of articulation, driving the formation of a nascent Kenyan working class (Ochieng, 1992, p. 262). The renowned political economist Colin Leys (1975, p. 171), reflecting on the profound significance of these polices, singled out one transformative process above all: ‘of all the ways in which capitalism wrought transformations in the pre-existing modes of production, the employment of wage labour stands out as the most far-reaching’.

The former mode of articulation confined to those privileged or tenacious few, who managed to negotiate the labyrinthine system of regulations and restrictions we will discuss below, was designed to retard African peasant agriculture. In other words, the destruction of the Kikuyu figuration was not uniform and in fact some elements were transformed into nascent centres of commodity production for the market. The imposition of a foreign economic system led to the emergence of an internal transition towards a petite bourgeoisie class of farmers whose ranks would be bolstered by the creation of a social layer of teachers, clerks, domestic servants, lawyers, interpreters and skilled workers who due to their income and security of employment would be given the appellation petite bourgeoisie (Leys, 1975). Combined with the rise of a new working class, this would unleash contradictions between two competing capitalist production relations within Kenya (Berman, 190, ch. 9). The third mode of articulation, namely the destruction of non-capitalist societies, and the ‘freeing’ of producers from the means of production, was the fate of the Sengwer and all other hunter-gatherer societies, since by virtue of being materially hunter-gatherer, its structure cannot so easily be adapted, as we saw in the Australian context, to producing value for settler-colonial capitalism and supporting the accumulation of capital and ultimately the expanded material reproduction of the capitalist system. The hunter-gatherer mode of Indigenous people and their knowledge of the Australian plains was well suited to assisting the pastoral and cattle stations. The hunter-gatherer mode of forest-dwelling people did not prove as useful to white settler farmers in Kenya. In another respect, there is a notable difference with the Australian colonial space, in that forcible monetisation did not, on the whole, force Indigenous people to produce cash crops for the market, but instead forced their entry into the labour market, either on pastoral farms and stations or, to a lesser extent, their participation in the various industries in the growing cities from the early twentieth century. This meant that, unlike in Kenya, the destructive articulation of two alien economic systems did not nurture an incipient petit bourgeois Indigenous farmer class of Australia.

So how did the colonial-settler state supply land and cheap black labour for settler production? Firstly, the colonial state embarked on a massive programme of land alienation and the forcible relocation of the dispossessed Kikuyu and all other ethnic groups to ‘native reserves’, equivalent to the homelands in South Africa under apartheid, the Indigenous reserves in the United States and the reserves or missions examined in Chapter 2 in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia. The laws alienating huge swathes of Kikuyu land which were forcibly imposed were varied and complex, beginning with the land regulations of 1897 (East Africa Protectorate, 1897), and ultimately culminating after years of bitter and protracted negotiation in the Crown Lands Ordinance in 1915 (East Africa Protectorate, 1915; see also Kilson, 1955, p. 114; Berman, 1990, p. 56). The latter completely nullified Kikuyu land rights and created a free market in land in the ‘White Highlands’ as they now became known. Previous laws had paid lip service to protecting the rights of Kikuyu to ‘occupy’ their land (Kilson, 1955, pp. 111–13), but ultimately the decisive influence in the shift to total land expropriation was the influence of ‘big capital’ from Europe and the key financial role it would play in stimulating land purchases and development (Berman, 1990, pp. 56–7). Again, we see the larger global structures at play. Given the precarious state of the colonial state’s finances this was financial leverage that it could not afford to resist. Ultimately, the Kikuyu would lose upwards of 60,000 acres to the settlers (Elkins, 2005a, p. 12). In Axis Rule, Lemkin (1944, p. 83) described this as the political technique of genocide, in that it imposed the national pattern of the colonisers by way of removing the occupied peoples and their property – in this case the land of the Kikuyu – and allocating it to the settlers.

The native reserves, as they were known, which were the natural corollary of the ‘land grab’, were located in the Central Province districts of Kiambu, Fort Hill and Nyeri. The vast majority was not set aside, and their boundaries not defined till 1926 (Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1926). In the Native Lands Trust Ordinance, 1928 (Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1928), the demarcations would be confirmed and a ‘Native Lands Council’ established that ruled over all matters pertaining to native reserves. Naturally, it consisted of no African representatives. Over time the conditions in the reserves deteriorated due to severe overcrowding, to such an extent that a Kikuyu family would struggle to meet their basic subsistence needs.

In a memorandum submitted to the Kenya Land Commission (from here on in Land Commission), a body which from 1932 to 1934 would hear land disputes and receive various relevant memoranda and testimonies on the topic, otherwise known as the Carter Commission after its chair Sir William Morris Carter, the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) were moved to comment on the abject state of land provision for the Kikuyu: ‘Some of the districts in our province break the record of the density of the world population of any agricultural people and occupy perhaps third place in the record of the density of the world population notwithstanding the fact that our country is a purely agricultural country’ (Colonial Office, 1934, p. 200). Meek (1949, p. 77) added that in 1944 ‘density figures of 1,100 and even 1,800 to the square mile have been reported’. By 1948, one and a half million Kikuyu were restricted to 2000 square miles, juxtaposed to the 30,000 white settlers who held 12,000 square miles, much of it the most fertile land (Newsinger, 2006, p. 185).

It is inconceivable that under such deleterious conditions the Kikuyu could furnish the necessary livestock to support their various cultural practices, let alone support their respective progression through initiation and the various status grades, which was so critical to the Kikuyu way of Life. Kilson (1955, p. 120) succinctly observed:

Kikuyu society would be well-nigh impossible without an adequate supply of land upon which these animals could graze. And, if one would couple this with the fact that extensive farming is another major aspect of Kikuyu society, one might conclude that to alienate land from the Kikuyu would be tantamount to setting their socio-cultural system on the road to total disintegration. [emphasis added]

The upshot of all these policies was to push the reserves to the brink of an ecological crisis, compounded by the polarisation of the Kikuyu between a tiny minority of rich Kikuyu chiefs who collaborated with the colonial authorities and the vast majority of the Kikuyu who were pushed further into penury and faced the double humiliation of loss of land and status under British colonial rule. The ensuring ecological meltdown would threaten the very survival of all who lived off the reserves (Elkins, 2005a, p. 23). Here we observe the technique of the destruction of the foundation of economic existence and ecological destruction. The effects of the British land policy eerily chime with Lemkin’s (1944, p. 85) observation in Axis Rule:

The destruction of the foundations of the economic existence of a national group necessarily brings about a crippling of its development, even retrogression. The lowering of the standards of living creates difficulties in fulfilling cultural-spiritual requirements. Furthermore, a daily fight literally for bread and for physical survival may handicap thinking in both general and national terms.

Secondly, the colonial government imposed a hugely burdensome ‘hut tax’ and ‘poll tax’ collectively equivalent to two months’ wages at the local rate (Elkins, 2005a, p. 23). The combined effect of the land and tax policy was to force Kikuyu migration in search of work and land. This conditioned the rise of what became known as the squatter community (Tanogo, 1987), and the dispersal of tens of thousands of Kikuyu tribesmen in search of living on settler farms and plantations. By 1945 there were 200,000 registered squatters in the White Highlands, the vast majority of whom were Kikuyu (Curtis, 2003, p. 319; Tanogo, 1987, p. 126). The effect was to further undermine the group integrity of the Kikuyu, with all the attendant genocidal effects that would accompany it (Kilson, 1955, p. 121) even if it depended on adapting or exploiting structural features of Kikuyu society, namely the aforementioned ahoi system or ‘Kikuyu expansionist dynamic’ (Kanogo, 1987). Recall that the ahoi were tenants attracted to a larger property-owning clan or mbari (Muriuki, 1974, p. 114) who wanted to augment their authority and power by attracting non-clan or alien elements to their fold. The neo-feudal aspects of the squatter system resembled at least superficially this ahoi system (Jackson, 2017, p. 238). This was an example of articulation and the partial preservation of the Kikuyu figuration.

The final screw in the first phase of genocide would come with the compulsory labour policy brought into being by master-and-servant laws that regulated, and ultimately coerced through penal sanction, Kenyan rural workers and farmers (Anderson, 2000). These labour ordinances had the effect (and intention) of forcing African peasants to pay for their tenancy rights through labour on the settler farms rather than cash payment, an obligation that was initially 90 days per year but by the 1930s had risen to between 240 and 270 days (Fibaek and Green, 2019, p. 93). Combined with the other labour laws, the labour control regime ensured a steady and reliable supply of labour on the settler farms and greatly reduced the operating costs for settler farmers, allowing them to capture a greater share of surplus value (Fibaek and Green, 2019).

In political-economic terms, the net effect of the articulation of the Indigenous peasant and settler modes of production on the Kikuyu – embodied in the land, tax and labour policy – was to ensure that ‘the material conditions of reproduction in the reserves were insufficient to meet the needs of simple reproduction, commodity purchases, and tax payments’ (Berman, 1990, p. 37) [emphasis added]. These were the mechanisms that forced the Kikuyu onto the labour market and meant they were paid below the value of commodity labour power and the market value of their cash crops. But given the paltry nature of the wages paid on the settler farms plus the meagre prices paid for the surplus product sold by the Kikuyu peasants – due to the aforementioned marketing boards – the vast majority of Kikuyu found it increasingly difficult to make up what Berman (1990, p. 37) described as the resulting ‘reproductive gap’. The intention of these policies was to subordinate African peasant production to the settler economy and force African peasants into waged work. The effect was to slowly cripple the economic, political and cultural foundations of the Kikuyu.

The (lumpen) proletarianisation of Kenyan peasants was a natural corollary of primary accumulation. Lumpen to a degree, since not all of the peasants alienated from their land would become workers gainfully employed in factories and large workplaces. Some, due to the population dynamics of the capitalist economic system, as we saw in Chapter 2, and resultant creation of a reserved army of the unemployed, were compelled to scrape together a living in the informal economy as prostitutes, hawkers and the like (Elkins, 2005, p. 24). It compelled the migration of impoverished African peasants, who either failed to scrape a meagre living together on the reserves, or who hadn’t managed to establish themselves as squatters on the White Highlands, into the increasingly overcrowded and depressed squalor of the urban centres in search of work. This was accelerated by ever increasing mechanisation of the settler estates, which forced thousands more to escape into the cities; the population of Nairobi doubled between 1938 and 1952 (Newsinger, 2006, p. 185). The unintended consequence of this was to foster the rise of popular discontent, not only among squatters and impoverished reservation workers in the countryside but an increasingly militant Kenyan working class and urban poor (Newsinger, 2006, pp. 186–7).

Here again we see, in a fascinating parallel with the Australian colonial space, the logic of (primary) accumulation, driving the logic of elimination: socio-economic processes which I earlier described as one of two key structures in the political economy of eco-genocide. In the context of British economic history, this first key structure gave rise to what was referred to as the ‘enclosures’ in Chapter 2, and the expansion into non-capitalist territory, ‘into a world dense with cultural difference’ (Smith, 2002, p. 79). This was a social cataclysm crippling the foundations of the Kikuyu, just as they crippled Indigenous life on the Australian Frontier and rural peasant life in Britain (Hobsbawm, 1959, p. 3), forcing the migration of some to the urban centres, where they were absorbed into the body of the nascent working class and urban poor. Once the stolen land and cheapened black labour was fully incorporated into the various industrial (and financial) processes operating within the expanded reproduction of the circuits of capital, the logic of the value contradiction at the heart of the political economy of capitalism, the second key structure nurtured the rise of class forces, which adopted ‘European political technologies’ and exhibited certain modalities of struggle commensurate with their class position, such as the formation of trade unions, strikes and other various forms of industrial action, as well as particular political programmes and political parties. These forms of struggle played a role in hastening the ‘defeat’ of the colonial authorities and the granting of independence, but not necessarily the end of relations of genocide for all Indigenous groups, as will be examined when we take a closer look at Kenya today. This unintended consequence, where the colonial authorities are concerned, is a function of what in Chapter 1 was described as the dialectic of the settler–Indigenous relations, where struggle against forms of colonial domination and genocide shift the terrain of genocidal techniques.

One fascinating distinction between the Australian case and the Kenyan settler–Indigenous dialectic is that although the forcible articulation of the Indigenous figuration with Australian settler capitalism drove radical economic and political transformations, giving rise to distinguishable class groups within the Indigenous community, such as an emergent rural and urbanised working class and urban poor, this did not give rise to, at least in the short term, internal class antagonisms within Indigenous nations or communities. By that I mean that there were not opposed class groups with irreconcilable class interests, but, by and large, rather class groups that did have material and political interests in common, as we saw in Chapter 2, with the rise of the pan-Indigenous movement. That is to say, with very few exceptions, the loci of the vast majority of Indigenous people were within classes that either had no access to, or control of land, or the other factors of production, such as capital or labour. They were rather either surviving in semi-feudal relations in the countryside, on the various settler farms, cattle stations and reserves, or joining the ranks of the urbanised working classes in towns and cities predominantly in the East, in the factories, the docks and so on. There would of course, over time, emerge a middle class of professionals, in sectors like law, academia or public administration, who also played a key role in organising Indigenous resistance. But this wouldn’t be until much later in the twentieth century, and moreover, this class, in the main, would also not be a property-owning class. In other words, there was no substantial Indigenous atomised (petty) bourgeoisie.

In part, this was because Indigenous people in Australia, on the whole, were either wiped out or locked into a state of semi-permanent unemployment, underemployment and economic irrelevance. Of course, as we saw in Chapter 2, their employment, inter alia, as sheep herders, pearl divers, stockmen, miners, guides for explorers, domestic servants and even as agents of repression and domination were crucial for the success and viability of the settler-colonial project in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Reynolds, 1990). But this was not to be the experience of the vast majority, who instead, once severed from their land, were either murdered, left to starve or corralled into reserves. This almost complete exclusion of Indigenous people from any form of meaningful right to property in land or land tenure or even common law rights to occupancy (barring those few Indigenous communities in the Northern territory and elsewhere who managed to maintain material-cultural ties to their land on colonial terms), endured until much later into the twentieth century, with the emergence of key milestone Indigenous land rights legislation in the Northern territories, the ARLA, and of course native title after the Mabo ruling. However, in Kenya and other colonial territories such as India, the colonists were a minority and so depended on Indigenous labour both as workers and consumers of manufactured goods for the reproduction of its economy, and for the maintenance of its polity more generally, on a far greater scale (Thorpe, 1992, p. 98). Moreover, the simple fact of the sheer demographic dominance of Indigenous people in Kenya meant that a significant proportion of land and resources would remain in the hands of the Indigenous of Kenya.

Above all, the differences in the class composition outlined above was determined by the fact that, in common with the Australian experience in Chapter 2, the forcible articulation of the settler with the Indigenous economic system is conditioned, in the initial stages at least, by the technical conditions in which settler capital historically finds Indigenous lifeways, or, as we saw earlier, what Hardt and Negri (1994, p. 15) called foreign processes of production. Unlike in Australia, Kenyan societies were composed of not just hunter-gatherer production relations but also pastoral and horticultural and agricultural economies. Therefore, the utility that these economies had to the settler economy and the possible ways in which they could be forcibly fused with it would, in the Kenyan settler-colonial space, give rise to antagonistic class divisions within Kenyan society and Kikuyu more specifically, almost from the very beginning of the life of the colony.

Tragically, the ‘reproductive gap’ imposed on the Kikuyu and other African peasants was, as has been revealed above, far from adequately filled. As Barta (1987, pp. 237–41) reminded us in his analysis of settler colonialism in Australia, colonisation established two ‘incompatible forms of society and economy’, in its quest to forcibly incorporate Indigenous society into the orbit of the global capitalist economy. The alienation of land had genocidal consequences for the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Barta understood genocidal intent as inherent in the policy of the metropolitan government, the local colonial authorities – in Kenya from the colonial governor all the way down to the district commissioners – and the settlers themselves who took the land, even when the horrific human consequences – the crippling poverty, the breakdown of their culture and the dissolution of the Kikuyu group – were foreseeable.

With the rise of open hostilities between the colonial authorities and the Indigenous peoples of Kenya, what would come to be known as the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), the genocide would enter its second much more brutal phase, which I (Crook, 2013) have elsewhere described as the ‘concentrated shock of genocide behind the “wire’. The Mau Mau insurrection was in essence a war between the British colonial authorities and the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), an army dominated by soldiers from the Kikuyu as well as Meru and Embu (Osbourne, 2010). Discussion of this ‘concentrated phase’ is beyond the remit of this book, suffice to say that to defeat the Mau Mau resistance would take the complete ‘obliteration of the Kikuyu domestic landscape’ (Elkins, 2003, p. 217). The concentrated shock of genocide would reach its highest pitch in the villages, affecting a devastating toll on the Kikuyu way of life, decimating their economic, social, political and cultural foundations, hasten the end of the formal empire and usher in the era of formal independence. However, as we will see below, this would not fully purge the Kenyan state and society of its colonial legacy, with devastating consequences for its ‘less civilised’ remaining Indigenous people, such as the Sengwer.

Indeed, what of the fate of those considered less ‘civilised’ than the agriculturalists like the Kikuyu? What would become known as the ‘Dorobo question’ in administrative circles, perhaps better than any other case of ‘civilising violence’ (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 3), serves to underscore the crucial dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, the logic of capital accumulation, more broadly conceived as the changing imperatives of settler capitalism in Kenya, and the broader exigencies of the world market. On the other hand, Indigenous elimination made possible through the uneven racialised landscapes that ‘othered’ those categorised as ‘Dorobo’. This dialectic is revealed once we consider the thinking of colonial officials tasked with solving the ‘Dorobo question’ and how the governance of forest-dwelling communities was reconciled with the ultimate exigencies of a settler economy ensconced in the political economic web of Pax Britannica. The biopolitical practices resolved to affect total cultural erasure of hunter-gatherer groups like the Sengwer, in order to ‘integrate’ them into the political economy, rather than, as we saw with the Kikuyu and other ethnic groups considered more civilised, bring about partial destruction of their economies and societies through forcible articulation with the settler-colonial system. The biopolitical practices of the colonial administration would deny the Sengwer and other forest dwellers any right to inhabit their forest dwellings as a sovereign cultural group, or to any land for that matter, and reinvent the Embobut Forest and the slopes of the Cherangani Hills, once again, as a blank map or palimpsest (Kostanski and Clark, 2009, p. 189), bereft of productive settlement: a reinscribing of a landscape that was already deeply etched with networks of Sengwer place names and pathways; this was terra nullius. They would be subject in the words of Cavanagh (2016, p. 3) to ‘civilising violence … to secure their liminal humanity’, including forced assimilation, dispossession and the attendant social death, to once again make them fit and productive members of the colony and its political economy.

In its fundamentals, this process of cultural erasure, supported by the burgeoning science of planning, was remarkably redolent of those same processes that took place in Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once again, it would entail the defining, controlling and regulating of spaces with prescribed relations that governed who could and couldn’t utilise the land and the forms of social life that could flourish within them (Jackson, pp. 72–3). What marked out these processes where the forest-dwelling communities were concerned was the deployment of a racialised conservationist logic, a form of ‘green governmentality’ (Luke, 1997), that would leave a lasting legacy in the governance of Kenya’s forest.

The question of the fate of the Sengwer would be determined by the imperatives of the colonial economy and the need to ‘conserve’ the forests and their ecosystem services for the benefit of white settler farmers and rationalise the top-down control of officially designated ‘tribes’ under British dominion. The forests became the focus of much concern for the colonial administration, in particular the material demarcation of forest reserves (Anderson, 1987). This included Crown Forest Reserves subject to the jurisdiction of the Forest Department, forest reserves given over to white settlement in the White Highlands, and forest reserves folded into reserves allocated to other non-Dorobo communities; a three-jawed pincer encircling and eroding the lifeways of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer groups. These demarcated forests, too, were racially spatialised and considered either ‘European’ or ‘African’. Just as with the native reserves, their demarcation fuelled conflicts and disputes around access, habitation and use of forest and grazing land resources (Anderson, 1987). Moreover, what was deemed by the colonial authorities the ‘fiscally barren’ nature of the Sengwer hunter-gatherer economy (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 10), meant that the only viable form of articulation as far as the colonial state was concerned would be Hartwig’s third mode, namely the destruction of the hunter-gatherer mode ‘such that the producers are “freed” of the means of production’ (1978, p. 129). As we will see below, this logic will carry over to the postcolonial state in the present day.

Their fate would be decided like all of Kenya’s Indigenous societies, through official committee hearings, in particular the landmark Land Commission and its subsequent report issued to London.² This administrative process marked a pivotal moment in the consolidation and deepening of the ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006). It would befall the Committee on the Dorobo Question, formed in March 1929, to interrogate this issue and submit a report to London, which was attached to the Land Commission report (Colonial Office, 1934). In a summary of the report of the Land Commission written for the Journal of the Royal African Society, former Chief Native Commissioner O. F. Watkins (1934, p. 213) captures the essence of the colonial administration’s position as it bore on the question of the ‘Dorobo problem’ and the conservation of the forest, when he concluded that ‘they cannot exist in the modern world as forest-dwellers without danger to forest and so to water, already a scarcening commodity in Eastern Africa’ [emphasis added]. The anxiety evinced by this summary, which would be reflected in the conclusion of the commission, echoed a broader fear among colonial administrators about the sustainability of the Kenyan forests and the problem of how to both ensure the conservation of large swathes of it and ensure its continued exploitation for profitable ends (Ofcansky, 1984, p. 136). It was long understood by the colonial administration that the sustainable use of the forests was key to sustaining the white settler economy and its native timber industry, and that if exploitation and deforestation of the forest were not slowed, its crucial ecological role as a water catchment area and its vital role in soil conservation would be lost – an anxiety that will rear its ugly head once more when we turn our attention below to the present day. In a report on Kenyan forestry for the colonial authorities, British forestry expert Robert Scott Troup (1922, p. 10) observed that the ‘limit has already been exceeded in respect of the destruction of forest on which the maintenance of the water supply depends’. After explaining the aforementioned ecological functions and the consequences of unchecked deforestation, he concluded, with a palpable sense of alarm, ‘in this respect the forests of Kenya Colony, situated as they are for the most part on hilly country, exercise an important, not to say a vital, influence on the general prosperity of the colony’ (Troup, 1922).

This was of a piece with the broader anxiety about environmental degradation and growing alarm at the rate of despoilation and degradation of soil and forests in the wake of the colonisation of Kenya (Anderson, 1984, p. 32), an ecological anxiety common throughout the European empires (Grove, 1995, p. 474, 1997; see also Crosby, 2004). Understood from this perspective, and as evinced by the evidence and conclusion of the Kenya Land Commission, forest-dwelling peoples, refracted through the prevailing discourse on race science, ‘civilizational development’ and African ‘nature’ more generally, and scientific forest management more specifically, were seen as ecological threats to the continued sustainability of the forests, and perhaps even an impediment to its continued profitable exploitation (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 11). A racialised political ecology secured through the bundle of racialised discourses on Africa’s environment, discussed below, played a key part in reconstructing African non-human nature, as much as it did Africans themselves.

Forest-dwelling groups were not compatible with the prevailing scientific conservationist logic, or scientific conservation (Guha, 2000, p. 7), which suggested the necessity of their removal, a logic borne of an enlightenment tradition that instrumentalised nature as something to be ‘mastered’ and ‘tamed’ by the application of European reason (Adams and Mulligan, 2003, p. 5). But they were simultaneously deemed a threat to romanticised notions of the African ‘wilderness’ that saw all humanity as a blight on its continued flourishing (Neumann, 1996). This sentiment would prove central to the rise of a ‘preservationist’ movement across the European colonies (Neumann, 1996, 1998), one whose legacy, as we will see below, continues to this day and will prove decisive in shaping the biopolitical status of forest-dwelling Indigenous groups in Kenya and elsewhere.

What Marx (1988) called humanity’s non-organic nature, with which humanity must maintain a constant dialogue, would be symbolically reconfigured through antecedent forms of ‘green governmentality’ (Luke, 1997), such that the Sengwer would no longer be able to converse with it; an eco-biopolitics that treated forest-dwelling groups and their forest dwellings as malleable clay. This was a racialised conservationist discourse that assumed as axiomatic that the Sengwer and all other forest-dwelling groups did not know how to live sustainably, within their dwelling places that they had lived in for hundreds of years. This ‘correcting’ of ‘destructive’ socio-ecological relations, or forms of ‘environmental control’ which Mackenzie (2000, p. 698) described as a ‘conservationist ethic’, eerily chimes with my definition of ecologically induced genocide, namely any ecologically destructive practice, or process, that forcibly controls the subject group’s interaction with, ejects them from or prejudices or precludes the enjoyment of their land and the local “ecosystems (Crook and Short, 2020, p. 167)

Despite numerous testimonies from members of the Sengwer³ and settler farmers⁴ affirming and confirming their existence as a legitimate and viable socio-cultural unit, the committee would eventually decide the only solution was forcible assimilation. This solution to the ‘Dorobo question’ was one that would befall all those hunter-gatherer groups considered ‘primitive’, including the Ogiek of the Mau Forest (Kimaiyo, 2004). The committee in essence recommended that, ‘wherever possible, the Dorobo should become members of, and be absorbed into, the tribe with which they have most affinity’ (Colonial Office, 1934, p. 2133). Moreover, that through ‘absorption’, submission to the ‘headman’ or administrative chiefs of other tribes and ‘intermarriage’, they will gradually be assimilated into more ‘advanced populations’ (Colonial Office, 1934, pp. 2133–5). Suffice to say, these recommendations would be wholly adopted by the Land Commission.

In its final report to London, the commission, speaking of those forest-dwelling groups found in the Rift Valley, which included, inter alia, the Sengwer and Ogiek, echoed the stagist logic of colonial administrators and the majority of the submissions and evidence found in the Land Commission report when it observed that ‘the passing of the game and forest laws interfered with the primitive mode of life led by the Dorobo’ and acknowledged the sustained attempts by the colonial administration ‘to induce them to become useful members of native society’ by encouraging them to ‘acquire stock and to cultivate’.⁵ Of course ‘induce’ was putting it rather mildly. In reality, this euphemism concealed a multitude of sins including various forms of lawfare and coded threats of state violence (Cavanagh, 2019, p. 99). The commission, following the Dorobo committee and the prevailing wisdom in colonial administrative circles, argued, ‘the Dorobo are most likely to progress and become useful citizens if they live side by side with communities who have already advanced some along the road of orderly progress’ [emphasis added].⁶ The conclusion drawn by colonial administrators was that Dorobo, like the Sengwer, should be assimilated via the technology of the reserve system into what Lord Frederick Lugard, treaty maker and colonial administrator, called more ‘advanced populations’ (1922, p. 200), or what Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate (1900–1904), called ‘superior tribes’ (1905, pp. 107–8) to accelerate their development. Indeed, by forcing them onto reserves much like we saw with the Kikuyu, they would, as Eliot (1905, p. 106) hoped, ‘adopt fixed habitations’ and thus be compelled to provide labour on the farms of white settlers and pay tax (Njonjo Commission 2002, pp. 25–6), as indeed many members of hunter-gatherer groups did (Hitchcock et al., 2015, p. 42).

This would bring about Hartwig’s (1978, p. 129) third stage of articulation and ‘free’ the producers from the means of production and Rey’s aforementioned third stage of articulation of the settler-colonial capitalism with Indigenous societies: ‘the total disappearance of the pre-capitalist mode’ (cited in Foster-Carter, 1978b, p. 218). Where hunter-gatherer groups were concerned, their level of ‘development’ would not permit any other form of articulation with the dominant settler-colonial system. Through the process of real subsumption of forest-dwelling labour to colonial capital, ‘foreign processes of production’ (Hardt and Negri, 1994, p. 15) would not be allowed to survive in any form, nor the corresponding communities permitted ‘to maintain their connection to the territory and the past’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017, p. 182).

The committee hearings would clearly demonstrate the biopolitics at work that attributed rights to the various groups according to their levels of advancement and mode of life, a normative vision that condemned lifeways that were not only not ‘fit’ enough, but, given the recurring financial crises of the Kenyan colonial state (Berman and Lonsdale, 1980), ‘fiscally barren’ (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 10). As we saw with the Kikuyu, the right to a reserve was tied to the political economic function of providing labour for the white settler farms on the White Highlands, valuable crops and tax for the colonial coffers.

However, the total destruction of the Sengwer would not come to pass. Though the remaining colonial records and oral evidence provide us with an incomplete picture, the forcible subsumption to colonial labour and integration into Eliot’s (1905, pp. 107–8) ‘superior tribes’ would (under the auspices of the British) ultimately fail. In practice, as Cavanagh’s (2008b, p. 308) exhaustive archival work has shown, despite official orders to transfer forest-dwelling populations and police access to those forests, officials occasionally opted to allow informal access for subsistence purposes. Nevertheless, as Card (2010) was keen to stress, social death does not mean an inexorable and permanent ending or finality. As the structural understanding of genocide as a process put forward in this book argues, genocide and its settler-colonial structure is not an event, a finite moment in time (Wolfe, 2006a, p. 163). If we understand relations of genocide or settler Indigenous relations as a dialectical phenomenon, then it is a continual process, with ebbs, flows and even reversals and regressions, unfolding through time. Ergo, the destruction of group life, or ‘social vitality’ is, similarly, a non-binary process stretched along the continuum of time which can be subject to reversals. As Card (2010, p. 262) herself argued, ‘In genocides, survivors experience a social death, to a degree and for a time. Some later become revitalised in new ways; others do not.’ The story of the struggle of the Sengwer would resume with the dawn of the new (post)colonial regime.

Architecture of dispossession then: racialised geographies and the cheapening of black bodies

The forcible articulation of different modes of production, upon which the new colonial political economy depended, hinged on racialised or ‘imaginative geographies’ (Said, 2003), just as did the colonial political economy in Australia. The aforementioned laws, and the segregation and racialised geography upon which they and the reserves were based, were predicated on the discursive creation of uneven racialised landscapes (and ecologies), on what I earlier described as racial spatialisation. These landscapes were key to the reproduction of racial capitalism, in that the latter assumed and depended on the cheapening of black bodies and their relocation and concentration for the successful reproduction of the settler-colonial economy (Berman, 1990, p. 59), as well as legitimating the colonial project in Kenya specifically, and Africa more broadly (Young, 1994, p. 74). Once again, genocidal techniques would include, as Wolfe (2006, p. 388) observed in other colonial contexts, a ‘whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations’ that would impoverish meaningful land rights and sovereignty and, at best, reduce Indigenous rights to that of occupancy and usufruct, whether they were agriculturalists like the Kikuyu, pastoralists like the Maasai or hunter-gatherers like the Sengwer.

By forcibly relocating ethnic groups and allotting some groups, land within strictly circumscribed socio-economic roles, like the Kikuyu, they were nurturing their ‘development’. As we learned earlier, In the case of hunter-gatherer groups like the Sengwer, collectively known as ‘Dorobo’, commonly believed by colonial administrators to be ‘pre pastoral’, according to colonial records, or even ‘pre tribal’, given their hunter-gatherer figuration (Cavanagh, 2019, p. 93), by forcing their assimilation into other social groups they were accelerating their ‘development’. Ultimately, they ensured the various ethnic groups contributed to the economic wellbeing of the colony. In other words, the reserves, in conjunction with the coercive legal measures and practices discussed above, were a biopolitical means of remedying the ‘backward’ nature of African peasants, by internalising new behavioural norms, conducive to the settler economy, and, like Indigenous peoples in Australia, initiating African people into the ‘rites of white discipline’ (Jackson, 2018, p. 80; Bernardi, 1997, p. 38). In this sense, the reserves were a crucial lynchpin in the fulfilment of the noble covenant of the British system of colonial governance, which was discursively and ideologically predicated on ‘the dual mandate’. Stated briefly this mandate obliged colonial authorities to develop the colonies economically, in the interests of the metropole, and civilise and develop the African races and tribes. Indeed, as argued above, the reserves served as a crucial political economic mechanism in the creation of a ready supply of cheap black labour in the countryside and the cities in the myriad forms described above.

These ‘imaginative geographies’ (Said, 2003) in Kenya, unlike Australia, also depended on uneven racialised landscapes that stratified ‘races’ according to a racial and civilisational ladder. Those considered ‘advanced populations’ by Lugard (1922, p. 200) could be apportioned land on reserves and amenable to indirect rule through ‘chiefs’ such as the Bantu ethnic groups in Uganda which had developed to the ‘kingdom stage’ of development (Lugard, 1922, p. 68), or in Kenya the Kikuyu, whom Eliot (1905, p. 106) considered to be ‘one of the most active and intelligent among the East African tribes’ and who were ‘almost certainly a comparatively recent hybrid between the Masai and a Bantu stock’. The latter two ethnic groups were considered to be ‘superior tribes’ by Eliot (1905, pp. 107–8) when compared to the acephalous or stateless hunter-gatherer groups, such as the ‘Dorobo’ like the Sengwer. In other words, races like the forest-dwelling Dorobo, or ‘pygmies’ or ‘Bushmen’, and the various tribes they were further subdivided into, were less ‘racially potent’ (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 96) and thought to exist in hierarchical relation to each other. Moreover, they existed on a point along a path of development marked by the capacity to develop and utilise technology, develop hierarchical and centralised forms of governance and, of course, the ability to accumulate wealth (Cavanagh, 2017, p. 292). Where possible, via the assistance of Lefebvrian spatial technologies such as the reserve system, the less advanced ‘races’ should be allowed to ‘hybridize’ with ‘fitter stock’ ‘to the great advantage of the country’ (Eliot, 1905, p. 107). In other words, Eliot (1905, pp. 106–7) argued a policy of absorption or assimilation could be applied to ‘distinct races’ depending on their level of development. Race was for Eliot (1905, p. 106) ‘a hybrid and in a process of slow change’ and to have different races ‘blend’ was ‘nature’s law’. It was therefore a ‘sound policy to encourage the intermingling of different tribes and the formation of a settled and peaceable population’ (Eliot, 1905) [emphasis added]. For Eliot and his peers, ‘settled’ and ‘agricultural’ modes of life and their associated economies were one step above hunter-gatherers in the ladder of civilisation. Therefore, those who were not advanced enough, such as the forest-dwelling Sengwer, would be absorbed into their more ‘advanced’ neighbours. This was of a type with the ‘stagist’ ‘evolutionary’ understanding of history we encountered in the Australian settler-colonial space and akin to Adam Smith’s teleological stages of development (1978, p. 14). Tragically, this stagist thinking will live on in residual form in the postcolonial period and have grave consequences for the present juncture.

Speaking to the broader significance of the ‘imaginative geographies’ (Said, 2003), colonial discourses on race and the colonial governmentality of which they formed part, Young (1994, pp. 75–6) sharply observed their inner connections with the imperatives of the colonial political economy, averring ‘[t]he idea of progress, now at its zenith, and notions of African society as malleable clay in the hands of the colonizer, available for reshaping into new economic functions and social contours, suffused the colonial system’ [emphasis added].

It was this notion of African society as malleable clay which powerfully conveys the centrality of biopolitics to the construction of the Kenyan colony. The demographic and racial categories furnished by the social Darwinian discourses facilitated the reengineering of Kenyan societies to suit the imperatives of the Kenyan settler class and ultimately the needs of the metropole. In other words, the reserves (and the colonial political economy more generally), were proto-eugenic laboratories that sought to mould Kenya’s fluid ethnic mosaic into rigid fixed identities that tied them to portions of land in the pursuit of the virtuous and noble goal of ‘protection’ or ‘improvement’ (Cavanagh, 2019, p. 96). They also conveniently facilitated the cleansing of those most fertile portions of the land desired by the white settlers. In today’s Kenya, as we will see below, the notion of malleable clay will still apply to some of its Indigenous denizens.

Taken together, these processes of biopolitical transformation visited upon both the forest-dwelling Sengwer and the agriculturalist Kikuyu, exhibit all the hallmarks of a ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006) or Barta’s (1987) relations of genocide, if one remembers that culture is the master concept and the target of genocide is the structure or edifice of the group, not necessarily the individuals that form its constituent parts. The forcible subordination of African peasant production to secure its political economic articulation to the settler economy, what was earlier described as the two stages or structures of the political economy of genocide, and force African peasants into waged work, had the effect of slowly crippling the economic, political and cultural foundations of the Kikuyu. The forest in the Cherangani Hills was an integral part of the economy and society of the Sengwer and their culture. Their forcible excision from the forest amounted to domicide that menaced the group’s cultural and biological integrity, given their territorially bounded nature (Abed, 2006, p. 326), and all the ways the Sengwer depend on the forests. Both cases are consistent with my definition of eco-genocide introduced in Chapter 1: the destruction of, or severance from the eco-systemic habitat of the group that leads to ‘social death’. Arguably, hunter-gatherer societies like the Sengwer suffered more extreme forms of social death and certainly more forced assimilation and cultural destruction, or ‘civilising violence’, than any other lifeway, given they had much further to come to meet the biopolitical standards expected of British colonial authorities.

Nevertheless, in the final analysis the clay was not malleable enough. The contradictions in the particular economy examined above would eventually trigger open revolt against the settler-colonial state. The ensuing Mau Mau struggle and the genocidal war it unleashed would, however, hasten the end of the British colony, with London convinced that the writing was on the wall, forcing the colonial power to the negotiating table, and setting in train a period in which attempts at negotiation would ultimately see the defeat of white colonial settlerdom and the victory of African nationalism (Ogot, 1968, pp. 285–8). On 12 December 1963, Kenya would be officially independent and one year later become a republic. In the midst of a global decolonisation movement, the metropole had decided retreat and withdrawal would be the prudent thing to do. The political and economic benefits of the ailing Kenya colony simply did not outweigh its costs anymore. Critically, however, the British would leave in their wake a colonial legacy that would cast a long shadow over Kenya’s postcolonial future, with devastating consequences for forest-dwelling peoples.

The legacy of colonisation, ‘decolonisation’ and decoloniality

As I argued in connection with Australian settler–Indigenous relations, the story of invasion, annexation and colonisation of land, and by extension, the imposition and extended reproduction of settler power, colonial economy and its corollary, relations of genocide, is just one side of the story; one side of the dialectic of settler–Indigenous relations. Struggle against these forms of colonial domination and genocide in Australia shifted the terrain of genocidal relations, in subtle yet profound ways. The ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006a, p. 387) would, in part due to resistance, mutate and transmogrify through various ‘modalities, discourses, and institutional formations’ (Wolfe, 2006a, p. 402). Relations of genocide in Kenya were not exempt from this dialectic. The Mau Mau struggle would precipitate the end of the colonial regime and usher in a new one led by Kenyan nationalists of the KAU and its leader Jomo Kenyatta. But this victory would be a pyrrhic one that would not end relations of genocide, at least not for all its citizens, principally because it would not fully purge itself of the legacy of colonialism and fully shake off what the Africanist Basil Davidson (1992) called ‘the black man’s burden’. Here, Davidson was principally speaking of the alien form, or what he called the ‘curse’ of the nation state and the imposition of ‘divide and rule’ tribal politics and racialised forms of Western governance, wholly divorced from precolonial African institutions and socio-political structures. The latter were more than capable of integrating themselves into a global order on their own terms; an opportunity squandered with the ‘scramble for Africa’, thus missing the ‘road not taken’ (Davidson, 1992, ch. 2). Comforted by the assumption that Africa had no history, or if they did it was distorted by Eurocentric and developmentalist assumptions – what Foucault (2002, pp. xxiii–xxiv) would have understood as an episteme that marred much of Western archaeology, colonial ethnography and anthropology (Davies, 2012) – European colonists felt entitled to subsume and reconstruct, and in some cases entirely liquidate, those precolonial institutions, to lift the veil of ignorance away from the ‘backward’ and undeveloped Africans forcibly and violently. As Shivji (2009, p. 2) put it so powerfully, all Africans were ‘denominated as uncivilized, uncultured, undisciplined pagans whose souls needed to be saved and whose bodies needed to be thrashed’. Paradoxically, this reterritorialisation of African geographic and cultural space which conveniently placed African societies outside the ‘family of lawful nations’, to become wards of the colonial and settler-colonial states, was done in order to bring them back into the fold of the ‘enlightened’.

The legacy of these processes, at least as they pertain to the structuring of the relations of genocide for those still considered Indigenous in Kenya today, would be threefold. Firstly, it would leave behind a political economic structure that by and large remained intact, with its skewed concentrations of wealth, maldistribution of land and resources and disfigured and dependant function as an economic auxiliary of the former colonial powers, through its forcible integration into the global capitalist economy, much as we saw with Australia. Though in the case of Australia, which, unlike Kenya, never experienced a return of the settler invaders to their mother country, the settler ruling class, and to lesser degree, the white settlers and their descendants who occupy lower positions in the class structure, would continue to benefit from the colonisation of the continent and its Indigenous people. Secondly, the structural and cultural ‘baggage’ of an inherited colonial state alongside its forms of racialised biopolitics and governmentality woven together with neocolonial discourses on development that, although ultimately coded for white privilege, due to its underlying axiom that there existed a hierarchy of races and tribes, could be readily adopted by new Kenyan political elites and pass over in residual yet important forms into the governmentality of the postcolonial period. Finally, the colonial lawfare and the socio-legal structures that left behind a poisoned soil, which forms a crucial substrate of the forms of governmentality, ideology and biopolitics; in short, superstructural relations of the postcolonial state. As Mignolo (2011a, p. 53) reminds us, there is a crucial difference between decolonisation, the formal process of acquiring political independence and sovereignty, recognised by international law, and decoloniality, which seeks to go beyond mere juridical forms and deconstruct, purge and heal the violence wrought by the ‘colonial episteme’, its associated institutions and forms of governance.

It is beyond the remit of this and the following section and indeed the book to give a full and thorough exploration of the social, political and economic history of the intervening period between the end of the colony and the present day. Instead, as I did with my analysis of the key antecedents that prefigured and overdetermined relations of genocide in modern day Australia, I illuminate the most important features, processes and structural dynamics of a given social formation analysed thus far that have survived and adapted, been repurposed and co-opted by new power structures and elites that ensure the relations of genocide endure into Kenya’s present day. In other words, my analysis has more in common with what was earlier referred to as a ‘history of the present’ (Garland, 2014; Foucault, 1995).

The political economic inheritance

The political economic inheritance of the newly independent Kenya was manifold. Attempts were made to ‘Africanise’ the state and economy and purge it of its white ruling elements. This critically involved the much-vexed question of land reform begun in earnest in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion under the British in the form of the African Royal Commission of 1953–5 and the Swynnerton Plan (Swynnerton, 1954; Ochieng, 1992). This programme served mainly to bequeath the economy to the rising Kenyan bourgeoise that had gestated within the womb of British colonialism (Swainson, 1977) – a class that had been originally mutated into, if not germinated, by the forcible articulation with colonial settler capitalism examined in the preceding sections.

Given the relative weakness of the African bourgeoisie or what Franz Fanon (1963, p. 119) called the ‘national middle class’, what has been described as the ‘developmental state’ would have to play a greater role. The African bourgeoisie Fanon (1963, pp. 119–20) argued were ‘completely canalised into the activities of an intermediary type’, principally merchant rather than industrial capital, with the psychology of a businessman not captain of industry. The ‘developmental state’ would therefore need to be leveraged to carve out a bigger economic role and accumulate some measure of power, compensating for centuries of colonial domination, redirecting some of the accumulation process to benefit the nascent capitalist class (Ake, 1981, p. 96). This would be done in Kenya through a variety of measures, such as the Trade Licensing Act 1967, which restricted trade of certain goods to Kenyan citizens, and the establishment of the Kenya Trading corporation (KNTC), which managed import-export trade and was used ‘as an instrument by the emergent bourgeoisie to penetrate the wholesale and retail sectors, which had formerly been the exclusive preserve of non-citizens’ (Swainson, 1977, p. 41). The latter organisation and others, such as the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC), which helped purchase or rehabilitate farms, and the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC), as well as a whole host of cooperative societies, were used to move capital into the hands of the burgeoning Indigenous bourgeoisie (Ochieng, 1992, pp. 266–7).

Nevertheless, unlike in many other African nations post-independence (Ake, 1981), the Kenyan state, aside from parastatals in key infrastructure such as post, telecommunications and transport (Grosh, 1987) would, with some exceptions, not embark on ambitious nationalisation programmes but, rather, the maintenance of a largely market-driven economy, even if state assisted and directed, particularly in the areas of agriculture and wholesale and retail trade. Attempts were also made at introducing ‘African Socialism’ by the newly minted KAU government, which sought to eschew the philosophies of the capitalist West and communist East. It broadly consisted of securing civil and political rights for all its citizens and the expansion of the democratic franchise, as well as the alleviation of the gap between the rich and the poor. Above all, independence was about rehabilitating the humanity and agency of Africans after centuries of colonialism and slavery. As the trade unionist and one of the founding fathers of the Kenyan republic Tom Mboya (1963, p. 13) proclaimed, independence meant ‘rediscovery of Africa by Africans’.

Alas, the economy would be deeply etched with the marks of British capital and, despite the aforementioned measures, would remain, as it does to this day, an economy that carries with it a profound legacy. This legacy is the one of underdevelopment. As Ochieng (1992, p. 263) argues:

Kenya’s colonial economy has been moulded into a distinctive pattern by the long years of colonial rule. It displayed characteristics typical of an underdeveloped economy at the periphery: the preponderance of foreign capital, the dominance of agriculture and the limited development of industry and heavy reliance on export of primary products and on imports of capital and consumer manufactured goods.

What Ndege (2009, p. 8) called ‘Colonial capitalism’ ‘provided the anvil on which the post-colonial social formation continues to be forged’. Through the forcible integration of the Kenyan economy and society into the Western-dominated global imperialist capitalist system and the forcible imposition of settler-colonial capitalism, Kenya’s economy would be forced into a dependent export orientation, structurally dependent on, above all, the British economy. This would force it into a relationship of complementarity or dependence (Ake, 1980; Shivji, 2009), specialisation in the production of primary commodities and a particular international division of labour. Perpetuated and reproduced though an ‘imperialism of trade’ and foreign investment controlled by the Western capitalist powers, which hinged on securing a market for manufactured goods as well as a source of primary commodities, driven by a capitalist system that was ‘struggling to defeat its internal contradictions’ (Ake, 1981, p. 36), the radical social and economic transformations and forcible articulations discussed in detail in the previous sections took place, further binding post-independence Kenya’s economic fortunes to the world imperialist and economic system. These forcible articulations are sometimes described as ‘disarticulation’ where various sectors and regions within the economy will suffer from a lack of linkages and complementarity and reciprocity with each other and a lack of what economists call forward and backward linkages (Ake, 1981, p. 43). Instead, the linkages and forms of complementarity will be externally geared towards servicing the former colonial powers.

In essence, Kenya remains an example of what Nkrumah (1965) called ‘neo-colonialism’: political independence but economic dependence, or what the historian Mark Curtis (2003, p. 330) wryly calls ‘dependent independence’. The upshot of all these structural legacies for the economy for the purposes of analysis here, as it pertains to the unfolding of relations of genocide where the Sengwer are concerned, is the resultant huge reliance on overseas loans and aid finance, due to ever worsening current account and fiscal imbalances. This in turn, due to attached conditionalities, further integrate underdeveloped countries like Kenya into the economic and political orbit of the hegemonic capitalist states in the North, in particular, as we will see towards the end of this chapter, through aid finance directed towards conservation of nature. Crucially, the role of international debt financing has long since been understood to play a role in primary accumulation (Marx, 1976, p. 921), which today invariably includes Indigenous land and people.

But more than this was the bequeathing to the postcolonial regime a particular political economy of land. It was not simply a matter of its maldistribution. Recall that a cultivated Kenyan bourgeois elite was forged in the fires of colonial rule through the forcible articulation of Indigenous societies and economies with the settler-capitalist system. This was ultimately in the pursuit of primary accumulation and its corollary, the creation of a ready supply of cheap black labour. The vast majority of Kenyans would through this articulation be forced into sedentary agriculture in the service of the colonial economy where the extraction of cheap labour was the aim. This was the second of Hartwig’s (1978, p. 129) three modes of articulation. The need to provide a supply of cheap black labour in the White Highlands would drive huge demographic changes with large migrations of Kikuyu and other tenant farmers and labourers, who would later reasonably make claim to land they laboured and worked on for decades, alongside the land claims made by those groups who were originally displaced to make way for the white settler farms (Cavanagh, 2018a, p. 126). This laid down the fertile soil for a politics of competing land claims in the future. For a minority it would be Hartwig’s (1978, p. 129) first mode: the extraction of agricultural commodities; for even fewer, they would go on to benefit from the socio-economic differentiation that it fuelled and become the nucleus of a future capitalist class. Their rise would be accelerated by land tenure programmes such as the Swynnerton Plan (1954) and the preceding drives to modernise the economy and its agriculture base through what is now described in African historiography as the ‘second colonial occupation’ (Low and Lonsdale, 1976).

These programmes were designed to transform land held by the native population into privately owned formally registered land. This commitment to the individuation of landownership was officially continued by the postcolonial state only a few years into its existence, ironically under a policy declaration called ‘African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya’ (GoK, 1965). Critically, this entrenched a political economy of land in which ‘collective’ or ‘community’ land rights, those that accorded with the ontology and relation to land of forest-dwelling communities like the Sengwer, were largely marginalised (Musembi and Kameri-Mbote, 2013, p. 6). Due to negotiations between the departing British and Kenyan nationalists on the eve of independence over the redistribution of formerly controlled settler lands to Kenyan citizens, the majoritarian ethnic groups who dominated the nationalist movement benefited the most from the land redistribution agreements and not minority groups like forest-dwelling peoples (Kew and Lyman, 2016, p. 153), compounding the iniquitous effects of the colonial political economy of land. However, as we will see below, the precise configuration of this political economy of land and their associated historical land injustices would not have been possible but for the broader institutional legacies of colonial rule and their ‘colonial land administration practises and laws’ in particular (GoK, 2009, p. 42). To this legal legacy and its continued effects in the present juncture, we will return below. For now, we will turn to the evolutionist and developmentalist ideology that underpinned this prioritisation of particular forms of property and land regimes.

Developmentalism and the ‘black man’s burden’

In the decades that followed independence, right across Africa, intellectual debate raged on what national renewal and development meant and how to achieve it. There were those who situated themselves in the radical traditions of Marx, Lenin, Baran, Amin, Sweezy, Fanon, Frank and many more. They argued that African nations were beholden to a subordinate position as periphery to the dominant centres of the global capitalist economy which siphoned off accumulated surpluses and fuelled the continued development of the imperialist powers whilst conversely under-developing Africa; the prescriptions were therefore necessarily revolutionary. On the other hand were those intellectuals who embraced the mainstream Western understandings of developmentalism and Western-orientated ‘modernization programmes’ predicated on an ‘almost mystical belief in the validity of one economic system’ (Samson and Gigoux, 2016, p. 115): Western capitalism. The programmes sought to ‘modernise’ backward sectors of the economy and infuse the ‘uncaptured peasantry’ (Hyden, 1980) with an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ (Shivji, 2009, p. 6). In essence, the programmes, which would spawn a rich new lexicon, sought to engineer the social and economic development of a large swathe of the world just emerging from the shadows of empire, dividing it into spatial regions according to levels of ‘poverty’, ‘progress’, ‘economic wealth’ and ‘growth’ (Chant and McIlwaine, 2009, p. 6). Moreover, these development discourses recast the role of former colonial powers, international financial institutions (IFI) and various nongovernmental organisations (NGO) based in the Global North as agents of progress and modernisation of the ‘Third World’, ‘developing world’, ‘underdeveloped South’. This form of developmentalism is usually associated with President Harry S. Truman’s inaugural address of the US in January 1949 in which he articulates his ‘Four Point Plan’, the fourth laying out his vision for post-war reconstruction in the context of decolonisation and the beginning of the Cold War (Chant and McIlwaine, 2009, p. 6–7). It is here that distinctions between ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘prosperous’ regions are first made, and where the former colonies were encouraged to emulate the paths of the development laid down by Europe and the US. Above all, this was an ideology that presupposed ‘the accumulation of capital as the preordained direction of history’ (Samson and Gigoux, 2016, p. 114).

Critically, these forms of developmentalism would bear the mark of their colonial roots. Arguably for two reasons. Firstly, as alluded to already, because they imposed a Eurocentric, unilinear and teleological model of development on the rest of the world, which presupposed that Western development paths were not only superior and more enlightened but the only path. Macekura and Manela (2018, p. 3) eloquently capture the loose bundle of ideas, assumptions and discourses:

[D]evelopment in history has amounted to a loose framework for a set of assumptions – that history moves through stages; that leaders and/or experts could guide or direct the evolution of societies through these stages; that some places and people in the world are at more advanced stages than others – that have structured how diverse historical actors understood their place in the world and sought to change it.

Secondly, because they are, as we will see below, woven into racist colonial assumptions examined above about the ‘uncivilised’ and ‘primitive’ nature of those still considered Indigenous people in modern-day Africa. Much as with the inherited colonial state more generally, this form of racialised developmentalism would not be confined to Kenya alone but shape the forms of racialised biopolitics and governmentality of many other African states in the postcolonial era (Samson and Gigoux, 2016, p. 117). This legacy will be key to our understanding of recent forms of ‘green developmentalism’ examined below. Both these two strands of development discourses would come together with devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples in Kenya. The aforementioned political economy of land hinged on a unilinear, developmentalist assumption that converting property and land to individuated, privatised land tenure was necessary to develop Kenya’s agricultural base since it would be better suited to market relations, therefore allowing access for credit and most importantly providing a profit motive that would unleash the entrepreneurial spirit (Musembi and Kameri-Mbote, 2013, p. 6). By extension, those modes of life, and their associated cultures, based on collective forms of land ownership and an ontology of reciprocity with nature, were deemed less productive and inferior. Ultimately, in Kenya, it was this latter school of thought, that which embraced Western blueprints for development, that won the day. No doubt this was in part due to the hegemonic imperatives of US imperialism during the Cold War, which did not tolerate radical national alternatives (Blum, 1986). Indeed, post-independence Kenyan regimes under Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi became ‘compradors’ of their imperialist sponsors (Shivji, 2007, p. 17). If radical alternatives did emerge, they were silenced through military coups and assassinations (Blum, 2001, pp. 125–67; Shivji, 2009, p. 7).⁷ Moreover, as Eric Aseka (2000) argues, the ideology of ‘African socialism’ in Kenya was never intended to overcome the structural features of underdevelopment (least not in a way that would allow for ‘autocentric’ development), and nearly two centuries of ‘moulding’ to the priorities of the British Empire and British capitalism. On the contrary, it was oriented towards the preservation of the capitalist system. Successive governments from Kenyatta through to Moi and right through the present day have encouraged a deepening of economic integration into the global capitalist economy.

In fact, the ‘curse’ of the colonial state and the preservation of British interests and, ultimately, the interests of international capital after independence, was assured through British statecraft and ‘substantial manoeuvring in the political and economic fields’ (Curtis, 2003, p. 330). These ‘manoeuvrings’ included the land transfer schemes shortly before and after independence, including the aforementioned Swynnerton Plan (Swynnerton, 1954), which ensured that, as argued earlier, on the whole, only the rising Kenyan bourgeoise could purchase land. These land schemes, which intriguingly were funded by the World Bank and Britain’s Commonwealth Development Corporation, an early harbinger of neocolonialism operating through international financial organisations and governance networks, were according to Wasserman (1975, p. 172) designed ‘to bolster a moderate nationalist state and to preserve European economic (and political) interests’. By shoring up and consolidating the rising Kenyan middle class, it would ensure a powerful vested interest that would act as a bulwark against radical change. Through land titles and loan repayments, this new economic elite would be obliged to defend a largely market driven economy conducive to private investment, and dependent on European dominated capital agriculture and its associated infrastructure (Curtis, 2003, p. 332). Colonial interests were confident that through a means of social control other than formal political authority, such as instruments of trade, aid and debt, most of the advantages that accrued to colonial powers would survive independence (Wasserman, 1976, p. 11). In essence, decolonisation ‘preserved the colonial political economy and, beyond that, integrated an Indigenous elite into positions of authority where they could protect the important interests of the colonial system’ (Wasserman, 1976, p. 1) [emphasis added].

The ‘black man’s burden’ would not finish here. The political economy of land would be further complicated by what was an already extremely complex politics of competing land claims entangled with a politics of ethnic clientelism and a party-political system organised along ethnic lines in the post-independence period (Kanyinga et al., 2020). Kenyatta’s KAU party was despite its rhetoric of national unity allocating resources and land to its base in the majoritarian Kikuyu and Luo communities. With the election of Daniel arap Moi and his KADU party in 1978, this time the ethnic patronage favoured the Kalejin communities. As we saw, ethnic patronage as a system of political power played its part in the consolidation of the colonial political economy of land and the further economic marginalisation of minority Indigenous groups like the Sengwer. Indeed, the legacy of ethnic clientelism traces its lineage back to the divide and rule politics of the British colonial period in which attributing land and resources along tribal and ethnic lines was a form of colonial governmentality.

Colonial lawfare

But this would not be the only legacy. Kenya would have to contend with socio-legal blueprints carried over from its colonial past as well, legal blueprints which determined access and ownership rights over land. As a result of the Kenya Land Commission (Colonial Office, 1934) and the conclusions it drew regarding the biopolitical status of forest-dwelling communities like the Sengwer and the Ogiek, the ancestral land found in the forests and surrounding grazing lands would be demarcated and gazetted as protected areas or government forests or folded into reserves allocated to other non-Dorobo communities. Where the Sengwer ancestral land was concerned, in the following decades, the colonial government would gazette ten blocks of forest highland areas found in the Cherangani Hills, followed by a further two blocks by the post-independence government (Kenrick, 2020a, pp. 238–9). In fact, on the eve of independence, as much as 22,000 km² of forest and ‘protected areas’ throughout Kenya had been alienated for the purposes of conservation alone (Cavanagh, 2018a, p. 125). As we saw, some ancestral land would be absorbed into the reserves of other ethnic groups permitted only to occupy, the right of usufruct, and not own the lands under the provisions of the law pertaining to ‘trust land’ (Sorenson, 1967, p. 47; Ojienda and Okoth, 2011, p. 159; Cavanagh, 2017, p. 238); they would remain ‘tenants-at-will of the Crown’ (East Africa Protectorate, 1915).

The category of trust land carried over into the post-independence period, to be held ‘in trust’ by local county governments. In 1964, one year after independence, land designated as ‘trust land’ was officially declared national forest reserves, essentially state property. The precarious status of trust land would be further undermined with the passing of two new land laws in 1968 which permitted the dissolution of trust land in the event of governmental or individual registration of title (GoK, 1968a, 1968b). This enabled government-appointed ‘trust land custodians’ to extinguish Indigenous land tenure or ‘set aside’ land for their own enrichment or that of powerful elite and tribal interests, often displacing entire communities (Kew and Lyman, 2016, p. 154; Wily, 2018, p. 7). In fact, the first of these laws, known as the Trust Land Act of 1968 (GoK, 1968a), was modelled on British colonial legislation examined in the previous chapter, which demarcated and gazetted native reserve land and provided for powers to ‘set aside’ land and extinguish all customary rights (Wily, 2018, p. 3). Recall that these powers were invested in the loyal Indigenous political and economic elite cultivated by the colonial authorities. In the post-independence period, these powers would be transferred to local officials of county councils, who invariably were drawn from the same dominant ethnic majority communities. These councils in turn were centrally controlled by government ministers in Nairobi.

As Kenrick (2020, pp. 238–9) argues, these are laws rooted, at least ostensibly, and sometimes outright mendaciously, in the approach known as ‘fortress conservation’, which is the practice of ‘fencing off’ nature and forcibly displacing Indigenous people with the aim of setting up ‘protected areas’ and preventing assumed destructive local practices, all which restructure socioecologies. The observant reader will recognise the continuity of this approach with the British colonial period examined earlier, which refracted through a ‘primitivist’ discourse assumes as axiomatic the harmful impact of ‘traditional’ ways of life on forests (Neumann, 1997, p. 568). We will return to this notion of ‘fortress conservation’ below and see how once again this practice and its associated discourse are tied up with broader notions of development, only this time dressed up in the garb of sustainable development and climate change mitigation. What is important to understand here is that these laws are predicated on a ‘conservationist ethic’ (Fiona and Mackenzie, 2000, p. 698), which moulds certain spatial attitudes, or ‘mental terrains’ earlier described as racecraft (Fields and Fields, 2012: 18). This facilitates the carving out of racialised topographical features through the imposition of draconian and domicidal land management practices of a piece with what Vandergeest and Peluso (1995, p. 387) describe as ‘internal territorialisation’, and ensures the consolidation of (neo)colonial state formation and the expansion of state power into rural areas (Neumann, 1997). Recall that for Wolfe (2006a, p. 388), territoriality is the key motive force driving the logic of elimination.

Fundamentally, this tangled legal web is rooted in a colonial tradition that contained a ‘dual bias’ (Musembi and Kameri-Mbote, 2013, p. 6) in favour of both privatised individuated ownership of land as opposed to community or collective ownership and the colonial presumption that sedentary agriculture is superior to all other modes, embedded in the Swynnerton Plan (1954) and ultimately the legal architecture imported by the British dating back to 1899, rooted as we saw, in a episteme of terra nullius. In essence, the postcolonial government consolidated and extended the political economy of land and its associated property forms and ‘production of space’ inherited from the former colonial occupiers, which already excluded alternative life ways that based their economies on forms of subsistence dependent on food procurement (gathering and hunting) and not just food production (farming). Through this lawfare, the Kenyan state and its economic and political elites continued the onward march into non-capitalist territory, ‘into a world dense with cultural difference’ (Smith, 2002, p. 79), entrenching the ‘facts on the ground’ through the necessary legal and institutional architecture in the form of private property regimes (Busbridge, 2017) and consolidating de jure as well as de facto control of Indigenous land, mirroring Lemkin’s second phase of genocide, the imposition of the ‘national’ pattern of the occupier. However, as argued before, this phase will only be completed once the non-capitalist territory, namely Sengwer ancestral land, is fully incorporated into the (global) circuits of capitalist production and subject to the reign of exchange value; as we will see, the Sengwer refuse to give up and repeatedly return to their forest dwellings, frustrating government attempts to complete this phase. Nevertheless, in more recent developments, colonial lawfare will play a key part in the denial of not just the collective land rights and suppression of Indigenous sovereignty of the Sengwer, but their alterity too. Ultimately, The Sengwer and their mode of life were marginalised legally and ultimately biopolitcally, through the deepening and consolidation of an inherited political economy of land understood as embodying the ‘preordained direction of history’ (Samson and Gigoux, 2016, p. 114).

Notes

1. 1. For the war of ‘pacification’ see Mungeam (1966).

2. 2. UKNA/CAB/24/248 – ‘The Kenya Land Commission Report, 1934’.

3. 3. See for instance the testimony by Arap Kamusein, UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, pp. 1992–1993.

4. 4. Mr A. C. Hoey, UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, pp. 1993–2003.

5. 5. Kenya Land Commission report, 1934, UKNA/CAB/24/248, p. 259.

6. 6. Kenya Land Commission report, 1934, UKNA/CAB/24/248, p. 260.

7. 7. For International development understood as a post-1945, Cold War doctrine see Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman et al. (2003); Engerman, D. (2016).