This article has been posted on several expat blogs that I subscribe to, and now that I am living in Kenya, the topic is even more interesting to me.
I've studied colonialism and the post-colonial world for a long time, but always at a distance. It is easy to have an academic detachment when you are living on the other side of the globe.
Kenya was once one of the crown jewels of Great Britain's colonies in Africa. White settlers did quite well for themselves in their Highlands farms. But with it, came huge displacement of the local Kikuyu tribes that were native to that area of Kenya.
This article is extensively about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during the late 1950's. I do not intend to re-tell the story, or the history of Kenyan independence. I'm sure I wouldn't do it justice!
But there are a couple of thoughts that I do find interesting.
Like so many other conflicts, in other parts of the world, the issue in colonial Kenya was land.
As one Kikuyu man explained to a visiting British Politician: "when someone steals your ox, it's killed and roasted and eaten, you can forget. But when someone steals your land, you can never forget. It's always there.... It is a bitter presence." *
You see, by the 1950's, some 3000 white settlers controlled 12,000 square miles of the fertile Highlands region of Kenya.
This, and the abuses of colonial rule, led to the formation of the Mau Mau.
The Mau Mau was secret organization that swore to throw out the colonial imperialists. And this they did, often using axes and machetes to attack the white farmers and Kikuyu who remained loyal to the British government.
As they had always done against popular uprisings in the colonies (India, Malawi, etc), the British hit back hard, and unmercifully. They employed torture, mass executions, and internment camps.
How could Britain claim to be a force of good in Africa and employ such techniques?
Obviously, they couldn't - and in the face of this hypocrisy - they lost the political will to fight.
The Mau Mau uprisings led directly, although not immediately, to Kenyan independence in December 1963.
Imagine the Mau Mau's feeling of betrayal when ownership of this prime land remained with the settlers after Independence. These settlers were given 999 year leases and the new Kenyan government chose to honor these leases.
So how do you measure a colonial legacy? There are many ways to critique colonialism in Africa: economic, social, political, ethnographical. I want to choose two ways that are of interest to me.
The first one is maps. I've loved maps since I was a little kid.
The map of Africa that we know today was set up by the European powers in 1884 at the Berlin Conference. It was here that the famous anecdote (mentioned in passing by Robert Redford in Out of Africa) of Queen Victoria having two mountains, and Kaiser Wilhelm having none, so giving her cousin a gift, she drew a line on a piece of paper, and gave Germany Mount Kilimanjaro.
The Berlin Conference included no Africans, they were Europeans who had never been to Africa and didn't know Africa. Is it any wonder these artificial national boundaries ended up dividing single communities, such as the Maassai in Kenya and Tanzania, the Teso and the Samia between Kenya and Uganda, or the Somali peoples who happened to be on the wrong side of the border line between Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia? **
The second is the idea of democracy.
The British claimed their method of governance in the colonies was the policy of indirect rule. Although touted as honoring local chiefs and native councils and giving some level of autonomy back to the colonial citizens, in practice they were extremely un-democratic.
These positions were instead filled with collaborators who followed the colonial administrators directives, which came from the home office in London. There is little evidence of the will of the people ever being taken into account, or of any capacity building for management, leadership or democratic institutions.
More often, it was this favoritism that led to the British "Divide and Rule" practice that caused the ethnic jealousy and conflict that we saw play out in places like Rwanda.
Most apologists for colonialism cite education being the one positive legacy of British colonial rule. You will even find some ex-Mau Mau fighters who will concede that education, especially for girls, was one good thing the British brought to Kenya.
A couple of points should be brought up though in rebuttal.
This presupposes a natural superiority of formal schooling of reading, writing and arithmetic, over more traditional informal education that has gone on for thousands of years.
This also ignores the fact the Koranic schools have been in the Islamic parts of Africa long before the arrival of the Europeans.
Finally, if this was to be such an important legacy for the colonial powers, then there should be evidence of colonial governments actively supporting and encouraging universal education. Colonial governments in fact did very little to support education in Africa. They were more concerned with extracting resources and maintaining peace and security. What ever education initiatives there were in the colonies, were almost exclusively the work of Christian missionaries. In fact, by the end of colonial rule, fewer than half to the children in British Africa had finished elementary school, much less secondary school.
* "Empire" BBC Television, Episode 5, Doing Good, written by Jeremy Paxman
** "Colonialism and its Legacies in Kenya" by Peter O Ndege, Page 3
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