Kindle Notes & Highlights
As well as immense self-confidence, he possessed an abundance of the quality which, above all else, had served to bring one quarter of the world under British domination – a complete inability to appreciate the true gravity of the danger lying ahead.
a complete inability to appreciate the true gravity of the danger lying ahead
Gideon Kibet Kitur Ruto liked this
the would-be English settlers camped outside the Land Office in Nairobi until such time as their own requests to buy land should be processed and adjudicated by an unprepared bureaucracy overloaded with work. Some of them had been waiting over a year, fretting impatiently while ill-equipped Government officials struggled to complete the survey and documentation without which no land could be handed over. Others had already given up hope and had gone home when their money petered out.
The Lands office has been at it for more than a century
some day the African would be educated and armed; that would lead to a clash … in the end the Africans will win
There was no thought of making Nairobi anything more permanent than just a halt on the line. It was far too unhealthy. The swamp extended from the present Boulevard Hotel to Racecourse Road and was a strong breeding ground for malaria. Smallpox had already driven the Masai away from the area, and the moisture-retaining black cotton soil south of the river made sewage drainage a near impossible task. The place was useful for railway purposes, certainly, but no one in his right mind would ever choose to live there. Or so the authorities reasoned.
It was well known among the settlers that administrators were born fools, who interfered needlessly with the development of the country by promulgating all sorts of fiddling rules and regulations to the detriment of progress and good sense. A mining ordinance, for example, listed clay as a valuable mineral and forbade settlers to use the clay on their land as a building material without first obtaining a mining licence.
2024, and the administrators haven't changed
‘Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?’
The more things change...
plant maize in soil heaven-sent for better things seemed a major crime in a country where optimum allocation of resources was essential if the economy was to prosper.
The Europeans argued that Africans were not temperamentally suited to a farming ethic that involved waiting five years before seeing a profit. If Africans took over the highlands, claimed the settlers, they would squander it on maize and goats and uneconomical smallholdings.
What the country needed was large-scale, efficient farming to create a profitable surplus, asserted the whites. Surrender the highlands to a legion of smallholders concerned with growing only enough to feed themselves as far ahead as they could see, which was not very far, and the treasury would very soon be bare.
Most important of all, however, they argued that violence was the only way to make the Europeans part with the land.
Any guerilla movement that employs hit-and-run tactics with the support of at least part of the local populace is bound to hold the initiative in the short term. It is in the nature of things that such a movement is extremely difficult to defeat. But the key to victory is control of the native population, of their hearts and minds, and hearts were never Mau Mau’s strong suit.
During the same period, more Europeans were killed in Nairobi traffic accidents than died at the hands of Mau Mau.
As is customary in Kenya politics, though most delegations had the colour of their skin in common, they had precious little else.
The chief constitutional adviser to the Africans was Dr Thurgood Marshall, a black American lawyer, later to become a judge in the US Supreme Court. Before the conference, he had written an anti-imperialist article in a Baltimore newspaper accusing Kenya Europeans of being colonial exploiters who had never even taken the trouble to learn the local language. So, at one of the conference sessions, Sir Michael Blundell formally tabled a motion for proceedings to be conducted in Swahili, a language spoken fluently by all the Kenya Europeans present, but not at all by Thurgood Marshall.
language
For the next two years Blundell – and his wife and daughter – were subjected to a constant campaign of vilification and abuse as the settler population, noted more for their outdoor qualities than their brain count, made it plain what they thought of any compromise with the Africans.
injections of settler capital over the past half century had developed the highlands to the extent that every square mile of European land yielded £4,150 against an African’s £1,180.
Injection of capital not raising taxes as some would have us believe
An equally serious problem was the dismemberment of the white highlands into tiny, uneconomical smallholdings as the large European farms were divided up among their new owners. The move was economic lunacy, but politically essential. Every African had to have a patch of ground to call his own. If that meant cutting down rain forests, pulling up fences and dispersing pedigree herds, then so be it.
Under the new regime, one sixty-acre farm on the Kinangop which had produced £8,000 a year under white ownership was shared out among four Kikuyu families. Each family grew enough to feed themselves and show a surplus of £40.
Minds closed to the possibility that the British might have done any good in the country, academic historians wrote books that often read as if the authors had begun with fashionably anti-colonial conclusions and then worked backwards in search of facts to fit their case.
ngugi
