But such is the case with Trapped in History; Kenya, Mau Mau And Me by Nicholas Rankin.
Beginning with the impressively researched book, there is plenty here that is bound to provoke deep discussion and reflection. And this alone makes the book well worth reading, even if you have no particular interest in the contents relating to the personal memoir, which is really just about what one British boy and his family did or saw during their time in Kenya in the mid-20th century.
Specifically, there is much here that is likely to upset many indigenous Kenyans, especially those from what we now refer to as “the mountain”. That is to say, the indigenous communities who traditionally have their ancestral lands around the Mount Kenya region (the Kikuyu, the Ameru and the Embu).
The thing to remember is that in these historical accounts, the author is rarely just expressing his own opinion, but rather quoting authoritative sources.
Here is an example that is likely to cause some consternation at this time, when many within “the mountain” believe that “the Kikuyu” have been betrayed by President William Ruto engineering the impeachment of his (now former) Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua.
According to Nicholas Rankin, there is really no such thing; no such tribe or community as “the Kikuyu”, except insofar as we are willing to accept a convenient fiction invented by the colonial authorities who ruled Kenya from the late 19th century up to the mid-20th century.
Here is a direct quote from the book:
Were the Kikuyu a ‘tribe’? The historian of Africa, Andrew D Roberts, points out that there is “a sense in which colonial regimes actually invented tribes.” He says that, “Contrasts based merely on dialect or location or livelihood were hardened into legal and administrative constructions.” Terence Ranger, the Cecil Rhodes professor of race relations at Oxford, once told me that “the Kikuyu” were really a colonial invention.
There are plenty more of such gems sprinkled throughout the book.
Given that, for most of us indigenous Kenyans, even the least “tribal” among us, a good part of our identity is tied up with the region of the country where our ancestors lived for a few centuries at the very least, the idea that such identity is essentially a colonial construct is not welcome news.
After all, we are still a largely agrarian country, with about 70 per cent of our people living off the land in the same part of the country where most of their “tribesmen” have lived for generations.
And so, even in the present day, if you draw an economic or political/electoral map of Kenya, you will find that most citizens in the various parts of the country live among people who speak the same language, grow the same cash crops and can be reliably expected to cast their ballots for the political coalition which that region’s acknowledged “political kingpin” has chosen to ally himself with.
‘THE HISTORIAN OF AFRICA’?
More about the Kenyan cash crop economy later.
First, let me draw attention to a remarkably insensitive — and intellectually lazy — remark which shows that, at the end of the day, this author was writing about a country he does not really understand.
The remark I have in mind is where he refers to “The historian of Africa, Andrew D Roberts…” Africa is a continent of about 54 countries, some of which are so fundamentally different that we generally tend to divide the continent into sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. And even within those two broad regions, the differences between, for example, Tanzania and Somalia, or Burundi and Ethiopia, are so great that it is unimaginable that any one historian, however brilliant, could have genuine expertise that encompasses the entire region.
Can there really be a “historian of Africa”?
Well, Nicholas Rankin seems to have no doubt that there is indeed such a person. And that his name is Andrew D Roberts.
But there is more here, which I have no doubt will surprise very many Kenyans as these are not things you would normally read about or hear discussed outside purely academic circles.
For example, the famous Kikuyu chief, Waiyaki (after whom Nairobi’s main multi-lane exit to the Rift Valley, Waiyaki Way, is named) was apparently not a Kikuyu at all, and not even Waiyaki. Rankin writes that “Waiyaki” was “originally a migrant Maasai, who had assimilated into Kikuyu society and changed his name from Ole Koyaki to Waiyaki”.
Likewise, the equally famous Kikuyu Paramount Chief Kinyanjui was in no way an authentic Kikuyu chief but rather a British imposition. Kinyanjui had previously been “a caravan porter” who learned how to flatter the all-powerful white men and was rewarded with this miraculous promotion of becoming the Paramount Chief.
CRUEL HYPOCRISY
Actually, Rankin did not need “the historian of Africa” to arrive at an understanding of what the colonial era in sub-Saharan Africa was really about.
Two of the most outstanding writers of English language fiction in the 20th century summed it all rather well in just a few paragraphs.
Here is VS Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature on that subject in his book A Bend in the River. The narrator is an Asian man whose family, originally from India, were then settled in Zanzibar:
“If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. [We] had never lied about ourselves because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different, and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilisation. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves like everybody else. But at the same time, they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilisation; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”
This is a very precise summary of the cruel hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise, which largely consisted of, on the one hand, a ruthless exploitation of the lands and the people targeted for colonising, and on the other hand, the need, in the hearts and minds of the colonisers, to believe that they were actually engaged in a sacred mission that was entirely for the benefit of the colonised.
Joseph Conrad, back in the early 1900s, saw it in much the same clear light, when he had Marlowe, the narrator of perhaps his most famous book, ‘Heart of Darkness’, mention to his friends that:
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
But that is exactly what Rankin sets out to do: to “look into it too much”.
His book is 560 pages long, and of those pages, 48 pages are ‘source notes and acknowledgements’, and 31 pages are a comprehensive index.
‘CONQUERORS AND PROFITEERS’
What I am not sure Rankin satisfactorily explains is this: “Why did they do it? Why bother colonising distant lands at all?”
Fortunately, there are others who have done just that: peered behind the curtain to see what the real motives were.
In his collection titled, “Essays in English History,” the British historian AJP Taylor has an essay titled, “Conquerors and Profiteers”, which is on this very subject.
He writes, “All empires are systems of domination, won by conquest and dependent upon superior strength. All, too, had a superior way of life, or so the imperial people believed. The imperial system of politics, law and religion was supposed to be uniquely inspired, and every empire claimed that it was bestowing benefits on those whom it conquered, even when the benefit took the form of extermination. In reality, the imperial people took most of the benefits for themselves.”
In other words, this great project of imperial domination was as cruel as it was hypocritical.
Later in the same essay, Taylor analyses the dynamics of imperialism more precisely. He refers to the British Empire as “an institution of plunder” and goes on to add that: “The British Empire was increasingly run for the sake of those who ran it. Not all were in the game for the high salaries they received. Many welcomed greater power and openings for achievement they could find in serving...”
BEYOND ‘SUBMISSION BY BULLETS’
If the establishment of a British colony in Kenya was then little more than a brutal land grab, enforced by what one administrator, quoted in the book, referred to as “submission by bullets,” did no good come from it at all?
That is where the balance of good and bad becomes really difficult to agree on.
For it can be argued that colonialism, however selfish the motives of those who imposed it, provided clear and indisputable benefits in precisely those sectors that most of us value: modern education, modern medical services and commercial agriculture.
And for those first two, we have to thank the missionaries who accompanied the colonial settlers and administrators; missionaries who came to the Kenya Colony right from the start.
There is, for example, just a tiny handful of schools, who, from early in the 20th century, offered education to youths from the various indigenous communities. And thus provided virtually all the indigenous educated elite that first of all agitated for Independence, and then ran the country when at last we gained Independence. This through Alliance High School, Mangu High School, Maseno High School and a few others.
Whether set up by Catholic missionaries or by Anglicans or Presbyterians, they provided the indispensable stepping stone to effective self-rule. Virtually all those who helped Kenya seamlessly transition from a predominantly white civil service to a civil service that was indigenous from top to bottom, were former “mission boys”.
To be continued
