Free It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong Page B

protectorate’s new commissioner, in 1901. ‘Until a greater effort is made to develop our East African territories, I do not see how we can hope that the Uganda line will repay the cost of its construction.’ The proposal seemed uncontroversial, for British officialdom saw few signs of systematic cultivation. Wildlife, in the form of the vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, buffalo and antelope, seemed to outnumber human beings. ‘We have in East Africa the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa ,’ wrote Eliot, in what must qualify as one of the classic mis-statements of all time, ‘an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country, where we can do as we will.’
    Eliot’s snap judgement was understandable–a territory the size of France only held around three million Africans at the time, and the activities of both the Kikuyu and the Maasai had recently been curtailed by rinderpest, smallpox and drought. But in fact, much of Kenya’s best land was already in use. To the north of the mosquito-plagued stretch of marshy land that would become the city of Nairobi, the well-watered foothills of Mount Kenya were beingintensively farmed by the Kikuyu; the nomadic Maasai drove their cattle the length of the Rift Valley; and on the western fringes of this natural cleft Nandi-speaking tribes–later to be rebaptised the Kalenjin–tended crops and livestock. Taming the locals would turn out to require a series of ruthless punitive military expeditions, in which homesteads were set ablaze, herds captured and chiefs assassinated.
    But the settlers trickled in nonetheless. Fleeing overcrowded Europe, the new tribe dubbed the wazungu –‘people on the move’–headed in the main for the Rift Valley’s grasslands, which felt more than a little familiar. On a drizzly day, when the chill mists crept stealthily down from the escarpment, they bore a striking resemblance to the rolling heaths of Scotland, a fact that seemed to confirm the settlers in the correctness of their choice. Much has been written about the antics of the dissolute aristocrats who made up the Happy Valley expatriate set. But most of the land-hungry British arrivals in ‘Keeenya’, as they pronounced it, were from decidedly modest backgrounds, grabbing the chance for a new start. In 1903 there were only around a hundred settlers; by the late 1940s the number had risen to 29,000, boosted by demobilised British soldiers. It would peak at 80,000 in the 1950s. And as the new arrivals marked up their farms, everything began to change for the more than forty local tribes.
    Back in Britain, the citizen’s right not to have his taxes raised or property confiscated on the whim of a greedy ruler had been recognised since the Magna Carta. But these fundamental principles did not apply to the British Empire’s African subjects. A series of regulations passed at the turn of the century decreed that any ‘waste and unoccupied land’ belonged to the Crown, which could then dispose of it as it wished, usually in the form of 99-and 999-year leases to settlers. In order to force Africans to take paid work on white-owned farms, which were desperately short of labour, the colonial authorities levied first a hut tax and then a poll tax. In the new colony of Kenya, formally declared in 1920, the African citizen was also prevented from competing with white farmers, who alone enjoyed the right to grow tea, coffee, pyrethrum and other crops for export.
    The fact that many of the communities the British encountered did not have simple hierarchical structures held up implementation of the new laws only temporarily. The British simply appointed their own chiefs from the ranks of the translators, mercenaries and other ‘friendlies’ willing to collaborate. It’s surely no coincidence that so much power in Kenya today rests in the hands of seventy-and eighty-year-olds who were impressionable