IMPERIALISM IN KENYA

Writing in "The New Leader" on British administration in Kenya, one of "our", recent Bast. African- acquisitions, Dr. Noritnan says:— ' ] (Sixty" years ago Eastern Africa was still unexplored. Whereas in West Africa native laws,"native' authorities, and native ownership in land have been respected, in Kenya it has been the British- policy to seize ownership of all the land, so that even those areas now marked as native reserves can be alienated without any legal process. Over a third of the best land has been so alienated and given, or sold for trifling sums, to Englishmen. The next aim was to induce or compel natives to work on the land for the European , concessionaires. By a skilfully designed series of measures we induced the natives to work on these estates, instead of in their own homes on the land not yet alienated to foreigners. The chief of these measures are high direct taxation, increased until it now amounts to a third of natives' total earnings, and the fixing by employers, with some Government cooperation, of rates of wages. The 'rate now varies, for ordinary labourers, from a halfpenny to a penny per hour. Private employers, less than are, have by tlieir wealth and good organisation won large' representation on the Legislative and . Executive Councils, and in practice have for some years controlled the policy of the country. Also the Government discouraged, to the point of extinction, such native industries.for export as in West Africa have provided us in Europe with so much leather and soap and margarine and cocoa.

But the estate owners were not satisfied with these advantages. Led by Lord Delamere, who liad received a free grant of land in 1903 of 100,000 acres, their representatives on the Legislative Council destroyed an income tax imposed on. them by the Colonial Office as one of the conditions on-which it agreed to a large increase in ; the native poll tax.

Even the taxation imposed did not, however, prevent African labourers from , leaving: their employers and returning to their own villages. Though Jt had been made a criminal offence, always heavily punished, for ..even a single labourer to leave his work contrary to liis employer's wish, it Was still common for labourers to give false names, desert work, and hide.

So, during the war, an Act was passed that locked the shackles of the hew slavery on all. This Registration Act registers in a Central Bureau the name, village, thumb-print, etc., of every African male, compels every African to wear on his person, at work and at play, in the field, in the road, in railway train, in church, a small receptacle containing his thumb-print, etc., together with his personal and industrial history as, given by all his past employers, and turns every magistrate and Government officer into an escaped slave catcher. There were over, two thousand convictions under the Act during its first year in operation. Excluding the cost of extra work thrown on police, magistrates, etc., its administration costs £ 20,000 a year, as compared with £22,122 (1921) spent by Government on education. Any European, who cares to can launch a State search and prosecution against an employee who leaves work without notice, and may even have his own expenses paid by the State. Native inf ringers of the law are punislied by flogging, imprisonment for months, or fines amounting to several months' wages. Forgetting to wear the receptacle is usually punished by imprisonment.

The Act has been gloriously successful, fiendishly successful. Desertion from work is punished so invariably and so heavily, that it has become quite rare. It is computed that each deserter costs the State £40, the equivalent of seven years' wages. Why, readers may ask, do natives not resist? Because they cannot. They' cannct even protest. . Their only spokesmen are the so-called chiefs, paid by Government sums five, ten, or twenty times the labourer's wage to say and do what the Government tells them. The only movement of protest was crushed by ■the massacre of twenty innocent men and women, and by the deportation of a leader who, though by all accounts neither very wise nor very worthy, has never been charged with any offence. Let the reader mark well that these people have no constitutional means whatever of liberation. History, one supposes, will repeat on yet another page, the v hideous story of growing anger, and hatred, sudden pitifully futile rebellions, followed by ever larger massacres and ever heavier chains of oppression. All this in a country, never conquered, where our only rights are those given in treaties, in which we promised protection and respect for native lawa and rights. '