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Censorship as Negotiation: The State and Non-European Newspapers in Kenya, 1930–54

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

Bodil Folke Frederiksen
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Abstract

This article is concerned with the colonial state as a producer, consumer, and regulator of print. Propaganda and censorship may represent two extremes in the management of a colonial public sphere. Censorship was an interactive and negotiated process—one whose successful management was in the interest of both the censoring agents and those censored. One might think that censorship is a measure taken in order for communication to break down. If we imagine colonial print communication as a continuum suspended between partners that at one end desire full freedom of expression and at the other full control, absolute censorship does constitute silence, like that represented by the dramatic closure of the African press in Kenya with the Emergency of 1952. In a politicised colonial environment, like that in postwar Kenya, censorship may be understood as negotiation between colonisers and colonised on the limits of free speech. The article examines what changed in Kenya's late-colonial period in relation to the production, broadcasting, censoring, and suppression of non-European newspapers, and how the change affected the institutions and groupings that produced and received texts. More narrowly, it seeks to trace the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the consolidated or emerging non-European publicists and publics. An examination that situates censorship in a broader context of management of discourse, of negotiation and dialogue, one that tests and goes beyond the dualism of suppression and resistance, may make it clearer why and to what extent a number of critical, anti-colonial publications were allowed to exist, and some were encouraged; and what the limits were, when opposition became unacceptable, and communication broke down.

Keywords

Kenyadecolonisationpresscensorshipnegotiation
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 44 , Special Issue 2: Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print , August 2020 , pp. 391 - 411
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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Footnotes

*

Bodil Folke Frederiksen is Associate Professor Emerita at Roskilde University.

References

Bibliography

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Seidenberg, D. A. Uhuru and the Kenya Indians: The Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics, 1939–1963. New Delhi: Vikas Pub. House, 1983.Google Scholar
Smyth, R. “Britain's African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14:1 (1985), 65–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Throup, D. W. Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau. London: James Currey, 1987.Google Scholar
Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Kenya National Archives [KNA]Google Scholar
Member for African Affairs Deposit 8Google Scholar
Attorney General Deposit 4, 5Google Scholar
The National Archives [TNA]Google Scholar
CO 533 Kenya Original CorrespondenceGoogle Scholar
British LibraryGoogle Scholar
India Office Records [IOR]Google Scholar
Hansard, 1955 vol. 538.Google Scholar
Hyam, Ronald, ed. The Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951, 4 vols., High Policy and Administration, vol. 2, part 1. British Documents on the End of Empire Project, Series A. London: The Stationery Office, 1992.Google Scholar
Newspapers, KenyaGoogle Scholar
The African Standard, 2 January 1904.Google Scholar
The Times of East Africa, 2 December, 1905.Google Scholar
The Indian Voice, 8 February, 1911.Google Scholar
Mumenyereri April, May, July 1950; September, October 1950.Google Scholar
The Kenya Daily Mail, vol. XII, March to June 1936.Google Scholar
The Daily Chronicle, vol. XVIII, 1951.Google Scholar
The Colonial Times vol. XII, 1946, vol. XIV, July-December 1947 and vol. XV, July-December 1949.Google Scholar
The East African Chronicle, vol. I, 1920.Google Scholar
The East African Weekly, February 1931 to August 1932.Google Scholar
Aiyar, S. “Anticolonial Homelands.” American Historical Review 116:4 (2011), 987–1013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aiyar, S. “Empire, Race and the Indians in Colonial Kenya's Contested Public Political Sphere, 1919–1923” Africa 81:1 (2011), 132–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, K. “I. B. Akinyele and Early Yoruba Print Culture.” In Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa, edited by Peterson, Derek R. and Macola, Giacomo, 31–49. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Barber, K. Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel. Leiden: Brill, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, C. A. Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Boyer, D. “Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:3 (2003), 511–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brennan, J. R. “Constructing Arguments and Institutions of Islamic Belonging: M. O. Abassi, Colonial Tanzania and the Western Indian Ocean, 1925–61.” Journal of African History 55 (2014), 211–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brennan, J. R. “Democratizing Cinema and Censorship in Tanzania, 1920–1980.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 38:3 (2005), 481–511.Google Scholar
Brennan, J. R. “Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika.” Africa 8 (2011), 68–89.Google Scholar
Brennan, J. R. Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Bromber, K. Imperiale Propaganda: die ostafrikanische Militärpresse im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collier, P. and Lal, D.. Labour and Poverty in Kenya, 1900–1980. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Cooper, F. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, F. On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Englund, H. “Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and the Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57:1 (2015), 221–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederiksen, B. F. “‘The Present Battle Is the Brain Battle’: Writing and Publishing a Kikuyu Newspaper in the Pre-Mau Mau Period in Kenya.” In Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, edited by Barber, Karin, 278–314. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Frederiksen, B. F. “Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connections.” Africa 8:1 (2011), 155–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furedi, F. The Mau Mau War in Perspective. London: James Currey, 1989.Google Scholar
Gadsden, F. “The African Press in Kenya 1945–1952.” Journal of African History 21 (1980), 515–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gadsden, F. “Wartime Propaganda in Kenya: The Kenya Information Office, 1939–1945.” The International Journal of Historical Studies 19:3 (1986), 401–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gregory, R. G. South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890–1990. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Gregory, R. G. Quest for Equality. New Delhi: Orient, Longman, 1993.Google Scholar
Hofmeyr, I. Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holquist, M. “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship.” In “Literature and Censorship,” special issue, PMLA 109:1 (1994), 14–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, E. “‘Our Common Humanity’: Print, Power, and the Colonial Press in Interwar Tanganyika and French Cameroun.” Journal of Global History 9:2 (2012), 279–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, L. E. “Playing the Russia Game.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43:3 (2015), 509–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larkin, E. “The Self-Conscious Censor: Censorship in Burma under the British, 1900–1939.” Journal of Burma Studies 8 (2003), 64–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, J. Empire State Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–52. Oxford: James Currey, 2000.Google Scholar
Low, D. A., and Lonsdale, John M.. “Introduction: Towards a New Order.” In The Oxford History of East Africa vol. 3, edited by Low, D. A. and Smith, Alison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Ogot, B. A. “Mau Mau and Nationhood: The Untold Story.” In Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, edited by Atieno Odhiambo, S. and Lonsdale, John, 8–36. Oxford: James Currey, 2003.Google Scholar
Omu, F. “The Dilemma of Press Freedom in Colonial Africa: The West African Example.” Journal of African History 9:2 (1968), 279–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osborne, M. “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu Is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau War.” Journal of African History 56 (2015), 77–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prasad, M. “‘The Natives Are Looking’: Cinema and Censorship in Colonial India,” In Law's Moving Image, edited by Moran, L. H., Sandon, E., Loizidou, E., and Christie, I., 161–72. London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2004.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, D. A. Uhuru and the Kenya Indians: The Role of a Minority Community in Kenya Politics, 1939–1963. New Delhi: Vikas Pub. House, 1983.Google Scholar
Smyth, R. “Britain's African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14:1 (1985), 65–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Throup, D. W. Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau. London: James Currey, 1987.Google Scholar
Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.Google Scholar