MASTER AND SERVANT IN COLONIAL KENYA, 1895–1939

Abstract

THE recruitment of African labour at poor rates of pay and under primitive conditions of work was characteristic of the operation of colonial capitalism in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The implications of these conditions have been generalized very widely in the historiography of colonial Kenya. Where capital was centred upon extractive industries or upon settler agriculture (as in Kenya), historians have found much evidence to indicate that colonial states (and the metropolitan government) readily colluded with capital in providing the legal framework within which labour could be recruited and maintained in adequate numbers and at low cost to the employer. The state itself was the largest employer of labour throughout British colonial Africa and shared an interest in encouraging Africans into the labour market. Criticisms of labour conditions prevailing in any colony were thus likely to be interpreted as criticisms of the state itself.