American Historical Review reviews Empire State-Building
A. Olumwullah, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
The Kenyan colonial state, although basically a conquest one, was both an event and a process. As an event, it was a revolutionary construct that came into its own through physical and ideological means. As a process, it was an apparatus that transformed, and in turn was itself transformed, by the African societies with which it came into contact. Thus, while in its transforming capacity it created a colonial economy and a colonial society, in the process of transformation it changed from its conquest/pacificationist stance between 1902 and 1920 to a status that at once talked about, on the one hand, mediation among settler, Indian, and African interests and, on the other hand, the protection of native population under the vaguely defined notion of trusteeship. During the interwar period and beyond, the colonial state moved in quick succession from its self-appointed role of mediator, to a settler-dominated construct that was interventionist in stance when it came to social and economic change in the colony. This story, as nuanced and fascinating as it is, cannot be said to have received the attention it deserves from historians as, say, debates surrounding the Mau Mau war of liberation. This is even the more true when it comes to the debates that informed these changes, the idea of welfare in Britain and its interface with notions of empire-building, trusteeship, and community development in the colony. That is the story that Joanna Lewis sets out to tell in her book.
Although the book has as its canvass the geographical space, Kenya, and a crucial period "flanked on either side by the tail-end of the Depression and the early violence of Mau Mau" to offer a history of administrative thought and practice as "told through the ways in which Europeans tried to engineer social change" (p. 3), its subject matter of necessity leads to a discussion of the ideational arena that informed the end of the British Empire. This is the "history of men and women at work whose labors reflected and affected their times," the men and women who, encouraged "to modernize trusteeship but enjoying little in the way of an extensive state structure or easy access to civil society . . . looked to improve African welfare as metropolitan Britain launched its welfare state." The conspicuous disjuncture between intent and practice notwithstanding, welfare and state-building in Kenya were not only "inexorably intertwined" but also reveal how post-World War II thought and practice became "one of the most enduring legacies of colonial government" (pp. 1-2). This history is told through four "historiographies of empire" (p. 4): the metropolitan historiography of the importance of World War II; the historiography of metropolitan thought and action; the historiography of gender as a historical dynamic; and the historiography on the late colonial state and its centrality to the understanding of the "fate of twentieth-century Africa" (p. 13).
Through her exploration of these historiographies, Lewis shows how, after the war, the Colonial Office increasingly came to pay more attention to African welfare, with specific attention to poor urban living conditions, rural squalor, health, and education. The four "witnesses" to the way war changed the tempo and contents of debates about these developments were Lord Hailey, who grafted Colonial Official thinking "on to a colonial reality that was hitherto opaque and out of London's reach" (p. 88); Margery Perham, the "godmother to the colonial service in the last thirty years of colonial rule" (p. 89) and "university aunt of the colonial service" (p. 362). Who not only "dramatized a real crisis in the imperial conscience" (p.110) but also urged "for an expanded state-building project designed to be Africa's panacea and right" (p. 101); a politically active class of Africans in Kenya who began "to pick up the echoes of Perham's colonial reckoning in impressive and threatening ways"; and the senior officials in Nairobi who, because the preceding three officials in Nairobi who, because the preceding three witnesses had testified to and exposed "a fragmenting, unstable vision of how to proceed with the modernization of trusteeship" (p. 111), acknowledged that "social and economic improvements" were crucial to the colonial enterprise while at the same time insisting on "longer timetables plus local autonomy" (p 120).
Although progress in reform and change began to be realized during the second colonial occupation as technicians, trainers, and professionals were brought in, the net result of all this was that the social reform and engineering envisioned by Perham and the post-war British Labour government slowed down. This was compounded by the growing assertiveness of the interventionist state and by the lack of tangible progress by African political groups agitating for reform. According to Lewis, the latter manifested itself in the lack of influence on the tempo of change by African returnee soldiers, since few of them assumed leadership roles in bodies like local native councils. Furthermore, the contestation between colonial officials over what African welfare or development meant did not help matters. Although these individuals were not opposed to the notion of African self-help, they thought it "difficult to break up the relationship between generalist district officers and their system of control through equally generalist chiefs." To them, "technical expertise never broke free of the subordination which sets the pattern for the rest of the century" (p. 155).
The book ends with the Mau Mau rebellion, and with a generalized overview of how community development was not only accepted policy but also a panacea to Kenya's problems. That this incredible story ends in 1952 is disturbing, given the author's promise in the introduction of the book that it is "a history of how contemporary development practice has its roots in the colonial period" (pp, 1-2). Taking the story further and anchoring it in, say, the all-important 1954 Synnerton Plan for land reform in Kenya would have been better. But this must perhaps await for a sequel to which any student of the British Empire and colonial state-building must look forward with great anticipation. Lewis is also silent on the role/place of Christian missions in the unfolding drama, and on liberal settlers who envisioned a multiracial society in Kenya. But these are quibbles that in no way diminish the scholarship that went into the research and writing of the book. It should not only go a long way in filling a gap in modern Kenyan historiography but will be a building, as well as for African leaders as they challenge colonial legacies on notions of development and seek new development paradigms for their countries.
American Historical Review
June 2004
