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Welcome to Kenya From Within by W. McGregor Ross (1927)

The Kenya case histories begin with the book entitled 'Kenya From Within: a Short Political History' written by William McGregor Ross and published in 1927. Ross' text has been digitised and annotated and extended with hypertext to the present day.

William McGregor Ross

William McGregor Ross (1876-1940) travelled to British East Africa in 1900, where he worked for three years as an assistant engineer on the Uganda Railway, then as engineer in charge of laying on a water supply to Nairobi. In 1904 he was made Director of Public Works, East Africa Protectorate, a post he held until 1923 and during a Commission of Enquiry into the working of his department. From 1916 to 1922 he served as an ex officio member of the Legislative Council of the East Africa Protectorate. Retiring in 1922, Ross returned to England, where he maintained an interest in African affairs, publishing 'Kenya from Within' in 1927.

He was also involved in Labour Party politics and was the British workers' delegate to the Forced Labour Committee at the International Labour Conference in Geneva, 1929. He was a member of the Mandates Committee of the League of Nations Union and gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee on East Africa, 1930-1931. In 1915 he married Isabel Abraham (1885-1964), a history teacher at Wellington High School for Girls, who had been living with his sister, Nellie Ross, for several years. In Kenya she pursued her interest in women's movements and politics, co-ordinating the East African Women's League in 1917. She was instrumental in obtaining the vote for European women in elections to the Legislative Council in 1919. They had two sons, both born in Kenya. Charles Freer Andrews (1871-1940) was a missionary who became involved in Indian affairs, campaigning in support of Mohandas Gandhi and holding the post of Vice-President in Rabindranath Tagore's Institution in Santiniketan, Bengal. Tagore was first acquainted with the Rosses while campaigning in Kenya in 1921 for the rights of its Indian settlers, and became a close friend, visiting them often in England.

Ross' book 'Kenya from Within' is an important eyewitness account, based on a long run of his personal diaries, of the aims of the British in Kenya, which he describes with amusing irony. His philosophy of empire building he defines as generating happy families for all participants in the process of colonisation. This is based on using and enjoying the land well. He contrasts this with exclusive land-grabbing motivation of the Europeans. The difference is clearly stated in his chapters on the administrator's treatment of Indians and Maasai.

In this respect his book is also important in that it is the account of the process of colonising other people's lands by someone who was firmly inside as part of the process but also an observer of the impact it had on the native peoples.

Colonisation of Kenya

The appropriation of land in East Africa, throughout its history of settlement and control by the British, from early exploration to the State's origin as the East Africa Protectorate (1895 until 1920) to its later status as Kenya Colony (1920 until independence in 1963), was an environment in which settlers, colonial authorities, and missionaries found themselves inextricably connected. Dependent on each other, these relationships were often symbiotic. However, while this "white man's country", twice the size of Britain and more than 4,000 miles from London, encouraged the positive development of relationships between these disparate European coteries and allowed each group unique possibilities for expansion, the associations were not always without friction.

As much as they needed their arms and indigenous allies, for the project of controlling their colonies, Westerners also needed cultural creations such as the map, the anthropological survey, information about the region's natural history, the Orientalist history, and the essentializing myths of Third World barbarism and backwardness. The cultural complex of beliefs, discourses, and customs reinforced and expressed British power. It is still a cross-cultural, interdiciplinary labyrinth that has to be navigated to gain an understanding of the ways rulers and subjects participated in colonialism. In Kenya as elsewhere this was expressed through the transforming effects of capitalism on the bonding of political economy and natural economy, with an inevitable conflict between cultural and materialist interpretations of land, where cultural constructions were focused on colonial "order and control."

However, the relationship between settlers, missionaries, and colonial authorities in Kenya was tenuous. Divided by socioeconomic background, economic interest, cultural pursuits, moral identity, and legal-political beliefs, the colonist groups shared little beyond skin color. While all three parties were concerned with pacifying and proselytizing indigenous Africans, they often pursued conflicting agendas according to their interests. Settlers, those Europeans (usually British) who came to profit from the economic opportunities of occupying vast tracts of land in East Africa, developed farms and cultivated livestock and were most focused on economic issues of the land; how to get it, what to do with it and how to keep it. The British government and its representatives and administrators in Africa were motivated by the economic development, political stability of people on the land and the retention of what today we describe as its overwhelming biodiversity.

Missionaries, however, were focused on the sociopolitical condition of the tribal peoples and were concerned with disseminating religious ideology. Their efforts resulted in the integration of the native Kenyans peaceably into the new European socio-cultural/economic framework. This involved the European colonists having to deal with three major indigenous ethnic groups; the Bantus, the Cushites and the Nilotes and the coastal Indian traders, who were already a long-standing part of the territory's economy.

Today, the Bantu form the largest ethnic community in Kenya. They make up about 70 percent of the country's population, but they occupy less than 30 percent of the Kenyan land base. The Bantu people in Kenya live mainly in the coastal, central, western and eastern regions of the country. The Kikuyu tribe forms Kenya's largest single Bantu sub group. Their closest kin are the Embu and Meru tribes. These are followed closely by the Luhya, who live in Western Kenya, the Kabmba people of Eastern Kenya, the Kisii tribe from the Rift Valley region, and the Swahili, Taita and Mijikenda people from Kenya's coast.

Unlike the Nilotes, rural Bantus are agriculturalists who grow much of Kenya's cash crops, including the popular Kenya coffee, tea and other agricultural products such as maize, beans, rice and sugar.

Cushites, or Cushitic people, live in the arid and semi-arid eastern and northeastern parts of Kenya. They reside along a very large area of land that runs from the east of Lake Turkana, stretches to the north of Kenya, and through to the Indian Ocean. Cushites include the Somali, Rendile, Borana and Oromo tribes. Due to the dryness of their habitat throughout most of the year, Cushites are mainly nomadic pastoralists who keep large herds of cattle, camels, goats and sheep. Cushitic people maintain very close ties with their kin across national borders - the Cushites of the neighboring countries of Somalia and Ethiopia.

Kenyan Nilotes reside in the broad Rift Valley region of Kenya, around Lake Victoria. They are comprised of three distinct groups: the River Lake Nilotes; the Luo, who live along Lake Victoria and practice fishing; and the Plain Nilotes, who include the Maasai, Samburu and Turkana people. The Plain Nilotes are pastoral tribes who have defied modern trends and retain most of their traditional ways of life. They mainly reside in the Rift Valley where they practice nomadic pastoralism.

The plain Nilotes roam from one part of their territory to another in resonance with the rainfall and in search of water and fresh food for their large herds. The Highland Nilotes are the Kalenjin people who live in Kenya's Western Highlands. Due to their geographical positioning and good climatic condition, the Kalenjins are able to practice both pastoralism and agriculture.

Kenya's other, smaller tribes are independent or sub-tribes of the larger tribes. Just like the large tribes, each of Kenya's small tribes is culturally unique. These tribes are spread out across the country, residing in different parts of Kenya.

The ancestors of the Maasai (or more properly Maa-speakers) came to East Africa from southern Sudan sometime during the first millennium AD. They ‘settled’ in what is now Kenya and Tanzania, and continue to live there today, the great swathe of Maasailand broadly following the line of the Rift Valley and fanning out on either side. By the early nineteenth century, at the height of their power, they lived in and on either side of the Rift, occupying an area stretching from Lake Baringo in the north to central Tanzania in the south.5 This former territory has been described as lying at a latitude of between one degree north of the equator to about six degrees south, and more than 200 km wide in some places.

Maasai are imagined to be manifest as two sides of the same coin. All in all, the Maasai tend to remain fixed in time and space as archetypal noble savages, embedded in western images of Africa, exploration and wilderness. Some Maasai themselves play up to this, both in order to satisfy tourist appetites and thereby capitalise on Western fantasies, and to invoke the idea of a ‘traditional’ idyll which has been shattered by modernisation. Public fascination focuses on whether they have ‘moved on’ at all since the turn of the last century, when Commissioner Charles Eliot dismissed their ‘bloody system’, or whether they still adhere to a supposedly timeless, traditional way of life. People are also curious to know whether the Maasai still exist, since news of their imminent extinction has been broadcast since the 1900s, and still abounds today. Some Maasai deliberately invoke this idea when calling for special protection as an indigenous community within the nation state. Little is popularly known or cared about with regards their recent political history.

Kenya: an educational model of cultural ecology

Cultures consist of groups that each have a common access to resources which takes place within a general set of values, beliefs, practices, institutions. Thereby, a group has a sense of shared identity, or the recognition that people are in some way connected and feel themselves to be part of a group. In particular, the adults of the group educate their young to take up the same values, beliefs, and practices as their elders. The big question is what comes first, the resources or the values. Among the many markers of indigenous cultural identity, the attachment to land is one of the most significant. Land is the basis of a culture's economy and is coupled with a deep spiritual relationship with the environment; people feel at one with their ancestral territory and feel responsible for the healthy maintenance of the land—its waters and soils, its plants and animals—for both themselves and future generations. In this connection, the war correspondent Aidan Hartley, online from Laiakipia in 2013, wrote:

"As I write this, my hands are seared and bruised from holding a hot iron after branding our cattle. We have castrated our steers and piled up the testicles on fence posts to fry later. We fought the cattle to the ground. We pulled their tails and they bellowed.

I feel so happy. The cattle brand sizzles into the flesh with a hiss and a cloud of smoke as it burns in the brand KH9, which has been the Hartley mark here in Kenya since 1936. Finally we might have a stud herd that can make a difference. This has all been going on in my absence, but I have come home to the farm after covering dozens of wars and crises for 25 years and I will do it no more. Cattle rustlers and bandits will still shoot at me but I am going to be a farmer for the rest of my life. And the farmer's foot is the best manure for me because I can personally fight off armed cattle rustlers and diseases such as foot-and-mouth.

This morning I went for a walk on the farm and found myself lying on my back, looking up at two African fish eagles calling triumphantly to each other as they wheeled about the sky. I found a buffalo hoof mark in the mud; a dik-dik midden, a swath of trashed bush where a herd of elephant had passed like a cyclone - and a dung beetle rolling a ball of turd like a miniature Sisyphus. Above the birdsong, in the distance, from my neighbour's farm several kilometres away there was the sound of the weaner calves lowing plaintively for their mothers. Sunlight and cloud shadow passed over the land in racing dapples. After walking for an hour, I found myself in a corner of the farm I had never found before, standing in front of a wild caper tree, with a trail of bees emerging from a hole in the trunk like a line of musical notes.

I am in one of the best places in the world. Near here, in November 1897, Lord Delamere, having trekked for a year down through the burning wastes of Somalia and Kenya, rode his horse up the steep escarpment from Lake Baringo in the hot trench of the Rift Valley to the northern marches of the Laikipia plateau a few miles from my home. Here he saw for the first time the cool waters, the green grass, the fresh breeze and cavalcades of clouds that I see each day. In her biography of Delamere, Elspeth Huxley wrote that these things astonished and excited him. Here 'was a promised land, the realisation of a Rider Haggard dream of a rich and fertile country hidden beyond impenetrable deserts and mountains. Here was a modern Eldorado, waiting only for recognition.'"

Hartley is the son of the fourth generation of his family to have served as colonial officers over two centuries.

There are 177 references to land and 42 references to land reservations in McGregor Ross' book and this alone makes it a second-to-none baseline for defining the origins of the culural ecology of present day Kenya.

Missions and the Mediation of Modernity in Colonial Kenya

Christopher Allen

University of Pennsylvania, phra1@upenn.edu

http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1063&context=phr

Hughes, Lotte (2006). Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure. St Antony’s Series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

http://oro.open.ac.uk/7869/3/masaichapter1andconclusion.pdf

http://users.wfu.edu/watts/w02_AfrAmer.html

Jonathan Tudge and Dolphine Odero-Wanga A cultural–ecological perspective on early childhood among the Luo of Kisumu, Kenya

https://www.uncg.edu/hdf/facultystaff/Tudge/Chap%208%20Tudge%20&%20Wanga.pdf

http://www.krepublishers.com/02-Journals/JHE/JHE-12-0-000-000-2001-Web/JHE-12-3-163-01-Abst-PDF/JHE-12-3-207-01.pdf

John Waithaka The Kenya Wildlife Service in the 21st Century

http://www.georgewright.org/291waithaka.pdf