As well as access to land, the settlers needed a cheap and abundant supply of labour. It was intended that Africans should be farm-workers on settler farms. The government proceeded to impose various legislative and financial measures to force Africans into the labour market.2 These measures included the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively), the alienation of African lands and the discouragement of African cash crops, especially in areas bordering the White Highlands. These would ensure that Africans were unable to become self-sufficient and would have to seek wage employment to meet their cash needs. For a period, the government even procured forced labour. The 1906 Masters and Servants Ordinance and an identification pass known as the kipande (1918) were used to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion. At the same time, the government sought to strengthen the settler economy by providing various services. These included a rail and road network, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services and credit and loan facilities.3
The above measures were all designed to polarise the settler and African economies, by subordinating the latter to the former.4 The process was protracted, violent and subtle, and unleashed numerous conflicts and contradictions. Although they were progressively subordinated, Africans, particularly the squatters, sought to adjust, and in some cases to outwit, the colonial machinations. The following examination of land alienation among the Kikuyu attempts to illustrate both the colonial government’s disregard for African rights of proprietorship in land, and the Kikuyu responses to the situation, especially with regard to the emergence of the squatter community.
Land alienation among the Kikuyu
When the British government declared a Protectorate over what came to be known as Kenya, Kikuyu settlement stretched northwards of Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya.5 European settlement of the White Highlands began in the southern district of Kikuyu country.6 It soon transpired that settlers intended to appropriate the more highly cultivated areas, land that had already been broken in preference to waste and unoccupied land.7 Administrative officers entrusted with the task of processing European applications for land usually gave settlers immediate authority to occupy land, with the only condition being that they pay the Kikuyu owners a meagre three rupees per acre compensation for their loss of rights.8 In the Kiambu-Limuru areas about 60,000 acres of Kikuyu land were alienated between 1903 and 1906.9 By 1933, 109.5 square miles of potentially highly valuable Kikuyu land had been alienated for European settlement. A register listed 50 Europeans who were expected to compensate the African owners of the land they now occupied with a total of 3,848 rupees to be shared between approximately 8,000 Kikuyu. A further 3,000 Kikuyu living on the land at the time of alienation received no compensation whatsoever.10
This indiscriminate alienation of African land rendered several thousand Africans landless. Those Kikuyu who had lost their land to European settlers in the Kiambu-Limuru areas were urged to stay on to provide labour for them. By July 1910, there were 11,647 Kikuyu on the Kiambu-Limuru settler farms cultivating approximately 11,300 acres of land then owned by European settlers. Some of these ‘squatters’ were the original owners of these same farms.11
The term ‘squatter’, which originated in South Africa, denoted an African permitted to reside on a European farmer’s land, usually on condition he worked for the European owner for a specified period. In return for his services, the African was entitled to use some of the settler’s land for the purposes of cultivation and grazing. In the case of the Kiambu-Limuru Kikuyu, this meant that those who continued to reside on the same land were transformed from landowners to squatters overnight. This first group also included Kikuyu families that had fled from the Kiambu-Limuru area to Muranga during the 1899 famine and had since returned. They too were encouraged to remain on their alienated land to provide for the labour demands of the settlers.12 But this initial attempt to create an African labour force was largely unsuccessful. Africans were reluctant to work as wage-labourers except temporarily and at their own convenience. In many cases, wage labour meant having to work far from home. This, coupled with the various hardships of wage labour, including inadequate housing, low wages, long working hours and unfamiliar diets, precipitated unrest and desertion among the workers.13
Attempts to turn the Kikuyu into farm-workers were therefore highly unsuccessful. This was partly because Kikuyu society had an expansionist dynamic of its own, propelled by clan (mbari) expansion and competition, by the entrepreneurial ambitions of the cattle-owning ahoi (landless people amongst the Kikuyu), and by the pressures of colonial measures enforced by greedy and hostile colonial chiefs. In addition, the settler community was weak and, for the most part, especially in the beginning, could get no more than the rent they charged from these Kikuyu frontiersmen.
The Kikuyu expansionist dynamic
The acquisition of land in Kikuyuland operated through what was known as the githaka system.14 Under this system, each clan established its ownership over a specified portion of land, with each clan member being entitled to land within the githaka. Ahoi from another clan could acquire the right to cultivate portions of the githaka in return for gifts to the clan elders. In this way, they were able to accumulate large herds of stock.
Land ownership among the Kikuyu was initially established either through prior cultivation, breaking up virgin land (known as kuna), or purchase. The first occupant or purchaser then founded an mbari comprising an extended family or clan. The founder of such a group had jurisdiction over this githaka and parcelled it out to his wives, married sons and ahoi. On his death the eldest son of the senior wife assumed the role of muramati (the trustee of the land). Subsequent subdivisions resulted in the development of several ithaka whose boundaries and manner of acquisition were known. If disagreements arose, members could leave their clan to buy land or clear virgin land and establish a new clan with a new muramati. New clan, or mbari, land could also be established while still maintaining allegiance to the old muramati.15
The establishment of colonial rule then blocked any further Kikuyu expansion either to the north or to the south. The pioneer migrants visualised the opening up of the White Highlands as a new frontier, in much the same way as the southern Kiambu area had been in the closing years of the last century.16 The availability of extensive virgin land in the White Highlands enabled squatters to continue their pre-colonial cultivation and stock-keeping on a much larger scale than was possible in Central Province.
In the following pages, I will show how squatters were not only drawn to the White Highlands by dreams of wealth, but were also pushed there because of land shortages and the oppression of chiefs. Initially the Kikuyu squatters merely took advantage of the suitable conditions presented to them but later, capitalising on administrative incompetence and inability to arrest their activities, they occupied and used vast areas of the White Highlands, bringing into existence an economic system that operated within and in competition with the settler economy.
Factors behind Kikuyu migration
Land shortage
Although there was definite evidence of land shortage in Kenya even before 1914,17 during this period the application of the term ‘land shortage’ was relative. While some clans in Kiambu District owned enough or even surplus land, land alienation had rendered many families in the same area completely landless, especially in the Limuru area. As a result, there had already been a wave of Kikuyu movement to the White Highlands in search of land as far back as the early 1910s. One of these early migrants was Wanjiku wa Kigo. She moved to the Rift Valley with her stepmother before the First World War.18 Her father had initially been left behind to look after the family’s livestock. Wanjiku said that her family moved because their land in Central Province was inadequate. They ‘hated their plot (shamba) at home because the soil was “red” – it lacked fertility’.19 This land compared poorly with the Rift Valley