Mau Mau and all that

Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya:

Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

And yet writing 30-odd years later in his monumental volume Inside Africa in 1954, John Gunther summarised the division of Kenya’s arable land between Europeans and Africans in two pithy sentences:

Roughly Kenya has 68,700 square miles of arable land. A minute handful of Europeans has 16,000 or 24 per cent of this; five and a half million Africans have to get by as best they can on the rest.

So what about the ‘paramountcy of African interest’? The answer has two parts. First, the White Paper was a near-perfect example of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. The key ‘crown land ordinances’ were all enacted before it. As Gunther told his readers, one of these

defined the borders of the White Highlands and forbade any ownership in this whole area by anybody not a white European.

The second part of the answer is that the Devonshire principle was never invoked, in all Kenya’s 40 years from 1923 to independence, as a ground for changing the defined borders of the colony’s so-called White Highlands.

Mau Mau is, of course, the name — of uncertain provenance — that has been given to the violent African uprising against Kenya’s colonial government in the 1950s.