Critics of colonial policy in Kenya: with special reference to Norman Leys and W. Norman McGregor Ross

Abstract

During the inter-war years a number of influential left-wing humanitarians tried to inform and arouse British public opinion in order to put a deadlock on the plans of the Kenya settlers for self-government. These liberals were successful in creating a political force to balance that of /a^e/y r'-ea.So^ the settlers and/a Great White Dominion was largely for this reason not created in East and Central Africa and a strong Imperial Trust was retained. Two men who had formerly been civil servants in Kenya, Norman Leys and W. Mc&regor Ross, were responsible for initially informing members of the public about the injustices perpetrated on Africans by the settlers and for maintaining a flow of pro—African propaganda in books, in the press and through a number of left-wing and humanitarian organisations, though chiefly through the Labour Party. They described the significant subsidy of white settlement by African taxation and labour, the complete absence of attempts to develop independent African production, the effective enslavement of the African in the modern industrial system.

Leys and Ross we® motivated by a desire to apply Christian ethical principles to the injustices of East Africa and used the socialist movement as their vehicle for achieving substantial political and economic reforms: peasant agriculture must be given direct economic aid by the State; Africans must be actively prepared for self-government in a multi-racial state; the African must own his own land and be free to labour on it for his own profit; European privileges must be extended to Africans, thus realising the traditional Imperial ideal of equal rights. They applied to Kenya the means which had helped to improve the lot of the British worker: education, the franchise, unions and co-operatives. Without these reforms, they predicted, a devastating African rebellion would occur. They failed to impress the Colonial Office with the urgency of the need for reform, though various commissions on, for example, land and taxation, confirmed their allegations, and were regarded there as partisan fanatics; as the economy of Kenya was dependent on settler production, initiative for change would have to come from Africans themselves. Leys and Ross helped to thwart the acquisition of greater political power by the settlers while African protest matured.