Paul Redfern
8 May 2005
London — Controversy has always surrounded the last years of British colonial rule in Kenya with recent allegations of atrocities committed on a massive scale against the Mau Mau gaining massive publicity.
Now, for the first time, another book looks at the whole period of colonial rule during the 20th century from the perspective of the white settlers, missionaries, and government administrators who lived there.
Its title, Red Strangers, the White Tribe of Kenya, is based on the name given to the white people who came to Kenya during the 20th century by the Kikuyu.
Christine Nicholls' book is an intriguing account of how whites viewed their time in Kenya and is, in the main, a fair retrospective history.
Nicholls ignores the antics of the "Happy Valley" crowd, describing them with scorn as a "wealthy and unrepresentative coterie, notorious for its licentious and irresponsible behaviour," who are far from typical of the vast majority of settlers.
The book was written to give voice to the letters and diaries of the many fascinating characters who lived in Kenya at the time, before their reflections on this period are lost forever.
Nicholls is largely balanced in her approach acknowledging readily that colonial rule had many faults, the most important of which was that "the voices of Africans were too little heard, or if noticed at all, too often ignored."
But she argues that the period of colonial rule should be looked at in its historical context and accuses academics of joining in the "fashionable" trend to "piously disavow the colonial years."
Nicholls acknowledges that "there is indeed much to condemn" in the period of colonial rule. But, she adds, "the truth remains that there was a great deal of good and too few people are prepared to stress this".
These achievements included building roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and housing and providing bureaucratic infrastructure and the Mombasa to Nairobi railway. But Nicholls argues that colonial rule also "brought peace where once there was war and released Africans from the horrors of Arab slavery".
Whites also, the book argues, enabled Kenyan farming to move onwards from a subsistence level towards lucrative cash crops. "The whites made an enormous contribution to the economic development and wellbeing of Kenya," Nicholls argues. "Unfortunately, the manner in which this was done was frequently arrogant, overbearing and insensitive.
"(But) much of what they had done was good. Kenya under African rule was economically and politically viable in 1964, it was a democracy, Africans had embraced 20th century ambitions and attitudes and advanced farming methods had been introduced."
Nicholls readily admits the starting point for her narrative for, as a 19-year-old, she had watched the stately lowering of the Union flag in Kenya and its replacement "to ecstatic applause" of the red, black, white and green standard of the new independent Kenya.
She describes her feelings as mixed in watching this and it is clear her narrative is driven in part by the previous life she led in Kenya. It couldn't be in starker contrast to Caroline Elkins' recent book, Britain's Gulag, about the Mau Mau uprising which has aroused such fierce debate both in Kenya and Britain.
And, while it is a perspective which may well irritate, even anger some ordinary Kenyans, it is surely a perspective that deserves to be heard and debated as Elkins' has been.
"Paternalistic though their methods may have been, they (the whites) believed their purpose was fine and proper (and) upon independence the whites felt immensely let down. They had failed to appreciate that governments bow to expediency and after the Second World War it seemed judicious to part with the British empire.
"It is far too simplistic to see one side as villains and the other as heroes."
The book is published by Timewell Press and priced at £18.99.
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