Abstract
The focus is on the limitations, politics, and spatiality of statistical knowledge in colonial Kenya, with particular reference to population and agricultural statistics. The objective is to contribute to recent debates surrounding the role of statistics and enumeration within colonial government and, in particular, research emphasizing the uneven nature of colonial statistical knowledge. It is shown that this unevenness took particular forms in a settler colonial context such as Kenya, where state enumeration was enrolled within particular kinds of political contestations and objectives. These centered on the conflicts between settler capitalism and African production, and resulting demands made on the colonial state. Statistical knowledge concentrated on settler production, but was extended to African areas and economic activities in accordance with specific economic and political objectives. This historical perspective helps to explain why the colonial statistical record in Kenya is piecemeal, incomprehensive and largely blind to specificities of “the urban” as a domain of knowledge and practice.
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The territory we would now recognize as modern Kenya was known as the East Africa Protectorate from 1895 to 1920, thereafter as the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya until independence in 1963. For consistency, in this article “Kenya” will be used throughout.
For example, Kenya’s annual report for 1905–06 noted that figures on birth and death rates were only kept for Europeans “and a few Christian natives and Indians in the larger towns.” These were only given for Europeans, as statistics for the other groups “would be misleading” (EAP 1907, p. 37).
Breckenridge (2014) argues that the fingerprinting system of registration pioneered for the Witwatersrand mines in South Africa, and subsequently exported to Kenya, provided colonial states “with the most basic tools of identification” without having to invest in the more costly processes of written civil registration. Over three decades later, this system would be employed during the Mau Mau Uprising as a means of population control (p. 88).
The rumors that had reached Delamere were mistaken: the annual report for 1924 indicated that the European population had increased by 14% since 1921 (CPK 1926).
The 1928 Births and Deaths Registration Ordinance duly provided powers “to declare the registration of births of all persons in the Colony of any particular race, class, or group, or of all or some of the inhabitants of any area, to be compulsory” (CPK 1928, p. 69). It continued a previous (1906) version’s stipulation that all deaths occurring within a township should be compulsory, while only non-African deaths were compulsory outside of townships.
In the late 1930s, for example, the Nairobi municipal officers of medical services and “native affairs” started to collect their own statistics on wages and cost of living as a means to calculate whether urban workers could afford an “adequate diet” (Van Zwanenberg 1972).
The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA): CO 533/388/8, Byrne to Passfield, 13 May 1931.
Ibid.
In Kenya, an example of the tendency for officials to rely on the “judgment” of local administrators can be found in the Legislative Council debates surrounding the 1929 Food Control Bill (CPK 1929, pp. 24–5).
For example, during the mid-1920s, the chief native commissioner had used the state’s own taxation figures to reveal the mismatch between African direct tax payments and expenditure on direct services in the reserves. Later in the decade, this argument was taken up and pushed by the newly established “local native councils,” in turn forcing a change in government policy on tax spending in favor of African areas (Tarus 2004, pp. 35–6)
TNA: CO 533/413/12, secretary of East African Governors Conference to under secretary of state for the colonies, 2 May 1931.
Statistics of various East African exports on a monthly basis, from June 1943 to September 1945, are available in TNA: MAF 83/1317.
TNA: CO 852/500/2, Grazebrook, ‘Confidential Report of the Controller of Prices and Military Contracts on Price Control in Kenya Colony’, n.d.
TNA: CO 533/530/7, Norton to chief secretary of Kenya, 8 February 1944.
TNA: CO 533/530/7, Norton to chief secretary of Kenya, 8 February 1944; CO 852/500/2, Grazebrook, ‘Confidential Report of the Controller of Prices and Military Contracts on Price Control in Kenya Colony’, n.d.
TNA: CO 533/530/7, Norton to chief secretary of Kenya, 8 February 1944.
TNA: CO 533/535/12, memorandum by Walter, 15 December 1944.
TNA: CO 927/60/4, circular by Jones, 26 November 1946.
TNA: CO 927/60/1, officer administering the government of Kenya to Jones, 15 July 1947.
TNA: CO 1034/11, ‘Extract from Report of African Statistical Conference’, n.d.
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Funding
This work forms part of the Governing Food Systems to Alleviate Poverty in Secondary Cities in Africa project, funded under the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research (Poverty in Urban Spaces theme). The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the UK Department for International Development is gratefully acknowledged (grant no. ES/L008610/1).
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Duminy, J. A Piecemeal Avalanche: the Uneven Topography of Statistics in Colonial Kenya, c. 1900 to 1952. Urban Forum 28, 403–420 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-017-9318-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-017-9318-z