Heritage

How costly rail changed Kenya’s destiny for good

rail

Nairobi Railway Station 1916. FILE PHOTO | NMG

When Kenya was declared a British Protectorate in 1895, the thinking in London was that it would merely serve as an access route to Uganda where the headwaters of the Nile had recently been “discovered” by Henry Morton Stanley.

The geopolitics of the day suggested that whichever imperial power controlled the source of the Nile would gain monopoly over trade and the vast natural resources in this part of Africa.

Kenya was to be held in support of a much larger imperial purpose, not to be developed. However, the original intention had to be revised substantially, as neither the cost nor the returns on the overhead capital outlay invested to meet the intention matched the original projections.

The Uganda Railway (as it was then known) was expected, in August 1895, to cost £ 1.75 million. These estimates had to be revised upwards to £ 3 million in 1896, £4.93 million in 1900 and, in the final reckoning, £ 5.53 million in 1902.

It was supposed to carry about the same value of imports as exports but by 1903 was carrying more than eight times as much, creating a very large deficit in revenue generation.

Although European missionaries had preceded the settlers in Kenya, admittedly on the more altruistic cause of spreading the Gospel to the Africans “living in darkness”, their presense and influence would play a vital role in making Kenya a viable investment for Whitehall.

The modus operandi employed by missionaries was to befriend local chiefs and acquire land on favourable terms in exchange for goods or cash. But as Thomas Watson was to note in 1897 “All the land here (Dagoretti) is privately owned by someone or more of the natives and now they have learned to ask for high prices for land compared with what they thought of two years ago”. However, he pressed ahead with the purchase, completing it in May 1898, at a cost of 6.4 rupees (Sh8.50) per acre.

This model of transaction between occupier and purchaser of land did not long outlive the formal colonial occupation: concessions of this type were incompatible with its persistence (Doris Lessing, The Old Chief Mshalanga: Collected African Stories).

The miscalculations of the cost of building the railway and the return on the investment therein required an immediate economic response to prevent the territory from becoming a long-term drain on the colonial government and Whitehall.

The “least-cost” means of forcing development was the granting of large-scale monopoly concessions of land to white immigrants, very often to companies with a British or Southern African base. This followed earlier abortive attempts to attract Indian cultivators, Jews and Scandivinians in the highland areas. By December 1914, the Governor, Sir Charles Eliot and his successors had managed to alienate a total of five million acres over a period of 11 years.

It was during this period that the White Highlands were created and the Maasai were moved out of Laikipia to make way for European occupation of large tracts of land.

The price of these concessions was set at two rupees per acre in the prime highlands with adequate rainfall, but Governor Eliot granted it free of charge to “pioneers” in areas where there was deemed to be no settlement.

Pastoral land was in principle leased to the Crown at one anna(0.08 rupee) per acre, but very often was sold outright to big concessionaires on leasehold terms which in response to pressure from the purchasers were made gradually easier as the years progressed.

The offer of such generous “package deals” – cheap land on easy development conditions and secure tenure- was seen, rightly or wrongly, as the minimum supply price which the colonial administration had to pay in order to attract the well-capitalized settlers they wanted, who ex hypothesi were already enjoying a comfortable standard of living and who needed inducements greater than those offered in Canada and Australia to compensate them for the climatic and disease risks associated with agricultural pioneering.

In order for the offer to be sustainable, it was necessary to crush the incipient “free” market for land between the coloniser and the colonised, where prices were far higher to the adavantage of the native people. This required a legal ban on that market backed by physical force.

In the event, a ban on all dealings in land “between Europeans of whatever nationality and natives” was imposed by the Kenya Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902, ostensibly in the interests of “preventing exploitation of the latter group”.

The supreme irony of the justification offered for the ban appears most clearly when one compares the sums received by Africans on the open market in pre-colonial times with the sums they received when ordered to part with what, by a stroke of a pen, had been turned into “Crown Land”.