Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–1963. Tabitha Kanogo
obligation to provide not less than 180 working days per year on a farm. In return for this, the worker and his family were allowed to live on the farm and cultivate a part of the settler’s land for his own use. A minimal wage would be paid for the work done. The Ordinance did not specify the acreage or number of stock allowed per squatter.
To enforce the Ordinance it was necessary that Kaffir farming be abolished and replaced by labour tenancy. Except for labourers on monthly contracts, the Ordinance stipulated that residence for Africans in the White Highlands should be restricted to Africans with squatter contracts, thus prohibiting illegal squatting. The adoption of this new set-up helped to limit the employers’ cash remunerations to the labourers. The labourer was expected to feed and house himself and his family.
More importantly, resident labourers would ensure the supply of sufficient and easily available labour to the farmers, for the squatters’ wives and children could be called upon at peak labour periods, especially during the harvesting season. Nonetheless, as will be shown later, labour shortages remained rife until the late 1920s, when labour requirements were eased by the depression.
In the meantime, ways and means were discussed as to how to compel ‘idlers’, i.e. ‘men who have not recently been in employment and who are not adequately engaged upon definite agricultural or other economic enterprise in their reserves’, to work.8 In the Settled Areas, labour shortages were juxtaposed with the problem of illegal squatting. Not only were the illegal squatters reluctant to sell their labour at all, but there were also incessant complaints about the contracted squatters’ failure to provide adequate labour. This confirmed the settlers’ contention that the native had no conception of the dignity of labour.9
Though designed to generate and control labour by emphasising the squatter’s labour obligations, the RNLO of 1918 largely failed to ensure the development of an adequate labour supply. The squatters continued to pursue activities that undermined and evaded the colonial government’s sole reason for allowing them into the area. Right from the beginning, then, there had been an ambivalence between the motives of the squatter community on the one hand, and the settler government on the other. But in so far as settlers could now evict any excess or illegal squatters they did not wish to sign on, the Ordinance could be said to have provided a legal framework within which the settlers could exercise some control over squatting. But in itself the Ordinance was insufficient.
Additional labour legislation
Settlers had hoped that the 1918 RNLO would be reinforced by the existing Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1906, under which workers were liable to heavy penalties for negligence of, or absence from, work. However, since squatters belonged to the category of labour-tenants rather than servants, they were able to avoid prosecution, even under the amended 1919 Masters and Servants Ordinance.10 The settlers continued to clamour for the inclusion of squatters under the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1924,11 which would make the squatters liable to prosecution for negligence of duty. The settlers maintained that it was necessary to define the word ‘squatter’ to emphasise that the status of a resident labourer was that of a servant rather than tenant.12 With the 1918 RNLO’s obvious limitations, other enactments to control labour were also used. From 1919 onwards, labourers were required to carry an identification certificate (kipande), on which the owner’s previous and current labour history was entered, including the nature of employment, date of engagement, length of contract and wages paid.13 The kipande system was a vicious imposition on ‘native’ labour. It made desertion very difficult, helped to keep the labourers’ salaries static, and turned the labourer into a virtual prisoner until such time as his contract came to an end and he was discharged. Even then, the squatter stood few chances of getting a better paid job unless he risked destroying his identity card, along with all the revealing information it contained. The combination of the kipande and the 1918 RNLO in effect meant that the squatter contract ceased to be a civil and mutual agreement between two people and became a ‘publicly supervised and enforced enterprise’.14
By 1920, it was evident that for a squatter the acquisition of a labour contract was little more than a means to an end. Settlers were forced to ‘police’ the attested squatters to ensure that they provided adequate labour. Uncontracted Kikuyu continued to reside illegally on occupied and unoccupied land in the White Highlands.15 In as much as both categories of squatters – legal and illegal – failed to comply with settler expectations, they were seen to constitute the much detested ‘squatter menace’.
To reduce the shortage of labour, settlers continued to welcome more squatters from the Reserves, even though those whose contracts had expired seldom returned home, preferring to stay on in the Settled Areas. New generations of squatters’ children also remained in the Settled Areas, though not always employed on the farms. Although the owners of large farms were seen to be particularly vulnerable to illegal squatters, it was the poorly-supervised unoccupied and Crown lands that literally teemed with uncontracted Kikuyu. The manner in which the Kikuyu encroachment took place made detection especially difficult, as an exasperated administrator remarked:
They creep on all unbeknown; first of all living with a friend or relation, then occupying the hut of a deceased person. Later a wife appears and a few handful of maize are planted. If enquiries are made it is stated by all that the person concerned is only on a short visit and was kind enough to give a hand in the hosts’ garden.16
According to the laws in operation in the mid-twenties, it was neither possible nor considered tactful to prosecute the occupier. But, as the administrator concluded, the 1918 RNLO also made it impossible to prosecute an African who encroached on such land:
Nothing exists in the law to prevent a native from going to a European farm, cultivating a crop and later when called upon to work sliding off and doing exactly the same thing. He gets virgin soil, the price of a good crop and no work. If fact we seem to have encouraged in the Kikuyu just what we wanted to put a stop to.17
Even when the demand for labour fell, exodus to the Settled Areas continued. This was most noticeable in the Naivasha, Nakuru, Eldoret and Trans-Nzoia Districts where ‘numbers of natives residing on farms continued to increase during the year (1923) somewhat out of proportion to the actual labour requirements’.18 In both the Naivasha and Nakuru Districts the African population, which was largely squatter, increased markedly.19 If we compare table 1.1 in Chapter 1 with the figures in table 2.1, we can see just how much the squatter population did increase in only one decade.
TABLE 2.1
It was felt that existing legislation was inadequate for coping with this sharp rise in the squatter population, and new Ordinances were therefore adjusted to take this into account. For example, the RNLOs of 1924 and 1925 provided for the punishment of a labourer who failed to carry out his duties, or who resided on a farm other than as a squatter under a labour contract. The 1925 Ordinance also stipulated that, when a farm changed hands, the contracts were automatically transferred to the new owner. In return for their increased powers over the squatters, the settlers were obliged to provide the squatter with building materials, in addition to land for grazing and cultivation.20 Even these increased powers, however, failed to curb squatter resistance and the administration had to intervene by forcibly removing illegal squatters from unoccupied or badly supervised farms to those that needed labour.21
Settlers and squatter stock
Existing legislation was also inadequate for dealing with the large numbers of squatter stock and the detrimental effect this was believed to be having on the settler economy. In the 1920s, high commodity prices encouraged settlers to diversify the largely maize monoculture economy into the stock and dairy industry. Settlers imported herds of expensive grade cattle and sheep, some of which