From trusteeship to development: how class and gender complicated Kenya's housing policy,...

Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 311e337www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

From trusteeship to development: how classand gender complicated Kenya’s housing policy,

1939e1963

Richard Harris

School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton,Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1

Abstract

Colonial rule required the control of territory, nowhere more than in cities. In the early twentieth cen-tury, colonial policy in Kenya and the rest of East and Southern Africa had only grudgingly accommodatedAfricans in urban areas. After 1939 policy changed, not only in response to poor local conditions and socialunrest but also because London’s new colonial development policy made a place for African workers intowns. From 1940, new housing and colonial policies acknowledged the importance of the discourses ofclass and gender. Administrators stabilised an African working class by building better municipal housing,and then sought to fashion a middle class by promoting home ownership. They began to promote housingfor families, having recognised that African women could help to make their men at home in the city, and toeducate children to become good citizens. The evolution of Kenya’s housing policy illuminates the charac-teristic pressures, calculations, and responses of colonial rule that were being played out internationally inthe late colonial period.� 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Colonial development; Gender; Housing policy; Kenya; Middle class; Working class

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312 R. Harris / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 311e337

Colonial rule required the control of territory, including its occupation and use by indige-nous populations. Control was critical but never absolute in cities, the hubs of economic ac-tivity and political power.1 As a large part of the built environment, housing was animportant object of regulation and policy; to the historical geographer it offers a prism on co-lonial rule and can ground discussions of colonial and postcolonial discourse.2 These observa-tions are nowhere more valid than in East and Central Africa where, until the 1940s, colonialgovernments denied Africans a permanent place in towns: the African presence was toleratedwhen their labor was required.3 Urban workers were supposed to retain small farms, or sham-bas, in rural areas. Many did so, and there arose what Europeans termed circular migrationand temporary urbanization.4 It seemed that Africans would require only bachelor housingwith minimal facilities: ‘bed-space’, rather than ‘dwelling’ or even ‘room,’ became the unitof measurement. Since urban Africans were supposed to have work, it was feasible to requiretheir employers (including the government) to accommodate them, with municipalities servingas a backup. Such views were consistent with prevailing notions of colonial trusteeship, whichimplied that rural African lifeways should be protected from modernity. The city was not forthe African.5

The change in policy that developed from the 1930s followed a different chronology in eachcolony, but was dramatic. By the 1950s, all colonial governments in East and southern Africa

1 N. AlSayyad (Ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, Aldershot,1992; A.J. Christopher, The British Empire at its Zenith, London, 1989; R. Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Mak-ing of British Colonial Cities, London, 1997; A. Howard, Cities in Africa: past and present, Canadian Journal of African

Studies 37 (2003) 197e235; A. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment, London,1976; N. Perera, Indigenising the colonial city: late nineteenth-century Colombo and its landscape, Urban Studies 39(2002) 1703e1721; B. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore,Oxford, 1996.

2 A. King, Colonial cities: global pivots of change, in: R.J. Ross and G.J. Telkamp (Eds), Colonial Cities, Dordrecht,1985, 12; A. King, Cultures and spaces of postcolonial knowledges, in: K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift(Eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2003, 389. Compare B. Yeoh, Postcolonial cities, Prog-

ress in Human Geography 25 (2001) 457.3 G. Myers, Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa, Syracuse, 2002; A. O’Connor, The African

City, London, 1983; J. Robinson, Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities, Oxford, 1996.4 The urbanization was permanent, but sustained by a changing pool of migratory workers. There were gradations,

and Wilson used the term ‘temporary urbanisation’ to refer to situations where men might spend much of their workinglife in a town. G. Wilson, The economics of detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers No. 5,Northern Rhodesia, 1941; W. Elkan, Circular migration and the growth of towns in Eastern Africa, International

Labour Review 96 (1967) 581e589; W. Elkan and R. van Zwanenberg, How people came to live in towns, in: P.Duignan and L.H. Gann (Eds), Colonialism in Africa, Vol. 4, The Economics of Colonialism, Cambridge, 1975,655e672; S. Stichter, Migrant Laborers, New York, 1985.

5 On urban policy before 1939 see A. Southall, The impact of imperialism upon urban development in Africa, in:V. Turner (Ed.), Colonialism in Africa 1870e1960, Vol. III, Profiles of Change, Cambridge, 1971, 245; G. Ive andS. Groak, A contribution to a review and agenda for research into the production of the built environment in (former

British) colonial Africa, Production of the Built Environment 7 (1985) 335e347. On housing policy see J. Collins, Urbanplanning in a British colony, 1931e1964, in: G. Cherry (Ed.), Shaping an Urban World, New York, 1980, 227e241.R.K. Home, From barrack compound to the single family house: planning worker housing in colonial Natal and

Northern Rhodesia, Planning Perspectives 15 (2000) 327e347; A. Hay and R. Harris, ‘Shauri ya Sera Kali’: the colonialregime of urban housing in Kenya to 1939, Urban History (in press).

313R. Harris / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 311e337

had replaced trusteeship with ‘development,’ implying modernization. Administrators assumedthat in Africa, as in the Europe, this required urbanization. The permanent presence of Africansin towns came to be seen as inevitable, indeed necessary, and so did the provision of housing, notonly for male workers but also for wives and children. Schools would be needed. Employers couldnot be expected to meet all of these needs. The state’s responsibility for African housing, then,grew enormously, and changed.6

What was the exact nature and scale of this shift in policy, what caused it, and what wereits new social dimensions? Although a good deal has been written about the history of hous-ing policy in specific urban centers, notably Nairobi, none of these questions have been sys-tematically dealt with. For a project that is concerned with the emergence and evolution ofBritish colonial housing policy after 1929, I am addressing such questions in several colonies,including Kenya. For that colony, Alison Hay and I have shown that after 1940 the govern-ment greatly increased its housing activity and began to plan for families, a shift apparent inNairobi, Mombasa, and also the provincial towns of Nakuru, Kisumu, and Eldoret.7 In thepresent paper, I consider why this shift occurred, and how it entailed changes in the socialcategories through which colonial policy was framed. My argument is that housing initiativeswere part of the broader shift in colonial policy from trusteeship to development that occurredin this period, and that they implied a social vision that complicated the discourse of race withthose of class and gender.

Those who have studied housing policy in Kenya have emphasized the importance of local con-ditions. They have argued that unrest in Mombasa, and uncontrolled urbanization, forced theKenyan government to tackle the housing question.8 But larger forces, too, were at work. Theidea of trusteeship, easily dismissed, carried weight into the 1950s. Then, London’s new interest

6 The shift in urban policy has been most widely discussed for Northern Rhodesia. See H. Heisler, The creation o

a stabilised urban society: a turning point in the development of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, African Affairs 70 (1971125e145; Northern Rhodesia, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Administration and Finances oNative Locations in Urban Areas, Lusaka, 1944; R.L. Prain, The stabilization of labour in the Rhodesian Copperbelt

African Affairs 55 (1956) 305e312; J.C. Mitchell, Cities, Society, and Social Perception: A Central African PerspectiveOxford, 1987; J. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life in the Zambian CopperbeltBerkeley and Los Angeles, 1999. See also Ive and Groak, A contribution (note 5); F. Cooper, Urban space, industriatime, and wage labour in Africa, in: F. Cooper (Ed.), Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State i

Urban Africa, Beverly Hills, 1987, 7e50; A. Burton, Townsmen in the making: social engineering and citizenship inDar es Salaam, 1945e1960, International Journal of African Historical Studies 36 (2003) 331e365. On Kenya seJ. Lonsdale, Town life in colonial Kenya, in: A. Burton (Ed.), The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, Nairobi

2002, 207e222. On the implications for housing see Collins, Urban planning (note 5); G. Tipple, Colonial housing policy and the ‘African towns’ of the Copperbelt: the beginnings of self-help, African Urban Studies 11 (1981) 65e85Home, From barrack compound (note 5); R. Harris and A. Hay, New plans for housing in urban Kenya

1939e1963, Planning Perspectives 22 (2007) 195e223.7 Hay and Harris, ‘Shauri ya Sera Kali’ (note 5); Harris and Hay, New plans (note 6).8 W.M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire, London, 1936; H. Johnson

The West Indies and the conversion of the British official classes to the development idea, Journal of Commonwealtand Comparative Politics 15 (1977) 55e83.

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in colonial development catalysed change since it brought a financial incentive.9 Under the Colo-nial Development and Welfare Act (CDWA) of 1940, Britain subsidized development projects inthe colonies, including Kenya.10 Locally, and across the colonial empire, a shift in housing policyrequired a positive social vision which suggested the way housing might stabilize workers, pro-mote social mobility and, eventually, ease the transition to political independence. First, as Fred-erick Cooper has argued, it sought to stabilize the working class.11 Then, male administratorsrealized that African wives might anchor urban family life, while home ownership might createa responsible middle class. Housing policy was realigned to meet the nationalist challenge: bythe late 1950s it was the African middle class to whom the British were preparing to pass thereigns of governance. Drawing on published materials, as well as primary sources that includenewspaper accounts, public archives, memoirs, and private papers, I show that this emerging so-cial vision was intimately bound up with the colonial state’s new interest in urban housing, as bothoutcome and catalyst.12

By focusing on one colony it is easier to disentangle, and weigh, the influences upon policy. Thedisadvantage is that wider developments appear as external forces when in fact the influences werereciprocal. The Kenyan government was influenced by London, but changes in London’s outlookthemselves responded to colonial events, including Mombasa’s 1939 strike.13 In Kenya, as in theWest Indies and the Copperbelt, an official report concluded that poor housing had stimulateddissent, and recommended that house building be incorporated into colonial policy.14 If therethinking of Kenyan housing policy after 1939 was guided by London, then, the influence wasmutual. And influences also circulated among the African colonies. Kenyan administratorslooked to neighbors, and to South Africa, for guidance. In 1941 Dr. Kenneth Martin and TrevorC. Colchester, respectively, Nairobi’s Senior Medical Officer of Health and Municipal Native

9 S.R. Ashton and S.E. Stockwell (Eds), Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925e1945, London, 1996, 2 Vols;

L.J. Butler, The ambiguities of British colonial development policy, 1938e1948, in: A. Gorst, L. Johnman, andW.S. Lucas (Eds), Contemporary British History 1931e1961: Politics and the Limits of Policy, London, 1991,119e140; S. Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914e1940, London, 1984; F. Cooper,

Modernising bureaucrats, backward Africans, and the development concept, in: F. Cooper and R. Packard (Eds),International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley andLos Angeles, 1997, 64e92; M. Havinden and D.G. Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical

Colonies, 1850e1960, London, 1993; J.M. Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government: A Study of the Ideas Ex-pressed by the British Official Classes in Planning Decolonisation 1939e1964, Oxford, 1967.10 R. Harris, The evolution of urban housing policy in the British West Indies, 1929e1960s, in: R. Jaffe, (Ed.), The

Caribbean City, Kingston, Jamaica, 2007; Harris and Hay, New plans for housing (note 6).11 R. Stren, Housing the Urban Poor in Africa. Policy, Politics and Bureaucracy in Mombasa, Berkeley, CA, 1978,

276e277; F. Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa,New Haven, 1987, 50e57, 175e193. See also A. Clayton and D.C. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya,

1895e1963, London, 1974, 271.12 The East African Standard [hereafter EAS] was surveyed from January 1, 1953 to July 1955, the height of Mau

Mau. Keyword searches in online databases located material in The Times and The New York Times. Colonial Office

(CO) records were consulted at the National Archives; microfilm records of the Kenyan administration were consultedat Syracuse University; personal papers at the School for Oriental and African Studies, London (SOAS), and RhodesHouse, Oxford (hereafter RH).13 Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11), 35.14 Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11), 3528; Harris, The evolution of urban housing policy (note 10).


Affairs Officer, drew lessons from South Africa’s experience with subsidizing rents; in 1949, withFrank Carpenter, Kenya’s Deputy Labour Commissioner, Colchester toured South Africa andthe Rhodesias for tips on financing and housing design; the previous year, Nairobi had used SouthAfrican expertise to devise its first Master Plan.15 What Kenyan sources do not reveal is whetherlocal initiatives themselves had a regional impact. The present paper cannot explore this issue, butthe probable existence of a web of influences must be borne in mind.

The legacy of trusteeship in Kenya

Why was Kenya’s housing policy re-thought after 1939? The usual answer is that changed cir-cumstances, including a wave of unrest, required it. Luise White has argued that ‘colonial officialswere less concerned with housing urban Africans than with controlling them.’16 Did paternal hu-manitarianism matter less than realpolitik? The balance is hard to weigh, but the significant pointis that after 1939 these considerations coalesced.

A sense of paternal responsibility for African conditions was part of the philosophy of trustee-ship that informed colonial policy until the 1930s. In 1934, the Kenya Land Commission haddeclared that government should build housing if lax enforcement of pass laws led to ‘irregular-ities’.17 Then again, in 1938 Nairobi’s Native Affairs Officer noted that ‘it is not part of our def-inite policy . to turn natives in the Colony into black Europeans,’ but added regretfully, ‘yet wehave done little to prevent this.’18 He, and others, assumed that administrators should address anyproblems that their actions e or inaction e had created. This view persisted after 1945 and in-formed the view of Gordon Wilson, the ‘government sociologist.’ If the state could not keep wivesand children out of town, he suggested, it should ‘accept as its obligation the responsibility ofhousing all and sundry,’ a view endorsed by the East African Standard, the leading Europeandaily.19

The government could have continued to deflect responsibility onto employers, and this was theofficial response to the Mombasa strike of 1939. The Willan commission and the Secretary ofState urged the Governor to enforce section 31 of the Servants Ordinance, which required

15 K.A.T. Martin and T.C. Colchester, Memorandum for the Native Affairs Commission of the Nairobi MunicipalCouncil, Nairobi, 1941; F.W. Carpenter and T.C. Colchester, Report arising out of the study tour to the Union ofSouth Africa and the Rhodesias e January to February, 1949, in: E.A. Vasey (Ed.), Report on African housing intownships and trading centres, Typescript, Nairobi, Apr. 1950, Appendix A, 47e65. Carpenter was promoted to

Labour Commissioner in 1951, a position he held until 1954; L.W.T. White, L. Silberman and P.R. Anderson, Nairobi:Master Plan for a Colonial Capital, London, 1948.16 L. White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, Chicago, 1990, 126.17 Colonial Office, Report of the Kenya Land Commission, September 1933, London, 1934, Cmd.4556, 173.18 Quoted in K.G. McVicar, Twilight of an East African Slum. Pumwani and the Evolution of African Settlement in

Nairobi, Unpublished PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1968, 39 [Hake Papers, PPMS 46, Box 42, File 4:42, SOAS].19 G.M. Wilson, African housing in municipalities, townships and training centres. An Appreciation of the Vasey Re-

port of 1950, Mimeo typescript, 1957, 6 [RH, Mss. Afr. s.919(1), Mombasa Social Survey Papers 1956e1958]; c.f. Stren,Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 189e190; Southall, The impact of imperialism (note 5). See, for example, African

Housing, EAS, 16 Oct. 1954, 6 [editorial]. Although the Standard was capable of contradicting itself without explana-tion. See, for example, Urban Housing, EAS, 21 Feb. 1953, 6.


employers to house their African staff, and he complied.20 This suited municipalities. In Nairobi,in 1953 Ald. Tyson urged the Chamber of Commerce to agree that larger employers should housetheir employees, and towns such as Eldoret agreed (Fig. 1).21 Increasingly, however, such argu-ments were resisted. At a meeting attended by the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies,the Chamber of Commerce rejected Tyson’s argument.22 It was guided by self-interest but colo-nial officials concurred. Among these was Ernest Vasey, once a businessman, and twice Nairobi’smayor, before writing an influential report on housing in 1950, and then becoming Finance Min-ister in 1952. Vasey suggested that money spent on housing might have a ‘hampering effect’ oncapital investment and that large employers might take their business elsewhere.23 Just as bad, be-cause subsidized, employer housing failed to ‘educat[e] the African in basic economics.’24 This wasalso an argument against ‘subeconomic’, municipal housing, as H.S. Booker noted in his reporton the Mombasa strike of 1945.25 But it had particular force against employer housing, whereeconomic rents were harder to implement. By the 1950s, municipalities still tried to extract what-ever they could from employers, but they now saw this as a temporary expedient. As Frank Car-penter, the Commissioner of Labour put it in his report on African wages in 1954, it would be‘unwise, at this stage, to place deterrents in the way of those employers who wish to build perma-nent housing for their employees.’26 Trevor Colchester, now the Secretary for Local Government,agreed with Vasey: ideally, employers and housing would be separated.27 The state, and above allmunicipalities, were responsible for housing Africans.

The government’s duty to house Africans could take different forms, but the paternalism oftrusteeship pointed to municipal housing. Europeans had denied Africans the right to ownurban property on the grounds that, untutored, they might be swindled. This view persisted.Louis Leakey suggested that Africans might be prey not only for European and Asian

20 Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11), 48. Those who employed casual labour, for less than twenty-four hours, were

relieved of this responsibility, a fact that encouraged the already-prevalent use of casual labour on the Mombasa wa-terfront. See Cooper,Waterfront (note 11), 34e35. To muddy the picture, employers were given the option of providinga housing allowance in lieu of accommodation, which some used as a pretext to limit wage. See also D.M. Anderson,

Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895e1939, Journal of African History 41 (2000), 459e485; Kenya, Report ofthe Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Examine the Labour Conditions in Mombasa, 1939, Nairobi, 1939, 12e15, 20;M. MacDonald to Governor H. Moore, 7 Mar. 1940; Moore to MacDonald, 24 Jul. 1940 [CO 533/518/10].21 G.A. Tyson, The African Housing Problem. A Memorandum submitted to the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce,

Nairobi, 1953) [CO 822/588]; Housing shortage ‘acute’ at Eldoret, EAS, Jul. 14, 1955, 5.22 Extract from the Minutes of the Monthly General Meeting of the Nairobi Chamber of Commerce held on Tuesday

the 17th February 1953, Typescript [CO 822/588].23 Vasey, Report on African housing (note 15), 4; E.A. Vasey to R.E. Norton, 13 Nov. 1952 [CO 822/304]. See also

United Kingdom. East Africa Royal Commission [hereafter EARC], East Africa Royal Commission 1953e1955 Report,London, 1955, Cmd.9475, 228; Colonial Office, Housing in British African Territories, London, 1954, Colonial No. 303,

12e13; D. Throup, The Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, London, 1988, 183e184. On Vasey see S. Stockwell,Vasey, Sir Ernest Albert (1901e1984), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.24 Kenya, Labour Department Annual Report, 1949, Nairobi, 1950, 8 [CO 544/60]; Colonial Office, Housing in British

African Territories (note 23).25 H.S. Booker, The official provision of housing in Mombasa, in: H.S. Booker, Report on the Economic and Social

Background of Mombasa Labour Disputes, Nairobi, April 1947, Cyclostyled, Appendix D, 54e56 [CO 533/545/4].26 Kenya, Report of the Committee on African Wages, Nairobi, 1954, 146.27 T.C. Colchester, Oral testimony to the EARC, 18 Jan. 1954, 15 [CO 892/8/3].

Fig. 1. A postwar housing project for the employees of the Kenya and Uganda Railway, Makongeni, Nairobi, c.1945. Employers

were nominally required to provide housing for their African workers and the K.U.R. was one of the first to build for families.

Source: M.F. Hill, Permanent Way. Vol. 1. The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway (Nairobi: East Africa Literature Bureau,

1950), opp. p. 361.


landlords but for street-wise and unscrupulous members of their own community.28 Leakey’sviews carried weight since the British regarded him as the expert on the Kikuyu, who occupiedthe territory around Nairobi and who comprised a majority of the capital’s African popula-tion. They had a certain plausibility, since most Africans were new to the city. Similar viewswere shared by administrators, including Tom Askwith. Askwith was the African AffairsOfficer for Nairobi in the late 1940s, with responsibility for the allocation of municipal hous-ing, before helping with resettlement during Mau Mau.29 A liberal, he believed that becauseAfricans needed protection from market competition the municipality should control lodginghouses and monopolize the sale of beer.30 He also justified public housing since the municipal-ity would not exploit Africans in the way that private landlords might. And so the paternalismof trusteeship continued to shape housing policy after 1945 when, because of changed circum-stances, its significance grew.

28 L.S.B. Leakey, Memorandum presented to the Royal Commission on Land and Population in East Africa, Type-script, 18 May 1953, 3e4 [CO 892/5/2].29 C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, London, 2005, 103, 110, 148; J. Lewis, Empire State-Building. War and Welfare in Kenya,

1925e1952, Oxford, 2001, 287e289; T. Askwith, African housing in Nairobi, Journal of African Administration 2 (195)37e39.30 Nairobi. Municipal African Affairs Officer, Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi e 1946, Nairobi, 1947

Cyclostyled, 9e10 [CO 533/558/7].


Uncontrolled urbanization

Another change that required some response was an uncontrollable increase in the urban pop-ulation, especially unemployed young men.31 Before 1939 this increase had been irregular. Nairo-bi’s African population had boomed in the 1920s, fallen with the Depression, surged in the late1930s and early 1940s, and then slipped before resuming an upward trend after 1948.32 Each cyclecaused administrators to wring their hands, notably in 1939e1940. Initially, these cycles weredriven by variations in the ‘pull’ exerted by urban employment: the decline in Nairobi after1930 was paralleled in other centers like Nakuru.33 Such fluctuations were thought to be self-regulating. The postwar boom was different, being driven by the ‘push’ of rural overcrowdingon the Kikuyu reserves and by the desire of young men and women to escape tribal restraints.34

Nairobi’s African Affairs Officer observed in 1953 that, ‘the African youth feels the pull of the‘‘big city’’.’35 This migration was not self-regulating. Typical of urban growth in many countriesafter 1945, left unchecked it had almost no limit.

Pass laws were meant to check urban growth but, despite urging, they could not be enforced. In1950 Nairobi’s mayor, Norman Harris, asked the government to restrict the influx of Africanssince it compounded the housing shortage.36 The case was also made for Mombasa by C.G.Usher, an elected member of the Legislative Council, who argued for house inspections ‘to seethat you are not getting in a large number of people who have no right to be there.’37 Harrisand Usher were whistling in the wind. Where the pass laws were not an outright ‘farce’ theywere a leaky sieve and a political liability.38 The cost of enforcing them was too great. As Ald.Tyson, speaking for Nairobi’s Subcommittee on African Social Services, observed in 1954, ‘keep-ing people out of Nairobi is well nigh impossible. After all, we have got an area of 32 square milesand short of fencing the area, I do not see how you can prevent people drifting into the town.’39

Usher’s alternative, house inspections, required even more manpower. One problem was that theBritish could expect only grudging cooperation, and no assistance, from legal residents. Speaking

31 P. Ocobock, ‘Joy rides for juveniles’: vagrant youth and colonial control in Nairobi, Kenya, 1901e1952, SocialHistory 31 (2006) 39e59.32 A. Hake, African Metropolis. Nairobi’s Self-Help City, London, 1977, 46, 50, 57.33 M. Tamarkin, Changing social and economic role of Nakuru Africans, 1929e1952, Kenya Historical Review 6

(1978) 105e125.34 Tamarkin, Role of Nakuru Africans (note 33); D. Anderson, The battle of Dandora Swamp: reconstructing the

Mau Mau Land Freedom Army October 1954, in: E.S.A. Odhiambo and J. Lonsdale (Eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood,

Oxford, 2003, 159; B. Frederiksen, African women and their colonisation of Nairobi: representations and realities, in:Burton, Urban Experience (note 6), 223e224; B.W. Gussman, Out in the Midday Sun, London, 1962, 102.35 F.A. Passells, African Affairs in Nairobi, 18 Feb. 1953, Memorandum to the EARC, Nairobi, 3 [CO 892/7/1].36 N. Harris, Oral testimony to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954, 13 [CO 892/8/3].37 C.G. Usher, Oral testimony to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954, 8 [CO 892/8/1].38 Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 191; compare Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11), 178e179; Hake, Af-

rican Metropolis (note 32), 60; J. McCullough, Empire and violence, in: P. Levine, (Ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford,2004, 232; R. van Zwanenberg, History and theory of urban poverty in Nairobi, Working Paper 26, Institute for De-velopment, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, 1972, 48.39 G.A. Tyson, Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954, 9e10 [CO 892/8/1]. A land agent and surveyor, Tyson was

also a nominated member to the Legislative Council.


of colonial African conditions in 1962, Boris Gussman commented that ‘ways and means of ob-taining both passes and accommodation are soon found’ since ‘in the last resort black men willalways help fellow black men to circumvent the white men’s laws.’40 This was borne out by theexperience of Tom Askwith. He noted that although theft was common on municipal estates,and although victims often lost all their worldly goods (since these were easily carried away), crim-inal investigations were hampered by a general ‘opposition to the Police as a body’ because theywere seen to be enforcing ‘an alien law.’41 He concluded that some of police duties should beshifted to Africans, even if this entailed a ‘certain loss of efficiency.’42 He was as good as hisword, establishing a ‘Village Committee’ on each estate. Twelve elected residents made recom-mendations about estate management, including the non-payment of rents. Some committeesworked better than others but at best, in the Government housing at Starehe, one had soon ‘trans-formed the residents from a disorderly crowd of degenerates into a self-respecting community.’43

For a time, in some places, on specific issues, cooperation was possible.But even the least threateningEuropeanwasmetwith suspicion.NicolinaDeverell, a socialwelfare

officer andAskwith’s assistant,whose taskwas toput ahuman face onestatemanagement inNairobi,was seconded to survey conditions inMombasa in 1947. Female, sympathetic, andwielding no policepower, her door-to-door visits nevertheless aroused suspicion. ‘L’, a casual laborer, disliked her in-vestigations and soon disappeared without trace; ‘J’, an unmarried Jaluo, was reluctant to provideinformation, especially after hisKikuyu roommate urged himnot to speak to the ‘offisi yamaskini.’44

How much less inclined they were to cooperate with officials whose job it was to exercise control.The cost of enforcement was increased by the growth of unauthorized fringe settlements. These

had existed since the origins of colonial rule. In some places they were tolerated. Around Kisumuthey had to be since settlement was on tribal lands where the municipality found it ‘tremendouslydifficult’ to secure cooperation from native authorities.45 Here again black men did not wish toenforce white men’s law. Elsewhere, Africans were occasionally cleared and rehoused. In Nairobi,the last prewar initiative was Shauri Moyo, built to house Africans displaced from Pangani.Clearances continued after 1945.46 The government claimed that by the mid-1950s every septic‘eyesore’ had been ‘removed from Nairobi’, and indeed all urban areas except Kisumu.47 Duringthe Emergency, some municipalities might have came close to achieving that goal. Even then, set-tlements reappeared after they had been demolished. In 1955, for example, bulldozers again

40 Gussman, Midday Sun (note 34), 77.41 Nairobi Municipal African Affairs Officer, Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi e 1946, (note 30), 7 [CO

533/558/7].42 Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi e 1946 (note 30), 9.43 Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi e 1946 (note 30), 15.44 N.M. Deverell, A social investigation in Mombasa, in: H.S. Booker, Report on the Economic and Social Back-

ground of Mombasa Labour Disputes (note 25), Section II, 96 [CO 533/545/4]; Lewis, Empire State-Building (note29), 289e290.45 M.G. Baker, Citizenship on the Septic Fringe. Urban Social Policy and Peri-Urban Development in Kisumu,

Kenya, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2002, 334.46 C. Dickerman, Africans in Nairobi during the Emergency. Social and Economic Changes, 1952e1960, Unpublished

MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1978, 19.47 Despatches from the Governors of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika and from the Administrator, East Africa High

Commission, Commenting on the East Africa Royal Commission 1953e1955 Report, London, 1956, 67, 69.


moved into Pangani, where ‘unhygienic’ development was creating a ‘black spot for crime.’48 Theprevious year a shanty town at Mathare had been demolished, but was soon re-settled and soonbecame one of Nairobi’s main informal settlements.49 The same happened in Mombasa eventhough affordable housing was available in Majengo districts.50 The city laid out a servicedself-help project at Changamwe in the early 1950s but discovered that Africans preferred to buildmore cheaply in an adjacent unregulated area.51 When it was suggested to C.G. Usher that houseinspections would simply displace Africans to the ‘perimeter of town’ he replied that ‘we are raz-ing the shanty towns to the very ground.’52 This was a fantasy inspired by Canute. The appeal offringe areas was that they lacked building regulations, pass laws did not apply, and people’s move-ments could not be monitored. The chair of the East Africa Commission asked Nairobi’s deputymayor whether the ‘irksome restrictions you impose on people e I mean irksome to them’ mightencourage some ‘to squat down and live just outside the Municipal boundary where they are notsubject to the restriction.’ ‘Thousands,’ was the laconic reply.53 Demolitions redirected but couldnever stem this tide.

The impossibility of enforcing pass laws was demonstrated during Mau Mau. In Nairobi theBritish mounted Operation Anvil, the ‘largest and most complex exercise of the war’.54 It involvedscreening every African in the capital. Houses were inspected; many locations were fenced off;over half Nairobi’s Kikuyu population was relocated. This emergency operation was undertakenwith the assistance of thousands of British troops. Even then, many Africans slipped through thenet. At the height of army control there was still ‘an intermittent trickle of unauthorized move-ment from reserve to city and vice versa’, with fringe areas like Kariobangi and Dagoretti servingas staging posts.55 Here was the ‘crescendo of lawlessness’ in the Nairobi area that underlined thelimits of state power in ‘outcast Nairobi’.56 With enormous effort municipal locations might bepoliced, for a time, but the suburbs could not.

And then there was the cost in goodwill. Africans faced a myriad of regulations that affectedeverything from where they might live and work to what movies they could see. (One African his-torian recalls that during World War II some films were deemed ‘not suitable for Africans andchildren under 16).’57 One set of regulations stemmed from the fact that the state was a landlord,

48 ‘Shanty village’ to be razed, EAS, 11 Feb. 1955, 9.49 D. Etherton, Mathare Valley. A Case Study of Uncontrolled Settlement in Nairobi, Nairobi, 1971; Hake, African

Metropolis (note 32), 147e149.50 Buildings survey planned, EAS, 8 Jan. 1954, 6.51 R. Stren, A site and service scheme in Mombasa, in: R.A. Obudho (Ed.), Urbanization and Development Planning in

Kenya, Nairobi, 1981, 237.52 Usher, Testimony (note 37).53 R. Alexander, Oral evidence to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954, B2 [CO 892/8/3].54 Anderson, Dandora swamp (note 34), 160.55 Kenya, African Affairs Department Annual Report for 1953, Nairobi, 1955, 186; c.f. Anderson, Dandora swamp

(note 34), 160e161; F. Furedi, The African crowd in Nairobi: popular movements and elite politics, in: J. Abu Lughod

and R. Hay (Eds), Third World Urbanisation, Chicago, 1977, 226.56 Hake, African Metropolis (note 32), 60; c.f. D. Hyde, The Nairobi general strike [1950]: from protest to insurgency,

in: Burton, Urban Experience (note 6), 236, 253; Throup, Mau Mau (note 23), 174e177.57 A.A. Mazrui, Africa and the hegemony of the Second World War: political, economic and cultural aspects, in

Africa and the Second World War, Paris, 1985, 14.


so that municipalities enforced regulations that felt unjust even when they were not. As GeorgeAtkinson noted during a visit in 1952, Nairobi’s projects were efficiently and fairly run, with ap-plicants selected on the basis of order of application, size of family, ‘probable term of residence’,and only then by ability to pay, this being hard to determine.58 Subletting was prohibited, lodgerswere disapproved, and rent arrears were followed up. But by the early 1950s many tenants hadsublet rooms, especially when they returned to their rural homes, and they often demanded‘key’ money. This was potentially exploitive but widely accepted, perhaps precisely because itdid not involve the British. As Miss Deverell noted, there was ‘a general impression among Afri-cans that once granted a tenancy, permanent possession of the house is obtained thereby, and theyare at liberty to sublet it or even . inherit it.’59 Such expectations were unreasonable but by con-tradicting them the municipality aroused resentment.

Almost as irritating were the suggestions that Deverell and her assistants offered, usually towomen. From 1946 until Mau Mau, Deverell ran Nairobi’s estates on ‘modern principles of socialand housing administration’.60 Tenants were monitored and offered a variety of assistance. ‘Allhouses are visited as frequently as possible, and the occupants advised where necessary regardingthe cleaning and furnishing of the house.’61 Welfare visitors noted cooking habits and the ‘use ofthe various household fittings provided’, while evening classes were given ‘to assist the inexperi-enced women and to instruct them in the care of their homes.’62 The advice was well-intentioned,and some may indeed have been useful and well-received. (Fig. 2). But most Africans probablycounted it as interference from busy-bodies associated with the colonial state.

How much more irritating were regulations, such as pass laws, that were obviously unjust. In1941 Dr. Martin and Trevor Colchester noted that every year thousands of Africans were con-victed for breach of the residency by-laws because there simply was not enough housing. This‘cannot fail to create utter disrespect for the law as a reflection of natural justice.’63 In the late1940s the situation grew worse. Those with their ears close to the ground detected a shift in1951e1952. Miss Deverell noted that in twelve months, beer sales had risen by 30% while librarybooks borrowed (chiefly Biggles and Westerns) had fallen by 25%.64 A south Asian visitor in 1953commented that everyday humiliations and restraints, which by then included a curfew, undercutsupport for British rule. ‘These ever-present social insults seemed to me to be very deeply

58 G.A. Atkinson to P. Rogers, Assistant Under-Secretary of State, 4 Jan. 1953 [CO 822/588]; Kenya. Office of theMember for Health, Lands and Government, Development of Facilities for the Permanent Settlement of Africans inUrban Areas. Housing, Typescript, Nairobi, 23 Feb. 1953, 7 [CO 892/7/1].59 N.M. Deverell, Annual Report of the Social Welfare Worker for the Year Ending 31st December, 1951. In:

Nairobi. Municipal African Affairs Officer, Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi, 1952, Nairobi, 1953, Appen-dix A, 10 [CO 892/7/1].60 G.C.W. Ogilvie, Housing of Africans in the Urban Areas of Kenya, Nairobi, 1946, 57e58. Ogilvie acknowledges in-

put from Miss Deverell in the preparation of this published document, and the text on pages 57e58 echoes accountsprovided by Deverell in archived records.61 Kenya. Office of the Member for Health, Lands and Government, Development of Facilities (note 58). This doc-

ument makes it clear that Deverell followed much the same procedure from 1946 to 1953.62 Kenya. Office of the Member for Health, Lands and Government, Development of Facilities (note 58).63 Martin and Colchester, Memorandum (note 15), 5. See also Furedi, African crowd (note 55), 231.64 N.M. Deverell, Annual Report of the Social Welfare Worker (Housing) for the Year 1952, In: Nairobi. Municipal

African Affairs Officer, Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi, 1952 (note 59), 24, 34.

Fig. 2. A kitchen scene in a house for government workers, Mombasa, c.1946. This posed photograph exemplifies the style of house-

keeping that welfare workers sought to instill among African women. G.C.W. Ogilvie, The Housing of Africans in the Urban Areas of

Kenya (Nairobi: Kenya Information Office, 1946), p. 53.


wounding to the Africans,’ she observed, and cause ‘more bitterness than political injustices oreconomic grievances.’65 Others have agreed with her assessment.66 Administrators knew thatcontrols had political fallout. Secret discussions during Mau Mau concluded that a stringentpass system would do more harm than good since it would alienate the ‘loyal’ tribes. The Britishhad to balance possible benefits against certain costs. In Nairobi, in Kisumu, and everywhere, thepass laws in particular were ‘very difficult to apply’ because they were an ‘unpopular thing.’67

After 1945, their chronic weakness compounded with rural overcrowding to produce rapidurbanization.

65 S.R. Rau, Life Goes On Under the Mau Mau’s Shadow, New York Times, 19 July 1953, SM 10, 37.66 Gussman, Midday Sun (note 34); M. Blundell, So Rough a Wind, London, 1964, 106; E.S.A. Odhiambo, The for-

mative years 1945e1955, in: B.A. Ogot and W.R. Ochieng (Eds), Decolonisation and Independence in Kenya 1940e1993,London, 1995, 32; Furedi, African crowd (note 55); D. Kennedy, Islands of White Settler Society and Culture in Kenya

and Southern Rhodesia, 1890e1939, Durham, NC, 1987, 152.67 J.D. Riddock, Oral evidence to the EARC, Kisumu, 27 Jan. 1954, 19 [CO 892/9/4].


Most observers have agreed that after 1945 urban growth led to worsening conditions.David Throup has suggested that ‘the plight of the majority of Africans [in Nairobi] had neverbeen so desperate as it was after 1947’.68 He confirms the impression left by the annualreports of the labor department, which indicate that the ‘acute’ housing shortage in 1945had become a ‘state of emergency’ by 1949 and worsened further in the following year,with ‘serious moral effect’.69 In fact the evidence is mixed. The most widely-used indicatorof living standards is the infant mortality rate. For Nairobi it underlines the extent of socialinequality. In 1939 the death rate for African infants (0.217) was six times that for Europeans(0.035).70 Over the next few years the European rate held steady before declining to 0.026 by1959. The rate for Africans fell markedly, however, reaching 0.131 by 1945, and declining fur-ther to 0.104 by 1959. Disparities had persisted but apparently narrowed, implying that theliving conditions of urban Africans had improved. But this was not the perception ofcontemporaries.

In Kenya, as elsewhere, concerns about public health were why the British first became inter-ested in African housing. They worried about the health of Africans and also themselves. Con-cerns resurfaced with each wave of urban growth. In the late 1930s Nairobi’s Native AffairsOfficer reported on African housing. Providing systematic evidence on overcrowding, St. A. Da-vies noted the consequences for public health.71 The issue resurfaced in the late 1940s when it soonfocused on the ‘septic fringe’. In 1953 Dr. Gregory complained of the ‘very great health problem’caused by the 40,000 Africans living on the city’s borders without sanitation and a reliable supplyof clean water.72 Other doctors, including the director of Medical Services, suggested that most ofthe cases of tuberculosis reported in Nairobi were of people living in the peri-urban areas of thecity.73 Similar concerns were expressed in other centers: in Kisumu, for example, a typhoid out-break was traced to living conditions in the fringe.74

The growth of social unrest

Urban growth and poor living conditions were not decisive. What mattered more, as LuiseWhite implied, was unrest. Strikes at Mombasa’s port in the 1930s, in 1945, and in 1947, wereserious, and after 1945 the emergence of an African crowd posed an even greater threat.

68 Throup, Mau Mau (note 23), 190.69 Kenya, Labour Department Annual Report, 1946 (for 1945), 6; 1950 (for 1949), 16; 1951 (for 1950), 12.70 Reported in M.A. Achola, Colonial policy and urban health: the case of colonial Nairobi, in: Burton, Urban Ex-

perience (note 6), 119e137. Expressed as the number per thousand of infants who die within their first year, rates fluc-tuated. The dates selected show the broad trend.71 E.R. St. A. Davies, Some Problems Arising from the Conditions of Housing and Employment of Natives in Nairobi, 18

Aug. 1939, Nairobi, 1939, Typescript [RH Mss. Afr. t. 13]; c.f. Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 194e195.72 Dr. Gregory, Oral evidence to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954, B3 [CO 892/8/3]; c.f. M. Parker, Political and Social Aspects

of the Development of the Municipal Government in Kenya with Special Reference to Nairobi, PhD, University ofLondon, London, 1949, 81, 101.73 Dr. Anderson, Dr. Walker, and Dr. Trim, Oral evidence to the EARC, 18 Jan. 1954, 3 [CO 892/8/3].74 Baker, Citizenship on the Septic Fringe (note 45), 335; N.R.E. Fendall, Housing, health and happiness, East African

Medical Journal 36 (1959), 473e485.


A growing Mau Mau insurgency ‘threatened to blow apart the charade of colonial trusteeship.’75

At every step administrators recognised that housing played a major role. The Willan commissionconcluded that in 1939 housing was of ‘paramount importance’ in causing labor troubles.76 Thelesson was immediately generalized. Davies’s report on Nairobi referred to Mombasa and con-cluded that in the capital, too, overcrowding was leading to a ‘lack of control.’77 Postwar strikesforced Charles Mortimer, Commissioner for Local Government, to concede that ‘stress has re-cently been laid on the lack of African housing as a prime cause of part and possible future dis-turbances.’78 When inland towns, including Nakuru as well as Nairobi, saw Mau Mau activityhousing was again fingered as a ‘major contributory factor.’79

In June 1953 the Kenyan Indian Congress observed that ‘only when overcrowding led to veryserious increase in crime and seriously threatened public health did the authorities wake up to theseriousness of the situation.’ In fact, public order trumped health, everywhere, and nowhere moreclearly than at the septic fringe. That month, The Times reported the demolition of a suburban‘plague spot’, but the phrase was metaphorical: authorities had acted ‘when it was found to bea Mau Mau headquarters.’80 The priority was clear: The Times’s headline was ‘Law and Orderin Nairobi’ and, reporting the same event, The New York Times declared: ‘Starts long-range hous-ing program by razing section where Mau Mau hid.’81 The arm of the state did not usually reachsuch places, which were nominally controlled by native authorities.82 Around Nairobi, especially,the threat to public order was greater than that to public health.

Part of the problem, housing had to be part of the solution. It is no coincidence that Kenyabegan to rethink its housing policy in 1939. In Mombasa and Nairobi, official reports calledfor action on the housing front.83 In Kisumu, where lethargy had prevailed, events in Mombasaprompted the District Commissioner to concede that poor housing was ‘a most fruitful’ source ofdiscontent and to call for a local Commission of Inquiry.84 Since this town was never seen much

75 Elkins, Britain’s Gulag (note 29); Furedi, African crowd (note 55); Hyde, Nairobi general strike (note 56);Anderson, Dandora swamp (note 34) and Dirty War, 188e192.76 Kenya, Labour Conditions in Mombasa, 1939 (note 20), 20. See also P.P.D. Connolly, Native Housing e Mombasa,

29 Sept. 1939, in Kenya, Labour Conditions in Mombasa, 1939 (note 20), Appendix I, 51e55; Notes on Labour in Mom-basa, in Kenya, Labour Conditions in Mombasa, 1939 (note 20), Appendix I, 60e64; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor(note 11), 196; Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11), 184.77 Davies, Some problems (note 71); Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 195e196.78 Foreword to Ogilvie, Housing of Africans (note 60); c.f. Kenya, Medical Department Annual Report 1945, Nairobi,

1947, 21; Kenya, Labour Department Annual Report, 1945, Nairobi, 1946, 6.79 Leakey, Memorandum (note 28), 26; M. Tamarkin, Mau Mau in Nakuru, Journal of African History 17,1 (1976),

123; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 207.80 Law and order in Nairobi: big housing effort to check crime, The Times, 7 Sept. 1953.81 Albion Ross, Nairobi gets loan to replace slums, New York Times, 27 June 1953, 3.82 Sir C. Mortimer and T.C. Colchester, Oral evidence to the EARC, 18 Jan. 1954, 21e22 [CO 892/8/3]; Baker, Cit-

izenship on the Septic Fringe (note 45).83 Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 195.84 District Commissioner, Kisumu-Londiani, to Provincial Commissioner, Nyanza Province, 30 Oct. 1939. Corre-

spondence, P.C. Nyanza [National Archives of Kenya, Microfilm Collection, Syracuse University, Film 2800, Reel 74].


unrest, however, it did little for African housing for some more years. Similarly concerned, theGovernor sought funds for housing to allay ‘native unrest.’85 Everyone got the point. As theEast African Standard thundered, ‘if we remember what happened . in Mombasa, we shallnot hesitate to pay a heavy insurance premium against the social unrest which inevitably breedsin the conditions we have allowed to persist.’86

If anything, unrest made the need for action even more apparent by the early 1950s. In 1949Mary Parker, a perceptive and critical observer of the urban scene, argued that, without action,housing would provoke a movement of ‘revolutionary character before economic differentiation[of Africans] has become sufficient to make such a movement split upon the rock of class inter-est.’87 This signaled the need for a development policy that would divide Africans. AlthoughParker was viewed suspiciously by colonial officials, her point was well-taken. The followingyear, Ernest Vasey produced a report on African housing which was a turning point and whichhighlighted its political importance.88 As Mau Mau came to dominate the scene after 1952, pri-vate investment in housing declined for the European and Asian populations while building bypublic authorities picked up.89 By 1954 Carpenter’s report on African wages acknowledged theconventional wisdom, that better African housing was a ‘basic condition of labour stabilisation,’in every sense of the word.90

In that sense all Europeans had an interest in building houses for Africans in towns. Those wholived there might bear the brunt of local unrest, but farmers stood to benefit too. More housing inthe cities might encourage Africans to move off the crowded reserves, themselves a source of con-cern, a well-understood connection that justified urban housing.91 Indeed, the circulation ofAfricans between town and country meant that conditions anywhere had a general effect. Urbanhousing was in the wider interest.

Outside pressure, and assistance

Kenyan policy responded to local conditions, but also to international pressures, notably fromLondon. The Mombasa strikes attracted attention in Britain but Mau Mau put Kenya in a worldspotlight. Britain framed the rebellion as tribal opposition to modernity but others saw it as anti-colonial.92 American visitors to Kenya deplored Mau Mau atrocities but noted colonial

85 R. Brooke-Popham to Secretary of State, 31 July 1939 [CO 533/513/12]; Clayton and Savage, Government and

Labour (note 11), 223.86 African Housing. A prompt discussion, EAS, 8 August 1941 [editorial].87 Parker, Political and Social Aspects (note 72), 108.88 Vasey, Report on African housing (note 15), 42; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 203e207.89 Colonial Office, Annual Report on the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya for the Year 1953, London, 1954, 76.90 Kenya, Report of the Committee on African Wages (note 26), 93.91 See the extensive discussion on this issue in the oral evidence provided by Mayor Travis and eight other members of

Nairobi City Council to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954 [CO 892/8/3].92 S. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds. British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-Insurgency,

1944e1960, London, 1995; A.S. Cleary, The myth of Mau Mau in its international context, African Affairs 89(1990), 227e245.


provocations. Housing figured in their accounts. In the New York Times, C.L. Sulzberger notedthat in Nairobi’s suburbs ‘can be found either the most modern and comfortable Occidentalmanor life, replete with country club, or jerry-built shacks and thatched-hut villages of truculentblacks.’93 In a popular book, soon a Hollywood movie, Robert Ruark wrote that the storefrontsand housing en route downtown from the airport were ‘shocking to a newcomer,’ and that, down-town, Nairobi’s whites ‘amble carelessly’ while Africans ‘move carefully aside.’94 British visitors,also concerned with housing, were hardly less critical. Fenner Brockway, a maverick socialist pol-itician, lobbied hard for Africans’ rights and earned the sobriquet ‘member for Africa.’95 Accom-panied by Jomo Kenyatta, he visited a Nairobi shanty town as well as the locations, describingKariokor as ‘incredibly bad’ and Shauri Moyo as ‘surely the worst public housing in the world.’96

His views would have been discounted by readers of The Times, but even this paper argued thatsomething had to be done about African housing.97

Before Mau Mau, the Colonial Office took an interest in Kenyan housing. By 1940 it under-stood the Willan report to be ‘almost equally suitable material for hostile propaganda’ as thatof the West India Royal Commission, recently suppressed for the duration of the war, and inboth cases for their portrayal of living conditions.98 The Office was soon helping the Secretaryof State respond to Parliamentary questions on the subject. Publicly, the Colonial Secretary de-fended the Kenyan government, and also the municipality and the Railways, for setting ‘an exam-ple to other employers by providing housing of a good standard for its own staff.’99 Behind thescenes, staff peppered the Kenyan government with questions and took steps to learn more. In1943 alone Dr. Kauntz, the medical adviser, and Sir Cosmo Parkinson, lately the PermanentUnder-Secretary of State for the Colonies and now on special duties, visited African locationsin Nairobi. Parkinson liked one project, probably Ziwani or Kaloleni, but in Pumwani he found‘appalling sub-human dwellings in use e worse, I fear, than even anything I saw in the WestIndies,’ while Kauntze declared that family life there was impossible.100 Later visits to Nairobilocations by the Secretary of State, and by George Atkinson, from 1948 the Colonial Office’s first

93 C.L. Sulzberger, Kenya crisis mirrors Africa’s changing face, New York Times, 28 Dec. 1952, E3; Rau, Life GoesOn (note 65).94 R. Ruark, Something of Value, New York, 1955, 185, 187.95 D. Howell, Brockway, (Archibald) Fenner, Baron Brockway (1888e1988), rev., Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography (note 23).96 F. Brockway, African Journeys, London, 1955, 105.97 Breakdown in Kenya, The Times, 3 Dec. 1952, 9.98 G. Seel, Minute, 26 Feb. 1940 [CO 533/518/10].99 Secretary of State to Major A.M. Lyons, 28 Jan. 1943 [CO 533/530/4].100 [Sir] C. Parkinson to [Sir] Arthur Dawe, 20 July 1943 [CO 533/528/18]; Dr. W.H. Kauntze, Minute, 21 Jan. 1943

[CO 533/530/4]. Parkinson’s duties entailed travelling widely as the Colonial Secretary’s representative. H. Poynton,Parkinson, Sir (Arthur Charles) Cosmo (1884e1967), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (note 23). See also

W.W. Ridout, Acting Town Clerk, Nairobi, to the Hon. Commissioner for Local Government, 2 July 1942 [CO533/528/18].


housing adviser, underlined London’s interest in Kenya’s housing, as do reports published byAtkinson’s office, and in the Colonial Office’s in-house journal during the 1950s.101

The Colonial Office expedited action in Kenya by helping the flow of British funds to the co-lonial. In 1938 Nairobi wanted to build African housing and demurred because of the cost.102

Only the availability of Colonial Development monies made possible the establishment of theHousing Fund in 1942 and the projects of the early 1940s, the most visible signs of Britain’snew colonial commitments.103 They continued to flow. Between 1945 and 1952, half of the hous-ing projects in Nairobi and Mombasa depended on CDW assistance.104 In 1953 the HousingFund received £400,000 from London, while Vasey negotiated a housing loan of £2 millionfrom the Colonial Development Corporation.105 Since 1948 the CDC had been financingbreak-even colonial projects. Together, the Colonial Office and Governor Baring persuaded Trea-sury that since poor living conditions were ‘one of the most fertile sources of social discontent’ inKenya the CDC should fund housing schemes there.106 When a new CDC loan enabled the Ken-yan government to declare a ‘big housing plan’, the Deputy Governor interpreted this as ‘our re-ply to certain people in Britain who think that the only thing happening in Kenya is people killingone another.’107 He failed to note that this ‘reply’ came courtesy of the British government.

A new vision of colonial housing

London not only exerted pressure and offered funds; it also circulated new ideas about hou-sing’s strategic role. Vasey’s request for CDC funds was endorsed with the claim that housingwould foster the ‘proper long term development of the colony.’108 To some extent this thinkingdiffused from London. From the late 1930s the Colonial Office acquired new expertise, and the

101 Nairobi. Municipal African Affairs Officer, Annual Report on African Affairs in Nairobi, 1951 Cyclostyled, Nairobi,1952 [CO 892/7/1] (note 59), 2; Atkinson to Rogers (note 58); Kenya. African housing at Mombasa, Colonial BuildingNotes 33 (May 1956), 5; A.C. Waine, African housing in the urban areas of Kenya, Overseas Building Notes 53 (1958),

1e13; Askwith, African housing in Nairobi (note 29), and T. Askwith, Self-Help housing, Journal of African Adminis-tration (note 29), 13 (1961), 204e210; D. O’Hagan, African’s part in Nairobi local government, Journal of AfricanAdministration 1 (1949), 156e158; J.M. Golds, African urbanisation in Kenya, Journal of African Administration 13

(1961), 24e28.102 Kenya. Annual Report on Native Affairs, 1938, Nairobi, 1939, 90.103 Askwith, African Housing (note 29), 38; Colonial Office, Annual Report on the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya

for the Year 1946, London, 1948, 57; Kenya, Development and Reconstruction Authority Report covering period 1st

August to 31st December 1946, Nairobi, 1947, Appendix I, 25e26; Ogilvie, Housing of Africans (note 60), 54; Claytonand Savage, Government and Labour (note 11), 209. Colonial Development Fund loans also made it possible to build tohigher standards, as at Kaloleni: What Nairobi is doing to house Africans, EAS, May 22, 1953.104 Estimated from evidence reported in Short Survey on Housing in Kenya, in Commision pour la cooperation tech-

nique en Afrique au Sud du Sahara, Surveys of Housing Practice in British Territories in Africa, Council for Scientificand Industrial Research, Pretoria, 1952, 119e160.105 Colonial Office, Annual Report on the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya for the Year 1953 (note 89), 76; Vasey to

Norton (note 23).106 A. Emanuel, Assistant Secretary, Colonial Office, to S.T. Charles, Principal, Treasury, 1 May 1953 [CO 822/304].107 Big housing plan for Kenya, Manchester Guardian, 3 Aug. 1953.108 Emanuel to Charles (note 106).


legislation of 1940 gave it new influence. A centralization of colonial power was felt every-where.109 This trend was strongly felt in Kenya in labor and social policy, but was less apparentin housing, since the Colonial Office appointed a housing adviser, George Atkinson, only in 1948.Atkinson’s advice was dispatched to African governors in 1954.110 It carried weight in some col-onies, but not so much in Kenya. As he noted after a visit in 1952, Kenya was unusual in that italready had a policy.111 Major rethinking had already begun.

The first step in the rethinking was to accept that Africans should settle in towns. It followedthat governments must accommodate a general urban population, and their families. This wouldstabilize labor geographically and also politically. The class dimension was obvious. The firstplace where this new thinking had to be applied was Mombasa. Following the 1939 strike, thegovernment tried to remake the casual labor pool into a better-paid and more permanent workingclass. As Cooper has argued, it changed wage and labor policy and created living environments toroot the skilled worker.112 Administrators feared the promiscuous mixing that occurred in Ma-jengo, the native quarters (Fig. 3). This mixing of ethnic, tribal, and income groups resisted con-trol, while spreading crime and political dissent. When Mombasa began municipal projects in the1940s, it built successfully for ‘better paid workers and civil servants,’ not the poor.113 The newestates at Mzizima, Tononoka, Buxton and Port Tudor, the largest, were never homogeneousbut they re-sorted Africans (Fig. 4). In the 1960s Richard Stren surveyed Port Tudor and oneof the Majengo districts. He found two ‘urban styles’: in Majengo an ethnic mix of less-educated,lower-income workers, many active within the informal sector, included coastal Arabs and In-dians (south Asians) as well as Africans; Port Tudor housed a better-educated and better-paidpopulation, exclusively African, including migrants from up-country who now worked for thegovernment, the major port companies, or the Railways and Harbours administration.114 The res-idents of the new estates were quite content. In 1955 a housing survey found that occupants ‘likethe flats’ and ‘seem to be proud of them.’115 This correlated with a broader political outlook. Afew years later Stren found that the proportion of residents who believed that political indepen-dence had benefited ‘all Africans’, as opposed to ‘the wealthy’ or just ‘a certain tribe’, was twice ashigh in Port Tudor as in Majengo.116 The residents of the new housing estates were indeed morestable.

We cannot know exactly what political impact the new estates had. Admissions policy was se-lective, accepting only those who could afford the higher rents and who may already have had

109 [Lord] W.M. Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories. Part IV. A General Survey of the Sys-tem of Native Administration, London, 1950e1953, 58; R.D. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa. British Colonial Policy

1938e1948, London, 1982.110 Colonial Office, Housing in British African Territories (note 23), Colonial No. 303. This was distributed by the Sec-

retary of State for the Colonies on Nov.3, 1953.111 Atkinson to Rogers (note 58).112 Cooper, African Waterfront (note 11).113 Cooper, Urban space (note 6), 30; Cooper, African Waterfront, (note 11), 189.114 Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 274.115 N. Burudi, Housing and Family Census. Government, Municipal and Employer-Built Houses on Mombasa Island,

Mimeo typescript, Mombasa, June 1957, 6 [RH, Mss. Afr. s.919(1), Mombasa Social Survey Papers 1956e1958].116 Burudi, Housing and Family Census (note 115), 263. The majority in both areas believed that independence had

mostly benefited the wealthy.

Fig. 3. A street scene in Majengo, the indigenous quarters of Mombasa, c.1960. From 1939 onwards, administrators had been con-

cerned about the industrial and political consequences of ethnic and income mix in such areas. Harm de Blij, Mombasa. An African

City (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p.73.


certain political predispositions. But evidence reported by Stren is suggestive. Rates of tribal inter-marriage were higher in Port Tudor (97%) than in Majengo (72%). Residents of Port Tudor weremore likely to say that their three best friends were from the same tribe (64%) or religion (92%)than were the residents of Majengo (42% and 69%, respectively).117 These contrasts indicate theeffects of segregation, and of a neighborhood effect, which probably extended into other realmsof social and political behavior. In Mombasa, at any rate, housing policy had not only aimed atcreating a stable working class but had had some success.

Attempts were made to apply the same thinking to inland centers, including Nairobi. In 1941a municipal report argued for the ‘creation of a Nairobi working class’ for whom the ‘fundamen-tal unit of association of community’ would be ‘the home.’118 But the situation was different fromMombasa, and initially less urgent. With less ethnic diversity, but formal segregation, Nairobi sawless mingling of ethnic groups. The most mixed area was Pumwani, the city’s first municipal lo-cation, where housing was privately owned and where prostitutes had long caused official concern.As in the other two prewar municipal locations, Kariokor (1928) and Shauri Moyo (1938), Afri-cans lived largely in African districts where a mixing of tribes and incomes was normal. Beginningin the early 1940s projects, such as the one described by Fenner Brockway, housed better-paidworkers but not as clearly as in Mombasa. Some projects were better than others, but nonehoused a labor elite. Units were assigned on a first-come, first-served basis and, during MauMau, by tribe. A contrast did develop between the municipal locations and unregulated fringe

117 Burudi, Housing and Family Census (note 115), 257.118 Martin and Colchester, Memorandum (note 15).

Fig. 4. A postwar municipal estate, Mombasa, c.1960. These estates housed only the better-paid African workers and, often, their fam-

ilies too. With superior facilities to Majengo, they helped stabilize the African working class. Harm de Blij, Mombasa. An African City

(Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 68.


areas. By 1962, African residents in the City were better off than those living at the fringe: theproportions of adult African males with some formal schooling were 67% and 34%, respec-tively.119 But, within the narrow range of African incomes, the municipal locations containeda mix of incomes.

Better housing was part of the new vision. A second element emerged in the mid-1940s with therecognition that women could stabilize the male labor force. By then the focus of concern wasshifting to Nairobi, and it was here that the state tried to restructure ‘African class relationsthrough gender relations.’120 The context was daunting. In 1939 the sex ratio in Nairobi hadbeen 8:1 in favor of men, hence the prevalence of prostitution. The pattern changed during andafter WWII. By 1948 the ratio had declined to 3.5:1 and by 1962 reached 1.9:1.121 As wivescame to town, administrators enlisted them in the remaking of the urban working class.

Deverell and her staff were the Kenyan vanguard of an international wave of community de-velopment that focused on educating women to be home makers.122 This approach became theconventional wisdom. Expressed in patronizing terms, some arguments have a modern ring. In1954 Lady Farrar and Mrs. Wood spoke to the Royal Commission on behalf of the East AfricaWomen’s League, an organization that claimed five thousand (European) members. The firstwoman on the Legislative Council, Lady Farrar spoke for about half of the European women

119 Kenya. Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, Kenya Population Census, 1962. Vol. III. African Pop-ulation, Nairobi, 1966, 50.120 White, Comforts of Home (note 16), 127.121 Lonsdale, Town life (note 6), 211; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 215.122 Frederiksen, African women and their Colonisation of Nairobi (note 34), 228.


in Kenya. She emphasized the need to educate African women who held ‘65% or 70% of thepower of the African’ since they raised the children while the men were away.123 She deploredthe way Europeans had ‘unconsciously’ suppressed African women by emphasizing the needsof the male worker.124 She echoed comments made by delegates from Nairobi’s African SocialServices Committee. Speaking about how to make Africans into productive town-dwellers, thesedelegates agreed that family housing e a physical structure and a proper domestic environment ewas the ‘king pin.’125 One elaborated: ‘if we can pull the women and children out of the reservesand have them housed in our locations here, where we can provide schooling and where the par-ents can exercise a certain amount of discipline . we shall be able to provide the incentive to themen.’126 This was not altruism but self-interest: ‘the women will see to it . that we shall get .increased output.’127

The would-be educators saw challenges. It was no good having women pay occasional visits totheir husbands in town since they might take a holiday from housekeeping.128 They must be madeto feel responsible for urban conditions. Unfortunately, they lacked urban experience. Mr. Powell,speaking to the Commissioners as part of a delegation from the Kenya Board of the British Med-ical Association, commented that ‘the man may be thoroughly conversant with hygiene, [but] thewoman who . probably has arrived recently from a native reserve, continues with the habits shewas accustomed to, and of course the man will make no effort to prevent her’.129 She might con-tinue rural methods or adopt something new and equally inappropriate, Mrs. Hughes suggested:‘It is rather the old story e in England it was no good giving them better housing because they willkeep the coals in the bath.’130 Patronizing and apocryphal, this warning may have containeda grain of truth. And so, as Mrs. Wood concluded: ‘African women need training to live in towns.They need a homecrafts course.’131 The problem was that the women had little education, includ-ing English-language skills. In 1962 one third of male Africans in Nairobi had no formal educa-tion but the proportion among women (55%) was higher.132 By the 1950s, Europeans could seethat African women were the weak link in the new urban policy. Michael Blundell, the liberalLeader of the Europeans, and a Member of the Executive Council, agreed that women’s educationhad been neglected and that ‘we should make the emphasis on getting motherhood into the

123 Lady S. Farrar and M. Wood, Oral evidence to the EARC, Nairobi, 30 Jan. 1954, 1 [CO 892/9/4].124 Farrar and Wood, Oral evidence to the EARC, Nairobi (note 123) 3. See also the comment of another elected

member of the Legislative Council, Norman Harris, an ex-mayor of Nairobi, that ‘it is the womenfolk who makesociety.’ N.F. Harris, Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954 [CO 892/8/1].125 Nairobi. Subcommittee on African Social Services [G.A. Tyson and five others], Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan.

1954, 4 [CO 892/8/1].126 Oral evidence to the EARC (note 123).127 Oral evidence to the EARC (note 124).128 Ogilvie, The Housing of Africans (note 60), 57. This may be why, according to some observers, African women

were not as house-proud as they should have been. See, for example, the comments of [Sir] R. Woodley, Oral evidence

to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954 [CO 892/8/3].129 Mr. Powell, Oral evidence to the EARC, 14 Jan. 1954 [CO 892/8/3].130 Nairobi. Subcommittee on African Social Services, Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954, 5.131 Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954, 6.132 Kenya. Population Census, 1962, Vol. III, 50.


Kikuyu women.’133 Europeans had concluded that, to stabilize the male worker, every effortshould be made to make African women into British housewives.

If better-educated women were the second step in making African families at home in the city,home ownership became the next. Advocated by Ernest Vasey in 1950, owner-occupied housingwas seen as a necessary complement to municipal housing, no matter how good. Dr. Leakey ar-gued that for the Kikuyu ownership did not matter but that, to preserve a connection with ances-tral spirits, each dwelling should be continuously occupied by the same family.134 That was whyKikuyu rented in town while maintaining homes on the reserves. It is unclear how rapidly theyadjusted this view, but it retained influence through the 1950s. Speaking to the Royal Commissionin 1953 Dr. Gregory, Nairobi’s MoH, suggested that to the African wife a house of her own ‘is toher what the ring is to an Englishwoman. If she is not provided with a hut or house . she is notmarried.’135 In a resonant comparison, he added ‘You might as well ask a Methodist parson tolend his daughter to the white slave traffic as to expect any respectable African father in the re-serves to allow his daughter to come into Nairobi.’136 Custom, not choice, prevented respectablewomen from moving to the city. If this was true, municipal housing could never be satisfactory.Only owner-occupation would serve.

It is doubtful whether administrators heeded the subtleties of Dr. Gregory’s argument. Mostfollowed their own cultural inclinations, which pointed in the same direction. In Britain, and inBritain’s settler ex-colonies, including the United States and Australia, the virtues of home owner-ship were assumed. Although undocumented, its potential for stabilizing the working classthrough embourgeoisement, and for undermining radical ideologies was widely appreciated.137

Vasey based his case for home ownership on this view, concluding ‘one of the best contributionsthat could be made to the stability of our social structure and to its defense against any encroach-ment of the theory of Communism would be the creation . of the African as a propertyowner.’138 Unfortunately, few Africans could afford to acquire homes. Vasey’s solution was tohelp them build their own by providing advice, building materials, serviced lots, and financing.This type of housing program had been implemented in an ad hoc way in some African colonies,as well as the West Indies.139 It was incorporated into Kenyan policy, with pilot projects beingmounted in Thika, Nairobi, and at Changamwe outside Mombasa.140 It was never Vasey’s inten-tion, or government policy, that such schemes would replace employer or municipal housing: theywere a new and necessary element in a balanced policy mix.141

133 M. Blundell, Oral evidence to the EARC, 8 Jan. 1954, 17 [CO 892/8/1].134 Leakey, Memorandum (note 28), 5.135 Gregory, Oral evidence (note 72), 6.136 Gregory, Oral evidence (note 72).137 R. Harris, The suburban worker in the history of labor, International Labor and Working Class History 64 (2003)

8e24.138 Vasey, Report on African housing (note 15), 42.139 Harris, The evolution of urban housing policy (note 10).140 Vasey, Report on African housing (note 15), 9, 16e17, 23e25, 31e32, 42; Housing targets plan for all towns, EAS,

11 Dec. 1953, 30; African housing, EAS, 12 May 1954, 6 [editorial]; Stren, A site and service scheme (note 51).141 G.M. Wilson, A general summary of African housing, Nairobi, Typescript, 5 [RH, Mss. Afr. s.919(1), Mombasa

Social Survey Papers 1956e1958].


How did administrators think that home ownership would stabilize Africans? They saw it asa more effective way of rooting the working class community than the sorts of estates built inMombasa. Home owners move less often, and develop stronger local attachments. Vasey hopedthat Africans would regard an urban property as a replacement shamba, and abandon their ruralroots. Even if an urban plot did not allow self-provisioning, it offered security during unemploy-ment or old age.142 It also offered self-respect. As the Christian Council argued, supporting Vasey,‘you have to give a man something to be proud of as his, before he will be proud.’143

Ultimately it was a question of citizenship, and of building a fully urban community.Municipal housing encouraged a resentful dependency. On the Nairobi estates in the 1950s,Africans dismissed everything from property neglect to litter as ‘shauri ya Sera Kali’ e theaffair of the Authorities.144 Instead, for Vasey property ownership would ‘encourage [theAfrican] to accept gradually the duties and responsibilities that such a position entails.’145 Thesemight include the duty of maintaining one’s own dwelling and of participating in municipal gov-ernment. Many estates built in the 1940s received family facilities (Fig. 5). Brockway welcomedthe clinics, schools, and reading rooms on some Nairobi estates.146 In Mombasa, the ‘model vil-lage’ of Port Tudor acquired schools, a church, playing field, and ‘village hall’.147 By 1954 the gov-ernment was trying to create ‘neighbourhood units which can be welded into social entities’ withthe result that ‘a new social pattern is expected to emerge.’148 This would require new ‘forms oflocal administration which take the place of tribal discipline.’149 The language is still paternalistic:Europeans are the ‘welders’. Askwith experimented with Village Committees, but municipalitieswere slow to give Africans any powers, even before Mau Mau put such ideas on hold.150 ButVasey’s argument used a language of citizenship that soon permeated colonial policy. Growingup in owned homes run by educated housewives, African children would be made into ‘good cit-izens’ by ‘good influences’.151 In theory, home ownership would prepare Africans for self-government.

InKenya, as in other colonies, independence approachedmore rapidly than expected, and finallyin a rush. Britain had long claimed that it was holding its colonies in trust but it was only during thewar that the Colonial Office began to think seriously about decolonization. In 1947e1948, as aneducational step, the Office began to replace AfricanNative Administration with English-style localgovernment. In Kenya, where local government was already strong and where the new policy wasintroduced very effectively, GovernorMitchell expressed the vain hope that local democracy would

142 Wilson, A general summary (note 141), 9; Stren, Housing the Urban Poor (note 11), 204.143 Christian Council of Kenya, Memo to the EARC, 27 Aug. 1953, Mimeo, 5 [CO 892/5/1].144 Wilson, African housing in municipalities (note 19), 13.145 Vasey, Report on African housing (note 15), 42.146 Brockway, African Journeys (note 96).147 Mombasa to extend its ‘model’ village, EAS, 4 Jan. 1954, 5.148 Five Year Plan for African Housing, EAS, 3 Aug. 1954, 1. See also H.T. Dyer, Written submission to the EARC,

Nairobi, July 3 1953 [CO 892/5/2].149 Five Year Plan for African Housing.150 On the changing arrangements for African input into the running of Nairobi, for example, see O’Hagan, African’s

part in Nairobi (note 101); Passells, African affairs (note 35); Parker, Political and Social Aspects (note 72).151 African housing, EAS (note 19).

Fig. 5. A health clinic on the Makongeni estate, Nairobi, 1946. After the early 1940s, many of the employer and municipal estates

boasted community facilities for African families with the idea of helping women raise responsible citizens and of making their

men feel at home. Source: M.F. Hill, Permanent Way. Vol. 1. The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway (Nairobi: East Africa

Literature Bureau, 1950), opp. p. 361.


forestall larger demands.152 The British abandoned the idea of working through tribal leaders andinstead put their faith in an emerging middle class, but this was problematic in that the largest el-ement in the Kenyan middle class was Asian, a community that the British had held at bay.153 FewAfricans owned businesses or held white-collar, professional occupations. References to an Africanmiddle class made sense primarily when speculating about the future.

In the 1940s housing was touted as a way of stabilizing workers, but it came to be seen a way ofbuilding a middle class. By the mid-1950s the Governor’s avowed policy was to hasten ‘the cre-ation of a stable middle class African population’, in part by zoning urban areas on socio-economic instead of racial lines.154 Owner-build schemes were the government’s response to the

152 U.K. Hicks, Development from Below, Oxford, 1961, 212e221; R.D. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa. British

Colonial Policy 1938e1948, London, 1982, 150, 198; R.E. Robinson, Why ‘indirect rule’ has been replaced by ‘localgovernment’ in the nomenclature of British native administration, Journal of African Administration 2,3 (195*),12e15. On Cohen see R.E. Robinson, Cohen, Sir Andrew Benjamin (1909e1968), Dictionary of National Biography,

Oxford, 2004.153 B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa, London, 1992, 197, 239; C. Leys, Under-

development in Kenya, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975, 38e39; J.S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa:

c.1886 to 1945, Oxford, 1969, 125; C.L. Sulzberger, Indians in Africa worrying Britons, New York Times, 31 Dec.1952, 4.154 Despatches from the Governors (note 47), 73, 77; c.f. Baker, Citizenship on the Septic Fringe (note 45), 272;

R. Stren, Housing policy and the state in East Africa, in: M.K.C. Morrison and P.C.W. Gutkind (Eds), Housing thePoor in Urban Africa, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1982, 87.


‘definite need to give the African middle class the amenities it deserves.’155 Gordon Wilson sug-gested that by expanding private property they would actually ‘create a middle class’ whichhad ‘vested interests in the status quo’; the Standard spoke in the same vein.156 In Britain, suchthinking was framing debates about the embourgeoisement of a working class.157 The Kenyanversion was strongly endorsed there.158 Its local character was captured by the Standard whenit reported on Nakuru’s first tenant-purchase scheme. The first buyer e of a two-room housewith kitchen and indoor plumbing e was Councillor J.F. Kanyua, one of the new African mem-bers of Nakuru Municipal Council.159 If municipal estates stabilized the working class, owner-oc-cupation promised to go one better by creating an African middle class.

A key advantage of owner-occupation was that it enabled a nascent middle class to realize itsaspirations. This was not self-evident. Some contemporaries believed that Africans did not re-spond to higher wages in the same way as Europeans, that once basic needs were satisfied theymight work less. Indeed, migrant workers often quit once they had saved a specific sum, butan expenditure survey in the 1950s, and a later study of housing consumption, indicate that Af-ricans responded to higher incomes by trying to buy more.160 The problem, as Gussman sug-gested, was that better housing and education were often unavailable at any price.161

Municipal housing was allocated to first-comers, and applicants had little influence over whichestate they were assigned. Municipalities might have tried harder to allocate units differently,but this was made difficult by long waiting lists and the conundrum of determining need, sincemany Africans received unreported income, in cash and in kind, from rural plots.162 In Nairobi,some employer projects maintained an exclusive character. These included Tobacco Village, theGailey and Roberts apartments, and the East Africa High Commission’s Jamaa Estate.163 Themunicipal estates, however, were variable in quality and socially mixed. As Gordon Wilson ob-served, even in Nairobi ‘social classes of Africans have not yet emerged . [and] this can neverbe achieved within housing estates.’164 The potential superiority of owner-occupied subdivisionswas obvious.

The problem was both economic and cultural. Even assisted, owner-built housing was more ex-pensive than Africans could afford. The Nairobi owner-build project attracted few applicants. Sodid Changamwe, outside Mombasa. Africans who had money preferred the greater freedom of

155 African Mayfair, EAS, March 4, 1955, 9.156 Wilson, African housing in municipalities (note 19), 6; Wilson, General summary of African housing (note 141),

11; African housing, EAS (note 19).157 Harris, The suburban worker (note 137).158 Breakdown in Kenya (note 97).159 £360 African houses for Nakuru, EAS, July 28, 1954, 7.160 M. Forrester, Kenya To-Day. Social Prerequisites for Economic Development, S-Gravenhage, 1962, 130e132; N.W.

Temple, Housing preferences and policy in Kibera, Nairobi, Discussion Paper No. 196, Institute for DevelopmentStudies, Nairobi, 1974, Tables 11, 13.161 Gussman, Midday Sun (note 34), 103.162 Gussman, Midday Sun (note 34), 84; Ogilvie, Housing of Africans (note 60), 57; Parker, Political and Social Aspects

(note 72), 44; Forrester, Kenya To-Day (note 160), 75e76.163 E.S.A. Odhiambo, Kula Raha: gendered discourses and the contours of leisure in Nairobi, 1946e1963, in: Burton,

Urban Experience (note 6), 255.164 Wilson, General summary of African housing (note 141), 5.


unregulated areas, where they could avoid ‘interference’ from the state.165 Many resisted buyinga city home since it symbolized the abandonment of rural roots. Such feelings were strongest inthe older generation, and among the less well-educated, but exerted a general influence beyondIndependence. Younger Africans viewed urban work differently, but still in an instrumentalway. Martin Makilya, part of a delegation from the Machakos District, explained that ‘an Africanbelieves that whatever he goes to do in the towns he must eventually go back to the land’, behav-ior that was widely noted by employers and administrators such as Mr. Eggers, who claimed thatAfricans worked in town only until they had enough money to put two new doors on their houseback home.166 This pattern, common in East as opposed to West Africa, persisted. In 1972, a sur-vey of 568 rural migrants to Kisumu found that most continued to ‘consider their origins to betheir homes’, and that 84% still owned rural property.167 Many municipal officials were thankful.As the mayor and Treasurer of Nairobi observed, the problem with building houses, or with help-ing Africans to do so, was that this would ease the housing shortage and encourage migrationfrom reserves.168 The more that municipalities did, the larger the problem would get.

Urban policy had changed, but certain realities had not. In the 1930s temporary urbanizationoccurred even when administrators discouraged it; from the 1940s permanent urbanization didnot happen just because they willed it. In particular, for a combination of reasons Kenya’s pro-motion of urban home ownership remained largely rhetorical. In 1957, Wilson judged that prog-ress in implementing Vasey’s vision had been ‘pitifully inadequate.’169 The problem was that therhetoric created expectations and that, for governments, frustrated expectations are the worstkind of all.

Conclusions

Housing policy may be used as a prism for viewing the evolution of colonial policy from a pol-icy of trusteeship to one of development. In Kenya, gender and class came to figure more prom-inently in the discourse. After 1939 the government changed its assumptions about the permanentpresence of Africans in towns. Acknowledging the importance of urban housing, it began to usehousing policy as an instrument of rule. Poor conditions had been a source of unrest and so betterhousing became part of the solution. Better, and different. Families would have to be accommo-dated, and Europeans soon concluded that African women were needed to help make their hus-bands at home in towns, and to educate children for citizenship. These gendered calculations werepart of a strategy to create class distinctions. During the 1940s municipalities used better housing,

165 Wilson, General summary of African housing (note 141); Stren, A site and service scheme (note 51), 237.166 M. Makilya, Oral evidence to EARC, 7 Jan. 1954 [CO 892/8/1]; Tea Board of Kenya, Oral evidence to the EARC,

9 Jan. 1954, 11 [CO 892/8/1]; comments of Mr. Eggins, in P.E.D. Wilson, Oral evidence to the EARC, 23 Oct. 1953[CO 892/7/3].167 J.O. Oucho, Rural orientation, return migration and future movements of urban migrants: a study of Kisumu,

Kenya, African Urban Quarterly 1 (1986), 207, 213.168 Mr. Travis and Mr. Kent, Oral evidence to the EARC, 15 Jan. 1954, 11, 13 [CO 892/8/3]. On African migration to

Nairobi see O’Connor, The African City (note 3), 93e95.169 Wilson, African housing in municipalities (note 19), 7.


on planned estates, to stabilize the African working class. A decade later, the government pro-moted home ownership to help create the middle class to whom they might pass the reigns ofpower. The use of housing to satisfy the middle class was continued after independence byJomo Kenyatta, whose government built and allocated units for those whose loyalty it wishedto secure.170 In this manner housing policy was an instrument in a gendered strategy that soughtto create class distinctions so as to modulate the racialized basis of colonial, and arguably post-colonial, rule.

The policies of the Kenyan government were developed in tandem with the Colonial Office inLondon. After 1940 Kenya drew on British funds, and to good effect. From the early 1940s, theBritish government sought to promote development in its colonial territories, and this implied thesorts of urban policies that Kenya soon adopted. But the influence was not all one way. London’spolicies were shaped by events in the colonies, including Kenya, and if thinking in both places ranon parallel tracks, that is, because both were constrained by critics of colonial rule, whether in-digenous, in the case of Nairobi, or domestic and international, in the case of London. The trackswere not perfectly parallel, or even straight. Kenyan policy did not satisfy all, or even most, do-mestic opinion, whether African, Asian, or white; it was an evolving compromise. But, even dur-ing Mau Mau, compromises pointed in a consistent direction. The evolution of Kenya’s housingpolicy illuminates the characteristic pressures, calculations, and responses of colonial rule as theywere being played out internationally in the late colonial period.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and theBritish Academy for their financial support.

170 F.T. Temple, Politics, Planning and Housing Policy in Nairobi, Unpublished PhD thesis, MIT, 1973.

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