Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands

Journal of Historical Geography xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands Connor Joseph Cavanagh Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, NO-1433, Ås, Norway

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 22 May 2018 Received in revised form 23 September 2019 Accepted 29 September 2019

In 1929 the administration of Kenya Colony under the governorship of Edward Grigg ordered the formation of a special committee to report on what had become known as ‘the Dorobo question’ across eastern Africa. As conceived by the committee, the Dorobo question was effectively that of how to govern ‘most hunting people’ under British rule in the region e particularly those thought to be ‘pre-tribal and pre-pastoral’ e and who were often inconveniently found to be living within newly demarcated forest reserves. An examination of the committee’s recommendations grants us insight into the ways in which colonial perceptions of incipient ‘environmental’ problems were often insidiously bound up in the social Darwinism of the period. Here, European perceptions of the Dorobo as a supposedly ‘dying race’ of forest-dwellers brings the entanglement of the period’s nascent ‘racial’ and natural sciences squarely into focus. Engaging these phenomena in relation to the case of the Sengwer community in western Kenya’s Cherangani Hills, I suggest that renewed inquiries into such conjoined discourses of race and nature may assist us in further enriching our understanding of the multiple, perpetually contested dimensions of identity formation within (post)colonial East Africa. Not least, the nuances of these dynamics may help us to more fully understand how the afterlives of these diverse racialisations and tribalisations continue to impinge upon the grievances of affected communities in the present, enabling an explicitly postcolonial e rather than, necessarily, a primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist e perspective on recent articulations of ‘indigenous’ or ‘ethnic minority’ rights in eastern Africa. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Colonialism East Africa Nature Race British empire Political ecology

By the early 1930s, the material demarcation of forest reserves in colonial eastern Africa had precipitated what became known as ‘the Dorobo question’ throughout the region. Though a subject of speculation in some circles from the earliest days of European occupation, administrative concern with this issue in Kenya Colony was bureaucratically institutionalised more formally in March 1929, when Governor Edward Grigg’s administration appointed a body known as the Committee on the Dorobo question.1 The committee defined the term ‘Dorobo’ as encompassing ‘most kinds of hunting people’, especially those ‘consisting of usually scattered families with no tribal organisation’. Further, it was thought e in the language of social evolution common at the time e that these groups were ‘pre-tribal and pre-pastoral’ in the sense that they largely eschewed both agriculture and livestock keeping in favour

E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 See, for instance, C. Hobley, Eastern Uganda: An Ethnological Survey, London, 1902; H.H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, London, 1902; C. Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate, London, 1905.

of more ‘primitive’ varieties of hunting and foraging.2 This rather broad and vague definition is suggestive of the somewhat confused provenance of the term ‘Dorobo’ itself, largely being an Anglophone corruption of the Maasai term il-torobo for hunters, foragers, or others regarded as ‘too poor to own cattle’.3 As conceived by the committee, the broader ‘Dorobo question’ was effectively that of how best to govern ‘pre-tribal and pre-pastoral’ communities under British rule in the region e and particularly those who were often inconveniently found to be living within newly demarcated forest reserves. Despite the seemingly obscure nature of the topic, the committee was in fact composed of quite notable administrators and settlers. These included the chief native commissioner, the commissioner for local government, lands and

2 UK National Archives (hereafter UKNA) CAB/24/248, The Kenya Land Commission Report, Evidence and Memoranda, Volume III, 2131. 3 C. Chang, Nomads without cattle: East African foragers in historical perspective, in: R. Lee and E. Leacock (Eds), Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge, 1982, 269e270.

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Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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settlement, and the conservator of forests. Likewise, civil society concern with this issue was signalled by the inclusion of a notable evangelical personality, Reverend Canon Burns, and an influential settler recently elected to Kenya’s legislative council, Conway Harvey.4 Indeed, the composition of the committee points to the ‘interdisciplinary’ nature of the Dorobo question, which straddled the interests of several of the administration’s technical departments, as well as the concerns and anxieties of various settlers, ‘natives’ and administrators alike. As a consequence, some have suggested that European engagements with and discourses about the Dorobo perhaps tell us more about the ‘the colonial mind’ in the early twentieth century than about the complex social, cultural and economic realities or experiences of East African communities.5 Indeed, as Michael Kenny argues, groups of apparent Dorobo have often served as a ‘mirror in the forest’, or a screen of sorts onto which the fantasies of both neighbouring African communities and European administrators have frequently been projected.6 Rather than seeking to somehow unearth the ostensible ‘truth’ about the genealogy of these groups as supposedly distinct communities in relation to their neighbours, however, this article approaches the ‘Dorobo question’ as an empirical phenomenon or administrative case e one that potentially grants us further insight into the nature, ideology and machinations of British rule in Kenya during the interwar period. Here, I draw methodological inspiration from what Anne Stoler and Frederick Cooper have termed ‘colonial studies’, or an approach that takes the empirical workings of colonial regimes themselves as the principal object of inquiry, rather than necessarily the ‘region’ in which they were embedded or the populations that they sought to govern.7 In particular, I suggest that renewed inquiries into conjoined colonial discourses of ‘race’ and ‘nature’ in the early twentieth century may further nuance our understanding of the multiple and perpetually contested dimensions of identity formation within (post)colonial East Africa. In unpacking this argument, I build upon a number of recent works on East African history, politics and historical geography that have perceptively engaged the formation and negotiation of various ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ identities over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting the classic social constructivist foci of ‘invented tradition’ scholars such as Terrence Ranger and Leroy Vail, many of these contributions have substantially advanced our understanding of the diverse ways in which e as Jon Iliffe once memorably put it e ‘Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to’.8 Aside from older works on the ‘ethnogenesis’ of groups often assumed to be more

singularly cohesive or mutually exclusive with other communities e such as the Kikuyu or Maasai e this growing literature has also incisively addressed the often quite recent (colonial) roots and subsequent rise to prominence of certain ethnic ‘federations’ in Kenya, such as the Luyia, Mijikenda and Kalenjin.9 These and related studies have done much to refine our understanding of the fluid opportunities and constraints for processes of identity formation in this period; the multiple forms of creative agency wielded by diverse African communities and intellectuals; and the manner in which these phenomena continue to impinge upon political-economic dynamics in the present.10 Yet many of these works have also remained somewhat curiously silent on discourses and practices of race and racialisation as such, as opposed to contested processes of the social construction of ‘tribe’, ‘tradition’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘custom’. In many respects, this relative lacuna in the East African literature underscores the importance of Jemima Pierre’s recent intervention that we cannot fully understand ‘how notions of ethnicity, nation, or culture are deployed … without recognizing the ways they are refracted through processes of racialisation’.11 Yet this is not to say that an inquiry into processes of racialisation must necessarily address only the consequences and effects produced by ideologies of racialised ‘colour’, which an extensive literature on European settler colonialism in eastern and southern Africa robustly investigates.12 Rather, as Michel Foucault once famously noted, nearly any form of imagined difference can become racialised, or mobilised to encode a perceived ‘caesura’ within a given population ostensibly as a distinction of race rather than a distinction of, for instance, culture, linguistic inclination or even normative socioeconomic preference.13 Particularly considering the discourses of social Darwinism within which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East African colonialisms were embedded, it would seem pertinent to remain attentive to the multiple ways in which shifting conceptions of race may have both implicitly and explicitly influenced administrative practices, as well as how these practices variously enabled, constrained or otherwise shaped local agency in response. In particular, the nuances of these dynamics may help us to more fully understand how the afterlives of diverse racialisations and tribalisations continue to impinge upon the motivations and grievances of affected communities in the present, enabling the development of an explicitly postcolonial e rather than, necessarily, a primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist e perspective on communities now articulating unique claims on account of their apparently ‘indigenous’ or ‘ethnic minority’ status.14 Exploring these themes in relation to the administrative perception and treatment of ‘Dorobo’ communities in Kenya Colony, this article proceeds as follows. First, I examine social

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UKNA CAB/24/248, The Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume III, 1934, 2131. C.J. Cavanagh, Anthropos into humanitas: civilizing violence, scientific forestry, and the ‘Dorobo question’ in eastern Africa, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35 (2017) 694e695. 6 M.G. Kenny, Mirror in the forest: the Dorobo hunter-gatherers as an image of the other, Africa 51 (1981) 478e479. 7 A. Stoler and F. Cooper, Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in: F. Cooper and A. Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley, 1997, 1e58. 8 J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, Cambridge, 1979, 324. See also T. Ranger, The invention of tradition in colonial Africa, in: E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983, 211e262; L. Vail, Introduction: ethnicity in Southern African history, in: L. Vail (Ed), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, Berkeley, 1989, 1e20. 9 J. Lonsdale, When did the Gusii (or any other group) become a tribe? Kenya Historical Review 5 (1977) 122e133; T. Spear, Introduction, in: T. Spear and R. Waller (Eds), Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa, Oxford, 2003, 1e18; J. Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda, Oxford, 1993; G. Lynch, I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya, Chicago, 2011; J. MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya, Athens, 2016. 5

10 See, especially, S.M. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania, Madison, 1990; T. Spear, Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa, The Journal of African History 44 (2003) 3e27. 11 J. Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race, Chicago, 2012, 5. 12 See, N. Leys, The Colour Bar in East Africa, London, 1941; D.K. Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890e1939, Durham, NC, 1987; C. Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Colonial Kenya, Manchester, 2007; B. Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900se1920s, Manchester, 2015. 13 M. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, New York, 2003, 254e255. 14 On claims to indigeneity as a form of ‘articulation’ and ‘positioning’, see T.M. Li, Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: resource politics and the tribal slot, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42 (2000) 149e179; J. Igoe, Becoming indigenous peoples: difference, inequality, and the globalization of East African identity politics, African Affairs 105 (2006) 399e420; D. Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World, Bloomington, 2011; G. Lynch, Kenya’s new indigenes: negotiating local identities in global context, Nations and Nationalism 17 (2011) 148e167.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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Darwinist influences upon British administrative thought and practice in eastern Africa, with a focus on debates around the concept of allegedly ‘dying races’. Second, I highlight the implications of these for the work of the Committee on the Dorobo question in Kenya Colony, as well as the uptake of the latter’s recommendations within Sir Morris Carter’s Kenya Land Commission of 1932e1933. Third, I highlight and contextualise archival findings on the administrative reception of testimonies submitted by an alleged ‘Dorobo’ community that contested its dispossession from customary lands and forests throughout this process: the Sengwer of the Cherangani Hills in what is now western Kenya’s contemporary Elgeyo-Marakwet County. Finally, I conclude by examining the resonances of these events for contemporary scholarly and activist debates, pointing to the ways in which the Sengwer case may highlight the potential contributions of engaging related themes through an explicitly postcolonial lens, whether in East Africa or far beyond. Social Darwinism in the forest: governing race and nature in the late British African empire Scholars of empire are well versed in the ways in which the ‘Darwinian moment’ of mid nineteenth-century evolutionary discourse exerted considerable influence upon theories and practices of late European colonialism.15 Particularly following Darwin’s own meditations upon the place of apparently ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ human populations in The Descent of Man, a vast range of commentators scrambled to speculate upon the significance of these ideas for the governance of colonised populations in Africa, South(east) Asia and elsewhere.16 Given that Darwin’s book was not published until 1871, however, the implications of this growing European obsession with social evolution became especially pressing for colonial administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa.17 There, the activities of imperial trading companies were only just beginning to substantially penetrate into the interior of much of the continent, precipitating historically unprecedented volumes of interaction between Europeans and a highly diverse range of African communities. Though widely discredited today, the idiosyncrasies of these social evolutionist discourses in the twilight of the nineteenth century provide a nuanced way of understanding the social and demographic categories employed by imperial administrators, as well as their political and other effects. Mahmood Mamdani, for instance, has recently revisited the relationship between administrative categories of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ in British African colonies. Here, he maintains, races ‘were said to comprise all those officially categorised as not indigenous to Africa’. In contrast, tribes ‘were all those defined as indigenous in origin’.18 Precisely this approach was institutionalised in mid twentieth-century census reports from the Kenya Colony and Protectorate, wherein only the territory’s native African ‘race’ was surveyed as being subdivided into distinct,

15 J.M. Mackenzie, Chivalry, social Darwinism, and ritualized killing: the hunting ethos in Central Africa up to 1914, in: D. Anderson and R. Grove (Eds), Conservation in Africa: Peoples, Policies, and Practice, Cambridge, 1987, 41e62; P. Levine, Anthropology, colonialism, and eugenics, in: A. Bashford and P. Levine (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford, 2010, 43e61. 16 C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, 1871. See also D. Moore, A. Pandian and J. Kosek, The cultural politics of race and nature: terrains of power and practice, in: D. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (Eds), Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, Durham, 2003, 1e70. 17 S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Cambridge, 1995; R. Gordon, The rise of the bushman penis: Germans, genitalia, and genocide, African Studies 57 (1998) 27e54. 18 M. Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Cambridge, MA, 2012, 46e47.

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mutually exclusive ‘tribes’.19 Yet this focus on the mid twentiethcentury ossification of the concept of race as primarily an ideology of racialised colour or geographical origin perhaps occludes as much as it reveals. Indeed, the much greater diversity of late nineteenthcentury conceptions of race had already exerted significant influence on various forms and practices of European colonialism on the African continent. As we will see, early twentieth-century administrators would often seek grounds to divide the African population into hierarchically ranked ‘African races’ or aggregated ‘races of tribes’, as well as into discrete tribal units. Integral to these social Darwinist theories of imperial administration was, as David Washbrook once put it, ‘the belief in a continuum between nature and society’.20 That is to say, debates about human evolution often construed the exact relationship and boundaries between humans and other primates as an empirically open question, just as various commentators often disagreed with each other about whether ‘races’ of humans were in fact analogous to ‘species’ in evolutionary thought.21 Whether conceived as one species or as many, however, common to most of these conceptions was the deeply entrenched notion of racial hierarchy. That is to say, both Darwin and his interlocutors were e to varying degrees e prone to the view that alleged differences of race were not neutral or relative, but rather indicative of asymmetrical relations of physical, intellectual or even civilizational superiority and inferiority. At the very bottom of these diverse hierarchies, moreover, were supposed races thought to be particularly ‘simian’ in character, or otherwise ‘closest to nature’ and therefore inhabiting a liminal position in relation to nonhuman primates.22 Here, allegations that some races were so inferior in relation to Europeans that they were ostensibly ‘dying’, ‘disappearing’, ‘vanishing’, or ‘doomed’ became particularly contentious.23 Russell McGregor, for instance, contends that such dying race theories were so widely accepted as to effectively constitute a scientific axiom or law, no less.24 Darwin himself had written that, at ‘some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races’. As a consequence, he thought, the continuum between nature and society would effectively grow more pronounced: the ‘break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state … and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla’.25 These processes of extermination were thus supposedly analogous to population dynamics under ‘natural’ conditions in the nonhuman environment. Indeed, as Darwin would later retrospectively describe the process of evolution more generally, each ‘new variety or species when formed will generally take the place of, and so exterminate its less well-fitted parent’, with ‘the flourishing twigs destroying the less

19 Kenya Colony and Protectorate, Kenya Population Census, 1962: Volume III e African Population, Nairobi, 1966. 20 D.A. Washbrook, Ethnicity and racialism in colonial Indian society, in: R. Ross (Ed), Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure, Dordrecht, 1982, 158. 21 Darwin, Descent of Man, 226. 22 Z. Magubane, Simians, savages, skulls, and sex: science and colonial militarism in nineteenth-century colonial South Africa, in: D.S. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (Eds) Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, Durham, NC, 2003, 109 -110; Cavanagh, Anthropos into humanitas, 700e701; F. Sysling, ‘Protecting the primitive natives’: indigenous peoples as endangered species in the early nature protection movement, 1900e1940, Environment and History 21 (2015) 381e399. 23 P. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800e1930, Ithaca, 2003. 24 R. McGregor, The doomed race: a scientific axiom of the late nineteenth century, Australian Journal of Politics and History 39 (1993) 14e22. 25 Darwin, Descent of Man, 201.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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vigorous’.26 In much the same way, colonial administrations could ostensibly not be faulted for simply ‘letting dying races die’, allowing the emergence of comparatively flourishing colonial polities or subject populations in their stead.27 By the early twentieth century, such concerns were still very much at the forefront of debates about the social and other consequences of European imperialism. In British Africa, however, certain officials would develop a somewhat dissenting view on the metropolitan dying race theories of the late nineteenth century. For instance, Sir Charles Eliot e in a reflection on his four years as commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate (1900e1904) e questioned whether ‘inferior’ or ‘uncivilised’ races were necessarily equivalent to ‘dying’ ones. As he wrote, the ‘relations between Europeans and Africans present in their extreme form the difficulties which may arise from the contact of advanced and backward races’, but nonetheless conceded that ‘the inferior race shows no sign of disappearing before its superiors’.28 Nearly two decades later, Lord Frederick Lugard would agree. As he put it in his influential The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, ‘the settlers in the American colonies, in Canada, and in Australasia’ apparently found ‘the indigenous races’ to be ‘sparse, decadent, and rapidly tending to extinction’. In contrast, Europeans in Africa encountered ‘a race, virile, increasing, and racially potent’.29 In this regard, British African colonies provided a seemingly inconvenient case for dying race theorists, given that native populations were construed as ‘inferior’ but simultaneously also ‘virile’ or relatively resistant to ‘disappearance’ in the face of encroaching European administrations and settler populations. Yet British officials did not perceive all African populations as being equally ‘racially potent’. This was especially so for minority groups variously construed as ‘bushmen’, ‘pygmies’, or e in the case of eastern Africa e ‘Dorobo’ who were thought to constitute dying races in relation not only to Europeans, but also to their ostensibly more ‘advanced’ African counterparts. Here, Eliot in particular mused that e whilst some of East Africa’s more ‘backward’ populations might disappear in the face of European colonisation e this might be mitigated with a sort of assimilation, understood almost as a crude form of social engineering or eugenics. As he wrote: A race is not an entity like an individual …. In the vast majority of cases, it is a hybrid and in a process of slow change. I can see no reason why we should attempt to stop this process of blending. … Among the Africans themselves it appears to me sound policy to encourage the intermingling of different tribes and the formation of a settled and peaceable population.30 If some African races appeared to be dying, in other words, they could be ‘blended’ or ‘intermingled’ with their allegedly more advanced neighbours. From this perspective, native reserves in British Africa were in some conjunctures not only sites for the ostensible ‘protection’ of rural populations or the ‘management of dispossession’ resulting from the expropriation of land and natural resources for European settler agriculture.31 Particularly in relation to the social Darwinian theories of the period, these reserves could

26 C. Darwin, The writing of ‘The Origin of Species’, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume 1, London, 1896, 481. 27 See. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 254e255. See also A. Lester, Settler colonialism, Sir George Grey, and the politics of ethnography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016) 492e507. 28 Eliot, East Africa Protectorate, 101e102. 29 F.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, London, 1922, 42. 30 Eliot, East Africa Protectorate, 106e107. 31 T.M. Li, Indigeneity, capitalism, and the management of dispossession, Current Anthropology 51 (2010) 391e394. 32 See also T.M. Li, Fixing non-market subjects: governing land and population in the global south, Foucault Studies 18 (2014) 34e48.

also serve as laboratories for a kind of proto-eugenic experimentation with the ‘improvement’ of native populations.32 Indeed, whereas Stoler and Cooper have memorably referred to European colonies generally as ‘laboratories of modernity’, this was sometimes the case simply due to the period’s often wavering distinctions between the practice of science and that of colonial government.33 Conversely, whilst these colonial laboratories were often ‘unwieldy sites of engineering’, whose ‘experiments were reworked by their subjects’, the scope for both individual and collective agency at some junctures also appears to have been quite tightly circumscribed.34 As I seek to illuminate in relation to the case of the Sengwer and the Committee on the Dorobo question, the scope for ‘African initiative’ could be seriously constrained both by the nature of the racial ideologies at work, and by the colonial state’s willingness to enforce the intertwined dispossession of lands, resources and claims to collective identity. The committee on the Dorobo question and western Kenya’s ‘administrative challenges’ In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Britain’s African colonies and protectorates were subject to an almost ceaseless succession of commissions of inquiry and other administrative exercises in governmental appraisal. In relation to the governance of land and natural resources, these were often intended to identify ways in which processes of mass dispossession for European settlement, other resource appropriations and their consequences might best be managed and administered. Throughout British Africa, such management was often thought necessary in order to avoid what was frequently described e with considerable understatement e as the ‘administrative challenges’ that might follow. If not well handled, in other words, such dispossessions might lead to a degree of strife that would demand ‘much in blood and money’ to suppress, even if deemed unlikely to pose an existential threat to the colonial administration itself.35 As Frederick Lugard put it, it was indeed the case that the ‘problem of the methods of acquisition was followed by the problem of the methods of exercising control’.36 In the western highlands of Kenya Colony, the ‘problem of the methods of exercising control’ was primarily related to managing the effects of dispossession for the simultaneous creation of separate areas for settlers, ‘natives’ and ‘nature’ or forest reserves throughout the western reaches of the colony’s so-called White Highlands (Fig. 1). Here, significant numbers of new settlers were introduced under the auspices of what became known as the ‘ExSolider Resettlement Scheme’ after 1919, in which a select few of those who had served the British Empire during the First World War would be rewarded with estates in the Kenyan highlands.37 Prior to 1919, the scale of settler colonisation had already been substantial, if not truly comparable to the volume of European immigration into Southern Rhodesia, much less the Union of South Africa. The annual report of the Kenya Colony and Protectorate for 1929, for instance, estimated that the European population was only 9,651 in 1921, though growing substantially to 12,529 by 1926

33 Stoler and Cooper, Tensions of Empire, 1e58. See also H. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870e1950, Chicago, 2011. 34 Stoler and Cooper, Between metropole and colony, 4e5. 35 C.J. Cavanagh and D. Himmelfarb, Much in blood and money: necropolitical ecology on the margins of the Uganda Protectorate, Antipode 41 (2015) 55e73. 36 Lugard, Dual Mandate, 18. 37 UKNA CO/1047/119, East Africa Protectorate Land Settlement Scheme for ExService Men and Women, London, 1919.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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Fig. 1. Map showing the study area in the western highlands of Kenya Colony, located at the interface of the Cherangani Hills range and the ‘White Highlands’ reserved for European settlement. Cartographer: Philip Stickler, Cartography Unit, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.

e an increase of thirty percent over five years.38 Despite these relatively modest numbers, Lord Hailey was quick to observe in his overview of early Kenyan land policy that ‘the alienation process rapidly “got out of hand”‘, thus recommending, ‘in view of the difficulties arising from the dispossession of natives, areas should be reserved for them’.39 It was not until 1926 that most of these reserves had begun to be substantively demarcated, however, and often in ways that prompted their own forms of contestation over new boundaries and the corresponding politics of belonging and exclusion that they inaugurated.40 Similar to what Richard Grove once observed of the late British empire more generally, it was certainly also the case in Kenya that ‘the origins of the colonial game or forest “reserve” and the concept of the “native reserve” were functionally and politically interrelated’.41 Alongside these processes of boundary specification for

native reserves, in other words, the demarcation of nature and forest reserves had also instigated a variety of disputes around the use, habitation and exploitation of both forests and highland grazing areas.42 To address the issue of forest-dwelling communities in particular, the Committee on the Dorobo question was formed in March 1929, and e as outlined in its report of July 1931 e broadly advocated for a strategy of assimilating these groups into ostensibly more ‘advanced’ neighbouring communities. Indeed, ‘the general recommendation regarding the whole problem’ was that, ‘wherever possible, the Dorobo should become members of, and be absorbed into, the tribe with which they have most affinity’.43 The assimilatory intent of such an ‘absorptive’ approach was also quite explicit. Through a combination of removal from forest territories, resettlement under the authority of an administrative ‘chief’ and likely intermarriage over time, it was thought that Dorobo would eventually assimilate into allegedly superior African races and become members of their constituent tribes.44

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Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Report for 1929, Nairobi, 1930, 24. Lord Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Some Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, Oxford, 1938, 745. 40 Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Government Notice No. 394 of 1926, Kenya Gazette, Nairobi, 1926. 41 R. Grove, Ecology, Climate, and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400e1940, Cambridge, 1997, 185. 39

42 T.P. Ofcansky, Kenya forestry under British colonial administration, 1895e1963, Journal of Forest History 28 (1984) 136e143. 43 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume III, 2133. 44 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume III, 2133, 2135.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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The views of the committee are notable, as they were largely adopted verbatim by a subsequent, higher profile exercise in land administration: the commission of inquiry into ‘certain land problems in the colony of Kenya’ led by the former chief justice of Uganda and Tanganyika, Sir William Morris Carter, over the course of 1932e1933.45 Officially, this was intended to recommend measures to equitably provide for the current and future land needs of Kenya’s diverse European, African, Indian and other populations. In relation to Kenya’s forest-dwelling communities, it was thus not inconsequential that Carter and his colleagues were broadly in agreement with the recommendations of the Committee on the Dorobo question. Moreover, given that the committee had concluded its activities in 1931, it was decided ‘neither to publish nor to implement’ the Dorobo committee’s recommendations pending the land commission’s own conclusions on the subject.46 The Kenya Land Commission would later note, simply, that ‘the final recommendation of the Dorobo committee is that they should be moved to the reserves of the tribes to which they are affiliated. We are in full agreement with this recommendation’.47 In his memoir, the land commission’s secretary, S.H. Fazan, retrospectively hints at the underlying rationale for this. The Dorobo ‘may have been aboriginals of East Africa’, he writes, ‘but more likely they were tribal offshoots. It seems that some tribes had, as it were, a forest-dwelling section barely or grudgingly recognized as fellow tribesmen’.48 Thus construed in implicitly evolutionary terms as especially ‘backward’ tribal offshoots, the broadly assimilatory impetus of the preceding Committee on the Dorobo question was generally upheld. Such an approach was remarkable in that it arose at a time, in an administration and within a wider late British Empire that was at least formally preoccupied with the protection rather than the eradication of African ‘custom’. Indeed, especially following the Devonshire Declaration of 1923 and prior to the East Africa Royal Commission of 1952e1955, colonial policy in Kenya was intimately bound up with the doctrine of ‘native paramountcy’.49 In other words, the colony’s development was at least outwardly framed in relation to the principle that it must be governed in the primary interest of its ‘native’ African population, rather than that of its European settlers or other immigrants, such as its substantial Indian community. Nonetheless, the chief native commissioner would himself write approvingly of the Kenya Land Commission’s recommendations on this issue in particular, declaring that the assimilation of Dorobo was justified on the basis that they were ‘just on the point of leaving the hunting for the agricultural stage of evolution’, and thus apparently could not ‘exist in the modern world as forest dwellers without danger to forest and so to water, already a scarcening commodity in Eastern Africa’.50 As is explored below, the consequences of this social Darwinist ideology are perhaps exemplified by the Kenya Land Commission’s treatment of a community known as the Sengwer in the Cherangani Hills of Kenya Colony’s western highlands. Here, we see how the

45 From the commission’s terms of reference. see UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 1. 46 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 259. Given that it formally remained unpublished, it appears that the only surviving version of the Committee on the Dorobo Question’s original report is the one appended as ‘Evidence and Memoranda’ received by the Kenya Land Commission. See UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume III, 2131e2135. 47 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 259. 48 S.H. Fazan, Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau, and the Winds of Change, London and New York, 2015, 87. 49 Colonial Office, Devonshire Declaration: Indians in Kenya, London, 1923. 50 O.F. Watkins, The report of the Kenya Land Commission, September 1933, Journal of the Royal African Society 33 (1934), 210, 213.

commission’s assimilatory approach to the Dorobo question was upheld in spite of the Sengwer’s insistence on alternative ways of seeing the relationships between their identity, livelihoods and claims to the landscape, as well as the protestations of both Sengwer representatives and certain members of the local settler and administrative communities.

‘We are not Marakwet, but Sengwerr’: dispossessions of land, forests and identity in Kenya Colony’s western highlands In relation to Kenya Colony’s broader ‘administrative challenges’, the land claims of the Sengwer were not an especially pressing concern e neither for the Kenya Land Commission, nor for the British administration more broadly. Indeed, the colonial state’s priority was generally not with cataloguing the grievances of western Kenya’s various minority groups, but rather with forging the terms of what might be called a ‘sustainable Pax Britannica’ in the region. Despite the administration’s support for settler colonisation in the highlands, settlers and natives would continue to live in close proximity to one another. Moreover, they would do so under political-economic circumstances that required both settlers and the administration to draw upon a reliable supply of African labour and agricultural commodities.51 Accordingly, the region’s ‘ecological infrastructure’ also needed to be maintained, such that ongoing processes of deforestation to enable agricultural expansion would not diminish the critical water resources available to both African and settler farms.52 Yet, despite its relative disinterest in the particulars of the Sengwer’s claims, the commission’s treatment of this community nonetheless illuminates the more subtle forms of violence that the colonial state was still able to deploy within its doctrine of ‘native paramountcy’. As explored below, such violence would manifest in this case, not least in the intertwined dispossession of customary lands and resources, as well as in the denial of the Sengwer’s assertions of collective identity in favour of an imperial policy of minority assimilation justified on ‘evolutionary’ grounds. Firstly, it is notable that the final report of the Kenya Land Commission itself makes no mention of the term ‘Sengwer’, utilizing instead the exogenously ascribed, derogatory term ‘Cherangani’. From the outset, the commission articulated a somewhat dismissive understanding of this community: The Cherangani are the northern section of the Marakwet. They claim an area of surveyed farms, some alienated and some still unalienated …. The evidence is that at one time the Cherangani were forest dwellers who did not own stock, and cultivated only on a small scale. When government became established, administrative officers did their utmost to persuade them to forsake their forests and take to stock-owning and cultivating.53 This characterization is important, as it classifies the ‘Cherangani’ as forest-dwellers e and thus, implicitly, as ‘Dorobo’ e that had already been targeted for eviction from highland forests and resettlement amongst neighbouring Marakwet communities. Such treatment was hoped to reorient their livelihoods from hunting and foraging toward locally prevalent forms of agro-pastoralism, and to reduce pressure on local forest resources in the process. Assimilation was thus thought to be almost synonymous with an environmental form of ‘civilisation’, given that subsequently adopted forms

51 See B: Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Oxford, 1992, 101e122; Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890s -1963, Oxford, 2002, 126e155. 52 C.J. Cavanagh, Critical ecosystem infrastructure? Governing the forests-water nexus in the Kenyan highlands, in: R. Boelens, T. Perreault and J. Vos (Eds), Water Justice, Cambridge, 2018, 302e315. 53 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 268.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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of livelihood were perceived to be comparatively ‘modern’, amenable to local administration or taxation and ecologically sustainable.54 In order to illuminate the full stakes of this prevailing administrative stance for the Sengwer, however, it is first important to consider the somewhat circumscribed testimony of two community representatives: Arap Kamusein and Arap Kabelion. Crucially, the testimonies of these two men highlight considerable resistance to these officially sanctioned forms of dispossession and assimilation. Aside from grievances related to ‘stolen lands’ alienated for European settlement, also salient was the colonial state’s implicit foreclosure upon the forms of livelihood and customary governance that the Sengwer’s habitation of highland forests and glades had enabled. Hence, although the commission euphemistically notes that ‘administrative officers did their utmost to persuade’ the Sengwer to ‘forsake their forests and take to stock-owning and cultivating’, in practice this was often coercive, or accompanied by the thinly-veiled threat of state violence and other forms of legal sanction.55 During a field expedition of the Kenya Land Commission to the estate of Arthur Cecil Hoey on 2nd October 1932, Kamusein and Kabelion arrived to provide testimony. The location had been selected for this purpose because Hoey was one of the earliest European settlers in the region, and because the rights to portions of his property were being disputed by the Sengwer. From the outset, Kamusein fundamentally tied his claim to the ways in which his community had been forced to vacate their lands to facilitate European settlement in this region. Kamusein was adamant that this ‘was the land of the Sengwerr’, but that his community had been unjustly ‘removed … by Government declaring it farm land’ for European settlers.56 Though acknowledging the veracity of the claim, the commission’s subsequent report simply notes that the land in question ‘is now [settler farm] No. 5784 … there was no question of the Europeans’ land being handed back to them’.57 Differently put, the commission’s immediate reaction to the very foundation of Kamusein’s claim was that the Sengwer would simply not be allowed either to remain within the region’s highland forests and glades nor to occupy nearby forest-adjacent areas following their alienation for settler farms. The Sengwer were caught, so to speak, between ‘a rock’, in the form of settler estates in this portion of the White Highlands, and a ‘green place’ in the form of the region’s emerging forest reserves. Following this initial dismissal of the Sengwer’s claim to European lands, Kamusein quickly departed from his narrative concerning these processes of dispossession to insist upon a related but distinct point. This concerned the identity of his community and its relationship to the neighbouring Marakwet population in particular. As he put it, rather directly: We are not Marakwet, but Sengwerr. We were robbed of our cattle by the Karamojong, and then the Masai laughed at us because we had no cattle, and called us Cherangani.58 Unfortunately, Kamusein was not allowed to elaborate, as his testimony was circumscribed at exactly this juncture. Also permitted to briefly contribute, Arap Kabelion underscored the significance of the above comment by elaborating upon the ways in which the Sengwer had been marginalised not only by land

54

Cavanagh, Anthropos into humanitas. 55 For records of ‘punitive raids’ undertaken to enforce the emerging British legal order in this region, see Kenya National Archives (hereafter KNA) DC/ELGM/7, Elgeyo-Marakwet Political Record Books, 1900e1910. 56 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1992e1993. 57 UKNA/CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1993. 58 UKNA/CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report (Vol. II), 1993.

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alienations for European settlement, but also by the demarcation of a new boundary for the West Suk District in 1926.59 As he put it: Some time ago, Mr. Hosking, the District Commissioner at Marakwet, and the District Commissioner, Kacheliba, met on this boundary [between the Marakwet and West Suk Districts] and made an arrangement by which we were deprived of a block of land. We did not get a fair deal. Mr. Hosking said, ‘Let us give the Suk some grass to help them, but the country will remain yours’. We agreed to that, and now we have lost the land.60 The cadastral transaction that Kabelion referred to constitutes only one moment in the somewhat kaleidoscopic (re)specification of boundaries for native reserves, settler farms, forest reserves and administrative districts in the region. This process would eventually see the Sengwer community included within the northern section of the Marakwet Native Reserve in a location dubbed ‘Cherangani’, and substantial amounts of land previously claimed by the community transferred either to white settlers, to the West Suk District or to the colonial state as forest reserves. Unfortunately, the truncated protestations and grievances of these two men appear to be the only surviving record of testimony from Sengwer community members collected by the commission. Nonetheless, they point to the ways in which the symbolic dispossession of claims to specific identities appear to have been intimately connected to the material dispossession of lands and resources. In other words, disqualification of a ‘Sengwer’ identity was simultaneously also a foreclosure upon this community’s right to inhabit a distinct territory, and thus to practice related modes of livelihood predicated on the inhabitation of upland forests and glades. Of course, the representation of such testimony in the colonial archive e as well as its subsequent interpretation e is rendered problematic by the context in which it was initially collected. Formal narratives delivered before such commissions are always potentially somewhat ‘performative’ or situationally instrumental in character. Indeed, diverse stakeholders would have certainly recognized the imperative of engaging administrative bodies like the Kenya Land Commission, if perhaps not realistically to their advantage, then certainly to what Eric Hobsbawm might have termed their ‘minimum disadvantage’.61 Moreover, with regard to the articulation of particular identities, further complications arise from the frequently ‘protean’ and often contested nature of both self assumed and externally ascribed ethnonyms or identifiers in the region, in the early twentieth century as well as in the present.62 Here, ‘ethnic’ labels or signifiers ascribed to certain communities by the state or larger communities have often been variously rejected and occasionally adopted strategically by the members of these groups. Even if perceived to be derogatory, in other words, such exogenous labels may sometimes be used voluntarily in certain fora. This might be in order to draw upon the authority seemingly offered by official records wherein these terms appear, or simply because they are thought more likely e with a greater or lesser degree of exasperation e to facilitate a certain degree of mutual understanding.63 In this sense, it is notable that both Kamusein and Kabelion elected to disavow the derogatory term ‘Cherangani’ in favour of their preferred ethnonym ‘Sengwerr’. This is particularly so as it was only the term ‘Cherangani’ that had been institutionalised as

59 Via Kenya Colony and Protectorate, Government Notice No. 394 of 1926, Kenya Gazette, Nairobi, 1926. 60 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1993. 61 E. Hobsbawm, Peasants and politics, Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1973) 3e22. 62 B.J. Berman, Ethnicity, patronage, and the African state: the politics of uncivil nationalism, African Affairs 97 (1998), 310. 63 See, for instance, D. Hodgson, Africa from the margins, African Studies Review 60 (2017) 37e49.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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the official name of a nearby administrative ‘location’ within the Marakwet Native Reserve, indicating that the latter’s usage may have been more understandable or legible to local officials.64 In short, however, the tactic was not successful. Carter and the other commissioners ultimately disregarded the Sengwer’s assertions of a collective identity distinct from the Marakwet. Interestingly, moreover, this was despite a dissenting opinion offered by the commission’s host, Arthur Cecil Hoey. It was Hoey’s view, for instance, that the Sengwer’s history and livelihood practices were substantially distinct from nearby populations of Marakwet. As Hoey put it to Carter: With regard to the actual condition of this country when I came into it after the Nandi War of 1906 …[,] [t]he Cherangani had been driven right back into the mountain here, and a few of them were living on the corner of my farm …. They simply lived there with no stock of any sort; they lived there entirely as Dorobo, with just a little wimbi [cassava] here and there.65 Apparently somewhat sceptical, Carter pressed Hoey on this comment, asking: ‘Would you say they were in the process of being absorbed by the Elgeyo or Marakwet?‘. Perhaps sensing the broader implications of these queries, however, Hoey resisted this line of questioning, responding: ‘No, I would not actually say that. I don’t think they have reached that position yet. I noticed yesterday how emphatic they were on the Sengwerr’.66 In subsequent testimony, the commissioner for Elgeyo District, J.G. Hamilton-Ross, would also reinforce Hoey’s narrative concerning the apparently unique ‘Dorobo’ livelihoods practiced by the Sengwer, as well as the marginalisation that they had experienced under British rule. As he put it: In the Cherangani area, the people were very largely of Dorobo descent with an admixture of Elgeyo and possibly Masai and perhaps Kony, with whom they maintained contact. … The same process went on along the Cherangani boundary with the same result, i.e. that through shyness and a complete incomprehension of the intentions of the white man natives were driven firmly but inexorably … from lands which they had occupied for several generations.67 Here, the testimonies of both Hoey and Hamilton-Ross were simultaneously both convenient and inconvenient for the commission. Convenient, because they e beyond the smaller scale ‘case’ of Sengwer land claims e appeared to reproduce the terra nullius doctrine of unoccupied or unowned land that the state believed to support the legitimacy or rightful nature of the land alienations made to European settlers. Yet they were inconvenient as well, because these testimonies appeared to support the notion of a history of prior residence and relative autonomy of a ‘Dorobo’ community in the region known as the Sengwer, who might conceivably press awkwardly reasonable claims to lands and resources on this basis, and to resist assimilation. Clearly somewhat reluctant to entertain the prospect of demarcating a discrete territory in addition to those already gazetted under the auspices of the Marakwet and Suk Native Reserves, however, Carter pressed Hoey in particular about whether the Sengwer could in fact be considered to maintain livelihoods or cultural institutions distinct from more sedentary agro-pastoralist communities nearby. Again, however, Hoey would reply somewhat defensively, pointing instead to the livelihood changes that had been brought about by the British administration itself: The Cherangani when I first came into the country had no stock

64 65 66 67

See, for instance, DC/TAMB/1/1/7, Cherangani Safari File. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1994. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1995. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1952, 1954.

whatsoever. In this Kaption Valley there was not a hoof of stock, but the Administration Officers did their utmost to persuade the Cherangani to adopt an entirely different mode of life and become stockowners, and to cultivate a good deal more than they had done in the past …. I think they were living on the edge of the forest, growing their small patches of wimbi, and living practically by hunting; honey-pots, shooting monkeys, and that sort of thing. They paid no taxes in those days; in fact, they had a very good life.68 Moreover, Hoey would proceed to make the subtext of his testimony much more explicit, and in ways that might bolster the claims of the Sengwer community on both political and ecological grounds. As he insisted, more bluntly: I feel very strongly on this question of regulating the grazing. If there is any idea, which I understand there is, of amalgamating the Elgeyo and the Marakwet and the Cherangani into one tribe … I am terribly concerned lest what is very fine country to-day should be laid to waste some years ahead.69 The reasons for Hoey’s testimony on this subject were perhaps counterintuitive. Queried by Carter about whether he felt that overstocking of cattle and grazing within forests would be the primary cause of this degradation, Hoey again dissented quite strongly: No, Sir; on the contrary, I think that in this country there is a lot of grazing available in the forest glades that should be used to-day. I maintain that the forest would benefit, because it would mean that instead of having the forest devastated by these enormous grass fires, the grass would be grazed down.70 Differently put, Hoey’s position on this issue appears to have been both quite sophisticated and critical of the administration’s broader stance on the ‘Dorobo question’. Firstly, he was reluctant to elide differences of identity and livelihood claimed by Sengwer representatives. Secondly, however, he emphasised the potential ecological implications of simultaneously both assimilating the Sengwer into the Marakwet Native Reserve and dispossessing them of their customary territories in the highland forests and glades. Here, Hoey’s prediction was that - in combination with the exclusion of these communities both from newly demarcated forest reserves and from surrounding lands slated for European settlement e the subsequent intensification of pressure on agricultural lands and resources would precipitate substantial deforestation, thus ironically endangering the very forests and water catchment areas that colonial environmental policy was meant to protect. Likewise, forest evictions would spell an end to the role of Sengwer grazing in regulating the overgrowth of grasses within the region’s forestpasture mosaic, increasing the risk of potentially disastrous forest fires that could spread to European estates on the highlands. With the above remarks, then, Hoey challenged or complicated prevailing colonial narratives of African ‘backwardness’, ‘ignorance’ and environmental unsustainability. Instead, he highlighted the negative environmental consequences of the colonial state’s own political-economic imperatives and practices of governance. In stark contrast, it was the position of the agricultural officer for the Nzoia Province, Colin Maher, that: The Elgeyo-Marakwet Reserve from being a land of primitive poverty and semi-starvation might well become a country of plenty and comparative wealth. The natives themselves are at present the stumbling-block and their education, especially in agricultural matters, and their improvement in general health must be considered the first stage in developing the resources of the reserve. The reports of the Medical Officers will doubtlessly include recommendations as to the means of making these tribes into more

68 69 70

UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1995e1996. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1997. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1997.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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virile races. … [T]he Elgeyo-Marakwet Reserve is a district of considerable economic possibilities if the lethargic and primitive nature of the inhabitants can be changed sufficiently by education.71 Conceived in such ‘racial’ terms, in other words, consolidation within a single native reserve and subsequent education offered, for administrators like Maher, a possible means of ‘revitalising’ what might otherwise constitute a ‘primitive’ collection of tribes that ostensibly included the remnants of a ‘dying race’ of forestdwelling Dorobo. Diametrically opposed, Hoey’s position points to a sceptical counterargument, which would instead highlight the ways in which the integration of these reserves into the colonial political economy had in fact produced many of the economic and ecological problems that Maher apparently wanted to ‘solve’ through education and racial ‘revitalisation’. However, the plurality of these views stands in sharp contrast to the singularity of the Kenya Land Commission’s ultimate resolutions, which reflect quite unevenly the evidence heard by its commissioners. For instance, the commission implicitly dismissed the claim to a distinct ‘Sengwerr’ identity, simply decreeing that ‘the Cherangani are the northern section of the Marakwet’.72 Thus established, the question was not whether to dispossess the Sengwer of their current territories and assimilate them into the Marakwet Native Reserve, but rather how much extra land might be required for addition to the reserve for them to live within it. As the commission’s report concluded: Having heard the evidence of Mr. A.C. Hoey … and having visited ourselves the land in question we have formed the opinion, with which the Provincial Commissioner agrees, that neither on grounds of right nor economic grounds are the natives entitled to quite so large addition of territory …. We recommend that the lands … comprising approximately 12 square miles be added to the reserve.73 With largely only ‘the stroke of a pen’, therefore, the Sengwer community had been formally dispossessed of both their preferred collective identity and their complex political-ecological system of upland forest and rangeland governance.74 Importantly, these are dispossessions of both identities and territories that have been upheld by the Kenyan state throughout the colonial period and into the present, notwithstanding the sustained resistances of contemporary members of these communities on the ground.75 Despite their inability to prevent colonial dispossessions in the early twentieth century, these resistances are nonetheless still of considerable importance today for understanding the dynamics influencing articulations of various collective identities in Kenya’s enduringly complex social, political and ecological conjuncture, as I discuss in conclusion below. Conclusion This article has examined the discourses and debates underpinning the machinations of the Committee on the Dorobo question in Kenya Colony, as well as its uptake within Sir Morris Carter’s Kenya Land Commission of 1932e1933. In doing so, it has highlighted the ways in which the territorialisation of space for mutually exclusive categories of settlers, natives and nature was

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UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, Volume II, 1974. UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 268. 73 UKNA CAB/24/248, Kenya Land Commission Report, 268. 74 Chang, Nomads without cattle; R.H. Blackburn, Fission, fusion, and foragers in East Africa: micro- and macroprocesses of diversity and integration among Okiek groups, in: S. Kent (Ed), Cultural Diversity Among Twentieth-Century Foragers: An African Perspective, Cambridge, 1996, 188e213. 75 Cavanagh, Anthropos into humanitas. 72

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becoming increasingly problematic for the administration. Amidst these attempts to impose rigid classifications of administrative legibility upon a political-ecological web of people, landscapes, flora and fauna, I have suggested that the position of ‘the Dorobo’ brings the implicit contradictions and tensions of these processes to the forefront. Indeed, for the Committee on the Dorobo question and other administrators, apparently forest-dwelling communities were problematic precisely because they challenged administrative categories that were still in the process of ossification: not least between ‘nature’ and ‘society’; between discrete landscape classifications like ‘forest’ and ‘farmland’; and between mutually exclusive or rigidly bounded tribes. Engaging the above phenomena, I have suggested that renewed inquiries into conjoined discourses of ‘race’ and ‘nature’ like those underpinning the Dorobo question in the early twentieth century can assist us in more fully understanding the multiple dimensions of identity formation in this period. Here, the case of the Sengwer community in western Kenya’s Cherangani Hills is particularly relevant for illuminating inextricably entangled forms of both tribalisation and racialisation. Administratively judged to be the remnants of a ‘dying race’ already undergoing a process of transitive social evolution e rather than a tribe worthy of ‘protection’ in their own right e the Sengwer were dismissively slated for assimilation into the nearby Marakwet Native Reserve despite their protestations. Refusing to recognise the Sengwer’s claims to ‘representational sovereignty’, or self-definition, the administration effectively foreclosed on the institutional conditions that would have enabled their existence as a viable socio-political entity within Kenya Colony’s emerging administrative geography.76 Differently put, while it is certainly the case that processes of tribalisation and the corresponding demarcation of tribal or ethnic territories were often engaged ‘from below’ by African leaders, ‘subaltern activists’ and ‘ethnic patriots’, the Sengwer case illuminates the ways in which such efforts were also far from guaranteed to achieve success.77 Moreover, the consequences of failure in this regard could not only be weighty, but also enduringly so, as evidenced by ongoing mobilisations of community members in the present. Still today, at issue is access to lands and resources that were initially alienated in this part of the British colonial period, despite the protestations of community members and support from certain sympathetic Europeans at the time.78 Accordingly, although some scholars now see the Sengwer as one of Kenya’s ‘new indigenes’ strategically clamouring to access streams of patronage from transnational ‘indigenous rights’ organisations, the fact remains that protestations concerning the salience of a uniquely ‘Sengwer’ identity and its connections to the habitation of upland forests and glades have been ongoing at least since the early 1930s.79 Beyond the Kenya administration’s final determinations concerning the ‘absorption’ of the Sengwer into the Marakwet Native Reserve, the opposing views of settlers, administrators and conservators outlined above also prefigure comparable debates today between scholars, conservation or indigenous rights organisations, and state or intergovernmental bureaucracies. This is perhaps especially the case with regard to debates about the emergence of claims to ‘indigenous’ or ethnic minority identities both in eastern

76 On the relations between ‘representational sovereignty’ and various forms of dispossession, see P. West, Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea, New York, 2016. 77 MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination, 17e20. 78 For an example of recent coverage from the advocacy grey literature, see Amnesty International, Families Torn Apart: Forced Evictions of Indigenous People in Embobut Forest, Kenya, Nairobi, 2018. 79 See, for example, Lynch, Kenya’s new indigenes.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

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Africa and elsewhere.80 Here, recent scholarship has tended to offer social constructivist critiques of ‘primordialist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ accounts of such claims. These perspectives are e as Richard Waller has recently noted e especially useful in illuminating how specific articulations of identity rise to prominence within a given historical and geographical conjuncture, as well as how these claims constitute ‘positionings’ that often change over time or in accordance with shifting socio-political contexts.81 I would suggest, however, that when it comes to the explanation of precisely why certain collective identities stabilise in a given place and time, many constructivist accounts nonetheless exhibit a tendency to implicitly lapse into instrumentalism. Such a tendency is particularly evident in works examining the recent claims to indigeneity of several minority groups in Kenya, including the Sengwer. It has been argued, for instance, that ‘the proliferation of communities that self-identify as indigenous peoples’ illuminates the ways in which ‘community leaders have self-consciously employed a global discourse of indigeneity … to strengthen moral and legal claims to land and resources, to access new domains of action and cultivate new channels of patronage’.82 Though such analyses are often presented as being ‘constructivist’ in nature, typically they offer a largely instrumental set of reasons for why a community like the Sengwer might articulate claims to indigeneity within the contemporary East African political landscape. By contrast, understanding the Sengwer case historically allows these recent claims to be viewed with greater nuance. Indeed, foregrounding the social Darwinism of late East African colonialisms e as manifested within the ‘dying race’ theories of the time e we are able to more clearly perceive the ways in which diverse populations have been unevenly affected by these now often forgotten processes of intra-African racialisation. Fully understanding the motivations of communities now ‘articulating’ unique rights claims on account of their apparently indigenous or ethnic minority status thus requires an appreciation of the afterlives of such idiosyncratic forms of racial discrimination.83 Still today, many ‘Dorobo’ communities like the Sengwer remain formally dispossessed of access to highland forests and glades enclosed within various state owned forest reserves. Implicit within the colonial state’s dismissal of their collective identity in the 1930s was, in this sense, also a denial of their capacities to sustainably own and manage these material lands and resources in the future.84 Consequently, the legacies or inheritances of these processes of racialised dispossession perhaps open up possibilities for viewing recent articulations of ‘indigenous’ identities in eastern Africa through an explicitly postcolonial rather than necessarily a primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist lens. Such a postcolonial vantage would emphasise the disaggregation of local historical experience, or the value of remaining attentive to the enduring relevance of highly unequal processes of both the tribalisation and racialisation of diverse African populations. These processes certainly often entailed a ‘politics of collaboration’,

80 For example Igoe, Becoming indigenous peoples; Lynch, Kenya’s new indigenes; Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous. 81 Waller, Ethnicity and identity, 9; Li, Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia, 152e153; Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, 9. 82 Lynch, Kenya’s new indigenes, 148. 83 On the dangers of excessively ‘ironic’ academic treatments of contemporary claims to indigeneity, see especially J. Hope, The constraints of an ‘ironic scholar’: negotiating critical engagement with indigeneity and nature conservation, Geoforum 78 (2017) 74e81. 84 Forest Peoples Programme, Illegal and Forceful Evictions of the Sengwer Indigenous People from their Ancestral Lands in the Cherangany Hills, Kenya, Moreton-inMarsh, 2019.

negotiation or even co-production, throughout which various African leaders, activists and intellectuals exerted considerable influence over the formation of native reserves and the specification of related boundaries.85 Importantly, however, the fact remains that the capacity to do so successfully or advantageously was not equally distributed, as illustrated by the forcible assimilation of smaller groups like the Sengwer despite their protestations and mobilisations to the contrary. In this sense, Iliffe’s famous adage e ‘Europeans thought Africans belonged to tribes; Africans built tribes to belong to’ e is certainly apt and memorable, but perhaps also occludes the ways in which certain smaller communities would occasionally be forced into tribes in ways perceived to be economically or politically disadvantageous to them. In short, after nearly a century of state attempts to uphold the legal and other inheritances of such forcible assimilation, claims to a unique and distinct identity amongst affected communities must also be seen as a continuing form of resistance to colonial rubrics or categories of administration, rather than simply an instrumentalist tactic for accessing lands, resources or patronage from states and civil society organisations in the present moment. Conversely, arguments for the recognition of such claims to indigeneity and the related ‘protection’ of indigenous rights admittedly also retain the potential to implicitly reanimate the misguided paternalisms of late colonial thought, even if inadvertently so or within a distinctly modern idiom. In this respect, efforts to pursue contemporary redress for both material and symbolic dispossessions rooted in the colonial era are also well advised to revisit the relation of present-day ‘protective’ discourses to the attitudes of a previous era of governors, conservators and administrators in East Africa and elsewhere.86 By doing so, initiatives to rebalance certain instrumentalist tendencies in contemporary scholarship will be more likely to avoid sliding into an unhelpful form of neo-primordialism, one that might seek to uphold or justify present-day rights claims with reference to an idealised e or perhaps even straightforwardly romanticised e pre-colonial past. Particularly with regard to forest-dwelling populations, such a perspective indeed risks the equally problematic reproduction of past varieties of ‘ecological nobility’ in colonial discourse, which e even if effective in securing land or resource rights e could potentially ‘eco-incarcerate’ its constituents within unrealistic expectations concerning antiquated modes of livelihood and their environmental impacts.87 Here again, however, an explicitly postcolonial lens is useful, as it would insist on the necessity of examining continuities between colonial discourses and contemporary arguments both for and against ongoing processes of material or symbolic dispossession. As such, there is perhaps still much to be gained from a new generation of inquiries into conjoined discourses of ‘race’, ‘nature’ and related social evolutionary tropes of the early twentieth century. Indeed, doing so might allow us to more fully or empathetically understand the motivations, grievances and aspirations of communities now articulating various conceptions of indigeneity in their efforts to imagine desirable futures e and not least within the social and political context of East Africa’s enduringly tumultuous present.

85 On the ‘politics of collaboration’, see R. Robinson, Non-European foundations of European imperialism: sketch for a theory of collaboration, in: R. Owen and B. Surcliffe (Eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London, 1972, 117e140. 86 On the resonances between colonial and contemporary discourses of protection, see also Li, Indigeneity, capitalism, and the management of dispossession. 87 E.T. Yeh and J. Bryan, Indigeneity, in: T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, London and New York, 2015, 536.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005

C.J. Cavanagh / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Miles Ogborn and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Research for this study was undertaken with support from the Research Council of Norway FRIPRO-Toppforsk project ‘Greenmentality: A Political Ecology of the Green Economy in the Global South’. Research clearance was obtained from Kenya’s National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI), and the Kenya National Archives. I am grateful to Philip Stickler at the Cartography Unit, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge for his kind assistance in drawing Fig. 1. Any errors of course remain my own responsibility. Connor Joseph Cavanagh is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences. His research explores the political ecology of conservation and agrarian change, with a focus on land and resource politics, novel economic valuations of nonhuman ‘nature’, and historically evolving property regimes in eastern Africa. Recent articles have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, and Geoforum amongst other outlets.

Please cite this article as: C.J. Cavanagh, Dying races, deforestation and drought: the political ecology of social Darwinism in Kenya Colony’s western highlands, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2019.09.005