¹ My thinking on this subject owes so much to unpublished manuscripts by and conversations with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Bruce Berman, John Lonsdale, and Luise White that I am not sure which of what seem like my ideas are really theirs; but they will have to forgive me until they let their manuscripts go.Google Scholar

² Low, D. A. and Lonsdale, John, ‘Introduction’, History of East Africa, III, Low, D. A. and Smith, A. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).Google Scholar

³ Rosberg, Carl G. and Nottingham, John, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Praeger, 1966).Google Scholar

⁴ His principal examples of pro-capitalist African politicians who were alienated by British policy are James Beauttah, who ran buses, and Andrew Ng'ang'a, who marketed eggs. In neither case, does he explain what mobilizing labour and other resources meant to such individuals, and he says nothing at all about the key question: how did his protocapitalists acquire land and labour in agriculture?Google Scholar

⁵ Throup paints a vivid portrait of ‘outcast Nairobi’, yet his portrayal of its basic relationships as ethnically determined seems at odds with his belief that acultural capitalists were available for official co-optation. His lack of conceptual clarity in handling issues of ethnicity is revealed, for example, in the ‘the’ in a statement like the following: ‘the 30,000 Kikuyu and members of the related Embu and Meru people subjected the 52,000 Nyanza Africans and the 7,000 Kamba to an unending reign of terror’ (p. 191). This would have been a large gang.Google Scholar

⁶ This is something that radical leaders in Nairobi apparently contemplated doing, or so Fred Kubai told Granada television a few years ago. When Kenyatta tried to stake out an anti-Mau Mau middle position in 1952, a delegation went to warn him: ‘He would have lost his life. It was too dangerous and he knew it. He was a bit shaken by the way we looked at him.’ Kubai, Fred, quoted in Lapping, Brian, End of Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).Google Scholar

⁷ Thus a statement like ‘Africa was increasingly forced to subsidise the expansion of the welfare state in Britain’ (p. 20) is included in a paragraph followed by a note (p. 29, n. 14) containing six archival references and a secondary source. Who said what?Google Scholar

⁸ Throup wants to rescue the Colonial Office — and Ronald Robinson's well-known interpretation of their new initiative in colonial affairs — from the Kenyan counterexample. Perhaps it is this basic interpretation that should be questioned. For a more thoughtful critique of the ‘Whig interpretation’ of decolonization, see Darwin, John, ‘British decolonization since 1945: a pattern or a puzzle?’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12 (1984), 187–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ Beinart, William, ‘Soil erosion, conservationism and ideas about development: a Southern African exploration, 1900–1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 11 (1984), 52–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ Caine, Sydney, minute, 23 April 1946, Andrew Cohen, minute, 6 May 1946, CO 852/1003/3; Creech Jones, Circular Despatch, 13 July 1948, CO 852/1003/4. On this particular point, the officials were not far from the arguments of the most able and progressive economist of the day, W. Arthur Lewis, who argued, ‘The colonies are poor because the colonial peoples have not learnt how to master their environment. Their techniques and their tools are primitive; their hygiene deplorable; and their attitudes too frequently a fatalistic acceptance of their condition as inevitable.’ ‘Principles of development planning,’ memorandum for Colonial Economic and Development Council, 11 April 1948, Fabian Colonial Bureau papers, Rhodes House, 67/1, item 1.Google Scholar

¹¹ See, for example, the documents for the African Governors' Conference of 1947, notably Appendix 6: ‘The economic development of agriculture production in the African colonies’, CO 847/36/47238. Throup's argument that Nairobi had a misguided fear of African landlordism was also shared in London, where officials held before themselves a mythic improving farmer or the mythic co-operative or the mythic state-run plantation, but thought actual Africans either lacked entrepreneurial ability or might reproduce, with different racial implications, the kinds of bitter conflicts over plantation agriculture they faced before the war in the West Indies and after it in Malaya. See the documents cited in this and the previous note.Google Scholar

¹² East Africa Royal Commission, Report, 1953–1955, especially pp. 48–53, 209, 213–14, 228–32; Report of the Committee on African Wages, Nairobi, 1954, pp. 11, 16.Google Scholar

¹³ The official diagnosis of Mau Mau was that it was a form of collective psychopathology and that it was akin to devil-worship. A key text is Carothers, J. C., The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1954).Google Scholar My argument here is strongly influenced by one made in regard to a quite different context by Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ The French Government, which also had its modernizing conception of empire, was able to deal calmly with protests that followed certain institutional forms — the Dakar general strike of 1946 or the railway strike of 1947–8 — but in Madagascar carried out a brutal repression of what they perceived to be the work of demagogic politicians and primitive rural rebels. Here too official savagery was justified by invoking the savagery of the colonized, and here too the officials in charge (both Popular Front veterans, Marius Moutet as Minister and Marcel de Coppet as Governor-General) saw themselves as progressive departures from retrograde colonialism, See Tronchon, Jacques, L'Insurrection malgache de 1947: essai d'interprétation historique (Paris: Maspero, 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁵ See also Buijtenhuijs, Robert, Essays on Mau Mau (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 1982), esp. pp. 81–6.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The possibility of moral discourses among Loyalists is suggested by Ogot, B. A., ‘Revolt of the elders: an anatomy of the Loyalist crowd in the Mau Mau Uprising, 1952–56’, in Ogot, (ed.), Hadith 4 (Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1972), pp. 134–48.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Lyttelton, Oliver, 1962, cited in Lapping, End of Empire, p. 420.Google Scholar