A Failed Eldorado: Colonial Capitalism, Rural Industrialization, African Land Rights in Kenya, and the Kakamega Gold Rush, 1930-1952 (review)

For the economically fragile white settler community of Kenya, the onset of the Great Depression was a crushing blow. However, a rainbow of hope appeared for some when gold was discovered in Nyanza Province in land marked out as the North Kavirondo native reserve. There were similar gold rushes elsewhere in Africa, some more ephemeral than this one. The Kakamega gold field did see alluvial mining give way to reef shafts, and corporate mining survived until 1952, when rising costs connected to depleted deeper gold deposits, labor "difficulties," and the fixed price of gold led the last corporate firm to leave Kenya. In the first days, Kakamega attracted as many as one thousand white prospectors, many of them ruined Kenya farmers, although by World War II this number had fallen to not much more than one hundred and the boom town had given way to a very small center. Still, in the banner year of 1941 gold was Kenya's number one export, and perhaps ten thousand laborers appeared in the dry season for each of the best years of the industry.

In this monograph Priscilla Shilaro gives us the first full account and the first critical study in depth of what until now has been a lengthy footnote in colonial Kenyan history. The Abaluyia, on whose land the gold was discovered, have negative memories of this episode in their history. For the most part they had been earning cash through migrant labor to farms, with limited cash sales themselves and a far less developed elite than could be found in central Kenya. They resented the onslaught of white intruders pegging claims and digging on their land, they were affected by environmental damage and accidents, and they were virtually banned from legally mining themselves. Wages, not to speak of land compensation awards, were low.

This study focuses on two related aspects of the Kakamega gold rush which indubitably loom large in the records. First, it provides an indictment of British claims, following from the Devonshire Declaration, of benign trusteeship in Kenya. Just after adjudicating the native reserves as part of carrying out their trust with the 1930 Native Land Trust Ordinance, the colonial government turned around to amend it and make provision for alienating land when the lure of gold imposed itself. A commission was appointed—loaded to favor the possibility of pursuing gold mining—and took evidence on the issue in 1932. This in turn brought Kakamega, as an example of trust betrayed, into the British debate on the future of Kenya in general, as a Labour government gave way to a long phase of Tory rule.

Second, Shilaro is convincing in her analysis of the land issue in general: while some Luyia chiefs accepted British legislation officially, for the population as a whole the mining story fed into a larger vision about African land being in a holding pattern until some white interest would demand it. The Luyia themselves had already lost land to the White Highlands, which they saw as their "frontier," to use Shilaro's word. This fear of land alienation ties the story into broader colonial Kenyan history and into resistance to heavy labor demands for soil conservation work, which had antagonized North Kavirondo inhabitants even before World War II. In a 1932 incident, a hapless settler pushed a local farmer out of the way physically—and was then beaten senseless by the farmer's daughter. At a 1934 meeting Lazaro Afwayi, a teacher, demanded to know from the Warden of Mines what would happen "if the Luyia declared war against miners" (103)—pungent incidents that illuminate widespread attitudes.

The book says less about mine labor and about how the mine system was regulated. Shilaro gives the impression that there was some regulation but not...