Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present by Myles Osborne (review)

Ethnicity and Empire is not a full history of the Kamba, though it does address important aspects of that history, nor is it a conventional study of the construction of an ethnic community, though it does follow and outline the process of “becoming” over a long period. At the core of the book is an examination of what it has meant to be Kamba at different times and for different people, an exposition of the core values of “Kamba-ness” set in historical context.

Articulating values and reaching a degree of community consensus in the process is never easy or without conflict. Osborne looks at the emergence of different strands of identity and at the values each reflected. Some were gendered, most notably embodied in colonial military service; others were based on inequalities of power and wealth, made sharper by uneven access first to the profits of hunting and trade, then to the colonial resources of chiefly authority and mission literacy, and finally, perhaps, to the new opportunities brought by local pre- and post-independence politics; others again were more experientially based—searching for food in times of dearth, fighting the Empire’s wars far from home, migrating to find waged work. Identities are thus composites. The author shows how each facet of “Kamba-ness” was initially promoted by a particular group before becoming more widely acceptable to the community. That stock ownership was a defining Kamba characteristic was first asserted by men who had gained wealth—but not necessarily influence and respect—by becoming early colonial chiefs. For them, wealth in cattle might substitute for the local authority that skills in hunting and managing trade had once brought. Men who achieved a degree of security and prestige through long service in the army or police made their claims in a slightly different way by asserting that it was loyalty and discipline that “made” the Kamba. They skillfully played on colonial notions of “martial races” to differentiate the Kamba from lesser “others” and later used their dominance in the services to pressure the colonial government into giving the Kamba privileged access to development resources in order to keep them “loyal.” Women under pressure formed self-help groups and argued that a tradition of community service was what underpinned being Kamba.

At the root of any Kamba moral as well as social identity were the linked notions of virtue, honor, and “loyalty.” These had deep historical resonance. Osborne shows how the key word iwi, which had originally carried the meaning of hearing and obeying in vernacular translations of the Bible and reflected hunting and trading virtues, was redefined to include the “loyalty” of military service. This loyalty, however, was not primarily something owed to those worthy of command, as the British imagined, but a reflection of a deeper concept of personal honor: in being “loyal” to the British, Kamba askari were first being loyal to themselves. Yet the honor of the warrior, to use Iliffe’s term, was not the only form. By the 1940s, if not earlier, women were asserting their own honor—a female version of Iliffe’s householder’s honor. For them, virtue lay not in housebound “obedience” as such, but in working to support their families, and by extension, the community. Without this connection, martial honor was mere male pretension. Eventually, women won their point and “loyalty” became domesticated.

The long historical perspective of the book allows the author to show how assertions of identity and the concepts on which they were based were shaped and redefined by changing circumstances. He draws on earlier historical studies to contextualize and deepen his argument. Ambler and Jackson had looked at the gradual emergence of Kamba communities; Tignor and Munro had placed them in a colonial context. But none of these studies...