Famine in Central Kenya, 1899

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Map of Kenya

The famine in central Kenya in 1899 is as a devastating disaster in the history of Kenya received. It spread rapidly in the central region of the country around Mount Kenya from 1898 after there had been little rainfall for several consecutive years. Locust plagues , livestock diseases that decimated cattle herds, and the growing need for food from passing caravans from British, Swahili and Arab traders also contributed to the food shortage. The famine was also accompanied by a smallpox epidemic that depopulated entire regions.

The number of victims is unknown; estimates by the few European observers were between 50 and 90 percent of the population. All people living in these regions were affected, but to different degrees.

Since the famine coincided with the establishment of British colonial rule , the residents of central Kenya did not see it as a result of natural causes. Rather, they understood it as a sign of a universal crisis that disturbed the balance between God and society and that also manifested itself in colonial rule.

The famine resulted in a social restructuring in the region. It made it easier for the British colonial power and the European missionary societies to establish themselves in Kenya, contributed to ethnicization and caused collective trauma among the population for decades .

Central Kenya at the end of the 19th century

Social organization

A fortified village in the Nyandarua Forests. Such villages with an enclosure were especially common in the border areas of the region inhabited by Kikuyu.

Central Kenya was already a densely populated region towards the end of the 19th century because of its fertile soils and the high rainfall, especially in the highlands. In addition to the area around Lake Victoria , it was the most populous area of British East Africa with (according to inaccurate estimates) around one million people . While communities of the Kikuyu , Embu , Meru , Mberry and Ogiek lived in the high-lying area between Mount Kenya and the Ngong Mountains , the lower-lying region to the east of it, transitioning into the semi-arid steppe , was mainly inhabited by kambas-speaking groups. Kikuyu, Ogiek and Maasai also settled south of the Ngong Mountains and west of the Nyandarua Mountains . The livelihood in the fertile highlands was primarily arable farming and in the barren steppes it was mainly cattle.

In contrast to what was often shown on maps in the 20th century, these groups did not live in clearly delimited territories. On the contrary, they were closely intertwined culturally and socially. Their languages ​​were - with the exception of the Nilotic Maa - Bantu languages and therefore closely related. Apart from the language, there was little in common between the members of the same language group, they were not connected by a common political authority and only rarely by common rituals. An ethnic identity as it is known today was not developed. Belonging to the Maasai, for example, could result from moving or changing the livelihood, e.g. B. from cattle breeding to agriculture, change.

Rather, the people lived in small communities, organized in clans , family or village associations. Such groups could also be formed from people with different linguistic backgrounds. Often they arose around a patron, an influential head of the family who knew how to bind people to himself by offering them protection in the community. Most of these communities identified themselves through the region in which they lived, through the founder of their community as common, also invented, ancestors, or through their way of life as arable farmers, hunters or cattle breeders. Hostilities between different units of the same language group were just as common as between members of different ethnic groups.

Women with goods in central Kenya, around 1895. There is probably beer in the calabash, something that women traditionally traded in.

Regional exchange and contact

Nevertheless, these small communities were in lively contact across linguistic boundaries. They often got married, traded and influenced the way of life, especially in areas where they lived together as neighbors. This contact was essential for survival. The productive highlands acted as the breadbasket for the entire region. If individual areas were threatened by a lack of food due to droughts, people went on trade trips to the highlands and exchanged goats, sheep and cattle, poison arrows and tobacco , tools or weapons, metals, salt and medicinal herbs, honey or their labor for food such as millet , yams and beans , Corn and bananas . In times of need it also happened that entire families emigrated to the highlands, lived and worked there on the land of a wealthy farmer and thus survived the time of need.

In addition, individual regions in the south of this area maintained lively contact with the large caravans that moved inland from the East African coast to buy ivory. In central Kenya, a number of trading hubs arose, where middlemen bought food from the local population and sold it to the large caravans as provisions for onward travel.

Lack of rain, rinderpest and locust plagues

For much of East Africa , the 1880s and 1890s were a period of erratic and poor rainfall. The cause of the drought in central Kenya was ultimately a strong occurrence of the La Niña climatic phenomenon in 1898. This event, as well as a very strong occurrence of El Niño in 1896 and another El Niño in 1899, also led to drought and famine in other parts of Africa. In central Kenya there were other negative factors. In the 1890s, swarms of locusts destroyed the inadequate harvests in the barren as well as in the fertile areas due to the lack of rain.

Rinderpest outbreak in Africa at the end of the 19th century

In addition, one had rinderpest - epizootic in 1891 large parts of the bovine herds destroyed. This animal disease , which originally came from Asia, was introduced to Ethiopia by Italian troops with Indian cattle in 1887 and spread from there to East Africa and finally to southern Africa, where there was no immunity to the disease. Cattle owners in Kenya lost up to 90 percent of their livestock. The loss of cattle has had profound consequences across the region. Their meat was consumed extremely rarely. They were regarded as prestige objects and were a valuable means of payment for the bride price and for buying food from fertile regions. Particularly in pastoral societies , the loss of cattle for children and young adults lost an important part of their diet, as they largely nourished themselves on a mixture of milk and blood mixed with herbs, which was tapped from milk and that from the cattle's carotid artery Blood won.

The Maasai in particular suffered from the effects, and cattle breeding was a central element in their society. After their economic basis was destroyed, thousands died and entire communities disintegrated. Survivors mostly sought refuge with the neighboring Kikuyu. Hostilities and the use of force increased dramatically during this period. Rinderpest turned the proud and feared Maasai into beggars, and they tried to stem social decline by stealing cattle and women from surrounding societies on a large scale to rebuild households.

The harbingers of colonial power

Flag of the Imperial British East Africa Company, which penetrated into interior Kenya from 1888

The first attempts by the British colonial power to gain a foothold in Kenya played a not inconsiderable part in the disasters. From 1889 the Imperial British East Africa Company set up a number of administrative posts along the existing trade route from the port city of Mombasa to Lake Victoria (German influence ended in 1890 with the transfer of Witus ). Their job was to supply the company's large trade caravans, which could hold up to a thousand people, with food for onward travel. For this purpose, large amounts of food were bought from the local population, sometimes even stolen from them. Caravan traffic also promoted the spread of previously unknown diseases such as rinderpest.

However, the influence of the British initially remained low and was limited to the few stations and a small area. That changed only with the construction of the railway. After Great Britain had taken over the administration of British East Africa in 1895, the construction of the Uganda railway began in 1896 , which was to connect Mombasa with Uganda . The further the completed route advanced, the easier it became for Europeans to reach inland. In 1899 the railway had reached Nairobi, which was created as a depot for building materials in 1896, and thus reached the southern Kikuya region in central Kenya. The number of Europeans in the country changed by leaps and bounds; Settlers and administrators, missionaries, adventurers, business people and scientists traveled there.

For the Africans, railroad construction had another dimension. Since the construction of the railway began in 1896, it has drawn numerous African workers to the huge construction sites. They hired themselves here as labor in order to be able to use their earnings to acquire coveted European goods such as cotton fabrics and clothing, tobacco boxes, firearms or pearls . Most of the railroad workers were Indian contract workers, but Africans from all over East Africa also worked here. Many of them came from central Kenya. These, mostly male, workers were lacking in agriculture, which further reduced crop yields.

The great hunger

When the Great Famine, as it was later called, spread in the late 1890s, it affected all Kenyan residents who lived between Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro . In the lower eastern regions, by the end of 1897, harvests were poor even in those areas which usually produced excess food. The year 1898 began with more dry months and hunger spread to regions in the south. A plague of locusts and a renewed outbreak of rinderpest, which in turn destroyed around 30 percent of the cattle herds, intensified the effects of the insufficient rainfall. As early as the middle of 1898, many people were starving to death. The rain that year came late and fell again in smaller amounts than usual. Now finally the harvests in the fields east of the highlands and in the southern Kikuyu area also dried up.

On the newly built section of the Uganda Railway

The lack of food in central Kenya had not yet fully spread in mid-1898. On the contrary, traders continued to sell food supplies from the highlands to passing caravans or to middlemen in order to purchase coveted goods such as clothing, pearls, weapons or copper and brass wire (from which jewelry was made). Apparently it was assumed that food was scarce only occasionally among the less affluent people and that in an emergency it could still be obtained through trade from the central highlands. The British missionary Harry Leakey from the Kabete Mission near Nairobi reported: “The horrors (the famine) were greatly increased by the fact that at that time a huge caravan of Nubian troops was marching through the Kikuyu area. The grocer's agents bought up large quantities of grain, and the proceeds in brass wire, cottons, and beads seemed luxurious to the unfortunate sellers. In fact, it meant disaster, because when finally enough rain came after two, if not three unsuccessful sowings, to let something grow, there was hardly any seed left in the granaries. "

Whether the food trade was actually a cause of the food shortage is still controversial. The anthropologist Kershaw pointed out that areas that did not trade with the large caravans were also affected by hunger. The historian Ambler describes the course of the famine as a shifting border that moved with the refugees: As soon as the hunger migrants immigrated to an area that was not yet affected by hunger, a food shortage developed there. This produced more refugees, who in turn moved to new areas and also caused food shortages there.

The rainy highlands between Mount Kenya and the Nyandarua Mountains were spared from hunger. Here, too, the harvests were smaller, but food surpluses continued to be produced, which meant the survival of refugees from the hungry areas.

In 1898 the railway construction approached the Kamba area and the highlands. To feed the construction workers - on some construction sites up to 4,000 people - additional large quantities of goats and sheep, beans, maize and grain were bought from the area. After many men had previously moved to the distant construction sites as workers, the number of wage workers also increased significantly among women as the construction sites moved closer to the area. In the growing caravan traffic, too, many men work as porters, so that there is an increasing lack of workers in agriculture. Due to the persistent drought, those who stayed at home were often too weak to take any additional measures against hunger.

At the beginning of 1899 the famine had reached a climax. It was not only accompanied by a smallpox epidemic, but also by the appearance of the sand flea , which was previously unknown in central Kenya and which spread rapidly. For the exhausted people who were not familiar with dealing with sand fleas, the infestation by the insect that ate through the skin ended in the flesh, often with crippled limbs, sometimes even with death.

Survival strategies

Trade and hunting

With withering crops in the fields and dwindling supplies, livestock, especially cattle, were the primary means of survival. Their milk and blood provided nourishment without delay or effort. More importantly, because of their value, cattle could be sold as objects of prestige for food from the highlands. In times of need, marriages were declared invalid in order to be able to reclaim cattle that had been paid as bride price. In other cases, girls were hastily married off in order to introduce livestock into the household. Despite the great hunger, however, cattle were rarely slaughtered for the meat they produced; it was a family's capital and was treated more as currency than food.

Trade trips to the highlands to get food there were risky, however. They lasted for several days, for which food was necessary, and rapid rivers had to be crossed. In many places, bands of robbers were up to mischief, attacking travelers and robbing them of their goods. Often the hunger-weakened travelers did not reach their destination and died on the way.

Poor families with little or no livestock suffered first and most from hunger and had to struggle to survive every day. Many of the otherwise farming families turned to hunting as a source of food, using traps to trap gazelles and lizards that stayed near the homes. Individual men got together in groups and went on the dangerous hunt for big game such as Cape buffalo or elephants - a form of survival that was generally despised in central Kenya. Women with children, the weak and the old, who had to stay at home, lived on roots and grasses, wild fruits and leaves. Desperate measures were taken to feed themselves. Leather and calabash clothes were boiled for days to make them edible, and charcoal was made into flour.

migration

The geographer Halford John Mackinder (left) traveled through the famine area in 1899 with the aim of climbing Mount Kenya. Next to him is Lenana , a Maasai medicine man, after whom Mackinder named one of the mountain peaks. Between the two Francis Hall, Fort Smith Station Administrator.

Since there was no shortage of food in the rainy central highlands, in the northern Kikuyu area and around Mount Kenya, thousands migrated to this area from the neighboring regions. Many died on the way or shortly after their arrival. The survivors tried to survive the famine as workers in the fields in the still fertile areas.

A crucial survival strategy was the mortgaging of women and girls. By pledging their female members to another household that had food, starving families saved both the men who received food and the women and girls who moved to well-cared for families. Despite the possibly extremely traumatic experience for the women involved, who often had to leave not only their family but also their familiar cultural and linguistic environment, this method was very widespread. Thousands of women and girls, mainly from Maasai and Kamba communities, transferred between 1898 and 1900 to mostly Kikuyu-speaking family groups who lived in the central and fertile highlands. Many women also moved on their own initiative to the administration stations or to the large railway construction camps and earned their living with prostitution , retail trade and brewing beer.

In addition to the women, however, entire village and family associations emigrated from the hunger regions. Some areas east of Mount Kenya and south of what is now Nairobi appeared depopulated to European observers who first traveled to the country. As a rule, the migrants sought refuge in regions that were familiar to them from trade trips or where they could hope to be welcomed by family members through marriage or blood brotherhoods . However, the refugees from hunger were by no means simply welcomed in the host communities. They experienced the fate of refugees as an outsider, their wives and children were often raped and robbed. In the further course of events there were occasional massacres because the host societies feared - not without reason - that the influx of refugees would exhaust their own food supplies.

Crime and violence

The need led to social structures and moral ties being dissolved in many places. Even the closest relationships were torn in order to free oneself from responsibilities and to ensure one's own survival. Blood brothers robbed each other, men abandoned their families and mothers abandoned their children. In a small, abandoned hut in the Kamba area, missionaries found 24 dead children who were hugging each other. Other children wandered around alone, with siblings or in larger groups, looking for shelter and food. Young men and even women formed small gangs and lived off the robbery. They attacked smaller and larger caravans and households that were no longer protected because of the lack of men. The railway construction sites were also the target of frequent raids, as the large number of workers who had to be looked after there promised an abundant supply of food.

The gangs of wandering marauders made life in the scattered settlements increasingly dangerous. Attacks on refugees increased, with women and children in particular captured by traders and sold as slaves to caravans. Even within families it happened that people of higher hierarchical level sold men and women from the family association into slavery. Rumors of cannibalism also spread. As reported by ivory dealer John Boyes, "Some of my men have heard gruesome stories of people who, in desperation at the lack of food, kill and eat each other."

Smallpox epidemic

The situation was made worse by an epidemic of smallpox that spread from Mombasa along the railway line. In Mombasa, the dead were picked up from the streets every morning, but the colonial administration there took no steps to prevent the disease from spreading. The disease quickly reached the hunger-affected central area thanks to the recently completed Uganda railway line .

Smallpox affected both the starving and the well-nourished. They were particularly devastating in the fertile highlands, where communities were largely spared the famine. The epidemic, which was brought in by the numerous refugees from hunger, spread at breakneck speed in the densely populated area - the population of which had increased due to the influx of refugees. Entire villages were shortly depopulated.

Rachel Watt, the wife of a missionary, described the situation in Machakos , around 100 km east of Nairobi: “Wherever you went, the paths were littered with corpses. Babies, emaciated to the bone, were found crying next to the corpses of their mothers. "

Many people tried to protect themselves from illness and death through amulets , medicine and other spells. Others directed their anger and desperation against individual people, in particular abandoned women or widows were accused of witchcraft and were held responsible for the misery. Some societies, such as the Embu, completely banned foreigners from entering their settlement area in order to prevent the spread of smallpox. In other areas, the refugees who had moved in were forced to take care of the sick.

The role of the colonial administration

Francis Hall. As administrator of Fort Smith Station , he was one of the few European witnesses to the dramatic famine.
Fort Smith station around 1900

The administrative stations of the establishing colonial power and the mission stations use the situation to strengthen their influence. With access to imported goods, they were no longer dependent on local food production, especially after the rail line reached Nairobi. The stations became contact points for many hungry people from the area, as food was available here, especially rice imported from India . After the completion of the railway, the stations and mission centers grew at a rapid pace. The Europeans residing here had previously complained about the shortage of workers needed to maintain the station. Migrant workers preferred to work on building the railways because they were better cared for and paid. This problem of labor shortages was solved as hundreds of men, especially Maasai, moved near the stations to hire themselves as porters and auxiliary policemen. Rice was given as a reward. In the regions of these early stations, the famine is therefore also remembered as Yua ya Mapunga , the "rice famine", since this relatively expensive and hitherto largely unknown food was introduced with it.

At the same time, an aid program organized by the administration and the missions and financed by the British government began. Camps were set up in the Kamba area and around Nairobi, giving adults a pound of rice a day. Refugees flocked to these places. In Machakos, the British civil servant John Ainsworth served 500 servings a day in August 1899, more than 1,500 at the end of the year. A total of around 5,000 people in central Kenya were living on food donations from the officers and missionaries at that time.

The end of hunger

The last months of 1899 saw heavy rainfalls, ending the drought that had devastated central Kenya over the past two years. However, they did not end hunger yet. For some areas this time was another period of suffering. The fields were devastated and overgrown by weeds, not all survivors still had the strength to prepare the soil for sowing again. Where crops ripened, hunger led to the consumption of the unripe crops, causing further illnesses among the debilitated.

Even if the rain did not end the emergency immediately, the supply situation improved relatively quickly. European stations made seeds available because many of those affected had consumed or sold their own seeds in the emergency. A few weeks later, survivors were able to harvest their first harvests.

consequences

Victim

John Boyes, ivory merchant and adventurer, witnessed the famine in the highlands and Kikuyo area

All attempts to record the number of victims are based on very inaccurate estimates. This results from the fact that the population in central Kenya can only be roughly estimated before the establishment of colonial rule. The only systematic study of famine losses was conducted in the 1950s by Dutch anthropologist Gretha Kershaw and was limited to a small area in the Nairobi area. It found that out of 71 adult men, 24 did not survive the famine. It should be noted, however, that this region was one of the more prosperous and that the arrival of Europeans opened up a number of options for survival.

It is more like descriptions of personal impressions from European observers that give an impression of the extent of the victims. In October, Francis Hall, a British official at Fort Smith Administration Station in the southern Kikuyu area, wrote to his father: “We bury six to eight people every day because of the famine and smallpox. You can't go for a walk without falling over corpses. ”John Boyes, who had made some influence in the Kikuyu area, wrote in a report that a caravan of famine refugees he accompanied into the highlands killed around fifty people a day .

The death rate was certainly very different in the individual regions. The areas east and south of the highlands, where many Kamba , Maasai , and to a lesser extent Kikuyu lived, suffered particularly high losses . Territorial, these were the areas of today's Central Province , Nairobi , the southwestern part of the Eastern Province and the southeastern part of the Rift Valley Province . The depopulation observed by Europeans, particularly in the lower-lying areas, may indicate both a high death rate and human emigration. A frequent topos in descriptions of stays in central Kenya from this period are the paths, the edges of which are littered with corpses. One British settler remembered the railway line as saying, “In 1899, when I was following the rails, I didn't even get to Limuru . The railway line was a mountain of corpses. "

Social and economic reorientation

After the great disaster, the most important endeavors of the population were to rebuild households, families and communities, restore social order and get a local economy going. Since trade was now carried out on the railroad, a main source of income for livelihoods collapsed. People therefore organized themselves more into small, scattered households and no longer into larger communities grouped around a patriarch . That way it was easier to feed all members of a family with the land you had.

The reconstruction took place literally in a field of corpses. One woman remembered that time when she was a child: “After the famine came a season of sowing millet and the millet grew very quickly. But you couldn't go to the fields because of the many dead. You saw a pumpkin or a bottle gourd, but you couldn't reach it because it was growing on a pile of corpses. "

After the bitter experiences, many people preferred to leave the semi-arid and lower steppes. Instead, they settled in the wooded highlands, which offered secure rainfall and a secure livelihood after the hard work of clearing, but little pasture for livestock. Due to the extreme increase in uncultivated soil, the dry regions became bush land again and thus in the long term a habitat for the tsetse fly . This made the resettlement of ranchers and the reorganization of local livestock farming difficult in these regions.

Social contrasts intensified permanently. Wealthy families who survived the hardship without leaving their homes often occupied the land of their neighbors who had migrated to the highlands. Due to their privileged position, they were able to tie needy people, widows and orphans to their household, to use their labor to cultivate additional land and thus to quickly build up considerable prosperity. Many refugees who returned to their homeland found their land occupied, they had to become tenants or earn their living as wage laborers. However, the loss of their land prevented them from building on their pre-famine successes as farmers. Land disputes that originated during this period were still being brought to court in the 1930s.

Consolidation of colonial rule

Nairobi train station 1907. Colonial rule has established itself.

The British colonial power emerged strengthened from the famine. Due to the hardship of the African population, the administrative stations had gained workers and a large following, who mostly continued to live in the vicinity of the stations even after the situation improved. The reputation of the missions had also improved significantly. Before the famine, interest in Christianity had been very low and disappointing for the missions. During the famine, however, many starving people found refuge with them, from which a first generation of African Christians in central Kenya emerged. In the area around Nairobi, the missionary Krieger had regularly provided the people in the neighborhood with the meat of wild animals that he hunted during hunting expeditions. In retrospect, missionary Bangert of the Kangundo Mission Station saw the famine as “a wonderful opportunity to bring the gospel into the hearts of these people”.

The scattered households identified less and less with the previously existing small societies. Instead, they increasingly classified themselves in the categories of the tribe that the colonial power had introduced and according to which the protectorate was administratively divided. The colonial administration used Paramount Chiefs , who represented an entire ethnic group and were much easier to control over the people.

In 1902 large parts of the southern Kikuyu area and the Maasai settlement area were expropriated and made available for sale to white settlers. Much of this was land that was depopulated by death and emigration during the famine. As the population of central Kenya recovered from the losses in the decades that followed, the scarcity of land became a persistent problem that only worsened by the end of the colonial era.

Ethnicization of relations in central Kenya

As a result of the famine, relationships among the communities in central Kenya changed significantly. Kikuyu developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards Maasai. Since they lived in drier regions and were particularly affected by hunger, they had stolen cattle, women and food on a massive scale in the Kikuyu, Embu and Mberry highlands and did not shrink from murdering women and children. Since many Maasai worked as auxiliary troops for European administrative stations, they had also taken part in so-called punitive expeditions against groups in the highlands, in which large quantities of cattle and food had also been confiscated from the Europeans.

Maasai warriors around 1900 in Kenya, a popular photo opportunity for visitors coming into the country by rail.

The high-altitude regions of Kenya, inhabited by Kikuyu and Embu speakers and blackberries, were not directly affected by the famine, but suffered from its indirect effects. The influx of refugees increasingly appeared to be a danger, as food was becoming scarce here too and the rapid spread of smallpox was seen as a consequence of migration. In Embu the villages tried to protect themselves against the needy immigrants. They forbade immigration, and the disease was increasingly seen as an ethnic characteristic of the incoming Maasai and Kamba.

The pledging of women, which had existed in large numbers, also led to tensions after the general supply situation had improved. Families who mortgaged women were interested in reintegrating them into their households in order to rebuild communities with their labor and reproductive potential. This often turned out to be very difficult as the women were often reluctant to be returned. In many cases they were already married, in other cases they had been sold as slaves. Thus the opinion arose among the Kamba and Maasai that the highland societies, especially those of the Kikuyu, were women robbers who had enriched themselves at the expense of their neighbors in need.

The famine in the collective memory

The Europeans were appalled by the extent of the famine, but saw it as one of the many catastrophes that Africans usually suffered until the establishment of colonial rule. The real significance of the famine for the African population was only recognized in scientific studies from around 1950. The anthropologist Gretha Kershaw, the Kenyan historian Godfrey Muriuki and the American historian Charles Ambler, who carried out extensive interviews and field research in Kenya for their investigations , made it clear through their research what trauma the famine had caused in the Kenyan population.

In central Kenya, it was believed that ancestors sent prosperity as well as evil as punishment or support. So the famine was also understood as a sign of retribution for an injustice committed. The establishment of colonial rule, the construction of the railway and the increasing presence of whites in central Kenya, which coincided with the famine, were therefore not initially seen as a political event. They were understood, just like the famine, the rinderpest, the lack of rain and the smallpox, as part of a universal crisis and accounting, the causes of which lay in one's own fault. Even decades after the famine, the survivors were reluctant and reluctant to speak about their experiences during that time. One remembered with horror not only the personal sufferings, but also the destruction of the social order and the power of the ancestors over the living.

To this day, the difficult times of this famine are anchored in the collective memory of Kenyans. The Kikuyu refer to it as Ng'aragu ya Ruraya , "The Great Hunger", in the Kambas-speaking areas as Yua ya Ngomanisye , "The hunger that came everywhere" or "The boundless hunger".

swell

  • John Boyes: King of the Wa-Kikuyu. A True Story of Travel and Adventure in Africa , London 1911.
  • Kenya Land Commission: Kenya Land Commission Report . 3 volumes, Nairobi 1934.
  • Paul Sullivan (Ed.): Francis Hall's letters from East Africa to his Father, Lt. Colonel Edward Hall, 1892-1901 . Dar-es-Salaam 2006.
  • Rachel S. Watt: In the Heart of Savagedom . London 1913.

literature

  • Charles H. Ambler: Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism. The Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century . New Haven & London 1988.
  • Greet Kershaw: Mau Mau from Below . Athens 1997.
  • Godfrey Muriuki: A History of the Kikuyu 1500-1900 . Nairobi 1974.
  • Bethwell A. Ogot (Ed.): Ecology and History in East Africa . Nairobi 1979.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles H. Ambler: Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism. The Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century , New Haven & London 1988, p. 5
  2. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities, p. 4 f.
  3. ^ Godfrey Muriuki: A History of the Kikuyu 1500-1900 , Nairobi 1974. Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 50-72.
  4. ^ Marcia Wright: Societies and Economies in Kenya, 1870–1902 , in: Bethwell A. Ogot (Ed.): Ecology and History in East Africa , Nairobi 1979, pp. 179–194.
  5. ↑ Mike Davis: The Birth of the Third World. Famine and mass extermination in the imperialist age , Association A 2005, ISBN 978-3-935936-43-9 , pp. 205–208, 268
  6. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , pp. 96, 122.
  7. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 96 f.
  8. ↑ Richard Waller: The Massai and the British, 1895-1905: The Origins of an Alliance ; in: Journal of African History 17 (1976), pp. 529-553.
  9. ↑ Christine Stephanie Nicholls: Red Strangers. The White Tribe of Kenya ; Pp. 3, 8-11, 15-17.
  10. ↑ Kenya Land Commission: Kenya Land Commission Report ; Nairobi 1934; Volume 1, p. 865: “The terrors of this were greatly intensified by the fact that about that time an enormous safari with Nubians troops marched right through the Kikuyu country. The agents of the food contractor bought up quantities of grain for what seemed to the unfortunate sellers magnificent returns of brass wire, American, and beads. But it spelt disaster for them because when at last after two futile plantings if not three, a sufficiency of rain did come to produce crops, there was hardly any grain left in the granaries to put in the soil. "
  11. ↑ Kershaw: Mau Mau ; Pp. 74-75.
  12. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , p. 135.
  13. ^ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 124-126.
  14. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 127–128. John Boyes: King of the Wa-Kikuyu. A true Story of Travel and Adventure in Africa , London 1911, p. 248.
  15. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 127-133.
  16. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 134-137.
  17. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , pp. 144, 146.
  18. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 144-146.
  19. ↑ John Boyes: King of the Wa-Kikuyu ; P. 248: "Some of my men heard gruesome tales of men killing and eating each other in their desperation at the lack of food."
  20. ↑ Paul Sullivan (Ed.): Francis Hall's letters from East Africa to his Father, Lt. Colonel Edward Hall, 1892-1901 ; Dar-es-Salaam 2006; P. 148.
  21. ↑ Rachel S. Watt: In the Heart of Savagedom ; London 1913; P. 309: “No matter where one went corpses strewed the tracks. Little skeleton babies were found crying by the dead bodies of their mothers. "
  22. ^ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 146.
  23. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 141.
  24. ^ Muriuki: History , p. 156
  25. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , pp. 123, 139f.
  26. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 147.
  27. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 149.
  28. ↑ Gretha Kershaw: The Land is the People. A Study of Kikuyu Social Organization in Historical Perspective . Chicago 1972, p. 171.
  29. ^ Sullivan: Francis Hall , p. 152: "What with famine & smallpox we are burying 6 or 8 a day. One can't go for a walk without failing over corpses. "
  30. ↑ Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu, p. 248.
  31. ↑ Muriuki, History , p. 155. Ambler, Kenyan Communities , p. 143. Quotation by Rumbold Bladen-Taylor from Kenya Land Commission: Evidence , Vol. 1, p. 754: “In 1899, when I went up the line, I could not get as far as Limuru. The railway line was a mass of corpses. "
  32. ^ Kershaw: Mau Mau , p. 84.
  33. ↑ From an interview with Charles Ambler, in: Kenyan Communities , p. 151: “After the famine, a season came when people planted millet and it came up very well. But you could not walk in the fields because of the corpses of those who had died. You would see a pumpkin or a gourd but you couldn't get to them because they were on top of the bodies of people. "
  34. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , p. 151.
  35. ^ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 148-149. Kershaw: Mau Mau , pp. 85-89.
  36. ↑ See Kenya Land Commission: Kenya Land Commission Report , Nairobi 1934
  37. ^ Kershaw: Mau Mau, p. 83.
  38. ↑ Quoted from Ambler, Kenyan Communities, pp. 148–149: “A marvelous opportunity for… getting the gospel into the hearts of these people”.
  39. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 152-154.
  40. ^ Muriuki, History of Kikuyu, p. 173.
  41. ^ Muriuki, History of the Kikuyu , p. 88
  42. ^ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 148-150
  43. ↑ Ambler: Kenyan Communities , pp. 3, 145. Kershaw: Land is the People , pp. 170-174.
  44. ^ Greet Kershaw: Mau Mau from Below , Athens 1997, p. 17; Muriuki, History, p. 155.
  45. ↑ Ambler, Kenyan Communities, p. 122.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on May 21, 2010 in this version .