S.H. Fazan - Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change

S.H. Fazan, CMG, CBE, 18881979, was a Provincial Commissioner in Kenya. A classical scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1911 he sailed to British East Africa (Kenya) where he worked continuously for the next 31 years in agricultural and political development, being latterly also an ex-officio member of the Legislative Council. After war service he returned to Kenya between 1949 and 1963. His most notable appointments in these years were as a special magistrate, official historian of the Kikuyu loyalists and member of both the Mau Mau Detainees Appeals Tribunal and the Committee for the Study of the Sociological Causes of Mau Mau.

John Lonsdale is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at the University of Cambridge.

Sidney Fazan was Britain's most important colonial officer serving in Britain's most important African colony. His voice is to be heard in every key discussion in Kenya's history from before the First World War until the Mau Mau rebellion. This edition of his personal writings, selected and superbly edited and annotated by John Lonsdale, will be an indispensible asset for any student of Kenya's colonial moment. This is a wonderful and immensely useful volume.

David M. Anderson, Professor of African History, University of Warwick

For students of British Colonialism and especially development to independence this is an invaluable record. We are fortunate that the editor has revealed the importance of S.H. Fazan's work. I was fortunate to meet him, long after retirement, working on his colonial records in happy seclusion in Muguga near his home. Increasingly Fazan pointed to the rising population of Africans and the grievances which led to the Mau Mau insurrection. Renewed calls for change came from the United Nations and newly independent countries like Ghana exerted pressure. The United Kingdom decided to accelerate the programme with independence in East African countries, in Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962 and Kenya in 1963. Fazan's work had helped prepare the ground successfully for African rule.

Sir John Johnson, former High Commissioner to Kenya

COLONIAL KENYA

OBSERVED

British Rule, Mau Mau and the
Wind of Change

S.H. F AZAN

Edited and with a Foreword by
J OHN L ONSDALE

First published in 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada
Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
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Copyright 2015 Gillian Fazan
Foreword copyright 2015 John Lonsdale

The right of S.H. Fazan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Gillian Fazan in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 865 6
eISBN: 978 0 85773 784 7

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: S. H. Fazan's formal portrait.

Porters on foot safari, Nyanza, before the First World War.

Luo warriors, before 1914.

Luo women dancing, before 1914.

Nyanza women, probably from Kisii, visit S. H. Fazan on safari, before 1916.

Luo Chiefs' Retainers or Tribal Police, before 1916.

S. H. Fazan's house, Lokiriama, Turkana, 1915 or 1916.

Transport donkeys, Turkana, c. 1916.

Turkana warriors, c. 1916.

A Christmas drink, Lokiriama, 1915 or 1916.

Christmas races, Lokiriama, 1915 or 1916.

Oxcart, the normal transport for settler pioneers.

Mombasa docks, 1926.

Mr and Mrs Fazan, shopping in Mombasa, 1926.

A coastal street, 1920s.

Unroadworthy car, 1920s.

Uncarworthy road, 1920s.

The District Commissioner's new house, Machakos, c. 1927.

S. H. Fazan with Kamba women charcoal burners, 1920s.

A District Commissioner's Baraza, 1920s.

Kikuyu Ngoma [dance], almost certainly in 1928, to celebrate the visit of Edward Prince of Wales.

The Aga Khan's Golden Jubilee, celebrated in Kisumu, 1937. Left to right, outside the Provincial Commissioner's House: The Aga Khan, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah; Anthea Fazan, Stephen Fazan, Eleanor Fazan, the Begum Andree Aga Khan, S. H. Fazan, Mrs Fazan, Mrs Cochrane, Cecil Davenport (a fellow Provincial Commissioner).

S. H. Fazan in full tropical fig with the Governor's lady, Lady Brooke-Popham, 1937.

The new Governor, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, with his senior officials, 1937. S. H. Fazan, as the senior Provincial Commissioner, is seated at the Governor's right-hand side.

FOREWORD

An official life

Historians who work in the Kenya National Archives, housed in Nairobi's old National Bank of India, sit up when they see a report from S. H. Fazan. He is always worth reading, one of the most interesting of colonial Kenya's officials. As a fellow historian has put it, clever and determined, [] diligent, serious and scholarly, he had little time for colleagues who refused to grapple with the complexities of African life.

If this Foreword is to do justice to Fazan the man, it must range as widely as his own intellectual interests and manifold career. Nonetheless, if his memoir of a life's work spent in Kenya colony's progress has a core, it is found in his reflections on these two reports. The first, the report of the Carter Commission, was almost entirely his own enormous labour, within terms of reference set by British politicians. Fazan instigated the search for evidence, collated it for the commissioners' consideration, and arranged for its publication in three fat volumes before then drafting the commission's recommendations. Expectations of restitution were scarcely extravagant but were dashed all the same.

Within its contradictory and restrictive terms the commission, Fazan always maintained, had been more than fair to Africans; so in his view Mau Mau insurgents were later recruited less by legitimate grievance than by exaggeration, intimidation and superstition. But they were not solely to blame for the tragedy of the Mau Mau war. In Fazan's reflections one finds rumination on the character of Kenya's white colony, how its members might have changed and why they did not do so. Why did not more of them come to see when (quite when is not clear) their racial privilege, possibly the colony's necessary foundation stone, had become both an intolerable injustice to Africans and a hindrance to Kenya's general progress? This memoir represents, among its other merits, an extended meditation summarised in Appendix I on the practical compromises demanded of all executive power, especially colonial power, when pursuing policies favoured by some major civil interests, but to which others, less influential but with an acute sense of injustice, are bitterly opposed. An outline discussion of Fazan's professional career is required before such a meditation can be properly understood.