During the 1910s, migrant workers on East Africa's coastal plantations left fields of sisal and rubber after long, humid days of manual labor and picked up their posho (food ration) from their employer: 1.5 lbs. of maize meal or rice. After collecting firewood and water, they returned to their encampment to start cooking. While preparing their starch in boiling water, they could then, if they had managed to acquire any additional ingredients, cook a relish of vegetables, meat, or fish to add flavor to their grain-based staple. Outside these plantations, many other migrants who came from the same “upcountry” communities in East Africa's interior were living and working in the nearby coastal city of Mombasa and also relied on posho as the primary food that sustained their labor.Footnote 1
At work in this mundane routine of acquiring and preparing food rations was the solution that colonial employers during this period used to solve a problem faced by all in Africa and elsewhere who relied on wage labor. As more and more peasants became workers after 1800, they lost access to the means of subsistence and the ability to produce their own food. As former peasants filled plantations, mines, and cities around the world, new systems of food provisioning, the relations and institutions that form what Jane Guyer has called the most fundamental aspect of “the material basis of social life” had to be created to bring food to workers who no longer produced it themselves.Footnote 2 Put another way, food provisioning was central to “social reproduction” under industrial capitalism, those ways, as Frederick Cooper puts it, that workers accessed “the rest, nourishment and relaxation necessary to get [them] back on the job the next day.”Footnote 3 In industrializing Britain during the nineteenth century, employers’ responsibility for social reproduction was largely reduced to a wage payment. Though exceptions existed, workers, for the most part, were simply paid in cash, which then they used to buy whatever food they could from a growing class of grocers, street traders, and restauranteurs. However, as the British began to colonize Africa, they saw African workers through a racialized vision that in turn created a different kind of working-class food system that fueled the labor of colonial capitalism.Footnote 4
The first large working classes in European colonies in Africa were those on plantations and in mines in the southern part of the continent during the last decades of the nineteenth century. As this system developed, Patrick Harries argues, European employers created labor relationships premised on “racial paternalism.” Europeans, drawing on social-evolutionary ideas, were concerned about how Africans that they saw as “children incapable of governing themselves” would adjust to the disruptions of proletarianization and concluded that African workers were not at a stage at which they could survive on cash wages in a market economy. Putting racial paternalism into practice, employers became directly and legally responsible for the daily reproduction of migrant working classes in southern Africa, providing housing, medical care, and, indeed, provisioning them with food. These labor relationships, however, were shaped not only by employers’ racialized sense of civilizational duty, but also by more narrowly economic concerns. Competition for labor became intense as urban centers expanded and the mining industry grew, and the provisioning of fixed, nonmovable benefits such as food rations, became key to convincing workers to stay for extended periods in mines, on plantations, and in cities.Footnote 5 Therefore, the colonists who expanded the British Empire into other parts of Africa at the turn of the twentieth century could draw on decades of theory about the management of African migrant labor. In coastal Kenya and other areas of not only the British but also the French and Portuguese empires, new labor systems premised on racial paternalism were built. Rations as well as land on which to grow food became fundamental to how migrant workers were compensated for their labor during the first decades of the twentieth century in colonial Africa.Footnote 6
For the migrants who arrived on Kenya's coast during this period, the region's new working-class food system constituted a dramatic transformation of the labor process of food provisioning. In analyzing this change, my approach follows that of Africanists who have called for labor historians to bring the rural communities that people left more fully into research on migrant labor.Footnote 7 In Cooper's study of urban protest in colonial Mombasa, Kenya's port city, he observed how “[t]o understand the diverse meanings that dockwork had, one must research not just in Mombasa, but in [the rural areas of] western Kenya, in Kwale, in Kilifi, in Taita, and in central Kenya … where many dockers originated.”Footnote 8 In the same way, to understand how migration to the Kenyan coast transformed the labor of food provisioning, and therefore the underlying basis of social reproduction, this article begins in rural East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. In these societies, women did most of the agricultural labor that produced their communities’ food and all the kitchen work involved in cooking. African men were able to acquire these prepared meals based upon their gendered membership in the kinship group. However, migration completely reordered the relationship between gendered labor and the acquisition of food. Migrants were nearly all men during this early period, and while away, they could now only access food through their own work. They sold their time to an employer, and in exchange received posho and surplus cash to buy additional ingredients. Then, without their wives, sisters, aunts, or mothers around, these male migrants had to cook. As migrants, men became reliant on their own labor to acquire their daily sustenance, working on plantations, in cities, and in their kitchens.
By linking rural communities to the experience of labor migration, we can also better see how cuisine became a focal point of struggle during the early-colonial period. When arriving on coastal plantations and in Mombasa, African migrants had left rural cuisines marked by a variety of flavors, textures, and ingredients that also changed seasonally. However, like elsewhere in Africa and the world, a colonial government concerned with stability and employers with minimizing cost prioritized foodstuffs that were consistently available and cheap. While potatoes, wheat-based bread, and sugar fueled industrial workers in nineteenth-century England, in Kenya, and much of the rest of British-controlled Africa, the staple became maize.Footnote 9 However, as an employer-supplied food ration, maize meal also represented a central component of how workers were compensated for their labor. The bland monotony of these rations—maize meal and salt every day, every season—were a stark contrast to the variety of what people ate in their rural homes.Footnote 10 Building on Guyer's insight that the existence of in-kind payments tended to direct workers’ struggles toward “the quality of the provisions,” this article explores how the components of migrant cuisine were as materially significant as the cash that workers were paid.Footnote 11
Finally, I will examine Kenya's early-colonial food system in both an urban and a rural context to provide a view into the spatial dynamics that shaped how food was provisioned and to consider what “urban” and “rural” meant to people who became migrant laborers. During the 1910s and 1920s, the differences between the ways that workers in Mombasa versus on plantations acquired their daily meals were of degree rather than kind. In the city, migrants had access to a more diverse range of markets from which to purchase additional ingredients, while on rural plantations, employers often set aside land where their employees could grow more food. Both city and countryside, though, were fundamentally structured by the food provisioning system of racial paternalism. Whether in the cosmopolitan port city of Mombasa or up the coast on a sisal plantation, migrant wage laborers centered their cuisines and the calories they consumed around posho. However, this flattening of urban and rural into a common migratory experience was a temporary phase in the history of capitalism and labor in East Africa. In the conclusion to this article, I examine how the 1930s and the decades that followed created a sharper distinction between the ways an “urban” and a “rural” context shaped how migrants accessed their daily meals.
Labor, Food, and Cuisine in Rural East Africa
Many of the people who migrated to Mombasa and the wider coastal region during the first decades of the twentieth century came from an area often referred to as the “interior” or “upcountry.” Most came from three sub-regions: the semi-arid savanna east of present-day Nairobi, the lush highlands further west and north, and then further west still along the shores and hinterlands of Lake Victoria. These people came mainly from communities that came to be called the Luo, Luhya, Kikuyu, and Kamba. Smaller proportions were Taita, Embu, and Meru, among others.Footnote 12 The food systems of these societies were situated as part of a larger political economy of labor and resource distribution in which gender structured work, and membership in the community granted access to resources. Elsewhere in East Africa, Great Lakes Kingdoms and Indian Ocean plantations produced large surpluses of food, but the food systems of these smaller societies were focused primarily on feeding those who lived within them. They were not “closed” subsistence economies, as complementarities between and beyond resulted in small surpluses of food being traded.Footnote 13 However, most of what was produced was consumed within. The food people ate, the majority of the time, was grown, slaughtered, or caught by themselves or a relative.
These rural cuisines were primarily vegetarian, and so agricultural labor formed the core of food production.Footnote 14 As women did the majority of agricultural work, their labor produced most of the food that they and their communities ate. However, men contributed to agriculture in certain contexts. For example, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Kikuyu and Kamba societies were expanding the areas they had under cultivation, and men played a key role in this process by clearing forests for planting.Footnote 15 For both the Kikuyu and the Kamba, male labor was key to opening new areas for the production of food. As observed of the Kamba, “the task of breaking up new ground for agriculture” was seen to be the work of men.Footnote 16 Noting this process in 1894, C.W. Hobley wrote: “the Wakamba are gradually extending the area under cultivation, clearing away thick woods in a most patient and preserving manner.”Footnote 17
However, after this initial clearance of land, women became central to agricultural production. For the Kamba, after men cleared an area, the work was “carried on almost exclusively by women.” The men had “done their part of the work and the women … [would] proceed.” After a brief respite following planting, “the women have little leisure from the field work” as the growing crops required weeding, pruning, scaring off fauna from the fields, and, finally, harvesting.Footnote 18 The evidence for the Kikuyu is somewhat more ambiguous. From his travels during the 1890s, Hobley noted that “Kikuyu men work in their fields quite as much as the women.” However, an observer in 1902 concluded that men did the “heavier” agricultural work, but women did the “planting, weeding and harvesting,” while a year later, a geographer similarly noted that “women work in the fields, but the men clear the ground, cut wood and build houses.”Footnote 19 Decades later, Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography of the Kikuyu presented agriculture as labor largely shared by men and women, if often in different roles, though by then, land expropriation and labor migration had radically transformed the conditions under which these central Kenyan communities grew their food.Footnote 20 The record, therefore, is inconsistent, but suggestive that Kikuyu women were more actively involved in the production of their community's food after the clearance of new land, but that men also contributed labor at certain points.Footnote 21
Among the Luo along Lake Victoria, agricultural work around 1900 was, in some ways, less explicitly gendered. G.A.S. Northcote reported in 1907 that men and women cultivated their own individual fields, and then contributed to a collective pantry from which the family's food was prepared, noting that “each adult male and female marks out and tills his own piece,” but that “the family in practice shares the produce.”Footnote 22 About five years later, a visiting British scientist observed that “on the whole” Luo men “share the burdens of life with women … and they will even join [them] in tilling their fields of millet.”Footnote 23 However, during research conducted in 1970, Janet Hay was still able to interview people who lived at the turn of twentieth century, and they characterized male engagement with agriculture at that time as an attempt to generate trade goods with which to replenish cattle herds that had been devastated by the rinderpest. Therefore, both men and women engaged in agriculture, but male labor may have been done as much for individual accumulation as to contribute to the family's food supply, the latter gendered more as “women's work.”Footnote 24
One area of food production where men consistently did a majority of the labor was the raising and hunting of animals, which were gendered as male activities.Footnote 25 However, meat was ultimately a rather peripheral part of these communities’ everyday diets at the turn of the twentieth century. At times, hunters caught considerable amounts of meat, but it was often eaten by the men during the hunt.Footnote 26 Cattle were also rarely slaughtered for daily consumption. Instead, the most common way meat was eaten within a village was when livestock were killed as part of a ritual, but this was still a periodic rather than regular feature of peoples’ meals.Footnote 27 In addition to animal meat, for the Luo who lived along the shores of Lake Victoria, fish were a central part of their cuisine. Men and women fished, and these lakeside communities were productive enough to trade dried surpluses regionally.Footnote 28
Therefore, both men and women participated in the labor of food production, but women did a significantly larger portion of the work. However, the labor of turning raw ingredients into cuisine was entirely the responsibility of women. They did the processing that some raw foods required, such as grinding cereals into meal or turning milk into butter, and the entirety of the cooking.Footnote 29 As recorded in 1902, among the Luo, “[a]ll the cooking is done by women.”Footnote 30 This labor included not only the actual preparation of the food, but also spending the required time beforehand gathering the water, firewood, and other materials necessary for cooking.Footnote 31 As a Kamba man interviewed around the turn of the twentieth century explained, “The woman's work is to powder maize, grind flour, chop wood, fetch water, look for vegetables and cook them.”Footnote 32
From this labor, regionally-diverse cuisines were prepared daily throughout rural East Africa. Scholars have largely considered such peasant cuisines through a “starch and relish” framework. That is, they are cuisines in which a core and plain-tasting starch is made more appealing by accompanying it with a small portion of a stronger-tasting dish of meat, fish, vegetables, or some combination thereof.Footnote 33 However, East-African cuisine was marked by more regional diversity than this framework can adequately describe. Rather than a single-ingredient starch requiring a relish, Kikuyu and Kamba women created staples that were a combination of ingredients, textures, and flavors. Kamba cooks, for example, prepared their staple isyo by combining and boiling whole-kernel maize and beans, “which was eaten practically every day without anything being added to it.”Footnote 34 For the Kikuyu, their main staple was similar, if somewhat more elaborate. Irio, also the generic word for “food,” was a dish prepared by boiling and mashing bananas, and then combining them with cooked maize kernels, legumes, salt, and fat. Women would commonly take irio with green leaves mixed in, while men would not.Footnote 35 Closer to the “staples and relish” framework was the cuisine of the Luo, which was often, though not always, centered around kuon, a boiled dough of ground sorghum accompanied by a relish.Footnote 36 For the Kamba and Kikuyu, though, staples were not plain, requiring a supplement, but were multi-ingredient dishes that could stand alone. For many East Africans, the idea that each staple necessarily needed its relish was an invention of the twentieth century, when the staple became boiled maize meal with a pinch of salt, or what has come to be called ugali.Footnote 37
Rural cuisines during this period were also seasonal. Depending on proximity to different harvest times, varying ingredients were available for African cooks.Footnote 38 For example, the Luo only ate the sorghum-based kuon when the grain was at hand, but otherwise shifted their staples to either sweet potatoes or maize on the cob depending on the season.Footnote 39 Broadly, among all these communities, their cuisines were not fixed as repetitive meals eaten every day throughout the year, but instead changed over the weeks and months as new crops were harvested and stores of older ones ran low.Footnote 40
Therefore, at the turn of the twentieth century, rural East Africans had cuisines that were varied and shaped by seasonality, providing a wide spectrum of flavors and textures. In Diana Wiley's analysis of nineteenth-century Zulu food systems, she argues that “taste” was a rather secondary consideration regarding food. Instead, satisfaction from eating food came from fullness, not flavor, as they “ate mainly to feel full.”Footnote 41 Such an interpretation fails to describe rural East Africans’ relationship to their food. Flavor and taste were crucial parts of how these communities thought about their cuisine. The Kamba, for example, created preparation techniques in which the only aim was to add flavor, as when they fumigated their calabashes with different woods “to improve the smell and taste of the milk.” Moreover, traveling Kamba traders desired the flavors of home, such as nzu (pigeon peas) common in isyo. When Kamba went “to a place where this bean is not cultivated … they miss this food more than anything else, and their friends sometimes send them some of the longed-for food.”Footnote 42 The Kikuyu would even forgo eating for short periods for the sole objective of tasting food they found more pleasurable. As observed in 1904, “The Akikuyu, even when pressed for hunger, keep their meat for two or three days before eating,” as they “prefer it slightly high.”Footnote 43 The prioritization of “fullness” over taste likely emerged during seasonal hunger and certainly during famine, but this was a situational rather than general feature of how East Africans viewed their food.
When people left these communities and migrated to the coast during the early decades of the twentieth century, it was wage labor, in fact, that imposed a diet organized around the idea that food need only make a person feel full. However, these migrants also created new forms of struggle directed at maintaining a diet that both filled their stomachs and provided flavors and textures that they found desirable.
Migration, Wage Labor, and Working-Class Food
From the 1910s to the 1920s, thousands of upcountry Africans migrated as wage laborers to the Kenyan coast.Footnote 44 Upon arriving in the city of Mombasa or on a plantation, food became something acquired not by communal membership, but instead through wage labor. This represented a marked transformation for these migrants, but the early-colonial labor system was, in fact, not radically different than the one that had existed on the coast during the pre-colonial nineteenth century. During the 1800s, coastal patriarchs extracted labor from enslaved Africans and other dependents, but they were also obligated to “maintain” them, provisioning them with the necessities of life, including food. Posho was a constituent part of what structured work on the pre-colonial coast within a broader system of reciprocal obligation.Footnote 45 Coastal society's mixture of patriarchal domination with a paternalist ethos of reciprocal obligation fit well within the imperial labor ideology of racial paternalism. As the British accustomed themselves to the realities of making an African working class on the coast, they created a system in which workers were paid a wage, but like the enslaved and other dependents during the previous century they were also provisioned with posho.
When looking for a labor force, the British first tried to recruit local Mijikenda peasants and the formally enslaved who lived in the coastal region. However, these communities refused to work in both the numbers and levels of regularity to satisfy the demands of colonial planters and urban employers.Footnote 46 As a consequence, Europeans on the coast looked to the interior for a migrant labor force, and by the 1910s, upcountry Africans were coming by the thousands, working both in and around Mombasa and on more distant plantations.Footnote 47 As these workers lived more than a day's journey from their home, the Master and Servants Ordinance, like the one passed in South Africa in the nineteenth century, required that they be “properly fed” at their employer's expense.Footnote 48 When these migrants arrived on the coast, they entered a new food system in which they became entangled in food commodity chains that abstracted the productive process. Their daily food went from being a product of gendered kinship labor, grown, caught, or slaughtered, usually quite close to one's home, to a commodity whose production was removed from their daily experience and immediate social relations. Food commodities arrived at places of employment as rations or in shops and markets, and were now goods that could only be accessed via wage labor or with cash acquired in some other way.
The Uganda Railway, one of colonial East Africa's largest employers, provides an insight into the changing networks through which food arrived in the form of posho. Until 1920, the railway imported rice from India, and bought some maize locally.Footnote 49 However, management realized that buying from East-African maize farmers would save money and incentivize the region's agricultural economies.Footnote 50 By 1921, the railway stopped importing rice from India and was able to acquire all its rations from local maize producers with “the advantage of this change … from a financial standpoint” being “considerable,” as it represented a “saving of several thousand pounds sterling annually.” Over the three years leading up to that announcement, the railway had increased its annual purchases of East-African maize from 341 to 2,303 tons.Footnote 51 From rice grown in South Asia to maize produced by East-African farmers, migrant workers’ diets were being shaped by managerial decisions about which commodity chain best suited employers, the state, and the wider colonial economy.Footnote 52
Workers acquired this grain in exchange for selling their time to an employer, and then they had to cook it. As the large majority of Africans who migrated to plantations and Mombasa were men during this period, migration therefore entailed the remaking of the gendered structures of kitchen labor. W.J. Simpson observed in 1915 that back in their rural communities, Africans had “a varied diet, which is well cooked,” but as migrants they “are without their wives; and the food is of a different kind, monotonous, and for them not always properly cooked.”Footnote 53 The affective history of how men felt about this transformation in kitchen labor and gender remains largely absent in the evidence, though in 1939, an official at Mombasa's Public Works Department noted that some African men “refused to cook because they say that that is the woman's job to cook and not theirs.”Footnote 54 Additionally, Jomo Kenyatta, in his ethnography of the Kikuyu published the same decade, described sharp social censures for men who cooked.Footnote 55 Whatever men felt about performing labor that their rural communities assigned to women, the evidence is rather clear that they were indeed doing much of their own cooking each day while migrants. During the 1910s and 1920s, only one employer on a single labor inspection report had hired a cook for its employees.Footnote 56 Instead, in nearly all instances, workers were supplied with pots and cooking utensils to prepare their own food, as “each man does his own.”Footnote 57 The daily social reproduction of migrant workers, in contrast to their rural communities, came exclusively from the labor of the men themselves.
The posho these men cooked was a stark departure from their rural cuisines that featured variety, layered combinations of flavors, and ingredients that changed with the seasons. During the early 1910s, prior to the later intensive shift toward maize, daily posho was 1.5 to 2 lbs. of either rice or maize meal, usually with nothing else except salt and sometimes beans. While rice presented a new food for many, and one that some preferred to maize meal, the repetitive monotony of the rations likely assured that its novelty wore off quickly.Footnote 58 In a labor report commissioned during this period, the author commented on the general “unsuitability and monotony of the diet” offered by the rationing system, and that “[s]ufficient care is not taken to provide labourers with the various kinds of grain and vegetable foods to which they are accustomed.” The way migrants were fed ignored the fact that in their rural homes they were used to “a very mixed diet.”Footnote 59
However, despite the plain and paltry ration, many workers ate a more varied diet, but their options were shaped crucially by geography. In Mombasa, Kikuyu, Luo, and Kamba migrants, as well as those from other rural communities, were paid in both cash and rations by the Public Works Department, the railway, private industry, and for performing other types of manual labor including road maintenance, carpentry, fuel cutting, and ballast work.Footnote 60 However, because they lived in Mombasa, they also had access to vibrant food markets from which they could purchase fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and much else.Footnote 61 Additionally, the city also featured illicit food traders who engaged in the “the promiscuous sale of fruit in Native Shops and Houses,” which the city government tacitly allowed because of insufficient space in its public markets.Footnote 62 Therefore, Mombasa workers, if they had enough surplus cash, could purchase supplementary ingredients for a relish to accompany their grain-based staple. Some plantation workers could also access nearby food markets, but many others could not. For example, at Powysland Estate near the town of Kilifi, African workers “could buy what food they fancied,” but at the more isolated Gazi, well south of Mombasa, “they had to depend on the rations supplied.”Footnote 63 Moreover, migrants had daily and periodic expenses beyond food, and many were also saving money for taxes and bridewealth. Thus, with their low wages stretched thin, workers were limited in their ability to spend much money buying more foodstuffs. In these conditions, with a bulk of grain provided as posho and a small amount of cash used to add extra flavor, we see the creation of a working-class and migratory cuisine where the plain, single-ingredient starch was complemented by a small relish. “Starch and relish,” in East Africa, became the cuisine of capitalist labor migration.
However, in their struggles to improve their diets, African workers also had significant leverage over their employers because of a labor market defined by scarcity.Footnote 64 Europeans on the coast were acutely aware of how a lack of “available” labor threatened their businesses, such as the manager of a plantation in Gazi who lamented that “unless some means of obtaining labor were evolved, it would mean either abandoning a portion of the cultivated area, or very badly cultivating the whole.”Footnote 65 Already seen as an issue for employers during 1912–1913, the mass impressment of Africans during World War One for porterage only deepened the scarcity crisis.Footnote 66 Exposed and needing labor, Europeans were quite sensitive about guarding their reputations among workers who maintained rumor networks that shared information about the living and working conditions of different employers.Footnote 67
Workers used this leverage to improve their access to food, but some tactics were limited to plantations. On European estates, workers often succeeded in convincing their employers to provide them land on which to grow their own food, made all the more feasible since plantations did not have the labor to put all their land under commercial cultivation. This, quite simply, allowed them to diversify the monotonous posho diet by growing their own food. Migrants were able to supplement their ration and to produce surpluses to sell for cash.Footnote 68 At Gazi-Gogoni Estate, south of Mombasa, a government inspector in 1917 noted that “the employees have in addition the advantage of cultivating their own shambas [farms],” and they were “quick to take advantage.”Footnote 69 Steven Stoll's recent work has shown how, in the Appalachian coalfields in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, employers also provided their workers with small garden plots, which he sees as having been explicitly exploitative. Instead of paying their workers higher wages to buy food, this allowed mining companies to force their workers to reproduce themselves and their families through their own unpaid agricultural labor.Footnote 70 A similar strategy was also employed in the mines of the Zambian Copperbelt during the 1930s.Footnote 71 In East Africa, however, these garden plots were more a concession to labor than a strategy of capital to suppress wages. Prior to increased attention to nutrition science in the later 1920s, the racialized assumption of colonial employers during the 1910s was that the maize meal, salt, and perhaps beans that they were legally required to supply as food rations were sufficient to feed their African workers.Footnote 72 Plantation owners and managers believed that they had already supplied the material basis to reproduce their labor force. Anything workers gained beyond that in terms of food was the result of their struggle to improve their diets.
Off plantations where such shamba were not available, workers used other common strategies, such as desertion, to push their employers to diversify their food.Footnote 73 During the 1910s, these tactics were making Europeans increasingly uncomfortable with a labor and food system that tied them so intimately to their workers. Rationing exposed Europeans to failing in their obligation to provide food that workers found adequate, a mistake that could cost them their workforce. An alternative was to more fully monetize the food system, as having workers purchase their own food with cash would shed the obligation of posho and the way its exposed employers to criticism. A monetized food system would avoid situations like the Public Works Department faced in 1916 when a group of Kamba deserted their employ in protest “of the quality of the food (unga flour [posho]) supplied,” during which it was also revealed that this was a “general complaint” from other workers too.Footnote 74 The following year, the department again found that a different group of 123 workers had deserted, and that “their chief grievance [was] in their posho,” in particular its lack of variety. Asked what they wanted, the workers replied: “a daily issue of some vegetables in addition [to maize meal], and particularly requested chiroko [pigeon peas].”Footnote 75 Feeling pressure from migrants who wanted more than grain, day-after-day, the official wrote with exasperation, “With a large variety of tribes it is difficult to meet all tastes.”Footnote 76
Hobley, now the provincial commissioner of the coast, considered the problems of the Public Works Department and advocated for a full monetization of the food system that would still adhere, at least theoretically, to the Master and Servants Ordinance that legally required employers to feed their workers. He asked: “Why not give cents and let them buy their own food?’Footnote 77 When faced with another desertion the following year, Hobley reiterated that “I am inclined that the best way would be to ration them in cents at the rate of 12 cents per day.”Footnote 78 The archival record is unclear whether the Public Works Department began to “ration” migrants with cash, but Hobley's theory was, in fact, already becoming practice among certain employers. However, while this presented certain advantages for management, limiting the obligation of posho to a cash payment, this may have also been appealing to migrants tired of the monotony of posho, and so we should not rule out that Africans were also pushing for this change. Being paid cash “in lieu” of food rations, particularly given the alternative of plain maize meal or rice, would allow workers more autonomy and control over what they ate. This made sense for people who worked close to food markets, like in Mombasa, the city's peri-urban plantations, and other estates on the coast close to towns, such as Kilifi. However, this also entailed risk. If employers were not required to provide actual food, instead only cash, this would expose Africans to fluctuating commodity prices and declines in wages that would directly impact their ability to purchase what food they needed, without the security of a guaranteed baseline ration.
However, workers were aware of this possibility and struggled to shape the process of monetization so that it would provide both variety and security. This materialized in the option to either have food rations or cash “in lieu.” In other words, workers could choose, according to their needs, whether and when they wanted a literal ration of food, or cash instead. We see this on the Nyali Sisal Estate located on the mainland next to Mombasa Island, where Kikuyu migrants worked the fields and Kamba the machinery. There, workers were paid cash wages and a daily ration, and they could also receive an extra bag of rice for working six continuous days. However, they also had the option to take their rations in cash and buy their own food in nearby markets.Footnote 79 Additionally, at the Sokoke Estate, near Kilifi, workers received “Rs. 10/- without posho or Rs. 8/- with posho,” a ration composed of rice and maize meal on alternating days. However, while the coastal Giriama working on the estate preferred their salaries in cash with no rations as they had access to food produced by their nearby villages, upcountry migrants were more cautious about entirely relinquishing their employers’ obligation to pay them partially in food. In 1915, during a period of wartime shortages, migrants chose to have their posho because food was scarce. However, when food was abundant, migrants preferred the Rs. 10 without posho, which allowed them to purchase a more varied diet from local growers.Footnote 80
In Mombasa, the city's vibrant food markets presented a clear opportunity to monetize the city's working-class food system, but the uneven nature of this process should caution any decisive conclusion that migrants wanted an end to their employers’ obligation to provide them with food. However, some compensation schemes clearly were shifting towards wages paid only in cash. For example, in 1918, the Medical Officer of Health, when seeking workers to cut the bushes in Mombasa, reported that they would be paid monthly, but also that 12 cents would be provided per day “with which to purchase posho and this is deducted at the end of the month.”Footnote 81 In addition, workers at the Conservancy Department in Mombasa were provided with no rations, but they also made appreciably higher cash wages than did other “unskilled” workers who received posho.Footnote 82 During this period and up to the 1920s, scarcity continued to define Kenya's labor market.Footnote 83 Therefore, given workers’ leverage, and European desires to shed the obligation of posho, if Africans had wanted the rationing system to end, it likely would have. However, most migrant workers in Mombasa continued to receive food as an in-kind payment well into the 1920s.Footnote 84
Rather than end posho, African workers used the leverage of labor scarcity to push up wages and improve their rations. During the 1910s and 1920s, wages steadily increased in Mombasa and on the coast.Footnote 85 In 1924, referring to the situation generally throughout the colony, a labor official quipped that wages were “rising again,” while noting the anxiety this produced in colonial employers who were asking “where this will stop.”Footnote 86 As wages went up, providing more opportunity to purchase the food that workers wanted, so too did their rations improve. For all workers, the allocation of grain rose from its low point of 1.5 lbs. daily during the early 1910s, when they also were given little else except salt and beans, to 2–2.5 lbs. by the 1920s. Moreover, many workers also saw posho diversified beyond a simple provision of grain. Powysland Estate near Kilifi provides a notable example. In 1920, migrant workers on the plantation received between Shs. 7/- and 12/- per month and were provided with 2 lbs. maize meal, plus 12 cents per week to purchase fish. However, by 1923, the base pay had been raised to 12/- per ticket/month, with a ration of 2 lbs. maize meal daily and 4 lbs. on Sunday, 2 lbs. cowpeas, salt, bananas, or paw paws once per week, with extra cash to purchase fish. The next year, the food changed, but remained a diverse selection, and wages increased to a base of 14/-.Footnote 87
These local changes on the coast were also part of a wider transformation that was underway in Kenya and the wider British Empire. A new ration scale was installed for railway workers in 1926, and it was reported “that conditions had been much improved, particularly in regard to feeding and housing.”Footnote 88 Workers had forced colonial employers to concede improvements in posho and to raise wages with which they could buy better food. By the mid-1920s, these East African struggles became linked into shifts in British thinking about nutrition and the “efficiency” of labor. In Britain, during the first decades of the twentieth century, researchers worried that the poor diets of the working class imposed by structural poverty were leading to declining health, and thereby making workers less “efficient.” Driven as much by concerns about the economy as humanitarianism, the nutrition and diet of British workers became an acute concern.Footnote 89 By the 1920s, the improvement and diversification of East-African diets was also becoming an official priority.Footnote 90 Considering the change in railway rations, Kenya's labor report observed: “It is evident that deficiency in rations is responsible for much disease and loss of man power. There is no doubt that health cannot be maintained, or a proper output of work expected, unless laborers are provided with a varied, liberal, well cooked and properly constituted diet.”Footnote 91 African working-class diets had already improved significantly, and with pressure from above and below, they were likely to continue to do so. However, this change in the material conditions of African workers was tied to a contingent moment in the history of labor in Kenya: the period of scarcity. During the 1930s, Kenya's, along with the world's, economy changed dramatically and so too did the colony's working-class food system.
Conclusion
Until 1930, the differences between Mombasa's working-class food system and the one that fed migrant laborers in rural areas were minimal. Migrant workers in both spaces were primarily dependent on employer-provided rations of grain, largely composed of maize meal. “Rural” and “urban,” therefore, were less important for understanding the nature of early-colonial capitalist food systems than the shared experience all migrants had of receiving the bulk of their daily caloric needs as a ration. However, after 1930, the way migrants accessed food in Mombasa changed. By the end of the 1920s, increasing migration began to lessen the labor shortage, and the economic downturn of the Great Depression effectively ended it.Footnote 92 During the 1930s, the balance of power within the labor supply completely shifted to employers, as unemployment became endemic in the city. Without the fear of losing their workers, most of Mombasa's employers stopped offering rations entirely by 1939. Politically and practically, such a transition was more possible in an urban space like Mombasa, given the intense concentration of businesses there from which workers could buy food. As a consequence, by the end of the 1930s, the city's food system was no longer structured by racial paternalism. Workers were paid a wage, and then they used that cash to buy their foodstuffs from grocers, street vendors or as an already-prepared meal from a roadside eatery.Footnote 93
This transformation in Mombasa's food system is key to the dynamics of urban economic insecurity that workers and other poor residents have faced in modern Mombasa. Without a guaranteed ration, the city's migrants were now far more exposed to fluctuations in food prices, which went up consistently during the colonial period from the mid-1930s onward.Footnote 94 In 1930, when food prices were still comparatively quite low, Mombasa's district commissioner estimated that a wage of no less than 40/- per month would barely cover basic rent and food expenses in the city.Footnote 95 In 1939, after years of price inflation, the railway in Mombasa paid its entry-level workers 15/- per month, plus 4/- in lieu of a ration.Footnote 96 To survive, many fell deep into debt to acquire the food they needed.Footnote 97 As workers organized and protested from the 1930s forward, wages rose, but these gains were significantly diminished by rising food prices. During the 1950s, a decade full of strikes and consequently rising wages, low-income workers nonetheless, on average, still spent approximately 50 percent of their earnings on food, with some allocating more than 80 percent. One man surveyed spent 82/- of his 95/- salary on food alone, while another migrant's total budget regularly exceeded his income by 40/-, surviving only by going into debt.Footnote 98 Cash-based exchange, and often credit leading to indebtedness, had replace the system of food rationing in Kenya's port city.
However, unlike their urban counterparts, rural wage laborers continued to provision much of their food directly from their employers in the form of in-kind payments for the remainder of the colonial period.Footnote 99 In Kenya, and elsewhere in Africa, these paternalist food systems fit the spatial context of rural areas where workers were far from dense concentrations of food businesses like the markets, grocery stores, and eateries that made a fully-monetized food system in Mombasa possible. In certain ways, rural paternalism only deepened after 1930, as some employers even began offering prepared meals to their workers. One mine in rural western Kenya offered uji porridge for breakfast and lunch, hot cocoa at the end of the shift, and an evening meal of maize-based ugali with a vegetable relish.Footnote 100 By the mid-1940s, a number of plantations had also “gone in for communal feeding and some give a snack of porridge during the working hours.”Footnote 101 During the 1950s, coastal plantations paid “cash wages [that] were considerably lower than those … in the urban area, but this was compensated for with the provision of free housing, rations, fuel and water.”Footnote 102 This longer-term commitment to rural paternalism, and the ways it secured a consistent workforce in isolated areas and solved the problem of daily social reproduction, existed in other regions of Africa as well. For example, these paternalist relations continued in southern African mines, as in the compounds of the Diamond Company of Angola where migrants ate in cafeterias, bought food at company stores, and tended crops on allotted plots of land.Footnote 103 More scholarship on urban food systems is needed, but it seems few other colonial cities offered such forms of industrial paternalism, as in colonial Harare where after the 1920s “many urban employers began to pay wages in cash rather than in kind.”Footnote 104
During the first decades of the twentieth century, urban along with rural employers had to compete fiercely for the services of African migrant workers. Offering fixed and non-movable benefits like food rations, and then improving them in response to workers’ initiative, provided a way to more firmly tie migrants to their employers in a system that also fit neatly into the labor theory of racial paternalism. However, since those looking for labor in Mombasa and elsewhere in urban Africa after 1930 had little worry about finding an adequate workforce, these inducements and the obligations they entailed became unnecessary. Rural employers, though, trying to convince Africans to migrate and live for long periods in isolated environs with limited access to food markets, continued to find paternalism useful. Importantly, the rationing system of racial paternalism should not be romanticized. It created a poorly-paid workforce that ate a monotonous diet with limited flavor, texture, or nutritional value. However, the monetized and credit-based urban food system that replaced it in Mombasa offered only new forms of nutritional and economic insecurity for the migrants who labored in Kenya's port city.
