Norman Leys is the biography of a doctor who worked in East Africa from 1901 to 1917 and then became a leading figure in arousing opposition to settler colonialism in Britain. In Kenya in 1911 he exposed the duplicity of the governor in moving the Maasai off their land to make way for settlers; the governor was forced to resign, but Leys was demoted and posted to a remote corner of present-day Malawi. The story of how a lowly medical officer developed a critique of settler colonialism which anticipated the work of Frantz Fanon is woven into the history of the period, from the Chilembwe rising in Malawi in 1915 to the final violent confrontation between Kikuyu, settlers, and the colonial army in the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, which Leys had foreseen and struggled vainly to avert. This captivating biography by his half-nephew brings Leys’s activism back to life.
When I was analysing the politics of the Phelps-Stokes’ Education Commission sent to East Africa in 1924, it was impossible not to engage with Norman Leys’s searing criticism of this international education initiative. I shall review Colin Leys’s book partly through an education lens as education is one of its key themes.
Norman Leys had actually met the director of this Education Commission, Thomas Jesse Jones, in London in the early 1920s, and had become convinced, from analysing their earlier Commission to West, South, and Central Africa, that the Phelps-Stokes Africa policy, as expressed by its chief architect (Jones) presupposed for Africans a permanent status significantly different from that of whites. He confided this view to Joseph H. Oldham of the Conference of British Missionary Societies who at that very time was working on a book about Christianity and race: “Jones in effect says it isn’t wise, it isn’t sensible to teach a Negro child what European children are taught because as men they have a different status.”Footnote 1
Three years later in October 1924, there was the publication of Norman Leys’s book Kenya,one of the most trenchant exposes of white settler exploitation to appear in the interwar years.Footnote 2 The timing was crucial; it antedated Jones’s East Africa report by several months and condemned in advance what Leys believed to be its educational heresies and its accommodation to white settlement. In three pages of passionate critique of Jones’s ideology, it demonstrated the central political importance of African education and concluded that Africans in Kenya needed equal access to knowledge, enlightenment, and the quest for the truth.Footnote 3
Norman Leys was also concerned about the change in the message of church missions, captured in a later edition of Kenya; he critiqued the paternalistic argument that there were elements in Western Christian life which were unsuitable for Africans to enjoy.Footnote 4 Equally, the protest by Harry Thuku in Nairobi and the rising by Chilembwe in colonial Malawi were both linked by Norman Leys to the pitiful state of colonial education; he argued there would be no native risings if most of the money raised by the taxation of Africans were spent on their education.Footnote 5 As Colin Leys shows, it is because of the centrality of education to good government that the eighth chapter of a long statement from Norman Leys to the colonial secretary in 1918 was dedicated to education and self-government (157–59).
Norman Leys’s focus on education, not one “adapted” for Africa in the Jones’s formula, but the same as that offered to whites, was picked up by A. Victor Murray, another critical commentator on the politics of African education in 1929. He argued that the Phelps-Stokes Reports emphasised educational differentiation before the attainment of political equality.Footnote 6
One of the things that became clearer over Norman Leys’s decades of protesting and seeking to influence opinion in Kenya and the UK was that the open racism of the settlers and much of the government in Kenya was paralleled by a deeply entrenched racism in Britain affecting even the so-called liberals. As Colin Leys notes, in Kenya, Norman Leys had already summed up the evidence against the existence of different racial capacities (100). He argued there was “nothing especially African about African minds,” and no basis for the theory of African racial mentalities.Footnote 7
If education and racism were two of the themes that Norman Leys nailed as critical in his analysis of settler colonialism, a third was “The problem of Phariseeism,” which takes up a whole chapter in Colin Leys’s book. He wrote of Norman that he “found himself using the concept in relation to… people who professed to be on the side of the Africans, including many people who thought themselves progressive on ‘the native question’ but were unwilling to do anything to end the injustice being done” to those Africans (100). Colin Leys picks out in Kenya and in the UK a whole series of people who came close to being Good Samaritans in Norman Leys’s eyes, but who in the final analysis were not ready “to stand up and be counted.” Evidently, “what was pharisaical was recognising injustice but not doing anything to put an end to it” (87).
Norman Leys’s protests about moving Maasai out of their last remaining land in the Kenyan highlands, which they had been promised would be theirs forever, eventually led to his demotion and transfer out of Kenya. This landed him in colonial Malawi where he encountered some of the outcomes of the failed Chilembwe rising of January 1915. Some 86 participants were shot or hanged, but Leys was able to interview some of the 300 who were imprisoned.
Reflection on the causes of the Chilembwe rebellion—including routine brutality by Europeans, economic injustice, and, especially, the lack of education opportunities—led Leys to fear that in Kenya “a radical change of policy” would be unlikely to “happen in time to prevent a rebellion” (119). As it turned out, in 1950 the Mau Mau uprising that Leys had foreseen duly came, and with it the reaction he had feared (119). The British official figure for the number of Kikuyu deaths in the hostilities was 11,000 over the period 1952–59, but it is widely believed to have been much higher.
Colin Leys is correct to say that the savagery and extent of the repression of the Mau Mau have been largely forgotten in the UK; but it is pertinent to be reminded by him of the settler colonialism that has been going on in Palestine and the Occupied West Bank for decades (122–23). Colin’s book, therefore, returns to the theme of his 1959 analysis of settler politics, European Politics in Southern Rhodesia, but with a viewpoint shaped by the development debates of the 1960s and 1970s, including his own 1975 study, Underdevelopment in Kenya.Footnote 8
Although education, racism, Phariseeism, and the possibility of a rebellion in Kenya run through Norman’s Kenya and Colin’s biography, there is a very great deal more in this volume, including on the origins and character of Norman’s socialism. Even though Norman got rid of all his own papers, his prolific correspondence with many influential people has meant that his letters can be found in many different libraries and collections. This has of course meant a great deal more legwork for Colin Leys. But because of the sheer range of Norman’s family and friends’ sources, we learn a huge amount of fascinating detail about this very unusual and influential man.
This volume—with its forty-five pages of relevant annexes of Norman’s writing on related issues—is a must for African history and politics, race relations, and education. It is also a very good and compelling read.
