In May 1961, Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir made his first representation to Kenya's Legislative Council (Legco). Nassir's Mombasa constituency elected the young Swahili activist to fight for the independence of the Protectorate of Kenya, a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean coast stretching from Lamu to the Tanganyikan border. Britain administered the protectorate, but per an 1895 treaty the sultan of Zanzibar retained titular sovereignty. As Kenya advanced towards independence, many in the coastal strip believed that postcolonial domination by an up-country government would prove disastrous for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Thus, several coastal groups demanded full autonomy for the protectorate. Critics denounced separatism as an attempt by British imperialists and Arab supremacists to perpetuate racial privilege and deprive Kenya of its most valuable port. Detractors added that Arab, Swahili, and other ‘autonomists’ – the term often used for those favoring secession – were foreigners in Kenya and so had no right to demand a separate coastal state.
Against this politically charged backdrop, Nassir asserted that the coastal protectorate had always been a distinct country. He then suggested that the conflation of race with geography had led to confusion over the region's true indigenes. Nassir proposed that contrary to popular belief black Africans were not the sole ‘natives’ of the coast region. He explained that there were two ways in which nationalists defined the African: by race and historical presence. After dismissing the exclusive nature of any racial definition of Africans, Nassir argued that if emphasis were placed on historical presence, ‘so-called Arabs’ might be ‘more African than those … regarded to be African’. Referencing the Minister of Government Ronald Ngala's claim that his Giriama ancestors had migrated to Kenya's coast only three centuries prior, Nassir posed the question: if by presence in Kenya for three hundred years one is ‘a native entitled to African rights’, could not Arabs who traced their ancestry in East Africa ‘ten times that period’ similarly be ‘natives’?Footnote 1 The chamber erupted with jeers.
As barbs rained, Nassir declared that although ‘strangers’ (a reference to up-country Kenyans) threatened ‘indigenous’ coastal people with expulsion, the coast belonged to those who ‘have been in this land’.Footnote 2 The birthright of the ‘children of the soil’, he concluded, was a separate coastal state. At this suggestion, Tom Mboya, a Luo representative from Nairobi and one of the Kenya African Nation Union's (KANU) brightest political stars, joined the chorus of hecklers. After interrupting Nassir several times, Mboya shouted, ‘Go and buy land elsewhere!’ Minutes later, referencing Nassir's partial Arab ancestry, Mboya roared across the chamber, ‘Go back to Arabia!’ Nassir responded in kind. Alluding to Luo claims to have migrated south from the Sudan, Nassir countered that by Mboya's logic he could ‘go back to the Sudan’.Footnote 3
The Nassir-Mboya row offers a window on racial and ethnic definitions of geography in colonial Kenya that would have long-term reverberations in the coast region. Specifically, the Legco exchange exemplifies the perceived interdependence of social identity and territorial rights that occupied political thinkers in the late colonial era and intermittently shaped political thought thereafter. Nassir and Mboya were progressive politicians who built pan-ethnic coalitions and represented diverse, urban districts. Nevertheless, Mboya responded to the separatist threat by rejecting Nassir as a racial stranger. Nassir's anxieties about the postcolonial future spurred demands for a separate state, which he and others argued was their right as a consequence of their historical relationship to coastal soil. The Nassir-Mboya exchange thus highlights a mode of political thought in which entitlements are imagined to flow from historical, communal, and exclusive relationships to territory. When articulated in the language of African nationalism, such nativist territoriality fortified demands for independence in Kenya and across the continent. Yet, when applied to subnational spaces, it produced a more precise and divisive politics of exclusion that Gabrielle Lynch has termed ‘ethnic territoriality’.Footnote 4 Much as Jonathon Glassman and James R. Brennan have shown for neighboring Zanzibar and Tanganyika respectively, coastal Kenya's position at the intersection of continental and maritime social imaginaries encouraged and complicated overlapping registers of nativism. This, in turn, engendered explosive debates over citizenship.Footnote 5
The end of colonial rule precipitated a fundamental reconceptualization of macro-spatial relations along Africa's Indian Ocean rim. Since anticolonial rhetoric emphasized the reclamation of indigenous rights, nationalist politics frequently linked race and ethnicity to continental geography. In many of the colonies that encompassed Indian Ocean Africa, nationalist political thinkers envisaged introverted postcolonial states that emphasized a continental rather than maritime orientation. An emerging body of scholarship on East African coastal societies demonstrates that decolonization created a conundrum for groups defined by diasporic or maritime identities.Footnote 6 In Kenya, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Mozambique diverse coastal communities highlighted their trans-oceanic genealogies and links to a perceived Indian Ocean ‘meta-culture’.Footnote 7 At the same time, these ‘local cosmopolitans’ (to use Engseng Ho's terminology), including Arabs, Swahilis, and Asians, were deeply embedded in local socioeconomic relations.Footnote 8 Many enjoyed political influence, social prestige, and economic power. In the era of decolonization, this combination of place-boundness and increasingly insecure status encouraged local cosmopolitans to engage in a range of political movements, both in support of wider nationalist projects and in opposition to them.
The uncertain future of local cosmopolitans and many others in coastal Kenya occasioned political tacks ranging from tentative forms of integration with Kenya Colony to union with Zanzibar. Most political communities in the region viewed up-country Kenyans, or wabara in Swahili, with suspicion. Nevertheless, historical mobility, social stratification, and the exigencies of contemporary politics fashioned differing perceptions of the coast's relationship with continental Africa and the wider Indian Ocean region. More precisely, the debate over the future of the protectorate exposed and encouraged divergent spatial imaginaries. These often emphasized either a continental African or maritime Indian Ocean essence of coastal society, spatial definitions conceptually bound to race, ethnicity, and religion. Therefore, the intellectual work of decolonization not only opened for debate the parameters of the postcolonial Kenyan state but it also gave significant gravity to conflicting sociocultural definitions of Africa's Indian Ocean rim.
This article examines the ways in which political thinkers in Indian Ocean Africa attempted to define citizenship, belonging, and space at the end of empire. Specifically, it explores the politics of the soil, or the perceived link between social identity and geography and its articulation in the political realm. In late colonial Kenya, political thinkers asserted communal claims to rights and resources through land-related metaphors, transforming ‘the soil’ into a symbolic reference for imagined histories and contemporary aspirations. To better appreciate this politics I trace a strategy that gained purchase in the 1950s: autochthony or the assertion of exclusive rights based on ‘original’ habitation. The debate over Kenya's protectorate offers a unique vantage point from which to reassess decolonization and nativism in Indian Ocean Africa. Because many at the Kenyan coast imagined a bleak future in which either up-country people or Arabs would dominate the region, political thinkers struck defensive postures, shored up ‘local patriotisms’, and hardened moral claims that first-comer status entitled certain communities to paramount rights.Footnote 9
As the product of an agreement between the British government and the sultan of Zanzibar, the protectorate question could only be resolved by the signatories. Accordingly, the principle strategy of each coastal bloc was to convince the two signatories that they had a moral responsibility to honor the wishes of the region's true autochthons. Histories of mobility and intermarriage complicated exclusive claims to indigeneity, but autochthony nonetheless fortified sociopolitical communities. As a result, competing claims to ‘the soil’ led to political impasse and communal friction. Recent work by James R. Brennan, Justin Willis, and George Gona has demonstrated that the sultan's sovereignty over the protectorate provided a critical basis for separatism and the perceived link between identity and rights significantly shaped political rhetoric.Footnote 10 Here I wish to extend these insights to suggest that by 1961 autochthony discourse had become a structuring frame of the protectorate debate. Just as important, I suggest that this nativist territoriality was far more malleable than it would at first appear. As I will show, on the eve of independence, the collective fear of KANU domination prompted rival coast political parties to modify their definitions of the indigene and recognize each other as members of a common coastal community. In doing so, political thinkers demonstrated that the concept of nativist territoriality could be preserved even as the identities of ‘foreigners’ shifted. In part as a result of this flexibility, autochthony would retain its political utility beyond the debates of the 1960s.
To contextualize late colonial Kenya's politics of the soil, I begin with a survey of recent literature on autochthony. I then outline the relevance of this literature for reassessing decolonization in Kenya as well as how reflection on autochthony discourse in the colonial era can refine our understanding of its use thereafter. In section two, I draw a thumbnail sketch of the circumstances of social stratification and communal tension in the decades prior to independence. The second half of the article offers a deeper analysis of the concepts of citizenship and space in the early 1960s by following the two main threads of the autonomy debate: narratives of discrete histories and harrowing projections of the future. For this analysis I draw on petitions, interviews, correspondences, and minutes produced by an official commission of enquiry into the protectorate question. This material offers unparalleled insight into the imagination of coastal political thinkers in the era of decolonization.
AUTOCHTHONY AND THE COLLECTIVE SELF
Autochthony is a political strategy that anchors social identity to territory as a means of claiming rights. The term autochthon is most commonly used in francophone Africa, but the perceived symbiotic relationship between people and territory that its Greek etymology implies – being ‘from the soil’ – makes it applicable to political strategies elsewhere in Africa, South Asia, and Western Europe. Over the past decade, interest in the autochthony trope has birthed a rich interdisciplinary literature that has established several common denominators. First, the concept of autochthony is predicated on the belief that every bounded territory is the property of a discrete cultural group. Such ‘geo-cultural links’, which political thinkers often paint as a natural symbiosis of land and ‘children of the soil’, undergird claims to rights and resources.Footnote 11 Second, autochthony discourse stakes claims that have little to do with codified rights; rather, it embeds legal or bureaucratic questions in emotive narratives of settlement and static concepts of geography. Third, the autochthony trope often emerges in environments of significant movement and inequality, particularly when migrants achieve high levels of success and influence. Fourth, autochthony often gains import during political crisis. The trope champions a local identity against ‘dangerous strangers’ as a means of gaining political leverage when resources, opportunities, and influence appear to be at stake.Footnote 12
Many analysts of the autochthony trope further argue that its popularization is a response to the contemporary forces of neoliberal globalization, democratization, and decentralization. Peter Geschiere has suggested that the desire for belonging and the crisis of citizenship that has given rise to autochthony claims are the ‘flip side’ of globalization.Footnote 13 Democratization and patterns of global integration since the late 1980s have intensified autochthony rhetoric, but we should recall that other conjunctures encouraged similar strategies. Much as in the current ‘conjuncture of belonging’, the era of decolonization brought basic questions of power, inclusion, and exclusion to the fore.Footnote 14 In Kenya, the nullification of racially discriminatory legal codes promised a reorganization of political and spatial relations, while democratization raised concerns about the constitution of the postcolonial government and the definition of the citizen. As one dimension of a global political realignment, decolonization engendered uncertainty on par with that occasioned by contemporary globalization.
In the late colonial Protectorate of Kenya, claims to exclusive rights based on ‘original’ habitation were the product of precolonial maritime and territorial subjectivities tempered by the dictates of the colonial state and the political imaginations of colonial subjects. In most precolonial East African coastal communities, social prestige and certain rights were denied many ‘latecomers’ or other outsiders, particularly migrants and slaves. At the same time, elites often referenced distant, mythic origins to justify exclusive rights. Hierarchies of belonging accorded prestige to Muslims of local birth or patrician background, glossed as wenyeji (locals or citizens), wenyewe (owners), or wamiji (urbanites). One's position within these citizenship regimes was negotiable, but newcomers, particularly those from the African interior, were often relegated to the margins.Footnote 15 Among the coastal elite, narratives of historical migrations from southern Arabia and Persia as well as more immediate Arabian genealogies further cemented prestige claims.Footnote 16 With the ascent of Omani-Zanzibari power in the nineteenth century, the notion of ‘civilization’ was conjoined with Arabness in the term ustaarabu, valorizing the link between Arab identity and social prestige.Footnote 17 Colonial administrative boundaries reinforced conceptual links among identity, prestige, and space. These boundaries firmly fixed identity to local geography and so limited the negotiability of social identities. Across Kenya, race and ethnicity were more completely territorialized as a result of the designation of ‘homelands’ and ethnic-majority districts, though the demand for labor stimulated movement across these sociocultural spaces.
As elsewhere in colonial Africa, political thinkers in postwar Kenya reimagined the terms of belonging in the context of multiple, overlapping, and competing registers. On the one hand, the larger edifice of Kenyan nationalism depended on a broad form of nativist thought that linked race to continental geography. Many political thinkers defined Africa as black and by extension considered non-blacks racial foreigners, a perception that accorded with colonial racial categories. For example, as the debate over the protectorate took shape, the Mombasa African Democratic Union declared the Kenyan coast ‘black land’ and so concluded that only black Africans could claim indigeneity.Footnote 18 At the same time, most political thinkers subscribed to the belief that each ethnic group had a discrete territorial home, even though such spaces were rarely homogenous. Partly as a result of this dissonance, by the early 1950s, ethnic territoriality had begun to resonate widely in Kenya. Many saw decolonization as a zero-sum game in which the more advantaged groups would reap the rewards of state power. Motivated by such anxieties, political thinkers that represented less influential social groups attempted to build group solidarity as a means to challenge the influence of ethnic strangers. One strategy was to emphasize ethnic ownership of subnational territories. When applied to broad regions such as the Rift Valley or the Coast Province, ethnic territoriality engendered a politics of exclusion fortified by claims of autochthony.Footnote 19
If, as many analysts suggest, contemporary autochthony discourse is a response to neoliberal globalization and democratization, it is only the most recent manifestation of a recurring strategy.Footnote 20 The conflation of land and identity in the assertion of communal prerogative has long been a prominent strain of political thought in East Africa. At Kenya's coast, this ‘politics of territoriality’ has been most virulent during periods of political flux, such as the early 1960s, the 1990s, and since 2007.Footnote 21 Each political crisis has affected a particular conflation of grievance, social identity, and spatial imagination. Therefore, while exclusive social definitions of geography have persisted, the identities of foreigners have changed over time, sometimes dramatically.
DECOLONIZATION AND THE SOIL
Recent studies of African and Indian Ocean decolonization have emphasized the possibilities and constraints that political thinkers faced in the postwar era.Footnote 22 Reflection on the history of nativist territoriality in coastal Kenya can add greater nuance to this body of work. Specifically, I wish to build on a historiography that portrays late colonial Kenya as less a nation-in-waiting than a collection of enclaves wherein political thinkers developed divergent definitions of space and relation, in some cases as an alternative to a common future.Footnote 23 Claims of autochthony, I suggest, offer an ideal lens through which to view the multiple and conflicting ways that colonial subjects envisioned the future.
To understand the permutations of nativism at the coast, and their relation to questions of territory and social identity in Indian Ocean Africa more broadly, we must appreciate the sociopolitical dynamics of postwar Kenya. Kenya was a highly stratified society in the late 1940s, and the distinction between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ constituted the most fundamental administrative division. The colonial government deemed native all those whose origins were within the bounds of the colony. For instance, the foreign origins of Europeans, Asians, and Arabs—referred to as ‘immigrant races’—conferred non-native status. However, taxonomical distinctions between native and non-native were not neat. For instance, mixed-ancestry Swahili were technically defined as an African ‘tribe’ (therefore native), but many enjoyed Arab (therefore non-native) privileges.Footnote 24 The Swahili Twelve Tribes, constituted by the sub-groups Thelatha Taifa (Three Tribes) and Tisa Taifa (Nine Tribes), claimed Arabian-Persian origins as well as an indefinite history at the coast. The Twelve Tribes maintained close relationships with other African groups in the coast region, ties often strengthened by marriage. Yet, by referencing their Indian Ocean genealogies, they also emphasized their difference from other African groups.Footnote 25 Moreover, in the early 1950s, Swahili leaders successfully lobbied for privileges once limited to Arabs, such as the right to enroll in Arab schools and vote for Arab Legco seats. Swahili individuals with immediate Arab ancestors even petitioned to be reclassified as Arab.Footnote 26 Despite their official designation as natives, Swahilis were popularly viewed as non-natives. Colonial taxonomic emphasis on origins thus created both obstacles and opportunities for coastal communities.Footnote 27
A critical secondary tier of social classification was race. Racial classification was based on multiple criteria, notably origins and culture. Arabs, for instance, were defined less by somatic traits than by the ability to identify immediate ancestors from Arabia, usually Oman or Yemen, and by adherence to Islam. Throughout the colonial era, Arabs dominated the prestige economy of Islamic ritual, and a small Arab elite occupied administrative positions such as liwali (governor) and kadhi (judge).Footnote 28 But because Swahili sought reclassification as Arab, the parameters of the Arab racial category were never fixed. Despite this permeability, political representation, status, income, education, and land ownership in Kenya correlated with race. Europeans enjoyed the greatest economic and political privileges, followed by Arabs and Asians, a category that included diverse social groups of South Asian ancestry. Africans, who represented the majority of the coast's population, occupied the lowest position in this hierarchy and could not elect Legco representatives. ‘African’ was a racial super-category that included Mijikenda, Pokomo, Taita, and recent up-country migrants such as Kamba, Luo, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin.Footnote 29 Also included in this category were people of slave ancestry: the descendants of Southeastern Africans and others brought to coastal plantations and mission stations. Though many had familial connections with other coastal African groups, a significant number of so-called ‘ex-slaves’ maintained an identity distinct from their neighbors.
In the early twentieth century, the colonial government strengthened the position of non-natives by encouraging the commercialization of land in the protectorate. After the abolition of slavery in 1907, the government upheld the rights of landowners in an attempt to ensure a clear division between the landed elite and landless laborers. Specifically, it recognized exclusive freehold rights for individual subjects of the sultan of Zanzibar, defined in racial terms as Arabs. Simultaneously, the government prohibited individual coast Africans from gaining land titles. Notably, Digos secured communal title to a ‘native reserve’, but land not secured by private claim or designated a reserve became Crown Land. Additionally, ex-slaves who remained on their former masters' land acquired no legal rights of tenancy. Neither law nor labor assured coastal Africans rights to land. Instead, most were reduced to tenants of private landowners or the government, while land rights strengthened the hand of a small landowning class. Processes of land designation therefore created blocs of landlords and workers defined by race and contrasting rights.Footnote 30
Drought in the coastal hinterland drove many African farmers to the more arable coastal strip in the 1930s. This contributed to a rise in those the administration termed ‘squatters’, and efforts to remove squatters to government-defined settlements met with mixed results.Footnote 31 After the Second World War, questions of land access contributed to heightened tensions between non-native landowners and native squatters. Landowners leveled high rents and tenants' inability to meet rising costs led to mass evictions. The greater mechanization of agriculture further encouraged evictions, forcing ex-slaves, Giriama, and others into what Frederick Cooper termed ‘relationships of subordination’ for survival.Footnote 32 These inequalities politicized and cemented social identities. For instance, in the mid-1940s, several linguistically-related coastal African groups, among them Giriama, Rabai, Duruma, and Digo – referred to as Wanyika in Swahili, or ‘people of the bush’ – embraced a composite identity they termed Mijikenda, or Nine Tribes (distinct from the Swahili subgroup). As Willis and Gona have demonstrated, a quasi-political organization, the Mijikenda Union, was born of this new interpretation of community. The union initially conceived of Mijikenda identity in catholic ways that included people of slave descent. Yet, as coastal identity became more politicized and exclusive in the 1950s, some Mijikenda began to refer to their ex-slave neighbors as newcomers to the coast.Footnote 33
By the 1950s, social identity and political agitation were deeply intertwined. Severe restrictions on African political organizing during the Emergency – instituted in response to the Mau Mau uprising – only encouraged this correlation. For instance, when African political organization was prohibited between 1953 and 1955, ethnic social organizations were the sole means for Africans to articulate grievances. This period of restriction and instability also coincided with a significant rise in Zanzibari nationalism and social advancement among Muslims in the coastal strip. In the early 1950s, some Zanzibari political thinkers, influenced by a nostalgic, monarchist vision of a seaboard state, embraced the idea that Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Protectorate of Kenya could be united as a single nation. They justified this vision by reference to the sultan's sovereignty over the coast and the belief that the maritime triad was East Africa's only natural geographical unit.Footnote 34 Being a subject of the sultan of Zanzibar once had no great significance in coastal Kenya. However, from the mid-1950s, emotional and political affinities with Zanzibar sparked dreams of a maritime union and offered an alternative to Kenyan nationalism. As a result, the presence of the sultan's flag on official buildings, the celebration of the sultan's birthday, and many other symbols linking the coast to Zanzibar gained significant political substance.Footnote 35
A number of social and culturally integrative programs also contributed to a stronger feeling of commonality among Muslims in the protectorate. For instance, the inauguration of an Arab Secondary School and the Mombasa Institute of Muslim Education offered advanced educational opportunities to coastal Muslims. Just as important, the radio station Sauti ya Mvita (Voice of Mombasa), which broadcasted across the protectorate, fostered a greater sense of community. With programs ranging from Islamic religious services to Swahili music, Sauti ya Mvita became, in Ahmed Idha Salim's words, a ‘fount and focus’ of Muslim cultural awakening at the coast.Footnote 36 Zanzibari nationalism and a sense of community among Muslims encouraged Kenyan Arabs, Swahili, and others to imagine a future independent from Kenya or in union with Zanzibar.
As the colonial state lifted restrictions on political organization in Kenya, parties slowly took shape. The increasing popularity of pan-Africanism and race-based nationalism meant that slogans such as ‘Africa for the Africans’ gained wide appeal. In an effort to check the development of colony-wide parties, between 1955 and 1960, the colonial government allowed only district-level political associations. In 1957, pressure from multiple quarters forced the colonial government to allow Africans to vote for African Legco seats. Once in office, African elected representatives demanded additional African seats and the release of Jomo Kenyatta. But because colony-wide parties remained proscribed, African elected leaders channeled political activity into ethnic and racial district political organizations. These political bases heightened what Bethwell Ogot referred to as ‘district self-consciousness’ and encouraged subnationalist sentiments.Footnote 37
At the coast, new political organizations often represented narrow ethnic or racial constituencies. Within coastal African communities, a concern with communal origins played a critical role in shaping the emergent political imagination. For example, in 1957, Ronald Ngala, a Giriama, and Francis Khamisi, a member of the ex-slave community, battled for a Legco seat. Ngala won, in part because his supporters emphasized Khamisi's Yao ancestry and dubbed him a ‘foreigner’ at the coast.Footnote 38 When Khamisi later gained a seat in Legco, he engaged in a form of nativism that underscored race rather than ethnicity. Khamisi argued that, by definition of geography, all land in Kenya was the property of Africans. Non-Africans, he charged, should accept that they had no long-term land rights.Footnote 39 By the end of the 1950s, many coastal parties had built political platforms that emphasized land grievances, social identity, and nativist territoriality. In this volatile political environment, the abstract yet seemingly immutable soil was a powerful metaphor for imagined pasts and contemporary demands.
In 1960, the government licensed colony-wide political parties. Since political organizations had come to rely on identity blocs, national parties emerged as assemblages of ethnic associations and local political organizations.Footnote 40 By the end of 1960, two parties, KANU and the Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) dominated the political landscape. Under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and Oginga Odinga, KANU united voters from Kenya's largest ethnic blocs: Kikuyu and Luo. From this position of strength, KANU lobbied for a powerful central government. This prompted leaders of many smaller ethnic groups to charge that KANU's aim was domination.Footnote 41 Consequently, a defensive ‘community of interests’ among Kalenjin, Maasai, Mijikenda, and other less influential groups coalesced in KADU.Footnote 42
Under the leadership of coast representative Ronald Ngala, KADU advanced a platform called majimboism. In opposition to KANU's centralization, majimboism sought a constitutional framework that allowed for greater provincial autonomy. The architects of majimboism hoped this would preserve the political influence of minority communities and ensure preferential policies in the allocation of land.Footnote 43 Over the next four years, the contest between KANU and KADU constituted the primary political battle in Kenya. Yet neither KANU nor KADU offered solace to members of smaller ethnic or religious groups such as Muslim Digo, Swahili, and Arab. Many feared that no matter which side won, their interests would not be served.
THE MWAMBAO QUESTION
As the struggle between a strong central government and the devolution of power to the regions took shape, coastal autonomists championed a third way for the protectorate, or mwambao (coastal strip) in Swahili: cleave it from Kenya. Some Arabs, Europeans, and Swahili feared status reversal and saw autonomy as a means to protect individual land titles.Footnote 44 Pro-autonomy leaders, however, harbored greater concerns. First, they emphasized that the protectorate gained little from British rule, while up-country groups enjoyed superior education and economic opportunities.Footnote 45 They asserted that integration with independent Kenya would only perpetuate this disparity and perhaps compromise recent Muslim social advancements. Second, since the influx of up-country workers in the 1950s nearly halved the percentage of coastal workers in the regional labor force, activists such as Abdilah Nassir believed that integration with Kenya would lead to greater joblessness among coastal people. Lastly, many autonomists argued that the migration of Christian Africans to the coast would erode the region's Muslim culture.Footnote 46
Fractures along racial, ethnic, religious, and class lines hindered the emergence of a singular autonomy platform, and so from late 1960, numerous secessionist parties took shape. The most reactionary party was the Arab-dominated Coastal League, a group that lobbied for reintegration with Zanzibar. The Coastal League placed great emphasis on the coast's Indian Ocean orientation. It argued that only full autonomy would ensure that the coast could ‘continue and expand our ancient relations with the Kingdoms, Sultanates and Sheikhdums [sic] of the Persian Gulf and Arabia’.Footnote 47 The Coast African Political Union (CAPU) staked out a very different, if no less extreme, position. CAPU, a largely Mijikenda organization called for the secession of the entire Coast Province, an area much larger than the protectorate. Established in mid-1960 by Ngala (who would later join KADU), the party wrote nativism into its charter. CAPU sought to foster the ‘spirit of Africanism’ as a means to ‘rid the Coast Province of British and Arab imperialism’.Footnote 48 CAPU also feared the influence of Kikuyus and Luos and so championed the slogan wabara kwao, ‘up-country people to their home areas’. By asserting the rights of coastal Africans over Arabs, Europeans, and up-country Africans, CAPU developed a particularly narrow form of nativism.Footnote 49
The most progressive autonomist group was the Coast Peoples Party (CPP). The CPP drew support from those who decried the biases of KANU, KADU, the Coastal League, and CAPU. Representative Abdilahi Nassir personified the CPP's relatively liberal attitude. He condemned racial inequality, and his willingness to transcend the social norms of the era by socializing with people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds drew scorn from conservative quarters. Nassir also shunned ethnic associations. He believed that only a political party that emphasized pan-ethnic unity could end British rule.Footnote 50 Nassir had been a founding member of KANU's Mombasa branch, but at the branch's second meeting Nassir witnessed an event that led him to question the party. During the meeting, a popular Giriama madrassa instructor was hectored by up-country party organizers who would not allow the teacher to speak and then slapped his hand down when he attempted to do so. Additionally, Nassir discovered that Kikuyu and Luo leaders followed multiethnic meetings with ethnically exclusive sessions. He reasoned that neither the atmosphere of disrespect towards coastal people nor KANU's dominance by two ethnic blocs bode well. He concluded that the best way to preserve the rights of coastal people was through regional autonomy and incorporation into an East African federation.Footnote 51 Under this banner, Nassir and the CPP were able to build a pan-ethnic base, albeit one that emphasized Muslim identity.
KANU and KADU denounced the CPP and other autonomists. Kenya's oil refineries and its largest port were located in the protectorate. The colony's two major parties as well as the Colonial Office therefore feared the economic repercussions of an independent coast. KANU was also deeply concerned that the separatists' success would set a dangerous precedent for other disgruntled groups. Anti-autonomists inside the protectorate feared that an independent coast would perpetuate Arab privilege. For instance, Ngala maintained that the autonomy movement was an Arab ruse to maintain the spoils of colonial-era racial discrimination.Footnote 52 Anti-autonomy politicians rattled audiences with the claim that autonomy might even facilitate the return of slavery. Legco member R. S. Matano declared that if ‘foreigners’ succeeded in gaining autonomy, Africans ‘shall be made slaves again’.Footnote 53
In 1961, the Colonial Office settled on a practical resolution to the protectorate question. To safeguard Kenya's economic interests, it decided that the protectorate should be legally joined with Kenya Colony before independence.Footnote 54 Since the sultan of Zanzibar leased the strip to Britain, the two governments could simply abrogate the 1895 treaty. The British government, however, was sensitive to Kenyan and international opinion on the issue. Moreover, in June 1961, Zanzibari election violence heightened concerns over mounting tensions in the protectorate. In order to unite the colony and protectorate in a way that appeared even-handed – and so, in the words of the secretary of state for the colonies, deflate the ‘pipe dreams’ of the autonomists – the Colonial Office created the impression that its decision was the product of comprehensive consultation.Footnote 55 To show due diligence and defuse tensions, the Colonial Office appointed Sir James Robertson to oversee a commission of inquiry on the mwambao question. Hearings at the coast were scheduled for late 1961.
The findings of the Robertson Commission were a foregone conclusion. Yet, the commission's hearings as well as the vast number of petitions and correspondences sent to the commissioners offer a valuable window on how political thinkers at the coast imagined space and autochthony at the end of the colonial era. The work of the commission conveyed the image that the British government was earnestly considering the possibility of the protectorate's separation from Kenya, and so many at the coast came to believe that the commission's hearings were akin to a referendum on mwambao. This belief further polarized coastal communities and encouraged ever more hostile confrontations between those who supported separation and those who rejected it.
DISCRETE PASTS
Because political thinkers presumed that the stakes of the Robertson Commission's work were high, they attempted to persuade the commission that their group's interests were paramount. Most groups emphasized their first-comer status, believing it to entitle them to primary consideration. Most also justified their autochthon claims through historical narratives that laid emphasis not only on settlement but also land tenure, religion, trade, and slavery. However, petitioners rarely offered more than simplified accounts of discrete and unchanging communities bound to the soil.
‘It is very obvious’, KADU President Ronald Ngala wrote in a memorandum to the Robertson Commission, ‘that the [coastal] strip is African soil’. KANU representatives from Kwale similarly asserted that the coastal protectorate had always been ‘Kenyan soil’.Footnote 56 Generally, anti-autonomists held that the boundary between the protectorate and the colony was predicated on neither any geographical nor historical reality. Accordingly, they argued that all non-Africans were foreigners in the colony and protectorate. For example, CAPU representatives contended that Mijikenda and Pokomo were the ‘original owners’ of the coast. Other Pokomo petitioners likewise explained to the Robertson Commission that they and the Mijikenda were the coast's ‘true inhabitants’, as opposed to Arab, Asian, and European ‘foreigners’. The entire Coast Province, they asserted, had belonged to the Pokomo and Mijikenda ‘from the foundation of the world’.Footnote 57 Others staked even more exclusive claims. A Digo petitioner submitted that not only had Digos arrived in Mombasa before Arabs but they were also the ‘original tribe’ among the Mijikenda. He thus arrived at the narrow conclusion that only Digos were true autochthons.Footnote 58
Many anti-autonomists portrayed coastal history as typified by a long-standing dichotomy between hosts and guests. The organizing secretary of KANU's Mombasa branch argued that while coastal Africans had welcomed foreign guests to Kenya's shores, these ‘foreigners’ subjugated their hosts.Footnote 59 A delegate to the commission from Msambweni framed Digos' relationship with others in similar terms. Digos, he suggested, were the ones who ‘accepted the [Arab, Portuguese, and British] visitors’. The delegate then rejected the sultan's sovereignty by asserting that Arabs never controlled any part of Kenya. They were guests, the delegate asserted, little more than slave traders.Footnote 60 Anti-autonomists regularly referenced the slave trade as a means to vilify their opponents. Some even used the specter of slavery to discredit Swahilis as authentic coastal voices. For instance, representatives from KANU's Kwale Branch rejected the autochthony claims of Swahilis because the Swahili, they alleged, were the children of Arabs who took enslaved African women as wives. The representatives concluded that by patrilineal reckoning the Swahili were foreigners.Footnote 61 KADU's Coast Branch concurred. They spelled out past horrors that they claimed birthed the Swahili: the Arab torture and rape of Africans. Such narratives vilified Arabs and painted Swahili as the children of oppressors, but they also confirmed Swahilis' African ancestry. Recognizing this dilemma, KADU concluded that though ‘mixed marriages’ are common around the world, leadership should always remain ‘under the hands of the indigenous people unaffected by mixed marriages’.Footnote 62 The soil, KADU petitioners reasoned, belonged to ‘pure’ Africans.
The autonomists similarly depended on contentious social definitions of geography and claims of indigeneity to make their case. For example, Abdallah Chiraghdin and his fellow petitioners depicted the Swahili as indivisible from other features of the Indian Ocean coastline. They argued that the Swahili were as natural to the coast ‘as the coconut trees and the sea’.Footnote 63 The Jomvu Social Club, which represented a subgroup of the Swahili Twelve Tribes, justified their claims to autochthony by arguing that although their ancestors ‘originated’ in Jeddah, they were the first settlers in Mombasa. The club added that on arrival their ancestors found only animals, and so they civilized a wild Africa. The theme of civilizing Africa had long been a mantra of the Arab elite, but the Jomvu Social Club extended the trope well beyond its common usage in order to establish Swahili autochthony.Footnote 64 The tamim, or representative, of the Tisa Taifa made a similar assertion. He claimed that it was not the Mijikenda but rather the Swahili Twelve Tribes who were the ‘aborigines’ of the coast as their arrival preceded the Mijikenda's by several centuries. The tamim of the Thelatha Taifa sketched out an even narrower interpretation of the past. He claimed that only his subgroup was the lawful possessor of the coast. This was proven, he maintained, by the fact that they alone gave permission to the sultan of Zanzibar to rule the coast.Footnote 65 A Swahili ethnic organization called the Afro-Asian Association articulated the Twelve Tribes' claims more poetically. Fixing metaphor to physical space, the association contended that ancient gravesites bore testimony to Swahilis' status as ‘sons of the soil’.Footnote 66 The association argued that their ancestors' remains in the soil offered incontrovertible proof of autochthony.
To strengthen their claims of autochthony, many Swahili thinkers distanced themselves from Arabs. This was a marked departure from earlier maneuvering. In the early twentieth century, many Swahilis emphasized their Arab ancestry, but as nativeness gained political utility some Swahili made clear distinctions between themselves and Arabs. For instance, Abdallah Chiraghdin and his co-petitioners to the Robertson Commission argued that while the Twelve Tribes shared certain affinities with Arabs, they were no more Arabs than were Indonesian Muslims.Footnote 67 Ahmed Idha Salim refined this point. He explained that although many Swahili claimed Arab origins, and the coast maintained close ties with southern Arabia, most people of Arab descent were not ‘ethnically Semitic Arabs’.Footnote 68 This reframing claimed a transoceanic genealogy, an Arab past, and an African ethnicity for the Swahili.
Conservative Arab leaders pushed the autochthony trope further. Liwali Sheikh Salim Mohamed Muhashamy proposed that because the coast was culturally Arab, the protectorate was an ‘Arab country’. Muhashamy argued that ‘immigrant races’ founded Nairobi, but Mombasa was racially and culturally an Arab town.Footnote 69 The coast, Muhashamy suggested, had a uniquely Indian Ocean orientation that distinguished it from Kenya Colony. In its attempt to claim ‘sons of the soil’ status, the Coastal League went so far as to argue that the indigeneity of Arab immigrants was the defining feature of the coast. Much like their opponents, representatives of the Coastal League also denounced those who disagreed with their interpretation of the coast's past as ‘foreigners’.Footnote 70 The Coastal League was not alone in asserting that the Islamic and Indian Ocean orientation of coastal culture made the protectorate naturally distinct from Kenya. Nassir argued that the long history of coastal city-states evidenced a coherent culture, a ‘common way of life, common traditions, a common language and a common religion’, linked to the wider Indian Ocean region.Footnote 71 The protectorate, he reasoned, was a country long before the 1895 treaty. The CPP's Omar Rashid Bakuli likewise asserted that whereas the ‘concept’ of Kenya was foreign-imposed, the protectorate was an organic product of a common history of Islamic praxis and maritime extraversion. Autonomists concluded that this underlying coherence of culture and origins constituted a coastal nation-state in waiting. One proponent of the idea even gave this imagined political unit a positively ethnocentric name: ‘Swahililand’.Footnote 72
BELLICOSE FUTURES
History provided abundant fodder for the autonomy debate, but the question of the coast's future fired the most impassioned engagements during the period of the Robertson Commission enquiry in late 1961. This was in no small part a consequence of the fact that many anxieties about the future were existential. For instance, the greatest fear among Muslim autonomists was that integration with Kenya would lead to a wholesale assault on Islam in the coast region.Footnote 73 One delegation to the Robertson Commission from Malindi projected that the kadhi courts would be suspended if the protectorate were joined with Kenya. In a more evocative articulation of their fears, the Malindi delegation added that their opponents had designs to turn coastal mosques into drinking clubs.Footnote 74 The veil offered a similarly symbolic as well as gendered reference to the religious degradation that Muslims believed they would suffer. The Women's Wing of the CPP relayed that anti-autonomists had already humiliated Muslim women by publically forcing them to remove their veils.Footnote 75 By stressing the perceived threat that integration posed to the practice of Islam, separatists emphasized that the exiting colonial administration had an ethical obligation to grant the coast autonomy.
Muslim political thinkers were not alone in their concerns about coastal culture. James Juma Mbotela, a renowned coastal author and Christian African of slave descent, shared the separatists' pessimistic view. Mbotela's position was of particular note because his embellished account of his father's experience of slavery, Uhuru wa Watumwa (The Freeing of the Slaves), was among the most popular indictments of Arab slave owners. Moreover, Mbotela's son, Tom, had been a prominent nationalist and member of the Kenya African Union, a precursor to KANU. Yet, Mbotela argued that if the protectorate were integrated with Kenya, the fundamental differences between up-country and coastal people would endanger the cultural foundations of the coast's Muslim society. Mbotela reasoned that domination by wabara would be inevitable and the ‘old culture’ of the coast would vanish.Footnote 76
Anxieties about the coast's future sparked heated exchanges, particularly during the Robertson Commission's visit to East Africa. Bellicose rhetoric peppered the national constitutional debate of 1961, and similar confrontational language colored discussions of coastal secession.Footnote 77 For example, in September 1961, KADU Coast Regional Secretary S.R.D. Msechu declared that his party was prepared to face the CPP ‘with [c]lubs’ if they did not abandon their separatist aspirations. A Mombasan KADU representative told the Robertson Commission that regardless of the British government's decision, Africans would take their land back from Arabs after independence. KADU President Ngala was more diplomatic. He explained to the commission that the Mijikenda had no intention of sowing unrest, ‘provided a reasonable decision [about the coast] is made’.Footnote 78 CAPU President Alex J. Karisa went a step further. He proclaimed that since the buildings of Arabs and Asians were on Mijikenda land, they would all be removed at independence.Footnote 79
KANU representatives made explicit threats as well. The Nairobi branch asserted that if the autonomists persisted in their demands they would be interred at the infamous Mau Mau detention facility, Manyani Prison. Even KANU's highest-ranking members used menacing language. In an overt reference to the killing of Zanzibari Arabs in June 1961, Tom Mboya warned autonomists to ‘take a lesson’ from the election violence in Zanzibar.Footnote 80 Future Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta, conditioned by experiences in Central Province, saw European settler interests as the engine behind the separatist movement. Europeans exerted little influence over any coastal party other than the Coastal League, but Kenyatta vowed to fight autonomy with ‘strength, nerves and blood’.Footnote 81 This rhetoric threatened to boil over into racially charged clashes during the Robertson Commission's tour of the protectorate in October 1961.
One tense episode began when Nassir arrived at a separatist rally in Mombasa carrying a miniature coffin bearing the names of prominent anti-autonomy groups: KANU, KADU, and the Kenya Labour Federation. He declared that he had come to bury his opponents.Footnote 82 Anti-autonomists quickly reacted to this provocation. A crowd of several hundred men, including many armed with bows, arrows, and knives, assembled outside the Mijikenda Union's Mombasa office. They too carried a coffin, but their full-scale casket was meant to symbolize the death of mwambao as well as ‘one or more of the leading autonomists’.Footnote 83 Such violent imagery led to a more dangerous confrontation at Mombasa's Mwembe Tayari Square the following day. Hundreds of knife and stick wielding anti-autonomists confronted an armed crowd of separatists. Only timely police intervention prevented significant violence.Footnote 84
Proposals by autonomist groups to build bulwarks against up-country migrants stoked tensions further. For instance, the CPP spelled out a decidedly illiberal immigration agenda wherein all up-country people would be returned to their home areas. The government would then set up a barrier to prevent reentry. ‘This would be done’, the CPP delegation to the Robertson Commission suggested, ‘by having control points … where people coming through would have to show a pass and satisfy the authorities as to their identity and home area’.Footnote 85 It was an idea reminiscent of Kenya's infamous kipande pass system, which restricted the movement of Africans. It was also a program of exclusion predicated on territorial identity and origins. CAPU proposed a similar plan in which all up-country African chiefs and other civil servants would be repatriated to their respective regions. Once this was accomplished, CAPU suggested, all unemployed up-country people would be removed to reserves.Footnote 86
Despite the efforts of the separatists, the Robertson Commission report advised that the coast be integrated with Kenya before independence. The commission did, however, recommend a number of safeguards to protect the interests and ‘way of life’ of coastal Muslim communities.Footnote 87 By the time the 1962 Lancaster House Conference on the Future of the Coastal Strip convened, delegates recognized that the question of autonomy was a dead letter. The conference therefore focused on the terms of the coast's integration. Leaders of KANU and KADU agreed that freehold land would be preserved and safeguards instituted, including the protection of Islamic worship, the kadhi courts, and instruction in Arabic for Muslims.Footnote 88 With such assurances, the sultan's abrogation of the 1895 treaty was only a matter of time.
As the outcome of the autonomy debate became clear, and tensions between KANU and KADU mounted, the political landscape shifted once again. For instance, Ngala, who had vigorously fought coastal separatism, warned of the secession of KADU strongholds if KANU instituted a strong central government.Footnote 89 Moreover, as fears of Kikuyu-Luo domination escalated, the internal divisions of the coastal separatists seemed to pale in comparison to the threat posed by KANU. Thus, in 1962 the CPP, Coastal League, and several other organizations put aside their differences to form an umbrella party dubbed the Mwambao United Front.Footnote 90 More remarkably, just before Kenya's final constitutional conference in 1963, a KADU contingent from the coast broke from the national party and called for the coast's complete separation from Kenya by October 1, 1963 – roughly two months in advance of independence. ‘[W]e have discovered’, the KADU defectors explained, ‘that there is no honesty of purpose in the Kenya Government’.Footnote 91
The protectorate would be fully integrated with Kenya, and while majimboism was enshrined in the constitution, KANU's political strength led many to question the long-term prospects for regionalism. By mid-1963, the future looked grim to many at the coast. Coast political thinkers therefore recalibrated collective identities and the parameters of inclusion. In a dramatic turn of events, once-bitter enemies from CAPU, KADU, and the CPP formed a new party: the Coast United Front (CUF). Contradicting their earlier positions, CUF representatives Alex J. Karisa and S.R.D. Msechu argued that the coastal region had ‘from time immemorial been recognised geographically, historically, linguistically and ethnologically to be a country with a separate identity of its own’. Many CUF members had rejected this narrative when articulated by the CPP, but faced with KANU domination CUF argued that both the 1895 treaty and the overarching culture of the coast evidenced the inherent unity of the protectorate. ‘[T]he Coast has come to the conclusion’, CUF leaders wrote to the departing governor in 1963, ‘that the only solution is for Britain and the Sultan to return to the Coast people their former autonomous status in order to preserve their identity’.Footnote 92 CUF thus affirmed that all coastal people, regardless of origins, were citizens of a discrete historical territory and bearers of a common identity. Former adversaries had embraced common geo-cultural links, and so a new definition of authentic locals emerged from the rapidly changing political climate.
CONCLUSION
Ontologically reductive concepts of culture and origins were the cornerstone of colonial Kenya's social hierarchy. In response, postwar political thinkers emphasized the exclusive geo-cultural link implied by the concept of the native and so transformed a mark of oppression into a badge of citizenship. In the form of racial nationalism, nativist territoriality successfully challenged colonial rule and its race-based legal codes. When applied to subnational spaces, however, nativist territoriality encouraged ever more precise and contentious definitions of the indigene, as presentations to the Robertson Commission demonstrate. These overlapping registers of nativism offered means to navigate the uncertain political waters of the early 1960s, but they also produced divergent, sometimes irreconcilable visions of the postcolonial nation.
In the Protectorate of Kenya, a region defined by mobility, diversity, inequality, and trans-Indian Ocean linkages, both separatists and their opponents claimed rights based on exclusive ties to coastal territory. Fearing persecution by Arab, African, or European ‘foreigners’, political thinkers outlined historical narratives of autochthony that aimed to discredit political opposition, appeal to colonial authorities, and bolster communal solidarity. Specifically, self-identification as ‘children of the soil’ condensed claims of historical presence and grievances about land allocation, securing them to local geography with emotive metaphor. In defining the coast's future by what they perceived as either its African or maritime historical essence, political thinkers used history and communal identity to chart differing futures. Yet, as independence approached, political thinkers again redefined the parameters of belonging to accord with emergent political possibilities. Definitions of geography and the foreigner that had once been cast as immutable proved to be flexible.
Though the protectorate became part of the Republic of Kenya, questions of belonging and regional identity remained unresolved.Footnote 93 Political crises and competition over regional resources have encouraged political thinkers to return to the dually integrative and divisive grammar of autochthony at several postcolonial junctures. For instance, claims of exclusive relationships to local territory played a critical role in defining communal enemies during the violence that accompanied Kenya's transition to multiparty politics in the 1990s. In 1997, perpetrators of violence at the coast targeted Kikuyus, Luos, and others they labeled foreign Kenyans. Additionally, some Swahili were exhorted to ‘go back to Arabia’.Footnote 94 From 2005, and particularly in the wake of the contested 2007 national elections, the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC) has drawn on multiple strands of nativism. The group stresses exclusive rights to land and other regional resources, but its rhetoric is no simple rehashing of 1960s nativism. Rather, its message represents an interlacing of 1960s and 1990s autochthony discourses in ways more inclusive of diverse coastal racial, ethnic, and religious groups while maintaining a profoundly anti-up-country stance.Footnote 95 These conjunctures and movements are unique, yet responses to the changing political landscapes of the 1990s and 2000s have been shaped by concepts of space and belonging similar to those articulated by political thinkers in the era of decolonization.
Since at least the 1950s, political thinkers in coastal Kenya have marshaled the autochthony trope as a means to leverage political aspirations and material interests. However, in this region defined by overlapping continental and Indian Ocean maritime imaginaries, political emphasis on exclusive, communal ties to the soil has not remained constant. Rather, the politics of the soil has shaped popular thought during unusually fraught conjunctures, often when the political stakes seem high. Reflection on the coastal autonomy debate of the early 1960s suggests that to fully understand this intermittent attraction to autochthony discourse we should not only consider the enduring frames of political thought but also how political thinkers reimagine the specific terms of belonging at each historical juncture.
