The struggle for hegemony is carried out as a contest of meaning, as well as through material forces.
—Crawford Young: The African Colonial State in Comparative PerspectiveIntroduction
This article is concerned with the colonial state as a producer, consumer, and regulator of print, as a “diligent reader,” as Isabel Hofmeyr has expressed it. Propaganda and censorship may represent two extremes in the management of a colonial public sphere. In between, newspapers, pamphlets, books, radio, and films, directed at different audiences, make up a tapestry of journalism, information, and political debate. In a colonial situation, what does censorship, fed by the changing and elaborate colonial intelligence and information institutions, tell us about the contradictions inside the state as an upholder of the liberties and its role as a guardian of state power, in a period when the justification of that power was under attack? The late-colonial period in Kenya was such a period. Newspapers and related formats of print culture were at the forefront in the ebb and flow of freedom and control of the public sphere. During the period between the publication of the first modern newspapers in Kenya around 1900 until the regime closed down most African newspapers in the early 1950s, the print world became both a partner in and a threat to the colonial order. In the critical postwar period between 1945 till the outbreak of the anti-colonial revolt known as Mau Mau in 1952, the growth of the anti-colonial opposition brought in its wake the gradual, hesitant increase of censorship initiatives.Footnote 1
Censorship was an interactive and negotiated process—one whose successful management was in the interest of both the censoring agents and those censored. One might think that censorship is a measure taken in order for communication to break down. If we imagine colonial print communication as a continuum suspended between partners that at one end desire full freedom of expression and at the other full control, absolute censorship does constitute silence, like that represented by the dramatic closure of the African press with the Emergency of 1952. But what went on along the continuum, in peaceful and critical periods, leading up to censorship, was wordy, diverse, and eloquent. In a politicised colonial environment, like that in Kenya in the period from the late 1920s, and particularly between 1945 and 1960, censorship was surrounded by a wealth of communication by those censored (demonstrations, international solidarity messages, secret organising) and the censoring agents (memos, correspondence, and questions in the British parliament and the administration in Kenya). The institutions of the metropolitan and local colonial state concerned with information and censorship did not always see eye to eye in the delicate business of interference. They debated among themselves and called for experience from other parts of the empire.
The negotiations were carried out by unequal partners—forcing censors and censored in their mutual dependency to be strategic, clothing their desired messages in ambivalence, misinformation, language games, subterfuge, propaganda, and secrecy. They were partners in the exercise of reading between the lines. The very asymmetry of the communication nexus released energies that spilled over into politics and could not be stemmed. Non-European publicists in Kenya were very aware of the openings this discursive flow offered; negotiations exposed colonial disagreements and fault lines that could be exploited. In this conversation and confrontation, non-European publicists challenged the colonial government's censoring practices on the ground of rights, and put pressure on the government to uphold the core value of freedom of speech and of the press, with some success even in the turbulent 1950s.
The period from 1945 to 1952 was the Golden Age of the independent non-European press. Officials involved in wartime information and propaganda had not anticipated the many factors, including rising literacy, which made it possible for the African and Indian population to create their own space for public political discussion. They underestimated the strengths and willingness to take risks that characterised a number of Indian and African politicians and editors who emerged towards the end of the war and the decade after.
The article examines what changed during this period in Kenya's dramatic political and social history in relation to the production, broadcasting, censoring, and suppression of non-European newspapers, and how the change affected the institutions and groupings that produced and received texts. More narrowly, it seeks to trace the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the consolidated or emerging non-European publicists and publics. Will an examination that situates censorship in a broader context of management of discourse, of negotiation and dialogue, one that tests and goes beyond the dualism of suppression and resistance, make it clearer why and to what extent a number of critical, anti-colonial publications were allowed to exist, and some were encouraged? And what were the limits, when opposition became unacceptable and communication broke down?
A number of studies of the colonial print world have stressed the significant contribution non-European newspapers and related publications have made towards unsettling, or at times supporting, colonial regimes in the last phase of colonial rule in Africa, and the period of decolonisation. Leslie James has examined how in West Africa the emergence of vernacular newspapers claiming the right of free speech became a challenge to the colonial governments. “The existence and substance of these newspapers meant that the complex web of codes and practices British officials used to respond to dissent more visibly conflicted with a fundamental notion of freedom held in the metropole, that of the freedom of speech.”Footnote 2 James uses the case of censorship aimed at the influential writings of George Padmore, which were seen to encourage irresponsible revolt against colonialism in West Africa, to argue her general point.
In his work on censorship in Nigeria, Fred Omu similarly stressed the dilemmas that censorship ran into when attempting to reconcile ideals of liberty and freedom of expression with a wish to regulate and suppress the anti-colonial press.Footnote 3 Isabel Hofmeyr has discussed Gandhi's pedagogics as demonstrated in the South African Indian Opinion, which assembled chosen reading matter to inspire an Indian-based opposition to the regime in South Africa, and which encouraged “slow reading.”Footnote 4 In their pioneering work on Indian politics and the public sphere in colonial Kenya, Ann SeidenbergFootnote 5 and Robert GregoryFootnote 6 have emphasised the key role of a large, well-educated and well-connected group of Indian publicists in informing publics in Kenya—European, African, and Indian—of world news and anti-colonial politics in India and South Africa, and thus supporting the emerging nationalist, African-led struggle against British colonialism in Kenya.
In earlier articles on a small group of influential and popular Indian and African newspapers in Kenya, I have examined networks of African and Indian editors and journalists, the economic assistance of the Indian community to African anti-colonial newspapers, the politics that brought them together and increasingly divided them in the late 1940s, and finally the highly developed European print culture that included newspapers, newsletters, and pamphlets, some independent, but most sponsored more or less directly by the Kenya government. Indian newspapers, in particular, explicitly invoked freedom of speech, using Milton's plea for press freedom and condemnation of licensing as a trail blazer for the role of the press in a new public sphere.Footnote 7 The articles were concerned with the constitution of publics and argued that self-confident publicists made efforts to address cross-cultural audiences. Several newspapers, like the Indian Colonial Times, were bilingual in Gujarati and English. Some were in Swahili, the lingua franca of Eastern Africa, others were exclusively in a vernacular, like the influential Mumenyereri. This paper came out regularly for seven years and took its place in the public sphere as a forum for news and debates on politics and social policies in the Kikuyu community, the government's intimate enemy, which later became the core of the Mau Mau uprising.
In his work on the Indian public sphere in Tanzania, Brennan examined two bilingual Indian newspapers, Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald. Their circulation peaked in the second half of the 1940s, and Brennan noted that “British officials . . . formed a significant audience segment for both papers.” In the underfinanced and precarious colonial print environment of Tanganyika, the two papers “shrewdly eschewed actionable slander, and ‘subversion’ that would instigate costly legal fees and endanger registration sureties, hazards which, in Kenya's larger and more radical newspaper markets, often induced investor pressure to moderate editorial policies.”Footnote 8
Harri Englund takes issue with what he sees as an unproductive emphasis on the anti-colonial character of colonial public spheres in his article on the government-sponsored vernacular press in Zambia, “Anti Anti-Colonialism.”Footnote 9 As an antidote, he examined two government-sponsored vernacular papers from the 1930s and 1950s, Mutende and Nkhani za kum’mawa, to establish the point that in postwar Zambia, the economy and social environment were such that an active readership of the papers, expressing themselves in letters to the editor, found other issues more pressing than that of colonial rule, and that “resistance to colonial oppression and exploitation coexisted with enthusiastic appropriations of new styles, tastes and opportunities.” His caveat, that “we should not assume that the absence of anti-colonial sentiments is evidence of any particular commitment to the colonial status quo,” is equally valuable when it comes to the semi-official press in Kenya. My earlier articles emphasised the role of the non-European press as agents of general information and enlightenment along with critique. Englund concludes, however, “The correspondence about Mutende shows how enlightened paternalism of postwar colonialism was sustained by an unprecedented regard for African sensitivities and opinions.”Footnote 10 This may have been the case in Zambia. In Kenya, the situation was different, and the views of those who read on behalf of the state often overrode the “regard for African sensitivities,” when it came to newspapers reports and discussions of controversial politics.
After a brief discussion of an understanding of decolonisation that highlights the postwar government's moves towards partnership and dialogue, the first section of the article sets the scene. It describes the political context of conflict and accommodation in Kenya's late-colonial period, focussing on the postwar public sphere. This was when the Labour government developed a new policy for Africa, as a step towards decolonisation. The second section discusses new approaches to censorship, and examines the local history of censorship in the light of wider British censorship practices. It describes the metropolitan and local institutions involved in propaganda and information policies from 1940 onwards. Recognising the importance of public opinion, the postwar information and public relations order of the empire, and locally in Kenya, underwent important changes, ostensibly upholding principles of free speech and taking steps towards partnership with African and Indian publicists, steps that were most often received with scepticism. The third section moves the attention away from high politics to the non-European print world in order to come to terms with the interface in a broad sense between the producers and consumers of print of different orders. It examines the representation and discussion in the African and Indian press of areas of political tension and responses and reactions from the colonial authorities. It highlights the themes that were the targets of colonial vigilance such as protest against government interference in land and the rural economy, attacks on colonially appointed chiefs, and reports on anti-colonial uproar and protest in India and West and South Africa. In conclusion, the article returns to the question of censorship, and discusses whether the focus on censorship has contributed to a nuanced understanding of the interaction between colonisers and colonised, the contradiction of the colonial state, the coexistence of opposition and accommodation in the later colonial period, and the significance of a particular colonial print worlds.
The Postwar Political Scene
During and after World War II, effective communication between the colonial authorities, the European settlers, and the colony's non-European majority population—Indian and African—became a necessity in the view of both the metropolitan and the Kenya government. The postwar period opened up the public sphere and inaugurated a struggle over ideologies and meaning. The social and educational development of the African population was high on the agenda of the new Labour government. New policies had to be devised and carried out in a situation of economic crisis when Great Britain had to make an economic recovery after the war.Footnote 11 Anti-colonial movements swept the world. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were in favour of the perpetuation of colonialism, and the foundation of the United Nations organisation supported human rights and colonial independence.Footnote 12 In his introduction to the documents making up The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945–1951, Hyam sums up three developments that necessitated a new postwar world order and a politics of decolonisation: “The growth of colonial nationalism, . . . the emergence of the communist threat. . . [and] the unprecedented development of interest in and criticism of colonial regimes.”Footnote 13
Throup emphasises that the ambition of the postwar government was that decolonisation of the British colonies in Africa should occur in an orderly manner as a “controlled political devolution,” by gradually incorporating nationalist politicians leaning towards reform into the colonial state.”Footnote 14 This objective was set out in pronouncements from the Governors’ Conference in 1947, called by the Labour government, as one of the steps towards developing a new Africa policy. A Colonial Office memo from 1950 emphasised that in the case of Eastern Africa the aim was “evolving a plural society, with each section of the community playing its part on equal terms, from a society which is at present stratified in practice, although not in law, with the Europeans and Indians as employers, managers and professional men and the Africans as workers and subsistence farmers.”Footnote 15
The project did not succeed in Kenya, as demonstrated by militant anti-colonialism in the shape of Mau Mau—far removed from the ideal of orderly incorporation of African political leaders supporting gradual reform. According to Throup, the metropolitan reform strategies splintered on the rocks of the Kenya government's failure in three connected areas: reliance on outmoded indirect rule—in this case basing their power on appointed chiefs rather than the emerging modernising educated African reform politicians like Jomo Kenyatta and the Kenya African Union; giving in to the pressures of the powerful settler lobby, protecting settler interests in agriculture by state subsidies, and allowing them to be incorporated into the legislative and executive branches of government in the mid-1940s; and finally, the underestimation by the Kenya and metropolitan governments of the effects of what, after Lonsdale and Low, is known as the “second colonial occupation”Footnote 16: the intensification of agricultural reforms by means of a radical increase in technical departments and interference in areas cultivated by the Kikuyu and Kamba by destocking, thus attacking the livelihood of pastoralists, displacement of communities, and terracing, often using compulsory labour.Footnote 17 Encouragement of trade unions was part of the colonial strategy, but the Mombasa dock workers’ strike in 1947, and the general strike in 1950, and a protest against celebrations in connection with Nairobi's fifty year jubilee spilled over into general urban unrest, and contributed to create and sustain the networks that were the urban basis for the Mau Mau. African and Indian politicians and publicists, and their watchers, the intelligence community, followed the independence struggles in India and the Gold Coast closely, and the coverage in newspapers meant that news reached a broad, mostly urban, public. An example is the report in the African paper Mumenyeriri in 1948, objectionable in the eyes of the censors, that it was George Padmore's view that in Ghana, “the Accra riots suggested the strategic role of towns,” and that revolt in urban areas “marked the beginning of the end of colonial slavery.”Footnote 18
Throup does not discuss in detail a fourth area of controversy and accommodation particular to Kenya—that of the political role of the ambiguously-positioned Indian population. In 1948 the Indian population had reached almost a hundred thousand.Footnote 19 According to Collier and Lal, the African population of Nairobi around 1948 was 64,000, “some 50,000 of which were male wage earners.”Footnote 20 However, figures were inaccurate and contested—exaggerated by European settlers who fought against Indian immigration and probably underestimated by the Indian communities, who feared immigration restrictions.
Indian anti-colonial politics in East Africa spanned defending Indians’ fight to be recognised as sub-imperial citizens in the 1920s and ’30s to fighting for Kenya's independence under the leadership of African nationalists in the 1940s and ’50s.Footnote 21 In Brennan's words, “South Asian nationalists in East Africa were Janus-faced, playing the role of sub-imperialists as well as anti-colonialists.”Footnote 22 Militant nationalism in India exerted a strong influence in Kenya from the mid-1940s. A new generation of political leaders, organised in the East African Indian National Congress, shifted the struggle for “recognition as equal partners in the imperial project” to one “influenced by the growing postwar anti-colonial nationalist discourse in India.”Footnote 23 Among this new generation were a number of activist political figures, editors, journalists, and printers, who with of a generation of African activists and publicists from similar strata, dominated the non-European public sphere.Footnote 24 According to Aiyar, Kenyan Indians were particularly active in four different political areas: “Anti-colonial nationalism in India, trade unionism among Indian and African workers, . . . interracial anti-colonial nationalism in Kenya, and loyalty to the colonial regime.”Footnote 25 As we shall see, reports and debates on these topics were prominent in the non-European newspapers of the period, and local colonial officials were diligently reading over the shoulders of journalists and editors, assessing both acquiescence and the damage they might do, debating among themselves and with different government branches in Kenya and Britain, and testing the possibilities of censorship.
Censorship in Context
In the introduction to a special issue of PMLA, “Literature and Censorship,” Michael Holquist compares the lack of discussion of censorship in literary studies to “the house of the undertaker, in which no one speaks of death.” He examines and recommends new approaches to censorship that do not see the practice as “an absolute choice between prohibition and freedom,” but one which understands the “relation between censors and victims” as “dynamic and multidirectional.” Censorship may be associated with “the archaeological practice of reading between the lines,” undertaken by both censors and readers, or, relevant to colonial censorship, “reading between worlds.” Censorship is an exercise in “discursive hegemony,” and has a plethora of techniques available. In colonial management of the print sphere, what he calls “hortatory censorship, laws that proscribe as well as forbid,” may cover a number of information and propaganda activities along the continuum of practices I have noted.Footnote 26
Along the same lines, Dominic Boyer argues for a new understanding of censorship that regards the practice as productive intellectual labour, which must be studied in its specific social and historical context—in his case practices in the German Democratic Republic. Censorship does not constitute a clash between the creation and destruction of knowledge, but its management—a negotiated production of knowledge that prunes its aberrations so that it is kept within the bounds of the approved episteme. In his words: “Censorship . . . is about the negotiation, maintenance, and reproduction of epistemic order.” He describes this practice as “hermeneutic power” a “particular settlement of categorical and symbolic order.” The power to carry it out rests most commonly with agents of the state. Boyer goes on to describe how to go about pinning down practices of censorship: “the study of censorial practices should be situated within the ethnography of intellectual practices of conservation and creation (among them: representation, interpretation, editing, planning, licensing, criticism, and theorisation) in their social and political contexts of cultural production.”Footnote 27 His interest is in the actual figure of the censor; mine is with the networks of state agencies that together function as interpreters of journalistic texts, their agreements, hesitations, and discords, and the way targets of censorship interfered with their understandings and came to be co-creators of knowledge. In the case of East Germany, famously, intelligence agencies saw to it that there was a whole archive of documentation. In the case of colonial Kenya of the 1940s and ’50s, the archive reflects the inequalities of the discursive order in that the official colonial discourse is richly available, as are numerous translations of articles from particularly African papers, thanks to alert intelligence officers and other officials, while debates and reflections of the potential or actual targets of censorship is sporadic. The best source, then, to that side of the equation is what can be found in the actual newspapers themselves.Footnote 28
Towards the end of the 1940s and during the Mau Mau revolt, censorship, control of newspapers, and diffusion of propaganda in pamphlets, books, films, and radio became key techniques in what evolved into a war of discourses. The second Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1945 provided public capital of £120 million over a ten-year period, and funds were directed at information and propaganda.Footnote 29 As Crawford Young summarises, “The old shibboleth of colonial self-sufficiency was finally abandoned.”Footnote 30
The need for coordinated propaganda efforts during the Second World War, directed from London, led to the establishment of a Ministry of Information with a division on empire in 1939.Footnote 31 The Colonial Office, the bearer of “considerable bureaucratic power,” built up from the mid-1930s,Footnote 32 resented the appropriation by a rivalling ministry of activities they regarded as belonging within their area, and in spite of a liaison body set up to coordinate initiatives between the two ministries, tensions persisted, and contradictions between their different institutional cultures had effects on the information and propaganda activities in Africa and Kenya.Footnote 33 Officials in the Colonial Office distrusted propaganda and publicity and emphasised the need for a tight control of the contents of the official and semi-official materials produced. The Ministry of Information pushed new technologies and innovative circuits of information diffusion, and participatory methods for the spreading of propaganda and information—they actively sought and created publics.
Locally, in Kenya, the Information Office, established in 1940, was responsible for dissemination to all racial groups in the civil population of propaganda and information material from London. Its mandate was to set up local information structures in the areas of film, radio, and print media, as well as production of material suited to the local circumstances. During the Second World War voices from the opposition were muted. The government suspected that Kenya's Asian population lacked loyalty and listened to German propaganda, especially with the fall of Singapore in 1942 and the widely reported Quit India campaign. However, their loyalty was less important than that of the African majority, who grew food and provided soldiers and labour. A section under the East Africa Command was in charge of military propaganda to the army. It published the popular, widely read magazine Askari in Swahili for East African soldiers abroad, making use of local informers. The Kenya Information Office added its own new magazine for a period, Kenya Kwetu, targeted specifically at Kenyan soldiers who had been stationed abroad. It proved superfluous with the popularity of Askari and Baraza, the Swahili supplement to the East African Standard, and was closed down.Footnote 34 After the war the Information Office was reorganised to direct its activities at the African population only.
The actual control and censorship of the press involved a number of interests, first and foremost those of the state as the caretaker of the security and well-being of its population. The fact that the majority of that population were unfree brought their representatives into direct and indirect conflict with the state. In the case of Kenya, the metropolitan and the local colonial governments often disagreed, reflecting the gap between Labour's new policies for Africa and what happened on the ground in Kenya. Officials in Nairobi persisted in their attempts to curb the press, often against the advice and decisions of the Colonial Office in London. Furthermore, different arms of government had diverging views on the benefits, dangers, and limits of press freedom. The interests of the state in many cases contrasted with those of newspaper owners, editors, journalists, and printers in their function as watchdogs, but coincided with them in their functions as purveyors of news, announcements, features, and comments. The publicists engaged in newspaper production invented new forms of addressing their readers, actively creating new publics.Footnote 35 They acted on behalf of colonial subjects, but had to calculate the pros and cons of subverting and challenging the dominant political institutions and discourses, taking into regard their financial situation, their attraction to potential advertisers, and the risk of being closed down. The European and Indian business communities, who provided production infrastructure, capital, credit, advertisements, and marketing know-how, depended on well-functioning infrastructures, like a reliable postal system and a stable economic and political environment. Indian and African newspaper owners and editors took advantage of the structures and opportunities afforded by the colonial state. African journalists migrated between government-sponsored publications and independent African newspapers. Editors knew that they took political and economic risks and often produced newspapers as one of several business activities, spreading their risk.
In their efforts to manage the public sphere, authorities practised direct consultation with editors, displaying a whole set of instruments, from financial support, skills upgrading, and redaction to warnings that if they did not moderate their political stance, they would be prosecuted over sedition under criminal law, often to little effect. A request by press liaison officer K. C. E. Downes to attorney general K. K. O'Connor in the early 1950s, urging leniency towards an erring African journalist, demonstrates both the tensions between the various arms of the government and the tenacity of British ideals of press freedom that worked against complete colonial control of the public sphere. In the tense political atmosphere around the turn of the decade new publicist initiatives were necessary. Encouraged by the Information Office, Downes launched a plan for the co-optation and regulation of the vernacular African press. To the director of information at the Colonial Office in London, he explained the aim of the scheme as “supplying and controlling the means of production” by providing a printing press and guiding editors as to professional journalistic standards. These initiatives might contribute to changing the African press from “from an irresponsible press to one of some reliability.”
As part of his lobbying, Downes asked the Kenya attorney general to drop a word in favour of the African editor, Victor Wokabi, and his printer, Oti Zabulon, who had been summoned to court in a case of sedition. Wokabi was the key person in Downes's efforts to enter into dialogue with the African press. Downes writes, “If anything can be done, it would strengthen my position tremendously as regards gaining the confidence of these Africans.” However, Downes knew that he was on shaky ground in spite of his unwarranted assurance to O'Connor that the chief native commissioner supported his scheme, and went on to write: “I do not suggest for a moment that the summonses should be dropped . . . but a word spoken by you to lessen the penalty would help us greatly.” He ended the letter with an expression of the widely shared scepticism in regard to the capacity of even elite Africans, like the two accused, to understand the nature of politics and law and order: “Needless to say, these Editors have no idea what sedition means, and this we are now attempting to explain to them.”Footnote 36
In his reply, the attorney general expressed his hope that in the desire of the press liaison officer to “get the African Press more under control” the intention is not that “there will be any attempt to dictate policy to them or to restrict their freedom in any way.” Regarding Wokabi, O'Connor went on to make it clear that it was impossible for the court to “take any action which might be misrepresented as a bargain not to take court proceedings, or not to pursue the case against him, if he agreed to modify the anti-Government attitude of his paper.”Footnote 37 Downes's proposal eventually came to nothing after having involved, in addition to the above mentioned, the Colonial Office, the governor, the British Newspaper Proprietors Association, the British Council, a prominent journalist from the London Times, and the European Elected Members Organization.
The most influential newspaper in colonial Kenya, the East African Standard, came under government pressure to be part of the regulatory exercise. The paper was in principle an independent, financially self-sustaining agent, but it was much too central for the dissemination of news and opinion to be left alone by the authorities. In reality the government funded Baraza, its Swahili supplement, and had also appointed its editor. Right from the start, the authorities attempted to censor both the Standard and Baraza when the papers brought reports from African political meetings or complaints by Africans on the running of local affairs. The managing director of the paper protested in a letter to the Secretariat: “Baraza's success will depend upon the confidence it receives as a medium of expression of the aspirations and grievances of the African.”Footnote 38
Reflecting on African and Indian resistance against the economic consequences of new censorship laws, the leader of the Elected Members Organization Wilfred Havelock, in a letter to Eric Davis, the deputy information officer, warned against a too obvious official financial support of the African press. The vigorous protests against the ordinance “underlines the necessity for preventing any suspicion of Government subsidy or unofficial aid to the African editors becoming known and strengthens the suggestion made by Rankin [chief secretary 1947–52] . . . that money should be provided from some other source, such as the British Council.”Footnote 39
The first half of the twentieth century in Kenya saw the paradox of the coexistence of colonial rule with absolute powers to govern and a fairly free and flourishing press. This situation was not unique to Kenya. Colonial India had fostered a highly developed press and censorship of newspapers was resisted, and made use of only reluctantly. The same was the case in Burma and Nigeria.Footnote 40 Freedom of expression was “an essential foundation of Western liberal theory of civil society,” and the press was a cornerstone. When formal censorship was introduced in India 1823, several Indian-language newspapers closed down in protest. The measures were repealed in 1836.Footnote 41 Omu describes how in Nigeria in the early 1900s attempts at introducing formal censorship based on the Indian penal code met with angry protests, and were given up. According to him, “the English laws of sedition and defamation were a museum of legal imprecision and confusion.”Footnote 42 The government in Burma took its guidelines from Indian law and rarely censored material in the vernaculars before publication. Here, as in Kenya, laws of sedition were the basis on which publications could be prosecuted, and “it suited the British to keep sedition ill defined.”Footnote 43 Cases of prosecution were rare in both colonies and in Kenya until the second half of the 1940s. Indian independence, African nationalism, and the growth of militant resistance then led to a number of charges of sedition against newspaper editors and owners. Many were lost, and those that led to conviction were widely publicised and fuelled anti-government feeling.
The instruments available for direct censorship of the newspapers were limited. The press in Kenya was regulated by the Book and Newspaper Registration Ordinance of 1906. It laid down that publications should be registered, and in the case of newspapers annual reports stating the title of the paper, name and address of the owner, and average yearly circulation figures be returned. On suspicion of libel or sedition, charges had to be based on the penal code, through the law of sedition. In practice, control could be carried out only after publication and circulation of material.
Although newspapers were not the objects of censorship before publication, films were censored. In the late 1920s the administration began to be concerned with Africans as a potential audience for films. On the initiative of the East African Governors’ Conference in 1926, a Committee on Censorship was set up in 1927, with the chief native commissioner, G. V. Maxwell, as chairman. The other members represented various European interests, whereas the committee had no non-European member. Its brief was to “consider the whole question of censorship.”Footnote 44 It held six meetings and heard evidence from nine witnesses. As a basis of its work the committee considered the rules and practices surrounding film showing and censorship in Uganda and Tanganyika Territory, and also more widely in West and South Africa and the empire generally.
Similar committees were set up in other parts of the empire. The Indian committee included two eminent Indians, representatives of what were seen as the dominant Indian Hindu and Muslim communities.Footnote 45 When it came to censorship the concerns of the two committees were the same. Both took British racial and cultural superiority for granted and in Kenya the committee recommended that, like in South Africa, censorship should be differentiated according to racial categories. “The problem in Kenya is complicated by factors common to all countries where the inhabitants consist of members of races in different stages of development.”Footnote 46 Tanganyika initiated a process towards film censorship around 1927, and in 1930 a film licensing and censorship board was set up. The members of the board were all European, but included non-official members, i.e., representatives of civil society.Footnote 47 Towards the end of the 1930s an African member was included.
Censorship of books and pamphlets in the colonies continued after the war. The last words on which publications to proscribe were ultimately left to the local government, as is made clear from a question in the British parliament in 1955, concerning the list of books and journals prohibited in North Rhodesia. Lennox-Boyd, Undersecretary of State to the Colonies, was asked “whether there is any appeal against this arbitrary censorship which exists in the Colonial Territories in Africa,” and responded that he had examined the list and was “satisfied that it is a matter entirely within the discretion of the governor who, knowing all the local circumstances, is in the best position to decide which publications to prohibit.”Footnote 48 From 1950 onwards, in Kenya, the government's hesitant censorship became self-assured and led to a drastic narrowing of the public sphere, the dilution of Indian anti-colonial resistance, and the suppression of African opposition. In 1952 the Printing Presses (Temporary Provision) Ordinance was in place. It made it a criminal offence to use an unlicensed printing press. It meant that a printer could be refused license by the registrar of printing presses if he “thought the press would be used for illegal publications or for printing documents ‘prejudicial to or incompatible with peace and good order.’” The ordinance remained in force to 1960.Footnote 49 A few weeks before the 1952 declaration of a state of emergency, E. R. Davies, the Kenya information officer, asked the director of information at the Colonial Office, C. Y. Carstairs, what kind of legislation could be introduced to “control our local press.” He suggested that it might be useful to look at what steps “in this matter of the yellow vernacular press” had been taken in West Africa to achieve that goal.Footnote 50 With emergency measures further steps had become unnecessary.
As shown by Brennan, Indian papers in Tanganyika managed to come out fairly regularly, but their survival was precarious as they were not supported by solid networks, and were vulnerable to manipulation of registration fees.Footnote 51 Restrictive licensing of publications was one way of preventing knowledge from reaching certain publics. Hunter notes that in Tanganyika, “the requirement to pay a hefty bond for any newspaper published more than every fourteen days successfully inhibited an independent African press until Kwetu appeared in 1937.” She demonstrates, supporting the argument of Englund on the sensitivity of the government-supported press to African preoccupations, that the Tanganyika government paper Mambo Leo increasingly came to be “understood by readers as means by which Africans could engage directly with the state.”Footnote 52 The editor explicitly denied that he carried out censorship, which of course did not mean that the paper was free to move outside the approved discursive order. In the case of the Tanganyika Herald, one of the two important Indian papers, the editor and proprietor were fined for publishing the paper without paying the registration fee, a last step before the paper closed in 1950.Footnote 53 Brennan points out that a significant number of issues out of the paper's two-thousand-copy circulation went to colonial officials, who now lost a chance of reading over the shoulders of the Indian community.
In Kenya, attempts at control and regulation met with different forms of resistance and counterstrategies. The 1930s saw a political crisis to do with debates in Britain and locally over the practice of female circumcision, seen as harmful and barbaric, but at the same time an integrated initiation practice among several African communities. According to Furedi, “In the Kikuyu society one of the first significant mass reactions to European domination took the form of a campaign against missionary interference in female circumcision.”Footnote 54 The crisis was compounded by protests from African squatters on the white-owned farms in the White Highlands over settler-inspired regulations on the amount of livestock they were allowed. African opposition matured, the Kikuyu community organised in the Kikuyu Central Association, a forerunner of the later nationalist organisation Kenya African Union (KAU). In the aftermath of this organised resistance, authorities took a new interest in the press. In 1935, the Indian publicist Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi, who came to play a central role in anti-colonial opposition as an editor of the Colonial Times, started a Swahili weekly newspaper, Habari za Dunia (Worldly Affairs), which continued intermittently throughout the 1940s.Footnote 55 In a letter to the colonial secretary, a provincial commissioner advises against a suggestion from the commissioner of police to take steps against the newspaper Muthithu, under the leadership of James Beauttah, who is known to have connections to India. Its writings on the political situation in Abyssinia are “bitter and anti-European,” its reports on the land situation in Kenya are “not only anti-government, but also misrepresents the whole situation.” The letter suggests starting up a newspaper in two vernaculars, Luo and Kikuyu, “under government auspices” to turn particularly the large Kikuyu community away from Muthithu, “which misrepresents or distorts the facts.”Footnote 56 At the time, Beauttah was a representative at a local native council, he fought to recover African land that had been appropriated by the British. He became vice president of KAU in the 1940s, was detained in 1952, and spent six years in detention.Footnote 57 A proposal in 1939 by the government's expert and informant on Kikuyu affairs, L. S. B. Leakey, along the lines suggested came to nothing.Footnote 58
In the 1940s and ’50s, the Asian press manoeuvred between radical and reformist newspaper owners and editors, and between co-optation and charges of sedition by the authorities. The first Indian newspaper to be prosecuted by the government on charges of libel was the radical daily the East African Chronicle, edited by A. M. Desai, a supporter of the African opposition leader, Harry Thuku.Footnote 59 It was closed down in 1923 as the consequence of a libel suit. A file of press cuttings from the Daily Chronicle in 1947, circulated to the municipal African affairs officer and the member of law and order, has material on the court case against Vidyarthi, on the “Municipal Beer Boycott,” native chiefs, and a shooting on strikers in Fort Hall.Footnote 60 In 1945 the masthead of the prominent Asian newspaper the Colonial Times carried the motto, “Free, Frank, Fearless”; in 1949 the motto was supplemented with, “A Free Press Is the Sentinel of People's Rights.” What from one point of view may seem like government vacillation and weakness in the face of the sophistication and self-assured strategies of the English- and Gujarati-language Indian press of the 1950s may also be understood as the authorities’ careful management of the population group that was regarded as a buffer between Africans and Europeans. The outcome of the ongoing dialogue was that the publication of the two Indian newspapers continued right through the 1950s, after the African press had been silenced.
The Asian section of Intelligence and Security Summaries for 1947–49 pays frequent attention to the Indian press. The summary for February 1947 notes that the editor and publisher of the Daily Chronicle had been charged with bringing false information and publishing a news item likely to “disturb the public peace” in the report on an arrest at the general strike in Mombasa. Both were convicted.Footnote 61 In May the summary reports that the other important Asian paper, the Colonial Times, had started a collection of money for a fund to support a court case against the government's attempt to close down a newspaper, Habari. The summary furthermore notes that the Daily Chronicle has appointed a new editor, D. K. Sharda, “a locally educated and politically minded Indian.” In June, protests from the Natal Indian Congress are cited over the conviction of sedition of the editor of the Colonial Times, G. L. Vidyarthi.Footnote 62 Beauttah's name crops up again in connection with his relations with the newly appointed Indian high commissioner A. B. Pant. In October, the summary reports that the Indian newspaper Blitz, which is “a classic example of the gutter press, . . . hurls streams of scurrilous abuse impartially at the British, South African and Indian Governments.” It notes that the Daily Chronicle describes Blitz as “a fearless champion of oppressed and exploited peoples everywhere.” The banning of the paper and the arrest of Vidyarthi resulted in demonstrations in Nairobi and international appeals of support for his release. In the same month, the influential trade unionist Makhan Singh was arrested as an illegal immigrant. The report notes that his arrest met with little protest.Footnote 63 Singh was later detained in Maralal, Northern Kenya, where he stayed for nine years.
Intelligence on the African press was equally substantial. Among the African newspapers, the authorities were particularly observant of the writings in Mumenyereri, Inooro, Muthamaki, Uhuru mwa Mwafrika, and Sauti wa Africa in the postwar period. The department of intelligence and security provided translations of contents suspected to be seditious for the Nairobi Secretariat and the Colonial Office in London to read. In cases where there might be grounds for charges of sedition, the material was sent on to the attorney general in order that he might decide whether to act. In 1948, Rees-Williams, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, visited Kenya. The Swahili paper Sauti Ya Mwafrika brought a direct appeal from Jomo Kenyatta, at this time president of KAU, to the colonial government, asking Rees-Williams to take note of a Memorandum, prepared by KAU. One section deals with freedom of the press: “At present we do not have Freedom of Assembly or of Press. . . . We know that African Presses are quite innocent, and yet they are often blamed to be seditious . . . when the truth is published.”Footnote 64 One batch of excerpts from Muthamaki, August 1952, highlights the African call for freedom, citing speeches by Jomo Kenyatta: “Show the light and people will see the way. I say, and we say, we want freedom. . . . Our freedom is very near, and we will get it through uniting ourselves as one irrespective of tribe, and by believing that all Africans are equal. We will get it in the same way as our brothers in the Gold Coast get it.”Footnote 65 This eloquent call came two months before attempts at conciliation and coexistence came to an abrupt halt in October 1952.
In the seven years between the end of the war and the emergency closure of the press, official watchers read every issue of the Kikuyu newspaper Mumenyereri (the Watchman).Footnote 66 Land issues and the role of chiefs were recurrent themes, as can be seen from a selection of article headlines: “Chief's Wives Do Not Dig Terraces” (29.9.1947); “Are the Terraces Made in Europe?” stating, “We are angry because of the death of many of our old men and old women because of the terraces,” and “Many young wives have become prostitutes because of terraces.” In the latter case a covering letter from the Director of Intelligence and Security commented that the article was considered to be “most objectionable” (18. 10.1947). “Shooting at Fort Hall,” reported on protests against the local chief, Ignatio, and the response by the District Commissioner, reported to have said that people “should control their birth rate,” and if the number of Kikuyu should continue to increase, “there would be blood shed.” (28.9.47). Another article followed up, “Fort Hall Chiefs Troubling School Boys Because of Poll Tax,” asking, “Now you, Chiefs, do European School children pay school tax?” (21.10.1947). Another important theme was morality and customs of the Kikuyu: “The Governor's Speech Was Instructive Advice and Not Unreasonable Blame” supporting the need to work hard (10.12.1947). “Failure of African Business” advised readers that if they did not work hard, we “shall remain in slavery for ever.” (26.6.1948).Footnote 67 A group of particularly offensive article were collected in a file titled “Prosecution of Seditious Publications” for the notice of the attorney general: “West Africans who are about to be given freedom, are well advanced, and their Trade Unions are up-to-date” (30.9.1950). “The Europeans Still Plan to Oppress Africans,” and “The Africans are striving to be like other nations, why should they be treated like wild beasts”? (13.10. 1950). “Kenya Laws are Retarding Africans’ Defence,” accused the government of attempting to ban the newspaper (2 August 1950). On 18 September 1949, the paper reported the words of a KAU delegation from a meeting with the Indian high commissioner: “Indians have sucked their blood greatly. Now we are poor. If they want proper cooperation, they must stop sharp practice and trade and teach us the good way of progress.”Footnote 68 Finally, in July 1950, Mumenyereri asked, “what kind of politics Africans are allowed to practice in this country,” a question right at the heart of the troubled relationship between the government and the African opposition.Footnote 69
Concluding Remarks
Negotiation surrounding freedom of the press in Kenya shows a deep contradiction of British colonial policy: upholding the principle of freedom of speech also for those colonised in a situation characterised by subjugation by force and pervasive lack of rights. Spokespersons of the new African and Asian publics fighting for freedom of the press constantly reminded the colonial authorities of the principles justifying the British right to govern. The paradox of censorship was that it constantly called attention to what it sought to eliminate—or, as Holquist has it: censorship is “at heart a fatal division: the prohibition that separates what is banned from what is permitted also fuses them.”Footnote 70 In this light, I want to return to the questions asked in the introduction: How do phases of political and social change influence the production, broadcasting, and suppression of newspapers, and affect the institutions and groupings that produce and receive texts? What are the dynamics of textual interfaces between the European print frameworks and those of the emerging non-European publics? And, finally, what does the extreme attentiveness of the changing and elaborate intelligence and information institutions tell us about the significance of Indian and African print culture?
In his reflections on the particularities of the African colonial state, Crawford Young concluded that the colonisers won the “struggle over meaning:” “The colonial state was unsparing in its efforts—through Christian missions, the educational systems and language policies—to monopolise the production of meaning and thus the construction of culture.” The outcome of the battle over meaning was near-complete European hegemony. He singled out Christianity as the one area in which the “reassertion of the indigenous” did occur, resulting in “syncretisation.”Footnote 71 What I have tried to show in the article is that with the opening up of political and discursive space and acceleration of anti-colonial resistance, African and Indian actors and publicists challenged European political hegemony in a number of ways. The ebb and flow of negotiations concerning control and censorship meant that not only the non-European press, but also some government-sponsored publications gave voice to what Fred Cooper has called “claim-making” by Africans—issues of rights and citizenship.Footnote 72 Publics were convened by the state, by missions, by political organisations; their boundaries were fluid, particularly in Nairobi and smaller urban centres. Polemics, announcements, propaganda, and reports on local and international news were of interest to all communities and created interfaces between European and non-European textual universes. In crisis situations, like the buildup to Mau Mau, the clampdown on media showed that the regime did not consider its control of the public sphere tight enough. In other periods the dynamism and dense interrelations and echo spaces created between European mainstream print media and African and Indian newspapers expressed the mutual dependency between colonisers and colonised. In the public sphere, as in religious life, Africans and Indians welcomed European ideas and technologies, and appropriated mainstream discourses while keeping up “indigenous” forms of expression and language use formed by political struggle.
My argument is in line with the present awareness of the multifaceted experience of colonialism on the side of colonisers and colonised—moving away from a mechanical suppression-resistance framework towards one of interaction. Englund has written about anti anti-nationalist publications in Zambia. Osborne claims that a magazine like Jambo, brought out as propaganda during the war, did have positive sides in spite of heavy stereotyping.Footnote 73 In spite of dramatic power asymmetries between colonisers and colonised, the already existing information order enabled and sustained both the European and non-European press in colonial Kenya, for a period, to the benefit of all.
In support of my argument about censorship as negotiation, I have looked for engagement in the interfaces between different textual universes. I have given some examples in internal negotiations between officials, of face-to-face conversations between editors and officials, and debates between officials and publicists. The article has shown that the fluctuations of openness and restrictions constituted a struggle over ownership and control of the public sphere. Not only does censorship “fuse” what is banned with what is permitted—it also activates what one might call the “return of the repressed.” When, after a period of relative openness in the six years after the war, the political and discursive space narrowed, when newspapers were closed down and politicians and trade unionists were detained, politics moved away from seeking understanding and a common ground, and a period of fear and mistrust took over. By 1952 European discursive hegemony had become non-negotiable, but that meant that political claims moved underground, took new forms, and contributed to the intransigence of the Mau Mau uprising.
