This much-needed volume retrieves the challenging figure of Norman Leys from the ‘condescension of history’, traces his criticisms of Empire, outlines his contribution to the anti-colonial movement and assesses his influence (i–ii) before concluding with reproduction of 45-pages of his own writing, which are well worth the reading.
Colin Leys, the author, writes that the lesson taught in Norman Leys’ most important book, Kenya, first published in 1924, needs to be learnt again. Just as the British state consistently sided with the settlers in Kenya, now along with the rest of ‘the West’, it is lending its unequivocal support to the Israeli settlers in Palestine and punishing those who sympathise with the Palestinians they are oppressing. This calls for a return to the concept of settler colonialism to understand the brutal exploitation it justifies. Yet there is also a personal element in Leys’ writing of this book.
Norman Leys was Colin’s half-uncle, and the latter’s reading of Kenya as an undergraduate had a lot to do with his spending many years writing on Africa, three of which were spent in Kenya early in his career. He does not dwell on this family connection, although he provides a photo of himself as a babe in Norman’s arms (132)! However, it is difficult to think Kenya was not influential in leading him to offer his own analysis of settler colonialism and its outcomes in Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism in Kenya. Published to acclaim in 1975, this led to extensive debate on the post-colonial state. To that extent, although no such claim is made, this should be considered part of Norman Leys’ intellectual legacy, of which the author provides a sympathetic, albeit quite hard-hitting, assessment in the penultimate chapter of this text.
Leys stresses that this is not a full biography of his half-uncle, not least because the latter destroyed all his own papers. Nonetheless, with the aid of copies of numerous letters he wrote to prominent people now held in various archives, along with accounts by historians of Norman Leys’ impact on affairs in his lifetime, Colin Leys provides a rounded summary of his personal life. This provides an account of his difficult childhood (his mother died when he was young, leading to his being shuttled between father, grandfather and assorted uncles and aunts, and between England, Massachusetts and Scotland), after which he graduated from the University of Glasgow as a doctor and in public health from the University of Liverpool. Then, in 1901, he took his first job as a medical officer for the African Lakes Corporation in the British concession in Chinde in then Portuguese East Africa. It was from here that he began to formulate the critique of colonialism that became his life’s work (14).
Life inside the concession was claustrophobic and racist, and he was shocked by the cruelty of Portuguese rule before, so after marrying a nurse he had met in Glasgow, he secured employment as a government medical officer in Nyasaland in 1904. Although relations between the colonial administration and African population were much better here, he was nonetheless disturbed by manifest abuses of colonial power. This forged his resolve to speak out about these openly. However, before he did so, he was moved in 1905 to Mombasa in British East Africa (today’s Kenya), prior to his being transferred again to Nakuru, in the heartland of settler country in 1908.
His experiences in Nakuru included his having to take part in a ‘punitive expedition’ against the Kisii (now Gusii) for having resisted paying hut tax, but it was from here that he made efforts to stop a plan to move the Masaai out of their remaining land to make way for further settler occupation. These eventually led to his being demoted and transferred out of Kenya (back to Nyasaland) after further spells of service in Mombasa and critically, Fort Hall, in the Kikuyu heartland. A highly critical memorandum he had penned about the dismal sanitation arrangements for Africans in Mombasa had already marked him out as a troublemaker. However, it was his actions as a whistleblower, sending letters to sympathetic MPs about the Masaai affair, which seriously upset the authorities. Such was the adverse publicity that Leys stirred up that it culminated in the resignation of the Governor for having concealed from the Colonial Office that he had promised land to settlers. Unsurprisingly, back in Nairobi, Leys’ actions were regarded as outrageously insubordinate, so in 1912, he was dispatched back to Karonga, where in 1915, he witnessed the revolt led by John Chilembwe against the abusive treatment of African plantation workers. After its brutal suppression, Leys wrote an analytical account of its causes which, including Kenya, was later borrowed in unattributed form by founding texts of Pan-Africanism.
Leys saw the rising as a predictable response by Africans to foreign rule. Consequently, when back in Britain in 1917 on sick leave, he received reports about brewing African discontent in Kenya and the administration’s resultant plans to strengthen the King’s African Rifles, his response was to write a scathing analysis of the situation in the form of a letter to the Secretary of State. He sent this to his close friend Gilbert Murray, the professor of Greek at Oxford, who through his wife had strong Liberal connections, asking him to forward it to the Colonial Office. Although it seems not to have reached the Colonial Office at the time, it was read in due course and led the authorities to find convenient grounds to retire him on pension. Thence followed the second half of his life: working as a doctor serving principally poor patients in Brailsford, a village near Derby, before in 1936, he retired for good and moved to Yalding in Kent.
Kenya was published by the Hogarth Press, established by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and enjoyed an unexpected success, so much so that after its initial print run was soon sold out. Further editions followed in 1925 and 1926. Leys’ aim was to expose ‘the facts’ of colonialism to members of the Labour Party’s advisory committee on Imperial Questions, to officials in London and Africa, to MPs, and to the press. Prior to its publication, Kenya was little known, and to the extent that it was known, it was as the home of doughty British settlers who were developing its potential. In contrast, Kenya achieved the author’s fundamental aim of establishing that what was happening in Kenya Colony was a new form of slavery. It described how the alienation of half of the territory’s productive land to Europeans was matched by the corralling of Africans in ‘reserves’, their coerced employment as cheap labour on white farms, and denying them the right to produce high-value crops, which was reserved for Europeans. Yet despite citing the many brutal punishments which Europeans inflicted on Africans, Leys’ analysis stressed that it was not the settlers who were evil, but the system itself.
Colin Leys regards the publication of Kenya as having played a critical role in blocking the settlers’ dream of persuading the Colonial Office to grant them ‘responsible government’, and as leading to the Devonshire Declaration of that year which announced that henceforth African interests in Kenya would become ‘paramount’. Although, as he acknowledges (p.110), the settlers’ ambitions to secure self-rule were always unrealistic (there were too few settlers relative to Africans for London to think of granting it), this was not always appreciated at the time, and successive Colonial Secretaries and colonial governors continued to pander to settler interests. This prompted Leys to write another book, The Colour Bar in East Africa, again through Hogarth Press, in 1941, as a sort of primer for (as he hoped) a future Labour Colonial Secretary, although when this came about in the form of Arthur Creech Jones under the Attlee government, the British economy was in such a parlous state that no disruption of the existing system of production in Kenya could be contemplated. On the contrary, support for settler production intensified, adding to the pressures on the African reserves, which in the early 1950s culminated in African rebellion in the form of Mau Mau.
Colin Leys’ account is particularly fascinating for its detailing of the extensive contacts which Norman Leys developed with the anti-colonial lobby. Numerous key figures of the inter-war period enter the text, individuals such as J.H. Oldham, the influential Secretary of the Conference of Church Missionary Societies, as well as other luminaries, such as Leonard Barnes, Margaret Ballinger, and particularly, Winfred Holtby, with whom he formed a close connection before her tragically early death. But Leys was no socialite; he was awkward in company, and not a few of them fell foul of his condemnation of ‘phariseeism’, the failure to match principles with action.
Colin Leys highlights Norman Leys’ foresight that, backed up by metropolitan support, settler colonialism would lead, inexorably, to African revolt and violence, which he interpreted as the slave’s means of affirming his humanity (125). Yet while giving him great credit for this, as also for his highly observant analysis of the economic dimensions of colonialism, he laments Norman Leys’ empiricism and the total lack of reference anywhere in his books to world history or theories of imperialism, if not of Marx, then at least that of his contemporaries, such as J.A. Hobson. As such, his work suffered from its lack of social theory and was guided by his own version of socialism, which was ethically Christian in inspiration (27).
All in all, Norman Leys emerges not just as an ‘awkward customer’, one of the labels Colin Leys ascribes to him, but as a highly principled, single-minded, curmudgeon. Nonetheless, he insists that he is one of whom we should take note, for when we review Ley’s analysis of the savagery of the repression of revolt in Kenya, we cannot help seeing the brutality of its repetition in Palestine today. Governments have now raised the costs of criticism of their foreign policy, but Norman Leys ‘would surely not have seen today’s more intolerant situation as a reason for staying silent about racism and injustice in Gaza or anywhere else’ (123). That’s not a bad tribute from one generation to another, not bad at all.
