Native Reserves as Labour Coercion in Colonial Kenya

Jonathan Jenner, University of Manitoba
Peter Gitau, Max Planck Institute
Robbie Johannson, University of Manitoba

This paper estimates how many Kenyans were pushed into the wage labour force by the Native Reserve system in colonial Kenya from 1920 to 1960. By decreasing African land access, Native Reserves pushed people to the labour force who would have otherwise engaged in independent production. Using newly created GIS maps of Kenya’s Native Reserves, combined with the FAO’s Global Agro-Ecological Zoning and maps from the Kenyan Agricultural Service, along with several other sources of data, we estimate colonial labour coercion by comparing the consumption needs of the population of Kenya’s Native Reserves to the production potential of those Native Reserves from agriculture and livestock production. This allows us to estimate coercive labour pressure as the difference between each Reserve’s consumption needs to its productive capacity. Using data on agricultural wages, we can see how many labour-years of paid employment would be required from each Reserve to make up this consumption shortfall. We make our assumptions as conservative as possible, and use various archival evidence to calibrate our estimates. We compare our findings a counterfactual scenario without the Native Reserve system, comparing Kenya’s overall carrying capacity to its population if the Native Reserve system were not it place. We find support for the idea that the Native Reserve system limited the ability of an independent peasantry to reproduce itself, and thus that the system functioned as a source of labour coercion. More, this coercion grew over time, as population grew in the Reserves with limited possibilities for expansion. We conclude with some thoughts about how our estimates likely underestimate the extent of the coercion. This estimation helps scholarship understand the extent and dynamics of land restriction as labour coercion in the colonial era, and how this structured the colonial labour market and post-independence economic forms.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 167. Labor Coercion and Class Formation in Global and Colonial Contexts