Managing the Reserve Army in Colonial Kenya: Unemployment, Incarceration, and Settler Profitability in the Great Depression

Jonathan Jenner, University of Manitoba

The sudden increase and persistence of unemployed, landless workers in Kenya during the Great Depression represented both opportunity and threat to the colony of Kenya and its settler capitalists. Opportunity, because the unemployed agricultural workers put downward pressure on wages and bolstered the profitability of settlers who were themselves hurt by the Depression. And threat, because the presence of unemployed workers in the White Highlands heightened fears of petty crime, the potential for labor organizing, and the delegitimization of the idea of ‘industrious uplift’ which served to justify the colonial project. Given this, the colonial regime called upon the disciplinary apparatus of the state, carefully calibrated, to neutralize the threat of the unemployed while preserving their labor market effects. This paper tells that story by weaving together archival sources which speak to the understandings, actions, and effects of colonial intervention. The legal and carceral system spatially controlled unemployment, moving it from the White Highlands to the Native Reserves to neutralize the threats to settler society, while also strengthening the gravitational pull of the labor force on the unemployed and preserving downward pressure on wages that the unemployed allowed in the labor market by strengthening labor recruiting, prioritizing carceral throughput, and calibrating the fallback position of Africans. In the wake of the Depression, these processes propped up the viability of settler capitalism in Kenya by allowing settlers to take a bigger share of growing output. They also further immiserated Kenyans while pulling them further into the state’s augmented role managing institutions of labor force coercion and discipline. Assessing this kind of countercyclical state intervention which buoyed capitalism by squeezing workers gives a different view of the Keynesian turn and frames a discussion of how Depression-era state intervention looked from the colonial periphery.

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 Presented in Session 13. Labor Movements and Configurations of Racial Capitalism: Theorizing Race, Class, Gender in historical change