Africans and Agricultural Production in Colonial Kenya: The Myth of the War as a Watershed

The Second World War obviously had a profound impact upon the colony, but the political structure of the colonial state in Kenya, the specific balance of power between emerging African capitalism, the settler community and metropolitan authority, and the battles they fought in the 1930s, meant that the consequences of the war were more subtle than is at first apparent. Doubtless, in other parts of Africa the war had equally contradictory effects. It stimulated new policies which marked an important transition in British attitudes to Africa, but it also delayed the implementation of plans which had been devised during the Depression. In Kenya the continuity between the 1930s and the post-war decade was, perhaps, peculiarly strong. The authors argue, therefore, that the perception of the war as a watershed must be examined against the background of the evolution of government thinking in the 1930s. This article examines the economic effects of the Second World War on African peasant producers in Kenya, and places the war years within the context of the colony’s economic difficulties during the Depression. – Notes, sum.