Robert Keable, who I write about in my book Utterly Immoral, was not known as a campaigning or political writer. However, he did write a couple of essays very critical of the government of his day and I have no doubt if he had lived longer, he would have spent more time campaigning on issues he felt strongly about.

His most political essay Slave, Serf, Citizen – And The Way Back was published in Blackfriars magazine in December 1920 soon after Keable had given up the priesthood. The essay is an attack on the British government for encouraging the use of forced labour across colonial Africa in general and the East Africa Protectorate (now part of Kenya), in particular.  

Forced labour in Kenya

During the First World War the area now called Kenya escaped the worst of the fighting and the economy thrived mainly because emergency legislation gave the white colonialist farmers control over most of the black-owned land. After the war for various reasons (including inadequate transport and an influx of WW1 veteran who were given land to farm) there was a labour supply shortage. Governor Northey’s solution was to force local men to work. In his labour circular of 1919, he stated: ‘All government officials in charge of native areas must exercise every possible lawful influence to induce able-bodied male natives to go into the labour field.’

The debate that followed Northey’s circular led, the following year, to Lord Milner, the Secretary of State for the colonies writing his Despatch to the Governor of the East Africa Protectorate relating to Native Labour[i]. Keable’s article was a response to this.

In the despatch Lord Milner clarified his government’s intentions. He reiterated Northey’s suggestion that the protectorate government should use all lawful and reasonable means to ‘encourage the supply of labour’; although he insisted forced or compulsory labour must not be organised by the protectorate government for private employers. He did however make clear that the protectorate government should be allowed to insist on compulsory paid labour for government work by local people. He gave as an example work constructing or maintaining the roads and the railway. He ruled the order was:

subject to the express proviso that no native shall be required to perform such work for more than sixty days in one year, and that any native who is fully employed in any other occupation or has been employed during the preceding twelve months for a period of three months shall be exempted from such labour.

Lord Milner also defended ‘the encouragement of native women and children to take up employment’. He stated that women and children who worked must be allowed to return home each night (unless their husband is employed on a plantation where they are working), and insisted that the work, which was usually coffee picking, allowed them to ‘earn good wages by this light work’.

Keable’s response

In his article Slave, Serf, Citizen Keable was clear that these and other measures are a form of slavery. He pointed out:

Before the Reformation, the State slowly abolished slavery. Since the Reformation, despite occasional spasmodic efforts on the part of individuals, the State has slowly tended to re-establish it in some form or another.

Keable’s main complaint was that Lord Milner’s new legislation meant that anyone who did not work for a white settler was considered unemployed. Colonialists were unaware or chose to ignore the fact that many Africans lived a very different economic life to them, working on the land or looking after their animals, exchanging goods and services instead of using money.

Keable gave as an example a European who had lived in Basutoland for twenty years and who bemoaned how lazy African men were, claiming women did all the work in the local village. Only after he had visited the village did he realise that men looked after the cattle and did all the milking and other farm jobs.

So, Keable pointed out, most Africans in Kenya were forced to work for the government often travelling many miles, unpaid, to reach the camp where they were ordered to work. Once in the camp their daily pay was low. This meant that for up to three months a year there was no one to work on the small holdings. If, as often happened, this time coincided with the harvest, then families would suffer. As it was family life was fractured when husbands and wives were apart for so long each year, and women and children ‘encouraged to work’.

Rhodesia

Also, in the same article Keable complained about the treatment of Africans living in Zimbabwe - then called Rhodesia. He detailed what had happened:

First, deliberate war was forced in the Matebele in 1893 by Dr Starr Jameson, who promised to each of the six hundred filibusters who rode against the natives, 6000 acres of native land conditionally redeemable at £9,000. Secondly, in 1896, the Mashona, oppressed and subject to Forced labour, heard of the collapse of the Jameson raid and rose against their oppressors. As a result both tribes lost their land, and 800,000 natives were allowed to live in their own country (1) on those lands now taken by whites, by paying £1 per head to the owner and £1 to the Chartered Company; (2) on those lands which nobody had taken and nobody wanted, by paying £2 to the Company; and (3) on the lands set aside for Reserves, by paying £1 head tax.

After explaining lands covered in (1) and (2) were called Unalienated Land and covered 70,000,000 acres he continued:

In 1914 the expropriation of the whole of this Unalienated land was effected by means of a deliberate plot… with the result that no single native of the Mashona, Matelele, and kindred tribes was to own, either personally or through membership of his tribe, a foot of land, a spring of water, a sacred graveyard, a patch of garden or even the plot on which his hut was built.

Keable’s concern was that what had happened in Rhodesia could happen in Basutoland and East Africa.

The end of Forced Labour under British rule

Keable’s article was just one of many calling for the end of forced labour in Africa. It took another ten years before the International Labour Organisation (ILO) introduced the Forced Labour Convention banning the practice. However, although the UK ratified the ILO’s proposal, they still continued to use the exemptions which allowed forced labour to continue in Kenya up until the decolonisation of the country.

[i]A copy of the despatch can be found in The Official Gazette of the Colony of Kenya and the East Africa Protectorate September 1^st 1920.  https://gazettes.africa/archive/ke/1920/ke-government-gazette-dated-1920-09-01-no-729.pdf