Journal of Social History Advance Access published April 3, 2012

BRETT L. SHADLE
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Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

Colonial Kenya was, by anyone's standards, suffused with violence and cruelty. Africans suffered conquest, the cane, and counterinsurgency. Indians endured their share of bloodied noses at the hands of whites. While the European immigrant community gave better than they receivedwithout admitting cruelty no matter the barbarity of their actionsthey too believed themselves living amidst unconscionable cruelty. Mother nature, in her heartless way, oversaw a cruel realm. Leopards seemed to have a particular taste for domestic dogs, often snatching them from front porches or even leaping through open windows for their innocent prey. Settler attempts to raise fowl often failed due to pitiless hawks or other predators. Whites were most repulsed by siafu or army ants. Siafu appeared, seemingly from nowhere, marching in a line a foot wide and yards long, consuming any living thing in their path. Europeans recounted gruesome scenes of animals and even human infants killed and bodies picked clean by marauding siafu. Nothing could be done to civilize nature. Dogs could be kept out of harm's way, and ashes could be spread at the perimeter of a house to divert siafu, but leopards could not change their spots, nor ants their ravenous marches. Other parts of the African scene were potentially more amenable to change. Most whites sincerely felt a responsibility to civilize Africans. But slowly. It had taken Britons two thousand years since the Roman invasions to reach the pinnacle of civilization. Under white tutelage Africans would advance more quickly, although it would still be a centuries-long process. Moreover, too much change too quickly was ineffective, even dangerous. Africans would lose their old morality and social structure without truly imbibing modernity. They would slide rapidly into anomie, amorality, and a savagery as yet unseen even in Africa.1
Author's note: Portions of this paper were originally presented at the African Studies Association Conference, 2008; my thanks to Tom Spear and members of the audience for their comments. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for JSH and to members of the Concerned Kenyan Writers who offered valuable feedback. Address correspondence to Brett L. Shadle, Department of History, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0117. Journal of Social History (2012), pp. 120 doi:10.1093/jsh/shr152 The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Journal of Social History

2012

Some whites insisted that African customsexcision, women being bent nearly in half by loads of firewood, or the desertion of the sick and elderly in the woods to die by exposurecould be understood as nothing but extreme cruelty. But most Kenyan whites brushed aside such protests as the misguided squawking of those who did not understand the intricacies of African cultures, the ways in which each custom was necessary for the preservation of tribal integrity. Most could ignore female circumcision or forced marriage of girls as perhaps distasteful but logical enough customs for peoples just emerging from barbarity. Under the civilizing influence of European rule, Africans eventually would see the errors of their ways. In the meantime, such cultural oddities as circumcision truly hurt no one; even women did not protest their oppression. Yet whites could not explain away all acts of violence by Africans. According to whitesmissionaries, settlers, and colonial officials alike Africans acted with wanton cruelty to dumb beasts. Africans who regularly inflicted unnecessary suffering on animals felt no empathy for their victims. In contrast, Europeans, modern bourgeois individuals, abhorred suffering. Or rather, they abhorred unnecessary suffering. Suffering that had a positive result was not cruelty. Brutalization of animals was cruel: it served no logical purpose.2 Removing a young woman's clitoris held the tribe together; bludgeoning a harmless piglet to death contributed nothing to the world. Should the African woman wish not to be circumcised she could speak out. Dumb beasts could only suffer in silence. They could not defend themselves nor make their wishes known. Cruelty to animals was not an unfortunate custom at which one could cluck one's tongue and move on. Unlike any other aspect of African culturesave those, like the provision of labor, that directly affected whitescruelty to animals demanded white intervention. Few if any whites argued against the conventional wisdom that African treatment of animals was cruel and had to be altered. None broke ranks or spoke out against the time and money spent to alleviate the suffering of dumb beasts. How to carry out this part of the civilizing process was less clear. Somehow, Africans had to be taught empathy for animals. This was an unusual position for Kenya whites to adopt. To the best of my knowledge, missionaries never tried to make patriarchs imagine how female circumcision might feel to their daughters, but rather used the discourses of civilization, Christianity, and health.3 Certainly Africans were never asked to put themselves in the place of an exasperated white employer, to imagine how it would feel to never have plentiful, hardworking laborers. Black thieves were not asked to empathize with whites whose houses they burgled: they instead would be taught more directly via the rod or the prison walls not to repeat their actions. In fact, Africans were actively discouraged from imagining themselves as white. Only via animals did whites try to inculcate empathy in African minds. Africans ought not to presume to feel what whites felt, but must learn to feel what animals felt. In the early years, Europeans believed Africans' humanity to be so stunted that only crude measures could be effective. The whip was the preferred method of preventing Africans from abusing animals. Perhaps making the African physically suffer as his animal victim had suffered would create some primitive equation between human and animal in the African's mind. Whites acted with more subtlety later on. As time passed, more whites appeared to be convinced that Africans had sufficient intellectual and

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Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

emotional maturity to be amenable to words and images, rather than simply the lash. By the 1930s, whites acting under the aegis of the East African Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had added education to their strategies of inculcating among Africans the need for kindness. Anthropomorphic dogs and birds described their suffering in literature directed to Africans.4 Nonetheless, the commitment to rewarding cruelty with violence reared its head in times of crisis. When Mau Mau threatened the continuity of white rule, settlers quickly reverted to the opinion that only violence could prevent cruelty. In the context of colonial Kenya, I suggest, discourses surrounding cruelty to animals helped structure how whites related to Africans. As Halttunen explains for the Anglo-American world, In the context of the bourgeois civilizing process, compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain became identified as distinctively civilized emotions, while cruelty was labeled as savage or barbarous.5 African cruelty to animals became one of the few areas in which whites truly tried to civilize Africans. By and large, whites hoped to retain distance social, emotional, and physicalbetween the races. More than we have hitherto understood, whites felt compelled to bridge that distance to protect dumb beasts. Yet the fact that Africans required civilization on this point provided incontrovertible evidence of African savagery. It justified white violence on African bodies. It reinforced the imagined distance between white and black. Anticruelty Sentiment in Britain Although some of the eighteenth century Scottish philosophers voiced concern over the treatment of animals, it would not be until the next century that more Britons took up anticruelty as a cause. As early as 1809 Lord Erskine introduced into the House of Lords a bill dealing with cruelty to animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824 and given a royal charter in 1840.6 Much like other reform movements of the time, the RSPCA's agenda and ideology were shot through with class bias. The poor and working classes required to be taught sobriety, self-control, and new notions of the law, the body, and punishment; for some reformers, this civilizing project including teaching them new attitudes toward animals. As Harrison puts it, the RSPCA aimed to civilize the lower orders. 7 As the century drew to a close, anticruelty activists had helped propel changes in how many Britons thought about animals. In order to truly change individuals' treatment of animals required teaching them empathyallowing people, or forcing them, to place themselves in the situation of an abused animal. Once a person imagined himself or herself beaten, baited, or lashed, the theory went, then that person became a convert to the anticruelty position. The novels and personal narratives that had been so important in inculcating empathy in nineteenth-century Europeans, and which had played such an important role in humanitarian movements such as abolitionism, helped the anticruelty movement as well. Individuals were encouraged to see animals, and to see the world through animals' eyes.8 Anthropomorphism became more common.9 Most important was Black Beauty, which put the reader into the mind of a cruelly treated horse. Black Beauty became the bible of the RSPCA and similarly minded Britons (and Americans) and quickly went through multiple printings.10 Schoolchildren as well as adults imagined how a horse might

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view the world, how it silently sufferednot only physically, but emotionally at the hands of brutal drivers. This is not to say that Britons did not expect animals to be free of pain altogether. Sometimes lazy horses had to be whipped, and few dogs would have escaped a swat or a kick. Lambs had to give their lives for the British table. Hunting was not only not cruel, but for many was a positive good for science and for proving manliness.11 Violence such as this had a purpose, however, and so long as it did not entail prolonged suffering it could be accepted.12 Anything else would be condemned as cruel. As one reformer put it at the turn of the century, Britons were ready to kill everything, but reluctant to torture anything.13 As compassion toward animals became more and more widely accepted, it also became a marker between civilized and savage. Civilized people empathized with other people and animals. They did not inflict unnecessary suffering on other sentient beings.14 Those who did were outside the pale of civilized society.15 Anticruelty Sentiment and Settlers in Early Colonial Kenya This was the world from which (most) Kenya whites had come.16 They showed a particular attachment to their domestic pets. When Arnold Paice stepped off the boat at Mombasa in 1907, he saw fit to carry with him nothing but a horse and an Irish Setter.17 By 1920 settlers were holding dog shows in Nairobi, and the East African Standard soon began a regular column, Kennel Notes.18 Some devout Christians even brought their dogs to church.19 The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1930 awarded its Silver Medal to Constable E. P. C. Thacker, for his courageous act of shimmying down a rope to rescue a dog from a 125 foot-deep well.20 Canines were not the only animals to receive human attention and affection. One white woman's advice to her sister-settlers to avoid becoming discontented, listless, aimless, filled with shapeless moods was to cultivate gardens and Surround yourself with pets such as dogs and horses, but also wild animals.21 V. M. Carnegie's husband kept geese on the farm, and although half were ganders, they ate tremendously, and pecked his family's legs, he refused to allow any to be killed. He loved them, she wrote, with a blind devotion.22 As in Great Britain, some animals were meant to die for human benefit food, clothing, or sportand humans sometimes had to inflict pain, but not excessive or unnecessary pain.23 Beating or whipping an ox or donkey might be necessary if it were slow or stubborn. Stray dogs crowding the streets of Nairobi were sent to the lethal chambers which was, in the opinion of the East African Standard, a good place for them.24 Any violence beyond that which was strictly necessarythat was cruel.25 The desire to avoid suffering among wild animals was strong. White hunters (and hunting was central to the colonial experience in Kenya) developed a particular moral code that strove to avoid causing unnecessary suffering for their animal victims.26 Baroness Blixen experienced a great feeling of terror reflecting on the fate of a bushbuck which some African children were trying to sell: What, I thought, would become of the fawn in the hands of the captors who had stood with it in the heat of the long day, and had held it up by its joined legs? On pain of dismissal, she sent out her servants in the dead of night to

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Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

find the fawn.27 After losing several head of cattle to a lion, Alyse Simpson's husband set a trap. The trap did its work, but the lion proved to be stronger than expected. It jumped back out of the corral with the trap attached, trailing blood into the bush. Simpson and his Maasai herder tracked the lion but eventually lost the trail: This troubled John for days, Simpson recalled, for he hated cruelty.28 Addressing Cruelty by Africans In late 1910, a few local ladies established the League of Mercy to attend to the care and raising of European children amidst a teeming native population, as well as to address education, care of graves, and cruelty to animals.29 Within two years, the East African Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (EASPCA) was formed under the auspices of the League; it became an independent body in 1914. The Society drew on the elites of the colony: its executive committee included ranking administrators (Hollis, Hobley, MacGregor Ross, Hinde) and leading settlers (Low, Wood), with Lord Delamere and the governor as patrons.30 The EASPCA had little difficulty gaining approval for legislation protecting animals.31 Administrators themselves instigated the passing of new regulations in 1915 on the transport of cattle by sea from Kismayu to other points on the coast.32 The government in 1921 assented to an EASPCA recommendation to outlaw the use of nose-rings and nose-ropes on oxen in certain provinces, while a year later the commissioner of police proposed it be extended to the entire colony.33 The EASPCA employed an investigator to seek out and bring to court perpetrators of cruelty. Police charged some as well, and individuals often brought cases to the attention of officials.34 The Society's success rate in court was quite good. In 1922 it succeeded in 11 of the 12 cases it brought.35 Complaints and court cases involved primarily the (Indian) owners and (African) operators of beast of burdens. Lame animals were forced to work; brakes were improperly maintained, pushing oxen downhill at dangerous speeds; bags were excessive or were improperly loaded on donkeys' back; animals were whipped until they bled.36 The need to eliminate cruelty to animals, and the conclusion that only savages perpetrated such cruelty, was highlighted in a minor scandal in 1916. One Mr. Shillington brought to light the unnecessary cruelty with which our oxen are slaughtered to-day in the Nairobi municipal butchery. A female columnist thought this a disgrace to our so-called civilization.37 Three men running for the Municipal Council vowed to alter the situation, for this is the twentieth centurythe age of progress. For their voters' enlightenment, the men drew the connection between civilization (and race) and the treatment of animals: It makes us ask the question, Are we white men? Or are we reverting to the manners and customs of the uncivilized savages, or the modern principles of the unspeakable Hun?38 The Standard placed their letter under the heading, Municipal Torture Chamber. Compared to their own civilized understanding of human-animal relations, whites saw only savagery and cruelty in African practices. African cruelty toward animals was, among whites at least, legendary. Upon retiring from

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Kenya, settlers often had their domestic animals put down rather than leave them in the care of Africans, while the wild ones they kept would be sent to a zoo.39 As Lady Evelyn Cobbold put it, The natives know no mercy or sympathy for pain, whether among animals or humans, while Elspeth Huxley thought her family's Gikuyu workers were not deliberately cruel, but horribly callous.40 Charles Stigand came to a similar conclusion:
With animals the native is not cruel intentionally, but he is horribly brutal and callous. He would not lift a finger to help an animal in pain. On the other hand, the thought of giving an animal pain would never occur to him unless the animal annoyed him. He ill-treats every animal he has to deal with, but only through expediency.41

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Others were less understanding. The Standard believed Africans poor treatment of animals arose from the inherent cruelty in the nature of the average native 42 All in all, the creeds of brutality and cruelty are still paramount among the aboriginals.43 Rather than an act of resistance or of desperation by underfed and underpaid workers, impaling cattle was understood as a base act of cruelty. Lord Cranworth explained the practice of Gikuyu workers secretly killing whites' oxen:
When a desire for meat seizes the Kikuyu herdsman and he thinks that the chance of detection is slight, he will select his opportunity and force a sharppointed stick or a cleft-stick with a stone in the cleft up the anus of an unfortunate animal, until the bowels are pierced. The stick is then broken off short and left in. In a day or two the animal dies a death of frightful agony. The herd then reports that a bullock has died of disease, and if the owner is young and ignorant the carcase [sic] is thrown away, and the revels commence.44

In Kiambu, two Africans were charged with having killed three oxen owned by the Highlands Transport Company, by forcing objects into either the throats or rectums of the animals. The men were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, 24 lashes, and a 100 rupee fine each.45 The magistrate ruled that There can be no doubt that whoever did this was prompted by sheer malignant intent to cause death and that by means the cruelty of which is beyond description.46 Newspapers and magistrates regularly illustrated acts of cruelty. One settler in 1923 came upon Africans skinning hyraxes alivetheir pelts were worth more that way than if taken from a dead animal. The editors of the Kenya Observer predicted that fashionable settlers would rather give up their furs than help to perpetuate this fiendish cruelty. Other writers deplored the barbarous treatment meted out [by] heartless savages.47 One African, who used sticks and stones to drive sheep to the slaughter, injuring three, received six months rigorous imprisonment in 1915. The magistrate remark[ed] that the accused was guilty of abominable cruelty.48 That is, he had caused unnecessary suffering whilst driving the beasts to necessary suffering at the slaughterhouse. The discourses of animal cruelty fed into a larger white discourse of corporal punishment. The changing attitudes toward cruelty to animals in Britain had emerged along with, or slightly in advance of, new attitudes toward pain and

Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

violence among humans. In medieval Europe, pain had not always been considered evil, but a constituent element of the human condition.49 With the rise of capitalism, advances in science, and new ideas of state power, the infliction of pain became less acceptable. Thus, for example, surgeons developed anesthesia to reduce pain. Abolitionists argued that central to the human condition was the right to be free of physical coercion and deliberately inflicted pain.50 It was no accident that slave narratives included scenes of masters viciously cruellybeating slaves.51 The situation in Kenya was rather different. Whites there firmly believed in the value of corporal punishment for Africans.52 Only violence, settlers and administrators believed, could teach Africans the difference between right and wrong, to introduce Africans to the rules of a new racialized world, to force Africans to respect whites. Corporal punishment also seemed to be the most logical means to prevent cruelty to animals. Teaching Africans empathy for animals was, at this point, simply not considered. Violence could quickly break Africans of their habits of cruelty. Perhaps, incidentally, violence might begin to introduce some rudimentary sense of empathy to animals into Africans' souls. In the Standard in 1910, A Wanderer called for new laws under which to charge Africans who mistreated wagon oxen. And the only punishment which would be likely to be of any avail, he instructed, would be flogging.53 When told of a cook who poisoned his employer's dogs, Margaret Collyer expressed in her Kennel Notes column a sincere hope that he was marched off to the nearest D[istrict] C[ommissioner] and received the hiding that he deserved.54 State officials sometimes agreed. Magistrate Logan sentenced an African to ten strokes for caning an ox and blinding it. The convicted man asked for a fine, to which Logan replied, I shall not fine you but have you hit, perhaps it will teach you not to be so cruel to animals in the future.55 The guilty man's lesson: inflicting senseless suffering on animals directly, inevitably, resulted in suffering to oneself. Wanderer, Collyer, and Logan did not advance reasoning or the civilized emotion of empathy as a solution to cruelty. Only violence could shape Africans' actions. Although A Wanderer asked for legal change, he also confided that Many natives have been thrashed on the quiet for cruelty to animals. C. T. Todd stopped a man (presumably an African) from lashing hell and fury out of [some] unfortunate oxen then turned and gave the driver a dose of his own medicine.56 Similarly, one settler woman, M. H. Hamilton, recalled that the nearest [she] ever came to killing anything was after having witnessed an African worker intentionally hitting a cow with a bucket, blinding the beast. He was twice my size, she wrote, but when like lightening, I hurled myself upon him, he came crashing to the ground. Had not the headboy forcibly dragged me off, I would have bashed his brains out on the stones I was so wild with fury.57 V. M. Carnegie discovered that her African servant had blinded a sparrow and tied it down in circle of snares in order to attract larger prey. Barbarity of this sort, she wrote, makes one's blood boil to such a pitch that it is difficult to keep a sense of proportion. The worker would have to be fired, but at the back of my mind I felt that more important still was to bring his cruelty home to him. She strongly considered violence, but ultimately (and somewhat reluctantly) decided against it. The African was too base for even the

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lash to work. With such a callous creature, she wondered, would physical punishment be of much use?58 The case of Captain H. M. Harries and his herder Kamauga wa Njoro illustrates the confluence of ideas about violence toward Africans and toward animals. On June 6, 1920, Harries came upon a dead pig, and then spotted Kamauga (deaf, mute, and possibly mentally handicapped) beating another. The herdsman fled into the bush, but the next day Harries had him brought forward, and proceded to beat him.59 Harries claimed to have inflicted a relatively minor beating, but Kiarie wa Njoroanother worker who, under threat of a beating, held down his brother Kamaugahad a different story. The beating lasted an hour, Kiarie explained at Harries's trial, during which time the white man inflicted 100 strokes over Kamauga's head and body.60 Kamauga ended up in the hospital for five weeks, unable to stand unassisted. The medical officer who treated him concluded that the beating was a severe beating and the hurt was grievous.61 During his trial, Harries admitted only the offence of simple hurt (since, as his lawyer noted, in law any beating however slight is an offence). After five minutes, the white jury returned a verdict of guilty on that count, but not guilty on the more serious charge of grievous hurt. Moreover, the jury added the rider that Harries had acted under intense provocation.62 In passing judgment of three months rigorous imprisonment, Justice Sheridan regret[ed] very much that he could not follow the jury's rider, but that Harries's punishment had to be severe enough to end immoderate and excessive acts of beating such as took place in this case.63 The Standard reported that the sentence was received by a crowded court with consternation and amazement, and later noted that the greatest indignation prevails [in Nakuru] over the case.64 The outraged jurymen themselves sent a letter to the registrar of the Court of Appeal protesting Sheridan's sentence.65 Harries himself justified his actions, and those of other settlers as well, in a letter to the Standard. I trust you will print this letter, he wrote, in order to show that British settlers do not flog a native for nothing but only, as expressed by the jury in their verdict and rider guilty of simple hurt under extreme provocation[;] neither would the district express great indignation at the sentence had the boy's offence been a trivial one. Harries did not deny the beating, but instead argued that Kamauga's cruelty to the animals required violence, as punishment and as deterrent: as one witness stated, Harries had said, I will beat Kamiuga because he has beaten pigs.66 In a letter to the Standard, M. G. C. believed Harries's sentence particularly unjust, since had the incident taken place in Britain the employer might have been fined twenty shillings, while the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have taken out a case against the herder.67 Physical violence toward Africans was fully justified necessaryto guide Africans toward civilized treatment of animals. Animal Cruelty in Late Colonial Kenya White attitudes towards animals Attachment to domestic pets continued. and Pets' Day at All Saints Cathedral, special invitation.68 Settlers fleeing had changed little by the 1950s. Nineteen-fifty saw the first Children's to which police dog Jock received a Kenya during Mau Mau and at

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Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

independence continued to have their pets put down.69 At least among government officials and members of the EASPCA, however, policies and attitudes towards Africans had altered. Overt racism had declined. Although whites did not doubt their superiority and right to rule, the conviction that Africans were pure savages was not so readily spoken. While still convinced that Africans treated animals cruelly, a consensus was building that this resulted from lack of education or information, rather than savagery. Confidence in elite Africans' abilities was such that African-run courts gained authority to hear cruelty to animal cases in 1950.70 The EASPCA began to reach out to Africans, teaching and civilizing them instead of simply condemning them. By the mid-1930s some discussion was underway on the possibility of producing Swahili-language pamphlets, although the first was not published until the 1950s.71 In 1945 an African section of the Society was formed, which could claim 4000 members by 1951, and 6500 by 1953.72 An African man, Njoroge Kiania, was hired on as a clerk/ inspector; the EASPCA praised him for his work uncovering cruelty by Africans, Indians, and whites alike.73 Mrs. F.L. Lyons, president of the society in 1956, thought that the more advanced and educated Africans should guide the benighted rural folk in humane treatment, care and kindness. It is, she pontificated, only by example and education in animal welfare that the dark veil of ignorance will be lifted and kindness will filter through.74 Indeed, the society had consciously undertaken in an earnest endeavour to teach the rudiments of kindness to animals to the indigenous population.75 In 1952 the African section of the EASPCA issued a booklet in Swahili, Utunzaji wa Wanyama [Care of Animals], and the society distributed it gratis to all district commissioners and police stations, with extra copies for sale at fifty cents.76 The booklet, with an introduction by E. Macharia Kang'ethe, Clerk of the African Section, employed typical strategies. Just as activists had done in Britain in the 19th century, the authors of the pamphlet strove to instill empathy in readers by asking them to visualize themselves as abused animals. The golden rule was to be applied to animals: Tafadhali watendee ndege wote kama vile wewe mwenyewe ungependa kutendwe vema (Please, treat all birds the way you yourself would like to be treated).77 Francis K. Mithori, a society member, contributed (in English) Kindness to Animals, in which he exhorted Africans to end cruelty. We cannot excuse our cruelty on the grounds of thoughtlessness, he wrote, for It is our DUTY to think, and noone [sic] who cannot enter into the feelings of an animal and sympathise with it in its weakness and helplessness should be allowed to own one. Indeed, cruelty to animals is almost more wicked than cruelty to men, simply because the animals and birds are helpless and dumb.78 In the same way that Black Beauty allowed readers to view the world through the eyes of an abused horse, the pamphlet presented various animals speaking directly to the reader, explaining how they wished to be treated. Please feed us like friends, the dog begged, because we love humans and guard your houses at night.79 Africans were now being taught to feel empathy, rather than only having that sense beaten into them. Despite this reaching out to Africans, much work remained to be done. In 1946, the Legislative Council appointed a select committee on cruelty to animals, charged with examining the current situation and proposing new legislation. It found little to be pleased with in the colony. Ritual slaughter of beasts

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for Jewish and Muslim consumption, if not in and of itself cruel, was at least preceded by cruel handling of cattle (a point disputed by three Muslims on the committee).80 Africans often neglected their dogs, donkeys were overburdened, poultry were transported improperly, Mombasa dairies were in deplorable condition. The committee recommended new legislation (although the Mau Mau rebellion pushed such changes to the back burner) and better enforcement of existing laws.81 In the end, however, education was the best route to change: We recommend, therefore, that propaganda in the vernacular, both over the wireless and in the press, should be employed to enlighten the ignorance, which on account of callousness and indifference, is the cause of much cruelty to animals.82 Africans were cursed with ignorance rather than the inherent cruelty of a savage. As whites spoke more of educating Africans, the state and the EASPCA became increasingly willing to criticize members of their own race for behaving cruelly to animals. The collection and export of African fauna for overseas zoo, if not done properly, could lead to much suffering.83 In fact, among the worst offenders in the treatment of wild animals was one Carr Hartley of Nairobi. In August, 1957, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts and friends visited Hartley's farm, presumably to view animals he kept there; Hartley and his sons were not present.84 According to the Roberts, African workers collected some live puppies and tossed them into a leopard's cage. The puppies were quickly devoured, while their mother whined and moaned outside. When Mrs. Roberts remonstrated with the African, the African said it was the custom and his employer's instruction. She waited some months before reporting to the authorities, hesitating to place her neighbor in legal trouble.85 Veterinary officers were dispatched to inspect Hartley's property. There they found two dead monkeys lying amongst seven live ones, which were forced to sit in their own filth and suffered untended wounds. The officials concluded that Hartley may not have been directly responsible for these conditions, as he would appear to have left the care of the monkeys to a crude African staff, with apparently little supervision.86 Nonetheless, although Africans had left the deceased monkeys in the cage, it was Hartelywho, as a white man, must have understood animals' needs and should have been able to empathize with the animalswho was targeted with investigation.87 Due to unexplained delays circulating paperwork in the government bureaucracies, Hartely was saved from having charges preferred against him. Nonetheless, the (incensed) crown counsel noted that This was a serious case of cruelty but I am confident that in future Carr Hartley's activities will be closely watched.88 Carr Hartley was cruel and failed in his duty to supervise (and, presumably, lift the veil of ignorance from around) Africans, and he had probably engaged in criminal acts, but no one thought to suggest he was a savage. Africans by now generally escaped such accusations as well. But in the peculiar circumstances of Mau Mau, when Gikuyu appeared to have discarded their thin veneer of civilization and reverted to their old way, whites returned to the trope of African cruelty to animals as evidence of African savagery. Mau Mau threatened the continuity of colonial rule and white settlement in Kenya as nothing had before. Settlers and colonial officials alike constantly harped on the bestiality of Mau Mau. Of course, much of these accusations had their origins in white imaginations. Some of them, whites accepted as truth. Others were used for anti-Mau

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Mau propaganda in the West. Among the alleged acts of barbarity: wanton slaughter of innocent men, women, and children; the use of menstrual blood in oathing ceremonies; sexual perversions; and cruelty to animals.89 One of the colonial government's most gruesome tools was The Mau Mau in Kenya, a 47-page pamphlet issued in Britain in 1954.90 Along with the usual text describing massacres, unscrupulous politicians, and conniving witchdoctors were photographs of dead Africans. A dead woman and child. A policeman, eyes open but unseeing. A mutilated body, one of the hundred Kikuyu reduced to anonymity and death by Mau Mau in the Lari massacre. Yet the Kenya public relations office apparently thought that displaying African corpses would not be sufficient to convince the British public of Mau Mau's savagery. Cruelty to animals would bolster the argument. Thus other photos included a cat hanged from a tree branch (Mau Mau warning: This will happen to you), a pile of dead cattle, and another beast standing but hamstrung (Dumb creatures are not immune).91 Perhaps most telling are two photos that share a single caption. In the background of one is a long wooden fenceclearly incapable of keeping Mau Mau at bayand in the left foreground lies a charred human body, face down, anonymous, the cause of death unclear. In the other photo the upper body and head of a dead cow fill the image, machete wounds clearly visible, its eyes open, and its severed tail placed, incongruously, near its head. The caption: Human beings and animals, both victims of Mau Mau terror.92 Settler memoirs reveal that disgust at the slaughter of animals was not simply a matter of propaganda. In her diary, E. C. Palmes noted a Mau Mau raid on a neighbor's farm. Three head of cattle had been taken, and a note was left on the fence: Bwana an honourable gentleman, very sorry but must have meat. While the theft was bad enough, It was the thought of those beautiful beasts being slaughtered that hurt, for the African had no idea of humane killing, in fact the cruelty and mutilation they perpetrate needs seeing to be believed.93 Her own farm later suffered a similar theft, and again the fate of her animals bothered her more than their loss: I shall not sleep tonight, thinking of the torture these savages may be performing on our cattle.94 After an ox was stolen, she and her husband decided to sell off their remaining three head rather than sentence them to horrible deaths at the hands of Mau Mau.95 Cruelty to animals during Mau Mau again gave settlers the opportunity to insist upon corporal punishment on Africans. Mau Mau seemed to demand extreme violence. The fighters had entered a primeval state of mind that could not be reasoned with. The state took more extreme measures to put down the rebellion, while settlers bayed for blood. Mau Mau fighters were certainly so depraved that they could not respond to education and empathy. Elected member Humphrey Slade in the Legislative Council called for increased use of corporal punishment, including on those guilty of maiming animals.96 His colleague S. V. Cooke made the link clearer still: People who take to the sword must perish by the sword, and they who take to violence, corporal or otherwise, must receive the same treatment, particularly for mutilating animals. I advocate corporal punishment, even the cat-of-nine-tails. Mau Mau were savages, as evidenced by their treatment of animals, and the state (and settlers) could shouldrely on violence to enlighten them.97

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This article focuses only on whites' discourses on Africans, on cruelty, on teaching empathy. This is, of course, only part of the story. Much more needs to be known about African ideas about animals and definitions of cruelty. Certainly, theirs differed from those of the European immigrant community. But how did Africans make sense of whites' queer attachment to dogs and child-like joy at slaughtering lions?98 Who were the Africans who joined the EASPCA, and what were their motivations?99 Much profit could also be had through research into the other major immigrant community, South Asians, who had their own sets of ideas about animals. More research in these areas could tell us much about notions of animals, of cruelty, and how members of the various racial communities viewed one another. The story traced here continues to resonate. Recalling the tortured history g~ of colonial Kenya, Ngu wa Thiong'o in 1981 cut to the heart of the intimate connection between animals, race, and violence:
To the settlers, dogs ranked infinitely higher than Kenyans; and Kenyans were either children (to be paternalistically loved but not appreciated, like dogs) or mindless scoundrels (to be whipped or killed). The settlers' real love was for dogs and puppies.100

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Echoes of such attitudes can still be heard. Crisscrossing Africa in 2008, famed Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul undertook an anachronistic expedition in search of the heart of African religious beliefs.101 Amongst his various patronizing and disparaging (and often racist) comments on modern Africa,102 he repeatedly bemoans the fate of the animals he encounters. He stops in Ivory Coast. The land is full of cruelty, which is hard for the visitor to bear. [Cattle shipped from far to the north,] still with dignity, await their destiny in the smell of death together with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. This lack of empathy for animals has stunted Africans' moral development: When sights like this meet the eyes of simple people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.103 Touring an emir's palace in Nigeria, he comes upon a hungry, perhaps orphaned, kitten crying. This little tragedy, Naipaul recalls, and my own helplessness, cast a shadow over the rest of my visit to the palace 104 Like whites in colonial Kenya, Naipaul experiences Africa and Africans through the treatment of animals. Had he visited fifty or one hundred years before, he would not have felt himself helpless. Endnotes
1. My understanding of white settlement and official thinking in Kenya draws in part on a very rich historiography. See, for example, Theodore Natsoulas, Harold G. Roberston: An Editor's Reversal from Settler Critic to Ally in Kenya, 192223, International Journal of African Historical Studies 5 (1972): 61028; Paul van Zwanenberg, Kenya's Primitive Colonial Capitalism: The Economic Weakness of Kenya's Settlers up to 1940, Canadian Journal of African Studies 9 (1975): 27792; Christopher P. You, The Threat of Settler Rebellion and the Imperial Predicament: The Denial of Indian Rights in Kenya, 1923, Canadian Journal of History 12 (1977): 34760; Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 18901939 (Durham, 1987); Bruce

Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race, in Colonial Kenya

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Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The dialectic of domination (Athens, Ohio, 1990); C. J. Duder, An Army of One's Own: The Politics of the Kenya Defence Force, Canadian Journal of African Studies 25 (1991): 20725; idem, Men of the Officer Class: The Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya, African Affairs 92 (1993): 6987; C. J. D. Duder and C. P. You, Paice's Place: Race and Politics in Nanyuki District, Kenya, in the 1920s, African Affairs 93 (1994): 25378; David M. Anderson, Sexual Threat and Settler Society: Black Perils in Kenya, c. 190730, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (2010): 4774; John Lonsdale, Kenya: Home Country and African Frontier, in ed. Robert Bickers, Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford, 2010). For more popular histories of white settlement, see Errol Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers (New York, 1985); C. S. Nicholls, Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya (London, 2005). 2. The literature in the new field of Animal Studies is burgeoning. Those which were of particular help in this article: James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore and London, 1980); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), ch.2; Carol Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison,Wisconsin, 1985); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA, 1987); Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London, 1998); Molly H. Mullin, Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships, Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 20124; Mary J. Henninger-Voss, ed., Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture (Rochester, NY, 2002); Harriet Ritvo, History and Animal Studies, Society and Animals 10 (2002): 4036; Kathleen Kete, ed., A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (New York, 2007); David A. H. Wilson, Racial Prejudice and the Performing Animals Controversy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Society and Animals 17 (2009): 14965. Africanists are at the beginning stages of adding to this literature, exploring how animal-human relations in African colonial contexts replicate and differ from those in Europe. For recent works, see T. C. McCaskie, People and Animals: Constru(ct)ing the Asante Experience, Africa 62 (1992): 22147; Nancy Jacobs, The Great Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass and the Politics of Class and Grass, American Historical Review 106 (2001): 485507; Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Power and Settler Society, c. 16541840, Kronos 29 (2003): 4763; Albert Grundlingh, Gone to the Dogs: The Cultural Politics of Gamblingthe Rise and Fall of British Greyhound Racing on the Witwatersrand, 19321949, South African Historical Journal 48 (2003): 17489; Lance van Sittert, Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province, c. 18501950, Journal of African History 46 (2005): 26991; Edward L. Steinhart, Black Poachers, Whites Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford, 2006); Lance van Sittert and Sandra Swart, eds., Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa (Leiden, 2008). 3. Although it would be fruitful to discover how missionaries taught the Golden Rule and the suffering of Jesus. 4. This opens a much wider theme, one that cannot be considered here, on white attemptsor non-attemptsto understand African ideas of pain and suffering. As Scarry has argued for the West, pain is an intensely personal emotion, and one immensely difficult to articulate (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World [New York, 1985]). This is, obviously, even more true of animals than humans. Whites rarely attempted to inquire into African ideas of pain and suffering, but created their own discourses about Africans. Settlers and missionaries who doctored Africans regularly commented on their stoicism in the face of physical pain. Many whites believed in the virtue of corporal punishment for Africans, but argued that Africans' ability to withstand pain

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required more lashes than might be necessary for a member of another race. Scholars could do more to understand African ideas of pain, especially given its centrality in so many rites of passage. For thoughts along these lines, see Paul S. Landau, Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith, Journal of African History 37 (1996): 26181. 5. Karen Halttunen, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture, American Historical Review 100 (1995): 30334, quotes from 3034. See also Thomas L. Haskell, Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, American Historical Review, Part 1, 90 (1985): 33961, Part 2, 90 (1985): 54766. 6. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 127; Arthur W. Moss, Valiant Crusade: The History of the R.S.P.C.A. (London, 1961). 7. Brian Harrison, Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England, The English Historical Review 88 (1973): 786820, quote from 815. See also Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog, 328; Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 4558; Ritvo, Animal Estate; Kathleen Kete, Animals and Human Empire, in Kete, ed., Cultural History of Animals; Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 17801900 (Ann Arbor, 1998); Wilson, Racial Prejudice. For comparison, Katherine C. Grier, The Eden of Home: Changing Understandings of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals in Middle-Class American Households, 18201900, in Henninger-Voss, ed., Animals in Human Histories. 8. Hilda Kean, The Moment of Greyfriars Bobby: The Changing Cultural Position of Animals, 18001920, in Kete, ed., Cultural History of Animals, 29. 9. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 71. 10. Lansbury, Old Brown Dog, 64. 11. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988); J.A. Mangan and C. McKenzie, Martial Masculinity in Transition: The Imperial Officer-Hunter and the Rise of a Conservation Ethic, International Journal of the History of Sport 25 (2008): 124373. 12. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 73. On notions of necessary versus unnecessary pain, and the relationship to notions of cruelty to humans, see Talal Asad, On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, in Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley, 1997). 13. S.V. Bensusan, quoted in Wilson, Racial Prejudice, 154. 14. Ritvo, Animal Estate, 12732; Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 121. 15. Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen; Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 69; Dan Weinbren, Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 18911919, History Workshop 38 (1994): 86105. 16. In this paper I deal primarily with settlers who came from Britain or elsewhere in Europe, and English-speaking South Africans. I thus by and large leave out Afrikaaners (Dutch in Kenyan parlance) who emigrated from South Africa. As a primarily rural population with a peculiar cultural history, their thoughts towards animals were perhaps closer to those of African pastoralists than those of fellow whites. Moreover, the sources for this paperpublished and unpublished memoirs and the main settler paperstend to be dominated by those who came directly from Europe and English-speakers from South Africa. 17. A. Paice, Some notes on the old days in Kenya, 1956. Kenya National Archive (KNA): MSS 104/1. Lord Delamere had his favorite dog. Times of East Africa, Jan. 20, 1906. See also Fragments, The Critic, March 10, 1923; Somerset Playne (compiler),
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F. Holderness Gale (editor), East Africa (British): Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London, 1909). 18. To-Day's Dog Show, East African Standard (EAS), Sep. 25, 1920. On the origin of dog shows in England, see Ritvo, Animal Estate. 19. Under the Standard Clock, EAS, Aug. 21, 1923. 20. President, EASPCA, to Private Secretary, Ag. Governor, Oct. 18, 1930, KNA: GH 7/21. The death of dogs tugged at whites' heartstrings. Reverend Gogarty in 1920 related the story of a dog having been eaten by a boa constrictor, which he mourned as a tragedy. Rev. H. A. Gogarty, In the Land of the Kikuyus (Dublin, 1920): 76. Etta Close, an American travelling through Kenya, witnessed another tragedy: a dog attacked and nearly killed a colubus monkey, after which her guide Mr. Trout shot it. Close, A Woman Alone in Kenya, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo (London, 1924): 154. Margaret Collyer, author of Kennel Notes, expressed sympathy for Mrs. Sladen, who was parted from a delightful friend and protector when a leopard ate her pet Airedale. EAS, Aug. 25, 1923, Supplement, n.p. 21. White Women in the Tropics, East Africa, Dec. 31, 1925. 22. V. M. Carnegie, A Kenyan Farm Diary (Edinburgh and London, 1930): 878. See also Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (New York, 1985 [1938]): 7083; Things We Want to Know, The Critic, Sep. 2, 1922. 23. Even then, some hesitated to slaughter farm animals. Carnegie called the killing of her turkey for Christmas dinner an execution. Carnegie, Kenyan Farm Diary, 61. 24. Occasional Notes, EAS, Sep. 2, 1916; Things We Want to Know, The Critic, March 31, 1923. See also, for example, the case of an ox-cart driver who lashed an ox till it bled, and twisted its tail until it nearly snapped. It was, according to both the accused and the Veterinary Officer giving evidence, a lazy beast. Doorly, who heard the case in Police Court, remarked that he was at a loss to understand, generally speaking, how oxen were to be driven if they were not beaten, and in giving judgment he said: I find that cruel measures were used in trying to make the ox go, but on the evidence I am inclined to sympathise with the driver's difficulty. He levied a mere four shilling fine. Under the Standard Clock, EAS, July 1, 1922. See also the comments of Magistrate Logan, in Native Convicted of Cruelty, EAS, Jan. 25, 1913. On the putting down of strays, see Occasional Notes, EAS, Sep. 2, 1916. In later years, however, some Nairobians apparently attempted to interfere with the work of the municipal dogcatchers, who thus had to shift their sweeps to the early morning hours. Echoes of the Week, EAS, May 13, 1922. For comparisons with South Africa, see Lance van Sittert, Class and Canicide in Little Bess: The 1893 Port Elizabeth rabies epidemic, and Kirsten McKenzie, Dogs and the public sphere: the ordering of social space in early 19th century Cape Town, both in van Sittert and Swart, eds., Canis Africanus. 25. The 1913 ordinance that set out new rules against cruelty to animals defined cruelty as unnecessary suffering. Judges and magistrates were instructed to follow Judge Hawkins in Ford v. Wiley, who determined that pain and suffering inflicted on an animal without necessity, or, in other words, without good reason, was cruel. Supreme Court of Kenya, circular to magistrates 27 of 1942, KNA: AG 31/8. 26. See, for example, the comments of Captain Ritchie, Minutes of June 15, 1927, meeting of Coast African Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, KNA: BV 5/5; The Junior Branch of the East African Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Nairobi: Jnr. Branch, EASPCA, 1927), 34, KNA: GH 7/21; Game Slaughter by Motor Car, or, A Western Yankee in Africa, Kenya Observer (KO), Sep. 12, 1923; H. A. C. Wilson, A British Borderline: Service and Sport in Equatoria (London,
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1913): 149, 21820. On the culture of white hunting more generally, see Steinhart, Black Poachers, Whites Hunters. 27. Dinesen, Out of Africa, 70-1. 28. Simpson, Land that Never Was, 200. Again, this points to an essential part of defining cruelty. The infliction of pain for a purposeto stop a lion from stealing cattlewas acceptable, while violence that served no apparent purpose, or went beyond a certain linea lion with a paw caught in a metal trap for several dayswas cruel. Similarly, Magistrate Logan convicted an African of cruelty to an animal for having brutally beaten a mule. Logan pointed out that the African's actions were unnecessary, since the mule was not acting stubbornly at the time. That is, beating a stubborn mule was not cruel. Native Convicted of Cruelty, EAS, Jan. 25, 1913. 29. League of Mercy, EAS, Oct. 4, 1910; League of Mercy, EAS, Dec. 28, 1910. It is likely that this League was affiliated with, or inspired by, the international League of Mercy active in moral issues. See Ashwini Tambe, The Elusive Ingenue: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of European Prostitution in Colonial Bombay, Gender and Society 19 (2005): 16079; Ashwini Tambe, personal communication, May 19, 2010. 30. Cruelty to Animals, EAS, Oct. 18, 1913; Dumb Animals, EAS, Jan. 6, 1914; Dumb Animals, EAS, Jan. 10, 1914. 31. The one significant exception was the Nairobi Municipal Council's reaction to an EASPCA proposal that two-oxen carts have a leader and a driver, like four-oxen carts. The Standard reported that Several councilors thought the suggestion ridiculous, and the idea was turned down. Municipal notes, EAS, Sept. 11, 1922. 32. The Cruelty to Animals at Sea Rules, 1915; Ag. Solicitor General, Opinion, Aug. 20, 1918, KNA: AG 31/10, and see also other letters in this file and in AG 31/6. 33. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Amendment) Ordinance, 1921; Commissioner of Police to Colonial Secretary, Nov. 18, 1924, KNA: AG 31/6. It had applied to Nairobi Township since 1918. Municipal Matters, EAS, June 8, 1918. 34. On the inspector, see EASPCA, EAS, Feb. 2, 1923. 35. EASPCA, EAS, Feb. 2, 1923. 36. See, for example, H. V., letter to ed., and Cruelty to Animals, both in EAS, Oct. 18, 1913; B. S. A. letter to ed., EAS, May 14, 1914; A Trooper from the South and N. Thompson, letters to ed., EAS, July 15, 1916; on African workers' mistreatment of government animals, see Municipal Oxen, EAS, Jan. 19, 1922. Although in writing, Europeans directed most of their wrath at Africans (brutal and ignorant, nigger [ox-cart] drivers, opined Alfred Williams [letter to ed., EAS, Oct. 26, 1912]), Indians and fellow whites were not immune from attack and prosecution. Indians, either as owners of ill or mistreated animals worked by African employees, or driving the beasts themselves, appeared in court on a semi-regular basis. Whites too might be charged with cruelty, although generally only when their African employees had mistreated animals. 37. Woman's World, EAS, Oct. 7, 1916. 38. Municipal Committee, EAS, Oct. 23, 1916; Municipal Torture Chamber, letter to ed. by Sydney Fichat, Harold Henderson, and Fred Tate, EAS, Dec. 30, 1916. See also Slaughter House Methods, EAS, Jan. 6, 1917; Municipal Committee, and Shillington, letter to ed., both in EAS, Jan. 27, 1917; Another Responsible Critic, letter to ed., EAS, March 17, 1917. 39. M. H. Hamilton, Turn the Hour: A Tale of Life in Colonial Kenya (Sussex, 1991): 283; Carnegie, Kenyan Farm Diary, 48. Failed farmer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) very nearly

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had her dogs and horses shot when she returned to Europe, but finally gave them to friends and neighbors. Dinesen, Out of Africa, 377. Those going to Britain would not have been able to bring their pets with them due to rabies quarantine, meaning that the choice was to surrender their pets to African cruelty or put them down. 40. Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Kenya: The Land of Illusion (London, 1935): 98; Elspeth Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika (New York, 1982 [1959]): 129. See also Dinesen, Out of Africa, 2656; W. S. Bromhed, Self Determination, EAS, April 27, 1918. 41. C. H. Stigand, The Land of Zinj: Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (New York, 1913): 302. On the same page, Stigand claims to have known only one African who was genuinely kind to animals. Elsewhere, he distinguished the white hunter from the African: the latter's hunting instinct is derived from a love of meat and a lust of killing [rather] than from any sporting feeling. Quoted in Steinhart, Black Poachers, 75. See also letter to ed., EAS, Nov. 2, 1912; M. W. Dobbs, Recollections of Kenya, 19061931, Rhodes House Library, Oxford University [RH]: MSS Afr. s. 504. 42. Occasional Notes, EAS, May 17, 1913. 43. Coddling the Natives, EAS, March 11, 1914. See also Natives and Poison, EAS, Aug. 11, 1923. 44. Cranworth, Colony in the Making, 54. For similar examples of cattle maiming, see evidence of W. E. Barker, Native Labour Commission; Huxley, Flame Trees of Thika, 254. 45. Cattle Stabbing, EAS, Oct. 26, 1912. 46. Kyambu Cattle Case, EAS, Nov. 2, 1912. A similar case was heard later that month. Cattle Maiming Case, EAS, Nov. 9, 1912; Cattle Maiming Case, EAS, Nov. 23, 1912. 47. Follow the Futurists, KO, June 25, 1923; The Hyrax, KO, July 17, 1923; D. F., letter to ed., KO, June 26, 1923. 48. Court Cases, EAS, April 10, 1915. 49. Karl Shoemaker, The Problem of Pain in Punishment: Historical Perspectives, in Sarat, Pain, Death, and the Law, 18. 50. Elizabeth B. Clark, The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America, Journal of American History 82 (1995): 46393. See also Halttunen, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain. 51. It was similarly no accident that the US Humane Society's edition of Black Beauty was subtitled The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Horse. 52. For an extended look at violence by settlers against Africans, see Brett L. Shadle, Settlers, Africans, and Inter-personal Violence in Kenya, 19001920, (International Journal of African Historical Studies, forthcoming). 53. A Wanderer, letter to ed., EAS, June 25, 1910. 54. Kennel Notes, EAS, July 14, 1923. 55. Magistrate's Court: A Brutal Native, EAS, Jan. 8, 1914. In 1921, the EASPCA brought a case to court of an oxen being worked with a sore foot. The Indian owner was fined 100 shillings, the African driver received seven lashes. E.A.S.P.C.A., EAS, Feb. 1, 1922. 56. C. T. Todd, Kenya's Red Sunset, 71, RH: MSS Afr s. 917. See also Fragments, The Critic, Feb. 10, 1923.
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57. Hamilton, Turn the Hour, 149. See also Life was Seldom Dull: The Experiences of a Woman in Equatorial Africa, E. F. Kennedy Memoirs, RH: Mss Afr. S. 514; Maevis Birdsey, Sigh Softly African Winds, RH: MSS Afr. s. 1794. My thanks to Will Jackson for these references. 58. She eventually decided to humiliate the worker instead, by circling a noose around his neck, placing a bandage over his eyes, and tying him to a tree stump where he could be seen by all. Carnegie, Kenyan Farm Diary, 345. 59. High Court at Nakuru, Criminal Case 58 of 1920, evidence of Herbert Michael Harries, KNA: AC 2/60. 60. High Court at Nakuru, Criminal Case 58 of 1920, evidence of Kiarie wa Njoro, KNA: AC 2/60. 61. Evidence of Christopher James Wilson, Medical Officer Nakuru, at Magistrate's Enquiry and in High Court at Nakuru, Criminal Case 58 of 1920, both in KNA: AC 2/60. 62. High Court at Nakuru, Criminal Case 58 of 1920, KNA: AC 2/60. 63. High Court at Nakuru, Criminal Case 58 of 1920, Judgment, KNA: AC 2/60. 64. Simple Hurt, EAS, Sep. 25, 1920; Assault Charge, EAS, Sep. 25, 1920; H. M. Harries, letter to ed., EAS, Oct. 2, 1920. In February, Harries's case in the Court of Appeal of East Africa was rejected, the judges determining that the sentence was not excessive. Harries Appeal, EAS, Feb. 18, 1921. 65. D. H. Maberly, et al., to Registrar of the Court of Appeal, Oct. 1, 1920, KNA: AC 2/60. 66. Magistrate's Enquiry, evidence of Kamau wa Mushiri, KNA: AC 2/60. 67. M. G. C., letter to ed., EAS, Feb. 22, 1921. 68. Secretary of EASPCA to Commissioner of Police, Sep. 13, 1951, KNA: AM 1/57. 69. E. C. Palmes, The Scene Changes, RH: MSS Afr. x. 946. See also Ngugi's comment on this in A Grain of Wheat (London, 1967): 162. 70. This was first recommended in 1946. K.M Cowley, Ag. Native Courts Officer, to all provincial commissioners, May 19, 1950, KNA: CA 14/22. 71. D. Genower, Secretary of EASPCA, to Director of Agriculture, Oct. 19, 1937, KNA: BV 5/5. 72. The E.A.S.P.C.A. appeals for more support, EAS, May 4, 1951, clipping in KNA: AM 1/57; Mrs. A. Mundy, President EASPCA, to District Commissioners and Officers i/c Police posts, KNA: AM 1/57. 73. R. O. Wahl, Secretary, EASPCA, letter to members, Feb. 26, 1960, KNA: GH 7/21. 74. Quoted in Greater care of Animals by Africans Urged, EAS, April 20, 1956, clipping in KNA: KL 4/6. The title of the article was misleading, in that half the text involved poor treatment of pets by Europeans. 75. Mrs. A. Mundy, President, EASPCA, to District Commissioners and Officers i/c Police posts, KNA: AM 1/57. 76. Chama cha Kuzuia Ukatili kwa Wanyama [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], Utunzaji wa Wanyama (Nairobi, 1952). I could find no further archival information on the African Section of the EASPCA.
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77. Utunzaji wa Wanyama, 6. In another publication, the anonymous author asks the readers, Aren't you happy that you aren't animals? I'm very happy! (Ninyi hamfurahi kwamba si wanyama? Mimi ninafurahi sana!). Fikirini! [(you pl.) Think!], KNA: CC 18/4. 78. Utunzaji wa Wanyama, 11. 79. Utunzaji wa Wanyama, 8. See also Sala wa Wanyama, KNA: CC 18/4. 80. Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council appointed for the purpose of inquiring into the incidence of cruelty to animals in Kenya, and advising what steps, if any, should be taken for implementing existing legislation, and what, if any, further legislation is desirable (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1947): 1, and Minority Report, 910. A copy of the report can be found in KNA: GH 7/21. See also Elizabeth Watkins, Olga in Kenya: Repressing the Irrepressible (London, 2005): 2534. 81. On the subsequent history of the report's legislative recommendations, see Minister of Legal Affairs, East African Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, note to Governor, 6 May, 1960, KNA: GH 7/21. 82. Report of the Select Committee, 7. 83. See the exchange of letters between R. W. Norton, Secretary, EASPCA, and T. C. Colchester, Secretary for Forest Development and Fisheries, March, 1956, in KNA: KL 4/6. 84. Hartley had already come to official notice two years before, during rail transport of wild species to the coast. At a stop at Thompson Falls a plain-clothed African constable lifted a screen on a car to peer, briefly, at a lion. Hartley's son ordered an African in his employ to beat the constable, who fought back. Carr Hartley arrived to break up the fight, which involved him punching the constable. Hartley later claimed justification, such that people crowding about the railway cars had disturbed the animals. No charges were brought against Carr Hartley, but state officials defended their constable against the white man. F. Matthews, Asst. Superintendent of Police, Nakuru, to Commissioner of Police, May 26, 1955, KNA: AM 1/57; Extract from a letter from Mr. Murray Smith of Feb. 10, 1958, and R. G. Turnbull, to G. Dolton, Marsabit National Reserve, Feb. 20, 1958, both in KNA: GH 7/21. 85. Carr Hartley's defense on this point was that the puppies were unwanted offspring of Africans' dogs, and that the puppies were always killed (how, he did not say) before being given to the leopard. Chief Game Warden to Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Forest Development, Game, and Fisheries, March 6, 1958, KNA: KL 4/6. 86. Veterinary Research Officer, Kabete, and Veterinary Officer, Nairobi, Report, July 1958, KNA: KL 4/6. 87. D. D. Charters, Crown Counsel, to Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Forest Development, Game, and Fisheries, Sep. 3, 1958, KNA KL 4/6. 88. D. D. Charters, Crown Counsel, to Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Forest Development, Game, and Fisheries, Jan. 2, 1959, KNA: KL 4/6. Another official in the ministry had advised dealing very drastically with Carr Hartley. A. H. to Chief Game Warden, March 3, 1958, KNA: KL 4/6. 89. Lonsdale notes that the first act to horrify [settlers] was the hamstringing of ranchers' cattle. Kenya, 104. 90. N.a., The Mau Mau in Kenya (London, 1954). 91. Mau Mau in Kenya, 18-9. 92. Mau Mau in Kenya, 20.
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Journal of Social History

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93. Palmes, The Scene Changes, 166. 94. Palmes, The Scene Changes, 171. 95. Palmes, The Scene Changes, 175. For similar reasons, when they finally decided to leave Kenya they had their two Siamese cats shot. Ibid, 210. 96. Legislative Council debates, Nov. 25, 1952. 97. Legislative Council debates, Nov. 25, 1952. g~ 98. On dogs, see Ngu wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, 415, 213; idem, Petals of Blood (New York, 1977): 169. 99. In Tanganyika Territory in the 1950s, some members of the Tanganyika African Association joined the RSPCA, but faced harsh criticism from other Africans who saw this as a organization advancing white interests only. Personal communication, James Brennan, May 18, 2010. g~ 100. Ngu wa Thiong'o, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (London, 1981): 33. 101. V. S. Naipaul, The Masques of Africa (New York, 2010). 102. One example: speaking with a Ghanaian, Naipaul discovers that the African had a European ancestor, and that he was not ruled by the instinctive life that (according to Naipaul) constricts African minds. So he had, after all, a gift of analytical thought; and though it might not have been fair to say so, this had perhaps come down to him from the Danish ancestor Naipaul, Masques of Africa, 133. 103. Naipaul, Masques of Africa, 158-9. 104. Naipaul, Masques of Africa, 108-9.
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