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of the White Highlands, they created a microcosmic world of privilege and decadence that has endured in romanticized, popular imagination as being “authentically Kenyan.” This was a world seemingly composed of “sundowner” cocktails, usually gin and tonic, taken outdoors every evening as the equatorial sun dropped out of the sky; of vast farmhouses dripping with bougainvillea and staffed by black servants in white kanzu (long robes); of months spent on safari and of regular black-tie balls at the tony Muthaiga Club or Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. Yet, the reality of the Happy Valley included seedier elements of widespread substance abuse—the visiting Prince of Wales was notoriously offered cocaine at a dinner party—and scandalous adultery: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” was a popular joke in interwar Britain.¹⁵

      The world of the Happy Valley endured in popular imagination not only after many of its denizens succumbed to dissolution, bankruptcy, and scandal, but even after the end of British rule in 1963. The area was chronicled at the time by white settlers, most notably Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Known by the nom de plume Isak Dinesen, her famous memoir, Out of Africa, begins with the lilting line, “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”¹⁶ Nostalgia for the dramatic and glamorous aspects of this colonial milieu was reinvigorated in the mid-1980s with the release of the film version of Out of Africa, based on Blixen’s memoir and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which in turn stimulated a spate of books and media productions romanticizing the settler lifestyle.¹⁷ This nostalgia for a romanticized British colonial past and its vast marketability even inspired a new Ralph Lauren fragrance, Safari, its print campaign mirroring the aesthetics of Out of Africa and making India Hicks, granddaughter of the last viceroy of India, its primary face.¹⁸ Yet, notably absent from these scenes set in Kenya’s upcountry “islands of white” are black Kenyans and their experiences of British colonialism. Missing, too, are any indications of conflict between the colonizers and the colonized or of the inherent violence of the colonial project overall.¹⁹ It is to these topics that the remaining sections of this chapter turn.

       Colonial Rule: Conquest, Bureaucracy, and “Tribal” Imaginaries

      Popular representations of the White Highlands would seem to suggest that the British arrived in Kenya and immediately took control of the country and its people without incident. But the reality of the coming of colonialism and the imposition of British rule was much more complicated—and violent. The first British boots on the ground in Kenya were not those of “great white hunters” or settlers like Delamere, but rather those of explorers and missionaries who traversed East Africa in the Victorian era.²⁰ They were followed by members of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). As we noted above, the British had come into possession of Kenya through the “Scramble for Africa.” Indeed, a popular anecdote of the late Victorian era highlighting the arbitrary nature of the scramble held that Queen Victoria ceded Mount Kilimanjaro, thereby shifting the border between British East Africa and German East Africa, to her grandson, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, because she had two mountains—Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro—and he had none.²¹

      At the Berlin Conference of the mid-1880s, the imperial powers agreed that in order for one country’s claim to an African territory to be recognized by the others, the claiming country had to show that it had “effectively occupied” the territory, that is, set up some form of rudimentary administration that would facilitate free trade and free transit in the territory. By the late 1880s, the British government had set up the IBEAC, the concessionary company “chartered to occupy Britain’s sphere of influence,” that is, to see to economic and administrative development of the British East African territories.²² By the late 1880s, the IBEAC was sending ivory caravans from the Swahili Coast through Kenya to Uganda, and by the 1890s had begun the violence-ridden process of conquering and subduing the area’s African populations. British officials often referred to this process as “pacification,” which resulted in “punitive” expeditions against any active resistance. For instance, in the Nandi-speaking regions of Western Kenya, British “pacification” from 1890 to 1906 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Nandi warriors as well as cattle seizures that decimated the pastoralist community’s herds.²³ However, at the same moment the IBEAC was cementing itself militarily with such punitive missions, its economic power was waning. The Foreign Office took over direct control of Kenya, establishing the East Africa Protectorate in 1895 and taking charge of building a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria, while many of the “company men” stayed on as the first British administrators.²⁴

      In ruling Kenya, the British were confronted with two central, interrelated problems: their numerical inferiority vis-à-vis African populations and the incredible diversity of African communities, or “tribes” as they called them. The system of governance known as “indirect rule” addressed both of these problems. Developed by Lord Frederick Lugard, chief British administrator in Nigeria, indirect rule was a co-optive model of administration based on African institutions and managed by African leaders under the oversight and authority of British administrators.²⁵ Outsourcing day-to-day administration to specially designated African functionaries dealt with the inability of the slim ranks of British officials to be everywhere at once in the districts under their authority, and indirect rule had the added advantage of being cheap. To borrow Sara Berry’s famous phrase, indirect rule was meant to enable “hegemony on a shoestring” and institutionalize a political, racial, and social hierarchy.²⁶

      Implementing indirect rule required the work of imagination and invention. British authorities had a “mental map” in which Kenya’s diverse and numerous ethnic groups were neatly divided into easily discernible “tribes,” with particular expectations attached to them. “Tribes,” as Brett Shadle points out, “were in the colonial imagination discrete collections of people attached to unique cultural, political, and societal norms, ruled by strong chiefs.”²⁷ Even if African communities did not assert “tribal” identities, Shadle’s statement brings us to the second layer of invention—the creation of African institutions and offices where none had existed before or had been present in significantly different forms. In many instances, the British introduced hierarchical political organization into ethnic groups that were acephalous, or “without a head,” or which located and exercised authority through councils typically composed of elders. As one 1909 administrative report neatly summed up, “The prestige of the chiefs is in the process of being created in most cases.”²⁸ The introduction of indirect rule and the tribal imaginings that accompanied it had far-reaching consequences in East Africa. Images of the British administrator in a pith helmet and the loyal, submissive African chief in “tribal dress” emerged, like those of the white hunter and the settler baron, as avatars of colonial rule.²⁹ Indirect rule was also part of the politics of “divide and conquer,” as British policy and practice hardened flexible webs of ethnic affiliation and affinity into distinct, cemented “tribal” categories, and subsequently parceled out power and privilege to favored “tribes” whom they deemed more “advanced” or “evolved.” This (re)imagining of fluid ethnicities into fixed tribes mobilized Victorian views of European history and contemporary notions of scientific racism. As John Iliffe explains, British officials believed that “every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar, to academic distinction between tribal societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, and to postwar anthropologists who preferred ‘tribal’ to the more pejorative word ‘savage.’”³⁰

      This view of the African as inherently “tribal” not only shaped colonial policy and practice, but also transformed the ways in which Africans reckoned their own identities and conceived of “self” and “other,” “us” and “them.” While the ethnic boundaries of many communities were ossified through this process of “inventing” tribes out of ethnicities, entirely new “umbrella” groups, such as Kalenjin, Abaluhya, and Mijikenda, were also formed out of amalgamations of smaller groups and imagined as discrete cultural communities for the first time.³¹ Overall, from the top down, British policies “invented tribes,” but Africans worked to shape and manage these identities throughout the colonial period.

      Local

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