European and African encounters in colonial Kenya’s ‘aristocratic households’: exploring domesticity from settlement to Mau Mau

Abstract

This paper examines transformations in the cultural realm that occurred as Kenya‘s pioneer white settlers in the Rift Valley and the abutting White Highlands interacted with African squatter communities on their estates and individual servants in their households. In spite of the supposed racial divide between black and white and the prevailing reductive logic which strived to essentialise tribal traits during the formative days of colonial rule ethnic and racial groupings were open networks because of the permeability of their cultural boundaries. Though Europeans and Africans occupied unequal power positions they exchanged ideas and traditions, deliberately and inadvertently, through everyday interactions as employers and employees and landowners and squatters. These encounters unravelled a complex cultural economy which entailed modifications of social practices and identities. The paper examines these alternative experiences to the Manichean conceptions of colonial encounters which view colonial societies through the rigid social grammar of racial and ethnic difference. The paper also shifts attention from mainstream discourses on domesticity in Africa that focus on “womanhood” and “housewifisation” to the experiences of African male servants, and to a limited extent boys, that served European employers in the most intimate of contexts such as households. Considering that these African-European encounters happened in the minutiae of colonial spaces, I argue, it was difficult to maintain the expected separation between whites and blacks in such an intractable web of dependency and entanglements.