Mombasa: The City Strikes Back

Between 1975 and 1976 Michel Foucault delivered a lecture series at the Collège de France, titled “Society Must Be Defended.” This series focused on the emergence of a new type of society and its relationship to war, which Foucault argued was at the foundation of all institutions of power. It was in this particular series that Foucault first posited his concept of “biopolitics” as he traced the origin of power and knowledge.

Foucault’s “biopolitics” refers to the mechanisms and technologies of power, employed by governments, to manage humans in large groups specifically in order to create a healthy workforce. Data, broadly the information which tracks the reproduction, natality, and mortality of a group of people, is an essential component of this disciplinary power in its attempt to maintain life and optimal levels of production (Foucault, 1997: 243). Tracking the rate of births, deaths, and life expectancies within large groups is important for governments to measure macro trends of population size, including the size of the available workforce. Also important is the collection of data that tracks the changing needs of a working population, including their nutritional intake, their access to resources, and daily output of labor.

Much has been written on the connections between biopolitics and European colonialism, including some scholars’ critique of Foucault’s lack of acknowledgment of links between the two. Lauria Scott Morgenstern (2011) has written about how settler colonialism in a western context has used biopolitics to shape the state’s use of biopower (another concept deployed by Foucault during the “Society Must Be Defended” series which looks at the practices of controlling populations versus the mechanisms of control). Couze Venn (2009) outlines how colonialism plays a key role in the genealogy of biopolitics and the global financial system. Conversely, Cordell, Ittman, and Maddox’s The Demographics of Empire argues that the application of Foucault’s all-encompassing biopolitics to the colonial world is especially difficult as he did not acknowledge race and colonialism as key features of modernity (2010: 5). Nonetheless, scholars have identified cases of the application of biopolitics in colonial contexts, including British imperial and colonial rule in India.

Cognizant of the limitations of Foucault’s biopolitics, by homing in on the relationship between data and governmental power one is still able to elicit illuminating insights when applied to British colonial rule in Kenya. In particular, a greater understanding of Mombasa during the general labor strikes of 1947 and 1955, both times in which the colonial state sought to control and harness the productive capabilities of African (native) and Asian populations within the city, can be attained. More importantly, we are able to appreciate how these populations resisted not just the colonial practice of control, but also the mechanisms—of collecting, monitoring, and acting on data—the colonial regime used in the pursuit of controlling large populations. The Mombasa general labor strikes in the mid-twentieth century are important not just because they represent moments of active indigenous resistance to colonial rule but for their role in continuing to stoke the fire of independence in Kenya that would culminate in 1963.

From the 1930s through the early 1960s there was a wave of strikes across Kenya, including Mombasa, which challenged the colonial state and economy. The strikes were “labour’s strongest weapon against capital,” and according to Zeleza posed a serious threat to the power of the state’s “extreme coercion in the organization of work, time, and space” (1993: 2, 6). Zeleza identifies the salience of such instances of resistance occurring in Mombasa—which he refers to as “the crucible of mass strikes”—as the city was central to the colony-metropole nexus (1993:6) because of the access it enabled between the central and western regions of the East Africa Protectorate and the trans-Indian Ocean trade arena. Mombasa’s essential importance to the colony’s economic survival explains why the disruptive strikes in the city had such an impact on the long path towards Kenyan independence. 

The importance of Mombasa as a site of resistance is not limited to its role in maintaining the colonial state through its advantageous transport and defensive links. As a city, like Nairobi, its development reflected a growing African urbanization which threatened the hegemony of the colonial state. As the cities grew, they fostered an African nationalist politics rooted in their urban reality (Otiso, 2005: 87). This growing African urbanism also threatened the supply of cheap labor to rural European settler farms (Otiso, 2005: 85). To stifle this brewing nationalist mobilization, the colonial state used the information held by the central government to employ multiple mechanisms of a politics of control. Two areas where this was most prominent was in the monitoring of public health in cities, specifically the spread of disease and sanitation facilities for each racial group as defined by the colonial government; and, control of the occupancy of residential buildings by Africans and Asians within Kenya’s various cities (Otiso, 2005: 83-88). Such measures included laws and regulations of African land ownership in urban areas, exclusion from positions of authority in public life, and the misuse of housing and planning policies (Otiso, 2005: 81).

Nonetheless, these cities posed conundrums for the colonial regime in Kenya, which Otiso deftly elucidates. Even though urban areas unnerved the colonial government, which feared they were hotbeds of resistance, their development at the same time reinforced Kenya’s colonial prosperity. As the African population needed for the urban workforce grew, peripheral settlements sprung up around colonial urban centers. As these settlements were illegal, they lacked sanitary services and were considered a public health risk to all. To efficiently accumulate capital the colonial managers were required to remove the barriers to African urban property ownership to reduce the cost of living and the risk of disease, which created a conducive environment for a more efficient labor force. In some areas, these measures included the implementation of housing programs, which in Mombasa included village layout schemes. Otiso highlights, though, that removal of these restrictions also enabled Africans to initiate their own housing projects, such as the Changamwe Repooling Scheme in Mombasa, which was more likely to have met most African residential needs (Otiso, 2005: 87).

A display of the mounting resistance to colonial rule that arose as cities like Mombasa formed a more cohesive African urban identity, was visible in the labor struggles in the city and can be traced back to the early years of colonial rule. Blanker describes this in his exploration of the importance of the Mombasa General Strike of 1947 to Kenya’s eventual independence. In 1900, a railway strike sparked in Mombasa traveled to other stops on the line, and disrupted the transport of goods and people in and out of the city (2018). In 1908, African railways workers and Indian dockworkers in Mombasa went on strike once again. Less than five years later, African boat workers in Mombasa’s port downed tools another time. However, the wave of labor militancy began to crest in the 1930s and 40s. As urbanization and industrialization expanded across Kenya, the need for a constant and stable labor force similarly increased (Blanker, 2018). Despite the colonial government’s attempts to control the workforce and manage unemployment to maintain capital accumulation and their own hegemony, a local working-class consciousness and behavior emerged. When food rations were reduced in 1942 and 1943 this collective identity was further mobilized into eventual strike action in 1947.

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya’s Food Shortage Commission of Inquiry Report, 1943 reveals the colonial regime’s perspective of the 1942-3 food shortage and proposed governmental response. Authored by H.C. Willan, W. H. Billington, John L. Riddoch, and G.J. Robbins, this report was conducted via a series of “sittings”—consultations—between colonial officials and witnesses across Kenya from May 8 to August 21, 1943 (1943: 1). The officials spoke with 272 witnesses—a mixture of European settlers, natives, British colonial officials, and others—and reviewed 118 memoranda while visiting nearly every province in the country, including Mombasa between July 8-13, 1943, where they surveyed a reconditioning plant for maize and other agricultural produce in Mombasa (1943: 2-3).

The report details a myriad of factors, from reduced rainfall the previous year to a lack of encouragement for European farmers to sow maize to surplus agricultural products being diverted to the military efforts during the Abyssinian Campaign, which contributed to a crop shortage between 1942-3. This crop shortage constituted a serious food deficit, and in “a few isolated areas” led to famine conditions, but only for African communities. The report asserts that while the availability of a wide range of foodstuffs was diminished, the most heavily impacted item was maize, which formed the basis of the African diet (1943: 4).

The response by the colonial government reveals just how central the desire for a productive workforce was as employers were instructed to issue limited rations only to their African employees and not their employees’ families (60-61). The government reduced the distribution of maize in certain industries and prioritized maintenance of industry over new projects or further construction. Food supplies were provided to sisal farmers and laborers who were engaged in production and cleaning but not for replanting or “development work;” supplies were curtailed completely for “road construction gangs,” while road maintenance teams retained reduced rations; only laborers required to care and maintain the gold mining industry received rations while those involved in future mining projects received none (1943: 60-61). In townships, rations were similarly reduced for employed African men and their families, while those who were unemployed seemingly received nothing from the state.

There was no national uniformity of rations supplied. However, the report’s detail of the maize meal allowed per day to an employed African man and his family in Nakuru District (northwest of Nairobi) provides insight into what the state deemed necessary to meet their needs: for a man 1.5lb of maize meal, for his wife 0.5lb of maize meal, and then for each other member of their family 0.5lb of maize meal (1943: 20). In Mombasa, only those who were permanently employed (usually by the port) received rations for themselves, their wives, and their families (1943: 20). Casual laborers received rations the days they worked, while the remainder of Mombasa’s African population had to depend on select shops in the city to acquire their daily food needs (1943: 20).

The curtailed rations during the 1942-3 food crisis caused “hardships” for the many African communities who were affected. In response, the government chose to move the “natives” (Africans) out of the towns and cities to the native reserves, not by legislation or force, but by manipulating “consciousness of the shortage.” The colonial government was able “to pick and choose whom [they] would ration” and how much (1943: 61). It is important to note that enforced villagization, as demonstrated by Zeleza, was one of the measures within the colonial government’s toolbox of state terror and repression used to reassert its control in Kenya (1993: 12). The report’s authors’ recommendation for responses to future food crises indicates that more in-depth policy planning was required, indeed more data, as “full consideration” would be necessary to determine whether the reserves which the Africans were “repatriated” to had sufficient food to support them and whether the Africans who were sent back even had homes to go to in the reserves (63).

The report reviewing the 1942-3 food shortage does not provide the data that the colonial government used to control populations in Kenya, specifically the African population. However, it does evidence that data was an essential component to policy formulation and implementation. A central component of the report’s analysis focuses on the nutrition and dietetics of the African diet, critiquing the prominence of maize and other starchy foods at the exclusion of other crops (1943: 57-8). The report also assesses the necessary quantities of protein, mineral salts, and vitamins required to stave off malnutrition among the African population, especially among those permanently employed (1943: 57-8). Food rations and the amount received by individuals was intrinsically linked to employment as European employers were the main issuers of basic rations, to the extent that the report’s authors attribute the source of “the undue prominence of maize” in the African diet to the practices of early European settlers with their employees (1943: 58).

While we are only privy to the results of the authors’ findings, we can deduce from the details of the report as laid out above that they were collecting and relying on data to form the evidence base from which they would craft policies to stave off future food crises. This use of data to drive policy is visible in the recommendation that the colonial regime engage their Agricultural and Medical Departments in tandem to craft a general native policy that set out the nutritional needs of the Africans across Kenya as well as the agricultural policies required to meet them (1943: 95). Data would be collected to determine the nutritional requirement of the African community as well as data on what could be feasibly provided to meet these needs. The ability of the colonial government to apportion rations to employed Africans based on their nutritional value harks back to Foucault’s conception of biopolitics in which governments use data to manage humans in large groups, specifically to create a healthy and productive workforce.

To some extent, the colonial government began to perceive the Africans themselves as data, rather than as sources of it. By the end of the 1943 report, native men and women are referred to as “consumer units,” the dehumanization of the colonial subject even more evident (1943: 109). To create a more efficient workforce the colonial regime reduced the African population in their employ to units of labor which consumed food as fuel. It is perhaps little surprise that said population of Africans challenged this reductive perception and demanded the state meet their needs on their terms. Sufficient provision of food and adequate housing were such demands and ignited the flame of strikes in the 1930s.

The culmination of the series of strikes in the 1930s and 40s occurred in 1947 when the Mombasa general strike commenced as the city’s railway and dock workers rallied other workers across the city to protest the elusive provision of adequate housing. Blanker states that the strike lasted eleven days, from the 13th to 24th January 1947, and involved 15,000 workers of a workforce of approximately 20,000 (2018). In 1955, Mombasa was the locus of resistance once again as dockworkers, oil refinery employees, and other laborers in the port area mobilized against the state and their attempts to manage broad populations for the purposes of creating an efficient workforce (Zeleza, 1993: 12).

As previously alluded to, the colonial government responded to these incidences of strike with increasing fervor and violence. From mass deportations and detentions to suppression of political activity and military campaigns, the colonial government did not hold back its attempts to maintain control.

The city of Mombasa was more than a backdrop to the burgeoning labor movement that swept across Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a central feature. Much of the colonial government’s power was derived from the defensive and transport links provided by the port of Mombasa which the city revolved around—many of those who took part in various labor strikes worked at or around the port. As the workers were concentrated in a particular geographic area and an industry essential to sustaining the colony’s economic development it was easier for strikers to organize the industrial action and to disrupt the colonial government’s means of controlling populations. While the colonial government used data to control how those in the city could and could not behave, work, or eat, the structure of the city shaped how those who were being controlled resisted. The local football field would become the rallying point and planning quarters for the collective action in 1947. The space provided a platform for stakeholders such as activists and government officials to make their voices heard among a diverse group of strikers. Zeleza claims this organizing space meant the mass planning meetings “made the strike a truly community affair” (1993: 15). The football field was renamed Kiwanja cha Maskini, Field of the Poor, which spoke to the collective economic pain felt by so many Mombasans at the time. The colonial government used the data they collected on the nutritional deficits in the diet of natives across Kenya; the food requirements of employed laborers; Kenya’s agricultural industry to meet such requirements; and the ability of employers throughout the region, including Mombasa, to determine the needs to sustain a productive workforce within the country in an attempt to control them. Their goal of classifying society along racial lines failed to acknowledge how doing so catalyzed the formation of a working-class identity that was crucial to navigating the way towards Kenya’s independence in 1963.   

Bibliography

FOOD SHORTAGE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY REPORT, 1943, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (1943) <http://kenyalaw.org/kl/fileadmin/CommissionReports/Food-Shortage-Commission-of-Inquiry-Report-,-1943.pdf>. 

Blanker, Mike, “The Mombasa General Strike of 1947: How Workers Initiated the Kenyan Independence Movement,” World History Connected October 2018 <https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/15.3/blanker.html>.

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Otiso, Kefa M., “Colonial Urbanization and Urban Management in Kenya” in African Urban Spaces: In Historical Perspective, edited by Toyin Falola, Steven J. Salm, 73-97.  Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2005.

Venn, Couze, (2009) “Neoliberal Political Economy, Biopolitics and Colonialism,” Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 26, 206-233.

Zeleza, Tiyambe, (1993) “The Strike Movement in Colonial Kenya: The Era of the General Strikes” Transafrican Journal of History, Vol. 22, 1-23.