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Famine in central Kenya in 1899

Karte Kenias.

The famine in central Kenya in 1899 has gone down in Kenya's history as a devastating catastrophe. It spread rapidly in the central region of the country around Mount Kenya from 1898, following several consecutive years of low rainfall. Plagues of locusts, cattle diseases that decimated the cattle population and the growing demand for food from traveling caravans of British, Swahili and Arab traders also contributed to the food shortage. The famine was accompanied by a smallpox epidemic that depopulated entire regions.

The number of victims is unknown, but estimates by the few European observers ranged between 50 and 90 percent of the population. All people living in these regions were affected, albeit to varying degrees.

As the famine coincided with the establishment of British colonial rule, the inhabitants of central Kenya did not see it as the result of natural causes. Rather, they saw it as a sign of a universal crisis that disturbed the balance between God and society and which also manifested itself in colonial rule.

The famine resulted in a social reorganization that made it easier for the British colonial power and the European missionary societies to establish themselves in Kenya, contributed to the ethnicization of the country and caused a collective trauma in the Kenyan population that continues to this day.

Central Kenya at the end of the 19th century

File:Kikuyudorf.jpg

A fortified village in the Nyandarua forests. Such villages with an enclosure were particularly common in the border areas of the Kikuyu-inhabited region.

Social organization

Central Kenya was already a densely populated region towards the end of the 19th century due to its fertile soils and the rainy climate, especially in the highlands. Alongside the area around Lake Victoria, it was the most populous region in British East Africa with (according to imprecise estimates) around one million people. While the high-lying area between Mount Kenya and the Ngong Mountains was mainly inhabited by Kikuyu, Embu, Meru, Mbeere and Ogiek communities, the lower-lying region to the east, which merges into the semi-arid steppe, was mainly inhabited by Kambaspeaking groups. Kikuyu, Ogiek and Maasai also settled south of the Ngong Mountains and west of the Nyandarua Mountains. Livelihoods in the fertile highlands were primarily based on agriculture and cattle farming in the barren steppes.

Contrary to what was often depicted on maps in the 20th century, these groups did not live in firmly demarcated territories. On the contrary, they were culturally and socially closely intertwined. With the exception of the Nilotic language Maa, their languages were Bantu languages and therefore closely related to each other. However, apart from language, the members of the same language group had little in common; they were not united by a common political authority and only rarely by common rituals. An ethnic identity as we know it today was not pronounced. Belonging to the Maasai, for example, could change through relocation or a change of livelihood, e.g. from cattle breeding to agriculture.

Instead, people lived in small communities, organized in clans, family or village groups. Such groups could also be made up of people from different linguistic backgrounds. They often developed around a patron, an influential head of family who knew how to bind people to him or her by offering them protection within the community. These communities usually identified themselves by the region in which they lived, by the founder of their community as a common, even invented, ancestor or by their way of life as farmers, hunters or cattle breeders. Hostilities between different units of the same language group occurred just as frequently as between members of different ethnic groups. link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Kikuyu-Frauen.jpg|thumb|Women with goods in central Kenya, around 1895. The calabash probably contains beer, a commodity traditionally traded by women.

Regional exchange and contact

Nevertheless, these small communities were in active contact across linguistic boundaries. They often intermarried, engaged in lively trade and influenced each other's way of life, especially in areas where they lived together as neighbors. This contact was essential for survival. The fertile highlands acted as the granary of the entire region. If individual areas were threatened by food shortages due to drought, people would undertake trading trips to the highlands and exchange goats, sheep and cattle, arrow poisons and tobacco, tools or weapons, metals, salt and medicinal herbs, honey or even their labor for food such as millet and yams, beans, maize and bananas. In times of need, entire families would emigrate to the highlands, live and work on the land of a wealthy farmer and thus survive the hardship.

In addition, individual regions in the south of this area maintained active contact with the large caravans that traveled inland from the East African coast to buy ivory. In central Kenya, a number of trading hubs emerged where middlemen bought food from the local population and sold it to the large caravans as provisions for their onward journey. link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Rinderpest_1896-CN.jpg|thumb|Rinderpest outbreak in Africa at the end of the 19th century.

Lack of rain, rinderpest and plagues of locusts

For large parts of East Africa, the 1880s and 1890s were a time of irregular and inadequate rainfall. The cause of the drought in central Kenya was ultimately a strong occurrence of the climatic phenomenon La Niña in 1898. This event, as well as a very strong occurrence of El Niño in 1896 and another El Niño in 1899, also led to drought and famine in other parts of Africa. In central Kenya, there were further negative factors. In the 1890s, swarms of locusts destroyed the already insufficient harvests in both the barren and fertile areas due to the lack of rain.

In addition, an epizootic of rinderpest had already destroyed large parts of the cattle population in 1891. This animal disease, originally from Asia, had been introduced to Ethiopia by Italian troops with Indian cattle in 1887 and spread from there to East Africa and finally to southern Africa, where there was no immunity to the disease. Cattle owners in Kenya lost up to 90 percent of their livestock. Throughout the region, the loss of cattle had profound consequences. Their meat was rarely consumed. They were considered an object of prestige and were a valuable means of payment for the bride price and for the purchase of food from fertile regions. In pastoral societies in particular, the loss of cattle deprived children and young adults of an important part of their diet, as they were largely fed on a mixture of milk and blood mixed with herbs, which was obtained from milk and the blood drawn from the carotid artery of the cow.

The Maasai, in whose society cattle breeding was a central element, suffered particularly badly from the effects. After their economic basis was destroyed, thousands died and entire communities disintegrated. Survivors sought refuge mainly with the neighboring Kikuyu. Hostilities and the use of violence increased dramatically during this period. The cattle plague turned the proud and feared Maasai into beggars, and they attempted to halt social decline by the warriors stealing cattle and women from surrounding societies on a large scale to rebuild households. link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Flag_of_the_Imperial_British_East_Africa_Company.svg|thumb|Flag of the Imperial British East Africa Company, which entered the interior of Kenya in 1888.

The harbingers of colonial power

The first attempts by the British colonial power to gain a foothold in Kenya played a not inconsiderable part in the disasters. From 1889, the Imperial British East Africa Company established a number of administrative posts along the existing trade route from the port city of Mombasa to Lake Victoria (German influence ended in 1890 with the handover of Witu). Their task was to supply the Company's large trading caravans, which comprised up to a thousand people, with food for their onward journey. To this end, large quantities of food were purchased from the local population, sometimes even stolen from them. The caravan traffic also facilitated the spread of previously unknown diseases such as rinderpest.

However, the influence of the British initially remained small and was limited to the few stations and a small radius. This only changed with the construction of the railroad. After Great Britain took over the administration of British East Africa in 1895, construction of the Uganda Railway, which was to connect Mombasa with Uganda, began in 1896. The further the completed line advanced, the easier it became for Europeans to reach the interior. By 1899, the railroad had reached Nairobi, which had been built in 1896 as a depot for building materials, and thus the southern Kikuyu region in central Kenya. The number of Europeans in the country thus changed dramatically; settlers and administrators, missionaries, adventurers, businessmen and scientists arrived.

Railroad construction had another dimension for the Africans. From the start of railroad construction in 1896, it attracted numerous workers to the huge construction sites. They hired themselves out as laborers to earn money to buy coveted European trade goods such as cotton fabrics and clothing, tobacco tins, firearms and pearls. Most of these railroad workers were Indian contract workers, but Africans from all over East Africa also worked here, including many from central Kenya. These mainly male workers were lacking in agriculture, which further reduced crop yields.

The great hunger

link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bahnhof_Changameve.jpg|thumb|On the newly built line of the Uganda Railway. When the Great Famine, as it was later called, spread at the end of the 1890s, it affected all Kenyans living between Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. In the lower-lying eastern regions, harvests were already poor by the end of 1897, even in those areas that usually produced food surpluses. The year 1898 began with more dry months and hunger spread to the southern regions. A plague of locusts and a renewed outbreak of rinderpest, which in turn destroyed around 30 percent of the cattle population, exacerbated the effects of insufficient rainfall. By the middle of 1898, many people were already dying of hunger. The rain that year came late and again fell in smaller quantities than usual. Finally, the crops to the east of the highlands and in the southern Kikuyu region dried up in the fields.

However, the food shortage had not yet fully spread in Central Kenya by mid-1898. Traders continued to sell food supplies from the highlands to passing caravans or to middlemen in order to acquire coveted goods such as clothing, beads, weapons or copper and brass wire (from which jewelry was made). It was apparently assumed that food was only scarce among the less affluent people in certain areas and could still be procured through trade from the central highlands in an emergency. The British missionary Harry Leakey reported from the Kabete mission station near Nairobi: "The horrors (of the famine) were greatly increased by the fact that a huge caravan of Nubian troops was marching through the Kikuyu area at this time. The agents of the food supplier bought up large quantities of grain, and the proceeds in brass wire, cotton cloth and beads seemed luxurious to the unfortunate sellers. In fact, it spelled disaster, for when at last, after two if not three futile sowings, enough rain came to make anything grow, there was hardly any seed left in the granaries."

Whether the trade in food was actually a cause of the food shortage is nevertheless controversial. The anthropologist Kershaw pointed out that areas that did not trade with the large caravans were also affected by famine. The historian Ambler describes the course of the famine as a shifting border that moved with the refugees: as soon as the famine migrants moved into an area that was not yet affected by famine, a food shortage developed there. This produced more refugees, who in turn moved to new areas and caused food shortages there too.

The rain-rich highlands between Mount Kenya and the Nyandarua Mountains were spared from famine. Although the harvests here were also smaller, food surpluses continued to be produced, which meant survival for refugees from the famine areas.

In 1898, the railroad construction approached the Kamba area and the highlands. Large quantities of goats and sheep, beans, maize and grain were bought from the surrounding area to feed the construction workers - up to 4000 people on some construction sites. After many men had already moved to the distant construction sites as workers, the number of wage laborers, including women, increased significantly as the construction sites moved closer to home. Many men also worked as porters in the growing caravan traffic, so that there was an increasing shortage of labor in agriculture. Due to the persistent drought, those who remained at home were often too weak to take additional measures against hunger.

By the beginning of 1899, the famine had reached its peak. It was accompanied not only by a smallpox epidemic, but also by the appearance of the sand flea, which had previously been unknown in central Kenya and was spreading rapidly. For the exhausted people who were unfamiliar with sand fleas, the infestation by the insect, which ate through the skin into the flesh, often ended with crippled limbs, sometimes even death.

Überlebensstrategien

Trade and hunting

With crops withering in the fields and supplies dwindling, the most important means of survival was livestock, especially cattle. Their milk and blood provided food without delay or effort. More importantly, cattle could be sold as prestige objects for food from the highlands because of their value. In times of need, marriages were annulled in order to reclaim cattle that had been paid as bride price. In other cases, girls were hastily married off to bring cattle into the household. Despite the great hunger, however, cattle were rarely slaughtered for their meat yield; they were a family's capital and were treated as currency rather than food.

However, trading trips to the highlands to procure food were risky. They lasted several days, for which food was needed, and raging rivers had to be crossed. In many places, gangs of robbers were up to mischief, attacking travelers and robbing them of their goods. Weakened by hunger, the travelers often did not reach their destination and died on the way.

Poor families with little or no livestock suffered first and most from hunger and had to fight for survival on a daily basis. Many of the otherwise farming families turned to hunting as a source of food and used traps to catch gazelles and lizards that were close to their homes. Individual men got together in groups and went on dangerous hunts for big game such as Cape buffalo or elephants - a form of survival that was generally despised in central Kenya. Women with children, the weak and the old who had to stay at home lived on roots and grasses, wild fruits and leaves. They resorted to desperate measures to feed themselves. Clothes made of leather and calabashes were boiled for days to make them edible, and charcoal was turned into flour. [[Datei:Lenana_maasai_medicine_man.jpeg|link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Lenana_maasai_medicine_man.jpeg%7Cthumb%7CThe geographer Halford John Mackinder (left) traveled through the famine region in 1899 with the aim of climbing Mount Kenya. Next to him is Lenana, a Maasai medicine man, after whom Mackinder named one of the mountain's peaks. Between them Francis Hall, administrative officer of the Fort Smith station.]]

Migration

As there was no shortage of food in the rainy central highlands, in the northern Kikuyu region and around Mount Kenya, thousands migrated to this area from the neighboring regions. Many died on the way or shortly after their arrival. The survivors tried to survive the famine by working in the fields in the still fertile areas.

A decisive survival strategy was the pawning of women and girls. By pawning their female members to another household that had food, starving families saved both the men, who received food in return, and the women and girls, who were transferred to well-supplied families. This method was very widespread, despite the fact that it could be extremely traumatic for the women involved, who often had to leave not only their families but also their familiar cultural and linguistic environment. Between 1898 and 1900, thousands of women and girls, mainly from Maasai and Kamba communities, moved to mostly Kikuyu-speaking family groups living in the central and fertile highlands. Many women also moved to the administrative stations or to the large railroad construction camps on their own initiative and earned their living through prostitution, petty trading and beer brewing.

In addition to the women, however, entire village and family groups also migrated from the famine regions. Some areas east of Mount Kenya and south of present-day Nairobi seemed depopulated to European observers traveling through the country for the first time. As a rule, the migrants sought refuge in regions that were familiar to them from trading trips or where they could hope for a friendly family welcome through marriage or blood brotherhood. However, the famine refugees were by no means only warmly received in the host communities. They experienced the outsider fate of refugees, their women and children were often raped and robbed. As time went on, there were also occasional massacres, as the host communities feared - not without reason - that the influx of refugees would also deplete their own food supplies.

Crime and violence

The hardship led to the dissolution of social structures and moral ties in many places. Even the closest relationships were torn apart in order to free themselves from responsibilities and ensure their own survival. Blood brothers robbed each other, men left their families and mothers abandoned their children. In a small, abandoned hut in the Kamba region, missionaries found 24 dead children holding each other tightly. Other children were wandering around alone, with siblings or in larger groups, looking for shelter and food. Young men and even women formed small gangs and lived from robbery. They raided smaller and larger caravans and households that were no longer protected due to the lack of men. The railroad construction sites were also the target of frequent raids, as the large number of workers who had to be supplied there promised a plentiful supply of food.

The gangs of roving marauders made life in the scattered settlements increasingly dangerous. Attacks on refugees increased, and women and children in particular were captured by traders and sold as slaves to caravans. Even within families, people higher up in the hierarchy sold men and women from the family into slavery. Rumors of cannibalism also spread. The ivory trader John Boyes reported: "Some of my men have heard gruesome stories of people killing and eating each other in desperation in the face of food shortages."

Smallpox epidemic

The situation was made even worse by a smallpox epidemic that spread from Mombasa along the railroad line. In Mombasa, the dead were collected from the streets every morning, but the local colonial administration took no steps to prevent the spread of the disease. The disease quickly reached the famine-stricken central area via the newly completed Uganda Railway line.

Smallpox affected both starving people and those with sufficient food. It had a particularly devastating effect in the fertile highlands, where communities had been largely spared from the famine. The disease, which was brought in by the many famine refugees, spread rapidly in the densely populated area - whose population had increased due to the influx of refugees. Entire villages were soon depopulated.

Rachel Watt, the wife of a missionary, described the situation in Machakos, around 100 km east of Nairobi: "Wherever you went, the paths were littered with corpses. Babies, emaciated down to their skeletons, were found crying next to the bodies of their mothers."

Many people sought to protect themselves from illness and death with amulets, medicine and other spells. Others directed their anger and despair against individuals, namely abandoned women or widows were accused of witchcraft and blamed for the misery. Some societies, such as the Embu, completely banned foreigners from moving into their settlement area in order to prevent the spread of smallpox. In other areas, the refugees who moved in were forced to care for the sick. [[Datei:258896.jpg|link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:258896.jpg%7Cleft%7Cthumb%7CThe Fort Smith station around 1900.]] [[Datei:Francis_Hall_1898.jpg|link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Francis_Hall_1898.jpg%7Cthumb%7CFrancis Hall. Als Verwalter der Station Fort Smith war er einer der wenigen europäischen Zeugen der dramatischen Hungersnot.]]

The role of the colonial administration

The administrative stations of the establishing colonial power and the mission stations used the situation to strengthen their influence. With access to imported goods, they were no longer dependent on local food production, especially after the railroad reached Nairobi. The stations became feeding points for many starving people from the surrounding areas, as food was available here, especially rice imported from India. After the completion of the railroad, the stations and mission centers grew at a rapid pace. The Europeans residing here had previously often complained about the lack of labor needed to maintain the station. Migrant workers preferred to work on the railroad because they were better provided for and better paid. This labor shortage problem was solved as hundreds of men, especially Maasai, moved to the vicinity of the stations to work as porters and auxiliary policemen. In the regions of these early stations, the famine is therefore also remembered as Yua ya Mapunga, the "rice famine", as it introduced this relatively expensive and previously unknown foodstuff.

At the same time, an aid programme organized by the administration and the missions began, financed by the British government. Camps were set up in the Kamba area and around Nairobi, issuing one pound of rice a day to adults. Refugees flocked to these places. In Machakos, British official John Ainsworth gave out 500 portions a day in August 1899, and more than 1500 by the end of the year. In total, about 5000 people in central Kenya were living on the food donated by officials and missionaries at this time.

The end of hunger

The last months of 1899 brought heavy rainfall and thus the end of the drought that had devastated central Kenya for the previous two years. However, they did not bring an end to the famine. For some areas, this time in particular meant another period of suffering. The fields were devastated and overgrown with weeds, and not all survivors had the strength to prepare the soil for sowing again. Where harvests were ripening, hunger tempted people to eat the unripe crops, which caused further disease among the weakened people.

Even if the need was not immediately ended by the rain, the supply situation improved relatively quickly. European stations provided seeds, as many of those affected had eaten or sold their own seeds during the emergency. A few weeks later, survivors were able to harvest their first crops.

Consequences

Victim

All attempts to record the number of victims are based on very imprecise estimates. This is due to the fact that the population in central Kenya before the establishment of colonial rule can only be very roughly estimated. The only systematic study of losses during the famine was carried out in the 1950s by the Dutch anthropologist Gretha Kershaw and was limited to a small area in the Nairobi region. It revealed that 24 out of 71 adult men did not survive the famine. However, it should be borne in mind that this region was one of the more affluent and that the influx of Europeans provided a number of opportunities for survival.

It is rather descriptions of personal impressions from European observers that give an impression of the extent of the victims. In October, Francis Hall, a British official at the Fort Smith administrative station in the southern Kikuyu area, wrote to his father: "Because of the famine and smallpox, we are burying six to eight people every day. You cannot take a walk without falling over dead bodies." John Boyes, who had gained some influence in the Kikuyu area, wrote in a report that of a caravan of famine refugees he accompanied to the highlands, around fifty people died every day.

The death rate was certainly very different in the individual regions. The areas to the east and south of the highlands, where many Kamba, Maasai and, to a lesser extent, Kikuyu lived, suffered particularly high losses. Territorially, these were the areas of today's Central Province, around Nairobi, the south-western part of the Eastern Province and the south-eastern part of the Rift Valley Province. The depopulation observed by Europeans, particularly in the lower-lying areas, may indicate both a high death rate and the migration of people. A frequent topos in descriptions of stays in central Kenya from this period are the paths whose edges are littered with corpses. One British settler recalled the railroad line with the words: "In 1899, when I followed the tracks, I did not even get as far as Limuru. The rail line was a mountain of corpses."

Social and economic reorientation

After the great disaster, the population's most important efforts were to rebuild households, families and communities, restore social order and get a local economy going. As trade was now carried out via the railroad, one of the main sources of livelihood was lost. People therefore organized themselves into small, scattered households rather than larger communities grouped around a patriarch. This made it easier to feed all members of a family with the land that was available.

Reconstruction literally took place in a field of corpses. One woman recalled this time, which she experienced as a child: "After the famine came a season of millet sowing and the millet grew very quickly. But you couldn't walk in the fields because of all the dead people. You saw a pumpkin or a gourd, but you couldn't reach it because it was growing on a pile of corpses."

After their bitter experiences, many people preferred to leave the semi-arid and low-lying steppes. Instead, they settled in the forested highlands, which offered reliable rainfall and a secure livelihood after the hard work of clearing the land, but little grazing land for livestock. Due to the extreme increase in uncultivated land, the dry regions became scrubland again and thus, in the long term, a habitat for the tsetse fly. This made the resettlement of cattle breeders and the reestablishment of local livestock farming in these regions more difficult.

Social contrasts intensified permanently. Wealthy families who had survived the hardship without leaving their homes often occupied the land of their neighbors who had migrated to the highlands. Due to their privileged position, they were able to bind needy people, widows and orphans to their household, use their labor to work additional land and thus quickly build up considerable wealth. Many refugees who returned to their homeland found their land occupied and had to become tenants or earn a living as wage laborers. However, the loss of their land prevented them from building on pre-famine successes as farmers. As late as the 1930s, land disputes originating in this period were still being brought to court. link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-2007-0013,_Reise_Bernhard_Dernburgs_duch_Deutsch-Ostafrika.jpg|thumb|The Nairobi railroad station in 1907: colonial rule is well established.

Consolidation of colonial rule

The British colonial power emerged stronger from the famine. The administrative stations had gained workers and a large following due to the plight of the African population, most of whom continued to live in the vicinity of the stations even after the situation had improved. The reputation of the missions had also improved considerably. Before the famine, interest in Christianity had been very low and disappointing for the missions. During the famine, however, many starving people had found refuge with them, from which a first generation of African Christians emerged in central Kenya. In the area around Nairobi, the missionary Krieger had regularly provided the people in the neighbourhood with the meat of wild animals that he had killed on hunting expeditions. In retrospect, missionary Bangert from the Kangundo mission station therefore also saw the famine as "a wonderful opportunity to bring the gospel into the hearts of these people".

The scattered households identified less and less with the previously existing small societies. Instead, they increasingly classified themselves in the tribal categories that the colonial power had introduced and according to which the protectorate was administratively divided. The colonial administration appointed Paramount Chiefs, who represented an entire ethnic group and through whom the people could be controlled much more easily.

In 1902, large parts of the southern Kikuyu territory and the Maasai settlement area were expropriated and made available for sale to white settlers. Most of this was land that had been depopulated by death and migration during the famine. As the population of central Kenya recovered from the losses in the following decades, land scarcity became a persistent problem that was exacerbated until the end of the colonial period. link=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_105-DOA0556,_Deutsch-Ostafrika,_Massaikrieger.jpg|thumb|Maasai warriors in Kenya around 1900, a popular photo motif for visitors arriving in the country by rail.

Ethnicization of relations in central Kenya

As a result of the famine, relations between the communities in central Kenya changed considerably. Kikuyu developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards Maasai. As they lived in drier regions and were particularly affected by famine, the Maasai had been stealing livestock, women and food on a massive scale in the Kikuyu, Embu and Mbeere areas in the highlands, and did not shy away from murdering women and children. As many Maasai worked as auxiliary troops for European administrative stations, they had also taken part in so-called punitive expeditions against groups in the highlands, during which large quantities of livestock and food were also confiscated by the Europeans.

The high-altitude regions of Kenya, inhabited by Kikuyu and Embu speakers and Mbeere, had not been directly affected by the famine, but suffered from its indirect effects. The influx of refugees increasingly appeared to be a danger, as food was becoming scarce here too and the rapid spread of smallpox was seen as a consequence of the migration. In Embu, the villages tried to protect themselves against the needy immigrants. They banned the influx and the disease was increasingly seen as an ethnic trait of the incoming Maasai and Kamba.

The pawning of women, which had occurred on a large scale, also led to tensions after the general supply situation improved. Families who had pawned women were interested in reintegrating them into their households in order to rebuild communities with their labor and reproductive potential. This often proved to be very difficult, as the women were often returned only hesitantly. In many cases they had already been married, in other cases they had been sold as slaves. This gave rise to the view among the Kamba and Maasai that the highland societies, especially those of the Kikuyu, were woman raiders who had enriched themselves at the expense of their suffering neighbors.

The famine in the collective memory

Although Europeans were horrified by the extent of the famine, they saw it more as one of the many disasters that Africans usually had to suffer until the establishment of colonial rule. The actual significance of the famine for the African population was only recognized in scientific studies from around 1950. The anthropologist Gretha Kershaw, the Kenyan historian Godfrey Muriuki and the American historian Charles Ambler, who conducted extensive interviews and field research in Kenya for their investigations, revealed through their research the trauma that the famine had triggered in the Kenyan population.

In central Kenya, it was assumed that both good and bad were sent by the ancestors as punishment or support. The famine was also seen as a sign of retribution for a wrong done. The establishment of colonial rule, the construction of the railroad and the resulting increase in the presence of whites in Central Kenya, which coincided with the famine, were therefore not initially seen as a political event. Rather, like the famine, the rinderpest, the lack of rain and smallpox, it was seen as part of a universal crisis and reckoning, the causes of which were their own fault. Even decades after the famine, survivors were reluctant and hesitant to talk about their experiences during this time. It was not only the personal suffering that was remembered with horror, but also the destruction of the social order and the power of the ancestors over the living.

To this day, the difficult time of this famine is anchored in the collective memory of Kenyans. Among the Kikuyu, it is referred to as Ng'aragu ya Ruraya, "The Great Hunger", in the Kampa-speaking areas as Yua ya Ngomanisye, "The Hunger That Went Everywhere" or "The Boundless Hunger".

Sources

• John Boyes: King of the Wa-Kikuyu. A true story of travel and adventure in Africa, London 1911.
• Kenia Land Kommission: Kenya Land Commission Report. 3 Bände, Nairobi 1934.
• Paul Sullivan (ed.): Francis Hall's letters from East Africa to his father, Lt. Colonel Edward Hall, 1892-1901. Dar-es-Salaam 2006.
• Rachel S. Watt: In the Heart of Savagedom. London 1913.

Literature

• Charles H. Ambler: Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism. The Central Region in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Haven & London 1988.
• Greet Kershaw: Mau Mau from Below. Athen 1997.
• Godfrey Muriuki: A History of the Kikuyu 1500–1900. Nairobi 1974.
• Bethwell A. Ogot (Hrsg.): Ecology and History in East Africa. Nairobi 1979.