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Provisioning the Posho: Labor Migration and Working-Class Food Systems on the Early-Colonial Kenyan Coast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2020

Devin Smart
Devin Smart*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Abstract

Engaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls a “racial paternalism” that structured many labor relations during the colonial period. The article starts in rural Kenya, but then follows labor migrants to their places of employment to examine the formation of this new food system. In upcountry rural societies, women had primarily produced and then exclusively prepared their communities’ food. However, as migrants, men received a ration (posho) of maize meal or rice as part of their pay, used their cash wages to purchase foodstuffs from nearby markets, and some plantation workers were also able to grow their own vegetables on plots allocated by their employers. After acquiring their food through these wage-labor relations, men then had to cook their meals themselves. In addition the cuisine created by labor migration was one of extreme monotony compared to what these migrants ate in their rural communities, but I also show how food became a point of conflict between management and labor. The article demonstrates how workers successfully pressured their employers to improve the quantity and quality of their rations from the 1910s to the 1920s, while also raising their wages that allowed them to purchase better food. I additionally argue that during this period an “urban” or “rural” context did not fundamentally define how migrant workers acquired their food, as those laboring in both city and countryside received these rations. However, the article concludes by examining how after 1930, economic transformations changed Mombasa's food system so that workers became almost entirely reliant on cash and credit as the way they acquired their daily meals, while paternalism continued to infuse the food systems of rural migrant laborers. In sum, this article is a local study of coastal Kenya that is also concerned with global questions about how food provisioning fits into the social reproduction of working classes in industrial and colonial capitalism.

Type
Lines of Labor, Lines of Production
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 98: East Europe and the Troubled Memory of “The Worker” / Labor Activism Under Neoliberalism / Lines of Labor, Lines of Production , Fall 2020 , pp. 173 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2020

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References

Notes

1. Narrative drawn collectively from the archival research for this article, as well as specific descriptions of plantation meal routines in “Native Labour Commission, 1912–1913: Report,” in Native Labour Commission, 1912–1913: Evidence and Report (Nairobi, ca. 1913).

2. Quote from Guyer, Jane, “Introduction,” in Feeding African Cities: Studies in Regional Social History (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 1Google Scholar. This article is focused on the food systems of wage laborers, but the first modern workers who lost access to the means of subsistence en masse were enslaved Africans brought to the Americas. Mintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, and Goucher, Candice, Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food (Armonk, NY, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a global overview of the changing relationship between labor and food, see Deutsch, Tracy, “Labor Histories of Food,” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, edited by Pilcher, Jeffrey (New York, 2012), 61–80Google Scholar.

3. Cooper, Frederick, “Introduction: Urban Space, Industrial Time, and Wage Labor in Africa,” in Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983), 9Google Scholar. See also Laslett, Barbara and Brenner, Johanna, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 381–404CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4. The majority of urban workers in Britain were fully reliant on wages to buy their food, while rural agricultural workers, because of the extent of enclosures by the end of the eighteenth century, could no longer effectively grow adequate food for their needs and purchased nearly all their food. See John Burnett's Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London, 1989 [third edition]), 21–63, 107–191, and Burnett, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present (New York, 2014), 17–39.

5. Patrick Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994), 71–80. For food rations in urban South Africa, see Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead, Give us our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethnic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, 1993), 120–35.

6. Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975 (Athens, OH, 2015), Thaddeus Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early-Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH, 2002), Guyer, “Introduction,” Feeding African Cities, 29–31, and also see the essays on colonial Harare, Yaoundé, and Dar es Salaam, George Chauncy, Jr., “The Locus of Reproduction: Women's Labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953,” Journal of Southern African Studies 7 (1981): 135–64, and Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London, 1976), 41–46.

7. Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT, 1987), xii–xiii., and on South Africa, see Harries, Work, Culture, Identity, xiii–xv, and Atkins, The Moon is Dead!, 1–8.

8. Cooper, On the African Waterfront, xii–xiii.

9. James McCann, Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 136–60, and his Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, MA, 2007), especially 94–119, Guyer, “Introduction,” 29–30, Mintz, Sweetness and Power, Burnett, Plenty and Want, 21–63, 107–191, Sharon Stichter, Migrant Labour in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response, 1895–1975 (Harlow, UK, 1982), 70–71, Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York, 1967), 97–102, 110–20, and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, [1963] 1966), 314–18.

10. Hobsbawm sees a similar experience for the English working class during the nineteenth century, noting that the diet of “white bread, potatoes, tea and sugar” of the industrial nineteenth century “contained less of the foods which Englishmen regarded as desirable, than did earlier ones.” Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, 111. Godriver Wanga-Odhiambo also notes how sugar plantation workers in western Kenya found ration-based diets deficient compared to the “varied and nutritious” food they ate in rural reserves, but, focused more on sugar production and labor on the estates, does not take the analysis further. Wanga-Odhiambo, The Political Economy of Sugar Production in Colonial Kenya: The Asian Initiative in Central Nyanza (New York, 2016), 187.

11. Guyer, “Introduction,” 30.

12. See labor inspection reports in Kenyan National Archives (KNA)/Coast/1/9/30, KNA/Coast/1/9/31, KNA/Coast/1/9/32, KNA/Coast/1/9/35, KNA/Coast/1/9/38, KNA/Coast/1/43, and KNA/Coast/1/53, Karim Janmohamed, “A History of Mombasa, c. 1895–1939: Some Aspects of Economic and Social Life in an East African Port Town during Colonial Rule,” PhD Diss., Northwestern University (1978), 358.

13. David William Cohen, “Food Production and Food Exchange in the Precolonial Lakes Plateau Region,” in Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa (Lexington, MA, 1983), 1–18, Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT, 1977), Charles Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (New Haven, CT, 1988), and Janet Hay, “Economic Change in Luoland: Kowe, 1890–1945,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison (1972).

14. H.R. Tate, “Further notes on the Kikuyu tribe of British East Africa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 34, (1904): 258–59, G.A.S. Northcote, “The Nilotic Kavirondo,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 37 (1907), 59, and Gerhard Lindblom, The Akamba in British East Africa: An Ethnological Monograph (Uppsala, 1920), 501, 511, based on field work from 1910–1912.

15. Carolyn M. Clark, “Land and Food, Women and Power, in Nineteenth Century Kikuyu,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 50, no. 4 (1980): 357-370, John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Poverty, Wealth and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (Athens, OH, 1992), 315–504, B. Dickson, “The Eastern Borderlands of Kikuyu,” Geographical Journal 21 (1903): 37, Richard Crawshay, “Kikuyu: Notes on the Country, People, Fauna and Flora,” Geography Journal 20 (1902): 26, and C.W. Hobley, “People, Places and Prospects in British East Africa,” Geographical Journal 4 (1894): 117, and Lindblom, The Akamba, 502.

16. Lindblom, The Akamba, 502.

17. Hobley, “People, Places and Prospects,” 117.

18. H.R. Tate, “Notes on the Kikuyu and Kamba Tribes of British East Africa,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 34 (1904): 136, and Lindblom, The Akamba, 502.

19. Crawshay, “Kikuyu,” 32, and B. Dickson, “The Eastern Borderlands of Kikuyu,” Geographical Journal 21 (1903): 37.

20. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (New York: Vintage, [1938] 1965), 52–67.

21. Based on a reading of mostly secondary sources, Clark comes to a similar conclusion in “Land and Food.”

22. Quote from Northcote, “The Nilotic Kavirondo,” 60, and Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 26.

23. Felix Oswald, Alone in Sleeping Sickness Country (London, 1915), 38, the opposite page also features a photo insert of a man and woman both working with in a field with a hoe.

24. Hay, “Economic Change in Luoland,” 93, 117, n. 14.

25. Lindblom, The Akamba, 465–85. For hunting and livestock outside Ukambani, see Crawshay, “Kikuyu,” 28–29, and Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 65.

26. This was observed of the Kamba, and evidence on other communities does not indicate that hunted game was consumed by the community at large. Crawshay, “Kikuyu,” 38 (a travelogue that has information on the Kamba, not just the Kikuyu).

27. Crawshay, “Kikuyu,” 38, Tate, “Notes on the Kikuyu and Kamba,” 132, 135–36, and Northcote, “The Nilotic Kavirondo,” 58.

28. Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 26, “The Nilotic Kavirondo,” 65, Hay, “Economic Change,” 112–15, and my in-progress article manuscript, “Fishing Nets and Fertile Waters: Rural Authority and the Transformation of Fishing in Colonial Kenya's Nyanza Province.”

29. McCann contends, on an Africa-wide scale, that cooking and cuisine were gendered bodies of knowledge controlled by women, a point that, if argued in a more contingent way, is true. However, I will below demonstrate how cooking and cuisine became increasingly gendered as “masculine” through labor migration. McCann, 9–10. For kitchen labor in rural East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, see Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 15, 26, Lindblom, The Akamba, 513–14, and Tate, “Further Notes,” 260–61.

30. Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 26.

31. Crayshaw, “Kikuyu,” 35, Tate, “Further Notes,” 260, and Lindblom, The Akamba, 543–44.

32. Lindblom, The Akamba, 543–44.

33. Audrey Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (Münster, [1939], 1995), Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 8–14, and McCann, Stirring the Pot, 137–53.

34. Lindblom, The Akamba, 513, 515.

35. See the recipe in R.A.W. Procter, “The Kikuyu Market and Kikuyu Diet,” Kenya Medical Journal 3 (1926): 18–19.

36. J.C.J. Callahan, “Notes on the Foodstuffs of the Luo Tribes,” Kenyan Medical Journal 3 (1926): 58–59.

37. McCann demonstrates how maize porridges have been a recent phenomenon of the twentieth century, but leaves the “staples and starch” framework intact. McCann, Stirring the Pot, 137–53. For maize in African history more generally, see McCann, Maize and Grace.

38. Tate, “Further Notes,” 258–59, Lindblom, The Akamba, 501–7, 513–17, and Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 26–27.

39. Callahan, “Notes on the Foodstuffs,” 58–59.

40. Tate, “Further Notes,” 258–59, Lindblom, The Akamba, 501–7, 513–17, and Hobley, Eastern Uganda, 26–27.

41. Wiley, Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), 47.

42. Lindblom, The Akamba, 488, 512, 514–15.

43. Tate, “Further Notes,” 259.

44. See labor inspection reports in KNA PC/Coast/1/9, and Janmohamed, “A History of Mombasa,” 358.

45. This history is embedded in the meaning of the Swahili word posho during the nineteenth century, seen in L. Krapf, A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London, 1882), 308, and A.C. Maden, Swahili-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1903), 319. See also Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, 1980), and Stephen J. Rockel, Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2006), 141–49.

46. Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, and Janmohamed, “A History of Mombasa,” 358.

47. On the process through which rural Africans entered wage labor, see Opolot Okia, Communal Labor in Kenya: The Legitimation of Coercion (New York, 2012), Stichter, Migrant Labour, and Janmohamed, “A History of Mombasa,” 325–83.

48. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/35, Lawrence Tooth, Ag. Solicitor General to the Ag. Attorney General, November 18, 1918, and Atkins, The Moon is Dead!, 120.

49. African and Commonwealth Collection, University of Oxford (hereafter ACC) 753.14s/5/1919-20, Administration Report, 1919–20: Railways, Kenya and Uganda (Nairobi, 1920), 5.

50. Ibid.

51. ACC 753.14s/5/1920-21, Administration Report, 1920–21: Railways, Kenya and Uganda (Nairobi, 1921), 5.

52. For food supply in modern African history, see the essays in Guyer, Feeding African Cities, Jeremy Rich, A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary (Lincoln, NE, 2007), Elisabeth McMahon, “Developing Workers: Coerced and ‘Voluntary’ Labor in Zanzibar,” International Labor and Working Class History 92 (2017): 114–33, and for Kenya see Stichter, Migrant Labour, 70–71.

53. KNA Library, W.J. Simpson, Sanitary Matters in the East African Protectorate, Uganda, and Zanzibar (London, 1915), 6.

54. KNA AG/8/119, Testimony of Robbins [no first name given], Public Works Department, to the Mombasa Labor Commission of Inquiry, 1939.

55. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 53.

56. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, “Inspection of Labour Camps,” July 17, 1919.

57. Conclusion drawn from labor inspection reports in KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, quote from KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, “Inspection of Labour Camps,” July 17, 1919.

58. Testimonies of Dr. Henderson [no first name provided], H.J. Steadman, Executive Engineer, Mombasa, MacJohn, [no first name given], planter, Sheik Ali bin Salim, Liwali of Mombasa, P.H. Clarke, Director of Messrs. Boustead and Clarke, J.J. Lory, planter, K.H. Rodwell, planter, and D. Lamont, planter, Native Labour Commission.

59. Native Labour Commission: Report.

60. See the inspection reports on Mombasa workers in KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, as well as Testimony of Stedman, Native Labour Commission, and British Library (Hereafter, BL) Native Affairs Department Annual Report, 1926 (Nairobi: Government Press, 1927), 69.

61. See KNA-Nairobi PC/1/14/97, Principal Sanitation Officer, Mombasa to the Ag. Provincial Commissioner, October 6, 1919. There is also evidence of documentation on Mombasa's food markets before 1930 in Kenya National Archives, Coast Province (hereafter KNA-Coast)/UY/30/1, and KNA-Coast UY/30/2. The business of food in twentieth-century Mombasa is covered extensively in my book manuscript, Consuming Capitalism: Migration, Urban Life and Working-Class Food Systems in Twentieth-Century Kenya.

62. KNA-Nairobi DC/MSA/1/3, Annual Report: Mombasa District, 1924, 9.

63. Testimony of Henderson, Native Labour Commission.

64. For scarcity and workers’ leverage in Tanzania, see Sunseri, Vilimani, xxii, 51–71, 149–50.

65. Testimony of Lory, Native Labour Commission.

66. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/20, C.W. Hobley, Labor Supply for Magarini Syndicate, November 22, 1915, and KNA PC/Coast/1/9/31 District Commissioner (DC), Voi to Capt. H. Hoppe, May 3, 1918.

67. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/30, C.W. Hobley, Provincial Commissioner-Coast Province (hereafter PC-CP): Labour Supply for Mararini Syndicate, November 22, 1915, KNA, PC/Coast/1/9/43, Manager, Nyali Estates, to Hobley, PC-CP, July 7, 1916, and KNA, PC/Coast/1/43 Hobely, PC-CP, to Manager, Nyali Estates, July 15, 1916 and testimony from Steadman, Native Labour Commission. Africans in German Tanzania also used rumor networks to pressure employers in a context of scarcity, where Sunseri argues workers succeeding in shaping work rhythms and culture on the plantation. Sunseri, Vilimani, 69. For rumor as a broader topic in African history, see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000).

68. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/38, Inspection Report, Gazi-Gogoni Estates, September, 1917, KNA PC/Coast/1/9/38 DC, Inspection of Labor Camp, East African Estates, Ltd. 18 April, 1916. In Mombasa, agriculture was common on the less densely-populated island before 1930, but the records are unclear on the extent to which migrants were growing any of these crops. See ACC 753.14/s.40/1920(1), A Project for the Drainage and Town-Planning of Mombasa Island (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1920), 7.

69. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/38, Inspection Report, Gazi-Gogoni, September, 1917, and KNA PC/1/9/38, Inspection of Gazi Rubber and Fibre Estates, March 20, 1918.

70. Steven Stoll, “The Captured Garden: The Political Ecology of Subsistence under Capitalism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 85 (2014): 75–96.

71. Chauncy, “The Locus of Reproduction.”

72. See the final paragraph in this section for more on labor and nutrition science.

73. Desertion was also a common tactic on Tanzanian plantations. Sunseri, Vilimani, 67–71.

74. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, L.J. Lightbody, DC, to Hobley, PC-CP, December 5, 1916, and KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, DC-Rabai to C.W. Hobley, PC-CP, December 17, 1916.

75. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, Assistant District Commissioner, Mombasa (letter, receiver not clear, but likely Hobley, CP-CP and/or the Executive Engineer's Office, Public Works Department, Mombasa) September 27, 1917.

76. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, Executive Engineer's Office, Public Works Department, Mombasa to Hobley, PC-CP, October 12, 1917.

77. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, Marginalia of Hobley, PC-CP, written on DC-Rabai to Hobley, PC-CP, December 17, 1916.

78. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/51, Hobley, PC-CP, to the Executive Engineer, PWD, Mombasa, October 25, 1917.

79. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/32, Inspection of Nyali Sisal Estate, March 17, 1915.

80. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/35, Inspection of Labour Camp of Sokoke Estate, March 20, 1915.

81. KNA PC/Coast/1/9/59, Medical Officer of Health, Mombasa, to the PC-CP, February 6, 1918.

82. Conclusion on wages drawn from data on wages and rations in Mombasa and the coast during the 1910s and 1920s aggregated from labor inspection reports in KNA PC/Coast/1/9, Native Labor Commission, and annual labor reports in the Native Affairs Department Annual Reports, from the BL and the ACC (Hereafter, Coastal Wage and Ration Data). For the conservancy department, in particular, see KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, “Inspection of Labour Camps,” July 17, 1919, and KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, “Inspection of Labour Camps,” September 20, 1923.

83. See the labor reports at the end of the Native Affairs Department Annual Report, 1924 (Nairobi, 1924), and Native Affairs Department Annual Report, 1925 (Nairobi, 1925). Evidence also drawn from Coastal Wage and Ration Data. Given that wages continued to climb in Mombasa, Stichter's position that scarcity ended in Mombasa by 1921 seems overstated. Stichter, Migrant Labour, 83.

84. Coastal Wage and Ration Data.

85. Ibid. For example, employees at the Nyali Sisal Plantation (renamed Mkomani Estate during the 1920s) just outside Mombasa made Rs. 6/- with posho in 1912–1913, Shs. 7/50 to 10/- with posho in 1919 [shillings were also of slightly higher value per unit than rupees], and then Shs. 12/- per month with posho by 1923. Testimony of K.H. Rodwell, Native Labor Commission, KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, Inspection of Labor Camps,” July 24, 1919, and KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, “Inspection of Labor Camps,” September 19, 1923. For detailed conversion rates of Rupees to Shillings and Pounds, see Clayton, Anthony and Savage, Donald C., Government and Labour in Kenya, 1895–1963 (London, 1974), xxivGoogle Scholar.

86. Native Affairs Department Annual Report, 1924.

87. Coastal Wage and Ration Data, and KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, Inspection of Labor Camp, July 26, 1919, KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, Inspection of Labor Camp, September 21, 1923, KNA PC/Coast/1/9/53, Inspection of Labor Camp, October 7, 1924.

88. Native Affairs Department Annual Report, 1926 (Nairobi, 1927).

89. National Archives, United Kingdom (NA) FD/87, Report of the Committee upon Quantitative Problems in Human Nutrition: Report on the Nutrition of Miners and their Families (London, 1924), and NA FD1/4366, K. Neville Moss, “The Food Requirements of Coal Miners,” Iron and Coal Trades Review, October 31, 1924. The extension of these ideas to South Africa is examined in Wiley, Starving on a Full Stomach.

90. For colonial nutrition science and rural African food systems, see Brantley, Cynthia, “Kikuyu-Maasai Nutrition and Colonial Science: The Orr Gilks Study in the Late 1920s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30 (1997): 49–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91. Native Affairs, 1926.

92. Though I see scarcity lasting longer in Mombasa than Stitcher, she effectively analyzes the large structural transformations that changed the labor supply in colonial Kenya, see Stichter, Migrant Labour, 96, and throughout chapter three.

93. This process is examined in-depth in the second chapter of my book manuscript, Consuming Capitalism.

94. Cooper, On the African Waterfront, 44–50, and Consuming Capitalism.

95. KNA-Nairobi DC/MSA/1/4, Mombasa District Annual Report, 1930, 13.

96. ACC 753.14s/6/1939(2), Report of the Committee of Inquiry Appointed to Examine the Labour Conditions in Mombasa (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1939), 5.

97. For debt in the 1930s, see KNA-Nairobi AG/8/119, Testimonies of John Josiah Stevens, Senior Supervisor, Kenyan Landing and Shipping Company, Mwashiri Mulea, and Abdulla Mohamed to the Mombasa Labour Commission of Inquiry, 1939, and for its continuation into the 1950s, see ACC MSS/Afr.s.919, “Family Budget Survey: Mombasa,” in Mombasa Social Survey, 1956–1958 (cyclostyled), 4–5. James R. Brennan has also noted the centrality of debt to household budgets and commerce in colonial Dar es Salaam in Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH, 2012), 9–10.

98. “Family Budget Survey: Mombasa,” 4–5.

99. A conclusion aggregated from surveying the “Labor Section” of the Native Affairs Department annual reports, and then those of the Labour Department after 1945, available in near-full run in the BL and ACC.

100. BL, Native Affairs Annual Report, 1935 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1936), 183–86. The report also indicated the continuation of rural rationing on tea and sisal estates throughout Kenya generally and specially on South-Asian owned produce farms in Nyanza, and at Magadi Soda Company. For a more detailed account of labor conditions in Kenya's gold mines, including on the diets of workers, see Priscilla M. Shilaro, Failed Eldorado: Colonial Capitalism, Rural Industrialization, African Land Rights in Kenya, and the Kakamega Gold Rush, 1930–1952 (Lanham, MD, 2008), and for rationing on plantations, see Wanga-Odhiambo, The Political Economy of Sugar, 186–87.

101. BL, Labour Department Annual Report, 1945 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1946), 7.

102. BL, African Affairs Department Annual Report, 1956 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1957), 145.

103. Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough. See also, for paternalism on the Zambian Copperbelt, Chauncy, “The Locus of Reproduction.”

104. Paul Mosley, “The Development of Food Supplies to Salisbury (Harare),” in Feeding African Cities, 215.