Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism

Abstract

Ambler concludes with the reflection that those convinced of the inherency and intractability of animosity, the peoples of nineteenth-century central Kenya have a story to tell. (p. 157). For most of his book, that story is exemplary: precolonial central Kenya knew nothing of tribes until the end of the era. Ambler has conceived his work as a people's history rather than a history of Peoples; a history of rather than ethnic groups,of shallow lineages with wide networks of affiliation, trade, and labor. This last was mostly free, at times dependent, and in the worst of times (especially for women), virtually slave; Ambler is excellent on the social differentiations of survival. And the story is convincing, even though it may not be the only one. The research base is impressive. Virtually all the early European eyewitnesses have been consulted, likewise 172 local informants, of whom no less than 36 were men old enough to have served in the First World War. The area of Ambler's researches is vast, effectively a quadrant of which the southeastern apex is Kamba country, somewhere near Kitui, and whose circumference arcs from southern Gikuyuland in the west to the Meru foothills of Mt. Kenya in the north. Nevertheless, the evidence which relates to the nodal points of economic and political activity which really mattered is sufficiently dense to evoke not only confidence, but at times admiration in the reader that so much can be said about people whom one had supposed were mere phantoms in the wings of history. Indeed, Ambler performs the historian's best (and in Africa often the rarest) service to the past, in that he really does bring the dead alive. He does so partly because of the imaginative ease of his writing, but that in itself has been made possible only through his hard-won, intimate, understanding of how people in small societies and harsh environments do actually arrange their relations of production, protection and exchange, not just to survive from day to day but also to control what past experience tells them is bound to be an uncertain future.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 132 citations exist upstream.