Between the State and the Community Appointed Chiefs and the Politics of Indirect Rule in Colonial Turkana, Kenya, c. 1918 to 1963

Abstract

This paper explores the process of the colonial administration in Turkana District of northern Kenya in its attempt to assert its authority over a society with no precolonial history of centralised chieftainship through the creation of chiefs. The paper draws on the methodological approach suggested by a recent scholarship that combines colonial archival documents and oral history gathered from elders and descendants of chiefs to suggest the chieftaincy instituted under the Native Authority Ordinance was not a straightforward colonial instrument or indigenous leadership system. Rather, the appointed chiefs were in a liminal and sometimes fragile role between the impositions of the colonial state and the expectations of the populace from which they could derive no legitimacy but only a kind of delegated authority. This is examined in this paper through the conquest and disarmament of Turkana in the early twentieth century, through the extension of tax and labour obligations, and through the chiefs' various reactions of negotiation, resistance or benefiting from the power vested in them. It argues that the colonial chieftaincy, with its ambiguities, had a continuing institutional legacy that had an impact on local governance long after independence in 1963.