Between the State and the Community: Appointed Chiefs and Indirect Rule in Colonial Turkana, Kenya, c. 1918–1963

Abstract

This article examines how the colonial administration in Turkana District, northern Kenya, created appointed chiefs in a society with no precolonial tradition of centralised chieftaincy, and how those chiefs negotiated, resisted and benefited from their office between c. 1918 and 1963. It reads colonial administrative records held in the Kenya National Archives against oral testimony from elders and descendants of chiefs. The evidence indicates that the chieftaincy created under the Native Authority Ordinance was neither a straightforward colonial instrument nor an indigenous leadership system. Chiefs held a delegated and fragile authority between state demands for taxation, labour and stock control and community expectations shaped by elders, age-sets and households. The article argues that chiefly agency is best understood as a shifting combination of negotiation, resistance and benefit rather than as collaboration or resistance. It concludes that the office was retained at independence in 1963 and suggests, with qualification, that its ambiguities influenced later local governance.