Dependent Capitalism and the Making of the Kenyan Working Class During the Colonial Period

Abstract

This study attempts to analyse the making of the working class in Kenya during the colonial period. First, the process of primitive colonial accumulation is traced and the coercive labour system which emerged in the first few decades of Kenya's dependent capitalism is examined. The study also deals with the impact of the Second World War on the Kenyan working class and further looks into the position of Kenyan workers in a post-war world marked by profound transformations in the global and local political economies. Moreover, the study focuses on the internal recomposition of the Kenyan working cl ass during the emergency, and shows the effects that this, together with the contradictions arising out of the decolonisation process itself, had on tendencies towards the bureaucratisation and de-radical i sati on of the Kenyan trade union movement on the eve of independence. Finally, the question of the movement's relations with international labour movements is considered.

The study seeks to examine the objective conditions underlying the process of Kenyan working class formation and the subjective propensities exhibited by this class both in response to those conditions and in reshaping them . The analytical concepts and paradigms used in the study are derived from underdevelopment and Marxist perspectives on dependent capitalism, articulation of modes of production, and the processes of class formation and class struggle in peripheral social formations. The study, therefore, attempts to depart from the more 'conventional' approaches that have tended to dominate Kenyan and African labour studies, and African historiography in general.