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Regulation and Revolution

Frank Furedi

• Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London

“The Social Composition of the Mau Mau Movement in the White Highlands.” Journal of Peasant Studies (UK) 1 (July 1974): 486–505.

Does state regulation spawn its own destroyers?

To answer this question we need to ask another, drawing on a recent example from Africa of the late 1940s and the 1950s: what social strata in Kenya's White Highlands supported the native revolutionary and independence movement known as the Mau Mau? This question highlights the key conflicts between the native peoples and the British colonial state.

Citing existing historical-sociological literature, including government surveys and reports, we can sketch out the policies of the white European settler regime which bore hard on the natives. A pattern of state intervention becomes transparent—measures gradually drive native entrepreneurs, peasant farmers, and artisans to the margin, as the whites reduce them to wage laborers by state coercion.

One implicit lesson is that peasants, when allowed to compete, rapidly develop “market rationality” and produce a surplus. The major conclusion is that in this agrarian struggle it was precisely from the discontented, talented, native Kikuyu strata—petty bourgeiosie, or the natural capitalists, artisans and petty traders (especially the latter two groups)—that the revolutionary cadres recruited themselves. These cadres gave leadership and coherence to the efforts of hard-pressed squatters, the dispossessed peasants, against the mercantilism of the British rulers.

This example illustrates the natural capitalism of peoples once introduced to world markets and their ability to compete unless suppressed by law.