Sydney Herbert Fazan (always known as S.H Fazan) came to Kenya in
1911 and had a long and distinguished career in the Provincial
Administration. He retired in 1949 and became a settler. He finished writing
this history in 1969 at the age of 80 but no publisher could be found to take
the manuscript at a time when colonial history faculties in the UK were
becoming increasingly anti-imperial. Fazan's family recently resurrected the
manuscript and passed it to Dr John Lonsdale, Emeritus Professor of Modern
African History at the University of Cambridge, and it is thanks to him that it has at last been rescued and published. His twenty page Foreword to the
book is both a professional review of the history and an appreciation of
Fazan's career and of his unrivalled firsthand knowledge of Kenya's
development as a colony through to independence.
The ICS had for many years recruited their administrators from Oxford and
Cambridge by rigorous examination. Fazan was a classics scholar at Christ
Church and was ICS quality. He was one of the first District Officers to be
recruited direct from Oxford into the Kenya Provincial Administration. (Most
of the early DC's had been with the Imperial British East Africa Company).
Fazan did several tours as a DO in Coast Province and in Kamba districts.
After that, he was DC in Nyeri and in Kiambu where he had the delicate task
of defusing the crisis caused by attempts by missionaries to suppress
female circumcision. He was later Provincial Commissioner in Coast and
Nyanza Provinces. Everywhere he served he gained an acute insight into
tribal customs and local history.
While in Kiambu he was a member of the government committee
investigating Kikuyu land tenure. This led to his appointment as Secretary of
the Carter Land Commission set up by the Colonial Office in 1931 to report
on the vexed question of Native (especially Kikuyu) land and the White
Highlands. Fazan not only ran the enquiry and wrote the lengthy report but
also drafted its recommendations. These were accepted and re-set the
boundaries of the White Highlands which lasted right through to
independence. Kenya's turbulent history had divided white opinion between
the "pro-native" and the "pro-settler". Government policy in the 1920's had
wavered between the two. Fazan had agonised over the rights and wrongs
of the settlers and well understood the divisive politics of land in Kenya which
he later realised were the main cause of the emergence of Mau Mau.
After war service as Political Liaison Officer with the KAR, Fazan retired in
1949 to a small farm at Tigoni, near Kiambu, from where he observed first
the surge in Kikuyu nationalism though the KAU and then the build up of Mau
Mau violence leading to the Emergency. In 1960 he published his "History of
the Loyalists", in effect a history of the Mau Mau rebellion through to the end
of the Emergency in January that year. It is a robust defence of the Kikuyu
Guard, the militia formed by the Provincial Administration and officered by
temporary DO's recruited mainly from the Kenya Regiment. Fazan rightly
saw the rebellion from the very beginning as a civil war between the Loyalists
and the Mau Mau. He did not, however, agree with much in the Corfield
Report, the official history of the Emergency also produced in 1960, which
concluded that "Kenyatta had callously imposed the horrors of the Mau Mau on the Kikuyu". And he dissented from Governor Renison who branded
Kenyatta as "the leader of darkness and death".
Fazan saw early independence for Kenya as the right goal but in the 1950's
"early" meant twenty years ahead. He had been hopeful then that Kenya
could evolve constitutionally to a multiracial elected government. He was
taken by surprise by the Lancaster House Conference of 1961 which
demanded African majority rule and led rapidly to independence in 1963.
He deplored the rapid exodus of the Colonial Service, settlers and Asians
which followed, at a time when Kenya's development was gathering pace.
But his final chapter ''The Wind of Change" ends on a note of optimism: "As
for the political stability of the country, it owes a very great deal to the triumph
of leadership of its first President, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. In the years
succeeding independence he fostered a spirit of amnesty and oblivion of past
enmities and he succeeded in controlling the exuberance of his own former
partisans, the Land Freedom Army". Wise words indeed when written in
1969.
There is little that is factually new in this history. Colonial Kenya has been
the subject of more books, articles and research by historians and journalists
than any other former colony, a fact well illustrated by the scores of scholarly
footnotes in John Lonsdale's Foreword. But Fazan's history is unique in that
it was written by someone who helped to make that history, having been in
Kenya Government service both in the field and in the Secretariat for nearly
forty years. It was also written soon after independence, with the conviction
that British colonial rule had been successful in bringing Kenya in just over
half a century from tribal life to nation state, and from subsistence economy
to productive farming and marketing. It is impossible today to find a colonial
historian like Fazan who is not merely judgmental about but also acclaims
the achievements of those who came to Kenya in the Colonial Service or as
settlers, missionaries and traders. Fazan was "one of us", and he writes as
one of us. His book, as the title suggests, is indeed Kenya "observed". It is a
reassuring tonic to read it, and for those of us who were fortunate enough to
have served in Kenya to be reminded that the years we spent there, despite
all the pain and controversies that dogged its history, were not in vain. I had
only one regret after finishing this remarkable book. I just wished that I could
have read it when I was a young District Officer.
|