Cross-cultural intimacy, migration and race in British East Africa, 1895-1920s

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the question of cross-cultural intimacy in relation to race, gender, and migration in British East Africa (BEA) between 1895 and the 1920s. The first decades of British colonial rule in BEA were characterised by various movements of people, including the immigration of Indian workers and traders, the arrival of European settlers, and the forced displacement of indigenous groups, as well as internal mobility triggered by the colonial labour system and urban development. At the same time, the period witnessed the progressive delineation of racial and ethnic boundaries which were materialised through spatial segregation, the institutionalisation of unequal treatments, and the tightening of racial thinking. This dissertation reflects on these historical developments through the topic of cross-cultural intimacy, which is taken as both a cause and effect of these political, economic, and social transformations. I use the notion of ‘cross-cultural intimate encounters’ to refer to different cases of close relationships that represented a transgression of racial boundaries along which British colonial society was supposedly organised. This notion allows me to consider within the same framework encounters of varying nature involving distinctive groups of people: marriage between local women and Indian migrants; British administrators cohabiting with African women; indigenous runaway wives re-marrying outside of their communities; urban prostitution; and cases of sexual abuse. In this dissertation, I examine how racial, sexual and gender norms were conceived and differently interpreted, how they were experienced and, above all, how they were challenged. I aspire to provide us with a more detailed understanding of the possibilities for cross-cultural intimate encounters by exploring the gap between colonial knowledge and the realities of these relations. Overall, this thesis addresses how the handling and effect of ‘transgressive’ intimate relations changed over time and, in addition, analyses the fluidity of racial, gender and sexual conceptual categories in early twentieth-century colonial Kenya.