Well written and extensively researched, Race and Empire details the growth of a eugenics movement in colonial Kenya during the inter-war period. The bogus science linking race with intelligence found a sympathetic audience amongst Nairobi's white chattering class, who not only embraced the metropolitan idea of eugenics but gave it a distinctive twist derived from the colonial context. Rather than sharing the British Malthusian fear of population growth, proponents of eugenics in Kenya were rather more concerned with African urbanization and modernization. Eugenics promised a form of social control over what Andrew Burton has recently labelled ‘the African Underclass’ and what colonial officials referred to as the ‘detribalised native’. Race and Empire thus fits neatly into both the literature on the production of colonial knowledge and that on law, criminality and deviancy within African colonies.
Proving once again a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, leading lights within colonial society in Kenya during the 1930s championed the cause of eugenics. Although small in number, these advocates of eugenics were not short of influence. They included senior colonial administrators and their wives, members of the colony's legislature and even the owner of the East African Standard newspaper. Missionaries were notable by their absence. Campbell explains the support for eugenics amongst sections of European society as an attempt to resolve the contradiction of colonialism. After the Devonshire Declaration of 1923, the administration in Nairobi was rhetorically committed to the notion of African paramountcy while at the same time economically dependent, or so it thought, upon European settlers. African agitation for greater access to education from the early 1930s appeared to the settlers to be a worrying indicator of an erosion of white privilege. The appeal, to this extreme settler position, of a brand of knowledge that suggested that significant investment in African education was not just politically inexpedient but scientifically ineffective in combating failure is self-evident.
The book compellingly describes the interface between metropolitan debates and their colonial application. Campbell details the exchange of ideas between eugenicists in Nairobi, particularly Drs. H. L. Gordon and F. W. Vint, and London. However, Campbell is also alert to the considerable scepticism towards eugenics maintained by the Colonial Office. With Whitehall controlling the purse-strings, that scepticism ensured that eugenicist-inspired policies would not see the light of day. Instead eugenics remained an abstract concept rather than the inspiration for policy in any significant way. Ironically, in order to establish the control necessary for the implementation and monitoring of eugenicist experiments, an enormous expansion of health and educational provision for the African population was necessary. That expansion, however, was well beyond the means of the colonial government, and so eugenics died before it could have much actual impact on the lives of the African majority in the colony. The marriage of social progression and racism met its match in colonial parsimony.
That is not to suggest that Campbell sees no lasting effects of eugenics. As Campbell describes, the leading light in the Kenyan eugenicist movement, Dr. Henry Gordon, was, in his capacity as Visiting Physician at the Mathari Mental Hospital, able to exert a considerable influence over the development of notions of criminal insanity and the treatment of juvenile offenders. Furthermore, the advocates of eugenics left a lasting impression on the ideas of the infamous post-war psychiatrist, J. C. Carothers, despite the latter's preference for nurture over nature when attempting to identify presumed racially defined psychiatric characteristics.
While a sense of African reception is missing from the book, Campbell can hardly be faulted for this, given the subject matter and the need to be reliant on colonial archival sources. What would have been interesting to read more about was the reception of the debate amongst Kenya's Asian population. The book makes one tantalizing reference to the attendance of Indians at the public meetings held by the Kenya Society for the Study of Race Improvement, at which they constituted around 10 per cent of the audience. Bearing in mind the Devonshire Declaration was provoked by Asian rather than African demands for equality with European settlers, Asians were clearly more than disinterested bystanders in any discussion of race and citizenship in colonial Kenya. More too could have been said of the Kenyan opponents of eugenics, particularly given the small minority of Europeans who participated in these debates.
In conclusion, Race and Empire is a powerful treatment of the limitations of colonial rule, the exchange and mutation of ideas between colony and metropole, and the complexity of notions of race that lay at the heart of the British imperial project. Innovative, theoretically sound and artfully constructed, it is highly recommended.
