EMBODIED RACISM AND THE INFRASTRUCTURES OF REGISTRATION

Across disciplinary fields, scholars have often focused on the sorting and classificatory implications of identity cards.Footnote ¹⁴ Timothy Longman, for example, notes that ID cards helped to ‘fix group identities throughout colonial and postcolonial Africa’.Footnote ¹⁵ Several studies have also cited the links between colonial-era identity cards and the forces that generated the Rwandan genocide.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet while ID cards undoubtedly helped to codify ethnic and racial categories, civil registration and identification systems in Kenya and elsewhere were not always driven by a panoptic desire for surveillance or a classificatory longing for taxonomic order.Footnote ¹⁷

Rather, the kipande scheme was first introduced at the behest of white settlers as a means of solving the problem of African resistance to wage labor. In the early twentieth century, white settler employers in East Africa faced persistent labor shortages and, looking aspirationally towards southern Africa, petitioned protectorate authorities for the creation of a pass system.Footnote ¹⁸ As one white settler witness explained to the 1912-13 Labour Commission, with a pass system ‘on the same lines as the South African one … it would be possible to get deserters back’.Footnote ¹⁹ Though disinclined towards any legislation that might restrict the free movement of labor, the Commission considered ‘a system of identification of natives’ to be ‘absolutely essential’ due to the ‘the absence of any means of identifying deserters’.Footnote ²⁰ In 1915, the protectorate government introduced the Native Registration Ordinance, though it was held in abeyance until after the First World War.Footnote ²¹ Once introduced, the Ordinance proved a significant deterrent against desertions.Footnote ²²

A technology of governance taken for granted in much of Kenyan historiography, the kipande quickly became a fixture within the Colony's labor structure. Yet the links between the registration and the migrant labor systems are not well understood.Footnote ²³ Much emphasis has been placed on the ID card itself but not on the vast infrastructure supporting it. This ranged from chiefs, who validated Africans’ identities and ethnic particulars, to registration agents, who captured fingerprints and submitted paperwork, to fingerprint experts, who categorized and filed millions of Kenyans’ biometric and biographical data.

This human infrastructure supported a paper infrastructure that linked the body to what Allan Sekula refers to as ‘the central artifact’ of nineteenth-century realism: ‘the filing cabinet’.Footnote ²⁴ The kipande listed the holder's personal details, including name, ethnicity (‘tribe’), Native Reserve, and thumbprint. Such biodata existed in duplicate in the Central Finger Print Bureau in Nairobi, which also held the ten-print ink records of all kipande holders. Using methods developed in colonial India and South Africa, Kenyan officials categorized Africans’ fingerprints using indexable codes, which allowed for a vast, searchable biometric database that could be cross-referenced against criminal records.Footnote ²⁵

Though often performative (the registration system always exhausted administrative capacity), this method enabled settlers and colonial officials to locate and verify the identity of any African subject issued with a kipande. Such a feat of mimesis was performed for the sub-committee tasked with re-evaluating the registration system in 1946, as pressure from African leaders mounted. At their very first meeting, the Committee toured the registration section of the Labour Department and were regaled with a demonstration of biometrics: ‘An unknown African was interviewed outside the building and requested to give a set of his finger prints … A set of finger prints were taken and within a short period the African was identified’.Footnote ²⁶ The ‘rapidity and accuracy’ of this presentation impressed the Committee and reinforced a hardening administrative belief that fingerprints were the apex of identification, one that affixed the African body to the archive.Footnote ²⁷ The efficacy of this analog system foreshadowed the electronic hyper-speed of today's computerized databases.

This curated performance nevertheless veiled the day-to-day messiness of the registration system. The kipande was a living document — one that could be torn up, forged, overlooked, carried by a friend or relative, used to solicit bribes, or retooled by employee and employer. Among the seemingly immutable bodily personal details, it also bore marks of superiors and a record of one's interaction with the wage labor system. Endorsed by employers upon discharge, the kipande was filled with information regarding an African's employment history, including their wages and rations. These sections were particularly vulnerable to manipulation by employers willing to stretch the provisions of the law.Footnote ²⁸ The practice of withholding signatures, for example, enabled employers to keep African laborers in their service indefinitely. Though this practice that may have been welcomed by some African laborers who sought exemption from forced communal labor on the reserves, it also prevented workers (who were effectively kept on reserve) from being released to find other employment.Footnote ²⁹ The ‘evil of granting indefinite leave’ was one of the many ways that the registration system, rather than facilitating the mobility of labor, constricted labor supply by accommodating the needs of white settler capital.Footnote ³⁰

The kipande brought Africans into asymmetric negotiation not only with white settlers, but also with African civil servants.Footnote ³¹ Every year, between 3,000 and 5,000 Africans were prosecuted for offences ranging from ‘failure to carry the kipande, mutilation and alteration’, to ‘the carrying of someone else's kipande’, which entailed hefty fines or several months’ imprisonment.Footnote ³² Africans could be arrested if they could not produce their certificate while moving outside the reserves, a policy that greatly restricted their freedom of movement in urban areas.Footnote ³³ Such policing practices were mediated not through a Weberian prism of bureaucratic efficiency but through the indiscriminate and often highly discretionary methods of low-ranking African police officers. In his memoir, Waruhiu Itote (General China) described how the Nairobi police, upon doing a sweep, would line up those detained by calling wafupi (short people) to the back and warefu (tall people) to the front. ‘Only they would pronounce it “warevu” which means clever people, that is those who had money for a bribe’.Footnote ³⁴ Inaudible and invisible to many colonial officials, such on-the-ground practices speak to the way that money, under many circumstances, became a de facto pass.Footnote ³⁵

Although African workers found various ways of evading arrest, deserting unpopular employers, striking deals with more favorable ones, discarding vipande, and adopting new personas, they always stood in danger of detection through the filing cabinet. Frequently treated as a more reliable witness than its possessor, the kipande was predicated on the silencing of African voices and the granting of literary and narrative power to state official and employers. In 1938, after checking a man's fingerprints, the Registrar of Natives confirmed that a worker on Brooke Farm in central Kenya was ‘in wrongful possession’ of another person's registration certificate and assured the employer that ‘steps will be taken to arrange for his arrest’.Footnote ³⁶ Reserved almost exclusively for the African worker, fingerprinting was a mute technology that inscribed and archived bodily markers and circumvented the political economy of literacy, enabling subjects to be tracked and identified regardless of their own voiced explanations or written narratives.Footnote ³⁷

While the fingerprint was a code intelligible only to those trained in biometric techniques, writing too could exceed its semantic meaning, sign and signifier splitting off in new directions, marks on paper becoming cypher. In 1925, the colonial government was forced to amend the Native Registration Ordinance to prevent employers from signing off vipande in red ink. As the Chief Registrar of Natives discovered, the use of red ink was intended to ‘warn potential employers that the holder of a certificate bearing such an endorsement was unsatisfactory’ and was widely ‘used by the Nairobi housewives’.Footnote ³⁸ Not unlike the semantic slippage of African police officers, white settlers had developed their own coded mode of communication to voice their complaints covertly, circumventing the modest constraints imposed on them by colonial authorities.Footnote ³⁹ There was no such recourse for dissatisfied African workers. As former colonial officer Ross W. McGregor noted in his pointed indictment of British rule in Kenya, the registration ‘system was designed to operate to the advantage of the worst employers’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such power dynamics were nevertheless turned on their head by an anonymous settler, who justified the use of red ink in a letter to the Daily Observer's editor in November 1925: ‘What other remedy has an employer? We are completely at their mercy. Some method must be devised whereby a boy's [sic] record may be known, otherwise I am afraid there will be serious trouble’.Footnote ⁴¹ Defensive settler responses were colored by anxieties about African men, particularly those working in close proximity to white women.Footnote ⁴² Though the registration system broadly restricted African freedom of movement, it gave greater rights of mobility to male laborers. African women, whom colonial authorities imagined as confined to the rural household, made up a relatively small portion of the formally registered (i.e. legal) migrant labor pool.Footnote ⁴³ This uneven sex ratio exacerbated concerns about the safety and respectability of white women. After a spate of crimes involving European women and children, the colonial government introduced the Domestic Servants Registration Ordinance, which bolstered white women's control over the boundaries of the gated household.Footnote ⁴⁴ From 1927 onwards, any African employed as a domestic servant had to carry a pocket register (known as a red book).Footnote ⁴⁵ Like early versions of the kipande, the red book included a section where notes could be recorded on an African's character. Opaque to any African worker who could not read English, it was often used by European women to disparage or favor African workers.Footnote ⁴⁶

The use of the pocket register indicates that biometrics never swept away the ‘slow and messy and unreliable paper-based systems of government’.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Séverine Awenengo Dalberto, Richard Banégas, and Armando Cutolo suggest, biometrics remained entangled in the documentary state.Footnote ⁴⁸ In fact, ID cards also generated novel modes of bureaucratic writing. This documentary assemblage was veiled, in many ways, from African discursive and communicative practices. The kipande existed within a hierarchy of documentation that linked literacy to civilizational achievement, reputational status, and racial superiority. This mirrored patterns in Britain where, as Edward Higgs notes, bodily identification (including branding and fingerprinting) had long-standing associations with criminality.Footnote ⁴⁹

Throughout the 1930s, literacy served as a marker of difference and a proxy for race, which enabled Kenyan officials to justify the registration system in the face of mounting criticism. By the early 1930s, the kipande had come under the scrutiny of the Labour Party and Colonial Office, which sought to avoid running afoul of the International Labour Organization (ILO).Footnote ⁵⁰ Lord Passfield, the newly appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies and a more progressively minded Fabian, was particularly troubled by African testimony elicited during the 1931 Joint Select Committee on Closer Union in East Africa. The testimonials reported practices that seemed to contravene the tenets of the 1923 Devonshire White Paper, which had rhetorically affirmed the paramountcy of African interests.Footnote ⁵¹ Appearing before the Committee, Kenyan witnesses had expressed grievances about the registration system, while those from Uganda and Tanganyika had complained about its potential introduction to their regions. Speaking on behalf of African representatives from Kenya, Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu testified that the ‘registration certification confers no benefit of any sort to natives. … We consider it a token of slavery’.Footnote ⁵² Invoking slavery would have no doubt roused a Colonial Office invested in the myth-making surrounding British abolitionist history and wary of the ongoing use of forced labor in the colonies.Footnote ⁵³

Dismissing such accusations, the Governor of Kenya defended the kipande system to a concerned Colonial Office on the grounds that ‘illiteracy demands special treatment’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The ‘native’, he reasoned, could not read nor write and lacked a fixed address. Local naming customs, according to the Governor, also rendered African subjects inscrutable: ‘The native … commonly has a number of different names and he changes his names at different periods of life. In some cases he is even prevented by tribal custom from giving to a stranger the name by which he is known in his village’.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was in both African and government interests, he argued, to maintain the existing registration system. Talk of cultural factors (such as non-standardized African naming and spelling conventions) became the recourse of colonial administrators.

By insisting that registration was ‘based upon illiteracy rather than upon race’, colonial officials were able to displace problems of racism onto a discussion of culture.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet such arguments were thinly veiled. Under the Native Exemption Ordinance, English-literate Africans (upon payment of a fee) could acquire a certificate signed by the Director of Education that relieved them of the obligation to carry a kipande. However, as noted by the Governor himself, only four people in the entire colony were issued with an exemption certificate in 1931.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such narrow exceptionalism belied the government's professed commitment to racial impartiality and exposed the discrepancy between metropolitan ideas of liberalism and colonial practices.

Within Kenyan historiography, the Native Registration Ordinance has largely been understood through the lens of the migrant labor system. Historians have pointed out that the kipande enabled white settlers and other employers to enforce labor contracts, track down deserters, and maintain African wages at an artificially low rate. Indeed, registration allowed the government to reduce African workers’ bargaining power while instituting a tenuous balancing act between facilitating labor mobility and enforcing racial and ethnic segregation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Still, the kipande was experienced not only as a form of labor control but also as chain of embodied practices, what I refer to as biometric rituals, which marked blacks as inherently suspect. As the Kenyan writer R. Mugo Gatheru noted in his memoir, the registration system was grounded in ‘the assumption that a large number or proportion of the Africans were inherently dishonest’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It served to normalize, through bodily and spatial practices, the untrustworthiness of black self-presentation and self-representation. Gatheru described a system that erased distinctions of character among Africans: ‘In Kenya a policeman could stop an African on the road or in the street and demand that he produce his Kipande — regardless of whether the African concerned was as wise as Socrates, as holy as St Francis [sic], or as piratical as Sir Francis Drake’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The humiliation of registration was often captured in more starkly dehumanizing terms. As another Kenyan memoirist, Muga Gicaru, explained, the kipande was popularly known to Kikuyu speakers as ‘mbugi, or “goat's bell”’.Footnote ⁶¹

REFORMISM AND BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA

Registration created market-based reputational identities for populations with limited English literacy skills, whose legal identities had not been shaped by a history of expansive, paper-based bureaucracy.Footnote ⁶² For several decades, this system reinforced work contracts that tacked uneasily between free and forced labor. In fact, the kipande helped give meaning to the very concept of ‘free labor’ by differentiating between wage employment in white-dominated sectors and the forced and often invisible, feminized forms of work that tended to occur on reserves.Footnote ⁶³

The significance of registration, however, far exceeded market logics. By the end of the interwar period, the kipande had become an emotive symbol and performative practice that gave texture to Kenya's racialized caste system.Footnote ⁶⁴ Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, substantial debate had emerged amongst members of the Colonial Office, colonial administrators, unofficial and official members of the Legislative Council (Legco), and employers and white settlers of differing ideological persuasions over the value and defensibility of registration. In spite of concerns about its mounting expense, decreasing utility, and growing political liability, the kipande survived amidst bureaucratic inertia, defensive white reactions, and the logic of reformism.

By the 1930s, the registration system had begun to break down. Already under scrutiny from the Colonial Office, the kipande's efficacy was further undermined by Depression-era budget cuts. It became easier for an increasingly literate African population to forge or discard vipande and gravitate to more popular employers. Additionally, a growing number of unregistered Africans were able to obtain work with European, Arab, and Asian employers who found it expedient to evade registration and reporting requirements.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1935, the Chief Registrar of Natives attributed the growing problem of desertion to ‘the thoughtless reductions that were made in my staff in 1933’ and the ‘“emasculation” of the Native Registration system’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The loss of white masculine power appeared as a sublimated fear amongst defenders of the kipande system, which included several white settler farmer associations.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1936, Sir Alan Pim, a financial advisor to the Colonial Office, suggested the kipande had outlived its utility and be scrapped ‘as a possible economy’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet, as Anthony Clayton and Donald Savage note, Pim ‘failed to recognize that the kipande was more than a system of control. It was also a symbol of European domination as the much more spectacular debate over abolition in the nineteen-forties would show’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The political strength of a small, but vocal white minority ensured that debates over registration gravitated towards reform rather than abolition. In 1937, the colonial government amended the Native Registration Ordinance to streamline the system and curb some of its worst abuses.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet this neither addressed African grievances nor allayed concerns within the metropole.Footnote ⁷¹ In a 1938 editorial in The Times, Archdeacon W. E. Owen, an inveterate colonial critic, cited the cruelties of the Ordinance: ‘Our pass system, represented in Kenya by the “kipandi”, has consigned about 50,000 Africans to gaol or other punishment since its inception about 18 years ago. It still operates, and under it about 3,000 are convicted every year’.Footnote ⁷²

Prior to the Second World War, the robust discourse of reformism reflected a pragmatic liberalism that enabled British and colonial officials to respond to such critics while continuing to appease right-wing elements of the white settler population. Reformism was predicated on a belief in the administrative neutrality of registration whose fundamental legitimacy, in the official mind, could be retained upon ‘removing certain features which may be open to objection’.Footnote ⁷³ This logic, however, ran counter to the arguments of African and Indian representatives who, by the mid 1940s, were escalating demands for complete abolition of the registration system. Many leaders were also attempting to manage or co-opt more militant political forces in the country. Amidst a mounting strike wave, political actors including Jomo Kenyatta, who took over the leadership of the Kenya African Union (KAU) in 1947, publicly advocated for ‘the wholesale burning of the kipande’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In so doing, they drew upon a long tradition of strategic civil disobedience dating back to Gandhi's anti-pass campaigns of the turn of the century and Harry Thuku's anti-kipande protests of the 1920s.Footnote ⁷⁵ The threat of physically destroying the kipande signaled both an act of defiance and a desire to radically rework the social and political relations that were not merely reflected, but also constituted through identification practices.Footnote ⁷⁶

Anti-kipande protests took on new meaning in the context of the changed and charged post-war political climate. In the wake of the Second World War, the newly elected British Labour government had begun to reimagine empire and reconfigure the racial order. In the name of developmentalism and political reform, the Kenyan administration gradually came to accept the presence of a permanent African urban class and began implementing incremental polices of Africanization.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rethinking registration became part and parcel of this broader transformation. In 1946, the Kenyan Labour Department established a sub-committee to assess existing registration legislation. The seven-member Committee, which included non-European leaders A. B. Patel, Eliud Mathu, and Francis Khamisi, began drafting a major overhaul of the system.Footnote ⁷⁸ A transformed labor market rather than political imperatives alone also made such legislative changes possible. ‘Without in any way underestimating the impact of the anti-kipande protests’, notes Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘it has to be recognized that by this time the kipande was no longer very useful as a means of controlling labour because the problems associated with labour shortages had long since disappeared’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Tensions between abolitionism and reformism nevertheless colored debates over the kipande's future. Skepticism about the limits of legislative change were perhaps best captured by a 1946 satirical article published in Mwalimu, an African newspaper edited by KAU Secretary Khamisi. Translated from Swahili by suspicious colonial intelligence agents, the article dismissed government efforts at reform.Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘We are all glad to note’, the article begins with faux enthusiasm, that ‘[His Excellency] the Governor’ will have ‘his finger prints taken in order to possess the card which is given to the Africans in Kenya’.Footnote ⁸¹ Still as the author explained, the Governor would need to go further: ‘First of all he must change his colour, he must be a blackman and never again a white man’.Footnote ⁸² He would also have to ‘walk along the River Road’ (one of the main thoroughfares for African workers) and ‘halt, when he is ordered by Police, in order to produce his Kipande’.Footnote ⁸³ Without facing these inequities, ‘his getting of Kipande is just “Bure” (is of no account)’ and ‘he [the Governor] is just treating the Africans in Kenya with contempt, despising, scolding them while they are in distress’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, racial discrimination would not be effaced by a few inky white fingertips. As this piece of satire bitingly suggests, many African political thinkers saw government efforts to deracialize registration as a performative gesture that allowed larger issues of racial inequality to remain unaddressed.

Labor organizations such as the African Workers’ Federation in Mombasa and the Nairobi Taxi Drivers’ Union also rejected the proposed reforms, which colonial officials continued to describe, in often paternalistic terms, as a progressive and necessary administrative move. As one colonial intelligence agent dismissively remarked: ‘I think we ought to endeavor to explain to these stupid people that taxi-cab drivers in London and New York’ also have ‘to wear a large badge’ and ‘exhibit their licenses’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Committed to the idea of identification as a neutral and universal feature of modern life, he refused to entertain the complaints of a more radicalized and politicized sector of workers for whom registration was yoked to a charged, racialized past.

In 1947, after ample debate in the Legislative Council, the Native Registration Ordinance was amended and repealed and the Registration of Persons Ordinance introduced.Footnote ⁸⁶ These legislative changes introduced universal fingerprint registration for all men in the Colony, separated identity cards from employment records, barred the police from arbitrarily arresting Africans who could not produce identification, and removed the obligation that Africans carry a certificate of registration on them at all times.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mathu, until 1946 the sole African representative in the Kenya Legislative Council, conceded to these reforms, which promised to deracialize identity documents, lessen police abuses, and improve the labor conditions for African workers. As a gesture towards racial equity, the colonial government promised to begin the registration drive with the European and Asian populations.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the interim, Africans could apply to a registration officer to have their kipande cut in half — thus divorcing their proof of identity on the upper portion of the certificate from their employment record on the lower half.Footnote ⁸⁹ Women, whose legal identities were still mediated through husbands and fathers, were largely excluded from this discussion.

Although the 1947 Registration of Persons Ordinance marked a significant victory for African leaders, it fell short of African demands and also furthered the normalization of a technology intimately linked to the history of British imperial expansion and capitalist domination.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, this reformist drive produced its own logic, enabling reactionary white settlers to frame their opposition to fingerprinting within a critique of authoritarianism and through the same liberal terms long used by colonial authorities to defend the kipande.

WHITE BACKLASH

The Registration of Persons Ordinance was passed with little fanfare in 1947 despite some objections from the Indian government and representatives of the Indian communities in Kenya.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet only two years later, when the colonial government sought to implement the terms of the Ordinance, a vocal group of white settlers began to mobilize against the legislation. Fingerprinting became a metonym for a wider set of post-war anxieties — the threat of authoritarianism, the rise of socialism, the emergence of new powers on the world stage, and the growing demands of educated African nationalists — all of which seemed to spell the loss of British prestige and white power.Footnote ⁹²

The discourses circulating among the more intransigent factions of the white settler community were given expression by R. R. Stokes, a Labour Member of Parliament in the UK. In 1949, he wrote to the Colonial Office on behalf of a former constituent living in Kenya:

Etienne Balibar argues that oblique cultural racism is a product of the post-Cold War era. Yet, as this letter attests, culture talk has long been a feature of colonial discourse.Footnote ⁹⁴ The language of liberal reformism was easily appropriated by more resolutely racist and intransigent settlers, who used literacy as an excuse to reject universal fingerprinting.

Framed as a matter of universal civil liberties, imperial loyalty, and British prestige, the complaints of a tiny, yet powerful, minority gained reception among metropolitan authorities and Members of Parliament. The letters entreating metropolitan officials to intervene on settlers’ behalf portrayed universal registration as an appeasement of radical forces amongst the African population. In December 1951, a Kenyan settler wrote to the Colonial Secretary to protest that fingerprinting was an affront to her husband, a decorated soldier who had fought in both world wars: ‘It is iniquitous that men like my husband … should be reduced to the level of illiterate Africans and be forced under threat of prosecution, to give their thumb and finger prints on an Identity Card — for no earthly reason than to appease a handful of semi-educated but politically minded Africans’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The problem of white backlash — today associated with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe — is hardly new.Footnote ⁹⁶ A perceived affront to white privilege, fingerprinting became a rallying cry for many colonists anxious about the changing post-war order. In April 1949, Mathu wrote that ‘the African is now astounded to see that the white unofficial community is agitating almost to the degree of irrationality against the system they accepted both in 1946 and 1947’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Events in South Africa, which continued to serve as an aspirational model for Kenyan settlers, likely helped precipitate the controversy. In 1948, the apartheid government came to power and, two years later, passed legislation dictating that every South African inhabitant be registered according to their race.Footnote ⁹⁸ South Africa's temporal trajectory seemed to run counter to that of Kenya, where the tenor and militancy of African national movements was also gaining pace. Opponents of fingerprinting expressed concern about ‘constitutional changes … pending in the Colony’, which they feared would ‘weaken’ their position and ‘increase the legislative power of other races’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Suspicion of, if not open hostility to, the Labour Party also informed settler responses. As Michael Blundell explained, the registration issue incited recent arrivals ‘who had left England because they could not adjust themselves to the changes and the social revolution of 1945’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

A member of the Kenya Legislative Council and among the more liberal white settlers, Blundell saw fingerprinting in a paternalistic vein — as an irksome, but necessary imposition that served a tutorial function for Africans: ‘To myself and my supporters there seemed no fundamental objection to fingerprinting as such … just as I had been swabbed years earlier with iodine and stuck with a needle to induce them [the Africans] to accept inoculation for plague’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Fingerprinting, as described by Blundell, was part and parcel of a narrative of technological progress tied to post-war developmentalist dreams. Though animated by common logics, the settler community was divided between those who saw themselves as the vanguard of a multiracial society and those who sought to further entrench segregation.Footnote ¹⁰² These competing visions speak not only to the internal diversity of the settler community but also to differing ways of constructing whiteness. Though sympathetic and ultimately supportive of an alternative form of identification, Blundell cast himself as a progressive settler charting a path towards racial reconciliation and blamed the controversy for ‘set[ting] alight the beginning of a reactionary and strongly racialist movement’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Under pressure to allay the growing controversy, the colonial government conceded to a commission of inquiry headed by Sir Bernard Glancy, former Governor of the Punjab, to review the new registration system.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Glancy Report recommended an alternative, photographic method of registration for literate populations (which it narrowly defined as those knowledgeable of English). It also advocated a voluntary record of employment for African workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These findings emboldened the Society for Civil Liberties, a right-wing white settler advocacy group founded to oppose the Registration of Persons Ordinance. Riddled with internal contradictions, their publications teetered between an explicitly racialized language and a more palatable discourse of civil rights, while dramatizing an anti-authoritarian stance. In one pamphlet, Exodus?, the Society framed their struggle in biblical terms, drawing comparisons between the Kenyan Governor and the wicked Pharaoh. Exodus? lamented the decline of white power while insisting that opposition to fingerprinting was non-racialist in nature:

A fever dream of post-war anxieties featured in the hyperbolic complaints of white settlers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Settlers drew menacing analogies between the British Empire, Nazi Germany, and authoritarian regimes in Latin America and the Soviet Union. As Richard Frost recorded, ‘[o]ne postwar immigrant wrote to The East African Standard prophesying that Europeans would be hauled off to police stations and subjected to treatment made infamous in Europe by the Nazi Gestapo’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Another complainant wrote directly to Winston Churchill: ‘You, who steered our Nation to victory against the forces of evil, cannot possibly agree that loyal Britons should be treated the same way as convicted criminals — and the Inhabitants of Venezuela. Even the poor tortured population of Soviet Russia and her oppressed satelites [sic] is spared this degradation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Painting fingerprinting as anathema to the British character, the author conflated the waning of white power with the loss of democratic freedom.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet for all their anxiety about encroaching ‘authoritarianism’, white settlers in Kenya were free to come to meetings fully armed and speak out in full opposition to the registration policy. Blundell described a mass meeting in his constituency: ‘One of my fiery opponents strode up and down the gangway of the hall with two large pistols hanging from his belt and flapping against his thighs during the voting’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Such menacing expressions of armed autonomy speak to the persistence of white male hegemony in the Colony.

However exaggerated, settler concerns seem to have found resonance in the metropole, where a parallel public debate was taking place over the compulsory IDs introduced at the start of the Second World War. In 1950, the Liberal activist Harry Willcock was arrested in London for refusing to produce his ID to a police constable. His trial and the controversy it engendered eventually led to the repeal of the 1939 UK National Registration Act. Willcock's case reaffirmed the links between the suspension of civil liberties and compulsory IDs. Within the wider British imaginary, mandatory IDs remained an exceptional measure intended only for colonized subjects, criminals, or as a temporary wartime measure.Footnote ¹¹²

Though Kenyan colonial authorities did not fully concede to settler demands, they enabled them to reshape the registration initiative. The Governor chose not to implement key findings of the Glancy Report despite its adoption by a majority vote in the Kenya Legislative Council.Footnote ¹¹³ This was done out of concern that appeasing white interests would precipitate a ‘mass burning of registration certificates’ by African protestors, encourage political alliances between Africans and Indians, and provide fodder for Communist agitation and infiltration.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Nevertheless, the government's claim to be a neutral arbiter opposed to racial discrimination was undermined by the actual practice of registration. Registration officers allowed settlers, who faced few consequences for opting out, to come forward on a voluntary basis.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nor was the new identity card shorn of its racialized antecedents. Registration was not only done on a racial basis, but Kenyan residents continued to be indexed within the state's vast filing cabinets according to racial category.Footnote ¹¹⁶

An enduring personal archive, the kipande also did not fade out of use immediately. By the post-war period, the registration certificate had developed into a coveted item among workers who had a need or aspirational desire to participate in the formal economy. Many colonial officials and African workers recognized that a work record (even if technically voluntary) remained a de facto prerequisite for many kinds of employment. Some men resisted the cutting of their vipande out of fear of invalidating hard-won records of service.Footnote ¹¹⁷ European members of the Legislative Council seized upon African reluctance to having the kipande cut to extol the merits of its work record. In this way, disempowerment was translated into consent.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In March 1951, the Legislative Council passed amended legislation which stipulated that Africans could have their vipande retained and endorsed as a record of service and introduced a new voluntary work record (known as the ‘buff card’).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Nominated African members such as James Jeremiah objected on the grounds that the Legislative Council was in effect ‘reintroducing the kipande in a new form’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Between exclusion and participation in the formal marketplace lay the interface of registration. In this way, Kenya's economy remained predicated upon a form of reputational identity that rendered Africans suspect and privileged literate European and Indian owners of capital.

Despite the gradual introduction of a new identification certificate, cut and uncut vipande remained in currency, providing a sedimentary layer upon which the new system developed. The old registration system also lived on in other ways. In 1952, only a year after the fingerprinting controversy had died down, Kenya's Governor declared a state of emergency to quell a nascent anti-colonial rebellion and internal civil war popularly known as ‘Mau Mau’. To suppress the insurgency, the colonial government introduced passbooks for the entire Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru populations of Central Kenya, which greatly restricted their freedom of movement. African civil liberties were thus swept aside amidst the hysteria surrounding Mau Mau. In this way, an identity document akin to the kipande was reintroduced in the name of securitization.Footnote ¹²¹

CONCLUSION: DERACIALIZING BIOMETRICS?

The history of the kipande highlights both the centrality of Kenya to the making of global registration systems and the need to re-center Africa within the history of racial capitalism and modern governance.Footnote ¹²² An elastic technology that traveled between metropole and colony, fingerprinting has long been a locus of debate over workers’ rights, the reach of government power, the relationship between race and citizenship status, and the extraterritorial position of imperial subjects and foreigners. Similarly, modern regimes have used identity cards both to confer rights and to demarcate people, spaces, and times that warrant the (often-permanent) deferral of civil liberties, thus delineating the state of exception (the suspension of normal legal liberties).Footnote ¹²³ Within Britain and its empire, fingerprinting and compulsory IDs have been applied to those without full citizenship rights (such as colonial laborers and criminals), spaces of heightened security (like the border), and exceptional times (including periods of war and emergency).

The kipande also reveals how racial capitalism was enacted and routinized through mundane, daily techniques of registration and identification, whose effects have not been well-explored. As the controversy over universal registration in Kenya shows, racial subjectivities were made not only through market relations, but also via embodied bureaucratic and documentary practices. Even as the kipande system began to outlast its explicit economic function, it continued to serve as a metonym for white dominance. Settlers and officials had become invested in the bureaucratic infrastructures and archives that reinforced the boundaries of whiteness and market-based reputational status.

Examining the enduring materiality of the kipande over the first half of the twentieth century serves as an important chapter in the prehistory of twenty-first-century digital biometrics. Today, across the postcolonial world, governments and non-governmental organizations are using fingerprint and iris scans for a range of activities—from national elections to refugee registration to aid distribution. To many proponents, biometrics are a tool for promoting greater democratic participation and financial inclusion. Even scholars who are less than sanguine about such technologies have argued that biometrics have the potential to serve progressive functions. Keith Breckenridge describes fingerprinting in contemporary South Africa as a post-racial technique capable of ‘improving the prosperity of those at the bottom of the social order’.Footnote ¹²⁴

So often effaced, however, within contemporary narratives of technological disruption (and the much-heralded idea of ‘leapfrogging’) is the long, troubled history of what is essentially a nineteenth-century British imperial invention.Footnote ¹²⁵ If digital biometrics are to become integral to new forms of social and economic redistribution (as some sociologists and anthropologists have suggested), then it is imperative to consider the racialized pasts and afterlives of these technologies.Footnote ¹²⁶ Today, digital biometric technologies — though no longer as explicitly racialized — are applied in a highly uneven fashion across the globe. They are far more ubiquitous in postcolonial countries, where they are governed by significantly less scrutiny, transparency, and consent than is the norm in the Global North. Rather than extracting labor, new biometric registration schemes are creating inroads for expropriating wealth from African populations.Footnote ¹²⁷ Such innovations have particularly fraught implications in countries like Kenya, where the biometric surveillance of refugees has become normalized and where national IDs are no longer used to police the boundaries between ‘native’ and settler, but between ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreigner’.Footnote ¹²⁸

The controversy in late colonial Kenya suggests that biometrics may be a malleable technology, but it is yoked to a charged history and tied to bureaucratic infrastructures, archives, and embodied practices often slow to change. For all its promises of emancipatory, disruptive change, digital technologies are layered atop analog pasts.Footnote ¹²⁹ The paper trails, material traces, and bureaucratic echoes of Kenya's racialized registration system have given the kipande an enduring afterlife as well as a currency within popular memory. As Gatheru so succinctly writes, even after it was abolished, ‘the scars of Kipande remained’.Footnote ¹³⁰