The Kenya Coast is populated by Africans, Arab-descendants, Indians and Europeans. As part of the Indian Ocean trading network, the predominantly Muslim Coast is an unusually rich site for investigating the historical interface of distinct medical systems---Islamic, ayurvedic and indigenous---which gave rise to an ever-evolving situation of 'medical plurality'. / This thesis addresses medical knowledge, practice and authority on the Coast from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The Coast is significant because of the variety of populations which inhabit the area, the early development of Muslim institutions for learning, and the Coast's isolation from white settler-dominated central Kenya, which allowed its populations a relative degree of political and social autonomy. / Particularly crucial for the Coast in this period is the intersection of African migration to the cities, the resulting pressures placed upon urban populations, and changes in disease patterns and intensity. This combined with contests over land appropriation among elites form a backdrop to the Colonial State's attempts to provide sanitation and public health to growing urban communities. / Local responses to disease and colonial public health initiatives point to the intersection of multiple medical understandings and practices on the Coast. This thesis explores the continuities of indigenous medical systems, the resulting inability of Western medicine to gain uncontested orthodoxy, and questions the conceptualization of 'traditional medicine' as a static, homogenous system. Interactions within various 'traditional medicines' are explained to show how indigenous healing and therapeutics have drawn on both formal, text-based and informal, experiential medical knowledge; coexisting and, in some periods, converging with external medical authorities. / Nineteenth century Western scientific medicine remained one of a multiplicity of choices available to local populations. Not until the advent of institutionalized Western medicine did Western medical practice become more widely accepted. Africans' encounter with Western science occurred primarily through British colonial attempts to regulate housing and purify the water supply. The impetus to provide better health for East Africans peaked in the 1920s as the British sought to generate a "productive" labour force. It is the reconciliation of economic demands, increasing populations and inadequate medical support that provides the background for the investigation of changing patterns of health and disease.

No description available.

This study investigates the causes of poverty among the residents of Thika District in Kenya over the period 1953-2000. Using the articulation of modes of production perspective, the study traces the dynamics of poverty to the geography, history and politics of Thika District. The thrust of the argument is that livelihoods in the district changed during the period under investigation, but not necessarily for the better. Landlessness, collapse of the coffee industry, intergenerational poverty, and the ravages of diseases (particularly of HIV/AIDS) are analysed. This leads to the conclusion that causes of poverty in Thika District during the period under examination were complex as one form of deprivation led to another. The study established that poverty in Thika District during the period under review was a product of a process of exclusion from the centre of political power and appropriation. While race was the basis for allocation of public resources in colonial Kenya, ethnicity has dominated the independence period. Consequently, one would have expected the residents of Thika District, the home of Kenya’s first president, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, to have benefited inordinately from public resources during his rule. Kenyatta’s administration, however, mainly benefited the Kikuyu elite. The study therefore demonstrates that during the period under examination, the Kikuyu, like any other Kenyan community, were a heterogeneous group whose differences were accentuated by class relations. Subaltern groups in Thika District therefore benefited minimally from state patronage, just like similar groups elsewhere in rural Kenya. By the late 1970s, the level of deprivation in rural Kenya had been contained as a result of favourable prices for the country’s agricultural exports. But in the subsequent period, poverty increased under the pressures of world economic recession and slowdowns in trade. The situation was worse for Kikuyu peasants as the Second Republic of President Daniel Moi deliberately attempted undermine the Kikuyu economically. For the majority of Thika residents, this translated into further marginalisation as the Moi regime lumped them together with the Kikuyu elite who had benefitted inordinately from public resources during the Kenyatta era. This study demonstrates that no single factor can explain the prevalence of poverty in Thika District during the period under consideration. However, the poor in the district devised survival mechanisms that could be replicated elsewhere. Indeed, the dynamics of poverty in Thika District represent a microcosm not just for the broader Kenyan situation but also of rural livelihoods elsewhere in the world. The study recommends land reform and horticulture as possible ways of reducing poverty among rural communities. Further, for a successful global war on poverty there is an urgent need to have the West go beyond rhetoric and deliver on its promises to make poverty history.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the events that took plac,e. in the Northern Frontier District I North Eastern Province of Kenya hetween the late nineteenth century and 1968. After 1900 the imposition of colonial policies impacted on the socio-economic and political structures of the Somali people. This thesis also examines the nature of Somali resistance l\P- to the late 1920s when Somali society was finally pacified. It further examines colonial policies such as the creation of the Somali-Galla line in 1919, the separation of the J uhaland region from the Kenya Colony in 1926 and the Special District Ordinance of 1934. Between 1946 and 1948 the British Government through its Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, attempted to unify Somali territories in the Horn of Africa and this raised Somali hopes of uni fication. The Bevin Plan collapsed because of the opposition of the United States, the Soviet Union, the French and Ethiopian leaders. Similar hopes of NFD Somali unification were raised hetween 1958 and 1963 because of the unification of the former British Somali land and Italian Somaliland. Due to the imminent end of British colonial rule in Kenya, the NFD Somali leaders demanded secession from Kenya to join up with the nascent Somali republic. But the NFDSomali hopes of unification with the Somali Repuhlic were dashed by 1964 because of the same opposition provided by the United States, the French and the Ethiopians. The British Government were all along half-hearted towards Somali unification attempts even though the field administrators adopted a pro-Somali attitude to the issue. In the early 1960s, however, the NFD Somali leaders were faced with the additional opposition of the new KANU government in Kenya. In 1964 the failure of the NFD Somalis to secede from Kenya led to the guerrilla war, what the Kenyan government called the 'shifta movement', that engulfed the North Eastern Region until 1968 when the Arusha Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Kenyan and the Somali Governments. The signing of the Arusha Memorandum of Understanding by the Kenyan and Somali Governments did not satisfy· the NFD Somalis hopes of joining the Somali Republic. The main conclusion of this thesis is that the N FD Somalis, except for few collahorators, did at no time, whether in the colonial or post-colonial eras, accept heing in Kenya. By the late 1960s the prospects of NFD Somalis unifying with the Somali Republic were, in view of the forces arrayed against the Somali secessionist movement, slim; and they have remained slim since then.

No description available.

No description available.

The outbreak of Mau Mau hostilities in Kenya was the culmination of a series of grievances which had developed among the more politically conscious Africans. The lack of political opportunities and the inability to promote economic and social integration fomented frustration and antagonism among these Africans. Yet, the violence and the imposition of the Emergency restrictions failed to disrupt the country's political, economic, and social development of the post-World War Two period. The struggle between the Colonial Office, the European settler, and the African nationalist in the nineteen-fifties, won political concessions for the Africans, divided the European political movement, and created a dilemma for the Colonial Office, particularly following the independence of Ghana. Throughout the Emergency it was apparent that the Colonial Office had seriously underestimated the rapid growth and strength of the nationalist movement in East Africa. By 1959, constitutional advancement in Tanganyika foretold a change in British policy in Kenya. As a consequence, African nationalism triumphed and the European hope for a 'white man's country' was dashed forever. While the political evolution of the African continued, Kenya enjoyed its greatest economic development during the nineteen-fifties. Social institutions also experienced a similar period of expansion. By the nineteen-sixties, owing to adverse weather conditions, poor world markets, and a loss of investment capital arising out of the growth of African nationalism, the country's economy collapsed. At the same time, the political disruption of the early nineteen-sixties brought a sharp rise in unemployment, and a shortage of educators and medical practitioners, which hampered the transition of the African from his traditional society to the modern world. With independence came some economic recovery, but continued recovery will be dependent on the maintenance of political stability and national unity. For Kenya's leaders the need to create a new unifying force to replace the old nationalism, built on a common anti-white hostility, is their most urgent task. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

No description available.