43. The Commission has found it useful to follow the lead of previous studies and to divide policing in Kenya into different zones of policing intensity. These zones were very clearly in evidence by the early 1920s. The first and more dominant zone consisted of main urban centres and the more populated (and developed) areas of white settlement in the Rift Valley and Central Kenya. These zones were policed in the sense that the presence of police was both routine and growing.
Crimes were detected and investigated with a certain rigor and attempts were made to arrest criminals and deal with them through the nascent criminal justice system. Developments in the policed zone were almost entirely defined by settler understandings of law, order, crime and punishment.
44. Beyond this core lay a second zone in which policing thinned out to, in the most extreme cases, almost nothing. On the frontiers of colonial rule in Kenya, therefore, it is not possible to speak of a consistent or sizeable police presence.
Indeed, it is difficult to speak of the maintenance and enforcement of colonial law and order in parts of the country where the concepts of law and order were
not only contested but irrelevant. The majority of Kenyan communities in the 1920s continued to deal with transgressors and offenders as they always had.
The notion that this function could be taken over by external agents did not resonate. Similarly, few communities were willing to leave issues concerning their foes and competitors to be handled by police forces whose legitimacy was only very poorly understood.
45. The Northern Frontier District provides the clearest evidence of what policing an un-policed zone looked like in the 1920s and the 1930s. The NFD was a vast, arid and sparsely populated district that effectively made up the whole northern half of Kenya. Exact figures are unavailable but until the early 1930s, it appears that the district was served by between just 240 and 300 policemen. The burden that these officers were expected to bear was a heavy one. In just one year, 1931–1932, nearly 180 murders were reported to the police. Several hundred others were simply never became matters because they took place during the course of violent inter-ethnic encounters between the various communities that occupied the district.
Police success in the processing and handling of these cases was very limited.
Isiolo—a southern corner of the district—recorded nearly 30 murders during that year. Just 12 arrests resulted with no word as to how prosecutions unfolded.
District officials were unsentimental about the shortcomings and failures of their policing programs. In 1935, administrators in Samburu expressed surprise that murder rates in their area were not much higher than they already were.
46. Lack of personnel and the demands of the territory gave rise to very unconventional and sometimes alarming forms of law enforcement that the Commission has taken as the foundations for a long history of questionable policing in the region in particular and in Kenya in general. In essence, what one finds very early on in the history of policing in Kenya is a certain readiness to abandon and ignore all norms under the guise operating in a difficult policing environment. Once again, the evidence from Samburu is instructive. Conventional police work in any sense of the word did not exist as administrators and officers readily admitted to ignoring all crimes other than murder, assault and stock theft. Others were candid about their treatment of suspects. Sometimes groups of people were held hostage and forcibly detained until communities produced those believed to be the real culprits.
Witnesses were similarly harshly treated and were kept under armed guard in the lead up to their testimonies and court appearances.
47. In some parts of the Northern Frontier District, all pretences at civilian policing were abandoned. Everything to do with the maintenance of law and order was abdicated to the King’s African Rifles. Such was the case for instance with the Ilemi
Triangle. Ilemi was a 5400 square mile triangle of land in the extreme north western corner of Kenya. With political ownership long contested by Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya, Ilemi was characterized further characterized by intense competition between the Turkana, the Dassanetch, the Didinga, the Topasa, the Nyangatom and other pastoralists who roamed the land in search of pasture and water for their livestock. The violence of their gun-dictated encounters were far too intense for the already stretched police force deputized to the Northern Frontier District. Add to this international tension over boundaries and frontiers and the police were simply unable to cope. In the later 1920s, units from the King’s African Rifles were posted to Lokitaung just south of a key Ilemi boundary. And there they would remain at the staggering cost of thirty thousand pounds a year. It was a cost that the Treasury would bear for another two decades. There was never any chance that the triangle would be left in the care of the police. Any civilians concerns about law, order and criminal justice were subsumed to the military imperative.
48. While terrain, lack of finances and personnel were all acknowledged as reasons for the dilapidated state of policing at the frontier, colonials seized on to much more fundamental existential explanations for the chaos. Many an administrator argued that African cultures and norms were fundamentally incompatible with Western notions of crime and punishment. They bemoaned incidents such as one took place in Gusii in May 1926 when a woman was killed during a brawl.
The killing went entirely unreported as the various parties decided that the issue was a private one that could be discussed and resolved internally. It took a concerned neighbour to alert the police. The overall assumption was that in time, African communities would eventually adjust to the new realities. And until that adjustment took place, most colonial officials, as exemplified by those in Samburu, were more or less resigned themselves to tackling the only most serious of crimes and leaving the rest to traditional systems of disputes and conflict resolution.
49. As colonial administrators chided local populations for their resistance and backwardness, they failed to consider that the piecemeal and haphazard nature of the policing that they offered held very few attractions for Africans. Officers rarely showed up to investigate incidents in a timely fashion. They offered no preventive measures whatsoever. On the very rare occasions when incidents were carried forward for prosecution, the outcomes were rarely satisfactory. A more accurate reading of the situation therefore has to be that instead of mindlessly rejecting colonial policing, Africans deliberately chose to continue using an indigenous system that worked well for them and was far more responsive to their needs.