I lay out the basic argument and the theoretical bases of the book. In order to appreciate the nature of settler colonialism in Kenya – and its impact on the state and on Africans – I argue that we must inquire into how settlers envisioned themselves, their foundational ideas about the settler project, and their (real and imagined) relations with Africans, the state, and one another. I argue that white settlement: (1) was based on particular ideas about white supremacy, whiteness, and civilization; (2) was emotionally enriched through notions of paternalism and trusteeship; (3) appeared constantly under threat by Africans, colonial officials, the judiciary, and fellow settlers; and (4) was shored up daily through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. Through this understanding of settlers’ worldview, we can then better understanding of black peril, which represented the inversion of the emotional and ideological material out of which white settlement was made. I finish the chapter with a historical outline of early colonial Kenya.

This chapter has three goals. First, it situates the story told here in Kenya within the larger white colonial world of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting new ways of understanding race and colonialism worldwide. Second, it brings the story of the settler soul to the present, suggesting ways in which it has and has not changed. Third, it offers some thoughts on how the settler soul affected Africans in the colonial and post-colonial decades.

Settlers instead invested enormous faith and energy in what they called prestige, a kind of protective barrier surrounding them. This, whites believed, permitted them to travel, work, and live in almost total security despite their being fantastically outnumbered by Africans. Lack of deference in the most minor way suggested that prestige was fraying and, unchecked, left settlers undefended. Because prestige must attach to white skin, any white person’s individual failure to maintain prestige threatened the prestige of all white people. Thus whites demanded of each other that they lived and comported themselves in certain ways. Settlers who fell into penury, became vagrants, turned to crime, or “went native” failed miserably to possess the demeanor necessary to inspire prestige. Moreover, settlers and colonial officials each wrote their own “public transcripts” that they demanded Africans follow. Whereas settlers insisted that prestige much attach to white skin, colonial officials argued it attached to all those representing the Crown. Settlers constantly attended to white prestige, both because it was crucial to the survival of white domination, and because it seemed perpetually in danger of dissipating.

This chapter examines settlers’ dedication to corporal punishment and a racially-biased legal system as props to their status as a ruling race. As philosophers and historians of pain and violence have shown, the neurological sensations resulting from corporal punishment are usually of secondary importance to the performance. A beating – with fist, boot, or whip – reinforces a hierarchy. Insofar as a challenge to prestige could be seen as humiliating to a white person, corporal punishment was humiliating to the sufferer. Settlers wished the state to be impartial only when dealing with intra-white concerns. For inter-racial disputes, they believed that the state machinery must favor whites. Unfortunately for settlers, many colonial officials and judges disagreed. Settlers railed against a judicial system that allowed Africans to charge settlers with assault, for it undermined their personal control over Africans. Africans would see not the genius of English law (settlers claimed), but only that a white magistrate had sided with a black man against a white man. It was humiliating to whites and undermined white prestige.