Transforming agriculture in Africa was one of the principal objectives of the colonial powers. The effort was driven not only by the demand for tropical products in Europe but also by the perception that peasant farming in Africa was backward and needed to be modernized. The colonial powers spent a lot of energy trying to bring the largely subsistence-oriented farmers into the market economy and thereby stimulate their interest in producing more. They also realized the problems of fulfilling demands in the mother country through support of peasant farmers only, and therefore embarked on establishing large-scale plantations for growing crops like peanuts and cotton that were in especially high demand at the time in Europe. In between these two modes of transforming agriculture was yet another – settler farming. Life in the industrial cities of England in the early 1900s was unattractive, and many workers preferred to emigrate. Most of them ended up in Australia or North America, but a good number settled in southern Africa, notably South Africa and what is today Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia).

A small number of aristocrats in the British countryside wanted to escape what they perceived as the detrimental effects of industrialization and urbanization and saw moving to Africa as return to a natural paradise. These people had been influenced by the explorers who traversed East Africa and reported on its beauty, its bounty of wildlife, and its stretches of what they considered unsettled lands. They became the “upper-class” settlers of the Rift Valley in Kenya and northern Tanganyika who were celebrated in the 1987 movie, The Happy Valley but also received a critical analysis by two Africanist historians, Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (1992).