Policing British East Africa

Annamaria on Monday

First a confession:  My modus operandi when starting a new book is to research broadly, keeping story possibilities in the back of mind.  At some point, my characters start moving around in their time and place—doing and saying things.  I follow them and write down their words and their actions.  Eventually, the adventure takes shape, and I am off and running on a workable first draft. 

I was, in this way, about the begin the fourth chapter of Strange Gods when I realized that I knew nothing about how the police force operated in British East Africa.  I had a good idea who Tolliver was.  He had had an encounter with some South African drunks who were shooting up a hotel bar.  He was about to go out to the Scottish Mission to investigate the murder of Dr. Josiah Pennyman.   It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea of the historical context for such an investigation.   I sent myself back to the research salt mines.  Google quickly got me to a monograph called “Policing the Empire” by a Cambridge scholar.  Its first two footnotes referred to a memoire—A Cuckoo in Kenya—by an Anglo-Irish police officer, W. Robert Foran who served in BEA from 1905-09.  Pay dirt!  Just my research cup of tea—the recollections of someone who had feet on the ground there and then.   And of course, my precious New York Public Library had a copy.  I dug right in.  I got to know Foran and his lifestyle.

But I did not to give my Justin Tolliver Foran’s rather devil-may-care, jolly attitude toward law enforcement by a colonial power.   Based on what I gleaned from Foran’s story, I imagined what life for a man with Tolliver's attitudes would be like once he joined the police.  I gave my particular policeman a deep-seated regard for justice.  This, I imagined, would not coincide with the motivations of his superiors in the government.  It was all intuitive for me, a way of creating an atmosphere that served my story.

That scenario served well in that first of the series and in the following two books.  Then, just over a month ago, preparing to crawl my way into Vera and Tolliver 4, I found a new research source—a 1994 paper by a sociologist that wasn’t on the Internet when I started work on the series back in 2013: “Law Enforcement in British Colonial Africa.”  The paper explained to me how right I was about the difference between Tolliver’s idea of policing and what his King’s empire builders would require of him.

Here is what this new information confirmed for me:  When it came to law enforcement, in the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Centuries, the British had two models: One for their island home and another for the “possessions.”

The Home police, the Metropolitan Police Force established in 1829 in London, became the pattern for almost all towns and cities in the British Isles.  These policemen were civilians whose job it was to enforce the law, prevent crime, and keep the peace.  They lived in the communities where they worked, were accountable for their own actions, and never under the direct command of the governmentally powerful.  They were unarmed.

In the territories of the Empire, the model was based on the Royal Irish Constabulary.   This police force was established in 1836 to put down disturbances that had arisen in British-occupied Ireland.  Unlike their Metropolitan distant cousins, these men were a semi-military, armed force.  They were commanded by their superiors, whom they were required to obey.  They lived in barracks, rather than the communities they policed.  Their main function was to support the ends of their government as it took control of new territory—to aid in Britain’s conquest, to support the economic and political goals of the British government. They upheld what passed for British Law only when it suited them.

In fact, outside of areas where the British had political or economic interests, there was no British “law enforcement” in BEA.

This approach to policing was not limited to BEA.  It was well established in India before the British entered East Africa.  Once the Protectorate of BEA was formed, they then found it convenient to import officers from service in India, to use the Indian Code of Law, and to bring in lesser police officials from the Raj.  This happened to such an extent that in BEA, the police records were kept in Urdu!

Now I know what “really” happened.  When Tolliver joined the force, he was imagining joining a Metropolitan Police-style organization.  But he found himself in an African incarnation of the Royal Irish Constabulary.  And he was just where I needed him to be: a man at odds with his surroundings.