2025/03/10 by Samuel Meyerson · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #African history and culture studies #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
paper · doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2475031
openalex publication_date 2025/03/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
The Turkana Patrol of 1918 is an often-overlooked episode in Britain’s colonisation of East Africa. The Turkana Patrol occupies a liminal position within established lines of discipline and historiographical periodisation; it took place in the shadow of the First World War, long after many of Britain’s wars of colonial conquest had come to an end, in the remote homeland of the nomadic Turkana people. This article seeks to place the violent British efforts to subjugate the Turkana in the wider ideological context of militarism and imperialism in the immediate aftermath of WWI. I argue that the British officers who participated in the Turkana Patrol and the subsequent administration of the Turkana region perceived the violence that they perpetrated against their Turkana adversaries as upholding the paradigms of racial hierarchy, imperialism and militarism that had been called into question by the mechanised slaughter of WWI. British narratives of the 1918 Turkana Patrol represented a counter-discourse to the literary and popular criticisms of militarism and imperialism that emerged from WWI, with depictions of colonial violence acting as a form of escapism into prewar notions of imperial certainty and righteous violence. Furthermore, I contend that, although the British failed to fully conquer Turkana, the writings of British officers who served in the region demonstrate that the existence of unconquered peoples such as the Turkana was an essential justification for the continuation of the imperial order. This essay, based on memoirs and archival materials, illuminates how the traumas of WWI and the anxieties engendered by postwar societal upheaval in the West were reflected in and exorcised through colonial violence.