School of Social and Political Science

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The Centre of African Studies is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar:

'Norman Leys and the fight against settler colonialism'

Speaker: Professor Colin Leys, Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, and an Honorary Research Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London

Chair: Professor Kenneth King, Emeritus Professor of International and Comparative Education at the University of Edinburgh, and former Director of the Centre of African Studies (CAS).

Norman Leys (1875-1944) worked as a medical officer in East Africa from 1901 to 1917. From his retirement on health grounds in 1918 until his death in 1944 he worked tirelessly to expose the injustice of settler colonialism in Kenya. His book Kenya, published 100 years ago this year, was a best-seller. 

Four remarkable historians (John Cell, Diana Wylie, George Shepperson and Lotte Hughes) have credited him with playing a, if not the, leading role in alerting the British public to the system of ‘modern slavery’ in Kenya, and in ensuring that the settlers never achieved ‘responsible government’ under their control, as they had in Southern Rhodesia. 

Cell also calls Leys the first writer to produce a political economy of settler colonialism from the standpoint of the colonised, and Shepperson argued that he anticipated Frantz Fanon’s theory of therapeutic violence. Further, Leys anticipated Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the social catastrophe resulting from ‘self-regulating’ capitalism. This is all the more remarkable in that he was an entirely self-taught political economist.

The seminar presentation will focus a) on Leys’ analysis, and what made him capable both of arriving at it, and of accepting the personal cost of denouncing the system he had analysed; b) the failure of people who saw themselves as ‘pro-native’ to face the fact that Kenya was a slave state, and do something about it, which Leys called ‘phariseeism’; and c) the relevance of Leys’ story to settler colonialism today.

When: Wednesday 6th November 2024 (3:30-5pm GMT)

Where: G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre - Doorway 4 (Medical School, Teviot) 

Format: In-person only

Speaker Biography:

Colin Leys is an emeritus professor of political studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, and an honorary research professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a half-nephew of Norman Leys.

He was fellow and tutor in politics at Balliol College, Oxford, and then Principal of Kivukoni College, Dar es Salaam. He subsequently taught at the universities of Makerere, Sussex, Nairobi, Sheffield and Queen’s. 

For most of his career he worked on development in Africa. From the late 1990s onwards his work focussed mainly on the political economy of Britain, and especially on health. He was the founding chair of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest. 

His books include European Politics in Southern Rhodesia (1959); Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975); Politics in Britain (1983, 1989); Namibia’s Liberation Struggle (with John S Saul and others,1995); The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (1996); Market Driven Politics: neoliberal democracy and the public interest (2001); The Plot Against the NHS (with Stewart Player, 2011); and Searching for Socialism: the project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn (with Leo Panitch, 2020).