Saving, Inheritance and Future-Making in 1940 s Kenya

The colonial state in Kenya offered its African subjects a novel tool for imagining a future life. The Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) was meant to encourage ‘thrift’ — the postponement of consumption — and to play its part in a wider colonial project of turning disparate forms of value into money that could be gathered and used by the state. In practice, Kenya’s POSB was inaccessible and/or unappealing to many people: it disappointed official expectations at the time and has retrospectively been deemed a failure. Yet some colonial subjects, mostly literate men, were able to incorporate the paper passbook issued by the POSB into strategies for managing multiple forms of value in the context of long-standing debates over the circulation of wealth. The numbers written in their savings book became an additional resource in arguments over inheritance and accumulation as they, like others, looked for ways to channel and contain the possibilities created by money and new institutions of finance.