Norman Leys

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Norman Leys’

Norman Leys (1875-1944) was a Scottish medical doctor and Christian socialist. In 1904 he began a sixteen-year-long residence in Kenya, then part of British East Africa, where he learnt to be severely critical of those to whom (in his phrase) Empire meant not liberty but domination: meddling Government officials, and crony capitalists. An outspoken opponent of segregation and European supremacism, Leys argued that racial prejudice was not part of the British character, but something that had arisen quite recently in Government circles as a consequence of the exaggerated self-importance that comes with wielding imperial power.

1

Lilies of the Field by Norman Leys

Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.

In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.

Read

Clay Lane The Copybook