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.

中文翻译：

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1940 年代肯尼亚的储蓄、继承和未来创造


肯尼亚的殖民国家为其非洲臣民提供了一个想象未来生活的新工具。邮局储蓄银行 （POSB） 旨在鼓励“节俭”——推迟消费——并在更广泛的殖民计划中发挥作用，将不同形式的价值转化为国家可以收集和使用的货币。在实践中，肯尼亚的 POSB 对许多人来说是无法访问和/或没有吸引力的：它超出了当时的官方预期，事后被认为是失败的。然而，一些殖民地臣民，主要是识字的男性，能够在关于财富流通的长期争论中，将 POSB 发行的纸质存折纳入管理多种形式价值的战略中。他们储蓄簿上写的数字成为关于继承和积累的争论的额外资源，因为他们和其他人一样，正在寻找引导和遏制货币和新金融机构创造的可能性的方法。