The British Empire and the Development of Modern Kenya

The British in Kenya built one of the more developed colonial economies in sub-Saharan Africa — and did so on land that had been taken, by the slow violence of ordinances and treaties, from the people who lived on it. That is the central paradox of Kenyan colonial history, and it explains why the country’s independence in 1963 was, in effect, the closing of a long account. The British claimed to have constructed a “model colony”; the Kikuyu and the Mau Mau knew they had paid for it.

The Protectorate and the Uganda Railway (1895–1920)

The British East Africa Protectorate was declared in 1895, and the Imperial British East Africa Company, which had administered the territory since 1888, was bought out. The decisive project was the Uganda Railway, begun in 1896 and completed in 1901, running 580 miles from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria. It cost roughly £5 million and 2,500 Indian and African lives — T. E. Lawrence’s father, who worked on the line, left an evocative diary of the labour. The line was sold to Parliament as a strategic route to Uganda; in practice, as the historian Robert Tignor argued in The Colonial Transformation of Kenya (1976), its principal effect was to open the highlands to European settlement.

The first substantial settlers arrived after 1902, drawn by the promise of land and the productive possibilities of coffee, tea, and maize. The 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance declared all “waste and unoccupied” land to be Crown land — a definition that, as the historian Sorrenson observed, “was stretched to include nearly all land in the protectorate.” The Maasai treaties of 1904 and 1911 forced the Maasai to surrender their best lands in the Rift Valley, and the alienation of Kikuyu reserves around Kiambu, Fort Hall, and Nyeri generated grievances that would outlast the colonial period.

The Kenya Colony (1920–1939)

In 1920, the protectorate was renamed the Kenya Colony, and the highlands were placed under the direct administration of the colonial government. African political protest, led by figures such as Harry Thuku of the East African Association, was met with repression. Thuku was arrested in 1922 after leading a march of women in Nairobi; the colonial government banned independent African political organisation for over a decade.

The 1920s were a period of relentless land alienation. The 1932 Kenya (Highlands) Order-in-Council reserved the highlands for European settlement, and the Kipande registration system, introduced in 1920, gave the colonial state an unprecedented tool for the surveillance of African labour. As John Lonsdale has argued in his essays on the colonial period, the settlers were not so much masters of the colonial state as its loudest constituents; the governor needed them, but the Colonial Office in London did not love them, and the resulting ambiguity shaped every political crisis to come.

The Post-War Political Awakening

The Second World War accelerated African political mobilisation. The Kenya African Union, founded in 1944 and led from 1947 by Jomo Kenyatta, demanded land reform, African political representation, and ultimately independence. The settler community, organised through the United Country Party and the New Kenya Group, demanded a permanent place for European farmers and the continuation of the highlands as a white-settled region. By 1951, the conflict had hardened, and groups of oath-bound Kikuyu militants, organised as the Mau Mau movement, began a campaign of violence against both settlers and African “loyalists.”

Kenyatta had been publishing for years — his 1938 Facing Mount Kenya, written under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski at the LSE, was the first substantial anthropological study of an East African people by one of their own. But by the early 1950s, as the British historian Tabitha Kanogo has shown in Gikuyu Women and the Mau Mau Rebellion (2015), the political and the personal had merged. Mau Mau was not, in the main, Kenyatta’s creation, but it could not be understood without him.

The Mau Mau Emergency and Its Consequences

The colonial government declared a state of emergency in October 1952. The campaign against the movement involved the deployment of more than 50,000 British and African troops, the villagisation of some 1.1 million Kikuyu civilians, and the detention of more than 80,000 people in detention camps. Jomo Kenyatta was tried and imprisoned in 1953; the evidence tying him directly to the Mau Mau leadership was, as the historian John Lonsdale demonstrated, never clear. (In 2011, a British court ruled that the Foreign Office had concealed a 1959 report establishing the existence of torture and sexual abuse at the Kenyan detention camps.)

The war produced a decisive shift in British policy, and from 1957 the government accepted the principle of African majority rule. The Lancaster House Conferences of 1960 and 1962 negotiated the constitutional arrangements for independence. Kenyatta, released from prison in 1961, led the Kenya African National Union to victory in the 1963 elections. The country became independent on 12 December 1963 with Kenyatta as prime minister. The following year, Kenya became a republic with Kenyatta as president.

The 2013 settlement, in which the British government paid £19.9 million to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyan claimants and formally acknowledged the suffering inflicted, was a small but real act of historical accountability. It did not, of course, return the land.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of colonial Kenya has been transformed. The settler-friendly narratives of Elspeth Huxley and the apologetic official histories have given way to the work of Tabitha Kanogo, John Lonsdale, Bruce Berman, and Michael Lofchie, who treated the colonial state as a structure of domination rather than a partnership. Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning (2005) was important in opening the Mau Mau files; the resulting court cases in London produced a body of evidence that no serious historian of the emergency can now ignore. The conventional view, that the settlers were the principal victims of Mau Mau, has been substantially revised in the last twenty years.

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