The British East African Protectorates

The British territories in East Africa are usually described in the same breath, but they were never the same kind of colony. Kenya was a settler state, Uganda a protectorate of kingdoms, Zanzibar a sultanate, and Tanganyika a League of Nations mandate over former German territory with almost no white population. To treat them as a single imperial project — which is what the “East African protectorates” label does — is to miss the central fact that the British in East Africa improvised, and that what they improvised depended on what they found.

The Imperial British East Africa Company

The British presence in East Africa was initially organised through the Imperial British East Africa Company, a chartered company established in 1888 with Sir William Mackinnon as its leading figure. Modelled on the East India Company, the IBEA Co. attempted to administer the territory between the coast and the Great Lakes on behalf of the British government. The company lacked the resources to govern effectively, and in 1895 the British Crown declared the East Africa Protectorate, taking over the administration directly.

The Uganda Protectorate, which had been administered by the company in conjunction with the Church Missionary Society since 1890, became a separate protectorate in 1894. The split was a small administrative decision with large consequences: it ensured that Uganda would be run, in collaboration with the existing kingdoms, as a protectorate in the old sense, while Kenya — opened to white settlement after the Uganda Railway — would become a colony of a different kind.

The Uganda Protectorate

The Uganda Protectorate was established in 1894, with the British administration cooperating with the existing kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole. The Uganda Agreement of 1900 created a system of native kingdoms with appointed rulers and defined the relationship between the British government and the Kabaka of Buganda. The system made Buganda a central pillar of indirect rule, and the kingdom’s chiefs became important collaborators in colonial governance.

The protectorate also produced one of the most significant educational institutions in colonial Africa: Makerere College, founded in 1922 as a technical school and elevated to university status in 1949. By the 1950s, Makerere was producing an East African elite — including Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, who taught there — whose common reference points helped create a regional identity that survives in the modern East African Community. Uganda became independent on 9 October 1962 with Milton Obote as prime minister.

The East Africa Protectorate and Kenya

The East Africa Protectorate, declared in 1895, became the Kenya Colony in 1920. The principal factor that distinguished Kenya from Uganda was the role assigned to European settlers. The construction of the Uganda Railway between 1896 and 1901 opened the highlands to large-scale European settlement, and the political dominance of the settler community shaped the colonial state until the Mau Mau emergency. As the historian Robert Tignor put it, “the railway made the colony.” It also, in the same gesture, made the alienation of Kikuyu, Maasai, and Nandi land a structural feature of the colonial economy.

The protectorate was declared a Crown colony in 1920, and the subsequent history of land alienation, African political protest, and settler resistance is one of the most contested chapters of the British Empire in Africa. The Kikuyu Central Association and the Kenya African Union, the latter led by Jomo Kenyatta after 1947, articulated a politics of land and dignity that the settlers refused to hear.

The Zanzibar Protectorate

The Sultanate of Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890, following the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty with Germany, and the British controlled the foreign affairs of the sultanate while leaving internal government in the hands of the Sultan. The protectorate included the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, and it remained an important centre of the East African clove and coconut trade. The British resident, in the judgment of the historian Abdul Sheriff, was careful to interfere in the sultanate’s affairs only when commerce was threatened; the rest of the time, the Sultan ran Zanzibar much as he had run it before.

The arrangement collapsed on 12 January 1964, when the Zanzibar Revolution overthrew the Sultan and established a revolutionary government under Abeid Karume. The revolution was led by the Afro-Shirazi Party and drew on a constituency of African peasant cultivators resentful of the Arab-dominated sultan’s government. The revolution produced a few thousand casualties and the flight of most of the Arab and South Asian population. The union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in April 1964 produced the United Republic of Tanzania.

The Tanganyika Territory

The Tanganyika Territory was transferred from Germany to Britain as a League of Nations Class B mandate after the First World War, and was administered under the supervision of the Permanent Mandates Commission. The territory was governed with a lighter touch than Kenya, and there was no significant European settler community. Tanganyika became the most peacefully decolonised of the East African territories, led by the Tanganyika African National Union under Julius Nyerere, who negotiated independence on 9 December 1961.

Nyerere went on to lead the country into union with Zanzibar in 1964 and to develop, through the 1967 Arusha Declaration, a programme of African socialism (ujamaa) that collectivised rural villages and nationalised the banks. The experiment was, as the anthropologist Michael Crowder once observed, “the most ambitious attempt at socialist construction in rural Africa,” and it produced mixed results. Nyerere stepped down in 1985; the system he left behind unravelled quickly. But Tanganyika’s peaceful decolonisation remains, in retrospect, an example of what British Africa could be when the settlers were not in the way.

The East African Currency Board and Inter-Territorial Cooperation

The British East African protectorates shared several common institutions. The East African Currency Board, established in 1919, issued a common currency, the East African shilling, which circulated across the four territories. The East African Common Services Organisation, founded in 1948, provided shared infrastructure in transport, communications, and higher education, with Makerere College serving as the regional university. The regional cooperation survived independence for a time through the East African Community (1967–1977), but the Community collapsed in 1977 amid the political differences of the member states — Nyerere’s socialism, Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972, and Daniel arap Moi’s Kenya.

The modern East African Community, revived in 2000, is one of the more successful regional organisations in contemporary Africa, and it draws explicitly on the inter-territorial institutions that the British built. The legacy of the protectorates, in that sense, has outlasted the empires that produced them.

Historiographical Note

The standard account is still, in many ways, the colonial official history. The revisionist literature, led by John Lonsdale, Bruce Berman, and Michael Lofchie, has worked to recover the African voices that the official history muted. Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship Between Empire and Nation (2014) is the indispensable account of the political ideas that bound the East African territories together. Tabitha Kanogo’s Gikuyu Women and the Mau Mau Rebellion (2015) has done most to extend the regional history into a more African and more gendered frame.

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