The History of Kenya under British Rule

Kenya is the imperial history that will not settle. The 2013 settlement, in which the British government paid £19.9 million to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyan claimants and formally acknowledged the torture and abuse inflicted during the Mau Mau emergency, was an admission that had been deferred for half a century. It did not return the land; it did not rewrite the Highlander’s charter; it did not change the fact that the country the British built on the East African plateau was built on a series of takings. That is the central fact about Kenya under British rule, and any account that loses sight of it has lost the plot.

The Imperial British East Africa Company

The British presence in East Africa was established in the late nineteenth century. The Imperial British East Africa Company, founded in 1888, administered the territory that would become Kenya and Uganda 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 territory was initially small, focused on the coast and the immediate hinterland, and the interior remained under the effective control of African societies.

The first British officials relied heavily on Indian clerks and officials, whose immigration transformed the demography of the coast. The Indian community in Mombasa and Nairobi — clerks, railwaymen, and traders — would be a fixture of Kenyan politics for the next century, and the 1967 Asian exodus under the Kenyatta government was a delayed consequence of the colonial labour policies of the 1890s.

The East Africa Protectorate and the Uganda Railway

The East Africa Protectorate was declared a British protectorate in 1895, and the British administration was extended to the territory. The construction of the Uganda Railway, begun in 1896 and completed in 1901, was the major British investment in the territory. The line ran from the port of Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, a distance of some 580 miles, and it cost £5 million. As the railway engineer Sir Guildford Molesworth wrote in his memoirs, “the railway was a vast undertaking in a country without roads, without skilled labour, and without any of the apparatus of civilisation.”

The railway was intended to extend British influence to Uganda, but its most important consequence was the opening of the Kenyan highlands to European settlement. The first substantial groups of British settlers, including many from South Africa, arrived after 1902, drawn by the promise of land and the production of coffee, tea, and maize. The 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance, as the historian M. P. K. Sorrenson demonstrated in Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country (1957), was the legal instrument by which the highlands were transferred from African to European tenure.

The Settler Colony and Land Alienation

The early twentieth century saw the transformation of Kenya into a settler colony. European settlers, particularly from Britain and South Africa, established farms and ranches in the highlands, often on land taken from the Maasai, the Kikuyu, and the Nandi. The 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance declared all land in the East Africa Protectorate to be Crown land, and the subsequent land alienations reduced the territory available to African agriculturalists. The Maasai treaties of 1904 and 1911 forced the Maasai to move from their best lands in the Rift Valley, and the dislocation of African communities produced a long-running grievance that influenced Kenyan politics for the next century.

The 1920 declaration of the Kenya Colony formalised the political dominance of the settlers. The 1932 Kenya (Highlands) Order-in-Council reserved the “scheduled areas” of the highlands for European ownership, and the subsequent registration of African labour through the Kipande system gave the colonial state an unprecedented tool for controlling the African workforce.

African Political Movements

The twentieth century saw the development of African political movements in Kenya. The East African Association, founded in 1921 by Harry Thuku, was one of the earliest African political organisations, but Thuku was arrested and deported after a march of women in Nairobi in March 1922. The colonial government banned independent African political organisation for over a decade. The Kikuyu Central Association, the Kenya African Union, and eventually the Kenya African National Union organised African political opinion through the 1940s. Jomo Kenyatta emerged as the most consequential African leader, and the publication of his study of Kikuyu society, Facing Mount Kenya (1938), established his reputation as an ethnographer of unusual seriousness.

The post-war period saw a rapid growth in African political activity. The Kenya African Union, founded in 1944 and led from 1947 by 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 collaborators.

The Mau Mau Uprising

The Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s was a major anti-colonial rebellion in Kenya, led primarily by the Kikuyu people. The uprising was suppressed by a brutal British counter-insurgency campaign that included the detention of perhaps 80,000 Kikuyu in detention camps, the use of torture and extrajudicial killings, and the implementation of the villagisation programme, which forcibly resettled more than a million Kikuyu into guarded villages. The colonial government declared a state of emergency in October 1952, and the emergency lasted until 1960.

Jomo Kenyatta was tried and imprisoned in 1953; the evidence tying him directly to the Mau Mau leadership was contested. The 1959 report by H. M. Patel, which the British government concealed for fifty years, established that the abuses in the detention camps were systematic. As Caroline Elkins demonstrated in Imperial Reckoning (2005), the emergency was a campaign of coercion on a scale that has only recently been acknowledged in the official record.

The uprising 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.

Independence and Its Aftermath

Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta as the first prime minister and, from 1964, the first president. The new state faced major challenges, including land redistribution, ethnic tensions, and economic development. Kenyatta governed Kenya until his death in 1978, and he was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, who ruled the country in an increasingly authoritarian manner until 2002.

The Mau Mau veterans’ claims against the British government were eventually settled in 2013, when the British government paid £19.9 million to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyan claimants and acknowledged the suffering inflicted during the emergency. It was, in the judgment of the historian David Anderson, “a historic acknowledgment, two decades overdue.” The history of Kenya under British rule remains a central reference point in the wider history of the British Empire in Africa — a place where the rhetoric of trusteeship and the practice of dispossession came together most visibly.

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.

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