The Independence of Kenya in 1963

The independence of Kenya on 12 December 1963 was one of the most contentious decolonisation events in British Africa. The Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s had been suppressed by a brutal British counter-insurgency campaign, and the political negotiations that led to independence were complex. The 2013 settlement of the Mau Mau veterans’ claims, and the public apology delivered by the British government, made plain what had been known to historians for thirty years: the counter-insurgency had involved systematic torture, mass detention without trial, and a level of racial violence that no subsequent British government could defend. The independence of Kenya was, in John Lonsdale’s phrase, “the most compromised” of the major African transfers of power.

The Mau Mau Uprising and Its Aftermath

The Mau Mau uprising of 1952–1960 was the most serious anti-colonial rebellion in British Africa. The movement, an oath-bound Kikuyu-led insurgency, demanded land reform and independence; it was answered by the British with a large-scale military and political campaign. The colonial government declared a state of emergency in October 1952, detained nearly the entire leadership of the Kenya African Union, and used mass detention, villagisation, and execution to defeat the insurgency. By the end of the Emergency, more than 80,000 Kikuyu had been detained without trial, and perhaps 12,000 of the detained died in custody or in the pipeline villages. The human cost of the campaign is now widely recognised as a defining example of British imperial violence. Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag (2005), which won the Pulitzer Prize, gave the historiography its most damning account; David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged (2005) gave it the documentary foundation.

The political fallout was substantial. The 1957 and 1960 elections produced African political majorities in the Legislative Council. The 1959 Devlin Commission, set up in response to allegations of abuse, acknowledged that “ill-treatment certainly occurred” but was, in its actual findings, a whitewash. The 1960 report of the Justice Department, suppressed at the time, was more candid. The release of Jomo Kenyatta from prison in August 1961 was the symbolic turning point, and the British decision to negotiate his release was the admission that the political strategy of mass detention had failed. The 2013 settlement — a £19.9 million compensation fund for 5,228 elderly Kenyan claimants, together with a public statement of regret — closed the legal question. The statement, in its own words, expressed “sincere regret” for “the suffering caused” by the colonial government’s conduct, and acknowledged the existence of “torture and other forms of ill-treatment” at the hands of the colonial administration.

The Lancaster House Conferences

The Lancaster House Conferences, held in London, were the principal forum for the constitutional negotiations that led to independence. The 1960 Conference established the principle of African majority government; the 1962 Conference agreed the independence constitution; the 1963 Conference finalised the arrangements for the transfer of power. The African delegation was led by Kenyatta, whose release from prison the previous year had been the precondition for the talks. The British side, led by Iain Macleod and later Reginald Maudling, was animated by the desire for an orderly transfer that would preserve British economic interests and protect the settler and Asian minorities.

The independence constitution established a parliamentary system with regional autonomy for the minority groups, designed to protect the interests of non-Kikuyu communities. The so-called “Majimbo” (regionalism) constitution was a compromise that favoured the rival Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), and it was abandoned in 1964 when KADU dissolved itself and joined KANU. The 1964 Republic constitution replaced the monarchy with an executive presidency. Kenyatta’s first government inherited a small, ethnically riven state with a near-bankrupt economy, a tiny African professional class, and a vastly larger population of smallholders and squatters on European farms. The transfer of land from the “White Highlands” to African ownership became the central political question of the next two decades, and was the unfinished business of Mau Mau.

Jomo Kenyatta and KANU

Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1897–1978) was the most consequential figure of the Kenyan independence movement. A Kikuyu from the Kiambu area, Kenyatta had worked as a teacher, interpreter, and trade unionist in Nairobi before travelling to London in 1931 to study anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. His 1938 monograph Facing Mount Kenya, an ethnographic study of the Gikuyu, became a classic of African anthropology, and his political career took him from the KAU presidency in 1947 to the prime ministership of an independent Kenya in 1963. The British had, in 1953, used Kenyatta’s authorship of the Jubilee Kikuyu-language text as the pretext for his trial and imprisonment; the charges were widely understood to be a politically convenient fiction. His death in August 1978 was followed by the succession of Daniel arap Moi, who ruled Kenya from 1978 to 2002 in an increasingly authoritarian manner.

The Independence Day and the Post-Independence Period

The independence of Kenya on 12 December 1963 was a major event, attended by Prince Philip on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II. The ceremony at the Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi included the lowering of the Union Jack and the raising of the new Kenyan flag, a speech by Kenyatta, and the swearing-in of the new government. Kenyatta’s address described independence as “the happiest day in the life of a people who have known oppression and suffering.” The 2010 constitution, the 2013 election of Uhuru Kenyatta (the first ICC-indicted sitting head of state), and the country’s continuing economic development are evidence of the durability of the Kenyan state that the 1963 independence created.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Kenyan independence has been transformed by Mau Mau. The pre-2000 generation — represented by Gertzel, Goldsworthy, and Odinga — treated the independence as a pragmatic transfer of power negotiated by African moderates and a British government anxious to disengage. The post-2000 generation, led by Anderson, Elkins, and Lonsdale, has insisted on the centrality of Mau Mau and the moral stain of British counter-insurgency. The 2011 discovery at Hanslope Park of the “migrated archives” — the files that the British government had concealed at independence — was a turning point. The post-2013 work, including Lonsdale’s Dreams from My Mother and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History’s 2014 special issue, has integrated the two pictures: independence was both a political settlement and a moral reckoning.

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