history of Kenya

Maasai and Kikuyu

The Maasai moved into what is now central Kenya from an area north of Lake Rudolf sometime in the mid-18th century. Their southward advance was checked about 1830 by the Hehe people from what is now Tanzania, but their raiding parties continued to range widely and even reached the coast south of Mombasa in 1859. The Maasai moran (“warrior”) prepared for war under the spiritual direction of the laibon (“medicine man”). Although not particularly numerous, the Maasai were able to dominate a considerable region because the Bantu-speaking inhabitants offered little effective resistance to their raids. The Nandi, who inhabited the escarpment to the west of the Maasai, were equally warlike and were relatively undisturbed by their predatory neighbors. Another group, the Taveta, took refuge in the forest on the eastern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, while the Taita, who were farther east, used the natural strongholds provided by their mountainous homeland to resist the Maasai raiders.

The Kikuyu, who were far more numerous than the Maasai, also looked to the mountains and forests for protection against Maasai war parties. The Kikuyu had expanded northward, westward, and southward from their territory in the Fort Hall area (present-day Murang’a, in south-central Kenya), where they cleared the forests to provide themselves with agricultural land. Toward the end of the 19th century, however, they had reached the limits imposed by the presence of the Maasai to the north and south and by the upper slopes of the Aberdare Range to the west.

Famine and smallpox in the 1890s compelled the Kikuyu to vacate much of the land in what is now in Kiambu county (in south-central Kenya) as they withdrew northward. The Maasai too were passing through a difficult period. An outbreak of disease, either pleuropneumonia or rinderpest, attacked their cattle in 1883; further infestations in 1889–90 continued to decimate their herds, while the Maasai themselves were overwhelmed by epidemics of smallpox. Simultaneously, the death of Mbatian, their great laibon, split the group into warring factions, and it was some time before his younger son, Lenana, was able to restore order. Power was never revived, however, because their problems coincided with the arrival of European traders and administrators who eventually gained control of the region.

Control of the interior

Trading relations had existed for centuries between southern Arabia and the coastline of what is now Kenya; some of the Arab traders remained in the area and contributed to the language that came to be known as Swahili. During the 19th century Arab and Swahili caravans in search of ivory penetrated the interior. One route went from Mombasa to Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria and then toward Mount Elgon, but this route was not as popular as the caravan trails farther south, both because of the difficulty of crossing the desert country of the Taru Plain and because of the hostility of the Maasai. The first Europeans to penetrate the interior were two German agents of the Church Missionary Society, Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann. They established a mission station at Rabai, a short distance inland from Mombasa. In 1848 Rebmann became the first European to see Kilimanjaro, and in 1849 Krapf ventured still farther inland and saw Mount Kenya. These were isolated journeys, however, and more than 30 years elapsed before any other Europeans attempted to explore the country dominated by the Maasai.

The British East Africa Company

As Germany, Britain, and France were carving up East Africa in the mid-1880s, they recognized the authority of the sultan of Zanzibar over a coastal strip 10 miles (16 km) wide between the Tana (in Kenya) and Ruvuma (in Tanzania) rivers. The hinterland, however, was divided between Britain and Germany: the British took the area north of a line running from the mouth of the Umba River, opposite Pemba Island, and skirting north of Kilimanjaro to a point where latitude 1° S cut the eastern shore of Lake Victoria; the German sphere, Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), lay to the south of that line. In 1887 the sultan’s territory on the mainland was conceded to the British East Africa Association (later Company) for a 50-year period; this was later made a permanent grant. Because the British government was reluctant to become involved in the administration of East Africa, in 1888 it granted the company a royal charter that authorized it to accept existing and future grants and concessions relevant to the administration and development of the British sphere in that part of the world. The financial resources of the company, however, were inadequate for any large-scale development of the region. The company also administered territory in what is now Uganda; when it became involved with the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, it incurred a great debt and therefore was forced to limit its activities to regions nearer the coast. This financial problem was finally resolved in 1895 when the British government made Buganda a protectorate and paid the company £250,000 to surrender its charter to the area that is now Kenya. The East Africa Protectorate was then proclaimed, with Sir Arthur Hardinge as the first commissioner. Initially, the British government did not attach much importance to the new protectorate because Hardinge continued to reside in Zanzibar, where he already functioned as the consul general.

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Resistance to European rule and early administration

During the early years, the new administration largely focused on asserting authority over the territory. Along the coast, the ruling Mazrui family, which had emigrated from Oman by or in the 17th century and came to power thereafter, actively resisted the usurpation of its authority by the British administrators, as did the Kikuyu and the Kamba. Farther west the Nandi did not accept their new overlords until 1905, after a series of British military columns had ranged through their territory. The Maasai were one of the few groups who offered no resistance to British authority, and they even served in the military during the British campaigns against the Kikuyu. Although this caused lasting enmity between the two groups, the Maasai behaved as they did largely because they had been so devastated by disease at the end of the 19th century.

The extension of British administration into the more remote areas of the protectorate was slowed by the lack of communication infrastructure and the limited financial resources available. When administration was introduced, though, it was direct rule because the British did not find the centralized African political system that had existed in other parts of Africa that they came to control.

The Uganda railway and European settlement

The East Africa Protectorate was valued by Europeans as a corridor to the fertile land around Lake Victoria, but the government’s offer to lease the land to British settlers was initially not popular. Two factors, however, changed this negative attitude: a railway was constructed from the coast to Lake Victoria, and the western highlands were transferred from Uganda (where regulations made it impossible to lease land to Europeans) to the East Africa Protectorate in 1902. Work on the railway began at Mombasa in December 1895, and the first locomotive reached Kisumu on Lake Victoria in December 1901; the entire line was completed by 1903. The protectorate was responsible for making the railway profitable, and the export of cash crops seemed to provide the perfect solution for generating revenue. Sir Charles Eliot, who became commissioner of the protectorate in 1901, invited South Africans to settle in the protectorate when European settlers were less than enthusiastic about the proposal, but they too were uninterested. At first only small areas of land, which had formerly been occupied by Africans and which the Kikuyu regarded as part of their legitimate area of expansion, were allocated to European settlers, but by 1906 more than 1,550 square miles (4,000 square km) had been leased or sold. Some Africans, such as the Maasai, were confined to reserves; by 1911 the Maasai reserve extended south of the railway to the present-day border with Tanzania.

As more Africans were separated from their land and as more European settlers entered the region, the Europeans became concerned with maintaining an adequate supply of African labor. Because few Africans voluntarily chose whether to work for Europeans, the settlers wanted the government to institute a system that would compel Africans to offer their services to European farmers. Successive commissioners and governors responded in varying degrees to the settlers’ demands, and it was not until immediately after World War I (1914–18), and largely as a result of public outcry in Britain, that compulsory labor on either public or private projects was strictly forbidden.

Thousands of Indian laborers were brought into the protectorate to construct the railway. Although most of these laborers returned to India after their contracts were completed, some remained. The opening of the railway encouraged Indian traders who had been living nearer the coast to penetrate farther into the interior, even ahead of the administration. Other Indians hoped to obtain land, but European settlers consistently opposed the Indians’ claim to land and to political and economic equality.

Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European participation in political affairs was limited mainly to creating pressure groups. The most prominent of these was the Convention of Associations, which had developed in 1911 from earlier European settler organizations. An Executive Council was appointed in 1905, and the first Legislative Council convened in 1907. When the protectorate was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office in April 1905 and the settlers did not gain the increased responsibility they had desired, they launched a campaign in 1913 to elect their own representatives to the Legislative Council. The outbreak of World War I temporarily limited the settlers’ legislative prospects, but the War Council, which was concerned with the effects of the war on the protectorate and included settlers, satisfied some of their desire to have elected representation in the legislature.

World War I and its aftermath

Germany had hoped that no battles with Britain would be fought on African soil during World War I, but Britain was concerned with its communications with India and with the safety of the Ugandan railway. Britain initiated hostilities, to which Germany responded, with Britain ultimately prevailing in East Africa. The conflict caused great hardships for the African population. Thousands of Africans were forced to serve as porters and soldiers, often with disastrous results, and a large number of Africans died, mostly from disease. The entire East African economic structure was affected, as food production became geared solely to supplying the troops. The burden of providing this food fell largely on African women, who did most of the farming anyway. Women were forced to use the same plots of land repeatedly, thereby depleting the soil, because most able-bodied men, who were responsible for clearing new land, had been conscripted. Droughts and famines recurred.

Most of the European settlers quickly joined the armed forces; they left their farms to be looked after by their wives, or else the farms were abandoned. An attempt was made immediately after the war to revive the settler sector by introducing a “soldier settler” scheme, but the hopes of prosperity encouraged by the postwar demand for agricultural produce received a severe setback in the early 1920s when a worldwide economic recession brought bankruptcy to many of those who had started out with inadequate capital or had relied on credit from the banks. Stability was further delayed by the replacement of the rupee currency with East African shillings. By the mid-1920s Kenya’s economy had wholly revived, although the Great Depression of the 1930s brought further economic difficulties to East Africa.

Rail communications had been improved when branch lines were opened to Thika and to the soda deposits at Lake Magadi in 1913; during the war a link was made between the main line and the German railway system to the south. The most important postwar project was the building of a new extension of the main line across the Uasin Gishu Plateau to tap the agricultural wealth of the highlands and then to Uganda in order to provide an outlet for the cotton crops of that protectorate. The line was eventually completed from Nakuru to Jinja in January 1928 and was carried on to Kampala, which it reached in January 1931.

Political movements

In 1920 the East Africa Protectorate was turned into a colony and renamed Kenya, for its highest mountain. The colonial government began to concern itself with the plight of African peoples; in 1923 the colonial secretary issued a White Paper in which he indicated that African interests in the colony had to be paramount, although his declaration did not immediately result in any great improvement in conditions. One area that definitely needed improvement was education for Africans; up to that point nearly all African schooling had been provided by missionaries. Those Africans who did manage to receive a Western education, though, found no place in Kenya’s legislature, their interests being represented officially by the members of the appointed council and by a European unofficial member, usually a missionary.

As more Africans worked on European farms and in urban areas such as Nairobi, they began to imitate political techniques used by European settlers as they attempted to gain more direct representation in colonial politics. At the outset, political pressure groups developed along ethnic lines, the first one being the Young Kikuyu Association (later the East African Association), established in 1921, with Harry Thuku as its first president. The group, which received most of its support from young men and was not supported by most of the older chiefs, demanded African representation in the legislature and won support among the Kikuyu when it complained about low wages, the prohibition of coffee growing by Africans, and the condemnation by Christian missionaries of such traditional practices as female genital cutting. At a protest in March 1922 Thuku was arrested, and eventually he was exiled for more than eight years. Although its attempts to win the support of other ethnic groups failed because of their unwillingness to accept Kikuyu leadership, the association was an important beginning in the African search for greater participation in the political process.

Throughout the 1920s and ’30s European settlers continued to oppose Indian demands for greater representation on the Legislative Council. Another concern among European settlers was the proposal, first made toward the end of World War I, to introduce some form of closer union with Uganda and Tanganyika (which had become a British possession after World War I). At first the European settlers of Kenya opposed closer union with the other territories because they feared African domination, but, in light of the British government’s determination on this issue, they agreed by the late 1920s to a compromise that would protect their political status in Kenya. By the 1930s they actively supported union with Tanganyika as a protection against Germany’s claims to its former overseas dependencies.

World War II to independence

The outbreak of World War II (1939–45) forced the colony to focus on its borders; with the entry of Italy into the war, Kenya’s northern border with Ethiopia and Somaliland was briefly threatened. The colonial government then turned its attention to African political representation, and in 1944 Kenya became the first East African territory to include an African on its Legislative Council. The number was increased to two in 1946, four in 1948, and eight in 1951, although all were appointed by the governor from a list of names submitted by local governments. This, however, did not satisfy African demands for political equality. While the East African Association had been banned after Thuku’s arrest, a new organization, the Kikuyu Central Association, emerged with Jomo Kenyatta as its general secretary beginning in 1928. Kenyatta, who advocated a peaceful transition to African majority rule, traveled widely in Europe and returned in 1946 to become the president of the Kenya African Union (KAU; founded in 1944 as the Kenya African Study Union), which attempted to gain a mass African following. There were, however, Africans in the colony who felt that Kenyatta’s tactics were not producing enough concrete results. One such group, which advocated a violent approach, became known as the Mau Mau. The actions attributed to the Mau Mau caused the colonial government to proclaim a state of emergency from October 1952 until 1960 and also resulted in a massive relocation of Africans, particularly Kikuyu. Kenyatta and other Africans were charged with directing the Mau Mau movement and sentenced in 1953 to seven years’ imprisonment; Kenyatta was released from prison in 1959 but was then confined to his home.

Numerous economic and social changes resulted either directly or indirectly from the Mau Mau uprising. A land-consolidation program centralized the Kikuyu into large villages. This plan was also extended to the area near Lake Victoria, and many thousands of Africans in Nairobi were resettled in rural detention camps. At the same time, the Swynnerton Plan (a proposal to strengthen the development of African agriculture) provided Africans more opportunities to cultivate cash crops such as coffee. Throughout the 1950s, foreign investment in Kenya continued, and limited industrial development occurred along with agricultural expansion.

Although the leadership of the KAU had been arrested, the party was not immediately banned, because the government hoped that new party leadership might provide a more moderate approach. However, this was not forthcoming, and the party was banned by mid-1953; African political organizations were not allowed again until 1960. The Kenya African National Union (KANU), founded in May of that year and favoring a strong centralized government, was built around Kenyatta, who was still in detention. Nevertheless, in June two of KANU’s founding members, Ronald Ngala and Daniel arap Moi, created their own organization, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). KADU’s position was that ethnic interests could best be addressed through a decentralized government; it was also concerned about Kikuyu domination. KANU won more seats than KADU in elections held in February 1961, but both parties called for the release of Kenyatta, who was finally freed from house detention in August. A coalition government of the two parties was formed in 1962, and after elections in May 1963 Kenyatta became prime minister under a constitution that gave Kenya self-government. Following further discussions in London, Kenya became fully independent on December 12, 1963. A year later, when Kenya became a republic (with Kenyatta as its first president and Oginga Odinga as vice president), most KADU members had transferred their allegiance to KANU, and KADU ceased to exist.