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Learn about the British colony and protectorate of Kenya, which existed from 1920 to 1963. Find out how it was created, governed, and eventually became independent, and what challenges it faced during the colonial period.
1 day ago · 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 ...
The British Empire established the East Africa Protectorate in 1895, from 1928 known as the Kenya Colony. [2] During the wave of decolonisation in the 1960s, Kenya gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1963, had Elizabeth II as its first head of state, and Jomo Kenyatta as its Prime Minister.
- Overview
- Early history
- Maasai and Kikuyu
- Control of the interior
- The British East Africa Company
- Resistance to European rule and early administration
- The Uganda railway and European settlement
- World War I and its aftermath
history of Kenya, a survey of notable events and people in the history of Kenya. The country, located in the eastern region of the African continent, is famed for its scenic landscapes and vast wildlife preserves, and its Indian Ocean coast has historically important ports, such as Mombasa, by which goods from Arabian and Asian traders have entered...
It is known that human history in Kenya dates back millions of years, because it is there that some of the earliest fossilized remains of hominids have been discovered. Among the best-known finds are those by anthropologist Richard Leakey and others in the Koobi Fora area along the shore of Lake Rudolf that have included portions of Australopithecu...
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.
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.
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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 runn...
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 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.
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.
3 days ago · Kenya - Colonialism, Independence, Wildlife: It is known that human history in Kenya dates back millions of years, because it is there that some of the earliest fossilized remains of hominids have been discovered.
Jan 2, 2020 · Learn about Kenya's colonial past, from the Berlin Conference of 1885 to the Mau Mau rebellion and independence in 1963. Explore the political and social changes since then, including the transition to multiparty democracy in 2002.
Dec 8, 2023 · My research reveals how harsh British detention camps in Kenya were, and the extremes to which the colonialists went to conceal information about this.
