Abstract
The British colony of Kenya was born by decree of the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council on 11 June 1920 annexing and adding to His Majesty’s Dominions most, though not all, of the territory of the East African Protectorate. It named the territory after its most celebrated physical feature, Mount Kenya, whose three snowcapped peaks, the tallest 17,058 ft above sea level, are almost on the Equator.1 Forty-three years later on the eve of Kenya’s independence, Jomo Kenyatta, her first Prime Minister, was to tell the Governor that his only objection to Queen Elizabeth becoming the country’s head of state lay in three words — the Queen’s Dominions. He had respect and liking for the person of the Queen, he said, but it would embarrass him politically in front of African VIPs to be regarded as part of her property.2
‘You are getting… white landlords occupying the higher posts of the country; you are getting a middle-class of clerks, engine drivers, guards, Stationmasters, all Indians; and you are preventing the African native from rising from a proletariat position at all.’
(William Ormsby-Gore, Conservative MP, later Colonial Under-Secretary)
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Notes and References
P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice] Kew CO 533/234 fx 432–44. Kenya was how Johann Krapf, the German missionary who was in 1849 the first white man to see the mountain, transliterated the Kamba pronunciation of the Kikuyu name for it, Kirinyaga. The Kamba substituted glottal stops for intermediate consonants, hence ‘Ki-i-ny-a’. T. C. Colchester, ‘Origins of Kenya as the Name of the Country’, Rhodes House. Mss Afr s.1849.
PRO CO 822/3117 Malcolm MacDonald to Duncan Sandys. Secret and Personal. 18 September 1963.
The new rail routes in question were the Uasin Gishu line and the Thika extension. M. F. Hill, Permanent Way. The Story of the Kenya and Uganda Railway (Nairobi: East African Railways and Harbours, 2nd edn 1961), p. 392.
Daily Sketch, 5 July 1920, p. 5.
Sekanyolya (‘the crane [or stork] looking out on the world’) was first printed in Nairobi in the Luganda language in 1921. From time to time it brought out editions in Swahili and for special occasions in English. Harry Thuku’s Tangazo was the first Kenya African single-sheet newsletter.
Interview with James Beauttah, Fort Hall, 1964. Beauttah was one of the first English-speaking African telephone operators. He claimed to be the first African to have electricity in his house.
PRO FO 2/377 A. Gray to FO, 16 February 1900, ‘Memo on Report of Law Officers of the Crown re. East Africa and Uganda Protectorates’. ‘The effect of the opinion of the law officers is that Her Majesty has, by virtue of her Protectorate, entire control over all lands unappropriated… and may, if so pleased, proclaim such land as “Crown lands”… The opinion leaves an extremely thin line of demarcation between British dominions and Protectorates.’
PRO CO 544/12 pp. 400 et seq. Report of Native Affairs Department, 1920–21.
CO 533/214 John Sinclair, Acting British Resident, Zanzibar, to Northey. Milner to Curzon, 3 January 1920.
The Times, 9 July 1920. ‘Kenya Colony: The New Rules in East Africa’.
Norman Leys, Kenya (Hogarth Press, 1926).
PRO CAB 134/1560 CPC(61)30, 14 November 1961. Memo to Cabinet from the Colonial Secretary.
The 1921 census of Africans was broken down as follows: Nyanza 881,135; Ukamba 274,136; Kikuyu 677,137; Coast 177,692; Naivasha 138,012; Masai 42,000; Jubaland 60,000; Northern Frontier District 80,000; totalling 2,330,112. The figures for the last three provinces were guesses. Jubaland was seceded to Italy in 1924. PRO CO 544/12 pp. 400–63. Report of the Native Affairs Dept, 1 Apr. 1920–31 Mar. 1921.
See the address presented by the British community in Zanzibar to the Acting Consul-General, Frederic Holmwood, on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887: ‘Zanzibar which, looking at the important Indian element in its population and trade might almost be called a British colony,… now … boasts of most of the appliances of civilization which a progressive trading community requires.’ See also N. S. Thakur, A Brief History of the Development of Indian Settlement in East Africa (Nairobi, 1961).
Most of the indentured labourers who survived the rigours of East African employment returned to India. They were not a principal source of the East African Asian population.
U. K. Oza, ‘Indian Settlement in East Africa’, Colonial Times, 1 July 1933. ‘On account of our Indian Empire we are compelled to reserve to British control a large portion of East Africa. Indian trade, enterprise and emigration require a suitable outlet. East Africa is, and should be, from every point of view, the America of the Hindu’ — Sir Harry Johnston, Commissioner for the Uganda Protectorate, ‘Report on Uganda’, FO 2/719, 11 July 1901.
Colonists’ Association, ‘Address to Alfred Lyttelton, Colonial Secretary’, 1905. Author’s archive.
For a bizarre example, see Richard Waddington to Frederic Holmwood, Acting Consul-General in Zanzibar, on 6 September 1886, proposing, in defiance of geography, to lay a light railway between Zanzibar and Bombassa [sic] to open up the Kimberley goldfields. Holmwood himself wanted to build a line to the uplands around Mount Kilimanjaro, which being 4,000 ft above sea level were suitable for European settlement. Holmwood Papers. Zanzibar Archives.
Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians. The Official Mind of Imperialism (Macmillan, 1961), chapter XI ‘Uganda, The Route of Liberalism’.
Until 1902 the Uganda Protectorate included the Provinces of Kisumu and Naivasha, thereafter in Kenya. For that reason, when for a short while the British lent countenance to a Zionist project to found a Jewish National Home in the East African Highlands, the idea was in some quarters given the soubriquet of ‘Juganda’.
PRO FO 2/447 Eliot to Lord Cranborne, 15 May 1901.
PRO FO 2/569 Dr Radford to Dr Macdonald (Principal Medical Officer, EAP). FO 2/571 John Ainsworth to Eliot.
Herbert Samuel MP, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) House of Commons Vol. 116, 11 December 1902, col. 938 ff.
Quoted by Herbert Samuel MP, ‘A Tourist in Uganda’ in East Africa and Uganda Mail, 10 January 1903.
In East African Protectorate (Edward Arnold, 1905), Sir Charles Eliot wrote, ‘It is a curious confession but I do not know why the Uganda Railway was built and I think many people in East Africa share my ignorance.’ (p. 208)
Eliot, ibid, p. 220.
The Nineteenth Century, September 1904.
PRO FO 2/843 Marsden (Cape Town) to Eliot, 7 November 1903.
A. T. Matson, ‘Early Newspapers of East Africa’. A onetime major in the Salvation Army, Olive Gray ‘tilted at various personalities and abuses in a flowery style which often degenerated into forthright abuse’. The East African and Uganda Mail was founded in August 1899 and expired in August 1904. The ‘rat’ was Arthur Marsden.
PRO FO 2/720 Frederick Jackson to Sir Clement Hill, 25 May 1903.
W. S. Churchill, My African Journey (The Holland Press, 1962), p. 14.
Norman Leys, Kenya, p. 171.
Margery Perham (later Dame Margery) was at this point at the beginning of her most distinguished career as an africanist.
Margery Perham, East African Journey. Kenya and Tanganyika 1929– 30 (Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 140.
For example, Sir Evelyn Baring, ‘I had always regarded British people on the whole as being calm and reasonable. Of course, the Kenya settlers looked like British people but, probably due to the altitude, calm and reasonable was just what the political leaders were not. They were highly excitable.’ Rhodes House, Howiek Papers, Mss Afr s.1574.
Eliot, The East African Protectorate, p. 3.
PRO CO 533/41 J. Gosling, Postmaster-General Nairobi to Frederick Jackson, 10 January 1908, forwarded by Jackson to the Earl of Elgin, 27 January 1908.
M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (OUP, 1968), chapter XII ‘The Masai Treaties’. At the 1961 East African Governors’ conference, when the British were beginning to think of leaving, it was argued that the Maasai Agreements would be unlikely to enjoy Treaty status in international law because, by the Agreements themselves, ‘the Maasai had conceded so much of whatever sovereignty they originally held as to destroy the legal personality assumed’. PRO CO 879/190, 4 January 1961.
John Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau. Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought’, in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Books I and II (James Currey, 1992), pp. 332–4.
Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (Seeker & Warburg, 1938).
In Colonel R. Meinertzhagen’s Kenya Diary (Oliver & Boyd, 1957) one of the first of the white settlers, Sandbach Baker, tells the author that he had been given 5,000 acres in 1901 provided he supplied Nairobi with meat. Asked if the Kikuyu were compensated he said the land was unoccupied owing to a decrease in the population because of famine and disease (p. 77).
Y. P. Ghai and J. P. W. B. McAuslan, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya (Nairobi: OUP, 1970), pp. 27–8.
This passage owes much to John Spencer, The Kenya African Union (KPI/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 10–12, which brilliantly summarizes the economic background.
But see John Lonsdale, ‘The Conquest State of Kenya, 1895–1905’, in Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley I, pp. 13–44, in which the various minor operations are added up and shown to amount to a considerable degree of conflict. See especially the chart on pp. 28–9 of ‘British military operations in the Kenya highlands, 1893–1911’.
‘Memorandum from the Kikuyu Land Board Association to the Joint Select Committee on Closer Union’, submitted by J. Kenyatta and P. G. Mockerie. Printed as appendix in Parmenas Mockerie, An African Speaks for His People (Hogarth Press, 1934), p. 78.
Dagoretti Political Record Book. Entry for 23 May 1908. K[enya] N[ational] A[rchives].
Colonel Robert Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary 1902–1906 (Oliver & Boyd, 1957) passim, but see especially pp. 51–2 and 73–4.
John Lonsdale, ‘The Politics of Conquest in Western Kenya, 1894– 1908’, in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book I, State and Class, p. 55.
Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘British Administration in the Central Nyanza District of Kenya, 1900–60’, Journal of African History, IV, 2 (1963) pp. 249–73.
A. T. Matson, Nandi Resistance to British Rule (Cambridge African Monographs, 1993). PRO CO 533/6 The Nandi Expedition.
CO 533/41 Sir James Hayes Sadler to the Earl of Elgin, 31 January 1908. Minute by Winston Churchill, 3 February 1908.
Cynthia Brantley, The Giriamo and Colonial Resistance in Kenya (University of California Press, 1981), especially chapter 7: ‘Rebellion 1914’.
Spencer, Kenya African Union, p. 18. According to Spencer, the Fort Hall Kikuyu regarded themselves as of pure Kikuyu blood, undiluted by extra-tribal marriages, and were regarded by the others as ‘proud and arrogant’. They in turn thought of Nyeri men as ‘brave but unsophisticated’ and of Kiambu men as ‘suspicious and untrustworthy’. Kiambu people’s stereotype picture of fellow-tribesmen in Nyeri and Fort Hall was said to be that of ‘simple, unsophisticated folk, gullible and hot-tempered’.
Ogot, ‘British Administration in Central Nyanza’, pp. 249–73.
Ogot, ibid, pp. 252–3.
Keith Kyle, ‘White Man’s War’. Unpublished paper delivered at Nuffield College, Oxford, 1966.
The East African Standard (EAS) had actually been launched — as the African Standard — in 1902 by the leading Indian merchant in Mombasa, A. M. Jeevanjee, but it was taken over by white interests in 1905.
EAS, 8 August 1914.
PRO CO 28/537 Memo by Sir Eyre Crowe (FO), 13 August 1914.
Kyle, ‘White Man’s War’.
PRO CO 544/12 Native Affairs Department 1920–1.
Mockerie, An African Speaks for His People, appendix ‘Memorandum from the Kikuyu Land Board Association. ’, p. 80.
A. M. Jeevanjee, the most prominent and wealthiest Indian businessman in East Africa, was nominated to the Legco in 1909, but he was not reappointed in 1911, leaving the Indian community unrepresented.
For the Grogan flogging incident, see PRO CO 533/28 Acting Commissioner Jackson to the Earl of Elgin, 19 March 1907; Sub-Commissioner Hobley to Jackson, 22 March; Jackson to Elgin, 9 April; Governor Hayes Sadler to Elgin, 19 May. Sadler said that Grogan’s only excuse was, ‘The Kikuyu had lost their respect for the white man [and] that want of respect was, with natives, generally followed by assault on white women.’
Robert M. Maxon, Struggle for Kenya. The Loss and Reassertion of Imperial Initiative, 1912–1923 (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), pp. 91–2.
Harry Thuku, An Autobiography (OUP, 1970), p. 18.
PRO CO 533/249 ff 245–250 Jeevanjee to Viscount Milner, 2 September 1920.
Rhodes House, Mss Afr s.633 Coryndon Papers Box 3. The editor of The Democrat was imprisoned ‘for his own personal safety’. A judge issued a deportation order, but the Governor ordered him to go free.
The Native Affairs Department echoed this opinion and declared in its report for 1920–1 that ‘There can be no question that in the future, and the sooner the better for the Colony, the skilled labour must be African’. While acknowledging that ‘some [white] employers recognize their duty… to raise the status of the native’, the department observed reproachfully that ‘others take no interest once the day’s task is done’. PRO CO 544/12.
Robert M. Maxon, Struggle for Kenya, pp. 181, 316n266.
According to the Native Affairs Department (Report, 1920–21, PRO CO 544/12) direct tax borne, for example, by the natives in Nyanza Province increased from £72,970 in 1915–16 to £294,730 in 1920–1. Total figures showed native tax up in those years from £182,699 to £658,413.
Buganda is the territory, in which a Muganda is a person; the Baganda are the people and Luganda is the language.
EAS, 21 May 1921, p. 29.
Spencer, The Kenya African Union, p. 37.
‘The crane [or stork] looking out on the world.’
Spencer, Kenya African Union, pp. 43–4.
According to Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru. An Autobiography (Heinemann, 1967), p. 25, James Beauttah visited Kisumu, on Lake Nyanza, for the East Africa Association and addressed large meetings.
Keith Kyle, ‘Gandhi, Harry Thuku and Early Kenya Nationalism’, Transition (Kampala) no. 27 (no. 4 of 1966), pp. 16–22.
The best account of the Thuku riots is to be found in Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau. Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Praeger; and London: Pall Mall Press), pp. 49–55.
Luhya (or Baluyia) did not become a universally adopted name for what had been called the Bantu Kavirondo until after the Second World War. It was adopted by the North Kavirondo Central Association in 1935. But the elders at that time rejected the name. B. A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo Vol. I, p. 139n21.
John Spencer, James Beauttah (Nairobi: Stellascope Publishing Company, 1983).
Secretary of the Kavirondo Association to Chief Native Commissioner, in The Leader, 14 January 1922, p. 21. The ‘mass meeting’ was held at Lundha, North Gem; the attendance was reported with suspect precision as being 8,846. See also the account in Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, pp. 25–9.
EAS, 4 February 1922. ‘We think this most momentous declaration by the Colonial Secretary at a public function practically settles the political and racial future of Kenya Colony and for this… the greatest thanks are due to our statesman-settler, Lord Delamere.’ (The Leader, 4 February 1922, p. 14)
EAS, 15 August 1922.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretaries concerned were Edward Wood (the future Earl of Halifax)(Colonies) and Earl Winterton (India). It was therefore known as the Wood-Winterton award.
Vincent Harlow and E. M. Chilver (eds), History of East Africa Vol. II, p. 298. Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country. Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya Vol. II (Chatto & Windus, 1935 and 1953), pp. 135–7. According to Huxley (p. 136), Governor Coryndon’s ‘comfort was carefully considered; his place of detention was selected on account of the excellent trout fishing available close by’.
Rhodes House, Mss Afr s.633 Coryndon 3/5. ‘The Indian Question During the Governorship of Sir Robert Coryndon’. The account given here derives primarily from this source which is amply documented. Maxon, Struggle for Kenya, is helpful but rather inclined to think of the Governor as being not so much panicky as a willing tool (because he was South Africa-born) of the settlers.
Reading to Earl Peel (Secretary of State for India), 2 May 1923. Reading Collection, India Office Records Mss. Eur.E. 238/6. Cited by T. G. Fraser, ‘Imperial Policy and Indian Minorities Overseas’, in A. C. Hepburn, Minorities in History (Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 163.
Rhodes House Mss Afr s.633 Coryndon 3/5, ‘The Indian Question’.
The Times, 28 February 1923.
As Leader of the Conservative Opposition Bonar Law had given every support and encouragement to the threats of civil war by which Ulster Unionists opposed Asquith’s Irish Home Rule bill in 1912–14.
B[ritish] D[ocuments on the] E[nd of] E[mpire], Series A Vol. 3, The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951–1957 Part II (HMSO, 1994) pp. 234–5. Peter Smithers was PPS to the Minister of State at the Colonial Office. Shortly before the Declaration of Emergency he reported on a trip to seven East and Central African territories.
Bodleian Modern Mss Room, Macmillan Diaries dep.d 37 f 33.
The mysterious and, in the circumstances, rather sinister one-word message ‘Assistance’ in fact related to the Kenya budget, but the appropriate Whitehall official was not there during the weekend, so it was not understood. Attempts to check up failed because of the damage to the cable service caused by the flood. Huxley, White Man’s Country Vol. II, pp. 161–6.
Rhodes House Mss. Afr 746 Blundell 29/1 Item 9. ‘A Preliminary Survey of the Constitutional History of Kenya’, signed ‘K. W.’ [Kendall Ward] and dated 5 October 1951.
Cmnd. 1922 (1923).
T. G. Fraser, ‘Imperial Policy and Indian Minorities Overseas’, p. 164.
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© 1999 Keith Kyle
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Kyle, K. (1999). The Foundation of Kenya Colony. In: The Politics of the Independence of Kenya. Contemporary History in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377707_1
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