Vol. 72/No. 15      April 14, 2008

Today Brown is prime minister of the United Kingdom. The political crisis that developed following the December elections in Kenya—which has left at least 1,500 people dead and 600,000 driven from their homes—is firmly rooted in the colonial rule of that country by Britain’s wealthy families, who continue to dominate Kenya’s economy today.

Summing up the barbarity of London’s rule in Kenya one former colonial official told a British TV documentary in 1987: “There were really no limits that they wouldn’t go to.”

Caroline Elkins, a professor of history at Harvard University, has authored the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, which provides useful information on Britain’s divide-and-rule policy in that country.

There are more than 40 ethnic groups in Kenya. The largest is the Kikuyu at 22 percent—followed by the Luhya, Luo, and Kalejin at 14, 13, and 12 percent respectively.

Beginning in the late 19th century the British colonialists forced Africans off their lands in Kenya and replaced them with white settlers. Huge tracts of fertile land, especially in the “White Highlands,” were stolen. From 1901 to 1904 Africans in Kenya lost 220,000 acres. That figure rose to 5 million acres by 1915.

Through “agreements” imposed upon the Masai ethnic group in 1904 and 1911, for example, the British rulers confiscated an estimated 50 to 70 percent of Masai land.

The Kikuyu were hardest hit by the land expropriations, according to Elkins, losing as much as 60,000 acres. Over time, the British pursued a course of driving them off their land, out of agricultural production as small farmers, and into wage labor working on the settler estates under “coercive and exploitative labor contracts,” she writes.

To enforce separation between the different ethnic groups, Africans were pushed into “reserves”—much like the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa—and forced to carry the much-hated “kipande” identity pass. A “hut tax” was also imposed to force Africans to migrate in search of work.

Some Kikuyu became sharecroppers, or “squatters,” on settler land. Many migrated to the capital city of Nairobi or other cities in search of work. Trade unions began to develop, which were banned by the British during World War II.

The colonialists imposed chiefs on the Kikuyu. In return for their loyalty to London, these despised collaborators were granted parcels of fertile agricultural land belonging to farmers of other ethnic groups.

In the mid-1940s several thousand squatters, who had previously been evicted from the White Highlands, were being threatened again with eviction from Olenguruone. They fought back, sparking a movement of organized resistance.

At the end of World War II Kikuyu soldiers returned from abroad having learned about the anticolonial movements in India and elsewhere. They swelled the ranks of a movement against British rule amidst the rising cost of living, unemployment, and overcrowding facing Kikuyu in the cities and the increasing evictions of squatters from settler land.

A movement for “land and freedom” took root among the Kikuyu that became known as the Mau Mau. Some 20,000 Mau Mau fighters, men and women, fought a guerrilla war in the forests armed with homemade weapons for nearly two years beginning in 1952. The British responded with a six-year brutal offensive against the Kikuyu population as a whole. In 1963 Kenya won its independence.  
 
 
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