Colonial Kenya
Until the 1880s little official interest was shown by the European powers in acquiring territory in East Africa. British government policy was to work through regional leaders to create an atmosphere in which trade could grow without the costs that direct administrative control would entail. The only other European power having substantial interests in East Africa was Germany, but the government of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck displayed an equal lack of eagerness for colonial ventures that might require direct government intervention and expenditures. Bismarck himself had ignored demands by German explorers and businessmen for colonial expansion overseas. His main concern was that German trading operations receive adequate protection by local regimes.
By 1885, however, international considerations and domestic policies had brought a change in Bismarck's outlook. His hand was also forced by the activities of Karl Peters, who had founded the Society for German Colonization to promote overseas expansion. In 1884 Peters and two associates went to Zanzibar, proceeding from there to the mainland where they persuaded Arab shaykhs and local African chiefs to sign treaties offering their territories for German colonization. The treaties were presented to, and accepted by, Bismarck the next year, and a subsequent order by the kaiser declared the areas to be under German protection.
A charter was issued to the society to administer the new protectorate—whose extent was not defined—which was to be known as German East Africa. The society then ceded its rights to the new German East Africa Company, also headed by Peters. At about the same time, the Germans had obtained a treaty with the sultanate of Witu on the northern Kenyan coast, which they also proclaimed a German protectorate in 1885.
In Britain the government of Liberal prime minister William Gladstone had sought to avoid a direct commitment to Zanzibar and had refused to support the sultan when he protested the German action. The new Conservative government that took office under Lord Salisbury in July 1885 determined to head off further German expansion in East Africa by reconciling conflicting claims in the region. The next year a joint British-German commission, which was convened to decide the extent of the sultan's domain, awarded the islands along the coast, including Lamu Island in Kenya, to the sultan, as well as a strip of land extending inland 16 kilometers that went as far north in Kenya as the mouth of the Tana River. The interior beyond the coastal strip was divided into British and German spheres of influence separated by a line roughly the same as the present-day Kenya-Tanzania border.
Kenya was formally established as a political entity in 1895. Effective control of the entire territory was achieved in the early 1900s, although the British administration never bothered to assert full control over large swathes of unproductive Northern Kenya, leaving those areas mostly ungoverned. Government investment in administration and infrastructure concentrated heavily on regions inhabited by the ethnic group in power: white settlers and representatives of the British government. Throughout nearly the entire 68 years of British administration, Kenya's formative period as a political entity, white settlers alone were permitted to organize themselves politically and lobby the administration.
The settler minority used their exclusive political clout to win for themselves large tracts of the most productive land, a monopoly on the production of the most important cash crops, and preferential treatment by the administration in all matters (security, education, employment in the state bureaucracy and military, etc.). State security forces were used to seize the best lands from the prior inhabitants (mostly Kikuyu in the central highlands) for redistribution to the settlers. The state enforced the settlers' monopoly on cash crop production and granted many other privileges to the small settler minority.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
