Haiti and Kenya independence · CHAPTER 10 ·
Road to Kenyan independence
Chapter 10 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978: “The Road to Uhuru”
By 1960 Britain wanted to leave Kenya, and the first Lancaster House conference gave Africans an elected majority in the Legislative Council. Two parties formed: KANU, drawing on the Kikuyu, Luo and Kamba, and KADU, which demanded majimbo, strong regional government; Kenyatta, freed in 1961, led Kenya to independence in 1963.
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The map above is the world of Kenya, 12 December 1963 — Uhuru — independence.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Kenya reached independence through the conference room, because by 1960 Britain wanted to leave and needed someone to hand power to. The first Lancaster House conference, a constitutional conference held in a government mansion in London, gave Africans an elected majority in the Legislative Council, the colony’s law-making body, in early 1960 and ended the settlers’ hold on politics. Two African parties formed that year. The Kenya African National Union (KANU) drew on the larger Kikuyu, Luo and Kamba communities. The Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) allied smaller peoples such as the Kalenjin, Maasai, Mijikenda and many Luhya. KADU feared that a strong central government would let the big communities take their land, so it demanded majimbo, a federation of strong regions, much like the states of a federal country with their own powers over land and police.
The decisive figure was still in detention. KANU won the election of February 1961 and refused to govern until Jomo Kenyatta was freed, and when he was released to Gatundu in August 1961, along the arrow from the northern desert, every party had to bargain with him. A second conference in 1962 wrote majimbo into a compromise constitution; on the map, the dashed lines mark its seven regions and the Nairobi area, the same boundaries as Kenya’s later provinces. KANU won the election of May 1963, Kenyatta became prime minister on 1 June, and Kenya turned red at midnight on 12 December 1963. The man Britain had jailed as the rebellion’s organiser became the guarantor of a peaceful handover, and that paradox shaped the new state.
The full story
Britain had decided to leave Kenya by 1960, and the remaining question was how to hand over power without losing its friends or its investments. Iain Macleod, Colonial Secretary, the British minister responsible for the colonies, from October 1959, chaired the first Lancaster House conference from January to February 1960, while Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament on 3 February that a “wind of change” was blowing through Africa. The Macleod constitution gave Kenya a Legislative Council of 65 seats, with 33 open seats in which African voters would decide the outcome and 20 seats reserved for European, Asian and Arab members. Settler hardliners called the result betrayal, while the moderate settler leader Michael Blundell accepted it. Political power had left the settlers’ hands for good, even though the land had not yet moved at all.
Independence politics took the shape of two parties divided by fear of each other, and the fear was about land. KANU, founded at Kiambu on 14 May 1960 with Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga among its leaders, wanted a strong central government. KADU, founded at Ngong on 25 June 1960 under Ronald Ngala of the coast, with Daniel arap Moi as chairman, united peoples who worried that a Kikuyu-led government would settle its own supporters on the Rift Valley’s former White Highlands. KANU won 67 percent of the vote in February 1961 but refused office while Kenyatta stayed in detention, so KADU governed. Kenyatta, moved from Lodwar to Maralal in April 1961 and freed to Gatundu that August, became the indispensable man: KANU’s leader, KADU’s negotiating partner and Britain’s best hope of order.
The final settlement balanced majimbo, the federal system of strong regions, against central power, and the balance did not last. The second Lancaster House conference, from February to April 1962, created a parliament with two chambers and regions with their own assemblies and protected powers over land, the outlines dashed on the map; a seventh region, North-Eastern, was added in March 1963 for the Somali-majority districts. KANU won 83 of the 124 seats filled in May 1963, Kenyatta became prime minister on 1 June, and a last conference that autumn moved some powers back to the centre. An agreement of 8 October 1963 ended the Sultan of Zanzibar’s sovereignty over the coastal strip, so the whole coast passed to Kenya. At midnight on 12 December 1963, at Uhuru Gardens, the British flag came down. Majimbo had bought KADU’s consent to independence, and KANU dismantled it within two years.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why Britain left so quickly
Historians explain the speed of Britain’s exit from Kenya by combining pressures from Kenya, from Africa and from Britain itself. Inside Kenya the Emergency had shown that about 60,000 Europeans could hold power over more than eight million Africans only with British troops, and the cost of that protection was rising. Across Africa, Ghana’s independence in 1957, France’s brutal war in Algeria and the collapse of the Belgian Congo in July 1960 offered lessons in what to copy and what to avoid. At home, Macmillan’s government saw colonies as a drain on a weakened economy and an embarrassment in a Cold War contest for the opinion of newly independent nations. Iain Macleod later wrote that Britain could not have held its African territories by force without terrible bloodshed. Keith Kyle’s The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (1999) shows how London tried to steer the transfer toward moderates who would protect investments and the remaining settlers. Speed was itself a strategy: by leaving quickly, Britain hoped to choose its successors before more radical ones emerged.
Majimbo: protection or obstruction?
The argument over majimbo was an argument about whether minorities could trust a national government, and it has never been fully settled. KADU’s leaders argued that regions with their own land boards would stop the Kikuyu and Luo, who were more numerous and better educated after decades of mission schooling, from taking the Rift Valley and the coast, and some settlers backed KADU in the hope that a weak centre would protect their farms. KANU called majimbo a colonial device to divide Africans and keep a federation of tribes dependent on Britain. The 1963 constitution gave the regions assemblies and protected powers, but KANU used its parliamentary majority to strip them away by amendments in 1964 and 1965. The idea of regional power did not die. In the early 1990s politicians revived the word to justify violent expulsions of Kikuyu and others from the Rift Valley, and the 2010 constitution returned to devolution in a new form, with 47 elected county governments. The fear that produced majimbo, that the centre would favour the strongest communities, proved a constant of Kenyan politics.
From prisoner to father of the nation
Kenyatta’s transformation between 1959 and 1963 is one of the most striking political reinventions of the decolonising world, and it served several interests at once. While Kenyatta was still restricted, Governor Sir Patrick Renison publicly called him “the African leader to darkness and death”; three years later the last governor, Malcolm MacDonald, worked with him as a partner. At Maralal in April 1961 Kenyatta insisted to the press that he had never led Mau Mau and spoke of a Kenya for all its races, and in August 1963 he urged settler farmers at Nakuru to forgive the past and stay. For the British he became the guarantor of property and order; for the settlers, the man who would not seize their farms; for most Kenyans, the prisoner whose suffering symbolised the nation’s. The cost of the reinvention fell on the forest fighters, whom Kenyatta asked to forget the past and who received little land or recognition. Historians such as John Lonsdale argue that Kenyatta genuinely believed in hard work and property, the Kikuyu ideal of earned self-mastery. His conservatism reflected conviction as much as convenience.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The Emergency made settler rule unaffordable. The Emergency proved that settler power rested entirely on British soldiers and British money. Once the forest war was won, London faced the bill for detention camps, garrisons and development without any prospect that the settlers could govern alone. Hola had made the camps politically toxic. After the 1959 election Macmillan’s government decided that the cheapest way to protect British interests was to transfer power to Africans who would respect them.
A continent on the move. Kenya’s independence was part of a continental wave. Ghana became independent in 1957, and seventeen African states followed in 1960 alone, while Tanganyika next door gained independence in December 1961 and Uganda in October 1962, as the map’s parchment neighbours show. The Congo’s collapse into civil war in July 1960 warned Britain of the danger of leaving too late or too abruptly. Holding Kenya as a settler colony while its neighbours became free became impossible to justify.
A political class ready to govern. Kenya had African politicians with experience, followings and international contacts by 1960, which made a negotiated handover possible. The first African elections of 1957 had brought Tom Mboya, the trade unionist, and Oginga Odinga into the Legislative Council, and they used it to demand Kenyatta’s release and majority rule. Mboya’s airlift of Kenyan students to American universities, begun in 1959, built links with Washington. Britain could negotiate with these men, and that made a negotiated exit possible.
Fear between Kenya’s peoples. Colonial rule had organised Kenyans by ethnic group, and the approach of independence turned those divisions into rival parties. Smaller peoples feared that the Kikuyu and Luo would use central power to take land in the Rift Valley and the coast, and settlers encouraged those fears. The demand for majimbo grew from this mistrust. The constitution of 1963 was therefore as much a treaty between Kenyan communities as a handover from Britain.
THE TURNING POINT
Gatundu, August 1961. Kenyatta’s release to his home at Gatundu, on 14 August 1961, is the hinge because it settled who would lead independent Kenya and on what terms. KANU had refused to govern without him, so his detention had frozen African politics; once free, he could unite KANU’s factions, negotiate with KADU and reassure Britain. His first months of freedom were spent proving he was a moderate, and his success at that task set the tone of the handover: land would be bought, settlers could stay, and the forest fighters would be asked to forget. A prisoner whom Governor Sir Patrick Renison had called “the African leader to darkness and death” became, within two years of his release, the prime minister who presided over a peaceful transfer of power.
What it changed
Majimbo dismantled. Kenya became a republic on 12 December 1964 with Kenyatta as president, and KADU dissolved itself into KANU in November 1964. Amendments in 1964 and 1965 stripped the regions of their protected powers, leaving a strong central state run from Nairobi through provincial administrators, much as the colony had been. The fear of central domination that had produced majimbo did not disappear.
Land changes hands by sale. The independence settlement protected property: settler farms would change hands only by sale, financed largely by British loans, under the principle of “willing buyer, willing seller”. This avoided the flight of capital and the violence that seizure might have caused. It also meant that landless Kenyans, many of them former forest fighters and detainees, had to buy back land their families had lost.
A north that did not consent. Most Somali-speaking people of the Northern Frontier District had told a British commission in 1962 that they wanted to join Somalia, and Britain instead made their districts a Kenyan region. Many boycotted the 1963 elections, and Somalia, independent since 1960, backed their claim. Within weeks of independence the new state declared an emergency in the north-east, the start of the Shifta War traced in the next chapter.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was Kenya’s independence granted by Britain or won by Kenyans?
The case for a British grant rests on timing and control: the Lancaster House conferences were held in London on London’s terms, Macleod chose the pace, and the constitution protected settler property and British investments. The case for Kenyan agency is stronger than that framing allows. The Emergency had made settler rule unaffordable, KANU’s refusal to govern without Kenyatta forced his release, KADU extracted majimbo as the price of its consent, and Kenyan negotiators shaped the final texts. Historians such as Keith Kyle show a bargaining process in which each side held cards. Kenyatta’s release illustrates the mix, since Britain freed him only after KANU had shown that no stable government could form without him. A good answer distinguishes between the decision to leave, which British leaders took under pressure, and the terms of leaving, which Kenyans of different parties fought over. The transferable lesson is that independence is usually both conceded and won, and the interesting question is who decided what.
An interesting fact
Kenya’s flag, first raised at midnight on 12 December 1963, adapted the black, red and green of the KANU party flag by adding two thin white stripes. Black stands for the people, red for the blood shed in the struggle for independence, green for the land and white for peace, while the Maasai shield and two crossed spears at the centre stand for the defence of freedom. The national motto chosen for the coat of arms, Harambee, means “let us all pull together” in Swahili. Both symbols were chosen to speak for every community in the new nation.
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