Was Kenya’s independence granted by Britain or won?

The short answer

• 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.

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.