Africans: Africa was now their homeland. On the
other hand, only one-third of Kenya was fertile,
and the highland plateau, the best of the land,
was until 1960 the exclusive preserve of the white
settlers. With the approach of independence the
settlers expected to preserve their privileges and
to retain influence far beyond what their numbers
could justify.
The oldest of African political leaders came
from Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta had been involved in
early African nationalist policies in the 1920s and,
when these were forbidden in the 1930s, came to
study and live in Britain, where politics could not
be proscribed. In 1947, by then already an elder
statesman, he returned to Kenya to lead the
Kenya African National Union. His aim was to
win African majority rule constitutionally step by
step, beginning with an increase in the number of
Africans on the Legislative Council. But a more
radical wing of the party – the Forty Group – was
determined to drive the British out by force.
Kenya’s political parties were largely ethnically
based and the two most powerful groups were the
Kikuyu and the Luo. The Kenya African National
Union, which was predominantly Kikuyu, organ-
ised a rising in 1952. The Kikuyu had plenty of
grievances, in particular a desperate shortage
of land. But there was also anger about discrimi-
nation and the colour-bar; ex-servicemen had
already experienced a different world of com-
radeship with white Europeans. Kikuyu national-
ism was strong too, and the oaths administered
to the Land Freedom Army deliberately harked
back to Kikuyu traditions. At the height of the
rebellion there were some 25,000 fighters in
the forests. The British ruthlessly suppressed the
rebellion. The picture presented in Britain
depicted the valiant farmer, with a rifle across his
knees, protecting his family and homestead from
savages crazed by the blood oaths of the secret
Mau Mau society to hack the whites to pieces
with their pangas. In reality during the four years
of the rising less than seventy white people lost
their lives.
The main victims were the Africans. Some
90,000 Kikuyu men between the ages of sixteen
and thirty-five were herded by the authorities into
detention camps. One of these, the Hola camp,
became notorious for beating and even murders.
African soldiers officered by the British meanwhile
defeated the guerrilla army. Black casualties on
both sides numbered some 18,000 and many
black African civilians died from malnutrition in
the forests. The governor, who had proclaimed an
emergency, also arrested Kenyatta and the princi-
pal leaders of the Kenya African National Union,
accusing them of having organised the Mau Mau.
Kenyatta was tried and sentenced in 1954 to hard
labour. It was a typical knee-jerk reaction. Once
the rising had been put down and the emergency
ended in 1956, wiser counsels prevailed. The con-
structive work of preparing Kenya for independ-
ence proceeded.
In 1961 Kenyatta was released. In Britain
Harold Macmillan was now prime minister.
Always a realist and a progressive conservative,
Macmillan recognised the futility of attempting to
perpetuate the privileges of a few thousand white
settlers at great cost to the British taxpayer. In
1960 at the end of a tour of Africa he delivered
his famous ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape
Town. The practical implications were soon
evident. The Kenyan highlands were opened to
African settlement, and restrictions on what the
Kikuyu could cultivate, such as coffee, were lifted.
Kenyatta resumed leadership of the Kenya African
National Union. Ethnic political rivalries impeded
progress for a time, but when Kenyatta’s KANU
in May 1963 won a majority, complicated plans
for a federal structure were abandoned and
Kenyatta was honoured as prime minister. This
was the last staging post on the road to inde-
pendence, which was duly accorded in December
1963.
During the Mau Mau struggle, rival politi-
cians, Oginga Odinga (a Luo) and Tom Mboya,
had come to the fore, but Kenyatta’s personality
and reputation dominated the country. For some
years ethnic politics continued to create distur-
bance, which Kenyatta countered by setting up a
one-party state. By the close of the 1960s his two
principal rivals had been eliminated: Tom Mboya
had been assassinated and Odinga detained.
Kenyatta encouraged foreign investment and
capitalism, but this was capitalism with the African
difference that it was state-dominated. The state