British Colonial Rule

In 1895, Britain declared the East Africa Protectorate. Its first big project was the Uganda Railway, built between 1896 and 1901 from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Around 32,000 workers were brought from British India to build it, and many stayed, forming Kenya's Asian community.

The railway was expensive, and Britain wanted it to pay for itself. The answer was European settlement. From 1902, Crown Lands Ordinances declared large areas of land 'empty' or 'unused' and gave them to settlers on long leases. The cool, fertile central highlands became known as the White Highlands.

Not everyone accepted this. The Nandi, a Kalenjin community, fought the railway and British forces for about ten years. Their leader, the Orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei, was killed in 1905 at a meeting he believed was a peace talk. On the coast, Mekatilili wa Menza led Giriama resistance to forced labour in 1913–14.

In 1920, Kenya became a Crown colony. The colonial state controlled Africans through law. The Hut Tax and Poll Tax had to be paid in cash, which pushed men into wage labour on settler farms. The kipande system forced African men to carry identity papers at all times, controlling where they could live and work. Africans were banned from growing the most profitable crop, coffee.

Britain ruled through chiefs, but many were appointed by the British rather than chosen by their communities. Society was organised as a racial ladder: Europeans at the top, Asians in the middle, Africans at the bottom.

For forty years, Africans had no seat on the Legislative Council, the body that made Kenya's laws. That changed in 1944, when Eliud Mathu, a teacher educated at Fort Hare in South Africa and at Oxford, was appointed as its first African member. He was nominated by the Governor rather than elected, and he sat among a large European majority. But his appointment, and the founding of the Kenya African Union the same year, gave Africans a voice inside the colonial system for the first time.

Africans organised. In 1922, police opened fire on a crowd protesting the arrest of the political leader Harry Thuku in Nairobi, killing at least 21 people. Among them was Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, who had pushed to the front of the crowd and challenged the men to free Thuku. Associations like the Kikuyu Central Association kept petitioning for land and rights through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Almost nothing changed, and by the late 1940s, frustration was boiling over.