The Politics of the Independence of Kenya

272 Pages·1999·13.54 MB·English

by  Keith Kyle (auth.)

THE POLITICS OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF KENYA
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY IN CONTEXT
Published in association with the Institute ofColltemporarv British Historv
General Editor: Peter Catterall, Director, Institute of Contemporary British History
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THE MYTH OF CONSENSUS: New Views on Blitish HistOlY, 1945-64
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USING EUROPE, ABUSING THE EUROPEANS: Britain and European Integration,
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Keith Kyle
THE POLITICS OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF KENYA
Spencer Mawby
CONTAINING GERMANY: Britain and the AI111ing of the Federal Republic
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BRITAIN'S WITHDRAWAL FROM EAST OF SUEZ: The Politics of Retrenchment
L. V. Scott
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Contemporary History in Context
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The Politics of the
Independence of Kenya
Keith Kyle
Visiting Prt~f'ess(}r (~r History
University (!( Ulster
Northern Ireland
oalgrave
in association with
PALGRA VE MACMILLAN ICBH
ISBN 978-0-333-76098-7 ISBN 978-0-230-37770-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-37770-7
© Keith Kyle 1999
General Editor's Preface © Peter Catterall 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 15t edition 1999
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kyle, Keith.
The politics of the independence of Kenya I Keith Kyle.
p. cm. - (Contemporary history in context)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-22201-7 (cloth)
1. Kenya-Politics and government-To 1963. 2. Kenya-History
-Autonomy and independence movements. I. Title. II. Series:
Contemporary history in context series.
DT433.575.K95 1999
967.62'03-dc21 98-50837
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 543
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
For Suzy, her Kenya book
Contents
General Editor's Preface ix
Preface xi
A cknowledgemenls xiii
A Note on Kenya xv
A Map of Kenya ill 1960 xvii
List of Abbreviations xviii
PART I AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 1895-1957
1 The Foundation of Kenya Colony 3
2 The Rise of African Nationalism 25
3 The Politics of Mau Mau 45
PART II THE INDEPENDENCE OF KENYA 1957-63
4 Tearing Down Lyttelton 69
5 The Bridge-Player 91
6 Kenyatta Released III
7 Majimbo 136
8 KANU Triumphant 160
9 Uhuru na Harambee 179
10 Epilogue 197
Noles and References 205
Bibliography 239
Index 244
vii
General Editor's Preface
After the elapse of some 30 years it is easy to forget how much
time and energy the demission of the British empire absorbed in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. I t is a truism that this was dispro
portionately the case in the settler colonies, such as Southern
Rhodesia or Kenya. However, the presence of white settlers, as
Keith Kyle shows, was by no means the only problem in Kenya.
The richest and most populous of the East African colonies, it was
nevertheless the last to achieve independence. No doubt this had
much to do with the presence of settlers, and not only in terms of
the political and electoral pressures from the Poujadist tendencies
of which Harold Macmillan complained in his diary in the wake of
the 1962 Orpington by-election disaster. Attempts to safeguard settlers
were also a complicating factor in a succession of constitutions,
each of which rapidly proved unworkable. At the same time, how
ever, these compounded existing inter-tribal difficulties and con
tributed towards the intensity of political conflict in Kenya. The
result was that progress towards independence was anything but
smooth. There was dissension over the future governance of Kenya,
exemplified by the conflict between KADU and KANU. Meanwhile,
in their attempts to achieve a peaceful transition to a legally con
stituted, secure and pro-western independent Kenya, the British
had to bear in mind not only the cold war dimension to the politics
of independence, but also the need to avoid the example of the
Congo.
Keith Kyle is particularly well-placed to tell this story. As a young
journalist in Nairobi he was an inside observer of the politics of
Kenyan independence. His account of key events in this story is
enlivened by personal recollection of, for instance, the release of
lomo Kenyatta, and has been enriched by his own collection of
papers and archives. But this is not a memoir, nor is it told from a
particular standpoint. It provides a detailed and authoritative as
sessment not only of political developments in Kenya but also of
the course of colonial policy in London. Instead of focusing on
one or the other Kyle skilfully interweaves both, in the process
showing how they interacted and impacted upon each other. Neither
operated in a vacuum; just as the successive constitutional settlements
ix
x General Editor's Preface
played a part in structuring Kenyan politics so the political re
alities of Kenya forced themselves upon Colonial Office policy, not
least in prompting the change in policy towards Kenyatta that forms
an important part of this account. This marked a dramatic shift in
the British attitude to the man who they had so demonized at the
time of the Mau Mau Emergency. In a sense, however, it was a
purely pragmatic reaction to the pressures building up in Kenya,
which were in turn driven in part by the rather negative fact that
the desirability of Kenyatta's release was the one thing most Afri
can politicians could agree on. The British attitude was to change
much more dramatically thereafter. As Keith Kyle shows, Kenyatta
was redefined by the colonial power, and indeed by settlers, from
being central to the problem to being central to the solution. De
spite his age, he provided the figure around which Kenyan politics
could coalesce in the run-up to independence. Kenyatta was thus
able to reconcile many of the tensions in Kenyan political life. But
he was perhaps too central, obscuring the degree to which the flaws
in the politics of Kenya's independence remained unresolved; flaws
which would however become increasingly apparent under his
successor.
PETER CATTERALL
Preface
One day shortly after the independence of Kenya I was walking
through the streets of Fort Hall (as Marang'a was still named) with
two veterans of the independence struggle, Jesse Kariuki and James
Beauttah. Kariuki suddenly produced out of his pocket a small,
leather-bound notebook in which were handwritten in English a
few outstanding dates, including his own computed year of birth
and the (subsequent) arrival of the white man. He asked me how
long the Romans had been in Britain. I told him about four hundred
years. 'Ah!' he said with great satisfaction, snapping the notebook
shut. The lesson was plain. He had seen the British in and he had
seen the British out.
Part I of this book is an abbreviated, and necessarily selective,
historical introduction to Britain's brief association with Kenya (as
it was known after 1920) from the time the British arrived in the
1890s until the beginning of Harold Macmillan's Premiership in
1957. The core of the book is contained in Part II and deals with
the political events that brought Kenya to independence. During
the first part of that period I was the political and parliamentary
correspondent of The Economist. From 1961 to 1964 I worked for
BBC television in East and Central Africa, appearing regularly on
the nightly Tonight programme. I also wrote for various British and
American papers including the Spectator, Time and Tide, Forum
Sel1'ice, Reynolds News, Christian Science Monitor, and Atlantic
Monthly. My main base was Nairobi. I was therefore a witness of
many of the events I describe in the latter part of the book. On
occasion I have quoted directly from what I wrote at the time.
While I was living in Nairobi I assembled a sizeable archive of
documents and interview notes with a view to publishing a book
soon after independence. I made some use of this material in pub
lished articles and when I was teaching a course in African politics
as a Fellow of the Institute of Politics, the John F. Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard, but the project, though started, was never
finished. After a thirty-year break I took up the subject again when
I was invited to contribute a paper to the Institute of Contemporary
British History's 1995 conference. This has subsequently appeared
in ContemporaJY British History (vol. 11, no. 4, Winter 1997) under
xi