East Africa Protectorate

Britain's first formal colony in what is now Kenya was the East Africa Protectorate, often called British East Africa, proclaimed on 1 July 1895 and stretching from the Indian Ocean coast to the borders of Uganda. Built around the Uganda Railway and, increasingly, around European settler farming in the highlands, it was reorganised in 1920 as the Colony of Kenya, while a narrow coastal strip, still nominally under the Sultan of Zanzibar, became the Kenya Protectorate.

The Swahili coast had long been a world of trading cities, and by the nineteenth century much of it acknowledged the Sultanate of Zanzibar. As European powers divided the continent in the Scramble for Africa, Britain backed the shipping magnate William Mackinnon, whose Imperial British East Africa Company received a royal charter in 1888 and leased a stretch of coast from the sultan. An Anglo-German deal of 1890 left the coast north of German territory to Britain. The company, however, ran short of money, and in 1895 the British government took over directly, first through the Foreign Office and later through the Colonial Office.

The Uganda Railway, begun at Mombasa in 1896, reached Kisumu on Lake Victoria in 1901. More than 30,000 labourers, mostly from Punjab and Gujarat, were contracted from British India, working in harsh and dangerous conditions. The line ran through the lands of the Nandi, who under their Orkoiyot, or spiritual and military leader, Koitalel arap Samoei resisted British expansion for years; their resistance is usually dated 1890 to 1906. British expeditions in 1895, 1897 and 1900 burned villages and seized livestock without ending it. On 19 October 1905 the officer Richard Meinertzhagen shot Koitalel dead at a meeting arranged as a truce, an act he defended as self-defence before a court of inquiry. Koitalel is honoured in Kenya today as a national hero.

From 1902 the protectorate absorbed the Eastern Province of Uganda, and the government began granting highland land to white settlers, many from Britain and South Africa; Lord Delamere became their best-known figure. The capital moved from Mombasa to Nairobi in 1905, and a governor with executive and legislative councils was installed in 1906. The fertile highlands were reserved for Europeans. In 1903 the British even offered land on the Uasin Gishu plateau for Jewish settlement, an offer withdrawn after Zionist opposition. Africans bore the costs: after the Second Maasai Agreement of 1911, Maasai herders were forcibly moved from the Laikipia plateau to drier land in the south, and Kikuyu communities lost land to settler farms. A hut tax helped force Africans into wage labour on European estates.

During the First World War the protectorate bordered German East Africa and became a base for the long East African campaign, for which the British Carrier Corps mobilised over 400,000 Africans as porters. Prophetic movements such as Mumboism, which spread in South Nyanza from 1913, openly called for the expulsion of the colonisers. On 23 July 1920 the inland territory was annexed as the Colony of Kenya, a change that alarmed many Africans over their land rights and helped spark new political associations in the early 1920s.

The protectorate set the pattern of colonial Kenya: a railway economy, a powerful settler minority, African reserves and racial divisions between Europeans, Indians and Africans. Grievances over land rooted in this period fed later movements, including the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.

Our 1914 map shows the protectorate as British East Africa, between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia to the north-east and north, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to the north-west, and German East Africa to the south. Its lands form most of today's Kenya.