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Resistance to European rule and early administration

During the early years, the new administration largely focused on assertingauthority over the territory. Along the coast, the rulingMazrui family, which had emigrated fromOman by or in the 17th century and came to power thereafter, actively resisted the usurpation of its authority by the British administrators, as did theKikuyu and theKamba. Farther west theNandi did not accept their new overlords until 1905, after a series of Britishmilitary columns had ranged through their territory. TheMaasai were one of the few groups who offered no resistance to British authority, and they even served in the military during the British campaigns against the Kikuyu. Although this caused lastingenmity between the two groups, the Maasai behaved as they did largely because they had been so devastated by disease at the end of the 19th century.

The extension of British administration into the more remote areas of the protectorate was slowed by the lack of communicationinfrastructure and the limited financial resources available. When administration was introduced, though, it was direct rule because the British did not find the centralized Africanpolitical system that had existed in other parts of Africa that they came to control.

TheUganda railway and European settlement

The East Africa Protectorate was valued by Europeans as a corridor to the fertile land aroundLake Victoria, but the government’s offer to lease land to British settlers was initially not popular. Two factors, however, changed this negative attitude: a railway was constructed from the coast to Lake Victoria, and the western highlands were transferred fromUganda (where regulations made it impossible to lease land to Europeans) to the East Africa Protectorate in 1902. Work on the railway began atMombasa in December 1895, and the first locomotive reachedKisumu on Lake Victoria in December 1901; the entire line was completed by 1903. The protectorate was responsible for making the railway profitable, and the export of cash crops seemed to provide the perfect solution for generating revenue.Sir Charles Eliot, who became commissioner of the protectorate in 1901, invited South Africans to settle in the protectorate when European settlers were less than enthusiastic about the proposal, but they too were uninterested. At first only small areas of land in Kiambu district, which had formerly been occupied by Africans and which theKikuyu regarded as part of theirlegitimate area of expansion, wereallocated to European settlers, but by 1906 more than 1,550 square miles (4,000 square km) had been leased or sold. Some Africans, such as theMaasai, were confined to reserves; by 1911 the Maasai reserve extended south of the railway to the present-day border withTanzania.

As more Africans were separated from their land and as more European settlers entered the region, the Europeans became concerned with maintaining an adequate supply of African labour. Because few Africans voluntarily chose whether or not to work for Europeans, the settlers wanted the government to institute a system that wouldcompel Africans to offer their services to European farmers. Successive commissioners and governors responded in varying degrees to the settlers’ demands, and it was not until immediately after World War I, and largely as a result of public outcry inBritain, thatcompulsory labour on either public or private projects was strictly forbidden.

Thousands ofIndianlabourers were brought into the protectorate to construct the railway. Although most of these labourers returned to India after their contracts were completed, some remained. The opening of the railway encouraged Indian traders who had been living nearer the coast to penetrate farther into the interior, even ahead of the administration. Other Indians hoped to obtain land, but European settlers consistently opposed the Indians’ claim to land and to political and economic equality.

Prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European participation in political affairs was limited mainly to creating pressure groups. The most prominent of these was the Convention of Associations, which had developed in 1911 from earlier European settler organizations. An Executive Council was appointed in 1905, and the first Legislative Councilconvened in 1907. When the protectorate was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Colonial Office in April 1905 and the settlers did not gain the increased responsibility they had desired, they launched a campaign in 1913 to elect their own representatives to the Legislative Council. The outbreak of World War I temporarily limited the settlers’ legislative prospects, but the War Council, which was concerned with the effects of the war on the protectorate and included settlers, satisfied some of their desire to have elected representation in the legislature.

World War I and its aftermath

Germany had hoped that no battles with Britain would be fought on African soil duringWorld War I, but Britain was concerned with its communications withIndia and with the safety of the Ugandan railway. Britain initiated hostilities, to which Germany responded, with Britain ultimatelyprevailing in East Africa. The conflict caused great hardships for the African population. Thousands of Africans were forced to serve as porters and soldiers, often with disastrous results, and a large number of Africans died, mostly from disease. The entire East African economic structure was affected, as food production became geared solely to supplying the troops. The burden of providing this food fell largely on African women, who did most of the farming anyway. Women were forced to use the same plots of land repeatedly, thereby depleting the soil, because most able-bodied men, who were responsible for clearing new land, had been conscripted.Droughts andfamines recurred.

Most of the European settlers quickly joined the armed forces; they left their farms to be looked after by their wives, or else the farms were abandoned. An attempt was made immediately after the war torevive the settler sector by introducing a “soldier settler” scheme, but the hopes of prosperity encouraged by the postwar demand for agricultural produce received a severe setback in the early 1920s when a worldwide economic recession brought bankruptcy to many of those who had started out with inadequate capital or had relied on credit from the banks. Stability was further delayed by the replacement of the rupee currency with East African shillings. By the mid-1920s Kenya’s economy had wholly revived, although theGreat Depression of the 1930s brought further economic difficulties to East Africa.

Rail communications had been improved when branch lines were opened toThika and to the soda deposits atLake Magadi in 1913; during the war a link was made between the main line and the German railway system to the south. The most important postwar project was the building of a newextension of the main line across the Uasin Gishu Plateau to tap the agricultural wealth of the highlands and then to Uganda in order to provide an outlet for the cotton crops of that protectorate. The line was eventually completed fromNakuru toJinja in January 1928 and was carried on toKampala, which it reached in January 1931.