The difficult years of the Depression were soon followed by the crisis of World War II. Kenyans were required to fight with British forces against the Italians in Ethiopia and Somalia and against the Japanese in Burma. This time most of them were trained in the use of weapons in combat. Kenya’s primary contribution to the war effort, however, was to provide extensive food supplies for the troops. African homesteads were ordered to sacrifice livestock and crops as “voluntary” contributions to a war effort they understood little about. The war years also witnessed government attempts to silence potential opposition by banning African newspapers and political movements.
The years following World War II saw a great increase in racial tensions and political conflict. Kenyan soldiers who returned home had a new sense of European vulnerabilities and expected to be treated with greater respect for their war service; they also returned with substantial pay packets and great expectations. At the same time, white settlers who had enlisted, or who had stepped in to replace colonial officials called up for the war effort, fully expected to be rewarded for their sacrifices and to have a greater say in the colony’s affairs. These conflicting expectations would collide violently in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s as white settlers confronted greater African militancy in both labor organizations and political movements.
While Nairobi was overwhelmingly a British colonial city, with clusters of African neighborhoods and shantytowns scattered around a white official and residential core, Mombasa remained very much a cosmopolitan African town, as it had been for centuries. That is perhaps why the organized Kenyan labor movement seemed centered around the workers of Mombasa, under the able leadership of men like the Luo Tom Mboya and the Indian Makhan Singh. Labor protests at the port of Mombasa beginning in the 1930s culminated in widespread general strikes in 1939, 1947, and 1957, each of which effectively shut down the port and other public operations within Mombasa, and often spread to Nairobi as well.
The roots of Kenyan political nationalism reached back to the 1920s, when a range of locally based organizations were formed to protest such issues as land alienation, the kipande system, hut taxes, forced labor, and the appointment of African chiefs who lacked local legitimacy. The best known of these protest organizations was the Young Kikuyu Association, led by Harry Thuku. Thuku’s arrest for sedition in 1922 led to a riot when policemen opened fire on the crowds demanding his release. Thuku was then exiled to Somalia and his organization banned, though a newly named Kikuyu Central Association, with similar concerns, was formed in 1925. Similar organizations in western Kenya included the Young Kavirondo Association (founded in 1922) and the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Associations (founded in 1923).
Following the wartime clampdown on African political activities, the nationalist movement gained momentum with Jomo Kenyatta’s return to Kenya in 1946 after years of study abroad. Widely recognized as the leader of Kikuyu nationalism, Kenyatta was president of the new Kenya African Union (KAU). The Luo and other ethnic groups shared many of the same colonial grievances, but Kikuyu dominance of KAU and the the shaping of the culture of resistance by Kikuyu traditions—including the widespread use of traditional oaths to recruit new members and bind them to secrecy—meant that the Mau Mau revolt was primarily, though not entirely, a Kikuyu affair.