The Kenyan government declared a State of Emergency in 1952, following sporadic outbreaks of violence targeting Europeans and African loyalists (those who had declared their support for continued British rule). The widespread anticolonial revolt that followed is known as Mau Mau. Under martial law, colonial police arrested nearly two hundred Kikuyu political activists in the Nairobi area, including Kenyatta himself Losing their key leaders at one blow, the movement went underground and developed a more decentralized leadership in the rural areas. Thousands of Kikuyu men and some women fled to the forests of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares, where they formed the military arm of the Mau Mau
movement, the Land and Freedom Army, and staged guerrilla raids on British command centers and loyalist farms.
In Nairobi, Operation Anvil forcibly “repatriated” thousands of Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru (sometimes referred to by the British as “KEM”) to the rural areas in the hope of breaking up the core of urban opposition. One side-effect of the campaign against Mau Mau was to open new windows of opportunity for other ethnic groups in Nairobi, particularly for the Luo and Luyia, who were often able to move into the jobs and housing left behind by the detained or repatriated Kikuyu.
While several white settler families were attacked, and other African groups had to deal with curfew violations and sometimes arbitrary police brutality, those who suffered most during the 1950s were the Kikuyu themselves. Perhaps 100,000 Kikuyu men and women were arrested and sent to detention camps, where they were beaten and required to perform hard labor. Great hardships also faced those who remained on the land—a campaign of “vil- lagization” forced perhaps a million Kikuyu into stockaded villages, usually surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and a deep trench and guarded by armed loyalists.
Most of the fighting had ended by late 1956, but the State of Emergency was not formally lifted until I960. After nearly a decade of struggle, some fifteen thousand Africans had died, while at most a hundred Europeans had been killed. But while the Land and Freedom Army might have lost the battle, they had essentially won the war, in the sense that it accelerated British withdrawal from Kenya. The costs of continued colonial control were simply too high for British officials, and negotiations began to settle the terms and process of the transition to Kenyan independence, including the immediate election of African representatives to the Legislative Council (LegCo) for the first time. Most white settlers gave in bitterly and withdrew at this point, selling their farms and leaving the country. (The independent Kenya government would purchase many of those white farms, ostensibly to make them available for landless peasants; in practice most farms were purchased by government ministers or high officials, who relied on tenant farmers to provide labor.)
In December 1963, Kenya became an independent nation with Jomo Kenyatta (nicknamed “Mzee,” a term of respect for an elder) as prime minister and a democratically elected Legislative Council dominated by the Kenya African National Union, or KANU. Less than a year later, the British model of parliamentary government was abandoned in favor of a republican government with a strong president. Despite the rhetoric of the radical nationalists, the new government declared its commitment to capitalism and to private property Kenyatta assured world leaders that his would not be a “gangster government” and urged Kenyans to forget the past. Those who had supported the more radical goals of the Land and Freedom Army suppressed their misgivings in the first heady years of independence, but eventually tensions grew between two ideological camps within KANU. With Luo politician and former vice president Oginga Odinga (nicknamed “Jaramogi”) as their primary spokesperson, the leftists argued for land reform, domestic equality, and international nonalignment. When Kenyatta purged KANU’s left wing, some twenty-nine members of Parliament defected to join the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), a new opposition party formed by Odinga in 1966. This political cleavage, which dominated national politics for at least the next decade, largely followed ethnic and regional lines: Kenyatta’s greatest support came from the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru people of central Kenya, while Odinga’s support was found primarily among the Luo and Luyia of western Kenya. The Luo and other non-Kikuyu groups felt that Kenyatta, his Kikuyu allies within KANU, and his home district benefited disproportionately from official economic development. Most Kikuyu felt that they were the only ones who had really fought for independence and that they deserved most of its rewards. These ethnic tensions only deepened during the following decade.
The 1969 assassination of Tom Mboya, the most prominent Luo in government, provoked riots in Kenya’s major cities. Further riots broke out several weeks later during Kenyatta’s first visit to Kisumu, the unofficial Luo capital of western Kenya. When members of the special forces opened fire on the crowds, many innocent bystanders died. Kenyatta blamed the riots on the
KPU and immediately banned the opposition party, arresting Odinga and other leaders and cracking down on political dissent. Others accused government supporters of inciting the riot in order to discredit the KPU. Conspiracy theories and allegations of corruption flourished. Other outspoken critics of the government were murdered, including J. M. Kariuki, the popular ex-Mau Mau fighter turned member of Parliament; student leaders disappeared; and prominent members of Parliament such as Martin Shikuku and Jean-Marie Seroney were arrested, along with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, East Africa’s best-known writer and novelist.
When President Kenyatta died in 1978, a smaller ethnic group, the Kalenjin, came to enjoy the fruits of power under his successor, Daniel arap Moi. Kenya’s population has increased rapidly in recent years, while the changing terms of trade for agricultural products since the early 1980s have led to a generally stagnant rural economy. A coup attempt in 1982—the most serious threat faced by the new nation—was sparked by air force officers who attacked Moi’s government for corruption and economic mismanagement. Forces loyal to the government restored order after a few days. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and other Western nations have pushed the Moi regime to reduce corruption, impose economic reforms, and permit a more open political system. Moi capitulated to international pressure in late 1991 and announced that opposition political parties could form and compete in national elections. In the face of the relative weakness of the ethnically fragmented and underfunded opposition, the regime has continued its repression of dissent, including the use of government-funded ethnic violence to convince ordinary Kenyans that they are safer clinging to the status quo.
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