Kenya's Independence
Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963, eight years after the rebellion that made it inevitable was defeated. The colony had been built around the White Highlands, some 30,000 square kilometres of the best farmland reserved by law for European settlers, from which Kikuyu families had been removed and to which many returned as squatter labourers on land they regarded as their own. The Mau Mau revolt from 1952 came out of that grievance and out of a generation of ex-servicemen and urban poor with no prospects. The British response was a state of emergency lasting eight years: some 1.5 million people moved into fortified villages, a network of detention camps holding tens of thousands, and interrogation methods that were investigated at the time and documented later. Around 11,000 rebels were killed by official count and perhaps far more; fewer than 200 Europeans died, of whom 32 were civilians. Jomo Kenyatta was convicted in 1953 of managing Mau Mau on evidence a witness later retracted, and spent nine years in prison and restriction. He came out as the only leader capable of holding the country together and negotiated independence at Lancaster House with the settlers' representatives in the room. His policy afterwards was reconciliation, land bought and transferred rather than seized, and a firmly centralised one-party state. Britain acknowledged the torture in 2013 and paid compensation to 5,228 claimants, and the archives it had removed at independence were found to exist. The land question was not settled by independence and has not been settled since. Much of the highland acreage passed to a new political and commercial elite rather than to the families displaced from it, and it remains one of the most reliable sources of Kenyan electoral violence.
- Year: 1963 CE
- Category: Independence
