Kenya Colony

A settler colony created around a railway, where the best farmland was reserved by law for Europeans and the fight to get it back was the most brutal in British Africa. Britain built the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria between 1896 and 1901, at great cost and using indentured Indian labour, and then needed traffic to justify it - which is the origin of the decision to encourage European settlement in the temperate, fertile highlands. Those lands were designated the White Highlands and closed to African ownership, while the Kikuyu who had used much of them were confined to reserves and drawn into wage labour by a hut tax payable in cash. Indians outnumbered Europeans and were excluded from the highlands too. The Mau Mau rebellion from 1952 was the consequence. Britain declared an emergency, detained well over a hundred thousand people in camps, and used systematic violence that it documented and then concealed; files hidden at the time were released only after litigation, and the British government apologised and paid compensation to survivors in 2013. Far more Africans were killed than Europeans, of whom fewer than forty settlers died. Jomo Kenyatta was imprisoned as a leader of the movement despite disputed evidence and became the country's first president. Kenya became independent in 1963. Nairobi grew from a railway depot into the capital. Land grievances remain politically live. The colony existed under that name from 1920 to 1963, having been the East Africa Protectorate before that. Nairobi was the capital and Mombasa the port. The railway ran around a thousand kilometres. Kenya now has around 55 million people.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration