political trajectories from the early twentieth century forward? In what ways and in what contexts have Kenyans narrated their own stories and represented themselves? What have these competing histories accomplished?
With these questions in mind, this chapter focuses on the complexities of the colonial experience, the myths surrounding it, and the work that competing discourses about Kenya’s colonial past continue to perform into the present day—not simply in Kenya, but globally as well. Indeed, writing about his long discussions with a local historian in Western Kenya during his 1988 visit, Obama recalls being admonished, “The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”8 Accordingly, a primary goal of this chapter is to sharpen understandings of Kenya’s colonial past and its relationship to the present. We turn next to one of the most enduring and powerful tropes, or common themes, about Kenya—Kenya as a “white man’s country.”9
Creating the Colonial Landscape: The (Un)Happy Valley of the “White Man’s Country”
By the time Roosevelt made his journey, the colonization of Kenya10 figured as the domain not just of the “white hunter” but of the white settler. In the swath of fertile land that extended from the slopes of Mount Kenya to escarpments hugging the Great Rift, with its volcanic lakes, to the plains of Laikipia that composed the White Highlands (so called because they were lands alienated, or officially given over to white settlement and ownership), Africans were progressively turned off the lands they had inhabited and worked for generations. They were expelled to “native reserves,” islands of agriculturally poor lands demarcated along tribal lines, or they were allowed for a time to “squat” on white farms, exchanging their labor for the right to reside on settler lands and to retain a small fraction of the crops they produced.
This realization of Kenya as a “white man’s country” had its deep roots in an African adventure undertaken a little more than a decade before Roosevelt’s epic safari by another young man of prominent family and considerable means, Hugh Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere.11 In 1896, accompanied by an entourage that included teams of Somali bearers, a professional photographer, and two hundred camels, Delamere, who reputedly coined the term “white hunter,” embarked on a far-ranging safari that led him more than one thousand miles throughout Somaliland and concluded ultimately in Central Kenya.12 The lush landscape captured Delamere’s imagination, and a few years later, shortly before British East Africa became the Kenya Colony and Protectorate in 1905, he returned as a settler, taking up a ninety-nine-year lease on one hundred thousand acres near the Mau Plateau that he pledged to spend £5,000 developing over a period of five years.13
Working from his vast Equator Ranch and as a chief figure in the settler lobby in Nairobi, Delamere threw his energy into the development of Kenya as a “white man’s country.” Chairing an official land commission in 1905, Delamere advocated that the initial development of the highlands be undertaken by wealthy, elite émigrés with large land grants. He was able to entice an array of his aristocratic contemporaries to emigrate from Britain, and in what became known as the “Happy Valley”14 of the White Highlands, they created a microcosmic world of privilege and decadence that has endured in romanticized, popular imagination as being “authentically Kenyan.” This was a world seemingly composed of “sundowner” cocktails, usually gin and tonic, taken outdoors every evening as the equatorial sun dropped out of the sky; of vast farmhouses dripping with bougainvillea and staffed by black servants in white kanzu (long robes); of months spent on safari and of regular black-tie balls at the tony Muthaiga Club or Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. Yet, the reality of the Happy Valley included seedier elements of widespread substance abuse—the visiting Prince of Wales was notoriously offered cocaine at a dinner party—and scandalous adultery: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” was a popular joke in interwar Britain.15
The world of the Happy Valley endured in popular imagination not only after many of its denizens succumbed to dissolution, bankruptcy, and scandal, but even after the end of British rule in 1963. The area was chronicled at the time by white settlers, most notably Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Known by the nom de plume Isak Dinesen, her famous memoir, Out of Africa, begins with the lilting line, “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”16 Nostalgia for the dramatic and glamorous aspects of this colonial milieu was reinvigorated in the mid-1980s with the release of the film version of Out of Africa, based on Blixen’s memoir and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which in turn stimulated a spate of books and media productions romanticizing the settler lifestyle.17 This nostalgia for a romanticized British colonial past and its vast marketability even inspired a new Ralph Lauren fragrance, Safari, its print campaign mirroring the aesthetics of Out of Africa and making India Hicks, granddaughter of the last viceroy of India, its primary face.18 Yet, notably absent from these scenes set in Kenya’s upcountry “islands of white” are black Kenyans and their experiences of British colonialism. Missing, too, are any indications of conflict between the colonizers and the colonized or of the inherent violence of the colonial project overall.19 It is to these topics that the remaining sections of this chapter turn.
Colonial Rule: Conquest, Bureaucracy, and “Tribal” Imaginaries
Popular representations of the White Highlands would seem to suggest that the British arrived in Kenya and immediately took control of the country and its people without incident. But the reality of the coming of colonialism and the imposition of British rule was much more complicated—and violent. The first British boots on the ground in Kenya were not those of “great white hunters” or settlers like Delamere, but rather those of explorers and missionaries who traversed East Africa in the Victorian era.20 They were followed by members of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). As we noted above, the British had come into possession of Kenya through the “Scramble for Africa.” Indeed, a popular anecdote of the late Victorian era highlighting the arbitrary nature of the scramble held that Queen Victoria ceded Mount Kilimanjaro, thereby shifting the border between British East Africa and German East Africa, to her grandson, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, because she had two mountains—Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro—and he had none.21
At the Berlin Conference of the mid-1880s, the imperial powers agreed that in order for one country’s claim to an African territory to be recognized by the others, the claiming country had to show that it had “effectively occupied” the territory, that is, set up some form of rudimentary administration that would facilitate free trade and free transit in the territory. By the late 1880s, the British government had set up the IBEAC, the concessionary company “chartered to occupy Britain’s sphere of influence,” that is, to see to economic and administrative development of the British East African territories.22 By the late 1880s, the IBEAC was sending ivory caravans from the Swahili Coast through Kenya to Uganda, and by the 1890s had begun the violence-ridden process of conquering and subduing the area’s African populations. British officials often referred to this process as “pacification,” which resulted in “punitive” expeditions against any active resistance. For instance, in the Nandi-speaking regions of Western Kenya, British “pacification” from 1890 to 1906 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Nandi warriors as well as cattle seizures that decimated the pastoralist community’s herds.23 However, at the same moment the IBEAC was cementing itself militarily with such punitive missions, its economic power was waning. The Foreign Office took over direct control of Kenya, establishing the East Africa Protectorate in 1895 and taking charge of building a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria, while many of the “company men” stayed on as the first British administrators.24
In ruling Kenya, the British were confronted with two central, interrelated problems: their numerical inferiority vis-à-vis African populations and the incredible diversity of African communities, or “tribes” as they called them. The system of governance known as “indirect rule” addressed both of these problems. Developed by Lord Frederick Lugard, chief British administrator in Nigeria, indirect
