On This Day: Kenya gains independence from Britain

DECEMBER 12, 1963: Kenya gained its independence from Britain on this day 50 years ago.

The new African state, which had been a colony since 1890, won its freedom following the Mau Mau Rebellion and a seven-year state of emergency.

Power was given to Jomo Kenyatta, whose Kenya African Union party won the country’s first general election in May 1963.

A British Pathé newsreel shows the Duke of Edinburgh giving the new Prime Minister the articles of independence at a packed stadium in the capital, Nairobi.

At midnight, the Union flag was lowered for the last time and Kenya’s new flag – with a Masai shield amid a black, red and green horizontal tricolour - was raised. 

The footage then shows “uninhibited tribal dancing” as fireworks fill the night sky in celebration.

Kenya’s independence followed that of its neighbours Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia and Uganda during a decade when Britain relinquished most of its territorial possessions.

Prior to UK colonisation, Kenya consisted of mostly wilderness hinterland and a coast where Arabs had traded for centuries and had enslaved 90 per cent of the local black natives.

The shoreline – with Mombasa its main city - had belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar until 1885, when it became a German protectorate.

But in 1890, it became part of British East Africa after Kaiser Wilhelm II ceded the territory to Britain to avoid conflict with his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Britain, which had a prosperous colony in resource-rich Uganda, set about linking the land-locked settlement with the sea by building a 660-mile railway.

They employed thousands of Indian labourers, who later settled mainly in Mombasa and today constitute a wealthy business class minority there.

The railway enabled white European settlers to move into the cooler hinterland and begin farming, particularly tea and coffee.

At the same time, natives from the seven main tribes were increasingly denied land and the right to farm these cash crops.

But the British inadvertently empowered the marginalised black majority after recruiting thousands to help them fight the Germans during the First World War.

Renegade German General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck ignored a truce between British and German East Africa – now Tanzania – and launched a guerrilla war campaign.

Despite being massively outnumbered, his 14,000 men were able to tie down the 300,000-strong British Empire forces in the region and went undefeated.

In 1920, British East Africa became known as Kenya after Mount Kenya, the tallest mountain in the territory and the second highest in Africa after nearby Kilimanjaro.

In the aftermath, the white settler population soared to 80,000 and, in doing so, drove more black itinerant farmers into the city, notably the new upland town of Nairobi.

As the urban population grew, so too did organisations demanding political rights and an end to British rule.

But the demands didn’t turn violent until 1952, the year Elizabeth II visited – arriving as a princess and leaving as Queen following the death of her father, King George VI.

In October – eight months after the royal tour – a state of emergency was declared following the Mau Mau Rebellion.

The Kenya Land and Freedom Army’s insurgency was quashed following the 1956 death of leader Dedan Kimathi and 12,000 members of the dominant Kikuyu tribe.

Nevertheless the uprising, which occurred while the British Army were fighing revolutionaries in Malaysia and elsewhere, came at a huge cost to the colonists.

For this reason the British realised they could not maintain Kenya as part of its empire and began working towards granting its people freedom.

It had hoped a moderate party would take power, but instead the Kikuyu and Luo-dominated socialist KAU were elected.

[On This Day: Sri Lanka gain independence]

They ruled the country as a one-party state with rubber-stamp elections until 1992, although they did not lose power until 2002.

In 2007, ethnic violence followed a disputed election result and 1,000 people were killed before a power-sharing deal was agreed.

[On This Day: Israel declares independence from Britain]

Sadly, it has also been blighted by Islamist terrorism, with 72 people killed in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi.

Yet Kenya remains one of the most politically stable and most democratic countries within Africa.

It is also the richest within its region and 11th overall among the 52 sovereign states of the continent due to burgeoning finance and tourism industries.