Britain and Kenya’s Constitutions, 1950–1960 By Robert Maxon

As is seen in subsequent chapters, this definition fits rather well with the aims and attitudes of those colonial officials and politicians who advocated multiracialism during the 1950s. Moreover, the maintenance of European leadership in racial politics formed an important part of advocacy for multiracialism.

Multiracialism in Kenyan politics had other meanings as well. Donald Rothchild described it, for example, as “a transitory stage” during which “the three main races shared responsibility for running the state.” It recognized racial differences but sought “to manage conflict by establishing a coalition of racial leaders at the top of the political system.”¹³ This was certainly the theory, but it seldom worked in practice during the 1950s. David Gordon viewed the intention behind the policy as “a means of ‘de-settlerizing’ the society through the development of a shared community of interests of all those integrated into the colonial order.”¹⁴ For John Harbeson, in contrast, “multi-racialism was a political and economic philosophy meant to take the steam out of African nationalism.”¹⁵ This was certainly an underlying intention, but it was also true, as Bruce Berman observed, that multiracialism sought to “shift the basis of political allegiance from race to class” while promoting interracial and intraclass collaboration. Although the ideals reflected a desire to avoid “the explosive potential for racial struggle across the main lines of cleavage in the political economy of the colony,” the transition toward a sharing of power was until the end of the 1950s envisioned as taking many decades to accomplish.¹⁶ Looked at from another angle, the policy of multiracialism involved the British government seeking to win African acceptance of the idea that “the minority communities” were sufficiently important economically that they should be disproportionately represented in the LegCo and in the executive branch.¹⁷

For those Kenyan European politicians subscribing to multiracialism, moreover, a key concept was parity. From the 1940s until 1957, this