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

immigrants, known as Indians and later as Asians, took up a pivotal role in commerce as well as working for the colonial state. Kenya’s smallest immigrant community, the Arabs, resided mostly in the coastal region of the colony. Although they were resident in Kenya much longer than the other immigrant communities, the Arabs’ economic and social influence was much less significant.

Most significant for this study, Britain was forced, for most of the colonial period, to deal with the competing claims of these immigrants and those of the African communities. These African communities constituted the overwhelming majority of the colony’s population, but colonial officials viewed Africans as less advanced economically and politically than the Europeans and Asians, in particular.

Nevertheless, it is particularly important to understand that as Kenya evolved during the twentieth century, policy makers in Nairobi and London viewed the colony as a plural society. Specifically, Kenya was perceived as a racially stratified society. Official perceptions reflected this in privileging the relatively small European settler population politically, economically, and socially. A large block of land was reserved exclusively for European farming, and most towns that emerged in colonial Kenya were marked by residential segregation. The colonial state also accorded European farming enterprise a substantial measure of support. Europeans were allowed the right of trial by jury; this was a right enjoyed by no other racial group. After World War I, the European population was given the right to elect representatives to the Legislative Council (LegCo) of the colony.¹ Most politically conscious European settlers saw this as an important step toward their ultimate control of the state through the achievement of white self-government on the pattern of South Africa or Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Asians were viewed as the second most important group in Kenya’s racially defined social hierarchy, with Arabs third and the Africans at the bottom.²

All this determined that Kenya’s politics prior to the 1950s were racially defined. The political struggles of the post–World War I period solidified this situation. Asian and African political activity challenged the dominant position accorded to Europeans. The Indian Question, for