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

economic class division, he argued, was of far less importance than racial division. The “fundamental struggle for power,” he stated, lay between “three politically and constitutionally recognized races.”⁸

Africans (97% of the colony’s population) were significantly underrepresented in the colony’s legislative and executive branches in this political structure, and the fact that this was accepted by the leadership of the colonial state and the CO proved significant because it was almost universally rejected by the Africans. The 1948 population census showed that there were 29,660 Europeans living in Kenya, and in the 1962 population count, this figure had risen to 55,759.⁹ The Asians represented a larger segment of the population. The 1948 census indicated that Kenya had a population of 97,687 Asians; in 1962 this had risen to 176,613.¹⁰ The Arabs numbered 34,048 in 1962.¹¹

In terms of numbers, the European population thus represented an extremely small segment of the total population during the period covered by this study. For much of the period, European political leaders, as well as leaders of the colonial state and the CO, grappled with the problem of how to maintain European political leadership and influence while at the same time moving forward a decolonization agenda similar to that implemented in other parts of the British Empire after World War II. The most influential initiative that emerged, so far as this study is concerned, was multiracialism.

Multiracialism had significant support from the colonial administration and London officials during the 1950s. The concept was not just applied to Kenya, of course, but to other portions of East and Central Africa under British colonial rule. According to Stultz,