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Kenya’s Land Freedom Army: Why Africans couldn’t get over their hatred of...
My search for the truth about Kenya’s Million-Acre Settlement Scheme turned me into a student of history, and helped me understand why, in the 1950s, Kenya endured a bloodbath. Kenya’s freedom...
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Justifying the colonization of Kenya: European attitudes and African reality
In order to understand what happened after Europeans took over the country we now call Kenya, we have to know something about both the attitudes of the invaders and the reality of African life. Elspeth...
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Seeking socially acceptable descriptions for land theft in Kenya
As European settlement spread through Kenya’s highlands early in the 20th Century, considerable amounts of African land were included in what became known as the White Highlands. In later years,...
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Wakaichukua: An overview of European land seizures in Kenya’s Kikuyu country
In a previous post, I catalogued some of the lame excuses Europeans in Kenya offered for their seizures of African land. A Swahili saying offers a more realistic take on what happened: Wazungu...
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Kenya Europeans go after Masai land
Kikuyus took the hardest beating when white Kenyans went after African land, but they were not the only victims of European land grabs. In my last post, and a previous one I showed how flagrant Kenya’s...
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Europeans help themselves to Nandi and Kipsigis land
Nandi warriors (date unknown) The stiffest resistance to European encroachment on African land in Kenya came from the Nandi on the Mau plateau west of the Rift Valley. In the 1890s, and in the first...
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African squatters on European land: Opportunity, followed by a squeeze
The establishment in Kenya of what Europeans liked to call the White Highlands — land reserved for occupation by themselves — cut off the land frontier that Africans relied upon to accommodate normal...
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The crackdown: Attempts to build a new Kikuyu society provoke a civil war
In a previous post we saw how increasing shortages of land were making life harder for Africans who had no land rights. The development of agriculture, both in the White Highlands and in the reserves,...
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A Kenyan official gets a humiliating taste of colonialism, on the eve of...
The bloody civil war in Kikuyu country dimmed Britain’s appetite for colonial rule, but did nothing to resolve the problem of what was to become of the Europeans Britain had invited to settle in Kenya....
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Kenya’s independence from colonial rule: How the British off-loaded...
As it dawned on the British colonial authorities that their African colonial enterprise wasn’t working for them anymore, and it became clear that they would have to end colonial rule, they faced a...
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