# How each Kenyan people was colonized and subverted How the colonizer subdued each Kenyan people in turn, the Kikuyu, Maasai, Luo, Kamba and others, by force, treaty, and divide-and-rule, and how each resisted. *This story parallel: Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning* *This story part of: The Scramble for Africa* *This story part of: Kenya: from the Swahili coast to the republic* *This story continues: Precolonial Kenya: peoples, states, and faiths* *This story parallel: The faiths that fought empire: African religion and resistance* *This story parallel: The White Highlands: the settler heartland and the land question* *This story part of: State, law, and coercion* *The colonial map of Kenya: neglected regions and regional inequality parallel this story* *Kikuyu initiation rites and the 1929 crisis parallel this story* *Tribalism as a colonial tool: how colonial rule hardened Kenya's divisions parallel this story* *The Mount Kenya peoples: Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru, and Embu led to this story* *The peoples of western Kenya: Luhya, Gusii, and the Wanga kingdom led to this story* *Kenya's Nilotes: Luo, Maasai, Kalenjin, and Turkana led to this story* *The coast and the Cushitic north: Swahili, Mijikenda, and the pastoralists led to this story* *The conquest of central Kenya: the punitive expeditions part of this story* *How the Maasai were disarmed: the fall of a warrior power part of this story* *The greats: Kenya's heroes of resistance and independence parallel this story* *The Akamba and the fight for independence: cattle, land, and Kapenguria part of this story* *Dorobo is not one tribe: Okiek, Yaaku, and Kenya's forest peoples part of this story* *Kitale and Trans-Nzoia: settler granary, railhead, and land grievance part of this story* *Timau: Mount Kenya settler farms, flowers, and the Laikipia edge part of this story* ## c. 1848 — Krapf and Rebmann open the interior to Europe The German missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann of the Church Missionary Society at Rabai near Mombasa were the first Europeans to report the snow-capped mountains of the interior, Rebmann seeing Kilimanjaro in 1848 and Krapf sighting Mount Kenya in 1849 while travelling with the Kamba trader Kivoi. Krapf also compiled the first Swahili dictionary and grammar. Their reports, disbelieved at first in Europe, drew explorers and then empire toward East Africa. ## c. 1872 — The chigoe flea reaches Africa The chigoe flea, or jigger, native to South America, took hold in Africa when a ship dumped ballast sand from Rio de Janeiro on the Angolan coast. Earlier introductions during the slave trade had died out; this one spread. The burrowing flea causes tungiasis, painful and disabling foot infestations. ## c. 1889 — Jiggers spread east across the continent Within two decades the jigger crossed Africa along caravan and trade routes, carried by porters and soldiers. Stanley's Emin Pasha Relief Expedition is credited with helping spread it into the Great Lakes region. It reached most Central, West, and East African colonies, and Madagascar by 1899. ## c. 1891 — The Emutai: Rinderpest, Smallpox and Famine Break the Maasai In the early 1890s a cattle plague called rinderpest swept south through East Africa and destroyed most of the Maasai herds, followed by smallpox and famine among the people. Maasai tradition remembers this disaster as the emutai, the wiping out, a time when whole sections lost their cattle and their strength. The catastrophe left the Maasai weakened and divided just as the British arrived, and historians argue it made their later conquest and displacement far easier. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s* *Source: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## c. 1892 — Fort Smith and the Violent Frontier in Kikuyuland The Imperial British East Africa Company pushed its caravan road into Kikuyu country and built Fort Smith at Dagoretti, seizing food and cattle from surrounding clans. Officers such as Francis Hall, after whom Fort Hall was later named, led punitive raids on villages that resisted, and the early Kikuyu leader Waiyaki wa Hinga died in company custody in 1892. Kikuyu oral tradition remembers this decade as one of burned granaries and stolen herds, and the record rests partly on those memories alongside company reports. ## 1895 — The Ten-Mile Coastal Strip and Its Ambiguous Status The narrow coastal strip was not simply conquered but held under the sovereignty of the Sultan of Zanzibar, leased to Britain and administered as a protectorate rather than a colony. This left the Swahili and Arab coast in a legal limbo, its land tenure and Islamic institutions treated differently from the interior. The strip's status stayed unsettled right up to independence, when its future had to be negotiated between Kenya, Zanzibar, and Britain. ## c. 1895 — The Nandi Resistance The Nandi, a Kalenjin people, fought the British longer than almost any other Kenyan community, raiding caravans and later the Uganda Railway that cut through their country. For roughly a decade from 1895 they turned back or bloodied several expeditions, guided by their ritual leader, the orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei. Their long defiance made them a target the administration was determined to crush. ## c. 1900 — Bringing the Lake Region Under Rule The British called the crowded, fertile country around Lake Victoria Kavirondo and set about administering its Luo, Luhya, and Gusii peoples through military posts and appointed headmen. The Uganda Railway reached its terminus at Kisumu in 1901, opening the lake to steamers, trade, and closer control. Densely settled and productive, the region was valued less for settler land than for its people, taxed and recruited as a vast source of labour. ## c. 1900 — Jiggers reach Kenya with the caravans and the railway The jigger arrived in the East African interior with caravan porters, soldiers, and the Uganda Railway during the conquest. It caused crippling foot infestations among communities already broken by rinderpest, smallpox, and famine, adding disease to the disruption of colonization. ## c. 1901 — Hut and Poll Tax and the Push to Labour The government imposed a hut tax and later a poll tax that had to be paid in cash, which most people could earn only by working for wages on settler farms or in towns. The tax was designed as much to force Africans into the labour market as to raise revenue, since a self-sufficient farmer had little reason to leave home. In the densely peopled west it turned thousands of men into migrant workers, draining the reserves of labour for months at a time. ## c. 1901 — Lenana, the British-backed paramount chief The British made Olonana, the senior Maasai laibon, into a paramount chief, an office the Maasai never had, since the laibon was a ritual prophet and not a ruler over the sections. Lenana supplied Maasai warriors for British punitive expeditions against the Kikuyu, Nandi, and others, and his name was put to the 1904 and 1911 agreements that gave up Maasai land. Whether he was a collaborator or a pragmatic survivor is disputed: the Maasai had been broken by the Emutai, he could not speak for every section, and the historian Lotte Hughes argues the British manufactured his authority to legitimise taking the land. *Source: Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure* ## c. 1902 — Invented Chiefs, Reserves and the Census Harden the Tribe Most Kenyan communities had no chiefs, governing instead through councils of elders and age sets, so the British created chiefs under the Village Headmen Ordinance of 1902 and ruled through these appointed agents. Ethnic reserves fixed fluid, overlapping peoples to bounded blocks of territory, and the census counted everyone into a single named tribe. Historians argue that colonial administration, needing tidy units to govern, turned soft and shifting identities into hard, official ones. ## c. 1902 — Meinertzhagen's Punitive Expeditions Against the Kikuyu Colonial forces mounted repeated punitive expeditions to break Kikuyu resistance, burning villages, confiscating livestock, and killing fighters and civilians. The officer Richard Meinertzhagen recorded some of these raids in his own diary, including the destruction of the Iriaini and Tetu areas, describing killings in matter-of-fact detail. Historians treat his account as revealing but self-serving, so the scale of the violence is drawn from several sources, not his word alone. ## c. 1902 — Missions and Schooling in the West A crowd of missions carved up the western region, Quakers settling at Kaimosi in 1902, the Church Missionary Society at Maseno, Mill Hill Catholics, and Seventh-day Adventists on the lake shore. They brought schools and clinics along with new churches, and the literacy they spread gave the Luo and Luhya an early foothold in clerical and professional work. Mission rivalry also cut communities into competing denominations, another line of division laid over older ones. ## c. 1903 — The Alienation of the Kikuyu Highlands The fertile, well-watered highlands the Kikuyu farmed were among the first lands taken for white settlement, declared Crown land on the fiction that they were empty or ownerless. Much of the frontier had in fact been thinned by the famine and smallpox of the 1890s, and settlers moved onto ground its owners expected to return to. The Kikuyu system of family land held under a founder, the githaka, gave people a strong sense of ownership that the seizures directly violated, feeding a land grievance that lasted for decades. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country: A Study in Government Policy* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization* *Source: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya* ## 1904 — The First Maasai Agreement and Move In 1904 the administration pressed the Maasai, through the laibon Lenana, to sign an agreement giving up the central Rift Valley grasslands and move into two reserves, one on the Laikipia plateau to the north and one to the south around Ngong and Loita. The treaty said the arrangement would last as long as the Maasai existed. Historians dispute how freely Lenana acted and whether he spoke for all the Maasai sections, but the effect was to clear prime pasture for white ranchers. *Source: Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure* *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s* *Source: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## 1904 — The Gusii Resistance and the 1904 Expedition When the British first pushed into the Gusii highlands in 1904, a military force met resistance, killed many people, and raised the Union Jack over the district. The Gusii, or Abagusii, a Bantu farming people ringed by pastoralist neighbours, had a reputation for independence and would not submit quietly. The 1904 violence opened a period of raids and reprisals that ran on for years. *Source: Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: Transitional Justice* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## 19 October 1905 — Killing of Koitalel arap Samoei Koitalel arap Samoei, the orkoiyot who led Nandi resistance, was shot dead by a party under British officer Richard Meinertzhagen, ending organised Nandi opposition. The circumstances are contested: Nandi tradition and many historians hold that he was killed treacherously during a meeting arranged under a truce, while Meinertzhagen claimed self-defence. The killing is remembered in Kenya as a colonial assassination. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s* *Source: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## 1906 — The Nandi Removed and Their Land Taken Koitalel arap Samoei was killed on 19 October 1905 after British officer Richard Meinertzhagen lured him to a supposed peace meeting under truce and shot him at close range. With Koitalel dead, a punitive field force drove the Nandi from much of their land, seized cattle, and confined them to a reserve. Their high, fertile country was handed to white settlers and to the railway, and the Uasin Gishu plateau nearby became prime settler farmland. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Nandi resistance to British rule, 1890-1906* *Source: The County Government of Nandi marks the 120th memorial service of Orkoiyot Koitalel Araap Samoei* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s* *Source: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## c. 1906 — The Conquest of Embu and Meru After subduing the Kikuyu, the British turned on their neighbours the Embu and Meru, who had refused to submit. A large expedition, again involving Meinertzhagen and drawing on Mbeere and Kikuyu auxiliaries, overwhelmed Embu resistance around 1906, and administrative posts soon followed in Meru. Local resistance continued in quieter forms, but the old councils of elders lost their power to appointed agents of the government. *Source: What Was the Kenya Emergency?* ## 1907 — The Abolition of Slavery on the Coast Britain abolished the legal status of slavery in the coastal protectorate in 1907, ending the labour system on which the Arab and Swahili plantations of cloves, grain, and coconuts had run. Freed slaves and Mijikenda migrants stayed on as squatters and low-paid workers, and former owners were compensated while the freed were not. The change reshaped coastal society and left a tangle of land and labour disputes that outlived colonial rule. ## 1908 — Otenyo Nyamaterere spears the British commissioner In the 1908 Gusii rising against British taxation and rule, the young warrior Otenyo Nyamaterere, inspired by the prophetess Moraa Ngiti, speared and wounded the British officer G.A.S. Northcote. The British answered with a punitive expedition that killed many Abagusii and seized their cattle. Otenyo was hunted down, captured, and executed, and he is remembered as a Gusii hero of resistance. ## 1908 — Otenyo, Moraa and the 1908 Gusii Rising The young warrior Otenyo Nyamaterere, urged on by the prophetess Moraa wa Ng'iti, speared the British administrator Northcote, who survived, and sparked a rising that took a month to put down. A punitive expedition raided the cattle enclosures of Kitutu and seized several thousand head, and Otenyo was captured and shot by firing squad. Gusii tradition holds that his head was taken to Britain, and to this day elders campaign for its return, though the details rest on oral accounts. *Source: Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: Transitional Justice* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## c. 1908 — Mission Schools and the Making of a Kikuyu Elite Church of Scotland and Church Missionary Society stations in Kikuyu country offered schooling, literacy, and wage skills, creating a class of mission-educated Christians the Kikuyu called athomi, the readers. This opening divided the community between those who embraced the mission path and those who held to custom, a split colonial rule would later widen into loyalist and rebel. Access to education became a form of power, and the elite it produced shaped Kikuyu politics for generations. ## 1911 — The Second Maasai Move Only seven years after promising the northern reserve was permanent, the government forced the Laikipia Maasai to trek south so their plateau could be opened to settlers. A new agreement in 1911, of doubtful validity, joined the two reserves into one southern block, and the drive south cost many cattle and lives. The broken promise made clear that colonial treaties with Africans held only as long as they suited the settlers. ## 1913 — The Giriama rise under Mekatilili and are crushed The Giriama leader Mekatilili wa Menza rallied her people against British demands for taxes, forced labour, and porters, administering unifying oaths and invoking the authority of the sacred kaya elders. In her famous confrontation with the officer Arthur Champion she used the fowl and feather challenge to defy British power. The British crushed the 1913-14 rising, burned the sacred Kaya Fungo, killed scores, fined the Giriama, and deported Mekatilili to distant Gusii country, from which she is said to have walked home. ## 1913 — The Maasai Case A group of Maasai led by Ol le Njogo sued the Crown, arguing the 1911 move broke the 1904 agreement and asking the court to let them stay on Laikipia. The court dismissed the case, ruling that an agreement between the Crown and a tribe was an act of state that British courts could not enforce. The decision confirmed that Africans had no legal defence against the taking of their land, a landmark in the law of colonial dispossession. ## August 1913 — Mekatilili wa Menza Defies Arthur Champion At a public meeting in August 1913 the administrator Arthur Champion demanded Giriama men for labour and closer submission to the government, and the elderly Mekatilili wa Menza rose to refuse him. She rallied the Giriama, especially the women, and administered binding oaths at the sacred settlement of Kaya Fungo against cooperating with the colonisers. Arrested that October and exiled far away to Kisii, she became the enduring symbol of Giriama resistance, her story carried largely through oral tradition. ## 1914 — The Giriama Uprising and the Burning of Kaya Fungo The Giriama refusal to supply labour hardened into open revolt in 1913 and 1914, met with a military campaign that killed hundreds and drove people from their land. Colonial forces razed Kaya Fungo, the sacred forest shrine at the heart of Giriama religion and authority, and imposed a heavy collective fine and demands for carriers for the coming world war. Destroying the kaya was an attack on the community's very identity, meant to break the elders and the spirits who sanctioned resistance. ## c. 1918 — The Squatter System on the Settler Farms Landless Kikuyu families moved onto European farms as resident labourers, or squatters, giving their labour in exchange for the right to cultivate a plot and graze a few animals. The Resident Natives Ordinance of 1918 and later laws steadily cut their land and stock rights, turning a tenancy into near-serfdom. When settlers tightened the terms in the 1930s and 1940s, evicted squatters carried their anger back to the crowded reserves, one of the roots of the Mau Mau revolt. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s* *Source: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post Election Violence* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## c. 1919 — The Somali and the Struggle Over Status Kenyan Somalis pressed the colonial state to class them as non-native, alongside Arabs and Asians, seeking to escape the taxes, the kipande pass, and the labour demands imposed on other Africans. The administration's shifting answers left them in an ambiguous middle, neither settler nor ordinary subject, a status historians link to their later sense of not belonging in Kenya. Their contested place in the colonial order fed grievances that would surface again at independence. ## c. 1920 — The Destruction of the Maasai Pastoral Economy Penned into a single reserve, the Maasai lost the wide seasonal range their herding depended on, cut off from dry-season pastures and salt licks now inside settler farms. Veterinary quarantines, grazing controls, and pressure to reduce stock further squeezed a way of life built on moving cattle across the plains. A people once dominant in the Rift became a controlled, impoverished margin, their economy deliberately hemmed in. ## c. 1920 — The Kipsigis and Other Kalenjin Lose Land The Kipsigis and neighbouring Kalenjin communities of Sotik and Kericho were pushed off grazing and farming land so the cool uplands could be planted with tea and settler crops. The 1905 Sotik punitive expedition was the violent hinge: a British force under Major L. R. H. Pope-Hennessy, using King's African Rifles, police, levies and machine guns, punished the Sotik/Kipsigis, seized cattle, and opened land for colonial control. Large tea estates later rose on ground that had carried cattle and millet. *Source: Origins of European Settlement in Kenya* *Source: I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya* *Source: Tea in Kenya: a History of Colonialism, Labour and Power* *Source: Tea-volution* *Source: Kenyan Land Dispossession* ## c. 1920 — The West Made a Reservoir of Migrant Labour Nyanza and the western districts became the main source of workers for farms, ports, and towns across the colony, their men circulating out to labour and back to the reserves. The kipande registration pass, carried around the neck, tracked and disciplined this workforce. Historians describe the region as deliberately underdeveloped, kept as a pool of cheap labour rather than developed in its own right, a pattern that shaped Kenya's economy long after independence. ## 1921 — The Young Kavirondo Association and Early Protest Mission-educated Luo and Luhya founded the Young Kavirondo Association to protest rising taxes, the kipande, forced labour, and the loss of land, holding a mass meeting the Luo remembered as Piny Owacho, the voice of the people. Alarmed officials steered the movement, with the help of the missionary Archdeacon Owen, into a tamer welfare body. Even so it marked one of the earliest organised African protests in the colony and seeded later western politics. *Source: History of the Southern Luo* *Source: Nyanza: The Odinga dynasty and beyond* *Source: Not Yet Uhuru* *Source: Assassination and Political Unity: Kenya* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## 1926 — The Closed Northern Frontier District The vast arid north, home to Somali, Borana, Rendille, Turkana, and other peoples, was sealed off as the Northern Frontier District, entered only with a special permit under the Closed Districts Ordinance of 1926. The government ruled it as a buffer to be policed rather than a region to be developed, spending almost nothing on schools, roads, or clinics. This deliberate isolation began the marginalisation of the north that outlasted colonial rule. ## c. 1929 — The Female Circumcision Crisis and Independent Schools A campaign by Protestant missionaries against female circumcision provoked a sharp Kikuyu backlash defending the practice as central to custom and initiation. The dispute drove many Kikuyu to break with mission churches and build an independent schools and churches movement outside colonial and missionary control. These independent institutions became centers of cultural assertion and nationalist sentiment, and the colonial government later closed many of them during the Emergency as suspected Mau Mau breeding grounds. ## 1930 — The Kakamega Gold Rush Breaks the Reserve Pledge When gold was found at Kakamega in the Luhya reserve around 1930, the government rushed to amend the Native Lands Trust Ordinance so prospectors and mining companies could enter land that had been promised to Africans for good. The change stripped the so-called protection of the reserves the moment that land became valuable to Europeans. It exposed the hollowness of colonial guarantees and stands as a plain case of one law for the settler and another for the African. *Source: Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940-93* *Source: Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-1963* *Source: Transitional Justice* *Source: Ballots to Bullets: Organized Political Violence and Kenya's Crisis of Governance* ## c. 1930 — Mission Ethnography and the Making of Moral Ethnicity Missionaries and officials wrote the dictionaries, grammars, and customary-law codes that pinned each community to one language, one custom, and one bounded culture, deepening the lines colonial administration had drawn. The historian John Lonsdale distinguished a community's own moral ethnicity, its inward argument about virtue and belonging, from the divisive political tribalism that colonial rule and the scramble for resources encouraged. Divide-and-rule set community against community, a hardened tribalism that still shapes Kenyan politics, and this reading is an interpretation historians debate rather than settled fact. *Source: Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa* ## 1934 — Special Districts and the Neglect of the North The Special Districts Administration Ordinance of 1934 gave officials in the north sweeping powers of collective punishment, letting them seize the stock and restrict the movement of whole communities for the acts of a few. Combined with the closed-district system, it locked the region into policing and underdevelopment. The frontier's peoples entered independence far behind the rest of Kenya, and the unresolved anger helped drive the Shifta secession war of the 1960s, covered elsewhere. ## c. 1945 — The Making of the Mau Mau Grievance Land hunger in the reserves, squatter evictions, the colour bar, and the frustration of a generation shut out of both land and advancement built into the grievance that erupted as Mau Mau in the 1950s. The Kikuyu, with the Embu and Meru, bore the sharpest edge of settler colonialism and so produced its fiercest revolt, covered in depth in the Mau Mau and loyalist threads. Colonial rule then split the community itself, arming Kikuyu loyalists against Kikuyu fighters in what became partly a civil war. ## c. 2010 — Jiggers persist as a disease of poverty in Kenya More than a century after it arrived, tungiasis remains endemic in poorer parts of Kenya, affecting well over a million people, many of them children. The World Health Organization classes it as a neglected tropical disease, and campaigns by groups such as the Ahadi Kenya Trust push treatment and shoes.