ABSTRACT
The issue of the state’s relation to African businessmen, unlike the issues of land and agriculture and labor relations and industrial policy, had not been and, in the post-war years, was not a central policy concern for the colonial authorities in Kenya. At the end of World War II, the Kenyan government had no coherent policy regarding African trade. The evolution of colonial Kenya as a settler-based society had substantially retarded the growth of a class of African traders that was so important to the West African peasant-based colonies. The preoccupations led the colonial government to propagate a series of regulations intending to limit commercial and financial dealings by Africans. The politicization of African businessmen was turned against the colonial regime. The Declaration of the Emergency in October 1952, and the change in political strategy that it engendered, dramatically altered the state’s approach to African business.
