ABSTRACT
Colonial Kenya offers an especially fertile setting for the examination of colonial political strategies and state initiatives in the various levels of the political economy. Decisions concerning Kenya and developments within the colony ramified across the rest of British East and Central Africa, areas in which immigration of sizable numbers of British settlers accompanied the implantation of colonial rule. Kenya, perhaps more than any other African nation, expressed the tension and drama of decolonization. British colonial policy-makers responded quickly to the American anti-colonial sentiment and to the pressures they created. The development thrust in post-war colonial policy thus had roots in the recovery needs of the metropolitan economy as well as in the need to justify colonialism in the new post-war world. In the post-war period the African elite’s desire to participate more equally in the institutions of colonialism was, in many ways, in congruence with the ideas that held sway within the Colonial Office.
