ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the significant role played by Kenya in far right conceptions of Empire, particularly during debates surrounding British rule in Africa and decolonisation. It will first examine the British Union of Fascist’s failed attempts to gain support in the colony among the white settler population during the 1930s. It will then show how, after the Second World War, while Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement persisted with policies which amounted to the continued domination and racial persecution of Kenyans, their ‘Eurafrica’ policy reflected a unique imperial idea within far right thought. A. K. Chesterton would be the most passionate supporter of continued white rule in Kenya, however, and the Mau Mau Uprising in 1952 saw his League of Empire Loyalists embark on a profoundly racist campaign which claimed that Africans were reverting to their natural state of war and barbarity. While the far right were in many ways no exception to the racist ideas of the time that were sceptical of the ability of Africans to self-govern, Mosley and Chesterton appeared to revel in detailing the gruesome conflict and discourse surrounding the hopelessness of Africans, while ignoring out of hand the growing tide of support for Kenya’s claims for majority rule. Despite a failed attempt to set up League of Empire Loyalist branches in Kenya and collaborate effectively with local supporters of continued white rule, the LEL would resist Kenyan independence until the bitter end while other fledgling far right parties were beginning to focus on immigration as the far right’s key issue to gain support.
