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Colonial Era: British colonial control of Kenya dates from the Berlin Conference of 1885, when the European powers partitioned East Africa into spheres of influence, with present-day Kenya passing to the British. The British government established the East African Protectorate and in 1920 made Kenya a British crown colony. The British opened the fertile highlands to white settlers, who established themselves as large-scale farmers. Extensive tracts of the best land were taken from Africans and reserved for white settlers, who eventually gained control of the colonial government. Protest by Africans, which began in the 1920s, peaked between 1952 and 1956 with the so-called “Mau-Mau” Emergency, an armed Kikuyu-led insurrection directed against white settler domination and British colonial rule. The British put Kenya under a state of emergency until 1959 and imprisoned many of the colony’s nationalist leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a British-educated Kikuyu and an activist since the 1920s. After the Mau-Mau revolt abated, Britain increased African representation in the colony’s legislative council until, in 1961, there was an African majority. Kenya became independent on December 12, 1963, and the next year became a republic and joined the Commonwealth. Kenyatta, head of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), became Kenya’s first president.

Independence under Kenyatta: Kenyatta engineered successive measures that increased the powers vested in the presidency, giving the executive, for example, the power to detain political opponents without trial if they posed a threat to public order. By 1969, KANU was the sole political party in a de facto one-party state. To forestall opposition and tribal conflict, Kenyatta relied on largesse, dispensing offices with all the wealth such patronage entailed across ethnic groups. In the economy, he pursued pro-Western, essentially free-market capitalist policies. Seeking to stem the outflow of capital underway since 1961, he...