kilometer radius in Nairobi it is possible to experience the opulence of the Kenyan richest and the desperate survival of a Kenyan proletariat .
Yet this situation seems stable and there is no sense of unease where one feels that the status quo is about to explode at any moment . And this is where we need to shine a light of the history of Kenya to get an understanding of why we are where we are as a country .
Revisiting History
By the time the Portuguese arrived on the East coast of Africa at the end of the fifteenth century they found vibrant commercial Swahili settlements on the East Coast , the locals having traded with Arab sea farers since the seventh century .
The Arab traders had established trading posts along the east coast of Africa in search of spices and later began to settle mainly due to those that were fleeing the Arab peninsula as a result of religious persecution during the Jihads associated with the spread of Islam .
Arab historians indicate that the Arab was aware of and traded or was in contact with at least one hundred and eighty different ethnic groups in what was later to be the British protectorate . These groups formed an organized and interdependent systems that facilitated trade .
The advent of the Portuguese was to shatter the centuries of cordial relationship between the locals in the east coast and Arabs since by the mid sixteenth century the Portuguese were the first European nation to ship slaves from West Africa to Brazil .
The Portuguese soon were looking for sources of slaves along their African posts and soon other European countries followed and so did the Arabs and the century old cordial coexistence came to an abrupt end as allies turned foes in the new lucrative trade .
One of the reasons the British took an interest in the east coast of Africa was the then British role that they had placed upon themselves to abrogate the shameful trade in human flesh and they championed the abolition of slavery as a Christian country .
To justify slavery , many European nations went to great lengths to argue that the black race were not humans and therefore did not enjoy the same rights as their captors who were a master race and destined to rule the world with the black race as their slaves .
This is a good example of how a historical narrative can affect individual perceptions and that poisonous narrative was to have an unfortunate long-term effect on global politics that even today the politics of race still rear their ugly head in all spheres of the global arena .
The historical irony is not missed that the European nation that was at the forefront of the abolition of slavery was the same nation that was to become the nation that oppressed those that they had fought others to set free . Colonialism was slavery by another name .
The British had set up the Protectorate of East Africa in 1895 and the British East African Company decided to connect the port of Mombasa with the Protectorate of Uganda and decided to build a rail to the Lake Victoria shore at Kisumu which was then under the Protectorate of Uganda .
To carry out this major project they had to import skilled labor from India and when the railway project was completed in 1901 , the rail having reached port Florence ( present day Kisumu ) many Indian workers chose to remain in the protectorate .
They considered themselves British subjects and they wanted to have the right to buy land , engage in commerce and have representation in government . The white settlers that were then moving into Kenya were uncomfortable with this arrangement .
The whites claimed that they were holding the African land in trusteeship and any attempt by the Indians to buy land would prejudice the African interest as the rightful owners of the land . This political ploy set the scene for the way Kenyan politics proceeded .
The British settlers continued to arrive in Kenya and managed to hive off over five million acres of the finest arable land , while pushing the natives into unfertile and marginal lands and forced over sixty percent of the adult African population into modern day slavery by taxation .
In 1920 the Protectorate of Kenya was established and the arbitrary borders of present-day Kenya was drawn to mainly accommodate the about ten thousand white settlers . By comparison there were two million Africans , thirty thousand Indians and ten thousand Arabs .
The British set up the three tier social structure that created the first class as whites , the second class as Indians and Arabs and Africans as the third class citizens of their own country . The die had been cast to create an apartheid style of government in Kenya .
But in denying the Indians the rights of free subjects of the empire and especially the right to buy land and exploit labor claiming that it would injure the rights of the natives the Indians decided to incorporate the African politicians into their fight to be recognized in government .
The Kikuyu who were the main tribe to be uprooted by the settler activities had already began to get organized and had registered the Kikuyu Association by 1919 . It was to this group that the Indian reached out for political alliance .
It should be noted that what the Indian was agitating for was not equality for the African but purely to be a thorn in the flesh of the whites who claimed they were holding the land in trust for the natives and yet were dislodging them from their homesteads .
But the African had been woken and using the democratic tenet of no taxation without representation the Kavirondo Taxpayers Association was formed in 1923 to challenge the government that was taxing the African without representation .
To bolster the effort of the taxpayers association the Luo Union was formed in 1925 to push the Luo community agenda in the colonial government where whites were elected to represent the rights of Africans without allowing them into parliament .
Kikuyus took the cue from the Luos and they registered the Kikuyu Central Association also in 1925 and the African push to be recognized in the colonial government was underway and these associations were the nascent political parties and labor movements in Kenya .
Some groupings of similar linguistic stem started to coalesce into political entities and the North Kavirondo Association was formed in 1932 representing roughly the diverse Luhyia communities in what would eventually be described as the Abaluhyia Association in 1954 .
By 1948 the Akamba Union was registered to cater for the growing political activities among the Akamba . This Union was expanded to include a wider base of the
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