Akamba nation and by 1961 the New Akamba Union was registered .
The reason we are tracing the birth of political consciousness is to demonstrate that in all these development the communities did not see themselves as Kenyan but as purely ethnic groups that had existed for centuries and whose livelihood was threatened by the Colonial government .
Right from the beginning the political formations were tribal and they existed to purely push for their narrow agenda of the communities affected by colonial disruption . The only viable way for communities to express their displeasure was through tribal groupings .
From 1907 the legislative council of Kenya ( Legco ) became the legislation of Kenya which was modelled on the Westminster system . This was then a nominated exclusively European Institution that was set up to serve the European community that was settling in Kenya .
The colonial government went out of their way to ensure that the African , whom they claimed to be looking out for was kept out of the political system of the colony and they instituted the now famous divide and rule system by deliberately encouraging ethnic rivalry and separation .
Right from the start the Indian question was an issue for the British colony since they were the ones that had brought in the Indian laborer and as early as 1909 , an Indian was nominated into the Legco , and in contrast the first African was nominated in 1944 .
That year coincided with the first time an African political organization with a national outlook was formed , Kenya African Union . From that time African political activity and pressure were intensified to demand independence for Africans .
In 1948 India attained Independence from Britain and that seismic political occurrence emboldened the Indian in Kenya to improve their political position in Kenya but they could only do this through the cooperation of the African political class .
The Indian lobby was an important irritant for the British because it could not be ignored , neither could it be seriously entertained because ceding any ground to the Indian lobby would mean they would have to accommodate the African requests that they were never prepared to do .
The writing was however on the wall that
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When we created the forty seven counties as devolved units we actually created the counties along tribal boundaries making it even more difficult for a national leader to address the self-destructive insular focus that defines ethnicity .
the British dominance in the world was waning and the Kikuyu community finally tired of being excluded and finding that dialogue was taking too long , decided to revolt and the Mau Mau uprising broke out in 1952 .
The eight year-long Mau Mau rebellion was not a Kenyan rebellion against the British rule but a Kikuyu ethnic expression of their dissatisfaction with their lot . The rebellion was crushed with the official number of insurgents killed or hanged put at eleven thousand .
This was however the turning point of the political stage in Kenya and the Kenya African National Union ( KANU ) was formed in 1960 the same year that the Kenya African Democratic Union ( KADU ) was also formed as a counter to KANU .
KADU was a loose association of the Maasai United Front , The Kalenjin Political Alliance , The Abaluhyia Political Union and the Coast Democratic Union . The group had been formed for fear of political dominance by the bigger tribes .
This is another demonstration that the so called Kenyans were really a collection of independent ethnic entities that were interested in grouping more as a survival tactic for the group and did not have a national agenda as a nation .
The point is that at independence the country we call Kenya did not exist except as an administrative map in the British Colonial Office and there was no sense of kinship between a Giriama at the coast and a Pokot in the Mt . Elgon area and yet they were now collectively independent as Kenyans .
The new illusion called Kenya was a myth since those that drew the boundaries did so for the arch reason of dividing and ruling and the ease of administration of a territory that was already difficult to govern given the pesky Indians who would not keep quiet .
The group of people that can attest to the non-existence of the country called Kenya are the Indians who found themselves shunted from second class citizens to stateless . The Indian had no natural claim to land in Kenya yet he had played such a crucial role for Kenya ’ s independence .
The British of course had a vision for Kenya , they wanted a land with a minority rule that used the local populace as labor . The Indian too had a vision of inclusivity and he was also looking at the African labor pool and could see a bright future .
The African who bore the brunt of the discrimination just wanted to see these ungrateful foreigners that they had welcomed into their territory removed and what the African was hoping for was a return to his old peaceful coexistence with his neighbors but now there was an entity called Kenya .
Unfortunately for the African the people that the Colonists handed over the instruments of power to at independence were the same Africans that had collaborated with the white settlers to oppress the African and they were now the new masters .
In fact immediately after independence , ethnic associations mushroomed and the most prominent was GEMA which was both a political and economic association looking after the interests of specific tribal pursuits that had nothing to do with Kenya .
The stolen land was not returned to its rightful owners and now belonged to an entity called Kenya that was controlled by the politicians of the day . That was also the genesis of land grabbing as the land technically belonged to the state , the state could allocate it at a whim .
At independence , through some political sleight of hand , the very settlers that had run roughshod on natives were still in Kenya in exactly the same vast tracts of land whose occupation had caused the agitation for independence . They were amazingly still protected and privileged .
The Kenyan independence was a con game ab initio and nothing really changed except that Kenya gained a new master tribe of what came to be known as the ‘ Wabenzi ’,
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