Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa: The Struggles of Emerging States by David M. Anderson & Øystein H. Rolandsen

Author:David M. Anderson & Øystein H. Rolandsen [Anderson, David M. & Rolandsen, Øystein H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781138846661
Google: FPK9oQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 23412145
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-01-15T12:33:16+00:00

Violence, decolonisation and the Cold War in Kenya’s north-eastern province, 1963–1978

Daniel Branch

Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

The paper explores the extent to which other domestic political matters and post-colonial ties to Britain shaped the Kenyan Government’s actions in northern Kenya between independence in 1963 and the death of President Jomo Kenyatta in 1978. The paper has a particular emphasis on the Shifta War of 1963–1967. Disputes between rival nationalist leaders at independence and doubts about the loyalty of the armed forces meant Kenyatta concentrated on protecting his regime from the threat of coups and other challenges than he was with using violence to extend state authority in north-eastern Kenya. That same calculation meant Kenyatta looked to Britain for support, in particular in the form of military backing for his government in the event of a coup or invasion from Somalia. The paper argues that the compromises made between British and Kenyan actors allow us to understand the particular nature of the Kenyan state’s actions in north-eastern province over this period.

Just a year before Kenya’s independence, Jomo Kenyatta insisted that the fate of the contested Northern Frontier District (NFD) was ‘a domestic affair of Kenya’.1 His argument was made up of several threads. He did not, for instance, think the threat posed by a nascent irredentist movement of ethnic Somalis to be great. ‘Pack up your camels and go to Somalia’, he told them.2 There was, he thought at first, no need for a future independent government to seek external assistance to defeat the ragtag army irredentists. Kenyatta was also certain that the Somali Republic had no right to interfere in the political debates about the future of the NFD after Kenyan independence. But Kenyatta and his fellow leaders of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the ruling party at independence a year later, were also wary of British influence in an independent Kenya.

In the Congo, the Katangese secession – sponsored by the departing colonial power – provided a bleak vision of one possible future for Kenya. ‘We have seen the tragedies and the shedding of blood resulting from Moise Tshombe’s secessionist attempts in Katanga’, a KANU delegation to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) stated in 1963. ‘Somali secessionists in the NFD are following the same Tshombe foot-steps and we shall not tolerate Tshombe in independent Kenya’.3 Fears of such a scenario in Kenya were not without foundation. Kenyans initially characterised the outgoing British colonial administration as having been initially sympathetic to the Somali cause as part of their efforts to ‘dismember our country’.4 Until shortly before independence in 1963, the colonial regime in Nairobi saw Kenyatta and KANU as dangerous radicals that threatened British future interests. Acquiescence towards Somali irredentism in northern Kenya was, therefore, part of a wider process of constitutional reform designed by the departing administration to weaken a KANU-led central government power at independence.5 This policy was, however, later reversed.6

If the British stance changed, so too did Kenyatta’s. Abandoning his earlier opposition

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