At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East African interior was still a very secluded region in comparison with other areas of Africa. With its focus on the Eastern trade, neither the Swahili Arabs nor the Portuguese ventured beyond the small stretch of land along the Indian Ocean. The latter had ruled from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century but by the early eighteenth century Arabs from Oman had taken over the coastal zone near the equator. They started slowly
Kenya.
To penetrate the interior, moving toward the Buganda kingdom near Lake Victoria, albeit by a southern route. They mostly shunned the northern stretch of land that in the twentieth century would become known as Kenya.
During the nineteenth century, Kenya underwent tremendous changes and yet also retained a degree of continuity. While the period witnessed the end of the relative isolation of African societies in the interior, it marked the reduction of the relative significance of the cosmopolitan Islamic coast. Both areas experienced a process of evolution, expansion, and differentiation that facilitated the emergence of practices and institutions which would be interrupted by colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century. However, neither the interior nor the coast showed any reduced dependence on agriculture and trade as a means of survival and stimuli for change.
Several ethnic groups varying in size, internal organization, and language, such as the Bantus, Cushites, and Nilotes, constituted nineteenth century Kenya. Patterns of life among these groups demonstrated a strong relationship between the environment and internal evolution and extra-ethnic relations. Broadly, crop production and pastoralism shaped ethnic distribution, power, and influence. They determined not only group survival and expansion but also whether a community was sedentary or nomadic. Thus, land was to crop producers what pasture and water were to pastoralists, significant aspects of group life and class differentiation on the one hand, and sources of internal and external disputes on the other.
The Bantu-speaking groups monopolized crop production since they inhabited some of the richest agricultural lands in central and southwestern Kenya. With adequate rainfall and its loam fertile soils central Kenya nurtured one of the largest Bantu groups, the Kikuyu, who with their Mount Kenya neighbors, the Embu and Meru, were fairly self-sufficient in food production. All three groups grew beans, peas, sweet potatoes, sorghum, arrowroot, and millet besides taming goats, sheep, and cattle, albeit not on a similar scale to their pastoral neighbors, the Maasai.
Agriculture fundamentally influenced the internal evolution and external relations of the Mount Kenya Bantu throughout the nineteenth century. Internally, agriculture enhanced population increase and strengthened sedentary life, the two distinct features of farming communities as compared to pastoral ones in precolonial Kenya. Also, social organization, political leadership, religious rites, and technological innovation revolved around agriculture and land. Among the Kikuyu, for example, the “office” of the Muthamaki (the head of the extended family) evolved mainly to oversee land allocation, distribution, and arbitration over land disputes.
Externally, agriculture nurtured constant trade links between the Mount Kenya Bantu and their southern neighbors, the Bantu-speaking Akamba, and the Maasai due to the semiarid conditions and the overdependency on the cattle economy. The Akamba constantly imported food from the Mount Kenya areas. This led to the creation of strong regional networks of interdependency sustained mainly by the Akamba Kuthuua (food) traders. They exchanged beer, animal skins, honey, and beeswax for the Mount Kenya staples of beans, arrowroot, and yams. Indeed, for most of the nineteenth century the Akamba played a prominent role not only as regional traders but also as long-distance (especially ivory) traders. They were intermediaries between the coastal Mijikenda and the Kenyan hinterland. From the second half of the nineteenth century their position weakened when the Zanzibar traders became involved in direct commerce in the Lake Victoria region and northern regions such as Embu, as elephants had become depleted in the more central areas. They exchanged cloth and metal rings for ivory and occasionally for slaves.
In western Kenya the Nilotic Luo and Bantu-speaking Luyhia practiced mixed farming, rearing animals, and cultivating crops. The Luo were originally pastoralists but gradually changed to mixed farming as a result of their migration to the Lake Victoria region and its attendant effects on their predominantly cattle economy. During a significant part of the nineteenth century their social, economic, and political institutions, like those of the Mount Kenya people, revolved around the importance attached to land. Increased pressure on land and subsequent disputes orchestrated the evolution of Pinje, quasipolitical territorial units, among the Luo. The Pinje enhanced corporate identity besides protecting corporate land rights. External aggression toward their neighbors, particularly the Nilotic Nandi, Luyhia, and Gusii, added further impetus to the Luo identity in the nineteenth century. Kalenjin inhabitants (Sebei groups) of the Mount Elgon area were similarly involved in intensive intertribal warfare throughout the nineteenth century with neighboring groups, mostly Karamojong, Nandi, and Pokot pastoral groups. The Luyhia, like their Luo and Kalenjin counterparts in western Kenya, were also characterized by internal rivalry and external confrontation with neighbors over land and pasture. Among the major causes of the fighting were periodic droughts and famine; the latter occurring at least once every decade.
Some sections of the Luyhia, such as the Bukusu, kept animals while others such as the Kisa, Maragoli, Banyore, and Marama practiced farming. The less numerous and isolated Bantu-speaking Gusii further up the highlands of southwestern Kenya underwent similar economic changes to those of the Luo and Luyhia. Once avowed pastoralists when living on the Kano Plains of the Lake basin, they gradually lost their affinity with cattle with their migration to the present-day Gusii Highlands. They turned to crop production and reduced the numbers of animals they kept. Regional trade that involved the exchange of goods produced by different groups provided interethnic linkages and coexistence that mitigated against land-based conflicts among the various ethnic groups of western Kenya in the nineteenth century.
Providing an economic contrast to the Bantu-dominated agriculture were the Nilotic-speaking ethnic groups such as the Turkana, Nandi, and Maasai, who practiced pastoralism. They controlled large chunks of territories in nineteenth century Kenya partly because of the requirements of the nomadic pastoralism they practiced and their inherent militarism. Of all the pastoral groups in Kenya the Maasai were a power to be reckoned with. Their force had risen since the eighteenth century and culminated in a complex southward movement by Maa-speakers from the area to the west and south of Lake Turkana south to present-day Tanzania. By doing so they conquered, assimilated, and pushed aside other groups in the Rift valley.
However, unlike the Kikuyu who enjoyed increased prosperity and demographic increase, Maasai power declined tremendously during the nineteenth century in the face of climatic disasters that annihilated their predominantly cattle economy, internal strife that led to the partition of the Maasai into contending groups, and human and animal epidemics that reduced their population and cattle stocks. The Maasai were weakened by the succession disputes of the last years of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of colonialism they had been replaced by the Nandi who emerged as the dominant power in western Kenya and resisted European penetration. In the northeast a similar change of power occurred. Since the sixteenth century Galla pastoralists had aggressively expanded southward from southern Ethiopia and Somalia. They finally reached Mombasa and occupied the lowland areas behind the coastal strip. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Galla, weakened by disease, had suffered several defeats at the hands of the Somali and gradually withdrew. Drought and rinderpest epidemics that swept through their cattle in the last decades of the century weakened them still further. This allowed the Mijikenda, although they suffered periodically from cattle raids by Maasai groups, to move slowly outward from the coastal zone in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The Kenyan coast, unlike the interior, had experienced historical links with the outside world long before the nineteenth century. The Arabs dominated the area from the tenth century onward with an interlude of - Portuguese rule and economic monopoly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the ousting of the Portuguese, the nineteenth century saw the reestablishment of the Oman Arabs’ rule that for economic and political reasons was consummated by the transfer of their headquarters from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840.
The politically semiautonomous settlements and trading posts such as Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Pate, Faza, and Siu remained as much an enduring feature of the Kenya coast in the nineteenth century as it had been in the previous century. The towns had strong ties between themselves based on religious, linguistic, and economic homogeneity. Islam was the dominant religion in the same way that Swahili was the prevalent lingua franca. Agriculture and trade remained the backbone of the coastal economy. Mainly practiced by the rich Arab families, agriculture’s economic significance continued apace with demands for agrarian produce in the Indian Ocean trade. Local trade between the hinterland and the coast was in the hands of interior middlemen and the coastal Bantu-speaking Mijikenda.
Despite the above developments, the resurgence of Zanzibar as the heart of commercial traffic and activity stimulated the gradual decline of the economic and political significance of Kenyan coastal towns. The dawn of colonialism in the 1890s added further impetus in that direction. The establishment of various colonial administrative posts in the interior, the building of the Uganda Railway (1896-1901) and the shifting of the colonial headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi diverted attention from the coastal towns in the opening years of the twentieth century.
One of the most important discoveries that made the interior of Kenya known to the Northern hemisphere had been the confirmation of the existence of snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. A German missionary Johann Rebmann saw Mount Kilimanjaro in 1848. He had arrived in Kenya to assist Johann Krapf in Rabai Mpia, a small village to the northwest of Mombasa. Both worked for the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of London, a Protestant mission founded in 1799. The work of the CMS and other Christian missionaries was the main European activity in East Africa before partition.
Although Christian missionaries pioneered European entry into Kenya, they were not responsible for the establishment of European political control that came about mainly as a result of happenings outside East Africa. French-British rivalry, both in Europe where Napoleon’s defeat transferred the Seychelles and Mauritius among others to Britain, and in Africa especially due to interests in Egypt, should be mentioned. This triggered a scramble for the East African interior, in particular to control the source of the river Nile. The rising power of Germany in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, resulting in claims for the Dar es Salaam region, forced Britain to act. British and German chartered companies divided mainland territories that formerly belonged to the sultan of Zanzibar. Soon Britain took over from the Imperial British East Africa Company and a boundary stretching from the coast to Lake Victoria was drawn between British and German East Africa in 1895. Thus, it took until the end of the nineteenth century for Kenya to be explored, evangelized, and finally conquered by Britain.
The arrival of European colonizers put an end to the dynamic spheres of influence and changing fortunes of the African groups. Settlers were encouraged to come to East Africa to recoup some of the costs incurred in the construction of the Uganda railway. Soon Kenya was to be transformed from a footpath a thousand kilometers long into a colonial administration that would redefine internal power.
Kenneth Samson Ombongi and Marcel Rutten
See also: Kenya: East African Protectorate and the Uganda Railway; Religion, Colonial Africa: Missionaries; Rinderpest, and Smallpox: East and Southern Africa.
Further Reading
Beachy, R. W. A History of East Africa, 1592-1902. London: Tauris, 1996.
Krapf, J. L. Travels, Researches, and Missionary Labors during an Eighteen Years’ Residence in Eastern Africa. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860.
Ochieng’, W. R. A History of Kenya, London: Macmillan, 1985. Ogot, B. A., ed. Kenya before 1900. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1976.
Oliver, R., and G. Mathew. History of East Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
New, C. Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa. 3rd ed. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1971.
Salim, A. I. Swahili-speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast.
Nairobi: East African Publishing Bureau, 1973.
Willis, J. Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijik-enda. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
World History
