East Africa Protectorate
East Africa Protectorate | |||||||||
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1895–1920 | |||||||||
Anthem: Commissioner, Governor | | ||||||||
• 1895–1897 | Arthur Henry Hardinge | ||||||||
• 1919–1920 | Sir Edward Northey | ||||||||
History | |||||||||
• Established | 1 July 1895 | ||||||||
• Disestablished | 23 July 1920 | ||||||||
Area | |||||||||
1904[1] | 696,400 km2 (268,900 sq mi) | ||||||||
Population | |||||||||
• 1904[1] | 4,000,000 | ||||||||
Currency | Indian rupee (1895–1906) East African rupee (1906–20) | ||||||||
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Today part of | Kenya and Somalia |
History of Kenya |
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Kenya portal |
East Africa Protectorate (also known as British East Africa) was a British protectorate in the African Great Lakes, occupying roughly the same area as present-day Kenya, from the Indian Ocean inland to the border with Uganda in the west. Controlled by the United Kingdom in the late 19th century, it grew out of British commercial interests in the area in the 1880s and remained a protectorate until 1920 when it became the Colony of Kenya, save for an independent 16-kilometre-wide (10 mi) coastal strip that became the Kenya Protectorate.[2][3]
Administration
European Christian missionaries began settling in the area from Mombasa to Mount Kilimanjaro in the 1840s, nominally under the protection of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. In 1886, the British government encouraged William Mackinnon, who already had an agreement with the Sultan and whose shipping company traded extensively in the African Great Lakes, to establish British influence in the region. He formed a British East Africa Association which led to the Imperial British East Africa Company being chartered in 1888 and given the original grant to administer the dependency. It administered about 240 kilometres (150 mi) of coastline stretching from the Jubba River via Mombasa to German East Africa which were leased from the Sultan. The British "sphere of influence", agreed at the Berlin Conference of 1885, extended up the coast and inland across the future Kenya. Mombasa was the administrative centre at this time.[4]
However, the company began to fail, and on 1 July 1895, the British government proclaimed a
On 23 July 1920, the inland areas of the protectorate were annexed as British dominions by Order in Council.
Development
In April 1902, the first application for land in British East Africa was made by the East Africa Syndicate – a company in which financiers belonging to the British South Africa Company were interested – which sought a grant of 1,300 square kilometres (500 sq mi), and this was followed by other applications for considerable areas, many of which came from prospective settlers in South Africa.[11] In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, then serving as Secretary of State for the Colonies, offered 13,000 square kilometres (5,000 sq mi) at Uasin Gishu in British East Africa to Zionist settlers as part of the Uganda Scheme. However, opposition to the scheme at the Sixth Zionist Congress led to the plan falling through and Chamberlain swiftly withdrew the offer.[12][13] In April 1903, Major Frederick Russell Burnham, an American scout then serving as a director of the East African Syndicate, sent an expedition consisting of John Weston Brooke, John Charles Blick, Mr. Bittlebank and Mr. Brown, to assess the mineral wealth of the region. The party, known as the "Four B.'s", travelled from Nairobi via Mount Elgon northwards to the western shores of Lake Rudolf, experiencing plenty of privations from want of water, and of the danger from encounters with the Maasai.[14] With the arrival in 1903 of hundreds of prospective settlers, chiefly from South Africa, questions were raised concerning the preservation for the Maasai of their rights of pasturage, and the decision was made to entertain no more applications for large areas of land.[11]
In the process of carrying out this policy of colonisation a dispute arose between
Legislation
In 1914, the British government banned cannabis ("bhang") in the Protectorate.[15]
Stamps and postal history of British East Africa
The protectorate upon becoming a direct possession of
See also
- Charles Eliot
- List of colonial governors and administrators of Kenya
- East African campaign (World War I)
- History of Kenya
- Analysis of Western European colonialism and colonization
References
Notes
- ^ a b "Census of the British empire. 1901". Openlibrary.org. 1906. p. 178. Retrieved 26 December 2013.
- ^ British East Africa Company
- ^ SR&O 1920/2343), S.R.O. & S.I. Rev. VIII, 258, State Pp., Vol. 87 p. 968
- ^ a b British East Africa, by Grant Sinclair
- ^ a b c d e "Commonwealth and Colonial Law" by Kenneth Roberts-Wray, London, Stevens, 1966. P. 761
- SR&O 1902/661), S.R.O. & S.I. Rev. 246
- ^ "Commonwealth and Colonial Law" by Kenneth Roberts-Wray, London, Stevens, 1966. P. 762
- SR&O 1920/2342)
- ^ Agreement of 14 June 1890: State pp. vol. 82. p. 653
- ^ Rayidow, poem 80; Diiwaanka gabayadii, 1856-1921
- ^ a b c d Cana, Frank Richardson (1911). Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 601–606. . In
- ISBN 978-965-229-037-3.
- ISBN 978-0-7864-7597-1.
- ^ Fergusson, W.N. (1911). Adventure, Sport and Travel on the Tibetan Steppes, p. preface. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
- ^ Kenya Gazette. 15 October 1913. pp. 882–.
Further reading
- Beck, Ann. "Colonial Policy and Education in British East Africa, 1900–1950". Journal of British Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1966, pp. 115–138. online
- Furley, O. W. "Education and the Chiefs in East Africa in the inter-war period." Transafrican Journal of History 1.1 (1971): 60–83.
- John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa 1878–1895 (Cambridge 1972)
- Gregory, John Walter. The Foundation of British East Africa (London: H. Marshall, 1901) online.
- Aim25.ac.uk: Sir William Mackinnon Archived 8 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine
- Savage, Donald C., and J. Forbes Munro. "Carrier Corps Recruitment in the British East Africa Protectorate 1914–1918." Journal of African History 7.2 (1966): 313–342.
- Whitehead, Clive. "The historiography of British imperial education policy, Part II: Africa and the rest of the colonial empire." History of Education 34.4 (2005): 441–454.
External links
- Unimaps.com: 1901 Map of British East Africa Protectorate (Kenya)
- Purl.pt: A map of part of Eastern Africa, prepared by authority of the Imperial British East Africa Company (1889)