White people in Kenya
There is currently a minor but relatively prominent White community in Kenya, mainly descended from British, but also to a lesser extent Italian and Greek, migrants dating from the colonial period.
The Portuguese established a presence in the region for two hundred years between 1498 and 1698, before losing control of the coast to the Sultanate of Oman when Fort Jesus was captured.
The initial driving force lay with pioneering businessmen, such as Carl Peters and William Mackinnon seeking to establish lucrative trade routes in the region.
In 1902, Sir Charles Eliot, then-British Commissioner of the Protectorate, initiated a policy of settling European colonists in what would become the White Highlands region.
Eliot's vision for the Protectorate was to turn the Highlands into a settlers' frontier, perceiving the region to be admirably suited for a White man's country.
Eliot believed the only way to improve the local economy and ensure the profitability of the Uganda railway, was to encourage European settlement and endeavour in hitherto large areas of uncultivated fertile lands.
Due to the high start-up costs involved in producing coffee and cattle, Kenya earned a reputation as a "big man's frontier".
Applicants were required to be British subjects of pure European origin, who had served in any officially recognised imperial service unit in the war.
Leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta and Harry Thuku highlighted a view of an unjust political and social situation for the non-settler population of Kenya.
[8] By the early 1960s, the political willingness of the British government to maintain Kenya as a colony was in decline and in 1962 the Lancaster House agreement set a date for Kenyan independence.
[11] Dating from 1902, the East Africa Protectorate government granted considerable concessions to European settlers in order to enable them to entrench themselves politically and economically.
The aftermath of the First World War saw a spectacular increase in European agricultural production, largely due to protective tariffs on imports and prohibiting African cultivation of certain crops such as coffee and pyrethrum.
The presence of herds of elephants and zebra, and other wild animals on these estates drew wealthy aristocracy from Europe and America, who came attracted by big game hunting.
[12] Nowadays only a small minority of them are still landowners (livestock and game ranchers, horticulturists and farmers), whereas the majority work in the tertiary sector: in finance, import, air transport, and hospitality.
Thomas Cholmondeley, a descendant of British aristocrats, has brought into question the class bias of the judicial system of the Commonwealth country and the resentment of many Kenyans toward what they perceive as White privilege.
[17] The White community in Kenya in the years before the Second World War was divided into two distinct factions: settlers, on the one side, and colonial officials and tradesmen, on the other.
Both were dominated by upper-middle-class and upper-class British and Irish (chiefly Anglo-Irish) people, but the two groups often disagreed on important matters ranging from land allocation to how to deal with the indigenous population.
The recession sparked by the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash greatly decreased the number of new arrivals to the Colony of Kenya and the influx of capital.
