From Mau Mau to Middlesex? The Fate of Europeans in Independent Kenya

Abstract

hether writing about the neocolonial aspirations of European powers or the desires for freedom within indigenous nations, the historiography of African decolonization often echoes contemporary preoccupations. In the period immediately after rapid decolonization, postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon were celebrated for their ideas on the strength of the colonized and the oppression of the colonizers. 1 Subsequently, African colonial historiography has gone through many phases, including optimism for the nationalist project, disillusionment about the African state, and fears for the weakness of society in the postcolonial setting. 2 With the end of the Cold War and the spread of concerns about globalization, terrorism, and American empire, historical focus has once again returned to the dialectic of Western neocolonialism, African corruption, and the problem of “failed states.” 3 Within Anglophone colonial historiography, most studies have engaged with the legacy of decolonization on the periphery and the indigenous populations therein. Several recent studies, however, have also begun to examine decolonization, colonial migration, and the postindependence period from cultural perspectives. 4 It is now becoming clear how the loss of Great Britain’s colonies affected metropolitan politics, demography, and national identity. 5 Even so, as Stuart Ward has said, “there remains a fi rmly entrenched assumption that the broad cultural impact of decolonization was confi ned to the colonial periphery, with little relevance to post-war British culture and society.” 6 The dominance of these competing perspectives has also caused most scholars to overlook an important aspect of the British imperial experience—the fate of Europeans in Britain’s settler colonies during and after decolonization. The postindependence history of Europeans in British colonies of the “African type,” “where overseas settlement expels an indigenous peasant population from the best land, but remains dependent on the labor of that same population,” 7 has remained obscured because