Illusions of World Power in Kenya: Strategy, Decolonization, and the British Base, 1946–1961

Abstract

in Kenya seemed to offer the ideal linchpin of Great Britain's post-war strategic realignment to meet the challenges of a bipolar world: a military headquarters east of Gibraltar controlling a new 'heartland' of British strategic industry and military training. Or so the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration thought. The state department official in charge of West, Central, and East African Affairs, Nicholas Feld, explained in 1953 that Kenya had become an 'increasingly important strategic area . . . [which] the Free World cannot afford to lose'.1 During the Mau Mau rebellion, members of parliament and military commanders in East Africa argued that a base in Kenya would also protect European settlers. Owing to opposition from the army high command, however, the plan for a base was shelved until after the Suez crisis of 1956. Ironically, just when the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who had made up his mind to hasten decolonization in the face of rising African nationalism, delivered his well-known 'Wind of Change' speech on 3 February i960, his government spent the most money on the base. British strategic thinking about Kenya occurred in three phases. Immediately after the Second World War, visions of Africa's role in a revitalized empire helped to sustain the dream of world power despite the bipolar world. When the economic strains of imperial policy became obvious, during the second phase between 1952 and 1957, the shift to nuclear deterrence lessened Kenya's strategic significance. During both stages, strategy ignored local conditions. However, the outcome of the Suez crisis of 1956 and the strategic re-emphasis on conventional warfare restored Kenya to the strategic map; during the third phase, from 1957 to 1961, when military strategy was entangled with party as well as colonial politics, the British finally decided to build the base. Its history in the 1950s