This article examines the political impact of decolonization upon different groups within the South African community in Kenya in 1963. Decolonization, as a phenomenon, did not constitute an instantaneous and seamless shift from colonial hegemony to an independent government ‘at the stroke of the midnight hour’. Rather, it was as much a process of slow, and often confusing, logistical and administrative change as it was political. These processes included the formation of new ideological and political alignments.Footnote 1 Colonialism created and entrenched not only institutions but also certain communities in countries they would have had no incentive to migrate to in the absence of the colonial state to enable their ‘new life’. The settler community in Kenya was one such creation of the colonial enterprise in Africa.
The South African community in Kenya has been broadly delineated into three groups here – with a focus on the first, and a brief discussion of the second and third, whose members constituted a slim minority of the community. The first group is that of the Afrikaner farmers – a numerically small but economically strategic section of the white community.Footnote 2 The Afrikaner farmers were fearful for the security of their property and person during the transition period, and of becoming special targets for persecution after independence. They planned a mass exodus by road to South Africa. The exodus, however, was not projected to be of the kind the world had been witness to in either the case of the flight of Belgian refugees from the Congo in 1960 after Congolese independence or that of the pied-noirs of Algeria who fled to metropolitan France overnight in 1962 with no financial compensation in the immediate future, after the failure of the French state to prevail in the Algerian War, in contrast to British success in ending the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya. There was no element of chaos, powerlessness, or lack of foresight here. The second group includes the South Africans based at British-majority firms or with business interests in Nairobi, who sought to secure their position temporarily as residents in Kenya by virtue of establishing themselves and their children not only as British subjects but also as British citizens. The third is the group of South Africans who were employed in the service of the crown. The concerns of these two urban groups did not revolve around land or compensation but rather around citizenship and residency issues – the right to remain and work in Kenya.
This article demonstrates how Afrikaners tried to leverage their unique position of economic strength and racial and political privilege to secure the best deal for themselves prior to their departure, planning months in advance. The Afrikaners were able to turn the threat of exodus, with all the negative publicity (besides other more obviously serious consequences) it entailed, into an effective political tool. The spectre of exodus from, and the circulations of displaced white populations within, the African continent made an impression on the white imagination in Africa and inspired the direction of Afrikaner negotiations in Kenya – in a gamble that displayed a remarkable degree of political acumen.
The three state actors, Britain, South Africa, and Kenya, turned this political moment into an opportunity – allowing especially the Kenyan and South African states to flesh out and entrench their state ideology in opposition to each other in an intra-African theatre of decolonization. South Africa sought to establish itself ultimately as the preferred white man's dominion in Africa, where white people of all ages and of both genders would be sheltered. Kenya used this opportunity to entrench its anti-apartheid and therefore anti-South Africa position whilst stating, as part of its vision of an inclusive multiracial state, that Afrikaners who renounced apartheid could continue to live on in Kenya. Britain had to maintain a delicate balance between its two primary objectives in this situation – to prioritize the interests and demands of the British members of the settler community in Kenya and to avoid upsetting the new Kenyatta-led Kenyan government with which Britain was about to set up a comprehensive strategic alliance establishing itself as Kenya's preferred partner – any concessions made to Afrikaners had to be made within this framework. Britain ultimately managed to get South Africa to co-operate with it and in turn compromised by making concessions in the matter of citizenship for the more powerful South Africans.
The article explores the idea of decolonization beyond the usual historiographical confines of the nationalist narrative as well as the metropole–colony dynamic by examining how foreign policy was a means for shaping the political identity of states, and indeed the concept of statehood itself in an international context, with newly independent countries reacting to each other. Many works on decolonization and foreign policy in the 1960s seek to explain developments in terms of a Cold War binary but this article presents itself outside that equation – especially interesting in light of the fact that South Africa and Kenya were firmly situated on the same side, and yet decidedly opposed to each other in principle. The article also examines the transition within a specific aspect of Kenyan policy from colonial to independent in the larger context of the effort to maintain the overarching objective of agricultural, and therefore economic, stability. The study steers away from the traditional focus on settler influence via metropolitan politicians and instead tries to demonstrate the agency of independent states in deciding who to include or exclude in the conception of their polity. Finally, the article looks at a return migration which was so orderly that it has eluded historical curiosity so far.
Most works, such as Gary Wasserman's, that deal with this period tend to treat the white community as a monolithic unit, possibly on the basis that they were all British subjects by virtue of living in Kenya Colony – this study attempts to bring nuance to this reading of the settler experience.Footnote 3 Gerrit Groen's thesis, which provides a historical overview of the community, is the only work of scholarship that mentions the Afrikaner departure from Kenya briefly but does not analyse it in any depth, politically or otherwise.Footnote 4 Settler chronicles such as Michael Blundell's memoirs (prominent settler-politician) contain no references to an Afrikaner presence or departure.Footnote 5 Charles Hornsby's work only refers briefly to Kenya's anti-apartheid stand.Footnote 6 Works such as Keith Kyle's study of the politics of the Suez Crisis or Poppy Cullen's work on Anglo-Kenyan foreign relations after 1963, signify a growing interest in the bigger picture of interstate relations in Africa in the aftermath of decolonization.Footnote 7 Kyle's book on Kenya explores the dynamics between Kenyatta and Kenyan politics, and British officialdom, particularly focusing on central figures such as Harold Macmillan, Duncan Sandys, and Iain Macleod but does not touch on geopolitics.Footnote 8 Neither nationalist nor policy histories of Kenya and South Africa mention the political significance of this episode even in passing. Bargaining by racial groups, for rights and concessions in a decolonization context, was a concept introduced by Wasserman's aforementioned work and by Donald Rothchild.Footnote 9
The British government established a ‘white man's country’ in Kenya – by creating a small, controlled, and politically powerful community of white settlers who emigrated from Britain over the first half of the twentieth century. This community was composed of predominantly upper- and upper-middle-class migrants from Britain, individually screened for their ‘suitability’ by the colonial state, on the basis of class and the possession of the capital required to jumpstart a career as a farmer in Kenya – unsurprisingly, they knew little to nothing, in practice, about farming. Second- and third-generation whites often migrated to territories like the Central African Federation (CAF) or South Africa where it was easier to succeed than in Kenya's harsh conditions.Footnote 10 This group was supplemented by a small group of Afrikaner farmers from South Africa (then a part of the British empire) by the invitation of the British government. Unlike their elite and inexperienced fellow settlers, this group was proficient at farming and was able to make a success of it.
South Africans soon also occupied places in the service of the crown, and in companies based in Nairobi. They did so unobtrusively, to the extent that it was only in 1963 that both the colonial administration in Kenya and the South African government realized that there were no records of how many South Africans were actually resident in Kenya nor indeed which of the settler community, flourishing under the auspices of the imperial edifice, were South African, which would discount them from the protection afforded to metropolitan citizens by the British state. A few also became entrepreneurs and successful businessmen with political links to parliament.
Kenya became independent only in December 1963. As independence loomed on the horizon, the settler experience became marked by a great deal of anxiety and insecurity about the community's future in Kenya. The Lancaster House Conferences made it clear that Kenya's future was multiracial and that state affairs would be in the hands of a black majority cabinet. This would, in effect, rob the whites of their erstwhile privileged position with African needs prioritized above all else. In a post-Mau Mau world, the white community realized that the British state would no longer be in a position of power to stave off African land hunger, and that the institutional racism that had barred Africans from owning land outside their tribal reserves or in white-only areas such as the White Highlands would become null and void. The only hope for the survival of the community was to align itself with the policies of the Kenyatta-led KANU (Kenya African National Union). The settlers despised the latter and had frequently referred to the KANU as a group of ‘Mau Mau thugs’ – a typically prejudiced generalization of Kenyan nationalists of all shades.
I
Jomo Kenyatta's black majority government aimed to establish Kenya as a fully functioning, secure, and successful multiracial state. Kenyatta's election pledge of closing the South African consulate immediately upon his ascendancy to power was one he was determined to keep, as a sign of commitment to the KANU's anti-apartheid policy.Footnote 11 Apartheid by this time had become the unapologetic cornerstone of the South African state's identity (especially in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960), both within the African continent and abroad. In other words, Kenya would be the antithesis to South Africa's apartheid state and prove that an independent African country run by blacks was not only viable but that whites could also live in and be an integral part of such a country.
In line with his positioning of Kenya as a racially inclusive state, Kenyatta took the position that Afrikaners were welcome to remain in a newly independent Kenya as long as they denounced apartheid.Footnote 12 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) officials privately observed that his fellow KANU members perhaps might not feel quite as magnanimous towards them.Footnote 13 However, the closure of the South African consulate was quite evidently a move designed to isolate and push the South Africans out, leaving them without any diplomatic protection and cutting them off from visits by friends and relatives from South Africa. In effect, it became clear that in order to remain they needed to throw their lot in with the Kenyans – whilst being alienated from their home country. Legally, any South African who took Kenyan citizenship would automatically lose South African citizenship.
Whitehall had also informed the South Africans that after the expiry of the ‘stand still period’ on 30 May 1962, British representatives in Commonwealth countries would no longer act in any way on behalf of the South African government or its citizens including ad hoc consular activity on behalf of the latter, with no exceptions to their policy.Footnote 14 No other country was willing to be a diplomatic sponsor for South Africa except Portugal which was itself ‘in the market for a sponsor’ after its consulate in Nairobi was to be closed (since Portugal was clinging to its African colony, Mozambique, at the time).Footnote 15 The South African government was also seriously concerned about rumours which had originated from the Anglophile Natal press (influenced by the presence of white Kenyan immigrants in Natal) to the effect that South Africans in Kenya would be held hostage against any arrests made of black Africans in the Republic by the state.Footnote 16 This rumour was investigated by Whitehall and declared to be false, a rebuttal fortified by a firm denial from the Kenyan cabinet.Footnote 17
Developments in this tripartite relationship unfolded against the larger background of South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth in defence of apartheid in 1961, sending shockwaves through the British establishment, and shattering any illusion of special British influence over the direction or decisions of its former colonies. Kenyan independence came just three years after Harold Macmillan's tour of Africa and his ‘wind of change’ speech which had failed in its basic objective of persuading South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth. Neither the UK nor the USA made any real effort to take a stand against apartheid given that South Africa was their firm ally against the perceived threat of communism in Africa. The UK's controversial abstention from voting on the UN Security Council resolution 181 on an arms embargo against South Africa in 1963 had earned them the disapprobation of other independent African states like Nigeria.Footnote 18 Ryan Irwin's work explores South Africa's apartheid debate in the 1960s along with its efforts to cement British and American support in the international community, and their opposition to the West's principle of ‘multilateral collaboration’.Footnote 19
The plan to boycott South African goods in Kenya was another move which generated a great deal of publicity and created an impression on the Kenyan public despite its ultimate failure. The idea of the boycott had originated from the grassroots politics of the East African trade unions, with politicians like Tom Mboya fanning the flames. Unfortunately for the unions, the plan was a product of pure political idealism with no basis in hard economics, and doomed to fail. The so-called ‘trade boycott’ lasted from January to September 1960, but was so ineffective that the value of South African goods increased by 6 per cent during this period, thereby making a profit margin of £3,270,120 over 1959 figures.Footnote 20 The Kenyan economy was heavily dependent on goods imported from South Africa, from industrial chemicals and explosives to alcohol and paper bags. The proper implementation of such a boycott would have had an adverse effect on Kenya's own industries – particularly its mining industry which was dependent on a supply of cheap mining machinery from South Africa. Finally, even the short attempt to boycott certain industries had the unfortunate and counterproductive effect of negatively affecting its allies – black South Africans. The boycott of the South African fishing industry, for instance, had put 800 Africans out of work and only two European supervisory staff, according to Whitehall estimates.Footnote 21 Finally, this was all a great risk since the Kenyans stood to lose a lot more than the South Africans if the latter decided to retaliate as £1 million of Kenya's £30 million (£96.1 million in 2019) worth of exports were to South Africa. Despite the failure of the trade boycott, the air was heavy with the Kenyan state continuing its efforts to establish itself as the Republic's natural enemy.
Another extension of this policy was the termination of South African Airways’ operations in and out of Kenya by closing both Kenyan airspace and airports to them. This was a move designed specifically to isolate, and affect the mobility of, white South Africans, most of whom were the ones who could afford air travel.Footnote 22 This step stood to hurt Kenya economically as it earned revenue from landing and over-flying rights, handling charges, and ticket prices.
Political and economic measures taken by Kenya against South Africa cemented the latter in the Kenyan national myth as a hostile state, and ensured that matters of high politics and trade penetrated the consciousness of the masses. It also confirmed the fact that the Kenyan government was determined to pursue this line of policy even at a prohibitively expensive cost to itself. As an FCO official put it, ‘Despite the economic realities, Kenya Ministers are quite likely in the end to cut off their noses to spite their faces.’Footnote 23 Hornsby's claim that Kenya did little, in practice, to take a stand against South Africa as well as the Kenyan state's own official stand of non-alignment (when it so clearly chose to align itself with the UK in a Cold War context) therefore do not quite provide an accurate picture.Footnote 24
Kenya's anti-apartheid stand would become, therefore, one of the defining features of its intra-African foreign policy. However, it was ultimately Kenyatta and Bruce McKenzie (then minister of agriculture) whose negotiations with the Afrikaners in November 1963 would convince them not to leave the country in a chaotic exodus. The colonial administration's policy objectives regarding the Afrikaners therefore intersected with those of the independent government insofar as they were able to maintain the political stability of the country and not allow an exodus to cause disruption.
II
The Afrikaners’ inextricable links with their country of origin made them deeply unpopular with black Africans in Kenya. As the date of independence approached, this unpopularity translated itself to a feeling of heightened insecurity about the safety of their persons and property. Afrikaners took verbal threats against them as a confirmation of their special position of vulnerability. White-owned farms began to experience labour troubles, cattle-slashing, and stock thefts. Houses were broken into and whites threatened, robbed, or assaulted. There were threats against the community in the press and at political meetings. There was also the fear of Afrikaner farmers turning into ‘economic prisoners’ if they were unable to sell their farms and raise sufficient capital to leave the country.Footnote 25 Finally, the Afrikaners were unsure of whether or not they would find a place in the lists of settlement schemes being prepared by the British and Kenyan governments for buying out white farmers. The settlement schemes were designed to bring African farmers into the White Highlands not only to give cash-crop agriculture a ‘truly multiracial complexion’ but also to populate the most developed part of Kenya, and the site of the greatest economic activity in the country, with Africans.Footnote 26
Letters on these attacks provide a useful look at the situation as it stood. One particularly violent incident that convinced the Afrikaners that they would become prime targets for their nationality was an attack on a British farmer, Higginson, whose home was invaded by a gang of miscreants. A gun was demanded from him and, after none were found in his safe, Higginson was struck repeatedly and told that he was a South African and must have a gun, as all South Africans had guns and if he did not produce one he would be killed. Higginson produced a letter from the officer in charge of Ol Kalou Police which proved that he was not in possession of a firearm; after which the house was vandalized. Throughout the attack, there were threats of violence against South Africans, to be escalated after Uhuru. A member of his domestic staff, who succeeded in convincing the gang that Mr Higginson was not a South African, salvaged the situation. The Higginsons had, however, prospected extensively in South Africa in order to settle there after disposing of their Kenyan property.Footnote 27
Afrikaners from South Africa also wrote to British colonial officials on behalf of their brethren in Kenya. A letter to the Governor's Office came from a ‘Spud Murphy’, describing the concerns of Erik and Rudi Hormand about violence in the Ol Kalou area where three Afrikaner farms overlooked a new settlement of 11,000 Kikuyus.Footnote 28 It said that the ‘anti-Kenyatta faction’ had ‘ill intentions’ during the ‘silly season’.Footnote 29 While the letter's comically overfamiliar tone left Colonial Office personnel confused, it clearly speaks of the fact that Afrikaners were writing back home in an attempt to secure help.
In light of these developments, the community began to weigh its options. The Afrikaners were adamant that getting a Kenyan or British passport would not help or protect them as they were ‘branded in the eyes of the Africans as Afrikaans’.Footnote 30 Two immediate options presented themselves: mass exodus or a purchase of their farms, coupled with a promise that stringent efforts would be made to dispel the propaganda that Afrikaners were ‘going anyway’ and that their land would eventually pass into the hands of the government. Prima facie, it would seem that allowing an exodus would be the simplest solution but there were strong arguments against this on political and economic grounds.
The estimated cost of their land was about £5 million (£105 million in 2019) and an assurance had been given that if this was guaranteed by the government, Afrikaner leaders would persuade their community to co-operate in having an orderly withdrawal from the country, and that the farmers would be prepared to accept promissory notes and not seek immediate payment.Footnote 31 The tide turned, however, as attacks escalated towards the latter half of 1963 (with those such as the Higginson attack). Afrikaner farmers decided to go all out to secure their interests – their strategy was to focus on planning a mass exodus to South Africa, and at the same time to get the British government to give them economic compensation for their farms and the produce grown for that harvest year.Footnote 32
Groen claims that most Afrikaners were ‘psychologically unprepared for the political developments of that decade’.Footnote 33 However, on the contrary, the same delegation of farmers had had a conversation with representatives of the South African government in 1961, when the latter had informed them that they would not provide money for buying out Afrikaner farms in Kenya, considering it an interference in another country's domestic affairs. This was, of course, with reference to the classic justification of apartheid as a domestic policy over which other countries had no say. These circumstances were, therefore, hardly unanticipated.Footnote 34
To complicate matters, it was very difficult for the administration actually to determine who was South African and who was British. N. S. Carey-Jones (permanent secretary of the Ministry of Land Settlement and Water Development) admitted that neither his Ministry nor the Ministry of Agriculture possessed any records that showed which members of the white population were South African. The picking out of obviously Afrikaner surnames would only give them an incomplete and unreliable answer. It was estimated that there were 250 of them in Kenya, with 117 in Uasin Gishu and Laikipia, both of which areas lay beyond the settlement scheme areas – fifty-seven roughly fell within the settlement schemes at that time while thirty were in the Ol Kalou Salient, which would later be included in the expanded scheme proposed.Footnote 35
III
The Afrikaners proceeded by garnering the crucial moral and political support of the British settler community in Kenya, and by sending a delegation of five Afrikaner farmers to open negotiations with the Governor's Office.
The former snobbery with which the white British community regarded the Afrikaner in Kenya had been now replaced with a sense of solidarity and identification. British settlers began to seek as allies other whites of non-British descent. This was also part of their efforts to present a united front of minorities against the visceral tide of African majoritarianism. Gone were the days of the Afrikaner–British divide – thirty years ago, the settler community had been at pains to identify themselves within micro groups, and to keep the community not only white British but also exclusively upper and upper middle class in its composition. Even while maintaining a social distance from Afrikaners in Kenya, British settlers had looked to the Union of South Africa as their natural ally in the preservation and expansion of white interests as late as 1952, with settler politicians meeting with Dr Malan (the architect of apartheid) much to Whitehall's horror. There was talk of creating a ‘Dominion of Africa’ extending to the Nile to preserve European domination in defiance of the British government's ‘progressive’ policies.Footnote 36 In this new atmosphere of alliance, British settler politicians began making representations to the governor on behalf of the Afrikaner farmers. Keeping with this spirit, Whitehall believed that anything that went against Afrikaner expectations would offend the white settler community as a whole.
Important members of the settler community with strong political links to the metropole supported the Afrikaner cause. Lord Enniskillen wrote in a letter to W. B. L. Monson (a powerful figure at the Colonial Office) asking for clarity for the Afrikaners,
A paper on this subject should show quite clearly the various courses open to the various Nationals concerned, and give some sort of considered opinion in respect of the best course open to the individual. In this connection you will note the wording of this paragraph, which is deliberate since you will appreciate that amongst the people out here there are, in addition to British Nationals, South African nationals and others, including also British protected persons.Footnote 37
L. M. Welwood, Member of the Legislative Council for Uasin Gishu district, where most of the Afrikaner farmers lived, wrote to Malcolm MacDonald, the governor of Kenya, in 1963 on behalf of the Afrikaner farmer delegation, who wished to remain in Kenya post-independence requesting an audience to discuss nationality and passport issues.Footnote 38 The farmers hoped furthermore that the governor would help them to obtain an interview with the African leaders who emerged victorious from the election. Their blunt pressure tactics and mercenary agenda left the governor unimpressed, ‘The main point is of course that the South Africans receive the benefits of the British Government's measures to assist European farmers, irrespective of nationality, but they want more for themselves because they are South Africans and therefore especially vulnerable on account of their home Government's racial policies.’Footnote 39
The Afrikaner farmers’ delegation (identified only by their last names – Kruger, Cloete, Barnard, and Roets) tried to pressure the British government into buying their properties in Kenya for the sum of £5 million. They insisted that having come to Kenya by invitation of the British government and now being at the mercy of restricted air and sea communications with their relatives and friends in South Africa, their assets in Kenya had become the responsibility of the British government. The Afrikaners emphasized that they had no personal responsibility for the attacks on them and blamed their persecution on ‘the premature and precipitate granting of independence by the British Government’ rather than the South African government's racial policies.Footnote 40 They also suggested the British government could alternatively lend the South African government £5 million to ‘facilitate and expedite the orderly and dignified departure of South Africans from Kenya before the date of independence’. Of this £5 million, 70 per cent was to cover the value of the land and 30 per cent the value of loose assets, including livestock. In addition to this, they claimed they should receive another half a million pounds as net value to farmers for standing crops.Footnote 41 The total value of their properties in Eldoret, Trans Nzoia and Uasin Gishu were self-evaluated to stand at £3.5 million, and Ol Kalou, Thomson Falls, and Laikipia at £1.5 million in total.Footnote 42 Eventually, their tactics changed from insisting that the British government take sole responsibility to pressuring the latter to negotiate with the South African government to facilitate an orderly departure.
N. S. Carey-Jones suggested to the secretary of state for the colonies, Duncan Sandys, that perhaps the farmers of the delegation could help them draw up a nominal roll but was wary of them being ‘a difficult bunch, particularly the most forceful of them, a man called Kruger, and are very liable to blow hot and cold. They are difficult people to help, and Kruger in particular is entirely devoid of personal appeal.’Footnote 43 Together, the Afrikaners owned about 400–500 farms and a staggering 500,000 acres of land – some of these farms had been already left behind to the care of their brethren.
The unabashed arm-twisting and hardball tactics employed by the Afrikaners signified the fact that they did not need to resort to supplication. Their language and demands were not designed to elicit sympathy but simply to extract the best deal for themselves under the colonial administration. This confidence came not only from the fact that they had a ‘home country’ in proximity to return to, with bright economic prospects, and where families and friends would receive them, but also from the actual role they played in the Kenyan economy. The Afrikaner farmers had a strong bargaining chip in their favour and were therefore able to negotiate from a place of strength. As a community, they produced 60–70 per cent of the total quantity of wheat grown in the country. This gave them a unique economically privileged position to bargain from. Their departure would require Kenya having to meet the deficit by importing wheat from abroad. This imported wheat, in turn, would have to be paid for by the finite foreign exchange and aid that Kenya was receiving from the UK and organizations like the World Bank and the International Reconstruction and Development Bank.Footnote 44
IV
The British (Conservative) government's priority was to handle the situation in a way that would avoid upsetting the sentiments of both the Kenyan government and white British settlers in Kenya. It was reluctant to invest further money into buying out farms outside the settlement areas (such as the Ol Kalou area), which would require an additional investment of a further £1 million. The Afrikaners’ multiple attempts to get the Governor's Office to admit officially that the former were in special danger by virtue of their status failed. Britain's new policy priority was to cement their status as Kenya's preferred strategic, defence, and economic ally and to secure their investment in the new Kenya. Given the fragility of this new relationship, they were very cautious about not pushing the Kenyans into the arms of the communist powers. Whitehall was quite certain that any pro-Afrikaner statement would antagonize the Kenyans. The Kenyan government probably realized that the British would not interfere in their South African policy, and indeed the Foreign Office wrote to their ambassador in Pretoria, ‘We are anxious in particular to avoid a public debate on the constitutional position which would probably harden the Kenyan attitudes to the disadvantage of the South Africans.’Footnote 45 The British government was absolutely immovable on the point of their refusal to acknowledge or create special arrangements for the Afrikaners that would distinguish them in any way from (and create resentment among) British settlers. This was despite their numerous admissions in private communications that the Afrikaners were indeed particularly vulnerable to violence and discrimination. One of the advantages of this refusal was that this would have the effect of absolving the British government from having to make any exceptions for the Afrikaners.
The meetings with the Afrikaner farmers' delegation left British officials ‘profoundly shaken’.Footnote 46 Initially relaxed about a potential Afrikaner exodus and seeing it as inevitable and unsurprising, Whitehall rapidly began to realize the actual consequences if such a situation were to develop in practice: 400–500 farms stood to be abandoned, potentially becoming irrecoverable from ‘squatters’ illegally over-running them as a consequence of the tremendous African land hunger that the prospect of independence was unleashing. Neither the fledgling Kenyan state nor the departing colonial state could prevent this vacuum from being filled in a rush. If those farms were occupied illegally it would upset the entire system of settlement schemes that the British and Kenyan governments had constructed painstakingly, and into which the former had poured vast amounts of money by way of compensation (this was part of the giant aid package that the British government had given the Kenyan government to bypass offers of aid by the Soviet and Chinese governments respectively in addition to the money that the British government had spent in 1959–60 in the form of interest-free loans) and would signal ‘the end of orderly settlement’.Footnote 47 The whole situation would take a nightmarish turn as far as law and order was concerned. The remaining European mixed farms would find themselves open to attack. Most of all, the colonial government was concerned about the negative impact that the ‘provocative presence of South Africans’ on trek would have on their own farmers as the violence could also spark off a trend of similar incursions on British farmers and their property.Footnote 48
Whitehall was concerned that world opinion might focus on the exodus which would ‘assume a dramatic aspect’ and thus bring about a degree of loss of confidence in the new Kenyan state.Footnote 49 Production would be seriously affected, and the economy thrown out of gear. The loss of foreign exchange to finance the subsequent wheat deficit would be seen as ‘a British failure to discharge their inter-territorial commitments’.Footnote 50 The Kenyan refusal to give South Africans visas for even business reasons also undermined and disrupted the territorial integration of the (former) British territories of British East Africa, the Central African Federation (dissolved on 31 December 1963), and South Africa. The colonial government would also be unable to guarantee the security of such a convoy once it moved beyond Kenyan borders – particularly of concern was what would happen once they were in Tanganyika and beyond the control of British protection.
Finally, there would be a loss to the British government of outstanding dues in respect of loans of approximately £4 million (£84 million in 2019).Footnote 51 It was estimated that the Afrikaners owed more than the £5 million that they were claiming for their farms. These numbers did not even take into account private indebtedness. The Kenyan government in the interim was to be advised to make an announcement that disorder would not be tolerated at the time of independence, that the farms concerned would pass into the hands of the government, and that they were to be considered to be managed by Afrikaners on behalf of the government – for this reason no intimidation of Afrikaners was to take place.Footnote 52 Gary Wasserman briefly refers to the fact that the plans of the twenty-four South African families to abandon their farms acted as a catalyst in getting Kenyatta's government to come up with the Jet schemes of late 1963 (which aimed to complete the Kinangop scheme with a Kikuyu bias – before independence at an accelerated pace using a military approach to prevent squatting).Footnote 53
Afrikaner concerns for their physical safety were not just based on paranoia or speculation. The inspector general of police had actually informed the governor that Nyandarua district represented the most serious threat facing the government and recommended that the latter should buy out all the European farms in the Ol Kalou Salient before independence, including the two farms owned by South Africans, and that Kenyatta should personally address a meeting in Ol Kalou to both warn them about the security situation and reassure them about the handling of the landless in the area. The situation in Uasin Gishu was also considered to be serious. The inspector general wrote in his report, ‘However little sympathy Ministers may have for the position of the South African farmers, it is, in our opinion, desirable that steps should be taken by the Government to ensure that they leave Kenya in an orderly and phased exodus.’Footnote 54 The evolution in the semantics of the memoranda on this subject over the space of a few days is significant – the situation in Uasin Gishu, for instance, went from being called ‘very serious’ to being tempered to ‘not so serious but there are thought to be undercurrents of a kind which might very quickly cause the situation of Nyandarua to be reproduced’. The alarmist charge that characterized the situation meant that any action taken would be anticipatory rather than responsive. Even amidst the administrative chaos that characterized the decolonization situation, policy formulation evolved almost daily as situational assessments continued to come in and be dealt with – a far cry from the quick decisive action that the Afrikaners sought.
Although some pithy promises were made about the protection of Afrikaner life and property, the colonial government knew that short of stationing armed forces at individual farms where trouble was anticipated (a measure which had not even been implementable effectively during the Mau Mau emergency with the full weight of the colonial state), they would be powerless to protect a handful of white farmers against thousands of impoverished landless squatters or from anti-Kenyatta assailants who could probably damage property or attack livestock without the slightest fear of getting caught. The ratio of European families to squatters in the Rift Valley province for instance was 2,500 to 250,000 in 1964 (before European departures)!Footnote 55 In short, it was a numbers game and the culmination of years of a system of institutional inequality and systemic racial discrimination that ended up backfiring on the Afrikaners who had been beneficiaries of this system of institutional exclusion.
V
Initially, the South African government indicated to Whitehall its intent not to respond to any Afrikaner overtures at all as it did not wish to be seen as encouraging anyone to leave another country. The Afrikaners in Kenya were regarded as British subjects and hence the responsibility of the British state, having voluntarily left South Africa to settle in Kenya, whilst actively contributing to the latter's economic development.Footnote 56 The South African government also refused to participate in the settlements scheme in the capacity of buyer – it insisted that to purchase, and therefore own, real estate in a hostile state would be entirely out of the question.Footnote 57
An organization called the Southern Africa League was formed to assist white settlers (British and Afrikaner) with information and assistance on moving to South Africa. The League received ‘mixed support’ from the South African government.Footnote 58 A total of 1,700 settlers from Kenya had moved to South Africa by April 1963, long before the projected date of exodus – numbers that pale in comparison to the 7,000 settlers who moved at the same time from the CAF but remain significant in terms of the flow of white migrants, and also when considering the limited size of the white population in Kenya.Footnote 59
The South African government turned a politically awkward situation into an opportunity by positioning themselves as a white man's haven. The Republic's curtailment of British immigration to South Africa to further the cause of Afrikaner predominance had led to a net loss of 2,823 whites in South Africa by 1960.Footnote 60 Once assured of the consolidation of Afrikaner power domestically, the Republic could then focus on positioning itself as the white man's first choice in Africa and make up the numbers which would be crucial in implementing and maintaining white supremacist hegemony beyond state control in the South African ecosystem. They began to put out feelers for attracting white settlers (who were looking to leave Kenya for greener pastures) to South Africa as a preferable African alternative with rosy economic prospects instead of having to migrate to a far-flung white Dominion like Australia. Importantly, the biggest selling point for South Africa as the white man's preferred destination was their willingness to pay for both the passage and resettlement of people of all ages.
The Republic eventually agreed to repatriate by air any European woman, child, and elderly person from Kenya whose life was threatened after or even before 12 December, thereby not limiting this arrangement to only those of South African origin. The policy was designed not only to attract dynamic or entrepreneurial blood for the purposes of building a nation-state but also consciously to position itself as a refuge for white immigrants from the potential or ongoing depredations of a newly independent country run by black Africans. This was also a provocative move vis-à-vis the Kenyan state whose self-conceptualization and external projection rested on multiracialism. This also signalled domestically that the South African government would boost white numbers through any means possible and that apartheid as a policy would remain firmly in place. By providing benefits to older white immigrants, South Africa posited itself as an attractive place to settle for families long term where the state would look after them in their old age.
Alfred Trollip, the Republic's minister of immigration and employment, announced that persons of South African origin who came to South Africa from Kenya would receive the same treatment as other immigrants, which meant that they would receive £60 for transport costs and the same concessions as other immigrants.Footnote 61 Therefore, instead of the settlement schemes, the South African government decided to participate in the compassionate cases scheme by taking responsibility for the South Africans on the list – funding the costs of the passage from Mombasa to Durban as well as the accommodation of elderly and indigent Afrikaners. This meant that despite their prickly posturing, South Africa did lend Britain a hand with their settler problem. By 1963, when the Colonial Office had lists prepared for the compassionate case phenomenon, there was now a separate category labelled ‘Persons going to South Africa’ and of the twenty-seven listed, fourteen were women.
Initially antagonizing the Kenyan government by refusing to meet Kenyatta, the farmers finally had a series of meetings with Kenyatta, Bruce McKenzie, and the governor.Footnote 62 Kenyatta reassured them about their position and by the end of the meeting had got them to agree not to trek on a large concentrated scale especially from Ol Kalou, despite the growing numbers leaving already, in favour of a phased withdrawal to be extended over a period of months. The Afrikaner farms that were vacated would be occupied by the army with a tough policy against squatters to ensure that no one stood to get free land. These would, furthermore, be run to an extent by the central government agriculture and livestock officers, regardless of whether departing farmers had made any private arrangements for management.Footnote 63
Kenyan colonial officials also confirmed by October 1963 that there was no question of South African farmers being left out of the land settlement schemes – the only exception would be the South Africans in the Ol Kalou area where the independent government of Kenya could, if it so wished, purchase land but that that would be their decision to make –the inclusion of Ol Kalou would involve an additional £1million (£21 million in 2019) from British aid provided already.Footnote 64 The Afrikaner farmers from this region were compensated by the Kenyan state in the end and Ol Kalou was eventually included in the settlement schemes.Footnote 65
By 18 November 1963, the fears of a chaotic exodus receded and instead of a mass convoy, single families moved on their own at their own pace towards South Africa with visa clearance and without any incident of violence. Some travelled on British passports, facilitating their travel through Tanganyika. Less extreme Afrikaner farmers adopted a ‘wait-and-see policy’ after Kenyatta's reassurances.Footnote 66 Ultimately, only two Afrikaner farmers, J. E. Kruger and Hofmeyr Retief, stayed on and became citizens – they reportedly described themselves as ardent Afrikaner nationalists and did not see this as being incompatible with their new identity as Kenyan citizens.Footnote 67 The rest returned to South Africa, almost in a spirit of trekgees in reverse.Footnote 68
VI
Although Afrikaner farmers made up the majority of the South African origin community in Kenya, theirs were not the only futures at stake here. The handful of South Africans employed by companies in Nairobi, or those who had businesses of their own, found all of a sudden that their citizenship had come to matter in a way it never had previously. In some cases, their companies tried to act on their behalf. C. H. Worrod, the East African manager of the Cinema and Television Advertising Company (East Africa) Ltd wrote to the Governor's Office on behalf of his South African employee who had resided in Kenya with his wife and three-year-old daughter (born in Kenya) on South African passports ‘under the British Flag’ for five and a half years, having spent two years in Rhodesia and then three and a half in Kenya. The Company had applied to the local passport office for a British or Kenyan passport for him but was told that he would not be eligible for one unless he had lived in Kenya for five years.Footnote 69 They were snubbed by the colonial administration who refused any special consideration for his case.Footnote 70
Other more powerful South Africans, who anticipated an unsympathetic response at the Nairobi level, took the more effective route of direct communication with Whitehall in order to pursue their case with the highest authorities within their reach.Footnote 71 They argued that they were British subjects and should, therefore, be able to obtain British citizenship, for themselves but especially for their children. The latter became a particularly sensitive topic. The Colonial Office co-ordinated with the Home Office to find ways to allow these Afrikaners to circumvent immigration rules to allow them to migrate to the UK if they should so choose. The Afrikaners petitioning Whitehall were extremely wealthy and influential, with business concerns in Nairobi.
There was one case in particular that created controversy in bureaucratic circles and was seen as ‘an important test of principles vs practice in the way such cases are dealt with in Nairobi’.Footnote 72 The case involved the Block family of Nairobi. Jack Block was a South African of Jewish descent and a real estate magnate who ended up thriving in independent Kenya, investing huge sums of money in the new state. Block's son Jonathan David went to school in Kenya and this was how he technically qualified for residence. Block's adopted daughter's parents were born in England so she was already a British citizen. This only left the other daughter who was born in Nairobi in 1946, went to school in Switzerland, and had no real claim to British citizenship. Their relatives, the Rabbs, also submitted a similarly controversial claim as did the Hellers (all families in question were resident in Kenya).
Their cases caused ripples within Whitehall, setting up an argument between two parties. The first, supported by influential figures including the duke of Devonshire, Earl Lytton, Duncan Sandys, and other MPs, aside from many at the Commonwealth Relations Office, felt it would be unethical to exclude children from British citizenship when members of their families were citizens. The major concern over-riding ethics was the danger of alienating the white settler community in Kenya (who supported the claims of the South Africans to concessions and compensation by the British government) – denying a single child in a family of three children British citizenship by virtue of the timing of their birth would confirm their heartlessness in the eyes of the settlers.Footnote 73 Those in favour persuaded the Home Office to manipulate loopholes in immigration regulations to allow them to register the children as British nationals and, furthermore, generally to be understanding of the special issues faced by white settlers from Kenya – they also brought greater pressure on colonial officials through both personal communications and parliamentary questions to resolve this issue in their favour. The second group put up a vocal opposition to this on strong grounds – they believed these three families, Rabb in particular, had a slim claim to British nationality. Their more important concern was the impact that this would have on the Asian community in Kenya whose children were not going to receive similar preferential treatment or indeed any acceptance at all when it came to applying for British citizenship through registration. Their wariness at the appeasement of one community potentially leading to a public relations disaster with another was completely valid but was nonetheless over-ridden. In the end, the South Africans in question were able to get their desired result much to the chagrin of the bureaucrats in the Nationality Department of the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), one of whom, D. M. R. Skinner, fumed to his colleague, A. L. Free, at the passport office in Nairobi, ‘We cannot help but feel that if it were not for the wealth and influence of this family group, the attitude taken towards these applications might not have been so generous.’Footnote 74 Indeed, it appeared that the potent combination of racial, economic, and class privilege allowed some cases to prevail over others.
Under Section 3 of the Kenya Independence Act 1963, it was implied that Section 3 (2) meant that children born after independence, with no patrilineal connection by way of the father or the grandfather with Britain or a colony remaining after 12 December 1963, would not become United Kingdom citizens. What it left ambiguous was what the fate of children who had been born in Kenya before 1963 to non-British white parents would be. For many South Africans, the uncertainty of their children's status and future was the determining factor in the decision to leave Kenya. Women and children were sent to South Africa before the farmers followed. An article in The Daily Nation said of the Afrikaners, ‘A steady flow of farmers, mostly people of South African origin are leaving the Uasin Gishu district – Kenya's “little Transvaal”. Every week brings news of more families who have made the decision to leave behind them their life's work and their land.’ It claimed that a third of the Afrikaners of that district had already left, and that they had done so for their children's futures.Footnote 75 Concerns about the possibility of farmers leaving Kenya without proper compensation being given to their labour were allayed by the fact that only two Afrikaner farmers left without paying in the end.Footnote 76
Rand, a hotelier, stayed on as did a few others with business interests. Their conflict with the new administration shows up quite interestingly in the documents, in their reluctance to accept Africanization at micro levels. Rand's refusal as chairman of the Princess Elizabeth Hospital to comply with an official request to change the name of the Hospital to an African name which would not remind Kenyans of an imperial past is a good example of this stubbornness.Footnote 77
The third group of Afrikaners to be mentioned here were those in the employment of the colonial government's administrative and civil services. In 1961, a letter from the permanent secretary to the chief secretary of service and training confirmed the presence of seven South African citizens who were employed by their ministry alone.Footnote 78
A confidential dispatch was subsequently circulated within the top branches of civil administration in Nairobi on the subject of South African employees of the East and Central African public services, and in the public services of the High Commission territories.Footnote 79 It stated that those South Africans employed already could continue to remain employed in terms of their service. South African citizens could continue to be recruited to contract posts but not to permanent posts. This policy was not to be communicated via any public statement or communication to staff associations, but heads of departments could be informed in confidentiality. This hiring freeze and its confidential nature was proof that the Afrikaners’ fears of discrimination were not unfounded – the British government's tacit acknowledgement of the uncertainty of their future lay in this concrete preventive measure taken against them. South African citizens would remain eligible for employment under the crown in dependent territories – but the rights that they had enjoyed so far in respect of nationality were to be altered. Such alterations could effectively turn them into aliens. South African citizens serving under the crown were entitled to apply for registration as British subjects under Section 6 of the British Nationality Act 1948.
VII
The Afrikaner farmers’ bargaining from a position of strength ultimately won the day for them. Their farms in the final settlement scheme areas were bought out by the Kenyan government. Indigent and elderly South Africans were repatriated to South Africa and the responsibility for their living and resettlement costs were met by the South African government. Urban South Africans were ultimately able to secure concessions on matters of citizenship and residency for themselves, and for their children. Those who wished to stay on, at least temporarily, could do so on legal grounds. What this did not mean, however, was that those Afrikaners who incurred the wrath of the Kenyan government could not be expelled as one greatly publicized case proved where Hosea Jaffe, a much-loved teacher of Afrikaner origin, was thrown out of Kenya, despite being a British citizen by registration, for criticizing the government's failure to implement multiracialism in primary schools in July 1965.
What the sources used for this article leave out is what influenced the Afrikaners with regard to their ability to mobilize and form an effective political strategy. Individual Afrikaner farmers did not leave behind personal papers, nor are there any Whitehall records of what actually became of these farmers after their journey to South Africa.
Although the relations between Kenya and South Africa made the former an intimidatingly uncomfortable place for South Africans to live, it is fair to suggest that it is likely that the Afrikaners did not themselves find a future where not only did they have to denounce their home country's policy, but also live in a country helmed by a black majoritarian government and deprived of their former privilege, palatable in the least. The European settlers who stayed behind made public statements in 1964 to the press, led by Michael Blundell, on their successful integration as white Kenyans into the mainstream fabric of the nation, an admission that their fears of racial discrimination were unfounded, and declared their unequivocal support of British policy in Africa.Footnote 80 Those settlers who remained in Kenya therefore did precisely what the Afrikaners were loath to do – they endorsed multiracialism (thereby subverting the basic principles of apartheid) and fell in line with the Kenyan government's policy. This is what differentiated the Afrikaners from the many European settlers who were eager to reinvent themselves as Kenyan members of a new nation-state – the majority of Afrikaners, on the contrary, saw themselves as immigrants in a formerly British colony.
By setting up a dynamic of opposition (on ethical grounds) to the most powerful and prosperous African state at that time, Kenya arguably projected itself as an equally powerful black majoritarian state that had the resources and capability to take the Republic on as an ideological opponent. In reality, of course, this stand was economically costly but earned them valuable political capital. This was not dissimilar to the ideological stands which were noble in theory, and flawed in practice, taken by other newly independent states – such as the Indian state's position of non-alignment in the Cold War even while accepting extensive monetary and material aid from both the USA and the USSR – which earned them political capital globally, especially with newly independent allied countries, and established them as a leader in Africa. The British government succeeded in convincing South Africa to take responsibility for its citizens who did not wish to remain in Kenya and thereby spared itself the political and economic costs of sponsoring any aspect of South African migration (return migration or emigration to the UK). It also managed to avoid an unnecessary source of tension with the Kenyan government.
Once again in settler history, strong ties to the metropole served the settlers well in terms of lobbying to achieve their ends. Pressure from Afrikaner relatives and friends of the farmers as well as the Natal press also played its role.
The article demonstrates the impact of foreign policy and the integration–exclusion dichotomy at a politics-and-policy level on a minority community, and challenges the narrative of the helplessness of white minorities in the face of decolonization to demonstrate that the combination of racial and economic privilege could be potent in real terms and lent them a great degree of agency. When it comes to larger questions of decolonization, this study examines an example of successful ‘bargaining’ by a minority settler group in contrast to contemporary failures by groups of white settlers in decolonized states across Africa. This episode in decolonization history could be read as a high-stakes situation which ultimately resolved itself, with each party – the South African in Kenya, the Republic, the new state of Kenya, and the British government – emerging from the situation with political gains.
