How Britain’s bids to dump refugees in Kenya flopped

By Inaya Khan

In the face of public outrage over the British government’s decision to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, it is worthwhile to point out that this is hardly the first time that Britain has sought to find a convenient offloading point in East Africa for its refugees.

An oft-overlooked but important historical precedent of this idea can be located in the British government’s attempt to create a homeland for Jewish refugees in Kenya’s ‘White Highlands’. The plan, which was ultimately unsuccessful, was dubbed ‘Jewganda’.

A few years after the First Zionist Congress of 1897, the secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, suggested that the White Highlands of Kenya be opened to settlement by Jews fleeing Russian, eastern and central European pogroms.

Kenya, which was then part of the British East Africa Protectorate and later annexed as a British Crown Colony in 1920, was conspicuously designed to be a ‘white man’s country’ for upper- class and wealthy British settlers who were closely connected to the ruling class in the UK at the time.

The British government offered the new Zionist Organisation a free grant of 3.2 million acres in the White Highlands, an area that was later designated exclusively for white settlement in 1923.

Chamberlain suggested that East Africa could serve as a base for Jewish settlers to continue their struggle for a Jewish nation in Palestine.

The Zionists also wanted to have administrative rights over its own settlers. The suggestion that Jewish settlers could realise sub-imperialist ambitions and create an alternate power base within a British territory was met with vociferous opposition from the anti- Semitic white settler community.

European community

That community argued that land grants should be made only to members of the European community and that Jewish settlers would clash with the African population. Sir Charles Eliot, the commissioner of the East African Protectorate, acquiesced with their demands and offered the Zionists land in the isolated Uasin Gishu plateau in a deliberate attempt to discourage them from settling in Kenya.

The Zionist delegation rejected the British government’s offer after inspecting the land. That area was later colonised by Afrikaner farmers from South Africa instead, whose presence was not quite as repugnant to the British settlers. The British government’s attempt to redirect asylum seekers to East Africa in the first instance thus failed.

A rescue operation of migrants and refugees at sea, off the coast of Sicily, on April 11, 2016.

The idea of Jewish settlement in Kenya was once again revived in 1938. This time the British government tried to turn the refugee problem into a win for British imperialism – 400 German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, who possessed sound knowledge of agriculture as well as the necessary capital could be sent to farm in Kenya, and thus contribute to the development of the colony.

Kenya’s colonial government, however, fought back on behalf of its white settlers, many of whom, including Lord Erroll of the aristocratic and decadent ‘Happy Valley’ set, were ardent fascists. The governor of the colony, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, refused to let Kenya turn into a multilingual ‘kind of Hampstead’ that would challenge Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance in the colony, and most importantly, allow the creation of a ‘second Palestine’ in Kenya.

An influx of Jewish refugees could potentially push British settlers to potentially leave the colony in a white exodus – something the colonial government, which relied on the settlers to exert its authority over vast swathes of the country, could not risk.

Colonial government

The coexistence of a powerful and restive Indian immigrant population with an African majority already lent Kenya a politically charged atmosphere, and the colonial government argued that the addition of a large number of Jewish immigrants to this mix might have disastrous long-term consequences.

Thus, Britain’s second attempt to send asylum seekers to East Africa also turned out to be unsuccessful.

Historically, therefore, the British government’s efforts to send asylum seekers to East Africa, were undone by the white supremacist ambitions of its own citizens – in 1903, it failed to provide a haven for Jews victimised by Russian, central and eastern European pogroms, and in 1938, Jews seeking to escape persecution in Nazi Germany.

Such obstacles in the form of a hostile British presence in East Africa no longer exist today. The choice of Rwanda as the point of arrival carries with it a strong echo of the pattern of the British state’s historical tendency to send what it considered ‘undesirables’ to its colonies in the global south.

Although Rwanda was never a British colony, it chose to become a member of the Commonwealth in 2009, and has now accepted £120 million from the British government to implement the plan before it has even been approved by the British Parliament.

Rwanda has, therefore, seized an opportunity turned down by other territories such as Gibraltar. The agreement between the two countries now threatens to set a precedent for other European countries to follow suit and export their asylum seekers to developing countries the same way they export their waste.

Miss Khan is a historian of British colonialism and decolonisation at Sciences Po Paris, and a specialist in the sub-Saharan region.