From Multiracialism to Africanization? Race, Politics, and Sport in Decolonizing Kenya

Abstract

Throughout the 1950s, colonial Kenya experimented with multiracial governance – maintaining separate racial identities and instituting group political representation – as a strategy for protecting white supremacy. Though independence negotiations in 1960 ended political multiracialism, in cultural arenas, white sports officials – and their conservative allies in the International Olympic Committee – continued drawing on multiracialist ideologies to justify their disproportionate influence as heads of Kenya's sports organizations and as coaches. Kenyan sport during the midcentury thus reveals the unevenness and incompleteness of decolonization, as well as the specific means by which white settlers attempted to maintain power in the independent era. These efforts can be seen as part of a broader, global right-wing backlash to African nationalism. Though white Kenyans attempted to clutch onto power within the world of sport, Kenya's independent state actors intervened, nationalizing the sports administration and sidelining white-dominated institutions. While recent scholarship has examined African decolonization as a contested process, much of this work has centered on the formal mechanisms of transition. This article shows that, after political transition, sport became a new battleground of decolonization.