Poorly staffed and ignorant of African culture, however, this company succeeded only in alienating indigenous peoples who got in the way of its disorganized trade route; it was not until British East Africa became a “protectorate” in 1895 that colonization truly began.
With its new protectorate status, British East Africa was a territory protected and partially controlled by Britain. It would not officially become a colony until 1920. Nonetheless, the British government began to assert its presence immediately, organizing a series of military expeditions between 1895 and 1914 against any group that resisted its rule, and constructing a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria to connect the country and more easily establish full political control. This railroad, completed in 1901, cost British taxpayers almost 6 million pounds. In an attempt to offset some of the expense, the governor of the Protectorate, Charles Eliot, decided to recruit Europeans as settlers. He reasoned that only white settlers could develop the Kenyan economy effectively enough to make the railroad viable. To begin the recruitment process, the British Foreign Office gave hundreds of thousands of acres to men of “position and means”— including Blixen’s acquaintances Lord Delamere (Hugh Cholmondeley), and Berkeley and Galbraith Cole—hoping to entice further settlers to join them.
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