Weep Not, Child

9 Pages 2249 Words

During the end of the nineteenth century the British government was planning, with Germany, on the partitioning of African territories so as to create holding on the continent and become part of the growing importance of this area to global trade and expansion. In the section of Africa that would become the British East Africa Protectorate and then Kenya in 1920, there was a wide range of cultural groups that lived by farming and herding livestock. There were also some groups, like the Kikuyu who were nomadic herders that lived in the mountainous, who were the least interested in colonization or cooperating with those types of governments. When the British decided to begin using the coastal areas of Kenya to trade in the Indian Ocean, they had a hard time extending their control inland. The cultural groups in the interior of the colony were not ready to give up their control and the British would have to take military action before the colony would be completely under their control. The British began to classify the ethnic groups in the colony and force them to live in different area in order to divide and conquer the ethnic groups. Some of the ethnic groups, those who were wealthy and powerful, started to work with the British to establish a British government to run the colony of Kenya. Those poorer groups in the southern and western parts of Kenya, as well as in the mountain regions, were more resistant to change. The book Weep Not, Child takes place during the same time period telling the story about one families, the Ngotho families experience during the time Britain took over in Africa.
The British helped the colonization by increasing the taxes levied on the Africans, in effect forcing them to work the white settler’s farm to pay the taxes, or retreat from the area. Either way the British were gaining more and more land to call Kenya. After World War II the British government had to deal with the tribal groups in Ken...