Caroline Nalule railways, security and defence, among others. Labour was sourced from the locals within Kenya and certain migrant communities that were specifically looking for work, but there were a number of foreign workers that were specifically brought in for specific labour roles. These included some Greeks, Goans, Portuguese, Somali, Indians and South Asians generally, Nubians from the Sudan, the Seychellois7, and the Makonde who mainly worked on the sisal plantations. South Asians and Arabs also continued to come into Kenya for trade purposes, while at the same time there were communities of freed slaves, such as the Yao who also settled in Kenya8. In terms of political, economic and social governance structures, the country had a three-tier racial stratification. The Europeans, who governed and controlled commercial and business farming, occupied the top rung, in the middle were the Asians who dominated trade and commerce in urban areas, and the African native population came at the bottom. It has been strongly posited that in terms of the legal governance framework under British rule, there were two sets of laws. The one set of the formal and civic laws to govern the elite urban population considered as ‘citizens’ who enjoyed a wide array of civil and political rights9, and the other set of native or customary laws to govern the ‘tribes’, each according to its traditional norms and customs10. In other words, the concept of ‘citizenship’ as understood by the colonialists did not apply for the African populations for whom the customary or traditional sense of kinship and common ancestry continued to largely define belongingness to a specific ethnic community. The elite urban population under formal law were considered as British subjects, a status conferred upon ‘a person born in any of Her Majesty’s dominions and allegiance’11. The word ‘citizen’ only appeared in British laws with the British Nationality Act, 1948. This Act was intended to create a linked framework of citizenship laws among Britain’s Dominions (a phrase that applied to nine select countries including Canada, Australia, India, South Africa and Ireland) that had by then gained self-government or full independence and enacted their own specific citizenship laws. The 1948 Act recognised a ‘citizen of an independent Commonwealth country’ as having a special status in the UK, and also converted the former status of British subject into that of ‘citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ (CUKC)12. The term British subject remained in use, but as an umbrella term covering both CUKCs and citizens of independent Commonwealth countries, without much free-standing content. Those born in a protectorate without a claim to CUKC status or another citizenship continued to hold the status of ‘British protected person’. A clear reading of this Act gives the impression that these new terms were defined almost exclusively for persons living in the nine specified Dominions and British settlers in the colonies and their offspring13. Apparently, it was never meant as a catch-all phrase to include all persons of African descent born in British colonies such as Kenya, whose rights and freedoms, particularly freedom of movement remained largely restricted compared to the 7 B Ng’weno & L O Aloo, ‘Irony of Citizenship: Descent, National Belonging, and Constitutions in the Postcolonial African State’, Law & Society Review (2019) 53 (1), 141 at 154. 8 Ibid. 9 The word ‘citizen’ is not used in its definitive technical sense, but rather as a term of racialized segregation adopted by the colonialists in their bifurcated governance practices. See M Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University 1996) 17-18. 10 C M Shaw, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 4-5. 11 The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, 1914, Chapter 17, section 1. 12 R Hansen, ‘The politics of citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act’, Twentieth Century British History (1999) 10 (1), pp. 67-95 at 77. 13 Ibid, also British Nationality Act, 1948, sections 1(1) & 13(1). RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/7 - © 2020 Author(s) 3