#RutoMustGoNow ☭

This is Michael Blundell, one of the most influential European settler politicians in colonial Kenya. Photographed around 1953 on his 1,200-acre farm in Subukia, near Nakuru, Blundell is seen speaking with two African police guards stationed to protect his property. Born in Yorkshire in 1907, he arrived in Kenya in 1925 as a farm apprentice. He later became a powerful political voice for the European settler community, leading the European Elected Members in Kenya's Legislative Council from 1952. The photograph captures a defining contradiction of colonial Kenya. European settlers owned vast tracts of African land, enjoyed political representation and had access to armed state protection. Meanwhile, Africans had no elected representatives in the Legislative Council and were living under a colonial system that denied them political power. Blundell's farm became part of the wider tensions of the Mau Mau Emergency, declared on 20 October 1952. TIME magazine reported in March 1953 that Mau Mau oath administrators had entered workers' quarters on his property and forcibly administered oaths to Kikuyu labourers. Blundell later joined the Emergency War Council in 1954 and became Kenya's Minister of Agriculture in 1955. This was British Kenya: a European settler elite exercising political influence over an African country, while African people themselves remained excluded from power.