East African Federation

The East African Federation (Shirikisho la Afrika Mashariki), ordinarily East Africa or the Federation, is a sovereign asymmetric federation occupying the East African interior, the Great Lakes and some three thousand kilometres of the Indian Ocean coast. It holds about a hundred and ninety million people across nine constituent states, of which four are kingdoms, four are republics and one is an autonomous coastal territory that is neither, and it is the second largest state in Africa by population, after the Federal Kingdom of Nigeria, and the fourth largest by economy, after Egypt, South Africa and Algeria.

It was assembled slowly, out of the leftovers of two empires. The interior and the southern half were German East Africa, which became an associated state of the German Empire in 1961, entered the Federation as Tanganyika in 1963 with its treaty intact, and terminated that association unilaterally in 1974; the Federation returned to it as a whole in 1994 and is the one state that belongs both to the German association and to the Commonwealth. The northern interior and the highlands were British East Africa, which left Britain on a different timetable and by a different route. The Federation is what the two halves built after they stopped being anybody’s, and it has been building it since 1963.

It is not finished, and it does not claim to be. The Constitution of 1963 was drafted for four members and now governs nine. Four Instruments of Accession have added states on individually negotiated terms, no two of which are identical. Federal competence over land, over education and over religious law is incomplete by design. Two member states have been under standing emergency provisions since accession and remain so. The Federation’s own formal description of itself, in the preamble that every schoolchild learns, is a union in the making, and East African constitutional lawyers use the phrase with a dryness that foreigners often miss.

The fact that distinguishes it from almost every other post-colonial state in Africa is that its crowns are still standing. The Kabaka reigns in Buganda, the Mwami in Rwanda and in Burundi, the Sultan in Zanzibar. Thrones of that kind were ordinarily abolished within a decade of independence. Nigeria is the one other place where the African crowns outlived decolonisation, but there a new national crown was made at independence and the old rulers were kept to ceremony; East Africa is the only place where the old crowns are states of a federation, and every one of these survived for the same reason: the Federation borrowed its constitutional architecture from the United Kingdom of America, a state whose entire achievement is holding unlike parts together without requiring them to become alike.

What that preservation cost is the subject of this article as much as the preservation itself. A crown is a hierarchy with a person on top of it. The Federation kept four, and in keeping them it froze what they sat on.

Etymology

The Federation takes its name from the region, and the region takes its name from the ocean. East Africa is a European coinage of the nineteenth century, describing the coast from the standpoint of ships arriving on the monsoon, and it entered the languages of the interior only when the administrations that used it did.

The Swahili name is older in construction and newer in application. Afrika Mashariki is a direct rendering, mashariki meaning the east and deriving from the Arabic root for the rising of the sun, which reached the coast with the trade that built its towns. The Federation is therefore called, in its own language, the association of the place where the sun comes up, which is a description of where the ocean is rather than of where anybody stands.

Shirikisho, federation, is a twentieth-century formation from the root for partnership and association, and was chosen in 1963 over two alternatives. The rejected words both carried a sense of union or merging, and the drafters declined them on the express ground that the state they were making did not merge its parts. That is the earliest statement of the asymmetry doctrine in the Federation’s own record and it is a piece of vocabulary rather than a clause.

The full formal style is used only on instruments. In ordinary use the state is the Federation, its citizens are East Africans, and the constituent states are called by their own names, which every one of them prefers.

History

Before the empires

The coast

The Swahili coast was a chain of stone towns trading with Arabia, Persia, Gujarat and China from at least the ninth century, Muslim, mercantile, and politically fragmented by design. Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Pate and Lamu were rivals rather than a state. The Portuguese took the coast in the sixteenth century, held it badly, and were expelled by Omani forces in the seventeenth.

Oman then moved in properly. The Busaidi sultans transferred their court to Zanzibar in 1840, and the island became the commercial capital of the western Indian Ocean: cloves grown on plantations, ivory carried from the interior, and an enormous traffic in enslaved people moving north and east. The Sultanate’s writ ran along the coast and up the caravan routes, and its money and its language went further than its soldiers ever did.

The interior kingdoms

The interlacustrine kingdoms of the Great Lakes were among the most developed states in pre-colonial Africa. Buganda on the northern shore of Lake Victoria was a centralised monarchy with a bureaucracy of appointed chiefs, a standing navy of war canoes and a court that received and assessed foreign embassies with unusual coolness. Bunyoro was its old rival, Ankole, Toro and Busoga its neighbours, and in the far west the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi were centralised, populous and hierarchical states under the Nyiginya and Ganwa dynasties respectively.

The Rwandan and Burundian social order is the fact this article will return to repeatedly, so it is set out here plainly. Both kingdoms were organised around a distinction between Tutsi, Hutu and Twa, which was a real division of status, occupation and clientage rather than an invention, which was to some degree permeable before the colonial period, and which the colonial period made rigid, documented and racial. The Mwami and the court were Tutsi. The great majority of the population was Hutu. The kingdoms were pastoral aristocracies with an agricultural majority underneath them, and no account of what the Federation later preserved makes sense without that sentence.

The scramble

The partition of East Africa was settled between Berlin and London in 1886 and 1890 by officials who had not been there, drawing lines through the interior on a map at a scale that made a kingdom the width of a fingernail.

Germany took the southern mass, the territory it called German East Africa, running from the Ruvuma to the Kenyan line and inland to the Great Lakes, including Rwanda and Burundi. Britain took the northern block, the East Africa Protectorate that became Kenya, and the Uganda Protectorate to its west. The Sultan of Zanzibar kept the island and a ten-mile coastal strip, leased to whoever was administering the mainland behind it, and lost everything else.

The Federation’s internal frontiers are still substantially these lines. Its constitutional problem is that two different empires, with two different theories of how to govern Africans, spent seventy years applying them to halves of the same region, and then left.

The German theory

German administration was direct, centralising and reformist in intention. It abolished chieftaincies it found inconvenient, appointed akidas and jumbes as salaried agents over people who had not chosen them, taxed in cash to force labour into the market, and built the two great railways from Tanga and from Dar es Salaam to the lakes. It also governed Rwanda and Burundi indirectly and lightly, through their existing courts, because the kingdoms were strong, legible and cheap to work through, and because the German residents found the Tutsi aristocracy congenial in a way they explained at the time in terms that do not bear repeating and are quoted in full in the Federation’s own school textbooks.

The Maji Maji war

The suppression of the Maji Maji rising between 1905 and 1907 is the founding atrocity of the southern half of the Federation. The rising began in the south-east against the forced cultivation of cotton, spread across an enormous area and across peoples with no previous common cause, and was defeated by a deliberate campaign of famine: crops burned, granaries destroyed, wells fouled, villages cleared.

The number of dead is not known and has been estimated between a quarter and three quarters of a million. Districts that were populous before 1905 were empty after 1907 and some have never recovered their population, which is visible in the settlement pattern of southern Tanganyika to this day.

Germany’s reckoning with it has been partial. A federal request for the return of remains taken to German institutions has been substantially met. A request for a form of words has been met with several. A request for compensation has been declined on the same legal advice that Denmark declines to publish, and the Federation has stopped asking in public and has not stopped asking.

The British theory

British administration in Uganda was indirect and worked through the kingdoms, above all through Buganda, whose chiefs were used as agents across territories that had never been Ganda and resented the arrangement bitterly. The Uganda Agreement of 1900 gave Buganda a written settlement with the protecting power that no other African polity in the region obtained, and that document is the direct ancestor of Buganda’s position in the Federation today.

British administration in Kenya was something else entirely. The highlands were alienated for European settlement, on the theory that a temperate plateau on the equator was wasted on its inhabitants, and something over three million hectares of the best land in the region passed to a settler population that never exceeded about sixty thousand people. The Kikuyu, Maasai and Nandi lost land they had used and in many cases occupied. A reserve system, a pass system and a hut tax completed the arrangement, and the Kenyan land question, which is the most dangerous question in the Federation, begins here and has never been closed.

The Great Wars

Both East Africas fought in the First Great War on the same side, since Germany and Britain were allies from 1914, and their soldiers and porters were sent against the French colonies. The campaigns were long, mobile and ruinous, conducted largely by African soldiers and overwhelmingly by African porters, of whom a number that exceeded the combatants died of disease and exhaustion. The carriers are the largest single group of East African dead in either Great War and were the last to be counted. A federal memorial at Dar es Salaam, opened in 1998, names them by district because the rolls did not name them individually.

The Second Great War took East African formations to Madagascar, to Burma and to the Mediterranean, and returned them to territories where the men who had commanded them held land they could not buy. Every account of what followed, in both halves, begins with the veterans.

The British half leaves

Kenya’s route out was violent. The land and freedom rising of the 1950s, fought by Kikuyu fighters in the forests, was suppressed by a colonial administration that detained something over a hundred thousand people in camps, used systematic violence within them, and hanged more than a thousand. The record was closed for fifty years, was released after litigation in British courts, and is not disputed. Britain settled the claims without admission of liability and without apology, paying a limited number of surviving detainees an amount the claimants accepted and described as insufficient.

Uganda’s route out was constitutional and nearly as difficult, because the question was not whether Britain would leave but what Buganda would be when it had. The kingdom held the 1900 Agreement, the best land, the capital and a majority of the educated administrative class, and it did not intend to become one province among several. It threatened secession twice and prepared for it once.

The German half leaves

German East Africa took the other route the Empire offered. It became an associated state in 1961, after negotiations that broke down twice, retaining the currency, the defence guarantee, the development fund and preferential access to the German market, and receiving in exchange a written right of unilateral termination on notice and without cause. It entered the Federation as Tanganyika in 1963 with its treaty intact, under a provision of the Constitution written for it, and for eleven years it was a state of the Federation and an associated state of the Empire at once.

It terminated in 1974. The German government accepted the termination without contesting it, and the Chancellor’s statement to the Reichstag that a right which is honoured only when its exercise is convenient is not a right became the most quoted sentence of the whole German colonial period.

It is quoted rather less in East Africa, and the reason is worth stating. The sentence is admirable and it makes the Federation an exhibit in somebody else’s argument about their own decency. East Africa terminated the association because the association was a dependency, and it has spent fifty years being cited by German liberals as proof that the dependency was voluntary. The Federation’s official position is gratitude. Its unofficial position is that being thanked for leaving is a strange thing to be thanked for.

The kingdoms of the west did not leave. Ruanda and Urundi, associated separately as monarchies, stayed in the association when the rest of German East Africa left it, and brought their treaties with them when they acceded to the Federation in 1977.

The federal idea

The idea of an East African federation is older than any of its members. A customs union linked the British territories from the 1920s, a common currency from the 1920s, and a shared High Court, railway, harbour and postal administration from the 1940s. By 1960 the northern territories already shared more institutions than most federations possess, and the question was only whether the political layer would be added on top.

What made it hard was that federation had different meanings in each place. Kenya wanted a federation because it had the industry, the capital and the port and would lead one. Uganda wanted a federation only if Buganda’s position survived it. Tanganyika wanted a federation because its leadership believed in one on principle, and its leaders said in public that they would delay their own independence to get it, which no other leadership on the continent offered.

Federation, in stages

The Federation has never been founded. It has been extended, five times, and each extension changed what it was.

1963: the Constitution

The founding members were Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Buganda, and the last of those is the point. Buganda entered as a state in its own right, separately from the rest of Uganda, retaining its Kabaka, its Lukiiko and its land settlement of 1900, and the Federation was asymmetric from its first day because that was the only price at which Buganda would come in at all.

Tanganyika was asymmetric in another way. It came in as an associated state of the German Empire, keeping its treaty of association, German defence and the mark, under a provision allowing a member state to hold a treaty of its own with the Federation’s consent. It held both until 1974, and the provision outlived its use: it is the one Rwanda and Burundi entered under in 1977.

The model was explicit and was acknowledged at the time. The drafters worked from the Charter of Union of the American Colonies, and the delegation that spent four months in New Westminster in 1962 came back with the doctrine that a federation may contain parts of unlike kind, unlike size and unlike constitutional character, and need not make them alike in order to hold them. East African constitutional law is therefore a Crown federation’s law without a Crown, which produces some of the odder passages in its jurisprudence.

1968: Zanzibar

Zanzibar acceded as a kingdom, its Sultan retained, its Arab and Shirazi and African communities holding guaranteed representation in a state legislature weighted to protect all three, and its accession instrument containing a clause found in no other: the Federation guarantees the Sultanate and may not alter its succession.

This is the accession that has been most criticised and it is the one that most obviously worked. A revolution against the Sultan was expected in January 1964, and elsewhere such a rising has overthrown a sultanate and killed several thousand people, most of them Arabs, within a fortnight. Here it did not happen. What did not happen instead is that the landholding did not change, and the plantation estates of the Omani families remained in the hands that held them, protected by a federal guarantee, and the African majority that would have taken them by force in 1964 has spent sixty years failing to obtain them by legislation.

1977: Rwanda and Burundi

The two kingdoms of the west acceded together, fourteen years after the Constitution, and their accession is the hardest thing in the Federation’s history.

They came in as associated states of the German Empire, which they had never left. The Federation’s constitution allowed them to keep their own treaties of association, German defence and the mark included, with the Federation’s consent, as it had allowed Tanganyika from 1963 to 1974, and they kept them after 1994, when the Federation’s own treaty came to cover every other state.

1981: Nyanza

Nyanza was created out of the western Kenyan counties as a separate republic in 1981, after a decade of pressure from the lake peoples for a state of their own rather than a periphery of Kenya’s. It is the only member created by division rather than accession, and Kenya agreed to it under federal arbitration and has never entirely accepted that it was necessary.

1994: the Somali Coast

The Somali Coast, the strip of the north-eastern coast running from north of Lamu to the frontier with Somalia, had been held outside the states as federal territory since 1963, when its Somali population refused inclusion in Kenya. It acceded as an autonomous territory that is neither kingdom nor republic, on terms that give it its own law of personal status, its own police, control of its own frontier and a permanent exemption from federal land legislation. It is the newest member, the poorest, the least integrated, and the one whose accession the Federation regards as unfinished business rather than achievement.

1994: the return to the association

In the same year the Federation re-entered the German association as a whole, by a treaty negotiated as a federation rather than state by state, twenty years after German East Africa had left it. It is a full association: defence a common responsibility discharged in practice by the Empire, the East African shilling pegged to the mark, the development fund restored on treaty terms and free movement continued. The Federation stayed in the Commonwealth, and the dual status was debated at the next Commonwealth summit and accepted, on the argument that a member’s other treaties are its own business. It is the only state in both. The return was broadly accepted in East Africa, where the argument for it was the mark and the development fund and the argument against it was the one the Federation had made in the 1970s.

Geography

The Federation runs from the Indian Ocean to the western wall of the Great Rift, and from the Somali deserts in the north to the Ruvuma in the south. It contains within one frontier the highest free-standing mountain in the world, the deepest lake in Africa, the largest tropical lake in the world by surface, an equatorial glacier, and about eight hundred kilometres of coral coast.

The Rift is the organising fact. Two branches of it run north and south, the eastern through Kenya and the western along the lakes, and between them sits a high plateau that is fertile, temperate, malarial only at its edges and consequently the most fought-over ground in the region for four hundred years. The kingdoms of the interlacustrine zone grew there. The settler colonies were planted there. The Federation’s densest population lives there still.

Around it the land falls away into country that is much harder. The coastal belt is narrow, humid and old, a strip of towns that faced the ocean and traded across it for a thousand years before they had much to do with the interior behind them. The northern arid lands, running east to the Somali Coast, carry pastoralists, seasonal water and about a twentieth of the Federation’s people across a third of its area. The southern plateau of Tanganyika is dry miombo woodland, thinly settled and holding the largest protected areas anywhere on the continent.

Water

Lake Victoria is the pivot. The explorer John Hanning Speke named it in 1858 for Queen Victoria, eighteen years after her murder and while Ernest II reigned, so that the name is a memorial and not a compliment to a sovereign; the lake peoples have older names for it, Nalubaale in Luganda and Nam Lolwe in Luo, and Nyanza, their word for the lake itself, gave its name to the republic of 1981. It touches four constituent states, holds the Nile’s headwaters, feeds thirty million people around its shore and is in poor condition, which is treated below. Tanganyika and Malawi hold water of extraordinary depth and unusual biology. The rivers are seasonal, the aquifers are old, and water allocation between member states is the most litigated federal subject after land.

The mountains

Kilimanjaro and Kenya are the great volcanic masses, both glaciated within living memory and both losing that ice at a rate the Federation’s own environmental agency in Nairobi reports on annually and with visible irritation. The Ruwenzori on the western edge holds the third equatorial glacier. The Federation is therefore the only state in the world with three, and expects to be the only state in the world with none.

Environment

The Federation is the seat of the world’s environmental administration and is among the states most exposed to what that administration exists to address, which is a coincidence its diplomats have used relentlessly and its officials find wearing.

Lake Victoria is in poor condition. Eutrophication from agricultural runoff and untreated urban sewage, the introduction of the Nile perch which collapsed several hundred endemic cichlid species, water hyacinth infestation, and a fishery under pressure from thirty million people around its shore. Four member states share it, the lake is a federal competence only in navigation, and the basin authority that manages it has always operated by agreement between states that did not agree. On 27 October 2028 the four states signed a binding standard for the effluent discharged into the lake, the first power the authority would have to bind them; the federal government at Dar es Salaam, which was not a party, welcomed it. It takes effect only when all four state legislatures have ratified it, and none has.

The glaciers are going. Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Ruwenzori have each lost the great majority of the ice recorded on them a century ago, and the Federation’s environmental agency publishes the measurements annually from Nairobi, where the world’s climate agreements are negotiated.

The wildlife estate is enormous and is a state competence, which produces the Federation’s characteristic environmental politics: the largest protected areas on the continent, a tourism industry worth several per cent of the economy, pastoralist communities excluded from grazing they held before the parks existed, and a federal government that can convene, fund and publish but cannot legislate.

Government and politics

The Constitution

The Federal Constitution of 1963 is short, was drafted for four members, and now governs nine. It has been amended eleven times and supplemented by four Instruments of Accession which have the force of constitutional law and which are not identical to one another, so that the Federation’s constitutional text is not one document but five, and the relations between them are the principal work of its courts.

Asymmetry

No two constituent states hold the same powers. Buganda holds land, custom and the succession. Zanzibar holds land, personal status law and its own courts of first instance. Rwanda and Burundi hold their institutions under guarantee and are subject to emergency provisions no other state carries. Kenya and Tanganyika hold ordinary state powers and nothing more. The Somali Coast holds its own frontier, police and personal status law and is exempt from federal land legislation altogether.

The doctrine that makes this lawful was imported. The Federation’s Supreme Court at Arusha cites American authority on asymmetry more often than any other foreign source, and the leading judgment on the point opens by observing that a federation of unlike parts is not a defective federation of like ones.

What the Federation holds

Defence, foreign relations, the currency, customs, the federal courts, citizenship, the railways, the ports, civil aviation, posts and telecommunications, and a federal competence over trade, industry and infrastructure that has grown steadily and by litigation rather than by amendment.

What it does not hold is land, and that is the whole of the Federation’s difficulty. Land is a state competence in every member, protected explicitly in four of them, and it is the subject on which every serious internal conflict in the Federation’s history has turned.

The presidency

The President of the Federation is elected directly for a single seven-year term and may not be re-elected. The single term is the Constitution’s most-praised provision and was inserted in 1963 by delegates who had watched what was happening elsewhere on the continent and drafted against it. Nine presidents have held the office and all nine have left it on the day their term expired, which is a sentence the Federation is entitled to say and few of its neighbours are.

The presidency is not a figurehead and is not an executive in the American sense. It commands the armed forces, conducts foreign relations, appoints the Chief Minister who must command the Federal Assembly, and holds the reserve powers under the emergency provisions. A rotation convention, unwritten and unbroken, has produced a president from a different member state at each election, and the convention is regarded as more important than several written provisions.

President Amina Kiptoo, of Nyanza, was elected in 2024 and is the third woman to hold the office.

Parliament

The Federal Assembly of three hundred and forty members is elected by population. The Chamber of States of eighty-four is not: each constituent state returns an equal number regardless of size, which gives Zanzibar the same weight as Kenya and was the price of the 1968 accession.

Legislation requires both. The Chamber cannot initiate money bills and cannot ultimately block ordinary ones, but it holds an absolute veto over any bill touching the Instruments of Accession, which is the mechanism by which the four guaranteed states protect their guarantees and the mechanism by which the Rwandan and Burundian settlements have proved unamendable.

Parties and elections

Federal politics runs on coalitions that cross states, because no party can win a federal majority from one state and every party has learned it the expensive way.

The Federal Union, descended from the parties that negotiated the 1963 Constitution, is the party of the federal idea itself and has held the Assembly for rather more than half the Federation’s life. Its weakness is that a party organised around the Constitution struggles to say what it would do with power beyond keeping the Constitution.

The Peoples Progressive Alliance is the party of the land question, strongest in Kenya and Nyanza, and its programme has for forty years been the transfer of federal competence over land, which every guaranteed state opposes and which its own Zanzibari and Somali branches oppose. It is the only major party whose central policy is opposed by parts of itself, which is the Federation’s asymmetry reproduced inside a party.

The Coast and Islands Party speaks for the Muslim coast, holds the balance in the Chamber of States more often than its size suggests, and trades support for defence of the personal-status settlement.

Below them sit the kingdom parties, which do not contest federal elections in any state but their own and hold, between them, enough seats to matter in most Assemblies.

Federal elections are free, are observed, and have produced nine changes of president and five changes of governing coalition. State elections in Rwanda and Burundi are held under emergency provisions, are observed by federal officers rather than international ones, and are described in the Federation’s own reports as adequate.

The kingdoms

Buganda

Buganda is the founding anomaly and the most successful one. It entered the Federation in 1963 as a state distinct from the rest of Uganda, and the arrangement was expected by everyone to be transitional. It has lasted sixty-five years.

The Kabaka reigns, the Lukiiko legislates on land, custom and the affairs of the kingdom, and the 1900 land settlement survives in modified form, having been reformed twice by agreement between the kingdom and the federal government and never by federal legislation. Buganda holds the federal commercial capital within its borders and does not hold the federal capital, which is in Dar es Salaam, and the separation was deliberate.

Relations with the Republic of Uganda, the remainder of the old protectorate, are correct and cold. The republic contains Bunyoro, Ankole, Toro and Busoga, three of which have their own restored ceremonial monarchies without state status, and the standing grievance of all of them is that Buganda obtained in 1963 what they were told in 1963 was constitutionally impossible.

Zanzibar

The Sultanate is guaranteed by the Federation and the guarantee is unamendable without the Sultan’s consent, which is the only such provision in the constitutional text. The islands run their own courts of first instance, their own personal status law and their own land registry.

The land registry is the problem. The plantation estates that the 1968 accession protected are still substantially in the hands of the families that held them, the labouring population that worked them is still substantially the descendants of those who worked them, and sixty years of attempted land legislation in the state legislature has produced three statutes, two of which the Federal Supreme Court struck down as contrary to the accession instrument and one of which is in force and has transferred a small fraction of the land.

The Federation prevented a massacre and preserved an estate system, and it has never found a form of words that makes those two facts sit comfortably in the same paragraph. Zanzibari politics is conducted almost entirely about this and is conducted peacefully, which the Federation counts as the vindication and which its critics count as the complaint.

Rwanda and Burundi, and what preservation cost

The Register states this plainly, at length, because the Federation’s proudest claim rests on it and because the claim is only half true.

What was preserved

Rwanda and Burundi entered the Federation in 1977 as monarchies, their Mwami retained in each, their courts recognised, their existing land tenure and clientage arrangements protected by the accession instruments against federal legislation for a period that was renewable and has been renewed.

The Federation’s account of why is straightforward and is not dishonest. The Rwandan monarchy came within a year of destruction in 1959, in a rising that would have expelled hundreds of thousands and set in train a catastrophe a generation later; the Burundian monarchy faced the same in 1966 and would have been followed by mass killings in 1972 and after. The Federation contends that its intervention, which was to offer both kingdoms accession on terms that guaranteed their institutions, prevented both sequences. It says that nobody in East Africa was permitted to secede into a massacre, and as a statement about what did not happen it is supported by the record.

What preservation meant

A crown is a hierarchy with a person on top of it, and the Federation guaranteed the whole structure and not merely the person.

The accession instruments protected the courts, and the courts were Tutsi. They protected the land tenure, and the land tenure was the instrument through which a pastoral aristocracy held an agricultural majority in clientage. They protected the succession, which meant the Federation undertook by treaty to maintain in being the specific institution around which the inequality was organised. The Hutu political movements of the late 1950s, which had the numbers and the grievance to carry a revolution, were offered guaranteed minority representation in a state legislature by a federation that had already guaranteed the throne they were organised against.

The emancipation did not happen. The killing did not happen either. These are the same sentence.

The emergency

Rwanda and Burundi have been under standing federal emergency provisions since 1977, renewed by the Federal Assembly at intervals of five years, without a break, for fifty years. The provisions permit the federal government to suspend state legislation, to garrison, to detain without ordinary process and to close the internal frontier. They have been used, in each state, more than once in every decade.

The killings that the Federation prevented in the large have occurred in the small, repeatedly. Federal troops have gone into both states, in 1988, in 1993, in 2001 and in 2019, on each occasion after violence that the federal government’s own inquiries have found to originate in disputes over land and clientage that the accession instruments placed beyond legislation. The inquiries are published. Their recommendations are substantially the same each time and are substantially not implemented, because implementing them would require amending the instruments, and amending the instruments requires the consent of the states whose institutions they protect.

Where it stands

The Federation’s claim is that it has held two societies out of catastrophe for fifty years. The charge against it is that it has done so by freezing the thing that causes the catastrophe and calling the freezing pluralism. Both are true. The Register does not resolve them, because the argument is live in the Federal Assembly, in the two states, and in the historiography, and because the honest position is that nobody knows what the alternative would have produced.

What can be said is that the Federation is fifty years into a temporary arrangement, that the emergency provisions were drafted for a decade, that every federal government since 1977 has renewed them, and that the only party which has ever proposed allowing them to lapse lost the subsequent election in every constituency in both states, including the ones it was trying to help.

Kenya, land, and the settlement

The Kenyan land question is the most dangerous in the Federation because it is the one where the injustice is clearest and the remedy is least available.

Something over three million hectares of highland were alienated for European settlement before 1960. At independence the Federation’s founding governments chose to buy rather than to take, financing purchase from British and federal funds and transferring land to smallholder settlement schemes over two decades. The transfer was real, it was large, and it was conducted on the willing-buyer principle at market prices.

The consequence was that the land went to those who could pay. A substantial part of it consolidated into large African holdings within a generation, the political class among them, and the descendants of those who had been evicted in the 1900s frequently received nothing, because compensation followed title and they had never held title. Kenya replaced a settler landholding class with an African landholding class of similar concentration, which is not what anybody promised and is documented in the Federation’s own land commission reports.

Every Kenyan election since federation has turned partly on this. Every serious outbreak of political violence in Kenya has been about it. Federal land legislation cannot reach it because land is a state competence, and Kenya has not chosen to reach it either.

The Somali Coast

The north-eastern coast acceded in 1994, last and most reluctantly on both sides, and its terms are the loosest in the Federation.

It holds its own police, its own frontier administration, its own personal status law under a Sharia-based code applying to its Muslim population, and a total exemption from federal land legislation, which in a pastoral society with communal tenure was the condition of entry. It sends members to both federal chambers and takes a federal transfer that is the largest per head in the Union.

Two questions are unresolved and both are known to be. The first is whether the accession is permanent: the instrument contains a review clause, exercisable by the territory, which the Federation reads as a review of terms and the territory reads as including a review of membership. Neither has tested it.

The second is that the Somali people are divided by frontiers the Federation did not draw and cannot alter, and Somali irredentism is a live politics on the Coast, in the neighbouring states and among the diaspora. The Federation’s position is that it will not pursue a frontier change and will not prevent its citizens arguing for one, which satisfies its neighbours and nobody on the Coast.

Law and judiciary

The federal courts

The Federal Supreme Court sits at Arusha, deliberately away from both the political and the commercial capital, and it is the institution the Federation is proudest of.

It has struck down federal legislation, state legislation and executive action; it has ruled against the federal government in the great majority of the accession cases; and its judgments are complied with, which in a federation of this composition is an achievement rather than an expectation. Judges are appointed by the President from a list settled by a commission on which every state sits, hold to seventy, and cannot be removed except by both chambers.

The Court’s docket is dominated by the conflict of legal families, by state boundary and water disputes, and above all by the accession instruments. Its jurisprudence on those instruments is what holds the Federation together and is also what makes the Rwandan and Burundian settlements unamendable, which the Court has acknowledged in terms in more than one judgment and has declined to resolve, on the ground that the remedy is legislative and not judicial.

Foreign relations

Germany, quietly kept

The German inheritance in the southern half is not celebrated, is not repudiated, and is used.

The law is the deepest part of it. Tanganyikan private law descends from the German civil code as adapted, the land registration system is the German one modified, and the southern courts work in a legal vocabulary a Berlin advocate would recognise. The northern states work in a common-law tradition. The Federation therefore contains both of the great European legal families and has spent sixty years harmonising them, incompletely, at Arusha.

The railways are German-built and German-gauged in the south and British-built and differently gauged in the north, and the break of gauge at the old frontier is a fact of federal logistics that has outlasted the empires that created it.

For twenty years after the termination the relationship with the German Empire was ordinary and correct, which is the phrase the German article uses and the phrase East African diplomats used back. Trade continued, and a bilateral agreement replaced the development fund on less favourable terms. Since 1994 the Federation has been an associated state again: the shilling is pegged to the mark, the development fund is fixed by treaty, the Empire discharges the common defence, and Ruanda and Urundi keep the separate treaties they never gave up. German is a language of record, German is taught in southern schools, and a substantial East African community lives in the Empire under free-movement arrangements that survived the termination and were restored in full by the return.

What is not settled is Maji Maji. The Federation asks; Germany expresses regret, returns remains and declines compensation. The asymmetry is that Germany regards the colonial question as a matter on which it has behaved better than its peers, and is not wrong, and the Federation regards better than its peers as a low bar.

The United Kingdom of America

The two states have an odd and warm relationship founded on a constitution.

The 1962 delegation to New Westminster is the origin. Four months of study of the Charter of Union produced the asymmetry doctrine, and East African constitutional lawyers have cited American authority ever since. The traffic runs both ways in a small way: the Realm’s own asymmetry cases occasionally cite Arusha, and the Federation’s handling of a guaranteed minority in a state whose legislature it does not control is studied in American law schools with reference to the treaty nations.

The relationship has no defence content and very little trade content. It is almost entirely institutional, conducted between courts, law faculties and constitutional commissions, and it is warmer than either state’s relations with countries it does far more business with.

Defence

The Federation maintains modest federal armed forces, recruited across all nine states with a deliberate policy of mixed units. Since 1994 its defence has been a common responsibility with the German Empire, discharged in practice by the Empire under the treaty of association, and that ended thirty years in which non-alignment had been the Federation’s practice under every government. The Federation belongs to no alliance in form, and the German guarantee covers defence against attack from outside: the federal interventions in the western states are federal business, and the Empire took no part in them, in Rwanda and Burundi any more than elsewhere.

Its foreign policy has three fixed points. It does not pursue frontier changes and does not recognise them elsewhere, a position that its Somali politics makes expensive. It keeps the World Environment Organisation in Nairobi. And it exports its own constitutional experience with an enthusiasm that its neighbours find variously admirable and insufferable, having supplied drafters, arbitrators and commission chairs to a dozen federal negotiations across Africa and Asia.

The Federation’s peculiar diplomatic asset is that it is the only large state in the world that has held together a genuinely asymmetric federation of monarchies and republics without a common Crown. It is asked about it constantly. It answers carefully.

Economy

The Federation is a lower-middle-income economy of very large aggregate size and very unequal distribution, growing quickly and from a low base.

Agriculture employs about half the workforce. Tea and coffee from the highlands, cloves and spices from Zanzibar, cotton, cashew and sisal from the south, cut flowers from around the Rift lakes flown to European markets overnight, and a horticultural export sector built in thirty years that now competes with the traditional crops in value.

Minerals and gas are the newer story. Tanganyikan gold, Rwandan and Burundian tin, tantalum and tungsten, and the very large offshore gas fields discovered off the southern coast, which are being developed slowly and with a federal revenue-sharing formula that took nine years to agree and satisfied nobody.

Services and finance are concentrated in Nairobi, which is the financial centre of the continent’s eastern half, and mobile money is the Federation’s most successful indigenous industry: a payments system built on telephones rather than banks, exported across Africa and Asia, and now handling a share of national transactions that surprises visiting economists from richer countries with worse systems.

The port question governs everything. Mombasa and Dar es Salaam are the two great ports, they are in different member states, they compete, and the federal government has spent sixty years trying to plan a single system across two states that both regard their port as their principal asset. The northern and central corridors, running inland by rail and road to the lakes and beyond the Federation’s frontiers, carry the trade of several landlocked neighbours as well as its own.

The shilling is a federal currency managed by a federal reserve bank, and its creation in 1963 out of the East African shilling of the colonial currency board was the least contested thing the Federation has ever done.

Welfare, health and transport

Federal social provision is thin and state provision is uneven. Health and primary education are state competences with federal minimum standards and federal transfers attached to them, and the gap between the best-provided state and the worst is wider than the gap between many separate countries.

The Federation has nonetheless made two things work at federal scale. Mobile money made banking universal without banks, and the payments system carries welfare transfers, wages and remittances for populations that no branch network reached. And the federal immunisation and disease-surveillance programme, run from Dar es Salaam with the League’s health body, produced one of the fastest declines in child mortality recorded anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century.

Transport is the Federation’s largest continuing project and its largest continuing failure. The break of gauge between the two colonial railway systems has been the subject of federal plans since 1963. A standard-gauge federal line has been built in sections, financed variously, and does not yet run continuously from either port to the lakes. The road corridors carry what the railways do not.

Demographics and society

Peoples and languages

There is no majority people in the Federation and no plausible route to one. It holds something over two hundred and fifty distinct languages, of five separate families, and the largest single ethnic group is under a tenth of the population.

Swahili is the federal language and is the Federation’s single greatest asset. It is a Bantu language of the coast, carrying a heavy Arabic borrowing and a thousand years of use as a commercial lingua franca, and its decisive quality is that almost nobody speaks it as their only tongue and almost everybody speaks it. It belongs to a place rather than to a people. A federal language that no member state owns is the reason the language question, which has destroyed federations elsewhere, is the one thing here that was never seriously contested.

English and German are both retained as languages of record, which is the most visible legacy of the double inheritance. Federal statutes are enacted in Swahili and published in all three. The northern courts run in English because they were built to, the southern in German for the same reason, and a federal advocate is expected to work in two of the three. The arrangement is inefficient, is defended on the ground that the alternative was choosing, and produces a small industry of translators at Arusha.

Religion

The Federation has no established religion and is close to evenly divided in a way that has required care. Christianity, in Catholic, Anglican and a very large number of independent and Pentecostal forms, is the majority inland. Islam is the religion of the coast, of Zanzibar, of the Somali Coast and of substantial inland minorities, and is the older presence in the region by eight centuries.

The constitutional settlement is that personal status law is a state competence. Zanzibar and the Somali Coast apply Islamic personal law to their Muslim populations through their own courts; the inland states apply a federal civil code with customary and religious options. It is untidy, it produces genuine conflicts of law that occupy the Arusha courts, and it has held.

Education

Education is a state competence with a federal framework, and the framework is the part that works. The federal school certificate is common across all nine states, is examined in Swahili with papers available in English and German, and is the single most powerful integrating institution the Federation has. A student educated in Bujumbura and a student educated in Mombasa sit the same paper.

Makerere at Kampala is the oldest university and was the intellectual centre of the whole region before federation. Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Arusha followed. The Federation’s universities were, in the 1960s and 1970s, among the most intellectually productive in the world on questions of development, dependency and post-colonial state formation, and the arguments made in the seminar rooms at Dar es Salaam in that period are still cited in the Federation’s own constitutional litigation.

The Asian communities

The commercial communities of South Asian origin, brought or drawn to East Africa from the nineteenth century, built much of the retail and wholesale trade of the interior and a large part of its industry.

An expulsion was proposed in Uganda in 1972, at ninety days’ notice, of some eighty thousand people, and it would have taken the economy a generation to recover from it. In the Federation they were not, and the reason is constitutional rather than moral: citizenship is a federal competence, expulsion of citizens is beyond a state’s power, and the federal government of the day said so within a week and had the Supreme Court’s opinion within a month.

The Federation is entitled to that. What it is not entitled to is the impression that the question was settled, and the Register records that the communities’ position remains politically exposed, that discriminatory licensing and land measures have been attempted at state level repeatedly, and that the federal guarantee has been tested about once a decade for sixty years and has held every time by a margin that has not widened.

Cities

Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam is the federal capital and was chosen in 1963 precisely because it was not Nairobi. Kenya had the money, the industry and the largest settler-built city, and the founding bargain required that the federal institutions sit somewhere that could not be accused of running the Federation for one member’s benefit. The choice was Tanganyikan, coastal, Swahili-speaking and comparatively poor, and it was made over Kenyan objection.

The city has grown from a colonial port of a hundred and fifty thousand to a metropolitan area of some eight million, largely without a plan, and the federal government has spent forty years building the capital’s institutions into a city that was not built for them. The Union Buildings on the harbour front, the Federal Assembly, the presidency at Magogoni and the federal ministries are a deliberately unmonumental group, and the contrast with New Westminster is drawn by East African commentators whenever the two states are compared.

Nairobi

Nairobi is the larger city, the commercial and financial capital, and the seat of the League of Nations World Environment Organisation, which administers the global climate agreements and the biodiversity programmes from a campus on the city’s northern edge.

That seat matters more to the Federation than any other single thing in its foreign relations. It is the only headquarters of a principal international organisation in Africa, it gives a federal capital’s worth of diplomatic weight to a city that is not the federal capital, and East African governments have defended it against relocation proposals three times with an energy their partners found startling.

Nairobi began as a railway depot in a swamp in 1899, became the settler capital, and is now a city of some ten million with a financial district, a technology sector and, inside the municipal boundary, a national park containing lions, which the city regards as the only fact about itself that foreigners reliably remember.

The others

Mombasa is the older place by a thousand years, the principal port, Swahili and Muslim in character and only partly reconciled to being a Kenyan provincial city. Kampala is the Bugandan capital and the Federation’s university town. Zanzibar Town, with its Stone Town of coral-rag houses and carved doors, is a world heritage site and the seat of the Sultanate. Kigali and Bujumbura are the two western capitals, small, orderly and heavily policed.

Culture and daily life

Culture and sport

Swahili literature is old, written in Arabic script for centuries before the Roman one, and the Federation’s most distinctive cultural institution is the continuous poetic tradition of the coast, which is performed, competitive and taken extremely seriously.

Taarab is the coastal music, Zanzibari in origin and Arab, Indian and African in construction. Benga came out of Nyanza and the lake, and bongo flava out of Dar es Salaam. The Federation’s popular music is one of the few things that circulates freely across all nine states without translation, because it is in Swahili.

The film and television industry is centred on Dar es Salaam and Nairobi and produces in Swahili for a market of a hundred and ninety million, which is large enough not to need anyone else’s approval.

Athletics is the sport. The Rift Valley highlands have produced middle- and long-distance runners in a concentration that has occupied sports physiologists for fifty years, and the Federation’s athletics federation is by some distance the most successful sporting institution in Africa. Football is the mass game, the federal league crosses state lines, and the derby between the two great Dar es Salaam clubs is the largest regular gathering in the country.

Symbols

The flag

The federal flag carries three horizontal bands, black over green over blue, divided by narrow gold fimbriations, with a gold band at the hoist. The black is the people, the green the land and the blue the ocean and the lakes, which are the three things every member state has some of. The gold is the crowns, and its position at the hoist rather than in the field was the compromise of 1963: the republics would not have a crown in the middle of the flag, and the kingdoms would not join a flag without one.

The arms and the seal

The federal arms show a shield quartered for the four founding members, supported by a lion and a crested crane, over a scroll bearing the federal motto. The motto is Umoja katika tofauti, unity in difference, which is the asymmetry doctrine rendered as three words and is inscribed over the door of the Supreme Court at Arusha.

The anthem and the observances

The federal anthem, Mungu ibariki Afrika, is sung in Swahili in all nine states and is the only federal symbol that has never been the subject of litigation.

Federation Day falls on 9 December and marks the Constitution of 1963 rather than any state’s independence, which was deliberate: no member’s founding date could be chosen without slighting the others, so the Federation commemorates the document. Each constituent state keeps its own day as well, and the kingdoms keep the reign days of their monarchs.

There is no federal flag protocol requiring precedence over state flags. They fly level, which was Zanzibar’s condition in 1968 and has been every subsequent accession’s condition since.

Assessment

The East African Federation is one of two places where the African crowns outlived decolonisation, with Nigeria, and the only one where the old crowns are states of a federation. It is the clearest available demonstration of what preserving them costs.

The achievement is real and should not be understated. Nine states of unlike character hold together under one constitution, and nine presidents have left office on the day their terms expired. The Supreme Court is obeyed. The Asian commercial communities were not expelled, because a federal competence stood in the way. The Zanzibar revolution did not happen. The Rwandan catastrophe did not happen. No serious observer disputes that a different arrangement of the same territory would have produced more dead people, and quite possibly very many more.

The cost is equally real and is structural rather than incidental. The Federation bought its stability by guaranteeing institutions, and the institutions it guaranteed were hierarchies. In Zanzibar it froze an estate system. In Rwanda and Burundi it froze a clientage in which a pastoral aristocracy held an agricultural majority, and then found that the guarantee it had given to prevent violence was the reason it could not remove the cause of violence. It has governed two member states under emergency provisions for fifty years, renewed by every government, on a settlement drafted to last ten.

The question the Register leaves open is whether the two halves of that record are separable. The Federation’s own answer, made in the Assembly and in the historiography, is that they are not: that the price of not having a revolution is not having had one, that the hierarchy persists because the alternative to a frozen hierarchy was a broken one and breaking it would have been done with machetes.

The answer given against it is that a state which has held an emergency in being for half a century has not prevented a catastrophe but deferred one, and that the deferral is now the largest single risk the Federation carries.

Both positions are argued by serious people in Kigali and Bujumbura, and the Federation has arranged its constitution so that neither can win.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• German Empire, whose East African territory became an associated state and then left it
• United Kingdom of America, whose Charter of Union supplied the asymmetry doctrine
• League of Nations, whose World Environment Organisation sits at Nairobi
• Union of South Africa, another of the continent’s large federal states
• Federal Kingdom of Nigeria, the most populous state in Africa and the other place where the African crowns outlived decolonisation
• Kingdom of Arabia, across the ocean the Swahili coast traded with for a thousand years
• Ethiopia, the empire on the northern frontier, which holds the Somali-inhabited Ogaden in its province of Harar