Lawyers, power and protest: How LSK learned to speak—or stay silent

Last year, there was uproar after LSK president Faith Odhiambo accepted to join a presidential panel to compensate victims of recent Gen-Z protests. Finally, she was forced to step down as vice chair, citing stalled progress and the need to protect its integrity – though she had been trolled online by critics.

LSK, since its formation, has always struggled between silence and eloquence. Initially, when it was registered as a colonial institution for the self-regulation of lawyers, one of the caveats was that it should keep off local politics and not challenge the colonial order. 

Ever since, each generation of lawyers, from Humphrey Slade in 1949 to Faith Odhiambo, has left its imprint on whether to be a professional guild, or a national institution with a duty to confront power when the Constitution is strained and the courts are pressured.

In this series beginning today, we look at a Society that was once instructed to keep out of politics, and a country that keeps dragging it back in. 

Read: LSK’s lost clout and a look at the days when lawyers led from the front

Prominence of Indian lawyers

Four years after lawyers were granted self-regulation in 1949—when the Advocates Ordinance and the Law Society of Kenya Ordinance transferred the power to regulate the profession from the Chief Justice to the LSK—the ground shifted beneath the new Bar.

With the 1952 Mau Mau war came the State of Emergency rule, mass detention, tightened courts, and a State’s obsession with loyalty and control.  As a result, LSK, then under QC  J. Sorabjee, the first Indian to head the body, faced a new kind of scrutiny: not over how it regulated lawyers, but over whether lawyers could remain professionally neutral in a time of political war. The flashpoint was the courtroom. 

During Jomo Kenyatta’s Kapenguria trial, attention fell sharply on members of the LSK. Notably, no white lawyer volunteered to join the defence group. Instead, the Nairobi-based advocates who stepped forward were Fitz de Souza, Achhroo Ram Kapila, and Jaswant Singh, working with a defence team led by QC Denis Pritt.

Their visibility mattered: it made the defence bar—already a professional community—appear, in the eyes of many settlers, as a political formation.

That same dynamic intensified during the Emergency. As advocates appeared for Mau Mau suspects and other political defendants—often in capital cases—white public anger regularly followed. Representation was recast as sympathy; a legal brief became read as allegiance. Defence itself became suspect. 

In this context, the prominence of Indian lawyers was especially instructive. Having already played a conspicuous role around the Kenyatta trial, they also turned up in Mau Mau cases, reinforcing a racialised narrative in which advocacy for the accused was treated not as professional duty but as political identification.

The LSK Council responded with a public statement aimed at correcting what it called a “misconception” about advocates’ duties. It said the public needed to understand how briefs in Emergency cases were taken up, stressing that defence counsel were not self-selecting into Mau Mau cases. In capital matters, LSK noted, briefs were allocated through the Registrar of the Supreme Court acting on the Chief Justice’s instructions, and it was customary for an advocate assigned to the task to accept.

“It is recognised by the council of LSK that at a time when public feeling (about Mau Mau) are aroused there may be ill-informed criticism of the acceptance of briefs in these circumstances, but the council wishes to record that the Advocates who appear do so in accordance with the highest traditions of the Legal Profession and have the support of the Members of the Council,” said the body.

Arrival of Argwings Kodhek, first African lawyer

The arrival of C. M. G. Argwings Kodhek, the first practising African lawyer in Kenya, in later Mau Mau cases introduced a new personality in a bar that had prevented Africans' entry. LSK had reluctantly allowed him into the profession. 

As an African advocate, Kodhek had to navigate official obstruction, including the need for special passes to enter Emergency zones. And like other lawyers who took on Mau Mau briefs, he faced constant harassment: the “spiteful petty interference” of police and European district officers. As historian, David Anderson writes “much of the work that Argwings-Kodhek did in the Mau Mau trials was at the paltry rates of paupers’  briefs – fees that barely covered his costs.”  

At one point, settler politician Michael Blundell asked the government asked the government to limit  the number of lawyers appearing for Mau Mau in group trials.  

“It was not justice that the settlers wanted: it was retribution, and they didn’t much care how they got it,” argues Prof Anderson in the book Histories of the Hanged.

Inside the LSK, Kodhek was widely viewed as an anomaly. Fresh from Lincoln’s Inn, where he was called to the Bar in 1951, he returned to Kenya with credentials that should have settled the question of admission. The Law Society had only recommended his admission reluctantly and waited for a misstep to bring him down. For years, the anticipated clash did not come. Then, in 1957, the net tightened. 

Investigators scrutinised his office and found not a scandal of theft or deception but improperly kept books of accounts. He had not distinguished clients’ accounts with proper titles. He also had not fully set out all monetary dealings in the way the profession demanded. It was, on its face, an administrative failure—an accountant’s complaint, not a criminal charge.

But in the hands of an LSK establishment searching for leverage, it became a weapon against the first African lawyer and member.

On July 10, 1957, the Supreme Court at Nairobi ordered that Argwings-Kodhek’s name be struck off the Roll of Advocates. The decision severed him from the practice of law in Kenya’s colonial system—an extraordinary outcome given that, even in the telling of those proceedings, there was no allegation of fraud.

From Nairobi, the matter was escalated to London. Striking him from the local roll was not enough. He remained a barrister. So, the fight moved to England—up the chain of authority that colonial professions depended on. The complaint landed before his Bar Council, and on October 5, 1958, the Masters of the Bench of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn ordered that Argwings-Kodhek be disbarred and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn, reinforcing his exclusion from LSK.

The LSK had been plunged into exclusion politics, and it had succeeded in keeping Africans out of the Bar.

Read: Argwings-Kodhek: The politician history should never forget

Argwings Kodhek: Behind the Iron Curtain

LSK: Gatekeeping in favour of whites

Thus, LSK was now policing the gates of the profession. It again started to through “residential training” rules that, in practice, kept the white Bar in place. 

Under the new regime, lawyers called to the Bar in England or admitted as solicitors in England had to complete 12 months of residential training in Kenya, while those qualified elsewhere faced 24 months—requirements the Chief Justice could waive. 

The Society then secured the selective use of those waivers for white applicants, a pattern illustrated by the case of a young South African lawyer, Duirs: initially rejected because the Bar did not want to open itself to South Africans. 

As independence approached, the colonial pipeline that sent African law students to London was collapsing under its own weight. There were too few places, and too much demand. There was also the growing recognition that new States would need their own legal institutions. 
In response, the British Lord Chancellor appointed a committee chaired by Lord Denning to review training for “students from Africa,” producing the report Legal Education for Students from Africa. The committee’s most consequential push was not simply to adjust London’s arrangements, but to accelerate local capacity in East Africa: ministers told the House of Lords that the report recommended establishing the University College of Tanganyika quickly and making a law faculty a top priority, initially in temporary accommodation in Dar es Salaam, backed by a British contribution of £350,000 over three and a half years. 

The Lord Denning’s report sparked the first of many open conflicts between the government and the LSK. The reason was simple: Denning’s proposals struck at what the Society guarded most jealously—control over entry into the profession.

As a reaction, the LSK called a meeting to explore a local system of qualifications for admission to the Bar to replace reliance on foreign credentials. A sub-committee—E.P. Nowrojee, Gerald Harris, and Hannigan—was appointed to examine it further. 

What was at stake was not simply the legal "standards" but the power to decide who could become an advocate in Kenya. The LSK’s resistance therefore operated as a gatekeeping strategy: by defending its dominance over accreditation and admission, it could slow African entry and keep the profession anchored to metropolitan pathways that favoured existing (largely non-African) practitioners.

To find a way out, the LSK and the government agreed on a framework for implementation, later embodied in the Advocates Act of 1961. Yet, the Society could not reconcile itself to the creation of a Law Faculty at Dar es Salaam. A regional law school meant that legal qualification—and thus access to the Kenyan Bar—would no longer be routed exclusively through institutions and examinations the LSK could effectively supervise. 

Put plainly, Dar es Salaam represented a loss of professional sovereignty—and, just as importantly, a weakening of the informal racial architecture that had kept the Bar white, as lawyer Paul Mwangi notes in his book, The Black Bar.

In that sense, the Denning report and the Dar es Salaam faculty became a proxy battle over the racial future of the profession. The Society’s stance was framed as protecting quality, but its practical effect was to defend an all-white (or at least non-African) Bar by keeping the “right” credentials—and the “right” networks—at the centre of professional legitimacy. 

LSK fights rise of Dar es Salaam law faculty

Lord Denning’s proposal gave many young Africans a clearer, more direct route into legal training and the Bar. So strong was his reputation among aspiring lawyers that, when students enrolled at the University College of Dar es Salaam, they formed a “Denning Law Society” in his honour.

LSK fought the rise of Dar es Salaam’s law faculty by trying to make sure the new route didn’t actually lead into the profession unless it still passed through LSK’s hands.

Through the Advocates Act debates in 1961, the Society pushed for a system that would treat the University College of Dar es Salaam law degree as irrelevant for admission in Kenya and restore articled clerkship as the sole entry path. That design mattered because clerkship could be controlled—who got placed, who got approved, who advanced, and who stalled.

When the government refused to scrap the degree route, LSK tried a second move: make Dar graduates “pay” for the degree route with a long-supervised apprenticeship. The Society argued that all Dar es Salaam graduates should be forced into three years of practical training under a law firm, effectively recreating the old bottleneck in another form. The government again rejected that and fixed practical training at one year, keeping the university pathway meaningful instead of symbolic.

From rights lobby to political warfare

Then came the institutional blow that LSK saw as the real defeat: the government adopted the Denning Committee logic and set up a Council of Legal Education, moving the control of qualifications away from LSK’s direct grip. LSK fought hard to dominate its membership (it —sought majority representation) but the government proposed a structure designed to prevent professional capture: judges, the Attorney-General (or representative), a law teacher appointed by the Attorney-General, and a limited number nominated by LSK.

At that point, the Society shifted from lobbying to political warfare. It used its members in the Legislative Council to pressure the Minister of Legal Affairs, who was also an LSK member, portraying him as isolated and disloyal to the profession. When that failed, LSK solicited support from British-based human rights and legal bodies reframing the dispute as “interference” with Bar’s independence and the rule of law, rather than a battle over who controlled admission.

The government responded with damage control and offered LSK a concession that gave the Society an extra vote in parity with the other members, without handing it the outright control it wanted. In practical terms, the fight was never only about academic standards. It was about whether a new generation African trained lawyers from Dar es Salaam could enter practice without first being filtered, slowed, and supervised by the Society that had long controlled the gates.

It was these battles that shaped LSK as Kenya became independent in 1963.  

Tomorrow on Nation.Africa: How the Njonjo factor shaped the Law Society of Kenya

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