In the winter of 1884-85, the major European powers gathered in Berlin to divide Africa among themselves. Not a single African was in the room. Kenya, which nobody in Berlin had ever visited, was assigned to Britain. The conference did not create colonies overnight, but it gave European powers the legal fiction they needed to begin the takeover. Within a decade, the British East Africa Company would be flying its flag over Kenyan soil and telling its inhabitants that the land now belonged to the Crown.