The Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya

The Mau Mau uprising was an anti-colonial rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s, in which a primarily Kikuyu movement fought to reclaim Kenyan land and political power from the British colonial government and the European settler community. The British response was severe, including the detention of perhaps 80,000 Kikuyu in detention camps, the use of systematic torture by the colonial police, the forced resettlement of more than a million Kikuyu into villagised “pipeline” villages, and the deployment of British Army and King’s African Rifles units in support of the colonial government. The state of emergency was declared in October 1952 and not lifted until January 1960. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, but it led to major constitutional changes and accelerated the path to Kenyan independence on 12 December 1963.

Mau Mau, in the judgment of the historian Caroline Elkins in Imperial Reckoning (2005), “is the central colonial story of the late British Empire.” The scale of the detention, the systematic use of coercive interrogation, the villagisation of an entire people — these were not, in Elkins’s view, the excesses of a few rogue officers but the workings of a counter-insurgency system that the British had built and used. The 2013 settlement, in which the British government paid £19.9 million to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyan claimants, was the price the British paid for an official silence that had lasted since 1959.

The Origins of the Mau Mau

The Mau Mau uprising had multiple causes, including the dispossession of Kikuyu lands during the colonial period, the political exclusion of Africans from the colonial government, the post-war influence of pan-African movements, and the activities of the Kenya African Union (KAU) under Jomo Kenyatta. The British conquest of Kenya in the 1890s had been followed by the allocation of the most fertile land in the so-called “White Highlands” to European settlers.

The Mau Mau Oath

The Mau Mau movement was bound together by a series of oaths, the most binding of which involved the use of blood, often chicken or goat, and ritual cleansing ceremonies. The oaths were administered across the Kikuyu community, and the British authorities attempted to suppress the movement in part by identifying oath-takers. The Kikuyu community was deeply divided between supporters of the movement, opponents, and a large uncommitted middle.

The Outbreak of Violence

The Mau Mau violence broke out in 1952, with attacks on European settlers and African loyalists. The colonial government declared a state of emergency on 20 October 1952, arrested the KAU leadership, including Kenyatta, and launched a major counter-insurgency campaign. The Lari massacre of 26 March 1953, in which Mau Mau supporters killed more than 70 Kikuyu loyalists at a village in the Rift Valley, was one of the most notorious incidents of the uprising.

The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign

The British counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya was one of the most extensive of the late colonial period. The principal force, the Kenya Police, was supplemented by the King’s African Rifles, the British Army, and the Kenya Regiment. The campaign involved the use of a network of informers, the screening of the entire Kikuyu population, the use of “pseudo-gangs” of turned Mau Mau fighters, and the systematic application of coercive interrogation. The most controversial aspects were the villagisation programme and the detention camp system, which held perhaps 80,000 detainees at its peak.

The Detention Camps and the Hola Massacre

The British detention camp system was a substantial and controversial operation. Detainees were held without trial under emergency powers, often on the basis of suspicion of Mau Mau oath-taking. The camps were officially intended to “rehabilitate” detainees through a programme of “re-education,” but the conditions in many of them were severe. The most notorious incident was the Hola massacre of 6 March 1959, in which 11 detainees were beaten to death by camp guards for refusing to participate in forced labour. The Hola massacre produced a major political scandal in Britain and was one of the turning points in the campaign.

The End of the Emergency

The state of emergency in Kenya was declared over on 12 January 1960. By that point, the Mau Mau leadership had been largely captured or killed, and the political situation had been transformed. The Lancaster House Conference of 1960 set the framework for Kenyan independence. Kenyatta, who had been released from prison in 1961, led the KAU to victory in the 1963 elections. Kenyan independence was granted on 12 December 1963, with Kenyatta as Prime Minister.

The Mau Mau uprising has been the subject of extensive legal proceedings in the twenty-first century. In 2011, a group of Mau Mau veterans brought a case against the British government, alleging torture and abuse in the detention camps. In 2013, the British government paid £19.9 million in compensation to over 5,000 elderly Kenyan claimants, and issued a public statement of regret in 2013 as part of a legal settlement with five elderly Mau Mau veterans.

The Legacy of the Mau Mau

The Mau Mau uprising has had a long-term legacy in both British and Kenyan memory. In Kenya, the Mau Mau are celebrated as freedom fighters, and Kenyatta’s government built the political settlement of independent Kenya in part on the memory of the uprising. In Britain, the Mau Mau episode was a major inflection point in the public understanding of colonial violence, and it has informed later debates about the legacy of empire.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Mau Mau was, for a long time, dominated by the British official accounts — the work of the Corfield Report of 1960 and the more popular accounts of the 1960s. The post-Cold War revisionist literature, led by Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning (2005), and the more recent work of David Anderson in Histories of the Hanged (2005), has produced a more critical picture, in which the British counter-insurgency is read as a system of coercion rather than a programme of rehabilitation. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to the Journal of British Studies and the work of Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau (2012), is over how far the British counter-insurgency in Kenya was a school for later British operations in Aden and Northern Ireland and how far it should be treated as a specific response to specific Kenyan conditions.

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