Mau Mau Rebellion
What was the Mau Mau Rebellion?
Who were the primary participants in the Mau Mau Rebellion?
How did the Mau Mau originate?
How did the British respond to the Mau Mau Rebellion?
Mau Mau Rebellion, conflict that raged in Britain’s Kenya colony from 1952 to 1960. It was fought by the Mau Mau, a militant Kenyan nationalist group comprising mostly fighters from the Kikuyu (one of the colony’s main ethnic groups) and some from other groups, such as the Embu and Meru. They sought to regain their land and freedom from the British. Their rebellion was countered by British military and security forces as well as by Kenyan militias that were loyal to and equipped by Britain. Ultimately, the rebellion was crushed, and, although the actual death toll is disputed, likely more than 20,000 Kenyans were killed in the counterinsurgency campaign. The historian Caroline Elkins, in her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005), called it “one of the bloodiest and most protracted wars of decolonization fought in Britain’s twentieth-century empire.” However, some scholars have argued that the rebellion helped create the conditions for Kenya to attain its independence in 1963.
Background
The British presence in what is now Kenya began in the 1880s, when Britain and Germany divided the land of East Africa between themselves. The area known as the East Africa Protectorate was turned into a colony in 1920 and renamed Kenya, for its highest mountain. To the British public, Kenya came to be seen as the “white man’s country,” a place of “sunshine, gin slings and smiling, obedient servants, where the industrious white colonizer could enjoy a temperate life of peace and plenty in a tropical land,” scholar David Anderson wrote in Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). But the toll on the Indigenous population was massive. The Kikuyu were agriculturalists who had lost more than 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) to the white settlers. Thousands of Kikuyu and other Indigenous people were also killed by the British during the early years of colonial presence as Britain attempted to exert control over the territory and its people.
There is no agreement about how the name Mau Mau originated, or what it means, though there are multiple theories. One common theory holds that Mau Mau is an anagram of the Kikuyu words uma uma (“out out”), and the group became known by that name after someone yelled it during a police raid on a gathering of the group. Another theory holds that the Kikuyu word for oath, muma, was mispronounced as mumau by someone being questioned by the police, who then misspelled it as “Maumau” or “Mau Mau.”
By the end of World War II (1939–45), the conditions of the Kikuyu had further degraded, and the African population in general still lacked meaningful political representation in Kenya. The group that became known as the Mau Mau was started by a faction of young militants from the Kenya African Union (KAU). Led by Jomo Kenyatta from 1947, the KAU was a political party that existed to challenge the colonial hierarchy but had not secured any meaningful reforms, leading its more militant members to endorse taking greater action. This radical offshoot grew rapidly; by 1952, hundreds of thousands of people had taken an oath of unity to join.
Rebellion
In 1952 the Mau Mau started executing both European settlers and Kikuyu who were loyal to the British government. On the evening of October 20, the British governor of the colony declared a state of emergency, and the next morning authorities arrested scores of alleged Mau Mau leaders. They hoped it would bring a halt to the movement. However, some Mau Mau managed to evade capture and flee to the forest. For the next several months, while hiding in the woods and mountains outside Nairobi, they built up a military operation. Residents in nearby areas supplied them with intelligence, weapons, and food—demonstrating the extent of the movement’s grassroots support.
The Mau Mau waged a guerrilla war in the following years. Colonial administrators gained the upper hand in 1954 with Operation Anvil, during which some 20,000 fighters, drawn from the British military and local police and militia forces, laid siege to Nairobi. Residents were forced out of their homes and moved into barbed-wire compounds, where they were screened as potential Mau Mau loyalists. More than 20,000 Kenyans were then moved to detention camps (which scholars have described as gulags), and more than 70,000 Kikuyu were detained over the following months. Mere suspicion that someone was affiliated with the rebels was enough for them to be incarcerated for two years or more.
Meanwhile, the Royal Air Force carried out a bombing campaign on the forests where the Mau Mau were based. By mid-1954 the air attacks had killed some 900 rebels and shattered morale. The October 1956 capture of one of the group’s main leaders, Dedan Kimathi, largely ended the British military response to the rebellion, though some Mau Mau remained in the forests and continued to fight.
Throughout the rebellion, both the British and the Mau Mau committed atrocities. The British implemented harsh anti-terrorism laws that ignored human rights and expanded the use of the death penalty. Kenyans detained by the British were held in appalling conditions, and many were tortured during interrogations. Historians have noted that the Mau Mau used ruthless tactics of their own. They assaulted and killed many fellow Kenyans, including women, children, and older adults. They tortured victims and were known to burn people alive.
In 1959 the British government started taking measures to decolonize Kenya, as it had already done with some of its other colonies. The state of emergency that had been declared in 1952 was formally ended on January 12, 1960. The British government implemented a program to buy out the settlers and redistribute their land to Kenya’s Indigenous population and took steps to establish a government in which Indigenous Kenyans held the majority. It also closed the remaining detention camps. Kenya became independent on December 12, 1963.
Assessment
For many years the conflict was widely seen as a “war between savagery and civilization,” Anderson wrote, with the Mau Mau being cast as barbarians trying to stop the march of social progress. However, popular opinion of the rebellion has shifted as the British government’s atrocities have become more widely known. Anderson argued that it was never a race war, even though media depictions of the conflict at the time portrayed it as one that the Mau Mau rebels were waging against the white settlers. He noted that the Mau Mau killed some 1,800 African civilians but only 32 European civilians and estimated that the death toll of Mau Mau fighters killed in combat may be more than 20,000. Throughout the rebellion, divisions—expertly stoked by the British—grew between the Mau Mau and the Kikuyu who were loyal to the colonial administration or did not agree with the rebels’ violent tactics. The rebellion began as a fight to regain land and freedom, but by the end it had been reduced to a civil war among the Kikuyu people.
The role of the Mau Mau in Kenya’s independence in 1963 has also been debated. Even though the Mau Mau Rebellion had been crushed some years earlier, scholars have noted that the Mau Mau succeeded in creating the conditions that led to an independent Kenya. The colonial administration’s response to the rebellion included some measures, such as incremental political reforms, to address the widespread grievances of Kenya’s people; such measures were aimed at those who did not take up arms. The uprising also demonstrated that a continued colonial presence in Kenya would come at too high a cost to Britain, prompting the colonial government to hasten its decolonization efforts.