Mau Mau Uprising
|Mau Mau Uprising|
|Mau Mau[A]|| British Empire
|Commanders and leaders|
| Evelyn Baring
|Unknown||10,000 regular troops (African and British); 21,000 police; 25,000 Kikuyu Home Guard|
|Casualties and losses|
Killed: 12,000 officially; perhaps 20,000+ unofficially
|British and African security forces:
Victims of Mau Mau:
The Mau Mau Uprising (also known as the Mau Mau Revolt, Mau Mau Rebellion and the Kenya Emergency) was a military conflict that took place in Kenya[B] between 1952 and 1960. It involved a Kikuyu-dominated anti-colonial group called Mau Mau and elements of the British Army, auxiliaries and anti-Mau Mau Kikuyu. The capture of rebel leader Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 signalled the ultimate defeat of Mau Mau, and essentially ended the British military campaign.
Mau Mau failed to capture widespread public support, partly due to British divide and rule, and the movement remained internally divided, despite attempts to unify its various strands. The British, meanwhile, drew upon their ongoing efforts to put down another rebellion in Malaya.
The uprising created a rift between the European colonial community in Kenya and the metropole, but also resulted in violent divisions within the Kikuyu community. The financial cost of the uprising to the former colony amounted to £55 million.
The origin of the term Mau Mau is uncertain. According to some members of Mau Mau, they never referred to themselves as such, instead preferring the military title Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). Some publications, such as Fred Majdalany's State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau, claim that it was an anagram of Uma Uma (which means "get out get out") and was a military codeword based on a secret language-game Kikuyu boys used to play at the time of their circumcision. Majdalany goes on to state that the British simply used the name as a label for the Kikuyu ethnic community without assigning any specific definition.
As the movement progressed, a Swahili backronym was adopted: "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru" meaning "Let the foreigner go back abroad, let the African regain independence". J.M. Kariuki, a member of Mau Mau who was detained during the conflict, postulates that the British preferred to use the term Mau Mau instead of KLFA in an attempt to deny the Mau Mau rebellion international legitimacy. Kariuki also wrote that the term Mau Mau was adopted by the rebellion in order to counter what they regarded as colonial propaganda.
Kenya before the Emergency 
The primary British interest in Kenya was land, which, observed the British East Africa Commission of 1925, constituted "some of the richest agricultural soils in the world, mostly in districts where the elevation and climate make it possible for Europeans to reside permanently." Though declared a colony in 1920, the formal British colonial presence in Kenya began with a proclamation on 1 July 1895, in which Kenya was claimed as a British protectorate.
Even before 1895, however, Britain's presence in Kenya was marked by dispossession and violence. In 1894, British MP Charles Dilke had observed in the House of Commons: "The only person who has up to the present time benefited from our enterprise in the heart of Africa has been Mr. Hiram Maxim", though such a state of affairs was in accordance with insistence of Arthur Hardinge, the first commissioner of British East Africa, that "[t]hese people must learn submission by bullets—it is the only school . . . In Africa to have peace you must first teach obedience and the only person who teaches the lesson properly is the sword." During the period in which Kenya's interior was being forcibly opened up for British settlement, Francis Hall, an officer in the Imperial British East Africa Company and after whom Fort Hall was named, asserted: "There is only one way to improve the Wakikuyu [and] that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies", and colonial officers such as Richard Meinertzhagen wrote of how, on occasion, they massacred Kikuyu by the hundred.
The onslaught in Kenya led Churchill, in 1908, to express concern about how it would look if word got out:
160 [Gusii] have now been killed outright without any further casualties on our side. . . . It looks like a butchery. If the H. of C. gets hold of it, all our plans in E.A.P. will be under a cloud. Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.
Kenyan resistance to British imperialism was there from the start—for example, the Kikuyu opposition of 1880–1900—though it bears emphasis that, in military terms, armed uprisings during the opening scenes of British colonialism in Kenya were, as was once movingly described by Norman Leys,
always hopeless failures. Naked spearmen fall in swathes before machine-guns, without inflicting a single casualty in return. Meanwhile the troops burn all the huts and collect all the live stock within reach. Resistance once at an end, the leaders of the rebellion are surrendered for imprisonment . . . Risings that followed such a course could hardly be repeated. A period of calm followed. And when unrest again appeared it was with other leaders . . . and other motives.
As mentioned, resistance in Kenya continued, and was met with egregious British violence, post-1895: the Nandi Revolt of 1895–1905; the Giriama Uprising of 1913–1914; the women's revolt against forced labour in Murang'a in 1947; and the Kalloa Affray of 1950. Nor did Kenyan protest end with Mau Mau; in the years that followed, a series of successful non-violent boycotts were carried out.
The Mau Mau rebellion can be regarded as a militant culmination of years of oppressive colonial rule and resistance to it, with its specific roots found in three episodes of Kikuyu history between 1920 and 1940. All of this is not, of course, to say that Kikuyu society was perfect, stable and harmonious before the British arrived. The Kikuyu in the nineteenth century were expanding and colonising new territory and already internally divided between wealthy land-owning families and landless ones, the latter dependent on the former in a variety of ways.
Economic deprivation of the Kikuyu 
A feature of all settler societies during the colonial period was the ability of European settlers to obtain for themselves a disproportionate share in land ownership. Kenya was thus no exception, with the first white settlers arriving in 1902 as part of Governor Charles Eliot's plan to have a settler economy pay for the recently completed Uganda Railway. The success of this settler economy would depend heavily on the availability of land, labour and capital, and so, over the next three decades, the colonial government and settlers consolidated their control over Kenyan land, and 'encouraged' Africans to become wage labourers.
Through a series of expropriations, the colony's government seized about 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km2; 11,000 sq mi) of land, some of it in the especially fertile hilly regions of Central and Rift Valley Provinces, areas later known as the White Highlands due to the exclusively European farmland which existed there. "In particular," the British government's 1925 East Africa Commission noted, "the treatment of the Giriama tribe [from the coastal regions] was very bad. This tribe was moved backwards and forwards so as to secure for the Crown areas which could be granted to Europeans."
Coupled with an increasing African population, the land expropriation became an increasingly bitter point of contention. The Kikuyu, who lived in the Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang'a districts of Central Province, were the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's land expropriation and European settlement; by 1933, they had had over 109.5 square miles (284 km2) of their potentially highly valuable land alienated. Strictly in terms of lost acreage, the Masai and Nandi were the biggest losers. The Kikuyu did mount a legal challenge to the expropriation of their land, but a Kenya High Court decision of 1921 cemented its legality.
As mentioned, the colonial government and White farmers also wanted cheap labour which, for a period, the government acquired from Africans through force. Confiscating land from Africans itself helped to create a pool of wage labourers, but the colony introduced measures that forced more Africans to submit to wage labour: the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively); the establishment of reserves for each ethnic group, serving to isolate each ethnic group and exacerbate overcrowding; the discouragement of African's growing cash crops; the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1906) and an identification pass known as the kipande (1918) to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion; and the exemption of wage labourers from forced labour and other compulsory, detested tasks such as conscription.
African labourer categories 
African labourers were in one of three categories: squatter, contract, or casual.[C] By the end of WWI, squatters had become well established on European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations. An unintended consequence of colonial rule, the squatters were targeted from 1918 onwards by a series of Resident Native Labourers Ordinances—criticised by at least some MPs—which progressively curtailed squatter rights and subordinated African farming to that of the settlers. The Ordinance of 1939 finally eliminated squatters' remaining tenancy rights, and permitted settlers to demand 270 days' labour from any squatters on their land. and, after WWII, the situation for squatters deteriorated rapidly, a situation the squatters resisted fiercely.
In the early 1920s, though, despite the presence of 100,000 squatters and tens of thousands more wage labourers, there was still not enough African labour available to satisfy the settlers' needs. The colonial government duly tightened the measures to force more Kenyans to become low-paid wage-labourers on settler farms.
The colonial government used the measures brought in as part of its land expropriation and labour 'encouragement' efforts to craft the third plank of its growth strategy for its settler economy: subordinating African farming to that of the Europeans. Nairobi also assisted the settlers with rail and road networks, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services, and credit and loan facilities. The near-total neglect of African farming during the first two decades of European settlement was noted by the East Africa Commission.
The hatred of colonial rule would not have been decreased by the wanting provision of medical services for Africans, nor by the fact that in 1923, for example, "the maximum amount that could be considered to have been spent on services provided exclusively for the benefit of the native population was slightly over one-quarter of the taxes paid by them". The tax burden on Europeans in the early 1920s, meanwhile, was absurdly light. Interwar infrastructure-development was also largely paid for by the indigenous population.
Kenyan employees were often poorly treated by their European employers—sometimes even beaten to death by them—with some settlers arguing that Africans "were as children and should be treated as such". It was widely acknowledged that few settlers hesitated to flog their servants for petty offences. To make matters even worse, African workers were poorly served by colonial labour-legislation and a prejudiced legal-system. The vast majority of Kenyan employees' violations of labour legislation were settled with "rough justice" meted out by their employers. Most colonial magistrates appear to have been unconcerned by the illegal practice of settler-administered flogging; indeed, during the 1920s, flogging was the magisterial punishment-of-choice for African convicts. The principle of punitive sanctions against workers was not removed from the Kenyan labour statutes until the 1950s.
Until the mid-1930s, the two primary complaints were low African wages and the kipande. From the early 1930s, however, two others began to come to prominence: effective and elected African-political-representation, and land. The British response to this clamour for agrarian reform came in the early 1930s when they set up the Carter Land Commission. The Commission reported in 1934, but its conclusions, recommendations and concessions to Kenyans were so conservative that any chance of a peaceful resolution to African land-hunger was ended.
In Nyanza, for example, the Commission restricted 1,029,422 Africans to 7,114 square miles (18,430 km2), while granting 16,700 square miles (43,000 km2) to 17,000 Europeans. By the 1930s, and for the Kikuyu in particular, land had become the number one grievance concerning colonial rule, the situation so acute by 1948 that 1,250,000 Kikuyu had ownership of 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 British settlers owned 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²).
As a result of the situation in the highlands, thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952. At the same time, there was a small, but growing, class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu lands and forged strong ties with the colonial administration, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu.
Around 1943, residents of Olenguruone radicalised the traditional Kikuyu practice of oathing, and extended oathing to women and children. By the mid-1950s, 90% of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru were oathed.
African politics 
|This section requires expansion. (March 2012)|
The first attempt to form a countrywide political party occurred on 1 October 1944. This fledgling organisation was called the Kenya African Study Union (so named to mask its anti-colonial politics); its inaugural chairman was Harry Thuku, who soon resigned his chairmanship. There is dispute over Thuku's reason for leaving KASU: Bethwell Ogot states that Thuku "found the responsibility too heavy"; David Anderson states that "he walked out in disgust" as the militant section of KASU took the initiative. KASU changed its name to the Kenya African Union (KAU) in 1946.
By the late 1940s the Kikuyu were a deeply divided people, increasingly in conflict among themselves as well as with the colonial political and economic order.
The failure of the KAU to attain any significant reforms or redress of grievances from the colonial authorities shifted the political initiative to younger and more militant figures within the African trade union movement, among the squatters on the settler estates in the Rift Valley and in KAU branches in Nairobi and the Kikuyu districts of central province.
In May 1951, the British Colonial Secretary, James Griffiths, visited Kenya, where the KAU presented him with a list of demands ranging from the removal of alleged discriminatory legislation to the inclusion of 12 elected black representatives on the Legislative Council that governed the colony's affairs. Griffith proposed a Legislative Council in which the 30,000 white settlers received 14 representatives, the 100,000 Asians (mostly from South Asia) got six, the 24,000 Arabs one, and the 5,000,000 Africans five representatives to be nominated by the government.
Nature of the rebellion 
The contemporary, colonial view saw Mau Mau as a savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult, an expression of unrestrained emotion rather than reason. Mau Mau was "perverted tribalism" that sought to take the Kikuyu people back to "the bad old days" before British rule. This characterisation reflected the British refusal to attend to the legitimate social and economic grievances of the Kikuyu that were a direct result of colonial rule. The official British explanation of the revolt did not include the insights of agrarian and agricultural experts, of economists and historians, or even of Europeans who had spent a long period living amongst the Kikuyu such as Louis Leakey. Not for the first time, the British instead relied on the purported insights of the ethnopsychiatrist; with Mau Mau, it would fall to Dr. John Colin Carothers to perform the desired analysis. This ethnopsychiatric explanation would infect everything, from British psychological warfare, which painted Mau Mau as "an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism", to the later official study of the uprising, the Corfield Report.
The psychological war became of critical importance to military and civilian leaders, who waged it in the time-honoured colonial fashion of divide and rule, always trying to "emphasise that there was in effect a civil war, and that the struggle was not black versus white", attempting to isolate Mau Mau from the Kikuyu, and the Kikuyu from the rest of the colony's population and the world outside. In driving a wedge between Mau Mau and the Kikuyu generally, these propaganda efforts essentially played no role, though they could apparently claim an important contribution to the isolation of Mau Mau from the non-Kikuyu sections of the population.
By the mid-1960s, this atavistic, psychopathic view of Mau Mau was being challenged by memoirs of former members and leaders that portrayed Mau Mau as an essential, if radical, component of African nationalism in Kenya, and by academic studies that analysed the movement as a modern and nationalist response to the unfairness and oppression of colonial domination (though such studies downplayed the specifically Kikuyu nature of the movement).
There continues to be vigorous debate within Kenyan society and among the academic community within and without Kenya regarding the nature of Mau Mau and its aims, as well as the response to and effects of the uprising. Nevertheless, as many Kikuyu fought against Mau Mau on the side of the colonial government as joined them in rebellion and, partly because of this, the conflict is now often regarded in academic circles as an intra-Kikuyu civil war, a characterisation that remains extremely unpopular in Kenya. Kenyatta described the conflict in his memoirs as a civil war rather than a rebellion. The reason the revolt was essentially limited to the Kikuyu people was, in part, that they were the hardest hit by British colonialism and its effects.
Wunyabari O. Maloba regards the rise of the Mau Mau movement as "without doubt, one of the most important events in recent African history." Oxford's David Anderson, however, considers Maloba's and similar work to be the product of "swallowing too readily the propaganda of the Mau Mau war", noting the similarity between such analysis and the "simplistic" earlier studies of Mau Mau. This earlier work cast the Mau Mau war in strictly bipolar terms, "as conflicts between anti-colonial nationalists and colonial collaborators". Caroline Elkins' 2005 study has met similar criticism, as well as being criticised for sensationalism.
Broadly speaking, throughout Kikuyu history, there have been two traditions: moderate-conservative and radical. Despite the differences between them, there has been a continuous debate and dialogue between these traditions, leading to a great political awareness among the Kikuyu. By 1950, these differences, and the impact of colonial rule, had given rise to three African political blocks: conservative, moderate nationalist and militant nationalist. It has also been argued that Mau Mau was not explicitly national, either intellectually or operationally;
Bruce Berman argues that, "While Mau Mau was clearly not a tribal atavism seeking a return to the past, the answer to the question of 'was it nationalism?' must be yes and no." As the Mau Mau rebellion wore on, the violence forced the spectrum of opinion within the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru to polarise and harden into the two distinct camps of loyalist and Mau Mau. This neat division between loyalists and Mau Mau was a product of the conflict, rather than a cause or catalyst of it, with the violence becoming less ambiguous over time, in a similar manner to other situations.
Mau Mau warfare 
Contrary to British propaganda and western perceptions of the time, the Mau Mau attacks were mostly well organised and planned.
"...the insurgents lack of heavy weaponry and the heavily entrenched police and Home Guard positions meant that Mau Mau attacks were restricted to nighttime and where loyalist positions were weak. When attacks did commence they were fast and brutal, as insurgents were easily able to identify loyalists because they were often local to those communities themselves. The Lari massacre was by comparison rather outstanding and in contrast to regular Mau Mau strikes which more often than not targeted only loyalists without such massive civilian casualties. Later regretted by the Mau Mau command due to its negative impact on the indigenous insurgency support “even the attack upon Lari, in the view of the rebel commanders was strategic and specific.”
Mau Mau fighters based their operations within Kikuya society, using local civilians as guides, and utilising the vast passive support they enjoyed among the natives to identify loyalist and Home Guard members through Mau Mau informants.
The Mau Mau command, contrary to the Home Guard who were renowned as “the running dogs of British Imperialism”, were relatively well educated. General Gatunga had previously been a respected and well read Christian teacher in his local Kikuyu community. He was known to meticulously record his attacks in a series of five notebooks, which when executed were often swift and strategic, targeting loyalist community leaders he had previously known as a teacher.
British reaction to the uprising 
Philip Mitchell retired as Kenya's governor in summer 1952, having turned a blind eye to Mau Mau's increasing activity. Through the summer of 1952, however, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton in London received a steady flow of reports from Acting Governor Henry Potter about the escalating seriousness of Mau Mau violence, but it was not until the later part of 1953 that British politicians began to accept that the rebellion was going to take some time to deal with. At first, the British discounted the Mau Mau rebellion because of their own technical and military superiority, which encouraged hopes for a quick victory.
The British army accepted the gravity of the uprising months before the politicians, but the army's appeals to London and Nairobi initially fell on deaf ears. On 30 September 1952, Evelyn Baring arrived in Kenya to permanently take over from Potter; Baring was given no warning by Mitchell or the Colonial Office about the gathering maelstrom into which he was stepping.
First European victim 
On 3 October, Mau Mau probably claimed their first European victim when they stabbed a woman to death near her home in Thika. Days later, on 9 October, Senior Chief Waruhiu was shot to death in broad daylight in his car, which was an important blow against the colonial regime. Waruhiu had been one of the strongest supporters of the British presence in Kenya. His assassination gave Baring the final impetus to request permission from the Colonial Office to declare a State of Emergency (see below).
Aside from military operations against Mau Mau fighters in the forests, the British attempt to defeat the movement broadly came in two stages: the first, relatively limited in scope, came during the period in which they had still failed to accept the seriousness of the revolt; the second came afterwards. During the first stage, the British tried to decapitate the movement by declaring a State of Emergency before arresting 180 alleged Mau Mau leaders (see Operation Jock Scott below) and subjecting six of them to a show trial (the Kapenguria Six); the second stage began in earnest in 1954, when they undertook a series of major economic, military and penal initiatives.
The second stage had three main planks: a large military-sweep of Nairobi leading to the internment of tens of thousands of the city's suspected Mau Mau members and sympathisers (see Operation Anvil below); the enaction of major agrarian reform (the Swynnerton Plan); and the institution of a vast villagisation programme for more than a million rural Kikuyu (see below). In 2012, the UK government admitted for the first time it accepted that prisoners had suffered "torture and ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration".
The savagery of the British response was inflated by two factors. First, the settler regime in Kenya was, even before the insurgency, probably the most openly racist one in the British empire, with the settlers' violent prejudice attended by an uncompromising determination to retain their grip on power and half-submerged fears that, as a tiny minority, they could be overwhelmed by the indigenous population. A common view among the settler community was that "[a] good sound system of compulsory labour would do more to raise the nigger in five years than all the millions that have been sunk in missionary efforts for the last fifty", and its representatives were so keen on aggressive action that George Erskine referred to them as "the White Mau Mau". Second, the brutality of Mau Mau attacks on civilians made it easy for the movement's opponents—even for African and loyalist security forces—to adopt a totally dehumanised view of Mau Mau adherents.
A variety of persuasive techniques were initiated by the colonial authorities to punish and break Mau Mau's support: Baring ordered punitive communal-labour, collective fines and other collective punishments, and further confiscation of land and property. By early 1954, tens of thousands of head of livestock had been taken, and were allegedly never returned. Detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels were finally released in April 2012.
State of Emergency declared (October 1952) 
On 20 October 1952, Governor Baring signed an order declaring a State of Emergency. Early the next morning, Operation Jock Scott was launched: the British carried out a mass-arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and 180 other alleged Mau Mau leaders within Nairobi. Jock Scott did not decapitate the movement's leadership as hoped, since news of the impending operation was leaked. Thus, while the moderates on the wanted list awaited capture, the real militants, such as Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge (both later principal leaders of Mau Mau's forest armies), fled to the forests.
The day after the round up, another prominent loyalist chief, Nderi, was hacked to pieces, and a series of gruesome murders against settlers were committed throughout the months that followed. The violent and random nature of British tactics during the months after Jock Scott served merely to alienate ordinary Kikuyu and drive many of the wavering majority into Mau Mau's arms.
Three battalions of the King's African Rifles were recalled from Uganda, Tanganyika and Mauritius, giving the regiment five battalions in all in Kenya, a total of 3,000 African troops. To placate settler opinion, one battalion of British troops, from the Lancashire Fusiliers, was also flown in from Egypt to Nairobi on the first day of Operation Jock Scott.In November 1952, Baring requested assistance from the Security Service. For the next year, the Service's A.M. MacDonald would reorganise the Special Branch of the Kenya Police, promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories, and oversee coordination of all intelligence activity "to secure the intelligence Government requires".
In January 1953, six of the most prominent detainees from Jock Scott, including Kenyatta, were put on trial, primarily to justify the declaration of the Emergency to critics in London. The trial itself was claimed to have featured a suborned lead defence-witness, a bribed judge, and other serious violations of the right to a fair trial.
African political activity was permitted to resume at the end of the military phase of the Emergency.
Military operations 
The onset of the Emergency led hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Mau Mau adherents to flee to the forests, where a decentralised leadership had already begun setting up platoons. The primary zones of Mau Mau military strength were the Aberdares and the forests around Mount Kenya, whilst a passive support-wing was fostered outside these areas. Militarily, the British defeated Mau Mau in four years (1952–56) using a more expansive version of "coercion through exemplary force". In May 1953, the decision was made to send General George Erskine to oversee the restoration of order in the colony.
By September 1953, the British knew the leading personalities in Mau Mau, the capture of General China in January the following year provided a massive intelligence boost on the forest fighters. Erskine's arrival did not immediately herald a fundamental change in strategy, thus the continual pressure on the gangs remained, but he created more mobile formations that delivered what he termed "special treatment" to an area. After "special treatment"—once gangs had been driven out and eliminated—loyalist forces and police were then to take over the area, with military support brought in thereafter only to conduct any required pacification operations. After their successful dispersion and containment, Erskine went after the forest fighters' source of supplies, money and recruits, i.e. the African population of Nairobi. This took the form of Operation Anvil, which commenced on 24 April 1954.
Operation Anvil 
By 1954, Nairobi was regarded as the nerve centre of Mau Mau operations. Anvil was the ambitious attempt to eliminate Mau Mau's presence within Nairobi in one fell swoop. 25,000 members of British security forces under the control of General George Erskine were deployed as Nairobi was sealed off and underwent a sector-by-sector purge. All Africans were taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures, whereafter those who were not Kikuyu, Embu or Meru were released; those who were remained in detention for screening.[D]
Whilst the operation itself was conducted by Europeans, most suspected members of Mau Mau were picked out of groups of the Kikuyu-Embu-Meru detainees by an African informer. Male suspects were then taken off for further screening, primarily at Langata Screening Camp, whilst women and children were readied for 'repatriation' to the reserves (many of those slated for deportation had never set foot in the reserves before). Anvil lasted for two weeks, after which the capital had been cleared of all but certifiably loyal Kikuyu; 20,000 Mau Mau suspects had been taken to Langata, and 30,000 more had been deported to the reserves.
Air power 
For an extended period of time, the chief British weapon against the forest fighters was air power. Between June 1953 and October 1955, the RAF provided a significant contribution to the conflict—and, indeed, had to, for the army was preoccupied with providing security in the reserves until January 1955, and it was the only service capable of both psychologically influencing and inflicting considerable casualties on the Mau Mau fighters operating in the dense forests. Lack of timely and accurate intelligence meant bombing was rather haphazard, but almost 900 insurgents had been killed or wounded by air attack by June 1954, and it did cause forest gangs to disband, lower their morale, and induce their pronounced relocation from the forests to the reserves.
Contrary to that which is sometimes claimed, Lancaster bombers were not used during the Emergency, though Lincolns were. The latter flew their first mission on 18 November 1953 and remained in Kenya until 28 July 1955, dropping nearly 6 million bombs. They and other aircraft were also deployed for reconnaissance, as well as in the propaganda war, conducting large-scale leaflet-drops.
After the Lari massacre, for example, British planes dropped leaflets showing graphic pictures of the Kikuyu women and children who had been hacked to death. Unlike the rather indiscriminate activities of British ground forces, which had had their repression and violence against Kikuyu encouraged from Cabinet level downwards, the use of air power was more restrained (though there is disagreement on this point), and air attacks were initially permitted only in the forests. Operation Mushroom extended bombing beyond the forest limits in May 1954, and Churchill consented to its continuation in January 1955.
Swynnerton Plan 
Baring knew the massive deportations to the already-overcrowded reserves could only make things worse. Refusing to give more land to the Kikuyu in the reserves, which could have been seen as a concession to Mau Mau, Baring turned instead in 1953 to Roger Swynnerton, Kenya's assistant director of agriculture. The primary goal of the Swynnerton Plan was the creation of family holdings large enough to keep families self-sufficient in food and to enable them to practise alternate husbandry, which would generate a cash income.
The projected costs of the Swynnerton Plan were too high for the cash-strapped colonial government, so Baring tweaked repatriation and augmented the Swynnerton Plan with plans for a massive expansion of the Pipeline coupled with a system of work camps to make use of detainee labour. All Kikuyu employed for public works projects would now be employed on Swynnerton's poor-relief programmes, as would many detainees in the work camps.
Detention programme 
When the mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves began in 1953, Baring and Erskine ordered all Mau Mau suspects to be screened. Of the scores of screening camps which sprang up, only fifteen were officially sanctioned by the colonial government. Larger detention camps were divided into compounds. The screening centres were staffed by settlers who had been appointed temporary district-officers by Baring.
Thomas Askwith, the official tasked with designing the British 'detention and rehabilitation' programme during the summer and autumn of 1953, termed his system the Pipeline. The British did not initially conceive of rehabilitating Mau Mau suspects through brute force and other ill-treatment—Askwith's final plan, submitted to Baring in October 1953, was intended as "a complete blueprint for winning the war against Mau Mau using socioeconomic and civic reform." What developed, however, has been described as a British gulag.
The Pipeline operated a white-grey-black classification system: 'whites' were cooperative detainees, and were repatriated back to the reserves; 'greys' had been oathed but were reasonably compliant, and were moved down the Pipeline to works camps in their local districts before release; and 'blacks' were the so-called 'hard core' of Mau Mau. These were moved up the Pipeline to special detention camps. Thus a detainee's position in Pipeline was a straightforward reflection of how cooperative the Pipeline personnel deemed her or him to be. Cooperation was itself defined in terms of a detainee's readiness to confess their Mau Mau oath. Detainees were screened and re-screened for confessions and intelligence, then re-classified accordingly.
A detainee's journey between two locations along the Pipeline could sometimes last days. During transit, there was frequently little or no food and water provided, and seldom any sanitation. Once in camp, talking was forbidden outside the detainees' accommodation huts, though improvised communication was rife. Such communication included propaganda and disinformation, which went by such names as the Kinongo Times, designed to encourage fellow detainees not to give up hope and so to minimise the number of those who confessed their oath and cooperated with camp authorities. Forced labour was performed by detainees on projects like the thirty-seven-mile-long South Yatta irrigation furrow. Family outside and other considerations led many detainees to confess.
During the first year after Operation Anvil, colonial authorities had little success in forcing detainees to cooperate. Camps and compounds were overcrowded, forced-labour systems were not yet perfected, screening teams were not fully coordinated, and the use of torture was not yet systematised. This failure was partly due to the lack of manpower and resources, as well as the vast numbers of detainees. Officials could scarcely process them all, let alone get them to confess their oaths. Assessing the situation in the summer of 1955, Alan Lennox-Boyd wrote of his "fear that the net figure of detainees may still be rising. If so the outlook is grim." Black markets flourished during this period, with the African guards helping to facilitate trading. It was possible for detainees to bribe guards in order to obtain items or stay punishment.
Interrogations and confessions 
By late 1955, however, the Pipeline had become a fully operational, well-organised system. Guards were regularly shifted around the Pipeline too in order to prevent relationships developing with detainees and so undercut the black markets, and inducements and punishments became better at discouraging fraternising with the enemy. The grinding nature of the improved detention and interrogation regimen began to produce results. Most detainees confessed, and the system produced ever greater numbers of spies and informers within the camps, while others switched sides in a more open, official fashion, leaving detention behind to take an active role in interrogations, even sometimes administering beatings.
The most famous example of side-switching was Peter Muigai Kenyatta—Jomo Kenyatta's son—who, after confessing, joined screeners at Athi River Camp, later travelling throughout the Pipeline to assist in interrogations. Suspected informers and spies within a camp were treated in the time-honoured Mau Mau fashion: the preferred method of cold-blooded murder was strangulation then mutilation: "It was just like in the days before our detention", explained one Mau Mau member later. "We did not have our own jails to hold an informant in, so we would strangle him and then cut his tongue out." The end of 1955 also saw screeners being given a freer hand in interrogation, and harsher conditions than straightforward confession were imposed on detainees before they were deemed 'cooperative' and eligible for final release.
While oathing, for practical reasons, within the Pipeline was reduced to an absolute minimum, as many new initiates as possible were oathed. A newcomer who refused to take the oath often faced the same fate as a recalcitrant outside the camps: they were murdered. "The detainees would strangle them with their blankets or, using blades fashioned from the corrugated-iron roofs of some of the barracks, would slit their throats", writes Elkins. The camp authorities' preferred method of capital punishment was public hanging. Commandants were told to clamp down hard on intra-camp oathing, with several commandants hanging anyone suspected of administering oaths.
Even as the Pipeline became more sophisticated, detainees still organised themselves within it, setting up committees and selecting leaders for their camps, as well as deciding on their own "rules to live by". Perhaps the most famous compound leader was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. Punishments for violating the "rules to live by" could be severe.
European missionaries and African Christians played their part by visiting camps to evangelise and encourage compliance with the colonial authorities, providing intelligence, and sometimes even assisting in interrogation. Detainees regarded such preachers with nothing but contempt.
Sanitation in the camps was often appalling, and epidemics of diseases such as typhoid swept through them. Official medical reports detailing the shortcomings of the camps and their recommendations were ignored, and the conditions being endured by detainees were lied about and denied. A British rehabilitation officer found in 1954 that detainees from Manyani were in "shocking health", many of them suffering from malnutrition, while Langata and GilGil were eventually closed in April 1955 because, as the colonial government put it, "they were unfit to hold Kikuyu . . . for medical epidemiological reasons".
While the Pipeline was primarily designed for adult males, a few thousand women and young girls were detained at an all-women camp at Kamiti, as well as a number of unaccompanied young children. Dozens of babies were born to women in captivity: "We really do need cloths for the children as it is impossible to keep them clean and tidy while dressed on dirty pieces of sacking and blanket", wrote one colonial officer. Wamumu Camp was set up solely for all the unaccompanied boys in the Pipeline, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys moved around the adult parts of the Pipeline.
Works camps 
There were originally two types of works camps envisioned by Baring: the first type were based in Kikuyu districts with the stated purpose of achieving the Swynnerton Plan; the second were punitive camps, designed for the 30,000 Mau Mau suspects who were deemed unfit to return to the reserves. These forced-labour camps provided a much needed source of labour to continue the colony's infrastructure development.
Colonial officers also saw the second sort of works camps as a way of ensuring that any confession was legitimate and as a final opportunity to extract intelligence. Probably the worst works camp to have been sent to was the one run out of Embakasi Prison, for Embakasi was responsible for the Embakasi Airport, the construction of which was demanded to be finished before the Emergency came to an end. The airport was a massive project with an unquenchable thirst for labour, and the time pressures ensured the detainees' forced labour was especially hard.
Villagisation programme 
If military operations in the forests and Operation Anvil were the first two phases of Mau Mau's defeat, Erskine expressed the need and his desire for a third and final phase: cut off all the militants' support in the reserves. The means to this terminal end was originally suggested by the man brought in by the colonial government to an ethnopsychiatric 'diagnosis' of the uprising, JC Carothers: he advocated a Kenyan version of the villagisation programmes that the British were already using in places like Malaya.
So it was that in June 1954, the War Council took the decision to undertake a full-scale forced-resettlement programme of Kiambu, Nyeri, Murang'a and Embu Districts to cut off Mau Mau's supply lines. Within eighteen months, 1,050,899 Kikuyu in the reserves were inside 804 villages consisting of some 230,000 huts. The government termed them "protected villages", purportedly to be built along "the same lines as the villages in the North of England", though the term was actually a "euphemism for the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilians were corralled, often against their will, into settlements behind barbed-wire fences and watch towers."
While some of these villages were to protect loyalist Kikuyu, "most were little more than concentration camps to punish Mau Mau sympathizers." The villagisation programme was the coup de grâce for Mau Mau. By the end of the following summer, Lieutenant General Lathbury no longer needed Lincoln bombers for raids because of a lack of targets, and, by late 1955, Lathbury felt so sure of final victory that he reduced army forces to almost pre-Mau Mau levels.
He noted, however, that the British should have "no illusions about the future. Mau Mau has not been cured: it has been suppressed. The thousands who have spent a long time in detention must have been embittered by it. Nationalism is still a very potent force and the African will pursue his aim by other means. Kenya is in for a very tricky political future."
The government's public relations officer, Granville Roberts, presented villagisation as a good opportunity for rehabilitation, particularly of women and children, but it was, in fact, first and foremost designed to break Mau Mau and protect loyalist Kikuyu, a fact reflected in the extremely limited resources made available to the Rehabilitation and Community Development Department. Refusal to move could be punished with the destruction of property and livestock, and the roofs were usually ripped off of homes whose occupants demonstrated reluctance. Villagisation also solved the practical and financial problems associated with a further, massive expansion of the Pipeline programme, and the removal of people from their land hugely assisted the enaction of Swynnerton Plan.
The villages were surrounded by deep, spike-bottomed trenches and barbed wire, and the villagers themselves were watched over by members of the Home Guard, often neighbours and relatives. In short, rewards or collective punishments such as curfews could be served much more readily after villagisation, and this quickly had an impact on breaking Mau Mau's passive wing. Though there were degrees of difference between the villages, the overall conditions engendered by villagisation meant that, by early 1955, districts began reporting starvation and malnutrition. One provincial commissioner blamed child hunger on parents deliberately withholding food, saying the latter were aware of the "propaganda value of apparent malnutrition".
The Red Cross helped mitigate the food shortages, but even they were told to prioritise loyalist areas. The Baring government's medical department issued reports about "the alarming number of deaths occurring amongst children in the 'punitive' villages", and the "political" prioritisation of Red Cross relief.
One of the colony's ministers blamed the "bad spots" in Central Province on the mothers of the children for "not realis[ing] the great importance of proteins", and one former missionary reported that it "was terribly pitiful how many of the children and the older Kikuyu were dying. They were so emaciated and so very susceptible to any kind of disease that came along". Of the 50,000 deaths which John Blacker attributed to the Emergency, half were children under the age of ten.
The lack of food did not just affect the children, of course. The Overseas Branch of the British Red Cross commented on the "women who, from progressive undernourishment, had been unable to carry on with their work".
Disease prevention was not helped by the colony's policy of returning sick detainees to receive treatment in the reserves, though the reserves' medical services were virtually non-existent, as Baring himself noted after a tour of some villages in June 1956.
Kenyans were granted nearly all of the demands made by the KAU in 1951.
On 18 January 1955, the Governor-General of Kenya, Evelyn Baring, offered an amnesty to Mau Mau activists. The offer was that they would not face the death penalty, but may still be imprisoned for their crimes. European settlers were appalled at the leniency of the offer. On 10 June 1955 with no response forthcoming, the offer of amnesty to the Mau Mau was revoked.
In June 1956, a program of land reform increased the land holdings of the Kikuyu.. This was coupled with a relaxation of the ban on Africans growing coffee, a primary cash crop.
In the cities the colonial authorities decided to dispel tensions by raising urban wages, thereby strengthening the hand of moderate union organisations like the KFRTU. By 1956, the British had granted direct election of African members of the Legislative Assembly, followed shortly thereafter by an increase in the number of African seats to fourteen. A Parliamentary conference in January 1960 indicated that the British would accept "one person—one vote" majority rule.
Deaths and atrocities 
The uprising was, in David Anderson's words, "a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly no glory." Historian Daniel Goldhagen describes the campaign against the Mau Mau as an example of eliminationism, though this verdict has been fiercely criticised.
The total number of deaths attributable to the Emergency has been a source of dispute: Caroline Elkins claims it is "tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands". Elkins numbers have been challenged by the British demographer John Blacker, who demonstrated in detail that her numbers were overestimated, explaining that Elkins' figure of 300,000 deaths "implies that perhaps half of the adult male population would have been wiped out—yet the censuses of 1962 and 1969 show no evidence of this—the age-sex pyramids for the Kikuyu districts do not even show indentations."
His study dealt directly with Elkins' claim that "somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for" at the 1962 census, and was read by both David Anderson and John Lonsdale prior to publication. Half of Blacker's own estimate of 50,000 comprises children under the age of ten. David Elstein has noted that leading authorities on Africa have taken issue with parts of Elkins' study, in particular her mortality figures: "The senior British historian of Kenya, John Lonsdale, whom Elkins thanks profusely in her book as 'the most gifted scholar I know', warned her to place no reliance on anecdotal sources, and regards her statistical analysis—for which she cites him as one of three advisors—as 'frankly incredible'"; "Susan Carruthers of Rutgers University, who noted that Elkins had managed to confuse the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, said: 'she proves the least reliable guide to history: this was not genocide—history is not well served by its sloppy invocation'."
The British possibly killed in excess of 20,000 Mau Mau militants, but in some ways more notable is the smaller number of Mau Mau suspects dealt with by capital punishment: by the end of the Emergency, the grand total was 1,090. At no other time or place in the British empire was capital punishment dispensed so liberally—the total is more than double the number executed by the French in Algeria.
Lari massacre 
Mau Mau militants were guilty of numerous atrocities. The most notorious was their attack on the settlement of Lari, on the night of 25–26 March 1953, in which they herded Kikuyu men, women and children into huts and set fire to them, hacking down with pangas anyone who attempted escape, before throwing them back into the burning huts. The attack at Lari was so extreme that "African policemen who saw the bodies of the victims . . . were physically sick and said 'These people are animals. If I see one now I shall shoot with the greatest eagerness'", and it "even shocked many Mau Mau supporters, some of whom would subsequently try to excuse the attack as 'a mistake'".
A retaliatory massacre was immediately perpetrated by African security forces who were partially overseen by British commanders. Official estimates place the death toll from the first Lari massacre at 74, and the second at 150, though neither of these figures account for those who 'disappeared'. Whatever the actual number of victims, "[t]he grim truth was that, for every person who died in Lari's first massacre, at least two more were killed in retaliation in the second."
Aside from the Lari massacres, Kikuyu were also tortured, mutilated and murdered by Mau Mau on many other occasions. Mau Mau racked up 1,819 murders of their fellow Africans, though again this number excludes the many additional hundreds who 'disappeared', whose bodies were never found. For their part, as already discussed, the British colonial government eventually instituted a system of detention and torture that was sanctioned at the highest levels of government in London, as well as carrying out or overseeing any number of extra-judicial executions and various massacres. One such killing spree was the Chuka massacre of June 1953, in which twenty African civilians, including a child, were shot in cold blood by soldiers of the 5th KAR B Company.
Thirty-two European and twenty-six Asian civilians were also murdered by Mau Mau militants, with similar numbers wounded. The most well known European victim was Michael Ruck, aged six, who was hacked to death with pangas along with his parents, Roger and Esme, and one of the Rucks' farm workers, Muthura Nagahu, who had tried to help the family. Newspapers in Kenya and abroad published graphic murder details, including images of young Michael with bloodied teddy bears and trains strewn on his bedroom floor.
A British officer describes his actions after capturing three Mau Mau suspects:
I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don't remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn't tell me where to find the rest of the gang I'd kill them too. They didn't say a word so I shot them both. One wasn't dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn't believe me but all he said was "bury them and see the wall is cleared up."
Settler groups, displeased with the government's response to the increasing Mau Mau threat created their own units to combat the Mau Mau. One settler with the Kenya Police Reserve's Special Branch described an interrogation of a Mau Mau suspect: "By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him."
Though Mau Mau was effectively crushed by the end of 1956, it was not until the First Lancaster House Conference, in January 1960, that African majority rule was established and the period of colonial transition to independence initiated. Before the conference, it was anticipated by both African and European leaders that Kenya was set for a European-dominated multi-racial government.
There is continuing debate about Mau Mau's and the rebellion's effects on decolonisation and on Kenya after independence. Regarding decolonisation, the most common view is that Kenya's independence came about as a result of the British government's deciding that a continuance of colonial rule would entail a greater use of force than that which the British public would tolerate. Nissimi argues, though, that such a view fails to "acknowledge the time that elapsed until the rebellion's influence actually took effect [and does not] explain why the same liberal tendencies failed to stop the dirty war the British conducted against the Mau Mau in Kenya while it was raging on." Others contend that, as the 1950s progressed, nationalist intransigence increasingly rendered official plans for political development irrelevant, meaning that after the mid-1950s British policy increasingly accepted African nationalism and moved to co-opt its leaders and organisations into collaboration.
Another view downplays the contribution of Mau Mau to decolonisation.
Compensation claims 
In 1999, a collection of former fighters calling themselves the Mau Mau Original Group announced they would attempt a £5 billion claim against the UK on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans for ill-treatment they said they suffered during the rebellion, though nothing came of it. In November 2002, the Mau Mau Trust—a welfare group for former members of the movement—announced it would attempt to sue the British government for widespread human rights violations it said were committed against its members. Until September 2003, the Mau Mau movement was banned.
Once the ban was removed, former Mau Mau members who had been castrated or otherwise tortured were supported by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, in particular by the Commission's George Morara, in their attempt to take on the British government; their lawyers had amassed 6,000 depositions regarding human rights abuses by late 2002. 42 potential claimants were interviewed from whom five were chosen to prosecute a test case; one of the five, Susan Ciong'ombe Ngondi, has since died. The remaining four test claimants are: Ndiku Mutua, who was castrated; Paulo Muoka Nzili, who was castrated; Jane Muthoni Mara, who was subjected to sexual assault that included having bottles filled with boiling water pushed up her vagina; and Wambugu Wa Nyingi, who survived the Hola massacre.
Ben Macintyre of The Times said of the legal case: "Opponents of these proceedings have pointed out, rightly, that the Mau Mau was a brutal terrorist force, guilty of the most dreadful atrocities. Yet only one of the claimants is of that stamp—Mr Nzili. He has admitted taking the Mau Mau oath and said that all he did was to ferry food to the fighters in the forest. None has been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime."
Upon publication of Caroline Elkins' Imperial Reckoning in 2005, Kenya called for an apology from the UK for atrocities committed during the 1950s. The British government claimed the issue was the responsibility of the Kenyan government on the grounds of "state succession" for former colonies, relying on an obscure legal precedent relating to Patagonian toothfish and the declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1860.
In July 2011, "George Morara strode down the corridor and into a crowded little room [in Nairobi] where 30 elderly Kenyans sat hunched together around a table clutching cups of hot tea and sharing plates of biscuits. 'I have good news from London,' he announced. 'We have won the first part of the battle!' At once the room erupted in cheers." The good news was that a British judge had ruled that the Kenyans could sue the British government for their torture. Morara said that, if the first test cases succeeded, perhaps 30,000 others would file similar complaints of torture. Explaining his decision, Mr Justice McCombe said the claimants had an "arguable case", and added:
It may well be thought strange, or perhaps even dishonourable, that a legal system which will not in any circumstances admit into its proceedings evidence obtained by torture should yet refuse to entertain a claim against the Government in its own jurisdiction for that Government's allegedly negligent failure to prevent torture which it had the means to prevent. Furthermore, resort to technicality . . . to rule such a claim out of court appears particularly misplaced.
A Times editorial noted with satisfaction that "Mr Justice McCombe told the FCO, in effect, to get lost. . . . Though the arguments against reopening very old wounds are seductive, they fail morally. There are living claimants and it most certainly was not their fault that the documentary evidence that seems to support their claims was for so long 'lost' in the governmental filing system."
During the course of the Mau Mau legal battle in London, a large amount of what was stated to be formerly lost Foreign Office archival material was finally brought to light, while yet more was discovered to be missing. The files, known as migrated archives, provided details of criminal British actions (torture, rape, execution) in its former colonies during the final stages of empire, including during Mau Mau, and even after decolonisation.
Regarding the Mau Mau Uprising, the records included confirmation of "the extent of the violence inflicted on suspected Mau Mau rebels" in British detention camps documented in Caroline Elkins' otherwise flawed study. Numerous allegations of murder and rape by British military personnel are recorded in the files, including an incident where an African baby was "burnt to death", the "defilement of a young girl", and a soldier in Royal Irish Fusiliers who killed "in cold blood two people who had been his captives for over 12 hours". Baring himself was aware of the "extreme brutality" of the sometimes-lethal torture meted out—which included "most drastic" beatings, solitary confinement, starvation, castration, whipping, burning, rape, sodomy, and forceful insertion of objects into orifices—but took no action. Baring's inaction was despite the urging of people like Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police for Kenya for less than eight months of 1954 before he resigned in protest, that "the horror of some of the [camps] should be investigated without delay". In February 1956, a provincial commissioner in Kenya, "Monkey" Johnson, wrote to Attorney General Reginald Manningham-Buller urging him to block any enquiry into the methods used against Mau Mau: "It would now appear that each and every one of us, from the Governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from public service by a commission of enquiry as a result of enquiries made by the CID." The April 2012 release also included detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels.
Commenting on the papers, David Anderson stated that the "documents were hidden away to protect the guilty", and "that the extent of abuse now being revealed is truly disturbing." "Everything that could happen did happen. Allegations about beatings and violence were widespread. Basically you could get away with murder. It was systematic", Anderson said. An example of this impunity is the case of eight colonial officials accused of having prisoners tortured to death going unpunished even after their crimes were reported to London. Huw Bennett of King's College London, who had worked with Anderson on the Chuka massacre, said in a witness statement to the court that the new documents "considerably strengthen" the knowledge that the British Army were "intimately involved" with the colonial security forces, whom they knew were "systematically abusing and torturing detainees in screening centres and detention camps". In April 2011, lawyers for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office continued to maintain that there was no such policy. As early as November 1952, however, military reports noted that "[t]he Army has been used for carrying out certain functions that properly belonged to the Police, eg. searching of huts and screening of Africans", and British soldiers arrested and transferred Mau Mau suspects to camps where they were beaten and tortured until they confessed. Bennett said that "the British Army retained ultimate operational control over all security forces throughout the Emergency", and that its military intelligence operation worked "hand in glove" with the Kenyan Special Branch "including in screening and interrogations in centres and detention camps".
The Kenyan government sent a letter to Hague insisting that the UK government was legally liable for the atrocities. The Foreign Office, however, reaffirmed its position that it was not, in fact, liable for colonial atrocities, and argued that the documents had not "disappeared" as part of a cover up. Nearly ten years before, in late 2002, as the BBC aired a damning documentary on British crimes committed during the rebellion and 6,000 depositions had been taken for the legal case, former district colonial officer John Nottingham had expressed concern that compensation be paid soon, since most victims were in their 80s and would soon pass away. He told the BBC: "What went on in the Kenya camps and villages was brutal, savage torture. It is time that the mockery of justice that was perpetrated in this country at that time, should be, must be righted. I feel ashamed to have come from a Britain that did what it did here [in Kenya]."
In October 2012, Mr Justice McCombe granted the surviving elderly test claimants the right to sue the UK for damages. The UK government then opted for the "morally repugnant" decision to appeal McCombe's ruling. In May 2013, it was reported that the appeal was on hold while the UK government held compensation negotiations with the claimants.
Mau Mau status in Kenya 
Members of Mau Mau are currently recognised by the Kenyan Government as freedom/independence heroes/heroines who sacrificed their lives in order to free Kenyans from colonial rule. Since 2010, Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day) has been marked annually on 20 October (the same day Baring signed the Emergency order). According to the Kenyan Government, Mashujaa Day will be a time for Kenyans to remember and honour Mau Mau and other Kenyans who participated in the fight for African freedom and Kenya's independence. Mashujaa Day will replace Kenyatta Day; the latter has until now also been held on 20 October. In 2001, the Kenyan government announced that important Mau Mau sites were to be turned into national monuments.
This official celebration of Mau Mau is in marked contrast to a post-colonial norm of Kenyan governments passing over Mau Mau as a symbol of national liberation. Such a turnabout has attracted criticism of government manipulation of the Mau Mau uprising for political ends.
It is often argued that Mau Mau was suppressed as a subject for public discussion in Kenya during the periods under Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi because of the key positions and influential presence of some loyalists in government, business and other elite sectors of Kenyan society post-1963. Unsurprisingly, during this same period opposition groups tactically embraced the Mau Mau rebellion. Mau Mau's politicisation within Kenya appears to continue up to the present.
See also 
- Chuka massacre
- Frank Kitson, author of the book Gangs and Counter-gangs
- Hola massacre
- Ian Henderson
- Weep Not, Child
- Mungiki, contemporary Kikuyu insurgency within Kenya
A The name Kenya Land and Freedom Army is sometimes heard in connection with Mau Mau. KLFA is not simply another name for Mau Mau: it was the name that Dedan Kimathi used for a coordinating body which he tried to set up for Mau Mau. It was also the name of another militant group that sprang up briefly in the spring of 1960; the group was broken up during a brief operation from 26 March to 30 April.
B Between 1895 and 1920, Kenya was formally known as British East Africa Protectorate; between 1920 and 1963, as Kenya Colony and Protectorate.
C "Squatter or resident labourers are those who reside with their families on European farms usually for the purpose of work for the owners. . . . Contract labourers are those who sign a contract of service before a magistrate, for periods varying from three to twelve months. Casual labourers leave their reserves to engage themselves to European employers for any period from one day upwards." In return for his services, a squatter was entitled to use some of the settler's land for cultivation and grazing. Contract and casual workers are together referred to as migratory labourers, in distinction to the permanent presence of the squatters on farms. The phenomenon of squatters arose in response to the complementary difficulties of Europeans in finding labourers and of Africans in gaining access to arable and grazing land.
D During the Emergency, screening was the term used by colonial authorities to mean the interrogation of a Mau Mau suspect. The alleged member or sympathiser of Mau Mau would be interrogated in order to obtain an admission of guilt—specifically, a confession that they had taken the Mau Mau oath—as well as for intelligence.
- Anderson 2005.
- Maloba 1998.
- Page 2011, p. 206.
- Anderson 2005, p. 5.
- Anderson 2005, p. 4.
- Anderson 2005, p. 84.
- Eatman 2007, p. 3.
- The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (1994) p. 346.
- Füredi 1989, p. 5.
- Eatman 2007, pp. 4–5.
- Mumford 2012, p. 49.
- Anderson 2005, p. 4: "Much of the struggle tore through the African communities themselves, an internecine war waged between rebels and so-called 'loyalists'—Africans who took the side of the government and opposed Mau Mau."
- Branch 2009, p. xii.
- Gerlach 2010, p. 213.
- Kanogo 1992, pp. 23–5.
- Majdalany 1963, p. 75.
- Kariuki 1960, p. 167.
- Kariuki 1960, p. 24.
- Curtis 2003, pp. 320.
- Curtis 2003, p. 320: "The principal item in the natural resources of Kenya is the land, and in this term we include the colony's mineral resources. It seems to us that our major objective must clearly be the preservation and the wise use of this most important asset."
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 149.
- Alam 2007, p. 1: "The colonial presence in Kenya, in contrast to, say, India, where it lasted almost 200 years, was brief but equally violent. It formally started when Her Majesty's agent and Counsel General at Zanzibar, A.H. Hardinge, in a proclamation on 1 July 1895, announced that he was taking over the Coastal areas as well as the interior that included the Kikuyu land, now known as Central Province."
- Ellis 1981, p. 100.
You can read Dilke's speech in full here: "Class V; House of Commons Debate, 1 June 1894". Hansard. Series 4, Vol. 25, cc. 181–270. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
- Mungeam 1970, p. 128.
- Ellis 1981, p. 92. Elliot observes that Hardinge's "choice of weapon is a little confused but the message is clear."
- Edgerton 1989, p. 4.
- Meinertzhagen 1957, pp. 51–2.
- Maxon 1989, p. 44.
- Robert W. Strayer (9 February 1986). "Letter: Out of Africa". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 March 2012.
- Lapping 1989, p. 469.
- Berman 1990, p. 72 n.43.
- Leys 1973, pp. 342.
A particularly interesting example, albeit outside Kenya and featuring guns instead of spears, of successful armed resistance to maintain crucial aspects of autonomy is the Basuto Gun War of 1880–1881, whose ultimate legacy remains tangible even today, in the form of Lesotho.
- Alam 2007, p. 2.
- Brantley 1981.
- Atieno-Odhiambo 1995, p. 25.
- Ogot 2003, p. 15.
- Nissimi 2006, p. 10.
- Coray 1978, p. 179: "The [colonial] administration's refusal to develop mechanisms whereby African grievances against non-Africans might be resolved on terms of equity, moreover, served to accelerate a growing disaffection with colonial rule. The investigations of the Kenya Land Commission of 1932–1934 are a case study in such lack of foresight, for the findings and recommendations of this commission, particularly those regarding the claims of the Kikuyu of Kiambu, would serve to exacerbate other grievances and nurture the seeds of a growing African nationalism in Kenya".
- Anderson 2005, p. 22.
- Anderson 2005, p. 15.
- Berman 1991, p. 196: "In contrast to the constructed image of a stable and harmonious tradition, the Kikuyu in the nineteenth century were actively expanding and colonizing new territory and already internally divided between wealthy land-owning families and landless families attached to them in a variety of forms of dependence."
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 187.
- Mosley 2009, p. 5.
- Anderson 2005, p. 3.
- Edgerton 1989, pp. 1–5.
Elkins 2005, p. 2, notes that the (British taxpayer) loans were never repaid on the Uganda Railway; they were written off in the 1930s.
- Kanogo 1993, p. 8.
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 159.
- Edgerton 1989, p. 5.
- Kanogo 1993, p. 9.
- Emerson Welch 1980, p. 16.
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 29: "This judgment is now widely known to Africans in Kenya, and it has become clear to them that, without their being previously informed or consulted, their rights in their tribal land, whether communal or individual, have "disappeared" in law and have been superseded by the rights of the Crown."
- Anderson 2004, p. 498. "The recruitment of African labor at poor rates of pay and under primitive conditions of work was characteristic of the operation of colonial capitalism in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . [C]olonial states readily colluded with capital in providing the legal framework necessary for the recruitment and maintenance of labor in adequate numbers and at low cost to the employer. . . . The colonial state shared the desire of the European settler to encourage Africans into the labour market, whilst also sharing a concern to moderate the wages paid to workers".
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 173: "Casual labourers leave their reserves . . . to earn the wherewithal to pay their 'Hut Tax' and to get money to purchase a few luxuries."
- Shilaro 2002, p. 117: "African reserves in Kenya were legally constituted in the Crown Lands Amendment Ordinance of 1926".
Though finalised in 1926, reserves were first instituted by the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915—see Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 29.
- Anderson 2004, pp. 506.
- Kanogo 1993, p. 13.
- Anderson 2004, pp. 505.
- Creech Jones, Arthur. "Native Labour; House of Commons Debate, 10 November 1937". Hansard. Series 5, Vol. 328, cc. 1757-9. Retrieved 13 April 2013.
- Elkins 2005, p. 17.
- Anderson 2004, p. 508.
- Kanogo 1993, pp. 96–7.
- Thiong'o 2010, p. 463.
- Anderson 2004, p. 507.
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 166: "In many parts of the territory we were informed that the majority of farmers were having the utmost difficulty in obtaining labour to cultivate and to harvest their crops".
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, pp. 155–6.
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 180: "The population of the district to which one medical officer is allotted amounts more often than not to over a quarter of a million natives distributed over a large area. . . . [T]here are large areas in which no medical work is being undertaken."
- Swainson 1980, p. 23.
- Anderson 2004, pp. 516–28.
- Curtis 2003, pp. 320–1.
- Anderson 2005, p. 10.
- Carter 1934.
- Anderson 2005, p. 22: "The Land Commission report of 1934 was the stone upon which moderate African politics was broken. . . . Militant nationalism was conceived in Kikuyu reaction to the report of the Kenya Land Commission. . . . Opposition to the Land Commission's findings fed militancy all the more over the next twenty years as the pressures upon land within the Kikuyu reserve became greater and the settler stranglehold on the political economy of the colony tightened".
- Shilaro 2002, p. 123.
- Elkins 2005, p. 25.
- Branch 2007, p. 1.
- Ogot 2003, p. 16.
- Anderson 2005, p. 282.
- Berman 1991, p. 198.
- Füredi 1989, p. 4.
- Berman 1991, pp. 182–3.
- Mahone 2006, p. 241: "This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the 'mania of 1911', which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this 'psychic epidemic' and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria."
- McCulloch 2006, pp. 64–76.
Carother's output includes a 1947 study of "mental derangement in Africans, and an attempt to explain its peculiarities, more especially in relation to the African attitude to life". For his "magnum opus", see Carothers 1953.
- Füredi 1994, pp. 119–21.
- Berman 1991, pp. 183–5.
- Clough 1998, p. 4.
- Branch 2009, p. 3.
- "Mau Mau uprising: Bloody history of Kenya conflict". BBC News. 7 April 2011. Retrieved 12 May 2011. "There was lots of suffering on the other side too. This was a dirty war. It became a civil war—though that idea remains extremely unpopular in Kenya today." (The quote is of David Anderson).
- Füredi 1989, pp. 4–5: "Since they were the most affected by the colonial system and the most educated about its ways, the Kikuyu emerged as the most politicized African community in Kenya."
- Berman 1991, p. 196: "The impact of colonial capitalism and the colonial state hit the Kikuyu with greater force and effect than any other of Kenya's peoples, setting off new processes of differentiation and class formation."
- Thomas, Beth (1993). "Historian, Kenya native's book on Mau Mau revolt". UpDate 13 (13): 7.
- See in particular David Elstein's angry letters:
- "Letters: Tell me where I'm wrong". London Review of Books 27 (11). 2005. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
- "The End of the Mau Mau". The New York Review of Books 52 (11). 2005. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
- "Letters: Tell me where I'm wrong". London Review of Books 27 (14). 2005. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
- Ogot 2005, p. 502: "There was no reason and no restraint on both sides, although Elkins sees no atrocities on the part of Mau Mau."
- Pirouet 1977, p. 197.
- Clough 1998.
- Berman 1991, p. 197: "[D]eveloping conflicts . . . in Kikuyu society were expressed in a vigorous internal debate."
- Anderson 2005, pp. 11–2.
- Branch 2009, p. xi.
- Berman 1991, p. 199.
- Branch 2009, p. 1.
- Branch 2009, p. 2.
- Pirouet 1977, p. 200.
- Kalyvas 2006.
- Anderson, David (2005). Histories of the Hanged. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 252.
- Edgerton 1989, pp. 31–2.
- Elkins 2005, p. 32.
- Nissimi 2006, p. 4.
- French 2011, p. 29.
- Edgerton 1989, p. 65.
- Füredi 1989, p. 116.
- Edgerton 1989, pp. 66–7.
- French 2011, p. 72.
- French 2011, p. 55.
- Olivier, Sydney. "East African Policy; House of Lords Debate, 7 December 1927". Hansard. Series 5, Vol. 211, cc. 551–600. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
The quote is of Ewart Grogan; the disgusted Olivier would have been quoting Grogan & Sharp 1900, p. 360.
And, as Bailey 1993, p. 21, reminds us, Ewart Grogan was rather more than just foul-mouthed: He earned the distinction, in 1908, of becoming the first Kenyan settler to commit a "killing which aroused the indignation of all fair minded people in Kenya and abroad", when he, along with four friends, flogged two of his so-called rickshaw boys so viciously for so long that one died, while the other was hospitalised for three months. Grogan was initially charged with murder, but ended up being convicted of mere common assault, serving just two months' hard labour as punishment.
Astonishingly, a 1981 biography by Leda Farrant is unabashedly called The Legendary Grogan, and as recently as 2001 HarperPress felt able to publish one by Edward Paice entitled Lost Lion of Empire.
- Elkins 2005, p. 75: "According to Emergency regulations, the governor could issue Native Land Rights Confiscation Orders, whereby '[e]ach of the persons named in the schedule . . . participated or aided in violent resistance against the forces of law and order' and therefore had his land confiscated".
- Wallis, Holly (18 April 2012). "British colonial files released following legal challenge". BBC News. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Anderson 2005, p. 62.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 35–6.
- Anderson 2005, p. 63.
- Anderson 2005, p. 68.
- Elkins 2005, p. 38.
- Anderson 2005, p. 69.
- Anderson 2005, pp. 62–3.
- Andrew 2009, pp. 456–7.
See also: Walton 2013, pp. 236–86.
- Andrew 2009, p. 454. See also the relevant footnote, n.96 of p. 454.
- Elkins 2005, p. 39.
- Berman 1991, p. 189.
- Elkins 2005, p. 37.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 37–8.
- Clough 1998, p. 25.
- French 2011, p. 116.
- Edgerton 1989, p. 83.
- French 2011, p. 32.
- French 2011, pp. 116–7.
- Elkins 2005, p. 124: "There was an unusual consensus in the ranks of both the military and Baring's civilian government that the colony's capital was the nerve center for Mau Mau operations. Nearly three-quarters of the city's African male population of sixty thousand were Kikuyu, and most of these men, along with some twenty thousand Kikuyu women and children accompanying them, were allegedly 'active or passive supporters of Mau Mau'."
- Elkins 2005, pp. 121–5.
- Chappell 2011.
- Chappell 2011, p. 68.
- Edgerton 1989, p. 86: "Before the Emergency ended, the R.A.F. dropped the amazing total of 50,000 tons of bombs on the forests and fired over 2 million rounds from machine guns during strafing runs. It is not known how many humans or animals were killed."
- Chappell 2011, p. 67.
- Edgerton 1989, p. 86.
- Anderson 1988: "The Swynnerton Plan was among the most comprehensive of all the post-war colonial development programmes implemented in British Africa. Largely framed prior to the declaration of the State of Emergency in 1952, but not implemented until two years later, this development is central to the story of Kenya's decolonization".
- Elkins 2005, p. 127.
- Ogot 1995, p. 48.
- Anderson 1988.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 128–9.
- Elkins 2005, p. 125.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 62–90.
- Elkins 2005, p. 109.
- Elkins 2005, p. 108.
- The term gulag is used by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins. For Anderson, see his 2005 Histories of the Hanged, p. 7: "Virtually every one of the acquitted men . . . would spend the next several years in the notorious detention camps of the Kenyan gulag"; for Elkins, see the title of the UK edition of her 2005 book, Britain's Gulag.
- Elkins 2005, p. 136.
- Editorial (11 April 2011). "Mau Mau abuse case: Time to say sorry". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 154–91.
- Peterson 2008, pp. 75–6, 89, 91: "Some detainees, worried that the substance of their lives was draining away, thought their primary duty lay with their families. They therefore confessed to British officers, and sought an early release from detention. Other detainees refused to accept the British demand that they sully other people's reputations by naming those whom they knew to be involved in Mau Mau. This 'hard core' kept their mouths closed, and languished for years in detention. The battle behind the wire was not fought over detainees' loyalty to a Mau Mau movement. Detainees' intellectual and moral concerns were always close to home. . . . British officials thought that those who confessed had broken their allegiance to Mau Mau. But what moved detainees to confess was not their broken loyalty to Mau Mau, but their devotion to their families. British officials played on this devotion to hasten a confession. . . . The battle behind the wire was not fought between patriotic hard-core Mau Mau and weak-kneed, wavering, broken men who confessed. . . . Both hard core and soft core had their families in mind."
- Elkins 2005, p. 178.
- Editorial (13 April 2011). "Taking on the Boss: The quiet whistleblowers on events in Kenya deserve praise". The Times. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 179–91.
- Elkins 2005, p. 148. It is debatable whether Peter Kenyatta was sympathetic to Mau Mau in the first place and therefore whether he truly switched sides.
- Mike Thompson (7 April 2011). "Mau Mau blame 'goes right to the top'". Today. BBC. 00:40–00:54. Retrieved 12 May 2011.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 176–7.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 171–7.
- Elkins 2005, p. 144.
- Elkins 2005, Chapter 5: The Birth of Britain's Gulag.
- Curtis 2003, pp. 316–33.
- Ian Cobain; Peter Walker (11 April 2011). "Secret memo gave guidelines on abuse of Mau Mau in 1950s". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 April 2011. "Baring informed Lennox-Boyd that eight European officers were facing accusations of a series of murders, beatings and shootings. They included: "One District Officer, murder by beating up and roasting alive of one African." Despite receiving such clear briefings, Lennox-Boyd repeatedly denied that the abuses were happening, and publicly denounced those colonial officials who came forward to complain."
- Peterson 2008, p. 84.
- Elkins 2005, p. 262.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 151–2.
- Elkins 2005, p. 227.
- Curtis 2003, p. 327.
- Elkins 2005, p. 153.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 240–1.
- French 2011, pp. 116–37.
- McCulloch 2006, p. 70.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 234–5. See also n.3 of p. 235.
- Elkins 2005, p. 235. Anderson 2005, p. 294, gives a slightly lower figure (1,007,500) for the number of individuals affected.
- Elkins 2005, p. 240.
- Anderson 2005, p. 294.
- Nissimi 2006, pp. 9–10.
- Elkins 2005, p. 239.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 236–7.
- French 2011, p. 120.
- Elkins 2005, p. 238.
- Anderson 2005, p. 293.
- Elkins 2005, p. 252.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 259–60.
- Elkins 2005, p. 260.
- Elkins 2005, p. 263.
- Blacker 2007.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 260–1.
- Elkins 2005, p. 263: "It is accepted policy that cases of pulmonary tuberculosis . . . be returned to their reserve to avail themselves of the routine medical control and treatment within their areas". (The quote is of the colony's director of medical services).
- Elkins 2005, pp. 263–4: "The financial situation has now worsened. . . . Schemes of medical help, however desirable and however high their medical priority, could not in [these] circumstances be approved". (The quote is of Baring).
- Anderson 2005, p. 2.
- David Elstein (7 April 2011). "Daniel Goldhagen and Kenya: recycling fantasy". openDemocracy.org. Retrieved 8 March 2012.
- Elkins 2005, p. xiv.
- Elkins 2005, p. 366.
- Anderson 2005, p. 7.
- Anderson 2005, pp. 119–180.
- Anderson 2005, p. 127.
- Anderson 2005, p. 132.
- Anderson, Bennett & Branch 2006: "This article tells the story of an atrocity committed by British military forces in colonial Kenya. . . . [T]he shooting of twenty Kenyan civilians at Chuka in June 1953 has been hidden behind a veil of official secrecy. Evidence on these events should have been released into the Public Record Office in 1984. The file was withheld by the Ministry of Defence and marked for closure until 2038. Requests under the Freedom of Information Act secured its release in January 2006, and we can now reconstruct the disturbing story of the Chuka massacre. But not everything on this file has been revealed: and that raises tough questions about the culpability of the British Army in colonial war crimes, official secrecy, and the inadequacies of Freedom of Information legislation".
- Anderson 2005, p. 94.
- Elkins 2005, p. 42.
- Elkins 2005, p. 66.
- Anderson 2005, pp. 299–300.
- Elkins 2005, p. 87.
- Carus, W. Seth (2002). Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents Since 1900 (Reprint of 1st ed.). Amsterdam: Fredonia Books. pp. 63–65. "This episode is not mentioned in histories of the Mau Mau revolt, suggesting that such incidents were rare."
- Wasserman 1976, p. 1.
- Nissimi 2006, p. 2.
- Branch & Cheeseman 2006, p. 11: "The co-option of sympathetic African elites during the colonial twilight into the bureaucracy, the legislature and the private property-based economy meant that the allies of colonialism and representatives of transnational capital were able to reap the benefits of independence. . . . The post-colonial state must therefore be seen as a representation of the interests protected and promoted during the latter years of colonial rule. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the post-colonial state represented a 'pact-of-domination' between transnational capital, the elite and the executive."
- Percox 2005, pp. 752.
- Lonsdale 2000, p. 109–10. "Mau Mau, despite its problematic claims to be called 'nationalist' . . . forced the issue of power in a way that KAU had never done. It was not that Mau Mau won its war against the British; guerilla movements rarely win in military terms; and militarily Mau Mau was defeated. But in order to crown peace with sustainable civil governance—and thus reopen a prospect of controlled decolonization—the British had to abandon 'multiracialism' and adopt African rule as their vision of Kenya's future. . . . The blood of Mau Mau, no matter how peculiarly ethnic in source and aim, was the seed of Kenya's all-African sovereignty."
- Wasserman 1976, p. 1: "Although the rise of nationalist movements in Africa was certainly a contributing factor in the dismantling of the colonial empires, one cannot wholly attribute the 'demise of colonialism' to the rise of nationalism. . . . [T]he decolonization process was shaped by an adaptive reaction of colonial political and economic interests to the political ascendency of a nationalist elite and to the threat of disruption by the masses."
- "Former guerrillas seek damages". The Irish Times. 8 August 1999. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- "Mau Mau compensation demand". BBC News. 20 August 1999. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- Thompson, Mike (9 November 2002). "Mau Mau rebels threaten court action". BBC News. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- Plaut, Martin (31 August 2003). "Kenya lifts ban on Mau Mau". BBC News. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- Mike Pflanz (11 October 2006). "Mau Mau veterans issue writ deadline". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 11 February 2012.
- Mitchell, Andrew (26 September 2006). "Mau Mau veterans to sue over British 'atrocities'". The Independent. Retrieved 12 April 2011.
- Ireland, Corydon (1 September 2011). "Justice for Kenya's Mau Mau". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- McGhie, John (9 November 2002). "Kenya: White Terror". Correspondent. BBC. Retrieved 26 May 2012.
- " 'He came with pliers'—Kenyan alleges torture by British colonial authorities". BBC News. 7 April 2011. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- "Mau Mau case: UK government cannot be held liable". BBC News. 7 April 2011. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- McConnell, Tristan (21 July 2011). "Kenyan veterans celebrate first victory in compensation claim". The Times. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Macintyre, Ben (8 April 2011). "In court to face the ghosts of the past". The Times. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- "UK 'atrocity' apology". BBC News. 4 March 2005. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- Owen Bowcott (5 April 2011). "Kenyans sue UK for alleged colonial human rights abuses". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 February 2012.
- Owen Bowcott (7 April 2011). "Mau Mau victims seek compensation from UK for alleged torture". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 February 2012.
- Owen Bowcott (21 July 2011). "Mau Mau torture claim Kenyans win right to sue British government". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 July 2011.
- Dominic Casciani (21 July 2011). "Mau Mau Kenyans allowed to sue UK government". BBC News. Retrieved 21 July 2011.
- Macintyre, Ben; Ralph, Alex; McConnell, Tristan (21 July 2011). "Kenyans can sue over 'colonial torture' ". The Times. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Editorial (22 July 2011). "Good News from London". The Times. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Ben Macintyre (12 April 2011). "Torture device No 1: the legal rubber stamp". The Times. Retrieved 12 April 2011.
- Elkins 2011.
- "Kenyans were tortured during Mau Mau rebellion, High Court hears". telegraph.co.uk. 18 July 2012. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
- Ben Macintyre; Billy Kenber (13 April 2011). "Brutal beatings and the 'roasting alive' of a suspect: what secret Mau Mau files reveal". The Times. Retrieved 13 April 2011. "Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor of Kenya, in a telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, reported allegations of extreme brutality made against eight European district officers. They included 'assault by beating up and burning of two Africans during screening [interrogation]' and one officer accused of 'murder by beating up and roasting alive of one African'. No action was taken against the accused."
- Caroline Elkins (14 April 2011). "My critics ignored evidence of torture in Mau Mau detention camps". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 April 2011.
- Kenber, Billy (19 April 2011). "New documents show how Britain sanctioned Mau Mau torture". The Times. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Andy McSmith (8 April 2011). "Cabinet 'hushed up' torture of Mau Mau rebels". The Independent. Retrieved 10 February 2012.
- Wallis, Holly (18 April 2012). "British colonial files released following legal challenge". BBC News. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- Dominic Casciani (12 April 2011). "British Mau Mau abuse papers revealed". BBC News. Retrieved 12 May 2011.
- Ben Macintyre (5 April 2011). "Tales of brutality and violence that could open the claims floodgate". The Times. Retrieved 6 April 2011. "A letter was sent to William Hague on March 31 stating: 'The Republic of Kenya fully supports the claimants' case and has publicly denied any notion that responsibility for any acts and atrocities committed by the British colonial administration during the Kenya 'Emergency' was inherited by the Republic of Kenya.' "
- David Anderson (25 July 2011). "It's not just Kenya. Squaring up to the seamier side of empire is long overdue". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- For more on Anderson's reaction to the 'missing' papers, see:
- "Colonial secret papers to be made public". BBC News. 6 May 2011. Retrieved 12 May 2011.
- Mark Thompson (7 April 2011). "Mau Mau blame 'goes right to the top'". Today. BBC. 02:38–03:31. Retrieved 12 May 2011. "These new documents were withheld because they were considered to be particularly sensitive, so we can but imagine what will be in these documents. . . . Senior members of the Commonwealth Office in London did know what was happening; senior legal officials in London did, to some extent, sanction the use of coercive force; and also, at Cabinet level, the Secretary of State for the Colonies certainly knew of the excesses that were taking place." (The quote is of Anderson).
- James Blitz (5 April 2011). "Mau Mau case casts light on colonial records". Financial Times. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
- McGhie, John (9 November 2002). "Kenya: White Terror". Correspondent. BBC. Retrieved 26 May 2012.
- Macintyre, Ben; Kenber, Billy (15 April 2011). "Hundreds more top secret files missing in Mau Mau abuse case". The Times. Retrieved 26 May 2012. "In a statement to the court dated March 8, released to The Times yesterday, Martin Tucker, head of corporate records at the Foreign Office, reported that the 13 missing boxes could not be found. 'There were at one time a further 13 boxes of material retrieved from Kenya at independence which are additional to the documents discovered in Hanslope Park [the closed Foreign Office repository in Buckinghamshire] in January of this year,' he wrote. He found evidence that the files had once been stored in the basement of the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall, but traces of them had vanished after 1995."
- Elkins, Caroline (18 April 2012). "The colonial papers: FCO transparency is a carefully cultivated myth". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 May 2012.
- Cobain, Ian (5 October 2012). "Mau Mau torture case: Kenyans win ruling against UK". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
- Day, Martyn; Leader, Dan (5 October 2012). "The Kenyans tortured by the British must now be justly treated". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
- Townsend, Mark (23 December 2012). "Fury as Britain fights ruling on Kenya torture victims". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
- Cobain, Ian; Hatcher, Jessica (5 May 2013). "Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over legal settlement". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
- Bennett, Huw (5 May 2013). "Kenyan Mau Mau: official policy was to cover up brutal mistreatment". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2013.
- Lonsdale 2003, p. 47.
- Jacob Ole Miaron, Permanent Secretary of the Vice President Ministry of State for National Heritage and Culture (26 February 2009). "Speech to the 52nd Commemoration of the Memory of Dedan Kimathi" (pdf). Retrieved 14 April 2011.
- "Chapter Two—The Republic". Constitution of Kenya, 2010. National Council for Law Reporting. Article 9, p. 15. "The national days . . . [shall include] Mashujaa Day, to be observed on 20 October".
- Dominic Odipo (10 May 2010). "Who are Kenya's real heroes?". The Standard (Nairobi: Standard Group). "Changing Kenyatta Day to Mashujaa Day is not just an innocuous and harmless exercise in constitutional semantics."
- Jenkins, Cathy (22 March 2001). "Monuments for the Mau Mau". BBC News. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
- Anderson 2005, pp. 335–6: "[Kenyatta] often spoke of the need to 'forgive and forget', and to 'bury the past'. He acknowledged the part the freedom fighters had played in the struggle, but he never once made any public statement that conceded to them any rights or any genuine compensation. Mau Mau was a thing best forgotten. . . . In Kenyatta's Kenya there would be a deafening silence about Mau Mau".
- Branch 2009, pp. xiii–xiv.
- Elkins 2005, pp. 360–3: "During the run-up to independence and the years that followed, former loyalists also wielded political clout to consolidate their own interests and power. Under Kenyatta many became influential members of the new government. . . . This system of loyalist patronage percolated all the way down to the local level of government, with former Home Guards dominating bureaucracies that had once been the preserve of the young British colonial officers in the African districts. Of the numerous vacancies created by decolonization—powerful posts like provincial commissioner and district commissioner—the vast majority were filled by one time loyalists."
- Branch 2009, pp. xii–xiii.
- Nissimi 2006, p. 11.
- Ormsby-Gore 1925, p. 148.
- Kanogo 1993, p. 10.
- Elkins 2005, p. 63.
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- Kalyvas, Stathis N. (2006). The Logic of Violence in Civil War. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85409-2.
- Kanogo, Tabitha (1992). Dedan Kimathi: A Biography. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.
- Kanogo, Tabitha (1993) . Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905–63. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. ISBN 9966-46-326-7.
- Lapping, Brian (1989). End of Empire (revised ed.). London: Paladin. ISBN 978-0-586-08870-8.
- Leys, Norman (1973) . Kenya (4th ed.). London: Frank Cass. ISBN 978-0-714-61688-9.
- Lonsdale, John (2000). "KAU's Cultures: Imaginations of Community and Constructions of Leadership in Kenya after the Second World War". Journal of African Cultural Studies 13 (1). pp. 107–124. JSTOR 1771859.
- Lonsdale, John (2003). "Authority, Gender & Violence: The war within Mau Mau's fight for land & freedom". In Elisha Stephen Atieno-Odhiambo & John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration. Oxford: James Currey. pp. 46–75. ISBN 978-0-852-55478-4.
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- Majdalany, Fred (1963). State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
- Maloba, Wunyabari O. (1998) . Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (revised ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-852-55745-7.
- Maxon, Robert M. (1989). Conflict and Accommodation in Western Kenya: The Gusii and the British, 1907–1963. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-0-838-63350-2.
- McCulloch, Jock (2006) . Colonial Psychiatry and "the African Mind" (revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-03480-7.
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- Newsinger, John (1981). "Revolt and Repression in Kenya: The 'Mau Mau' Rebellion, 1952–1960". Science & Society 45 (2): 159–185. JSTOR 40402312.
- Nissimi, Hilda (2006). "Mau Mau and the Decolonisation of Kenya". Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 8 (3).
- Ogot, Bethwell Allan (1995). "The Decisive Years: 1956–63". In Bethwell Allan Ogot & William Robert Ochieng', eds., Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–93. Oxford: James Currey. pp. 48–82. ISBN 978-0-8214-1051-6.
- Ogot, Bethwell Allan (2003). "Mau Mau & Nationhood: The Untold Story". In Atieno-Odhiambo; Lonsdale. In Elisha Stephen Atieno-Odhiambo & John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration. Oxford: James Currey. pp. 8–36. ISBN 978-0-852-55478-4.
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- Pirouet, M. Louise (1977). "Armed Resistance and Counter-Insurgency: Reflections on the Anya Nya and Mau Mau Experiences". In Ali A. Mazrui, ed., The Warrior Tradition in Modern Africa. Leiden: Brill. pp. 197–214. ISBN 978-9-004-05646-6.
- Ranger, T. O. (1968). "Connexions between 'Primary Resistance' Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa. Part I". The Journal of African History 9 (3): 437–453. JSTOR 180275.
- Sandgren, David (2012). Mau Mau's Children: The Making of Kenya's Postcolonial Elite. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-28784-9.
- Swainson, Nicola (1980). The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918–77. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03988-9.
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- Walton, Calder (2013). Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. London: HarperPress. ISBN 978-0-007-45796-0.
- Wasserman, Gary (2008) . Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue 1960–1965 (digital reprint ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-10023-6.
Further reading 
- Bennett, Huw (2012). Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-02970-5.
- Berman, Bruce; Lonsdale, John (1992). Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa; Book One: State & Class. Oxford: James Currey. ISBN 978-0-852-55021-2.
- Berman, Bruce; Lonsdale, John (1992). Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa; Book Two: Violence & Ethnicity. Oxford: James Currey. ISBN 978-0-852-55099-1.
- Branch, Daniel (2006). "Loyalists, Mau Mau, and Elections in Kenya: The First Triumph of the System, 1957-1958". Africa Today 53 (2): 27–50. JSTOR 4187771.
- Clough, Marshall S. (1990). Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918–1940. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. ISBN 978-0-870-81207-1.
- Derrick, Jonathan (2008). Africa's "Agitators": Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-70056-6.
- Heinlein, Frank (2002). British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945-1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind. London: Frank Cass. ISBN 978-0-7146-5220-7.
- Henderson, Ian; Goodhart, Philip (1958). Man Hunt in Kenya. New York, NY: Doubleday and Company.
- Hewitt, Peter (2008) . Kenya Cowboy: A Police Officer's Account of the Mau Mau Emergency. Johannesburg: 30° South Publishers. ISBN 978-1-920-14323-7.
- Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi (1975). "Mau Mau" Detainee: The Account by a Kenya African of his Experiences in Detention Camps 1953–1960. New York and London: Oxford University Press.
- Kyle, Keith (1999). The Politics of the Independence of Kenya. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-72008-3.
- Lonsdale, John (1990). "Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya". The Journal of African History 31 (3): 393–421. JSTOR 182877.
- Lovatt Smith, David (2005). Kenya, the Kikuyu and Mau Mau. Mawenzi Books. ISBN 978-0-954-47132-3.
- Lyttelton, Oliver (1962). The Memoirs of Lord Chandos. London: Bodley Head.
- Marsh, Zoe; Kingsnorth, G.W. (1972). A History of East Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-08348-6.
- Murphy, Philip (1999) . Party Politics and Decolonization: The Conservative Party and British Colonial Policy in Tropical Africa, 1951–1964. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820505-0.
- Murphy, Philip (1999). Alan Lennox-Boyd: A Biography. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-86064-406-1.
- Njagi, David (1991). The Last Mau Mau (Kenya's Freedom Heroes or Villains?): An Excerpt. Nairobi. Archived from the original on 24 July 2009.
- Parsons, Timothy (1999). African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King's African Rifles, 1902–1964. Hanover, NH: Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-325-00140-1.
- Percox, David (2011) . Britain, Kenya and the Cold War: Imperial Defence, Colonial Security and Decolonisation. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84885-966-1.
- Shilaro, Priscilla M (2002). "Colonial Land Policies: The Kenya Land Commission and the Kakamega Gold Rush, 1932–4". In William Robert Ochieng', ed., Historical Studies and Social Change in Western Kenya: Essays in Memory of Professor Gideon S. Were. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. pp. 110–128. ISBN 9966-25-152-9.
- Throup, David (1987). Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53. Oxford: James Currey. ISBN 0-85255-024-3.
- Archive newsreels from Pathé News. Includes footage of: military operations against Mau Mau; the capture of Dedan Kimathi; capture of General China (Waruhiu Itote); the survivors of the Lari massacre and the defendants' trial; Operation Anvil.
- Colonial Film's archive footage of Mau Mau
- "Lost" Mau Mau-era government-documents posted by the BBC's Dominic Casciani