The Mau Mau rebellion (1952 to 60), led by the Kikuyu people of Kenya, was a guerrilla war conducted against British colonial rule, motivated by anger at land confiscations and the threat to indigenous belief systems and cultural practices. Called by the British the 'Kenyan Emergency,' the response of the authorities to the wave of violent attacks by the Mau Mau on African civilians and White settlers involved mass arrests in detention camps, reprisals against villages, and the forced resettlement of civilians suspected of involvement, and such abuses as torture and executions without trial.

Britain had established a presence in East Africa from 1887, when it leased this part of what was then known as the Swahili Coast from the Sultan of Zanzibar. A royal charter was awarded to the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888, and this entity controlled what was then called British East Africa (comprised of Kenya and Uganda). The main export was ivory in this period. Nairobi, which became the Kenyan capital, was founded in 1899, and its population boomed, with many immigrants coming from Britain and British India. British East Africa was a British protectorate from 1895, and in 1920, it became a full colony when its name was changed to Kenya.

The colony prospered (from an imperial point of view) thanks to its mild climate, which made it suitable for diverse plantations. Kenya also had large game reserves (where hunting was strictly controlled), which were first created in 1898. Africans were excluded from political representation except at a local level in the Local Native Councils.

In 1948, there were around 30,000 White settlers in Kenya, which then had an overall population of around 5 million people. By the early 1950s, the British government realised that independence movements across the British Empire were becoming more and more insistent. Nevertheless, the government wanted to preserve and continue to promote British interests wherever possible, including in Kenya. A balancing act was required where British, nationalist, and minority group interests could all be preserved. Key requirements for a handover of power in more advanced and stable colonies like Kenya were universal suffrage in free elections and multiracial development.

A proposal to join together Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika to create an East Africa Federation was rejected as contrary to the British government's main aim of ensuring the interests of Africans were cared for, as opposed to only those of White settlers in these areas. The three states did share a postal system, currency, and common market. Nationalist movements in all three countries wanted their own independent state. Some Kenyans, particularly amongst the Kikuyu people, were prepared to achieve change through violence.

The Kikuyu people had been present in Kenya since the 17th century. The Kikuyu were then the largest ethnic group in Kenya (and still are today). They dominated the central highlands with its cool climate and fertile soil ideal for agriculture. Lacking traditional chieftship and with government loosely based on tribal elders, it was colonial rule that forged them into a unified resistance movement based on ethnicity. As the historian P. Curtin notes: "Before the colonial impact, the Kikuyu of central Kenya had no deep consciousness of a common identity, probably because they lived on separate mountain ridges, had very local historical traditions, and lacked a unified political system" (518). As Waruhui Itote, the Mau Mau general, stated in 1967: "I had become conscious of myself as a Kenyan African, one among millions whose destinies were still in the hands of foreigners" (Dalziel, 128).

In colonial Kenya, the Kikuyu were united by common grievances against the British authorities. These grievances included anger that land was taken from the Kikuyu and given to White settlers, particularly in the highly desirable areas known as the "White Highlands," where the higher altitude meant crops could grow better and where a wider range of crops was possible. The British government wanted to encourage British settlers, and so, from the early 20th century, a programme was instigated where a new White settler received either 1,000 acres (404 ha) of agricultural land or 5,000 acres (2023 ha) of pasture land on long leases. At least 16,000 square miles (41,440 km²) of land was reserved in this way for cultivation by White landowners. With an acute shortage of land, many Kikuyu farmers now found themselves obliged to work as labour tenants on farms owned by White people. The pastoral Masai people also suffered from these restrictions and lost access to land they had traditionally used for grazing their cattle.

Laws passed in the 1930s began to restrict African land ownership in the colony. Laws also prohibited Africans from raising certain types of crops. Coffee, for example, was reserved for White landowners and reflected the government's policy that Africans should cultivate foodstuffs for Kenya's domestic market while White owners cultivated more lucrative cash crops for export. The policy of restriction had the intended effect since by 1956, 95% of Kenya's agricultural exports came from European-owned farms.

The Kikuyu did not like either the spread of urban centres or the segregation restrictions the authorities imposed on Africans. In Nairobi, Africans were not permitted into the urban core centre without a pass. Another grievance was that the British promotion of primary schools and Christian missionary schools eroded traditional religions and cultural practices. By 1960, 49% of Kenyan children were enrolled in primary schools, double the figure it had been in 1950. The Kikuyu began to set up their own rival schools.

As the historian R. J. Reid notes, of all these grievances, it was the land crisis and the government's insistence on creating a cheap African labour force that could work on European farms or for city businesses that were the key to the Mau Mau unrest:

The landless poor – lacking in skills and access to them, working as labourers either on white farms or in the swelling urban centers – constituted a huge chunk of the populace, increasingly politicized, radicalized, and open to revolutionary political ideas; they were ripe for mobilization, and began to congregate around any cause that held out the promise of destruction of the extant political and social system. These were the underlying roots of the Mau Mau revolt.

(207)

In 1952, a terrible, violent phase began in the long-simmering movement for Kenyan independence. Rebels, based in the forests and hills of southern-central Kenya, essentially attempted to sabotage anything connected with Europeans. Members of the Mau Mau movement, who also included a minority of Embu and Meru people, swore an oath of allegiance which not only reinforced a common identity among them but also ensured discipline and, above all, secrecy, in their mission to bring down White rule. The British gave these rebels their name, "Mau Mau", but the precise meaning of the term is much disputed. The historian R. J. Reid suggests the name was a mispronunciation of the Kikuyu rebels' slogan uma uma, meaning "out, out" or derived from muma, meaning "oath."

Most of the victims of the Mau Mau rebels were not Europeans but other Kikuyu suspected of collaborating with the Whites. Men, women, and children were tortured, mutilated, and murdered in a deliberate attempt to strike terror into the colonial regime and its supporters. Sometimes entire villages were attacked in this way, such as in the infamous Lari massacre in March 1953, where 75 villagers were herded into their huts, which were then set ablaze. Only a small number of White settlers were attacked and murdered by the Mau Mau, but the few cases that there were had a dramatic effect on the colony and on the British government in London. As the historian L. James notes:

Very few settlers were killed by the Mau Mau, but its psychological effect was enormous, reminding them of their smallness in numbers and isolation. Mau Mau was the ultimate white man's nightmare whose ingredients were images of a dark, impenetrable Africa of witchcraft and fear of sudden attack by crazed tribesmen armed with pangas and spears.

(611)

A national emergency was declared in 1952, and the Mau Mau movement was classified as a terrorist organisation, which allowed the authorities to extend the powers of the police, suspend personal freedoms, and censor the press. White settlers were given protection, largely through the use of trained African soldiers, who protected the more isolated homesteads, the Kenyan police service, and the army. Villages were systematically searched, and indiscriminate arrests were made. 70,000 Kikuyu and other Africans loyal to the colonial regime volunteered to form a sort of home guard. Some volunteers were even formed into "counter-gangs to fight Mau Mau" (Reid, 276) and to act as spies within the Mau Mau organisation.

Jomo Kenyatta (1894 to 1978) was the most prominent Kenyan nationalist leader. In 1952, Kenyatta, who was a Kikuyu, was arrested for suspected involvement in the Mau Mau rebellion. In fact, Kenyatta's involvement with the Mau Mau rebels was never direct. Kenyatta had pursued more peaceful means of achieving political change through the political party of which he was president from 1947, the Kenyan African Union (KAU). Nevertheless, in 1953, Kenyatta was convicted of organising groups within the rebellion and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. It was later discovered that the evidence used against Kenyatta was perjured.

Anyone, then, suspected of being a Mau Mau rebel or connected with the movement was arrested. So many Africans were arrested that special detention centres had to be built. The most infamous such centre was the Hola Camp prison, where rebels were beaten, flogged, tortured, hanged, or shot attempting to escape (according to the authorities). The numbers are suggestive. In just one six-month period, between November 1952 and April 1953, "430 prisoners had been shot dead while attempting to escape…" (James, 610). The lack of any wounded strongly suggests these people were simply executed.

A later enquiry revealed just what had been going on in places like the Hola Camp. The British authorities had declared that membership of the Mau Mau was caused by a sort of mental illness, an indoctrination of violent ideas that somehow now had to be reversed. As R. J. Reid notes:

…detainees were treated with marked brutality, including brainwashing and forced labour with the aim of cleansing body and mind of the "disease." Many detainees had refused to work and had been subjected to physical abuse, some of them being beaten to death.

(277)

The majority of Kikuyu people did not endorse the Mau Mau movement. There was a broad rejection of the brutally violent methods used. The Mau Mau's lack of popular appeal, coherent ideology, and distinct leadership structure all meant that the movement failed to spread to other areas of Kenya or involve other Kenyans. There was some sympathy with the rebels' calls for reforms, but it was widely recognised that the colonial authorities, who were much better armed than the rebels, would ultimately put an end to the wave of violence. There was also a substantial number of Kikuyu farmers who had done well out of the colony's policy of restricting them to the domestic market since they were able to always find customers in the growing urban centres for their goods. Such well-off Kikuyu and those Kenyans who worked as white-collar workers or owned businesses in the towns had no particular interest in throwing over the colonial system.

The Mau Mau rebellion gained international news coverage and was sometimes used by other African nationalists elsewhere as inspiration for their own independence movements. Even in Britain, the long-held idea that the British were somehow civilizing the populations in their colonies was being seriously questioned, as was the very idea of an empire in the post-war 20th century. Clearly, the colonial authorities could take no chances with allowing the rebellion to escalate or drag on. 12,000 army troops were called in, as was the air force, and, with the help of the Kenyan police force and an army of local African recruits, the rebels were relentlessly hunted down, and the movement ultimately quashed. The rebellion was largely over by 1956, when the most prominent Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, was arrested, tried, and hanged. It then took several more years to weed out the remaining isolated Mau Mau rebel groups. In this period, thousands of ordinary Kenyans were obliged to remain in the detention camps. The emergency was only officially declared over in 1960.

In all, around 11,000 rebels had been killed and at least 80,000 people arrested during the rebellion. 2,000 Africans and 32 White civilians died as victims of the Mau Mau rebels. Over one million Africans had been forcibly displaced to guarded villages by the colonial authorities. In 2013, the British government acknowledged that atrocities had been perpetrated by both sides and set aside £20 million to pay compensation to victims of police brutality during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Kenya's problems, and particularly those of Africans, did not go away with the end of the rebellion. In 1956, Kenya's White population was still a mere 1% of the total population. At least the British government was beginning to concede that change had to happen. Land reforms were instigated, including opening up the White Highlands to African settlers, and subsidies were awarded to African agriculture. These reforms only helped the better-off Kenyans rather than the poorer farmers who had joined the Mau Mau movement. Nevertheless, it became only a matter of time and what form self-government would take. Indeed, it is quite possible that the Mau Mau rebellion, if anything, delayed political progress towards independence since no handover could be contemplated until some sort of stability was regained. Ghana, for example, had achieved independence in 1957.

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in office from 1957 to 1963, famously described the unstoppable movements calling for independence across the British Empire as a "wind of change" in a speech in South Africa in 1960. Colonial leaders in the specific colonies were rather less enthusiastic about change. Patrick Renison, Governor of Kenya from 1959, persisted in insulting such figures as Kenyatta, describing him as "a leader unto darkness and death" (Marshall, 177). Nevertheless, Kenyatta was released from prison in 1961, and free elections were held, which saw the first Africans in government. Another election in 1963, this time based on universal suffrage, allowed Kenyatta and his party, now called the Kenya African National Union (KANU), to form the government. Kenya gained independence on 12 November 1963, and Kenyatta became its first prime minister and then president in 1964 (when Kenya became a republic), a position he held until his death in 1978. Although far from trouble-free, Kenya has since enjoyed more political and economic stability than most post-colonial states in Africa.