Mau Mau rebellion

The Mau Mau rebellion, also known as the Kenya Emergency, was an armed uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya, fought mainly between 1952 and 1956, with remnants holding out until 1960. Its fighters, who called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, were drawn mostly from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru peoples. The British defeated the insurgency with military force, mass detention and forced resettlement, but the conflict hastened the end of colonial rule, and Kenya became independent in December 1963.

Britain declared a protectorate over Kenya in 1895 and made it a colony in 1920. White settlement began in earnest in 1902, and over the following decades the colonial government and settlers took control of large areas of fertile land, the "White Highlands", reserved for Europeans. Africans were confined to overcrowded reserves and pushed into wage labour by hut and poll taxes, labour laws and a compulsory pass, the kipande. The Kikuyu of the central highlands were among the hardest hit by land loss. Peaceful political organising through the Kenya African Union, founded in 1944 as the Kenya African Study Union, achieved few reforms, and the initiative passed to younger militants, squatters on settler farms and activists in Nairobi. Oaths of loyalty, a traditional practice that was radicalised and spread widely, bound supporters to the movement. The origin of the name Mau Mau is uncertain; one suggestion is that it echoes the earlier Maji Maji Rebellion.

In October 1952 Mau Mau killed a European woman near Thika and then assassinated Senior Chief Waruhiu, a leading supporter of colonial rule. On 20 October Governor Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency, and Operation Jock Scott arrested about 180 alleged leaders, among them Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta, who had publicly criticised Mau Mau and whose role in it rested on little credible evidence, was put on trial in 1953 in proceedings alleged to have been seriously unfair. Thousands of fighters went into the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. The conflict was also a civil war within Kikuyu society, between rebels and "loyalists" who sided with the government.

Violence was severe on both sides. In March 1953 Mau Mau fighters attacked the settlement of Lari, burning people in their huts; official figures put the dead at 74, and a reprisal by security forces that followed killed perhaps 150 more. Officially Mau Mau killed 1,819 African civilians, though the historian David Anderson estimates about 5,000, as well as 32 European and 26 Asian civilians.

Under General George Erskine the British combined forest sweeps and bombing with Operation Anvil in April 1954, which sealed off Nairobi and detained or deported tens of thousands of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru residents. Suspects were held in a network of screening and detention camps, where torture and abuse were widespread. From 1954 more than a million Kikuyu were forced into fortified "protected villages". The capture of the rebel leader Dedan Kimathi in October 1956 marked the military defeat of the movement. Abuses continued, as at the Hola camp in March 1959, where guards beat eleven detainees to death.

Estimates vary widely. British forces probably killed more than 20,000 fighters, and 1,090 people were hanged. Anderson estimates around 25,000 deaths overall and the demographer John Blacker about 50,000, many from hunger and disease; Caroline Elkins has suggested far higher figures, which other scholars dispute. About 95 British military personnel died.

Political concessions followed, and a conference in London in January 1960 opened the way to African majority rule. Kenyatta became the country's leader after independence, and Mau Mau was long played down in official memory. Mau Mau remained officially banned until 2003. In 2013 the British government, which still denies legal liability, agreed to pay £19.9 million to 5,228 Kenyans who had been tortured or mistreated, and it funded a memorial in Nairobi unveiled in 2015.

Our 1945 and 1960 maps show British Kenya during the colonial period, and the 1985 map shows independent Kenya.