The Mau Mau Uprising

By the 1940s, the Kikuyu people of central Kenya had a problem that would not go away. The fertile highlands their families had farmed for generations had been taken by British settlers and renamed the 'White Highlands'. Kikuyu families were squeezed into crowded reserves or lived as squatters on settler farms, working for low wages on land that had once been theirs.

For years, Kenyans tried to change this peacefully. They sent petitions, formed political associations and argued their case in courts and newspapers. Almost nothing changed. By the late 1940s, a growing number of young Kikuyu, many of them landless and unemployed, decided that peaceful routes were closed.

They began taking oaths, serious spiritual promises that bound them to the movement and to each other. The colonial government called the movement 'Mau Mau'. The fighters often called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army.

On 20 October 1952, the Governor declared a State of Emergency. Jomo Kenyatta and other political leaders were arrested, even though Kenyatta's real role in Mau Mau was unclear. In 1953 he was convicted at a trial in Kapenguria and imprisoned. Thousands of fighters moved into the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya and fought a guerrilla war, led by commanders such as Dedan Kimathi. A few women fought in the forests too; Muthoni Kirima rose to the rank of field marshal.

The British response was massive. In April 1954, Operation Anvil swept through Nairobi, rounding up tens of thousands of Africans. Tens of thousands more were detained in a system of camps known as 'the Pipeline'. From 1954, around a million rural Kikuyu were forced into guarded 'emergency villages'. Abuse in the camps was widespread. More than 1,000 Kenyans were hanged.

The conflict also divided Kenyans. Many Kikuyu, known as loyalists, openly sided with the British, often serving in the Home Guard. Mau Mau fighters attacked them, and also people they accused of being collaborators: those suspected of secretly passing information to the British or refusing to support the fighters. Some accusations were true; others were not. In some ways it was also a civil war.

Kimathi was captured in October 1956 and executed in 1957. By then the forest army was nearly defeated. But the Emergency had cost Britain heavily in money and reputation. It lasted until 1960, and within four years Kenya was independent.