The Mau Mau Uprising

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Sarah Medeiros
HIS295H5
Professor N. Marshall
Thursday, April 24th, 2014

The Mau-Mau Uprising: The Buildup to British Counter-Insurgency

Insurgencies are no strangers to history, and have incessantly proven to be turning points for those populations who are oppressed or subjugated, typically into a chance for positive change. However, history books tend to overlook Africa’s remarkable political growth in the modern era, even though their population has endured centuries of oppression and have rebelled similarly to that of the Soviet Union insurgencies in the twentieth century. A strong example of African political strife would be between the Mau-Mau and the British in Kenya. The Mau-Mau Uprising was a civil war fought in Kenya, which began on October 21st, 1952, and ended on January 12th, 1960. The rebellion had been fought by the African rebellion groups, the Mau-Mau, against the British government in an attempt to regain Kenyan land which had been procured from the original owners and permeated by white colonists. Their road to improvement had become blocked by colonialism, and the Mau-Mau chose to express their displeasure through violence and upheaval. Following the realization that they had become subjugated in their homeland, the Mau-Mau Uprising is a chief instance of African peoples opting to wage war for their freedom. It is an event which revealed how politically conscious Kenyans were at the time, and how they fought to create their own future apart from the colonialist world of which they were slowly becoming prisoners.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, European explorers charted sections of central Kenya, and began to map the coastlines. Foreigners had lived and ruled on Kenyan soi...

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... the duration of “Operation Anvil,” 20,000 Mau-Mau suspects were brought to screening camps and even more were forced into unhygienic reserves or designated camps. Many “screening camps” were created that the government had to employ white settlers as provisional officers to be their authority. The circumstances within the camps were vicious, and all of the detainees were racially separated by their color. The white prisoners were cooperative and were sent to the less-awful reserves, the “greys” were considered the radicals who had been involved with the Mau-Mau, but were somewhat obliging and moved to labor camps, whereas the blacks were seen as extreme radical Mau-Maus and were individually detained in specific black camps. Because of the large number of prisoners escorted to these camps monthly, the screening process was usually brutal, tiring, and demoralizing.

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