Mau Mau Rebellion – Kenya’s Bloodiest Decolonization War Fought During The Twentieth Century

Introduction

Ring a bell? A. If not, don’t worry — it’s not a result of the public education system failing to inform you of Kenya’s bloodiest decolonization war fought during the twentieth century; rather, it’s a result of the British failing to tell the world that they brutalized the Kikuyu people in order to maintain a reputation of being the peaceful leader of the colonizing world. I was in my Modern African History class where we learned about how the Kikuyu people had reacted to the British taking their land to build the Uganda Railroad, and how the British had quietly, yet violently colonized them with the use of detention camps. Since this was mainly brought into the spotlight in 2006 by the release of Caroline Elkin’s Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, the information has been swept under the rug in the educational realm. Today, I’m going to be educating you on why the rebellion formed, how the British attempted to cleanse the urban and rural areas of the Kikuyu people, and the reparations that were made once the discovery of the hidden files of their civilizing were revealed.

The 1952-1960 Mau Mau Rebellion had remained relatively uncovered and unresearched because Kenya was overlooked as a mild, eventless country of colonizing. That is, of course, until, then Harvard graduate Caroline Elkins, decided to focus her dissertation on the uprising of the native Kenyan-Kikuyu people, who were forced from their land during British’s colonization of north and southeastern Africa. According to London’s archives of the civilizing (in insert author and book), the detention camps “were not meant to punish the rebellious Kikuyu but rather to civilize them. Behind the barbed wire, colonial officials were reportedly giving the detainees civics courses and home-craft classes; they were teaching the insurgents how to be good citizens and thus become capable of running Kenya sometime in the future. ”

Great Britain began constructing The Uganda Railway in the 1880s to allow Uganda to be globally connected to the world. British Protectorate Sir Charles Eliot surveyed Kenya in 1902 and found that the people were deficient of civilization and the land of future consumers of the railroad’s potential goods. I. With this, Great Britain began their expedition to spread racism and white violence by taking the Kikuyu’s most prized possession: land. In order for a Kikuyu man to have his rite of passage into manhood, he needed to have land to cultivate, but since they fled from British invasion and disease, it wasn’t plausible. World War II allowed Kenya to consolidate the settler’s economic control into a powerful enough force to conscript the Kenyans onto British farms.

With the growing pressure, the Kikuyu had to leave their traditional sedentary practices to make the most of every reserved parcel of land. The Kikuyu people lost more than sixty-thousand acres in the fertile southern region of Kiambu. The British police felt entitled to fight the war by any means necessary. A. Beginning in 1953, Britain worked in coordination with British-Kikuyu loyalists to cleanse the countryside of the Mau Mau by assaulting people, stripping them, beating them, and then either executing them there or leading them off to be shot.

As one woman who survived stated in Caroline Elkin’s Imperial Reckoning, “later, the whites ordered them to be buried beneath the road and tarmacked it over again. But for a long time, you could see the dried blood that had oozed to the surface and out of the sides. ” The British government, under the power of Governor Baring, attempted to break the Mau Mau’s aid by increasingly ordering for punishments and confiscations of land and personal belongings. Tens of thousands of cattle, goats, and sheep were taken, and never returned. The following quote is quite gruesome, but without sharing the entire story, I find that it’s hard to grasp the extent of the true horror that took place. In Imperial Reckoning, a past officer stated “I can truthfully say that only one act of cruelty towards a Kikuyu ever revolted me during my service in the police. With two other Europeans I was questioning an old man. His answers were unsatisfactory. One of the white men set his dog at the old fellow. The animal got him to the ground, ripped open his throat, and started mauling his chest and arms. In spite of his screams, my companions just grinned”.

Operation Anvil occurred on April 24, 1954, when twenty-five thousand police members forced ethnic cleansing by rounding up all Kikuyu in urban Nairobi to prepare for screening. A. At the end of the operation, over fifty-thousand Kikuyu were sent in for screening and/or deportation at one of two camps — one for “soft” sympathizers of the Mau Mau; the other camp was for extreme oath taker offenders. Most suspects were held and tortured without trial. Torture would range from castration, to being force-fed feces, to the diseases that spread throughout the camps such as typhoid, dysentery, and diarrhea because of the water’s - if available - poor quality.

Later, British historians were suspicious of the gaps in the detention camp’s lists and archives. A. The colonial government was careful to hide the violence of dealing with the detainees by rephrasing beatings of ‘rape, castration, and arbitrary killings’ to ‘screening, dilution, and rehabilitation. ’ Instead of calling the rebellion as being engaged in ‘war’, they called it a ‘tribal uprising’. They wanted to follow the British Attorney General’s conclusion of ‘If, therefore, we are going to sin, we must sin quietly. ’ Later papers revealed that Governor Baring was aware of the processes that took place — he once even asked for the numbers of men beaten.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Great Britain’s idea of civilizing resulted in a deadly rebellion and detention camps that would strip people, literally and figuratively, of their dignity and well-being. Although the Kikuyu people underwent horrendous torture and loss, they eventually were able to achieve independence and monetary reparations for their hardships. The during and post-World War II time period was a time for gulags, and with the revelation of this eight-year period, the world can hopefully learn from their mistakes to prevent any future similar happenings.