Mau Mau Uprising
Date 1952–1960 Location Colony of Kenya Result British military victory
Belligerents
Mau Mau[1][2][A]	British Army Kikuyu Home Guard
Commanders and leaders
Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi Field Marshal Musa Mwariama General China (Waruhiu Itote) Stanley Mathenge	Sir Evelyn Baring (Governor) General Sir George Erskine Sir Kenneth O'Connor (Chief Justice)
Strength
Unknown	10,000 regular troops (African and British); 21,000 police; 25,000 Kikuyu Home Guard[3][4]
Casualties and losses
Mau Mau: Killed: 12,000 officially; 20,000+ unofficially[5] Captured: 2,633 Surrendered: 2,714	British and African security forces: Killed: 200 Wounded: 579 Surrendered: n/a
Civilians Victims of Mau Mau:[3][6] These figures do not include the many hundreds of Africans who 'disappeared', and whose bodies were never found. Africans killed: 1,819 Africans wounded: 916 Asians killed: 26 Asians wounded: 36 Europeans killed: 32 Europeans wounded: 26

Map of Kenya

The Mau Mau Uprising (also known as the Mau Mau Revolt, Mau Mau Rebellion and the Kenya Emergency) was a military conflict that took place in Kenya^[B] between 1952 and 1960. It involved a Kikuyu-dominated anti-colonial group called Mau Mau and elements of the British Army, auxiliaries and anti-Mau Mau Kikuyu.^[1][7]

The movement was unable to capture widespread public support.^[8] The capture of rebel leader Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 signalled the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau uprising, and essentially ended the British military campaign.^[9]

It has been argued that the conflict help set the stage for Kenyan independence in December 1963.^[10] It created a rift between the European colonial community in Kenya and the Home Office in London,^[2] but also resulted in violent divisions within the Kikuyu community.^[5][11]

Etymology[link]

The origin of the term Mau Mau is uncertain. According to some members of Mau Mau, they never referred to themselves as such, instead preferring the military title Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA).^[12] Some publications, such as Fred Majdalany's State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau, claim that it was an anagram of Uma Uma (which means "get out get out") and was a military codeword based on a secret language-game Kikuyu boys used to play at the time of their circumcision. Majdalany goes on to state that the British simply used the name as a label for the Kikuyu ethnic community without assigning any specific definition.^[13]

As the movement progressed, a Swahili acronym was adopted: "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru" meaning "Let the European go back to Europe (Abroad), Let the African regain Independence".^[14] J.M. Kariuki, a member of Mau Mau who was detained during the conflict, postulates that the British preferred to use the term Mau Mau instead of KLFA in an attempt to deny the Mau Mau rebellion international legitimacy.^[15] Kariuki also wrote that the term Mau Mau was adopted by the rebellion in order to counter what they regarded as colonial propaganda.^[14]

Nature of the rebellion[link]

The contemporary, colonial view saw Mau Mau as a savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult, an expression of unrestrained emotion rather than reason. Mau Mau was "perverted tribalism" that sought to take the Kikuyu people back to "the bad old days" before British rule.^[16][17] This characterisation reflected the British refusal to attend to the legitimate social and economic grievances of the Kikuyu, grievances that were a direct result of colonial rule. Indeed, the official British explanation of the revolt consisted not of the insights of agrarian and agricultural experts, economists and historians—nor even of a European who had spent a long period living amongst the Kikuyu, such as Louis Leakey—but of a psychiatrist who could analyse the "African mind", one JC Carothers. This ethnopsychiatric explanation affected everything from British psychological warfare, which painted Mau Mau as "an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism", to the later official study of the uprising, the Corfield Report.^[18] The psychological war became of critical importance to military and civilian leaders, who waged it in the time-honoured colonial fashion of divide and rule, always trying to "emphasise that there was in effect a civil war, and that the struggle was not black versus white", attempting to isolate Mau Mau from the Kikuyu, and the Kikuyu from the rest of the colony's population and the world outside. In driving a wedge between Mau Mau and the Kikuyu generally, these propaganda efforts essentially played no role, though they could apparently claim an important contribution to the isolation of Mau Mau from the non-Kikuyu sections of the population.^[19]

By the mid-1960s, this atavistic, psychopathic view of Mau Mau was being challenged by memoirs of former members and leaders that portrayed Mau Mau as an essential, if radical, component of African nationalism in Kenya, and by academic studies that analysed the movement as a modern and nationalist response to the unfairness and oppression of colonial domination (though such studies downplayed the specifically Kikuyu nature of the movement).^[20]

There continues to be vigorous debate within Kenyan society and among the academic community within and without Kenya regarding the nature of Mau Mau and its aims, as well as the response to and effects of the uprising.^[21][22] Nevertheless, as many Kikuyu fought against Mau Mau on the side of the colonial government as joined them in rebellion^[11] and, partly because of this, the conflict is now often regarded in academic circles as an intra-Kikuyu civil war,^[5][22] a characterisation that remains extremely unpopular in Kenya.^[23] The reason the revolt was essentially limited to the Kikuyu people was, in part, that they were the hardest hit by British colonialism and its effects.^[16][24]

Wunyabari O. Maloba regards the rise of the Mau Mau movement as "without doubt, one of the most important events in recent African history."^[25] Oxford's David Anderson, however, considers Maloba's and similar work to be the product of "swallowing too readily the propaganda of the Mau Mau war",^[26] noting the similarity between such analysis and the "simplistic"^[26] earlier studies of Mau Mau. This earlier work cast the Mau Mau war in strictly bipolar terms, "as conflicts between anti-colonial nationalists and colonial collaborators".^[26] Harvard's Caroline Elkins' 2005 study has met similar criticism, as well as being criticised for sensationalism.^[27][28]

Throughout Kikuyu history, there have been two traditions: moderate-conservative and radical.^[30] Despite the differences between them, there has been a continuous debate and dialogue between these traditions, leading to a great political awareness among the Kikuyu.^[30][31] By 1950, these differences, and the impact of colonial rule, had given rise to three African political blocks: conservative, moderate nationalist and militant nationalist.^[32] It has also been argued that Mau Mau was not explicitly national, either intellectually or operationally;^[33] Bruce Berman argues that, "While Mau Mau was clearly not a tribal atavism seeking a return to the past, the answer to the question of "was it nationalism?" must be yes and no."^[34] As the Mau Mau rebellion wore on, the violence forced the spectrum of opinion within the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru to polarise and harden into the two distinct camps of loyalist and Mau Mau.^[35] This neat division between loyalists and Mau Mau was a product of the conflict, rather than a cause or catalyst of it, with the violence becoming less ambiguous over time,^[36] in a similar manner to other situations.^[37][38]

Kenya before the Emergency[link]

The primary British interest in Kenya was land, which, observed the British East Africa Commission of 1925, constituted "some of the richest agricultural soils in the world, mostly in districts where the elevation and climate make it possible for Europeans to reside permanently."^[40] Though declared a colony in 1920, the formal British colonial presence in Kenya began with a proclamation on 1 July 1895, in which Kenya was claimed as a British protectorate.^[41]

Even before 1895, however, Britain's presence in Kenya was marked by dispossession and violence. During the period in which Kenya's interior was being forcibly opened up for British settlement, an officer in the Imperial British East Africa Company asserted, "There is only one way to improve the Wakikuyu [and] that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies",^[42] and colonial officers such as Richard Meinertzhagen wrote of how, on occasion, they massacred Kikuyu by the hundred.^[43] In 1894, British MP Sir Charles Dilke observed in the House of Commons: "The only person who has up to the present time benefited from our enterprise in the heart of Africa has been Mr. Hiram Maxim",^[44] though such a state of affairs was in accordance with Sir Arthur Hardinge's insistence that "[t]hese people must learn submission by bullets—it is the only school . . . In Africa to have peace you must first teach obedience and the only person who teaches the lesson properly is the sword."^[45] The onslaught in Kenya led Churchill, in 1908, to express concern about how it would look if word got out: "It looks like a butchery . . . Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale."^[46][47][48]

Kenyan resistance to British imperialism was there from the start—for example, the Kikuyu opposition of 1880–1900—and continued throughout the decades thereafter: the Nandi Revolt of 1895–1905;^[49] the Giriama Uprising of 1913–4;^[49] the women's revolt against forced labour in Murang'a in 1947;^[50] and the Kalloa Affray of 1950.^[51] (Nor did Kenyan protest against colonial rule end with Mau Mau. For example, in the years that followed, a series of successful non-violent boycotts were carried out).^[52]

The Mau Mau rebellion can be regarded as a militant culmination of years of oppressive colonial rule and resistance to it,^[53][54] with its specific roots found in three episodes of Kikuyu history between 1920 and 1940.^[55] All of this is not, of course, to say that Kikuyu society was perfect, stable and harmonious before the British arrived. The Kikuyu in the nineteenth century were expanding and colonising new territory and already internally divided between wealthy land-owning families and landless ones, the latter dependent on the former in a variety of ways.^[56]

Economic deprivation of the Kikuyu[link]

A feature of all settler societies during the colonial period was the ability of European settlers to obtain for themselves a disproportionate share in landownership.^[58] Kenya was thus no exception, with the first white settlers arriving in 1902 as part of Governor Sir Charles Eliot's plan to have a settler economy pay for the recently completed Uganda Railway.^[59][60] The success of Eliot's planned settler economy would depend heavily on the availability of land, labour and capital,^[61] and so, over the next three decades, the colonial government and settlers consolidated their control over Kenyan land, and 'encouraged' Africans to become wage labourers.

Through a series of expropriations, the colony's government seized about 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km²; 11,000 sq mi) of land, some of it in the especially fertile hilly-regions of Central and Rift Valley Provinces, areas later known as the White Highlands due to the exclusively European farmland which existed there.^[61] "In particular," the British government's 1925 East Africa Commission noted, "the treatment of the Giriama tribe [from the coastal regions] was very bad. This tribe was moved backwards and forwards so as to secure for the Crown areas which could be granted to Europeans."^[62] Coupled with an increasing African population, the land expropriation became an increasingly bitter point of contention. The Kikuyu, who lived in the Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang'a districts of Central Province, were the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's land expropriation and European settlement;^[63] by 1933, they had had over 109.5 square miles (284 km²) of their potentially highly valuable land alienated.^[64] Strictly in terms of lost acreage, the Masai and Nandi were the biggest losers.^[65] The Kikuyu did mount a legal challenge to the expropriation of their land, but a Kenya High Court decision of 1921 cemented its legality.^[66]

As mentioned, the colonial government and White farmers also wanted cheap labour^[67] which, for a period, the government acquired from Africans through force.^[64][68] Confiscating land from Africans itself helped to create a pool of wage labourers, but the colony introduced measures that forced more Africans to submit to wage labour: the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively);^[64][69] the establishment of reserves for each ethnic group, serving to isolate each ethnic group and exacerbate overcrowding;^[70] the discouragement of African's growing cash crops;^[64] the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1906) and an identification pass known as the kipande (1918) to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion;^[64][71] and the exemption of wage labourers from forced labour and other compulsory, detested tasks such as conscription.^[72][73]

African labourers were in one of three categories: squatter, contract, or casual.^[C] By the end of WWI, squatters had become well established on European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations.^[61] An unintended consequence of colonial rule,^[61] the squatters were targeted from 1918 onwards by a series of Resident Native Labourers Ordinances—criticised by at least some MPs^[74]—which progressively curtailed squatter rights and subordinated African farming to that of the settlers.^[75] The Ordinance of 1939 finally eliminated squatters' remaining tenancy rights, and permitted settlers to demand 270 days' labour from any squatters on their land.^[76] and, after WWII, the situation for squatters deteriorated rapidly, a situation the squatters resisted fiercely.^[77]

In the early 1920s, though, despite the presence of 100,000 squatters and tens of thousands more wage labourers,^[79] there was still not enough African labour available to satisfy the settlers' needs.^[80] The colonial government duly tightened the measures to force more Kenyans to become low-paid wage-labourers on settler farms.

The colonial government used the measures brought in as part of its land expropriation and labour 'encouragement' efforts to craft the third plank of its growth strategy for its settler economy: subordinating African farming to that of the Europeans.^[64] Nairobi also assisted the settlers with rail and road networks, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services, and credit and loan facilities.^[61] The near-total neglect of African farming during the first two decades of European settlement was noted by the East Africa Commission.^[81]

The hatred toward colonial rule would not have been decreased by the wanting provision of medical services for Africans,^[82] nor by the fact that in 1923, for example, "the maximum amount that could be considered to have been spent on services provided exclusively for the benefit of the native population was slightly over one-quarter of the taxes paid by them".^[57] The tax burden on Europeans in the early 1920s, meanwhile, was absurdly light.^[57]

Kenyan employees were often appallingly treated by their European employers—sometimes even beaten to death by them—with some settlers arguing that Africans "were as children and should be treated as such". Amongst other offences, it was widely acknowledged that few settlers hesitated to flog their servants for petty offences. To make matters even worse, African workers were poorly served by colonial labour-legislation and a prejudiced legal-system. The vast majority of Kenyan employees' violations of labour legislation were settled with "rough justice" meted out by their employers. Most colonial magistrates appear to have been unconcerned by the illegal practice of settler-administered flogging; indeed, during the 1920s, flogging was the magisterial punishment-of-choice for African convicts. The principle of punitive sanctions against workers was not removed from the Kenyan labour statutes until the 1950s.^[83]

Until the mid-1930s, the two primary complaints were low African wages and the kipande.^[26] From the early 1930s, however, two others began to come to prominence: effective and elected African-political-representation, and land.^[26] The British response to this clamour for agrarian reform came in the early 1930s when they set up the Carter Land Commission.^[85] The Commission reported in 1934, but its conclusions, recommendations and concessions to Kenyans were so conservative that any chance of a peaceful resolution to African land-hunger was ended.^[53][86] In Nyanza, for example, the Commission restricted 1,029,422 Africans to 7,114 square miles (18,430 km²), while granting 16,700 square miles (43,000 km²) to 17,000 Europeans.^[87] By the 1930s, and for the Kikuyu in particular, land had become the number one grievance concerning colonial rule,^[26] the situation so acute by 1948 that 1,250,000 Kikuyu had ownership of 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 British settlers owned 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²).

As a result of the situation in the highlands, thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952.^{[citation needed]} At the same time, there was a small, but growing, class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu lands and forged strong ties with the colonial administration, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu.

Around 1943, residents of Olenguruone radicalised the traditional Kikuyu practice of oathing, and extended oathing to women and children.^[88] By the mid-1950s, 90% of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru were oathed.^[89]

African politics[link]

This section requires expansion.

The first attempt to form a countrywide political party occurred on 1 October 1944.^[90] This fledgling organisation was called the Kenya African Study Union (so named to mask its anti-colonial politics); its inaugural chairman was Harry Thuku, who soon resigned his chairmanship.^[90] There is dispute over Thuku's reason for leaving KASU: Bethwell Ogot states that Thuku "found the responsibility too heavy";^[90] David Anderson states that "he walked out in disgust" as the militant section of KASU took the initiative.^[91] KASU changed its name to the KAU in 1946.

By the late 1940s the Kikuyu were a deeply divided people, increasingly in conflict among themselves as well as with the colonial political and economic order.^[92]

The failure of the KAU to attain any significant reforms or redress of grievances from the colonial authorities shifted the political initiative to younger and more militant figures within the African trade union movement, among the squatters on the settler estates in the Rift Valley and in KAU branches in Nairobi and the Kikuyu districts of central province.^[92]

In May 1951, the British Colonial Secretary, James Griffiths, visited Kenya, where the Kenya African Union (KAU) presented him with a list of demands ranging from the removal of alleged discriminatory legislation to the inclusion of 12 elected black representatives on the Legislative Council that governed the colony's affairs.^{[citation needed]} Griffith proposed a Legislative Council in which the 30,000^{[citation needed]} white settlers received 14 representatives, the 100,000^{[citation needed]} Asians (mostly from South Asia^{[citation needed]}) got six, the 24,000^{[citation needed]} Arabs one, and the 5,000,000^{[citation needed]} Africans five representatives to be nominated by the government.

British reaction to the uprising[link]

Sir Philip Mitchell retired as Kenya's governor in summer 1952, having turned a blind eye to Mau Mau's increasing activity.^[93] Through the summer of 1952, however, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton in London received a steady flow of reports from Acting Governor Henry Potter about the escalating seriousness of Mau Mau violence,^[93] but it was not until the later part of 1953 that British politicians began to accept that the rebellion was going to take some time to deal with.^[94] At first, the British discounted the Mau Mau rebellion^[95] because of their own technical and military superiority, which encouraged hopes for a quick victory.^[94] The British army accepted the gravity of the uprising months before the politicians, but the army's appeals to London and Nairobi initially fell on deaf ears.^[94] On 30 September 1952, Sir Evelyn Baring arrived in Kenya to permanently take over from Potter; Baring was given no warning by Mitchell or the Colonial Office about the gathering maelstrom into which he was stepping.^[93] On 3 October, Mau Mau probably claimed their first European victim when they stabbed a woman to death near her home in Thika.^[93] A week later, on 9 October, Senior Chief Waruhiu had been shot to death in broad daylight in his car.^[96] Waruhiu had been one of the strongest supporters of the British presence in Kenya, and had profited accordingly. His assassination gave Baring the final impetus to request permission from the Colonial Office to declare a State of Emergency (see below).^[97]

Aside from military operations against Mau Mau fighters in the forests, the British attempt to defeat the movement broadly came in two stages: the first, relatively limited in scope, came during the period in which they had still failed to accept the seriousness of the revolt; the second came afterwards. During the first stage, the British tried to decapitate the movement by declaring a State of Emergency before arresting 180 alleged Mau Mau leaders (see Operation Jock Scott below) and subjecting six of them to a show trial (the Kapenguria Six); the second stage began in earnest in 1954, when they undertook a series of major economic, military and penal initiatives. The second stage had three main planks: a large military-sweep of Nairobi leading to the internment of tens of thousands of the city's suspected Mau Mau members and sympathisers (see Operation Anvil below); the enaction of major agrarian reform (the Swynnerton Plan); and the institution of a vast villagisation programme for more than a million rural Kikuyu (see below).

The savagery of the British response was inflated by two factors. First, the settler regime in Kenya was, even before the insurgency, probably the most openly racist one in the British empire, with the settlers' violent prejudice attended by an uncompromising determination to retain their grip on power^[98] and half-submerged fears that, as a tiny minority, they could be swamped by the indigenous population.^[99] Settler representatives were so keen on aggressive action that George Erskine referred to them as "the White Mau Mau".^[99] Second, the brutality of Mau Mau attacks on civilians made it easy for the movement's opponents—even for African, loyalist security forces—to adopt a totally dehumanised view of Mau Mau adherents.^[98] A variety of persuasive techniques were initiated by the colonial authorities to punish and break Mau Mau's support: Baring ordered punitive communal-labour, collective fines and other collective punishments, and further confiscation of land and property. By early 1954, tens of thousands of livestock had been taken, and were allegedly never returned.^[100] Detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels were finally released in April 2012.^[101]

State of Emergency declared[link]

On 20 October 1952, Governor Baring signed an order declaring a State of Emergency. Early the next morning, Operation Jock Scott was launched: the British carried out a mass-arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and 180 other alleged Mau Mau leaders within Nairobi.^[102][103] Jock Scott did not decapitate the movement's leadership as hoped: news of the impending operation was leaked. Thus, while the moderates on the wanted list awaited capture, the real militants, such as Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge (both later principal leaders of Mau Mau's forest armies), fled to the forests.^[104] The day after the round up, another prominent loyalist chief, Nderi, was hacked to pieces,^[105] and a series of gruesome murders against settlers were committed throughout the months that followed.^[106] The violent and random nature of British tactics during the months after Jock Scott served merely to alienate ordinary Kikuyu and drive many of the wavering Kikuyu majority into Mau Mau's arms.^[107]

Three battalions of the King's African Rifles were recalled from Uganda, Tanganyika and Mauritius, giving the regiment five battalions in all in Kenya, a total of 3,000 African troops.^[102] To placate settler opinion, one battalion of British troops, from the Lancashire Fusiliers, was also flown in from the Egypt to Nairobi on the first day of Operation Jock Scott.^[108]

In November 1952, Baring requested assistance from the Security Service. For the next year, the Service's A.M. MacDonald would reorganise the Special Branch of the Kenya Police, promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories, and oversee coordination of all intelligence activity "to secure the intelligence Government requires".^[109]

In January 1953, six of the most prominent detainees from Jock Scott, including Kenyatta, were put on trial, primarily to justify the declaration of the Emergency to critics in London.^[104][111] The trial itself was claimed to have featured a suborned lead defence-witness, a bribed judge, and other serious violations of the right to a fair trial.

African political activity was permitted to resume at the end of the military phase of the Emergency.^[112]

Military operations[link]

The onset of the Emergency led hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Mau Mau adherents to flee to the forests, where a decentralised leadership had already begun setting up platoons.^[113] The primary zones of Mau Mau military strength were the Aberdares and the forests around Mount Kenya, whilst a passive support-wing was fostered outside these areas.^[114] Militarily, the British defeated Mau Mau in four years (1952–56)^[115] using a more expansive version of "coercion through exemplary force".^[116] In June 1953, General Sir George Erskine arrived to oversee the restoration of order in the colony.^[117] By September 1953, the British knew the leading personalities in Mau Mau, the capture of General China in January the following year provided a massive intelligence boost on the forest fighters.^[118] Erskine's arrival did not immediately herald a fundamental change in strategy, thus the continual pressure on the gangs remained, but he created more mobile formations that delivered what he termed "special treatment" to an area. After "special treatment"—once gangs had been driven out and eliminated—loyalist forces and police were then to take over the area, with military support brought in thereafter only to conduct any required pacification operations. After their successful dispersion and containment, Erskine went after the forest fighters' source of supplies, money and recruits, i.e. the African population of Nairobi. This took the form of Operation Anvil, which commenced on 24 April 1954.^[119]

Operation Anvil[link]

By 1954, Nairobi was regarded as the nerve centre of Mau Mau operations.^[120] Anvil was the ambitious attempt to eliminate Mau Mau's presence within Nairobi in one fell swoop. 25,000 members of British security forces under the control of General Sir George Erskine were deployed as Nairobi was sealed off and underwent a sector-by-sector purge. All Africans were taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures, whereafter those who were not Kikuyu, Embu or Meru were released; those who were remained in detention for screening.^[D] Whilst the operation itself was conducted by Europeans, most suspected members of Mau Mau were picked out of groups of the Kikuyu-Embu-Meru detainees by an African informer. Male suspects were then taken off for further screening, primarily at Langata Screening Camp, whilst women and children were readied for 'repatriation' to the reserves (many of those slated for deportation had never set foot in the reserves before). Anvil lasted for two weeks, after which the capital had been cleared of all but certifiably loyal Kikuyu; 20,000 Mau Mau suspects had been taken to Langata, and 30,000 more had been deported to the reserves.^[121]

Air power[link]

For an extended period of time, the chief British weapon against the forest fighters was air power. Between June 1953 and October 1955, the RAF provided a significant contribution to the conflict—and, indeed, had to, for the army was preoccupied with providing security in the reserves until January 1955, and it was the only service capable of both psychologically influencing and inflicting considerable casualties on the Mau Mau fighters operating in the dense forests. Lack of timely and accurate intelligence meant bombing was rather haphazard, but almost 900 insurgents had been killed or wounded by air attack by June 1954, and it did cause forest gangs to disband, lower their morale, and induce their pronounced relocation from the forests to the reserves. Contrary to that which is sometimes claimed, Lancaster bombers were not used during the Emergency, though Lincoln bombers were. The latter flew their first mission on 18 November 1953 and remained in Kenya until 28 July 1955, conducting over 900 sorties and dropping nearly 6 million bombs. They and other aircraft were also deployed for reconnaissance, as well as in the propaganda war, conducting large-scale leaflet-drops. After the Lari massacre, for example, British planes dropped leaflets showing graphic pictures of the Kikuyu women and children who had been hacked to death. Unlike the rather indiscriminate activities of British ground forces, which had had their repression and violence against Kikuyu encouraged from Cabinet level downwards, the use of air power was more restrained (though there is disagreement^[122] on this point), and air attacks were initially permitted only in the forests. Operation Mushroom extended bombing beyond the forest limits in May 1954, and Churchill consented to its continuation in January 1955.^[123]

Swynnerton Plan[link]

Already overcrowded, Baring knew the massive deportations to the reserves could only make things worse. Refusing to give more land to the Kikuyu in the reserves, which could be seen as a concession to Mau Mau, Baring turned instead in 1953 to Roger Swynnerton, Kenya's assistant director of agriculture.^[124][125] The primary goal of the Swynnerton Plan was the creation of family holdings large enough to keep families self-sufficient in food and to enable them to practise alternate husbandry, which would generate a cash income.^[126]

The projected costs of the Swynnerton Plan were too high for the cash-strapped colonial government, so Baring tweaked repatriation and augmented the Swynnerton Plan with plans for a massive expansion of the Pipeline coupled with a system of works camps to make use of detainee labour. All Kikuyu employed for public works projects would now be employed on Swynnerton's poor-relief programmes, as would many detainees in the works camps.^[124][127]

Detention programme[link]

When the mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves began in 1953, Baring and Erskine ordered all Mau Mau suspects to be screened. Of the scores of screening camps which sprang up, only fifteen were officially sanctioned by the colonial government. Larger detention camps were divided into compounds. The screening centres were staffed by settlers who had been appointed temporary district-officers by Baring.^[129]

Thomas Askwith, the official tasked with designing the British 'detention and rehabilitation' programme during the summer and autumn of 1953, termed his system the Pipeline.^[130] The British did not initially conceive of rehabilitating Mau Mau suspects through brute force and other ill-treatment—Askwith's final plan, submitted to Baring in October 1953, was intended as "a complete blueprint for winning the war against Mau Mau using socioeconomic and civic reform."^[131] What developed, however, has been described as a British gulag.^[132]

The Pipeline operated a white-grey-black classification system: 'whites' were cooperative detainees, and were repatriated back to the reserves; 'greys' had been oathed but were reasonably compliant, and were moved down the Pipeline to works camps in their local districts before release; and 'blacks' were the so-called 'hard core' of Mau Mau. These were moved up the Pipeline to special detention camps. Thus a detainee's position in Pipeline was a straightforward reflection of how cooperative the Pipeline personnel deemed her or him to be. Cooperation was itself defined in terms of a detainee's readiness to confess their Mau Mau oath. Detainees were screened and re-screened for confessions and intelligence, then re-classified accordingly.^[133]

A detainee's journey between two locations along the Pipeline could sometimes last days. During transit, there was frequently little or no food and water provided, and seldom any sanitation. Once in camp, talking was forbidden outside the detainees' accommodation huts, though improvised communication was rife. Such communication included propaganda and disinformation, which went by such names as the Kinongo Times, designed to encourage fellow detainees not to give up hope and so to minimise the number of those who confessed their oath and cooperated with camp authorities. Forced labour was performed by detainees on projects like the thirty-seven-mile-long South Yatta irrigation furrow.^[135] Family outside and other considerations led many detainees to confess.^{[136][137][138]}

During the first year after Operation Anvil, colonial authorities had little success in forcing detainees to cooperate. Camps and compounds were overcrowded, forced-labour systems were not yet perfected, screening teams were not fully coordinated, and the use of torture was not yet systematised.^[139] This failure was partly due to the lack of manpower and resources, as well as the vast numbers of detainees. Officials could scarcely process them all, let alone get them to confess their oaths. Assessing the situation in the summer of 1955, Alan Lennox-Boyd wrote of his "fear that the net figure of detainees may still be rising. If so the outlook is grim."^[139] Black markets flourished during this period, with the African guards helping to facilitate trading. It was possible for detainees to bribe guards in order to obtain items or stay punishment.^[135]

By late 1955, however, the Pipeline had become a fully operational, well-organised system. Guards where regularly shifted around the Pipeline too in order to prevent relationships developing with detainees and so undercut the black markets, and inducements and punishments became better at discouraging fraternising with the enemy.^[141] The grinding nature of the improved detention and interrogation regimen began to produce results. Most detainees confessed, and the system produced ever greater numbers of spies and informers within the camps, and others switched sides in a more open, official fashion, leaving detention behind to take an active role in interrogations, even sometimes administering beatings.^[141] The most famous example of side-switching was Peter Muigai Kenyatta—Jomo Kenyatta's son—who, after confessing, joined screeners at Athi River Camp, later travelling throughout the Pipeline to assist in interrogations.^[142] Suspected informers and spies within a camp were treated in the time-honoured Mau Mau-fashion: the preferred method of cold-blooded murder was strangulation then mutilation: "It was just like in the days before our detention", explained one Mau Mau member later. "We did not have our own jails to hold an informant in, so we would strangle him and then cut his tongue out." The end of 1955 also saw screeners being given a freer hand in interrogation, and harsher conditions than straightforward confession were imposed on detainees before they were deemed 'cooperative' and eligible for final release.^[141]

While oathing, for practical reasons, within the Pipeline was reduced to an absolute minimum, as many new initiates as possible were oathed. A newcomer who refused to take the oath often faced the same fate as a recalcitrant outside the camps: they were murdered. "The detainees would strangle them with their blankets or, using blades fashioned from the corrugated-iron roofs of some of the barracks, would slit their throats", writes Elkins.^[144] Camp authorities preferred method of capital punishment was public hanging. Commandants were told to clamp down hard on intra-camp oathing, with several commandants hanging anyone suspected of administering oaths.^[141]

Even as the Pipeline became more sophisticated, detainees still organised themselves within it, setting up committees and selecting leaders for their camps, as well as deciding on their own "rules to live by". Perhaps the most famous compound leader was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. Punishments for violating the "rules to live by" could be severe.^[135]

European missionaries and African Christians played their part by visiting camps to evangelise and encourage compliance with the colonial authorities, providing intelligence, and sometimes even assisting in interrogation. Detainees regarded such preachers with nothing but contempt.^[145]

Sanitation in the camps was often appalling, and epidemics of diseases like typhoid swept through them. Official medical reports detailing the shortcomings of the camps and their recommendations were ignored, and the conditions being endured by detainees were lied about and denied.^{[147][148][149]} A British rehabilitation officer found in 1954 that detainees from Manyani were in "shocking health", many of them suffering from malnutrition,^[150] while Langata and GilGil were eventually closed in April 1955^[151] because, as the colonial government put it, "they were unfit to hold Kikuyu . . . for medical epidemiological reasons".^[151]

While the Pipeline was primarily designed for adult males, a few thousand women and young girls were detained at an all-women camp at Kamiti, as well as a number of unaccompanied young children. Dozens of babies^[152] were born to women in captivity: "We really do need cloths for the children as it is impossible to keep them clean and tidy while dressed on dirty pieces of sacking and blanket", wrote one colonial officer.^[153] Wamumu Camp was set up solely for all the unaccompanied boys in the Pipeline, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys moved around the adult parts of the Pipeline.