Mau Mau uprising (1952-6). This uprising in Kenya was defeated by tactics learned in counter-insurgency campaigns elsewhere during the retreat from empire. The regrettable truth of the matter is that the violence that spotted this process was not anti-colonialist per se, although presented as such, but rather a competition among local factions for who was going to rule once the British pulled out. Kenya was a prime example. After 1945 the most probable decolonization scenario would have left the white-settler minority as the main beneficiaries of imperial devolution. This prospect met with rebellion among the Kikuyu, one-fifth of the population. As the largest source of labour for the white farmers, they were the most displaced by post-war mechanization and suffered the worst urban poverty. Conversely, they enjoyed the best education and grew much of the urban food supply. Of all ethnic groups, therefore, the Kikuyu were most deeply divided between the constitutional politics of hope and the militancy of despair. This intimacy of disagreement obliged Kikuyu militants—the so-called ‘Mau Mau’—to coerce kinsmen into keeping secret their plans to drive white settlers from their lands. Conflict within the insurgents ensured Mau Mau's defeat as much as British counter-insurgency.
Defeating the Mau Mau took four years, a long time considering the inequality of the fighting forces. The British fielded three brigades at the height of the campaign, in 1954-5, in which British infantry balanced the white-officered King's African Rifles. The loyalist Kikuyu Guard was much larger but was dispersed and immobile in its village keeps. The police also expanded. Mau Mau guerrillas may have numbered up to 15, 000 in late 1953 and 25, 000 in all over the four years. Less than one in five of them carried precision firearms however, and their casualties were heavy; over 10, 000 died. Of the security forces, 164 died: 100 of these were African, largely Kikuyu auxiliaries.
Nonetheless the campaign started disastrously. After a few shocking atrocities during attacks on isolated white households, racial panic and poor intelligence fostered a blind brutality that terrorized many Kikuyu into the arms of the Mau Mau. Forgetting the lesson of the utility of minimum force taught by the Anglo-Irish conflict, the authorities were also slow to accept the example of the Malayan emergency on joint military and civil command, convinced that the Mau Mau would soon give in. When in mid-1953 Gen Erskine arrived with such powers, his troops were at first wasted in penny-packet farm guards and large but ineffective sweeps. The answer lay in combining the urban techniques used in Palestine and the rural civil action employed in Malaya. The early 1954 ANVIL cleared suspect Kikuyu out of Nairobi in emulation of AGATHA eight years earlier in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile the concentration of the rural population in defended villages at last followed the Malayan example and forced the Mau Mau out of concealment to obtain supplies. This was accompanied by small-unit penetration of Mau Mau mountain-forest strongholds.
In time, almost all the forest-fighting patrols were made up of ‘pseudos’, that is captured or surrendered Mau Mau ‘turned’ by very much more decent treatment than they had been receiving from their own leaders, among them Dedan Kimathi who was captured and hanged. The precise role of post-independence leader Jomo Kenyatta in the rebellion was never satisfactorily established, but the Mau Mau certainly served to make him look like a moderate and to become the main beneficiary of independence.
— John Lonsdale
