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The Mau Mau Uprising. The Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960) was the great revolt of the Kikuyu people of Kenya against British colonial rule, and one of the decisive blows against empire in Africa. Its roots lay in land: white settlers had taken the fertile Kenya highlands, while the Kikuyu, the largest people of the colony, were crowded into reserves or worked as squatters on settler farms. After the Second World War, returning African veterans and the growing city of Nairobi turned land hunger into militancy.
From the late 1940s a secret movement bound its members by oaths to fight for land and freedom, and in October 1952 the colonial government declared a state of emergency. The rebels, calling themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army but known to the world as Mau Mau, took to the forests of the Aberdare mountains and Mount Kenya, where fighters such as Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge led a guerrilla war against the British, while supporters in the reserves and in Nairobi passed food, guns, and information.
The British response was overwhelming and brutal. Tens of thousands of Kikuyu were detained in camps where beatings, forced labor, and torture were routine; more than a million villagers were forcibly resettled into fortified villages. By 1956 the army had broken the forest fighters, and Dedan Kimathi was captured and hanged in 1957. Perhaps eleven thousand rebels died, against some two hundred colonial soldiers and police, though the detention system claimed many more lives.
The emergency could not save the colony. The revolt convinced Britain that Kenya must move to African rule, and in 1963 Kenya became independent under Jomo Kenyatta, himself jailed for years as the alleged Mau Mau leader. The rising transformed Kenya's politics, and its veterans are honored today as heroes of independence, while Britain has since paid compensation to surviving victims of its camps.
Imperial War Museums: Kenya Emergency Explained
South African History Online: The Mau Mau Uprising
National Army Museum: Kenya Emergency
Kenya Presidential Library: Mau Mau Uprising: From Grievance to Rebellion