Mau Mau Uprising - Kenya Before The Emergency

Kenya Before The Emergency

The principal item in the natural resources of Kenya is the land, and in this term we include the colony's mineral resources. It seems to us that our major objective must clearly be the preservation and the wise use of this most important asset.

“ ” —Deputy Governor to Secretary of State
for the Colonies, 19 March 1945

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." 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.

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 that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies", and colonial officers such as Richard Meinertzhagen wrote of how, on occasion, they massacred Kikuyu by the hundred.

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" imperial conquest"], though such a state of affairs was in accordance with Sir Arthur Hardinge's insistence that "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." 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."

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; the Giriama Uprising of 1913–1914; the women's revolt against forced labour in Murang'a in 1947; and the Kalloa Affray of 1950. 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.

The Mau Mau rebellion can be regarded as a militant culmination of years of oppressive colonial rule and resistance to it, with its specific roots found in three episodes of Kikuyu history between 1920 and 1940. 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.