The Second World War forever altered the complexion of the British
Empire. From Cyprus to Malaya, from Borneo to Suez, the dominoes began
to fall within a decade of peace in Europe. Africa in the late 1940s and
1950s was energized by the grant of independence to India, and the
emergence of a credible indigenous intellectual and political caste that
was poised to inherit control from the waning European imperial powers.
The British on the whole managed to disengage from Africa with a minimum
of ill feeling and violence, conceding power in the Gold Coast, Nigeria
and Sierra Leone under an orderly constitutional process, and engaging
only in the suppression of civil disturbances in Nyasaland and Northern
Rhodesia as the practicalities of a political handover were
negotiated.
In Kenya, however, matters were different. A vociferous local settler
lobby had accrued significant economic and political authority under a
local legislature, coupled with the fact that much familial pressure
could be brought to bear in Whitehall by British settlers of wealth and
influence, most of whom were utterly irreconciled to the notion of any
kind of political handover. Mau Mau was less than a liberation movement,
but much more than a mere civil disturbance. Its historic importance is
based primarily on the fact that the Mau Mau campaign was one of the
first violent confrontations in sub-Saharan Africa to take place over
the question of the self-determination of the masses. It also epitomized
the quandary suffered by the white settler communities of Africa who had
been promised utopia in an earlier century, only to be confronted in a
post-war world by the completely unexpected reality of black political
aspiration.
This book journeys through the birth of British East Africa as a settled
territory of the Empire, and the inevitable politics of confrontation
that emerged from the unequal distribution of resources and power. It
covers the emergence and growth of Mau Mau, and the strategies applied
by the British to confront and nullify what was in reality a tactically
inexpert, but nonetheless powerfully symbolic black expression of
political violence. That Mau Mau set the tone for Kenyan independence
somewhat blurred the clean line of victory and defeat. The revolt was
suppressed and peace restored, but events in the colony were
nevertheless swept along by the greater movement of Africa toward
independences, resulting in the eventual establishment of majority rule
in Kenya in 1964.
