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 hand over 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 hand over. 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 postwar 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.
Peter Baxter is an author, amateur historian and African field, mountain
and heritage travel guide. Born in Kenya and educated in Zimbabwe, he
has lived and travelled over much of southern and central Africa. He has
guided in all the major mountain ranges south of the equator, helping
develop the concept of sustainable travel, and the touring of
battlefield and heritage sites in East Africa. Peter lives in Oregon,
USA, working on the marketing of African heritage travel as well as a
variety of book projects. His interests include British Imperial history
in Africa and the East Africa campaign of the First World War in
particular. His first book was Rhodesia: Last Outpost of the British
Empire; he has written several books in the Africa@War series, including
France in Centrafrique, Selous Scouts, Mau Mau and SAAF's Border War.
