Haiti and Kenya independence · CHAPTER 8 ·
Origins of the Mau Mau uprising
Chapter 8 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978: “War, Land and the Oath”
Between 1939 and 1952 Kenyan politics turned from petitions to a secret oath of loyalty to the land and freedom movement officials called Mau Mau. Nearly 100,000 Kenyan Africans served in the Second World War, while settler-run councils cut squatters’ plots and herds and pushed thousands back to the reserves.
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The map above is the world of Kenya, 1950–52 — The oath spreads.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Kenya turned from petitions to the oath in the decade after 1939, and it did so because every peaceful route to the land seemed to close at once. The oath was a secret pledge of loyalty to the movement for land and freedom that officials would soon call Mau Mau, sworn in a Kikuyu ceremony and meant to bind as firmly as a soldier’s oath of enlistment. The Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest people, farmed the central highlands around Mount Kenya and had lost the most land to settlers. Nearly 100,000 Kenyan Africans served in the Second World War, some as far away as Burma, and came home with expectations raised. At the same time settler-run councils in the Rift Valley, the great valley west of Nairobi lined with European farms, cut the plots and herds of squatters, Kikuyu families who farmed a plot on a European farm in return for their labour, much like sharecroppers. Thousands were pushed back to the reserves, lands set aside for African farming much like Native American reservations, but the reserves were already too crowded to feed them, so the land squeeze now reached every Kikuyu family.
Constitutional politics offered the obvious alternative, and its failure opened the way to the oath. Jomo Kenyatta returned from Britain in 1946 and soon led the Kenya African Union (KAU), a party that asked for land and elected seats much as a modern civil-rights group petitions a government. The petitions won almost nothing, because settlers dominated the Legislative Council, the colony’s law-making body, much like a parliament, where Africans had only a few appointed members and no elected seat until 1957. Militants in Nairobi’s unions spread the oath through the reserves from 1951; on the map, the breathing red perimeter marks where oathing had spread by 1952. Gunmen killed Waruhiu, the leading Kikuyu chief among the African officials the government appointed, on 7 October 1952, and two weeks later the new governor declared a State of Emergency, a suspension of normal law much like martial law. The stalemate had handed the initiative to those prepared to fight.
The full story
The Second World War widened Kenyan horizons faster than the colonial state could absorb the change. About 98,000 Kenyan Africans enlisted, most in the King’s African Rifles, the British army’s East African regiment, and the 11th (East Africa) Division fought into Burma in 1944–45. On the map, the arrow leaving Mombasa, Kenya’s main port, traces its voyage. Veterans such as Waruhiu Itote, later the forest commander “General China”, had fought beside British soldiers and seen that the colonisers were neither invincible nor uniquely brave. The Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest people and the highland farmers who had lost the most land to settlers, had lost their political voice when the government banned the Kikuyu Central Association in 1940. Veterans came home to the same pass laws, which made every African man carry the kipande, an identity document much like an internal passport, and the gap between their service and their treatment became a political force.
The land squeeze tightened after 1945 because settlers, rich from wartime prices, wanted their farms back from the squatters, Kikuyu labour tenants living on them much like sharecroppers. By 1945 about 200,000 people lived in squatter families, and a law of 1937 let settler-run councils cut their cattle and crops; after the war thousands were sent back to the reserves, the overcrowded lands set aside for Africans much like Native American reservations, along the arrow from the Rift Valley farms. Olenguruone was a government settlement on the Rift Valley’s forested western wall, the Mau escarpment, for Kikuyu moved off land claimed by the Maasai. Its families refused rules that treated them as tenants on probation, and around 1943 they gave the oath of unity, a ceremony binding members to the movement as firmly as a soldier’s oath of enlistment, to women and children for the first time. Evicted in 1948–49, the holdouts were deported to Yatta, a dry plateau east of Nairobi, in 1950. Olenguruone taught squatters that the government would move them at will, and it gave them the ritual that would bind a movement together.
Constitutional nationalism, the campaign for self-rule through petitions, parties and elections, grew alongside the oath, and the oath grew faster because petitions kept failing. The Kenya African Union (KAU), a party that petitioned for land and elected seats, made Jomo Kenyatta its president in June 1947. He also ran the teachers’ college at Githunguri, built by Kikuyu parents independently of the Christian missions. Yet a land petition carried to London in 1951 won nothing. That June the trade unionists Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia captured KAU’s Nairobi branch and formed a secret committee, Muhimu (“important”), which pushed the oath into Kiambu, Fort Hall and Nyeri, as the red arrow shows. Officials and the press called the oath movement Mau Mau. At Nyeri on 26 July 1952 Kenyatta told a huge crowd that KAU was not Mau Mau, yet many listeners had already sworn the oath. When Senior Chief Waruhiu, the most prominent of the government’s appointed chiefs, was shot dead on 7 October, the government decided it faced a rebellion, and the moderates had nowhere left to stand.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Did the veterans make Mau Mau?
Early accounts of Mau Mau gave ex-soldiers the leading role, and the evidence for that view is real but narrower than it first appears. The Nairobi militants of the Forty Group, the Anake a 40 (“young men of 1940”), took their name from the year 1940, when many of its members went through circumcision, the initiation that made a Kikuyu boy an adult, or were called up, and Waruhiu Itote’s memoir “Mau Mau” General (1967) describes how serving in Burma changed the way he saw race and empire. Yet historians of African soldiers, among them Timothy Parsons in The African Rank-and-File (1999) and David Killingray with Martin Plaut in Fighting for Britain (2010), point out that most of the 98,240 Kenyans who enlisted went home and stayed out of politics, while some joined the Home Guard, the loyalist Kikuyu militia that fought the rebels. Veterans supplied a few commanders, some military skills and a sharp sense of injustice. The movement’s mass base, however, lay among the young and landless: squatters pushed off the farms, unemployed men in Nairobi and families in overcrowded reserves. War sharpened the grievance without creating it, and that distinction matters when weighing the causes of the revolt.
The squatters’ road to rebellion
The Rift Valley became an early centre of the movement because a bargain between settlers and squatters broke, as Tabitha Kanogo’s Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (1987) shows. Before 1945, she argues, squatters were partly independent farmers: settlers needed their labour and squatters needed land, so each side depended on resources the other controlled. After the war settler councils used the Resident Native Labourers Ordinance of 1937 to cut squatter cattle and cultivation and turn families into wage workers, and those who refused were sent back to reserves where they held no land rights. David Throup, in Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau (1987), adds the reserves’ side of the story: officials pressed compulsory terracing, the digging of earth steps across hillsides to stop rain washing the soil away, and other conservation rules on overcrowded farms, often through unpaid work by women, and made the colonial state hated in Fort Hall and Kiambu. The two studies complement each other. Mau Mau grew where a people squeezed on the highlands met a people squeezed in the reserves, and the oath linked the two.
What the oath meant, and what the name hides
The oath was a political technology as much as a ritual, and its meaning is still debated. Fighters rarely called themselves Mau Mau: they preferred the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and their slogan was ithaka na wiyathi, land and freedom. John Lonsdale’s essay “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau” (1992) reads wiyathi as self-mastery, the standing of a grown person who has earned land through work, so that landlessness felt like being denied adulthood itself. The oath came in stages: an oath of unity for the mass of members and the batuni, or platoon, oath for those who would fight. Where the name came from nobody knows; theories include a children’s word game, a mishearing of muma (oath) and, as the detainee J. M. Kariuki argued, a colonial label chosen because it sounded savage and denied the movement a cause. It first appeared in official reports around 1948, and the movement was banned in August 1950. The oath bound people by fear as well as faith, since many were forced to take it, and that compulsion planted the civil war within the rebellion.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Petitions that won nothing. Moderate politics failed to deliver anything a landless family could see. KAU asked for elected African seats and the return of alienated land, the colonial term for African land taken over for European settlement, but the Legislative Council was dominated by settlers, the first African elections came only in 1957, and the KAU leaders who took a petition to London in 1951 were rebuffed. Each failure weakened the argument that patience would pay. When the respectable route led nowhere, younger men looked for one that would.
The squatters’ bargain broke. For thirty years squatter families had traded labour for land on settler farms, and after 1945 the settlers ended the trade. Councils cut cattle and cultivation, evicted those who resisted and sent thousands back to reserves where they held nothing. Olenguruone, where evicted families were themselves evicted again in 1948–50, became the symbol of a government that would move people at will. A population with no secure land anywhere had little reason to fear rebellion.
Crowded reserves and compulsory work. The reserves could not absorb the returning squatters, because Kikuyu land was already divided into ever smaller plots. Officials answered soil erosion with compulsory terracing, earth steps dug across hillsides, and other rules, often enforced through unpaid labour by women, which turned conservation into another grievance in Fort Hall and Kiambu. Chiefs who enforced the rules, and who often prospered, became targets. The countryside that had sent its sons to war was being policed more closely than ever before.
A generation that had seen the world. The war gave a generation of Kenyans a new view of their rulers: nearly 100,000 Kenyan Africans served, in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Ceylon and Burma, and saw that their colonisers could be beaten and frightened like anyone else. They came home to the same pass and the same land laws, and some, like Waruhiu Itote, brought organising skills to the militant groups in Nairobi. Most veterans stayed out of politics. Those who joined the movement gave it a confidence and a discipline that colonial officials had not expected.
THE TURNING POINT
The Kiambu road, 7 October 1952. The killing of Senior Chief Waruhiu is the hinge because it drove both sides to violence. Waruhiu was the government’s most prominent Kikuyu ally, and his death in his car near Gachie, seven miles from Nairobi, convinced the new governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, who had arrived only on 30 September, that a rebellion was under way. On 20 October Baring declared a State of Emergency, and that night Operation Jock Scott began arresting Kenyatta and a list of some 180 suspected leaders. The killing also showed that the conflict divided Kikuyu from Kikuyu, loyal chiefs from oath-takers, and that civil war would run through everything that followed.
What it changed
The Emergency begins. The State of Emergency declared on 20 October 1952 gave the government powers to detain without trial, ban meetings and later to shoot on sight in forest areas, much like martial law. British troops flew in within days. The emergency was meant to last weeks; it lasted until January 1960 and became the largest counter-insurgency, a war against a guerrilla movement, in Britain’s African empire, the subject of the next chapter.
Kenyatta becomes a prisoner and a symbol. Arrested on the first night, Kenyatta was put on trial at Kapenguria for managing Mau Mau, a charge he always denied and which historians now doubt. Prison removed him from the movement’s decisions, yet it made him the one leader every Kenyan faction could claim. The man the government cast as the rebellion’s organiser emerged nine years later as the only figure able to unite Kenya’s nationalists and negotiate the end of colonial rule.
Kikuyu turned against Kikuyu. The oath had divided communities before the shooting started: those who swore it, by choice or by force, against chiefs, Christians and landholders who refused. After October 1952 those divisions hardened into rival armies, the forest fighters on one side and the Home Guard on the other. Daniel Branch’s argument that what followed was a Kikuyu civil war inside a colonial war shapes how historians now read the Emergency.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did constitutional nationalism fail to contain the oath between 1946 and 1952?
The most direct answer lies with the colonial system: settlers dominated the Legislative Council, London moved slowly, and KAU’s petitions for land and elected seats returned with nothing, so moderation brought no visible reward. Officials also misread the danger, because they policed the oath as a crime and left untouched the land crisis that drove it. Social change made the failure dangerous, since squatters pushed off the farms, crowded reserves and Nairobi’s unemployed young men produced a constituency with little to lose. KAU itself was divided: Kenyatta needed the militants’ energy and could not afford to break with them, so his denunciations of Mau Mau at Nyeri and Kiambu were too guarded to satisfy the government and too hostile to satisfy the movement. Historians weigh these factors differently; Throup stresses colonial misgovernment, Kanogo the squatters’ crisis, Branch the divisions inside Kikuyu society. A strong answer shows how they reinforced each other. The transferable lesson is that when moderate leaders cannot deliver change, the leadership of a movement passes to those who promise to take it.
An interesting fact
The Kenya Teachers College at Githunguri, founded in 1939 by the American-educated Peter Mbiyu Koinange and later run by Kenyatta, was built to train teachers for the Kikuyu independent schools. Those schools had grown out of the quarrel with the missions over female circumcision in 1929–31; by 1939 there were 63 of them with 12,964 pupils, and by 1952 more than 400, paid for by Kikuyu parents. When the Emergency began, the government closed every one. A people barred from the land had tried to build its future through the classroom instead.
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