title: 1970s energy crisis

text: A crisis emerged in the United States in 1979 during the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Amid massive protests, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled his country in early 1979, allowing the Ayatollah Khomeini to gain control. The protests shattered the Iranian oil sector. While the new regime resumed oil exports, it was inconsistent and at a lower volume, forcing prices to go up. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations, under the presidency of Dr. Mana Alotaiba increased production to offset the decline, and the overall loss in production was about 4 percent. However, a widespread panic resulted, driving the price far higher than would be expected under normal circumstances.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: In 1980, following the , oil production in Iran nearly stopped, and Iraq's oil production was severely cut as well.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: After 1980, oil prices began a decline as other countries began to fill the production shortfalls from Iran and Iraq.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: The 1973 and 1979 energy crisis had caused petroleum prices to peak in 1980 at over US$35 per barrel (US$ in today's dollars). Following these events slowing industrial economies and stabilization of supply and demand caused prices to begin falling in the 1980s. The glut began in the early 1980s as a result of slowed economic activity in industrial countries (due to the 1973 and 1979 energy crises) and the energy conservation spurred by high fuel prices. The inflation adjusted real 2004 dollar value of oil fell from an average of $78.2 per barrel in 1981 to an average of $26.8 in 1986.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: In June 1981, "The New York Times" stated an "Oil glut! ... is here" and "Time Magazine" stated: "the world temporarily floats in a glut of oil", though the next week a New York Times article warned that the word "glut" was misleading, and that in reality, while temporary surpluses had brought down prices somewhat, prices were still well above pre-energy crisis levels. This sentiment was echoed in November 1981, when the CEO of Exxon also characterized the glut as a temporary surplus, and that the word "glut" was an example of "our American penchant for exaggerated language". He wrote that the main cause of the glut was declining consumption. In the United States, Europe and Japan, oil consumption had fallen 13% from 1979 to 1981, due to "in part, in reaction to the very large increases in oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other oil exporters", continuing a trend begun during the 1973 price increases.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: After 1980, reduced demand and overproduction produced a glut on the world market, causing a six-year-long decline in oil prices culminating with a 46 percent price drop in 1986.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: The decade of the 1970s was a period of limited or negative economic growth due in part to the energy crises of that decade. Although the mid decade was the worst period for the United States the economy was generally weak until the 1980s. The period marked the end of the general post-World War II economic boom. It differed from many previous recessions as being a stagflation, where high unemployment coincided with high inflation.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: Other causes that contributed to the recession included the Vietnam War, which turned out costly for the United States of America and the fall of the Bretton Woods system. The emergence of newly industrialized countries rose competition in the metal industry, triggering a steel crisis, where industrial core areas in North America and Europe were forced to re-structure. The 1973–1974 stock market crash made the recession evident.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession in the United States lasted from November 1973 to March 1975. Although the economy was expanding from 1975 to the first recession of the early 1980s, which began in January 1980, inflation remained extremely high for the rest of the decade.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: During this recession, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States fell 3.2%. Although the recession ended in March 1975, the unemployment rate did not peak for several months. In May 1975, the rate reached its height for the cycle of 9%. (Only two cycles have higher peaks than this: in early 2020, when the United States' unemployment rate briefly exceeded 15% in response to economic consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic; and the early 1980s recession, when unemployment peaked at 10.8% in November and December 1982.)


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: The recession also lasted from 1973 to 1975 in the United Kingdom. The GDP declined by 3.9% or 3.37% depending on the source. It took 14 quarters for the UK's GDP to recover to that at the start of recession.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: High oil prices in the 1970s induced investment in oil production by non-OPEC countries, particularly for reserves with a higher cost of production. These included Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the North Sea offshore fields of the United Kingdom and Norway, the Cantarell offshore field of Mexico, and oil sands in Canada.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: As a result of the 1973 crisis many nations created strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs), crude oil inventories (or stockpiles) held by the governments of particular countries or private industry, for the purpose of providing economic and national security during an energy crisis. The International Energy Agency (IEA) was formed in the wake of this crisis and currently comprises 31 member countries. According to the IEA, approximately of oil are held in strategic reserves by the member countries, of which is government-controlled. The remainder is held by private industry. These reserves are intended to be equivalent to at least 90 days of net imports. At the moment the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is one of the largest government-owned reserves, with a capacity of up to .


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: Recently, other non-IEA countries have begun creating their own strategic petroleum reserves, with China being the second largest overall and the largest non-IEA country.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: Since Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 this state has found itself in nearly continual conflict with the Arab world and some other predominantly Muslim countries. The animosity between the Arabs and the Israelis became a global issue during the 1970s. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, with the supplying of Israel by its Western allies while some Arab states received Soviet supplies, made this one of the most internationally threatening confrontations of the period.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: The large oil discoveries in the Middle East and southwestern Asia, and the peaking of production in some of the more industrialized areas of the world gave some Muslim countries unique leverage in the world, beginning in the 1960s. The 1973 and 1979 crises, in particular, were demonstrations of the new power that these countries had found. The United States and other countries were forced to become more involved in the conflicts between these states and Israel leading to peace initiatives such as the Camp David Accords.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: One of the first challenges OPEC faced in the 1970s was the United States' unilaterally pulling out of the Bretton Woods Accord and taking the U.S. off the established Gold Exchange Standard in 1971. With that standard, only the value of the U.S. dollar was pegged to the price of gold and all other currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar. The change resulted in instability in world currencies and depreciation of the value of the U.S. dollar, as well as other currencies, and decreasing real revenues for OPEC whose producers still priced oil in dollars.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: OPEC was slow to adjust to the situation but finally made the decision to price oil against gold. Frustrated negotiations between OPEC and the major oil companies to revise the oil price agreement as well as the ongoing Middle East conflicts continued to stall OPEC's efforts at stabilization through this era.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: The major oil-producing regions of the U.S.—Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Alaska—benefited greatly from the price inflation of the 1970s as did the U.S. oil industry in general. Oil prices generally increased throughout the decade; between 1978 and 1980 the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil increased 250 percent. Although all states felt the effects of the stock market crash and related national economic problems, the economic benefits of increased oil revenue in the Oil Patch states generally offset much of this.


title: 1970s energy crisis

text: Following the 1970s, the global energy consumption per capita have break away from its previous trend of rapid growth, instead remaining relatively flat for multiple decades until the next century with the rise of large Asian economy like China. The break down of fuel types indicated that the continuous rapid rise in oil consumption have came to a stop in 1970s and the trend reversed downward, and the growth in natural gas consumption have also decelerated. In the meantime the use of nuclear energy have picked up, but until 1990s after the Chernobyl disaster occurred, the growth of nuclear energy stopped, and its place have been taken by re-accelerated growth of natural gas, as well as the growing use of coal following an almost a century long stagnation, as well as the growth of other alternative energy.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: East Coast hip hop is a regional subgenre of hip hop music that originated in New York City during the 1970s. Hip hop is recognized to have originated and evolved first in the Bronx, New York City.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: In contrast to other styles, East Coast hip hop music has prioritized complex lyrics for attentive listening rather than beats for dancing. The term "East Coast hip hop" more specifically denotes hip hop originating from the East Coast of the Northeastern United States; Southeastern states such as Georgia instead fall under the umbrella of Southern hip hop rather than "East Coast hip hop". A notable exception is the Hampton Roads music scene, centered on Virginia Beach, which produced artists as diverse as Missy Elliott, Pharrell and the Neptunes, Timbaland and the Clipse, all of whom are closely associated with the New York music scene and the evolution of East Coast hip hop, particularly from the late 1990s to present.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: In contrast to the more simplistic rhyme pattern and scheme utilized in older hip hop, hip hop in the late 80s developed a stronger emphasis on lyrical dexterity. It also became characterized by multi-syllabic rhymes, complex wordplay, a continuous free-flowing delivery and intricate metaphors. Although East Coast hip hop can vary in sound and style, "aggressive" beats and the combining of samples were common to the subgenre in the mid- to late 1980s. The aggressive and hard-hitting beats of the form were emphasized by such acts as EPMD, Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, while artists such as Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, Big Daddy Kane, Nas, Notorious B.I.G and Slick Rick were noted for their lyrical skill. Lyrical themes throughout the history of East Coast hip hop have ranged from lyrical consciousness by such artists as Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest to Mafioso rap themes by rappers such as Raekwon, MF Grimm and Kool G Rap.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: East Coast hip hop is occasionally referred to as New York rap due to its origins and development at block parties thrown in New York City during the 1970s. According to AllMusic, "At the dawn of the hip-hop era, all rap was East Coast rap." Leading up to hip hop, there were spoken-word artists such as the Last Poets who released their debut album in 1970, and Gil Scott-Heron, who gained a wide audience with his 1971 track "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". These artists combined spoken word and music to create a kind of "proto-rap" vibe. Following this, early artists of hip hop such as DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, the Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, Jam Master Jay and Run-DMC, pioneered East Coast hip hop during hip hop's earlier years in the 1970s and 1980s. As the genre developed, lyrical themes evolved through the work of East Coast artists such as the Native Tongues, a collective of hip hop artists associated with generally positive, Afrocentric themes, and assembled by Afrika Bambaataa. New York-based groups such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers also earned recognition for their musical eclecticism.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: This was called "The Golden Age" of hip hop. Although East Coast hip hop was more popular throughout the late 1980s, N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton" (released in the summer of 1988) presented the toughened sound of West Coast hip hop, which was accompanied by gritty, street-level subject matter. Later in 1992, Dr. Dre's G-funk record "The Chronic" would introduce West Coast hip hop to the mainstream. Along with a combined ability to keep its primary function as party music, the West Coast form of hip hop became a dominant force during the early 1990s. Although G-Funk was the most popular variety of hip hop during the early 1990s, the East Coast hip hop scene remained an integral part of the music industry. During this period, several New York City rappers rising from the local underground scene, began releasing noteworthy albums in the early and mid-'90's, such as Nas, The Notorious B.I.G. and others. The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show was the launch pad for many East Coast rappers during this era.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: Nas's 1994 debut album "Illmatic" has also been noted as one of the creative high points of the East Coast hip hop scene, and featured production from such renowned New York-based producers as Large Professor, Pete Rock and DJ Premier. Meanwhile, The Wu-Tang Clan, Onyx, Black Moon, Smif-N-Wessun, Big L, Lost Boyz and Mobb Deep became pillars in New York's hardcore hip hop scene, achieving widespread critical acclaim for their landmark albums, "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" (1993), "Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous" (1995), "Enta da Stage" (1993), "Bacdafucup" (1993), "Dah Shinin'" (1995), "Legal Drug Money" (1996) and "The Infamous" (1995).


title: East Coast hip hop

text: The Notorious B.I.G. became the central figure in East Coast hip hop during most of the 1990s. Bad Boy Records comprised a team of producers known as the Hitmen Stevie J, Derrick "D Dot" Angelletie and Amen Ra directed by Sean Combs to move the focus on hip hop to New York with the Notorious B.I.G.'s Billboard topping hits. His success on the music charts and rise to the mainstream drew more attention to New York at the time of West Coast hip hop's dominance. According to AllMusic editor Steve Huey, the success of his 1994 debut album "Ready to Die" "reinvented East Coast rap for the gangsta age" and "turned the Notorious B.I.G. into a hip-hop sensation — the first major star the East Coast had produced since the rise of Dr. Dre's West Coast G-funk". Many saw his dominating presence as a catalyzing factor in the East Coast/ West Coast hip hop rivalry that polarized much of the hip hop community, stirring the issue enough to result in the Brooklyn rapper's 1997 death, as well as his West Coast counterpart, Tupac Shakur, months prior. His commercial success helped pave the way for the success of other East Coast rappers such as Jay-Z, DMX, Busta Rhymes, Ja Rule, The Lox, Fat Joe, Big Pun and many upcoming rappers.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: Mainstream hip hop began to commercialize styles of Southern hip hop over traditional East and West Coast hip hop in the early 2000s, leading many critics and rappers, such as Nas, to proclaim that hip hop was 'dead' by the mid-2000s (although Nas claimed 15 years later that he was only referring to New York). Southern hip hop artists such as Lil Wayne and T.I. gained prominence, with regional scenes in New Orleans and Atlanta. Other southern cities such as Houston and Miami received attention in the mainstream, with subgenres such as Houston's chopped and screwed hip hop, bounce and trap attracting commercial recognition. Yet, despite this overall trend, individual East Coast hip hop artists did see significant success in the first decade of the 2000s, such as 50 Cent, Ja Rule, Fabolous, Cam'Ron, Lloyd Banks, Juelz Santana, Jim Jones and Talib Kweli. Jay-Z's seven studio albums and three collaborative albums released between 2000 and 2010 were all certified platinum, and nine out of ten reached #1 on US charts.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: A partial mainstream revival of East Coast rap has occurred in the last decade, albeit without the same level of commercial success as in the nineties, due to various factors, such as the rise of social media, music streaming and the internet, which has led to a decline in unique regional scenes across many musical genres. In addition, rivalries between different cities and regions have declined significantly and artists across different regions and genres are much more willing to collaborate than in the past. Despite this, the distinctive East Coast sound is still notable in today's music. Major artists who have risen to prominence in the past decade include A$AP Mob particularly, A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg, Joey Bada$$, Vast Aire, Azealia Banks, as well as French Montana, and most notably Nicki Minaj, Cardi B and J.Cole (himself a transplant from North Carolina), all based in New York City. Other notable artists include Wiz Khalifa, Meek Mill, and Lil Uzi Vert from Pennsylvania, Fetty Wap from New Jersey, and Wale and Logic from Washington, DC.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: In addition, New York City's drill movement, heavily influenced by UK drill (and often using the same London producers), has injected new energy into the New York hip hop scene, attracting critical acclaim, media controversy and a significant following, despite departing from standard hip hop song structures. Initially focused in Brooklyn, led by artists such as the late Pop Smoke, Fivio Foreign, Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, Bizzy Banks, J.I. Prince of N.Y., Jay Critch and others, it has expanded to the Bronx, with artists such as A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Lil Tjay, and C Lanski.


title: East Coast hip hop

text: East Coast hip hop was the dominant form of rap music during the Golden Era of hip hop. Many knowledgeable hip hop fans and critics are particularly favorable of East Coast hip hop in the early and mid-nineties, viewing it as a time of creative growth and influential recordings, and describing it as "The East Coast Renaissance". Music writer May Blaize of MVRemix Urban comments on the nostalgia felt among hip hop fans for records released during this time:


title: East Coast hip hop

text: David Drake of "Stylus Magazine" writes of hip hop during 1994 and its contributions, stating: "The beats were hot, the rhymes were hot – it really was an amazing time for hip-hop and music in general. This was the critical point for the East Coast, a time when rappers from the New York area were releasing bucketloads of thrilling work – Digable Planets, Gang Starr, Pete Rock, Jeru, O.C., Organized Konfusion – I mean, this was a year of serious music."


title: East Coast hip hop

text: East Coast hip hop has also produced a multitude of highly acclaimed female rappers, including Salt and Pepa who have won one Grammy award, three MTV Video Music Awards, one Soul Train award, and two VH1 hip hop honors, Queen Latifah who has won one Grammy award, one Soul Train Music award, and numerous acting awards, Lil Kim who has one four ASCAP Rhythm & Soul Awards, six BDB Spin Awards, one Billboard Music Award, one New York Music award, four VH1 awards, and has been awarded the key to West Hollywood, and Lauryn Hill who has won over one hundred musical awards and numerous international recognitions, having broken the record for most awards won by a female artist in a single Grammy ceremony and still holds the record for most nominations by a female artist in a single ceremony. Other notable East Coast female rappers include Ladybug Mecca, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, Foxy Brown, Charli Baltimore, Eve, Angie Martinez, Remy Ma, Lil Mama, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B, who have all left their impact on the legacy of hip hop.


title: Stevie J

text: Steven Aaron Jordan (born November 2, 1971) is an American DJ, record producer, and television personality. One of the most successful record producers of the mid-to-late 1990s, Jordan won a 1997 Grammy Award for his work on Puff Daddy's debut album "No Way Out" and produced for a number of artists including Mariah Carey, Tevin Campbell, The Notorious B.I.G., 112, Jodeci, Faith Evans, Jay-Z, and Eve.


title: Stevie J

text: Steven Aaron Jordan was born on November 2, 1971 in Utica, New York to Moses Jordan and Penny Daniels. He was raised in Buffalo, New York and Rochester, New York by his father after his mother abandoned the family.


title: Stevie J

text: Jordan first rose to fame as a member of Bad Boy Records' "Hitmen" roster of in-house producers and writers during the 1990s. He worked often with label owner Sean "Puffy" Combs, producing on several Bad Boy projects, such as the self-titled debut album of R&B quartet 112. Jordan produced their lead single "Only You" featuring The Notorious B.I.G. Jordan produced several records on Notorious B.I.G.'s "Life After Death" album, such as "Mo Money Mo Problems", "Nasty Boy", "Notorious Thugs" (featuring Bone Thugs-N-Harmony), "Another", "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)", and "Last Day". Jordan went on to win a Grammy Award for production work on Combs' "No Way Out" album, most notably the Notorious B.I.G. tribute song, I'll Be Missing You. Outside of his association with Bad Boy, he has also produced for artists including Mariah Carey, with whom he was nominated for a Grammy Award for the contribution on her album "Butterfly" (1997). From the album, he produced songs like "Honey" (the album's lead single), "Breakdown" (featuring Bone Thugs-n-Harmony), "Babydoll", and for Carey's "#1's" (1998) "I Still Believe" and "Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)". In the summer of 1997, three of the aforementioned Stevie J-produced records (I'll Be Missing You, Mo Money Mo Problems, and Honey) topped the Billboard Hot 100 consecutively from the chart weeks of June 14 through September 27, 1997. He has also produced for Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Brian McKnight, Ma$e, Lil' Kim, Deborah Cox, Simbi Khali, Tamia and Tevin Campbell. Jordan also co-wrote the 2001 hit single "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" for Eve.


title: Stevie J

text: Prior to joining Bad Boy Records, Stevie J often performed with Jodeci as one of their live musicians, playing the bass guitar. Stevie also appeared on their 1995 album "The Show, The After Party, The Hotel". Jordan was a member of Swing Mob, a Rochester, New York-based record label and music compound founded by Jodeci member DeVante Swing. After Swing Mob folded and Jordan signed with Bad Boy, he continued a working relationship with Swing's younger brother and fellow Jodeci member Dalvin DeGrate, producing and singing on DeGrate's solo debut album, "Met.A.Mor.Phic" (2000).


title: Stevie J

text: In 2012, Stevie J began appearing as a primary cast member of the VH1 reality TV series, "", which featured him involved in a love triangle involving his then-girlfriend, Mimi Faust, and new girlfriend, Puerto Rican rapper, Joseline Hernandez. It was alleged that Stevie and Joseline Hernandez were married, but later revealed that they were actually not legally married.


title: Stevie J

text: Since the show premiered in 2012, Jordan and Hernandez have become a popular couple in the hip-hop world, making cameo appearances in music videos such as former labelmate Faith Evans' "I Deserve It", featuring Missy Elliott and Sharaya J, and Trey Songz's Hail Mary, featuring Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. In 2016, Jordan announced that he will be producing and starring in a movie "That Time of the Month" which is set to be released by the end of the year.


title: Stevie J

text: Both Mimi and Joseline appear with Stevie on "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta". Jordan was always known as a bad boy with wild relationships, but his show "Leave It to Stevie" chronicles not only him as a father and family man, but his growth and maturity, while falling for his best friend [Faith].


title: Stevie J

text: On February 1, 2017, Jordan was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $1,304,835 in restitution for non-payment of child support obligations.


title: Stevie J

text: He married Faith Evans, whom he had known and been friends with for over 20 years, in 2018. He has a grandson, Zion, from his eldest son, Dorian. He filed for divorce from Evans in 2021.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), also known as the Mau Mau uprising, Mau Mau revolt or Kenya Emergency, was a war in the British Kenya Colony (1920–1963) between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the "Mau Mau", and the British authorities.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Dominated by the Kikuyu people, Meru people and Embu people, the KLFA also comprised units of Kamba and Maasai peoples who fought against the white European colonist-settlers in Kenya, the British Army, and the local Kenya Regiment (British colonists, local auxiliary militia, and pro-British Kikuyu people).


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The capture of rebel leader Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 signalled the defeat of the Mau Mau, and essentially ended the British military campaign. However, the rebellion survived until after Kenya's independence from Britain, driven mainly by the Meru units led by Field Marshal Musa Mwariama and General Baimungi. Baimungi, one of the last Mau Mau generals, was killed shortly after Kenya attained self-rule.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The KLFA failed to capture widespread public support. Frank Füredi, in "The Mau Mau War in Perspective", suggests this was due to a British policy of divide and rule. The Mau Mau movement remained internally divided, despite attempts to unify the factions. The British, meanwhile, applied the strategy and tactics they developed in suppressing the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). The Mau Mau Uprising created a rift between the European colonial community in Kenya and the metropole, and also resulted in violent divisions within the Kikuyu community: "Much of the struggle tore through the African communities themselves, an internecine war waged between rebels and so-called 'loyalists' – Africans who took the side of the government and opposed Mau Mau." Suppressing the Mau Mau Uprising in the Kenyan colony cost Britain £55 million and caused at least 11,000 deaths among the Mau Mau and other forces, with some estimates considerably higher. This included 1,090 executions by hanging. The rebellion was marked by war crimes and massacres committed by both sides.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The origin of the term "Mau Mau" is uncertain. According to some members of Mau Mau, they never referred to themselves as such, instead preferring the military title Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). Some publications, such as Fred Majdalany's "State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau", claim it was an anagram of "Uma Uma" (which means "Get out! Get out!") and was a military codeword based on a secret language game Kikuyu boys used to play at the time of their circumcision. Majdalany also says the British simply used the name as a label for the Kikuyu ethnic community without assigning any specific definition.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Akamba people say the name Mau Mau came from "Ma Umau" meaning 'Our Grandfathers'. The term was first used during a pastoralists revolt against de-stocking that took place in 1938 led by Muindi Mbingu, during which he urged the colonists to leave Kenya so that his people (the Kamba) could live freely like the time of 'Our Grandfathers' ("Twenda kwikala ta maau mau maitu, tuithye ngombe ta Maau mau maitu, nundu nthi ino ni ya maau mau maitu").


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: As the movement progressed, a Swahili backronym was adopted: "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru" meaning "Let the foreigner go back abroad, let the African regain independence". J. M. Kariuki, a member of Mau Mau who was detained during the conflict, suggests the British preferred to use the term "Mau Mau" instead of "KLFA" to deny the Mau Mau rebellion international legitimacy. Kariuki also wrote that the term "Mau Mau" was adopted by the rebellion in order to counter what they regarded as colonial propaganda.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Author and activist Wangari Maathai indicates that, to her, the most interesting story of the origin of the name is the Kikuyu phrase for the beginning of a list. When beginning a list in Kikuyu, one says, ""maũndũ ni mau", "the main issues are...", and holds up three fingers to introduce them. Maathai says the three issues for the Mau Mau were land, freedom, and self-governance.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The armed rebellion of the Mau Mau was the culminating response to colonial rule. Although there had been previous instances of violent resistance to colonialism, the Mau Mau revolt was the most prolonged and violent anti-colonial warfare in the British Kenya colony. From the start, the land was the primary British interest in Kenya, which had "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.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Even before 1895, however, Britain's presence in Kenya was marked by dispossession and violence. In 1894, British MP Sir Charles Dilke had 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" (inventor of the Maxim gun, the first automatic machine gun). During the period in which Kenya's interior was being forcibly opened up for British settlement, there was plenty of conflict and British troops carried out atrocities against the native population.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Opposition to British imperialism had existed from the start of British occupation. The most notable include the Nandi Resistance of 1895–1905; the Giriama Uprising of 1913–1914; the women's revolt against forced labour in Murang'a in 1947; and the Kolloa Affray of 1950. None of the armed uprisings during the beginning of British colonialism in Kenya were successful. The nature of fighting in Kenya led Winston Churchill to express concern about the scale of the fighting: "No doubt the clans should have been punished. 160 have now been killed outright "without any further casualties on our side".… It looks like a butchery. If the H. of C. gets hold of it, all our plans in E.A.P. will be under a cloud. Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Settler societies during the colonial period could own a disproportionate share of land. The first settlers arrived in 1902 as part of Governor Charles Eliot's plan to have a settler economy pay for the Uganda Railway. The success of this settler economy would depend heavily on the availability of land, labour and capital, and so, over the next three decades, the colonial government and settlers consolidated their control over Kenyan land, and 'encouraged' native Kenyans to become wage labourers.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Until the mid-1930s, the two primary complaints were low native Kenyan wages and the requirement to carry an identity document, the "kipande". From the early 1930s, however, two others began to come to prominence: effective and elected African-political-representation, and land. The British response to this clamour for agrarian reform came in the early 1930s when they set up the Carter Land Commission.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Commission reported in 1934, but its conclusions, recommendations and concessions to Kenyans were so conservative that any chance of a peaceful resolution to native Kenyan land-hunger was ended. Through a series of expropriations, the government seized about of land, most of it in the fertile hilly regions of Central and Rift Valley Provinces, later known as the White Highlands due to the exclusively European-owned farmland there. In Nyanza the Commission restricted 1,029,422 native Kenyans to , while granting to 17,000 Europeans. By the 1930s, and for the Kikuyu in particular, land had become the number one grievance concerning colonial rule, the situation so acute by 1948 that 1,250,000 Kikuyu had ownership of 2,000 square miles (5,200 km), while 30,000 British settlers owned 12,000 square miles (31,000 km), albeit most of it not on traditional Kikuyu land. "In particular", the British government's 1925 East Africa Commission noted, "the treatment of the Giriama tribe [from the coastal regions] was very bad. This tribe was moved backwards and forwards so as to secure for the Crown areas which could be granted to Europeans."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Kikuyu, who lived in the Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang'a areas of what became Central Province, were one of the ethnic groups most affected by the colonial government's land expropriation and European settlement; by 1933, they had had over of their potentially highly valuable land alienated. The Kikuyu mounted a legal challenge against the expropriation of their land, but a Kenya High Court decision of 1921 reaffirmed its legality. In terms of lost acreage, the Masai and Nandi people were the biggest losers of land.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The colonial government and white farmers also wanted cheap labour which, for a period, the government acquired from native Kenyans through force. Confiscating the land itself helped to create a pool of wage labourers, but the colony introduced measures that forced more native Kenyans to submit to wage labour: the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively); the establishment of reserves for each ethnic group, which isolated ethnic groups and often exacerbated overcrowding; the discouragement of native Kenyans' growing cash crops; the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1906) and an identification pass known as the "kipande" (1918) to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion; and the exemption of wage labourers from forced labour and other compulsory, detested tasks such as conscription.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Native Kenyan labourers were in one of three categories: "squatter", "contract", or "casual". By the end of World War I, squatters had become well established on European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations. An unintended consequence of colonial rule, the squatters were targeted from 1918 onwards by a series of Resident Native Labourers Ordinances—criticised by at least some MPs—which progressively curtailed squatter rights and subordinated native Kenyan farming to that of the settlers. The Ordinance of 1939 finally eliminated squatters' remaining tenancy rights, and permitted settlers to demand 270 days' labour from any squatters on their land. and, after World War II, the situation for squatters deteriorated rapidly, a situation the squatters resisted fiercely.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In the early 1920s, though, despite the presence of 100,000 squatters and tens of thousands more wage labourers, there was still not enough native Kenyan labour available to satisfy the settlers' needs. The colonial government duly tightened the measures to force more Kenyans to become low-paid wage-labourers on settler farms.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The colonial government used the measures brought in as part of its land expropriation and labour 'encouragement' efforts to craft the third plank of its growth strategy for its settler economy: subordinating African farming to that of the Europeans. Nairobi also assisted the settlers with rail and road networks, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services, and credit and loan facilities. The near-total neglect of native farming during the first two decades of European settlement was noted by the East Africa Commission.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The resentment of colonial rule would not have been decreased by the wanting provision of medical services for native Kenyans, nor by the fact that in 1923, for example, "the maximum amount that could be considered to have been spent on services provided exclusively for the benefit of the native population was slightly over one-quarter of the taxes paid by them". The tax burden on Europeans in the early 1920s, meanwhile, was very light relative to their income. Interwar infrastructure-development was also largely paid for by the indigenous population.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Kenyan employees were often poorly treated by their European employers, with some settlers arguing that native Kenyans "were as children and should be treated as such". Some settlers flogged their servants for petty offences. To make matters even worse, native Kenyan workers were poorly served by colonial labour-legislation and a prejudiced legal-system. The vast majority of Kenyan employees' violations of labour legislation were settled with "rough justice" meted out by their employers. Most colonial magistrates appear to have been unconcerned by the illegal practice of settler-administered flogging; indeed, during the 1920s, flogging was the magisterial punishment-of-choice for native Kenyan convicts. The principle of punitive sanctions against workers was not removed from the Kenyan labour statutes until the 1950s.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: As a result of the situation in the highlands and growing job opportunities in the cities, thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952. At the same time, there was a small, but growing, class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu landholdings and forged ties with the colonial administration, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Mau Mau were the militant wing of a growing clamour for political representation and freedom in Kenya. The first attempt to form a countrywide political party began on 1 October 1944. This fledgling organisation was called the Kenya African Study Union. Harry Thuku was the first chairman, but he soon resigned. There is dispute over Thuku's reason for leaving KASU: Bethwell Ogot says Thuku "found the responsibility too heavy"; David Anderson states that "he walked out in disgust" as the militant section of KASU took the initiative. KASU changed its name to the Kenya African Union (KAU) in 1946. Author Wangari Maathai writes that many of the organizers were ex-soldiers who fought for the British in Ceylon, Somalia, and Burma during the Second World War. When they returned to Kenya, they were never paid and did not receive recognition for their service, whereas their British counterparts were awarded medals and received land, sometimes from the Kenyan veterans.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The failure of KAU to attain any significant reforms or redress of grievances from the colonial authorities shifted the political initiative to younger and more militant figures within the native Kenyan trade union movement, among the squatters on the settler estates in the Rift Valley and in KAU branches in Nairobi and the Kikuyu districts of central province. Around 1943, residents of Olenguruone Settlement radicalised the traditional practice of oathing, and extended oathing to women and children. By the mid-1950s, 90% of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru were oathed. On 3 October 1952, Mau Mau claimed their first European victim when they stabbed a woman to death near her home in Thika. Six days later, on 9 October, Senior Chief Waruhiu was shot dead in broad daylight in his car, which was an important blow against the colonial government. Waruhiu had been one of the strongest supporters of the British presence in Kenya. His assassination gave Evelyn Baring the final impetus to request permission from the Colonial Office to declare a State of Emergency.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Mau Mau command, contrary to the Home Guard who were stigmatised as "the running dogs of British Imperialism", were relatively well educated. General Gatunga had previously been a respected and well-read Christian teacher in his local Kikuyu community. He was known to meticulously record his attacks in a series of five notebooks, which when executed were often swift and strategic, targeting loyalist community leaders he had previously known as a teacher.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Mau Mau military strategy was mainly guerrilla attacks launched under the cover of darkness. They used stolen weapons such as guns, as well as weapons such as machetes and bows and arrows in their attacks. They maimed cattle and, in one case, poisoned a herd.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Women formed a core part of the Mau Mau, especially in maintaining supply lines. Initially able to avoid the suspicion, they moved through colonial spaces and between Mau Mau hideouts and strongholds, to deliver vital supplies and services to guerrilla fighters including food, ammunition, medical care, and of course, information. An unknown number also fought in the war, with the most high-ranking being Field Marshal Muthoni.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The British and international view was that Mau Mau was a savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult, an expression of unrestrained emotion rather than reason. Mau Mau was "perverted tribalism" that sought to take the Kikuyu people back to "the bad old days" before British rule. The official British explanation of the revolt did not include the insights of agrarian and agricultural experts, of economists and historians, or even of Europeans who had spent a long period living amongst the Kikuyu such as Louis Leakey. Not for the first time, the British instead relied on the purported insights of the ethnopsychiatrist; with Mau Mau, it fell to Dr. John Colin Carothers to perform the desired analysis. This ethnopsychiatric analysis guided British psychological warfare, which painted Mau Mau as "an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism", and the later official study of the uprising, the Corfield Report.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The psychological war became of critical importance to military and civilian leaders who tried to "emphasise that there was in effect a civil war, and that the struggle was not black versus white", attempting to isolate Mau Mau from the Kikuyu, and the Kikuyu from the rest of the colony's population and the world outside. In driving a wedge between Mau Mau and the Kikuyu generally, these propaganda efforts essentially played no role, though they could apparently claim an important contribution to the isolation of Mau Mau from the non-Kikuyu sections of the population.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: By the mid-1960s, the view of Mau Mau as simply irrational activists was being challenged by memoirs of former members and leaders that portrayed Mau Mau as an essential, if radical, component of African nationalism in Kenya and by academic studies that analysed the movement as a modern and nationalist response to the unfairness and oppression of colonial domination.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: There continues to be vigorous debate within Kenyan society and among the academic community within and without Kenya regarding the nature of Mau Mau and its aims, as well as the response to and effects of the uprising. Nevertheless, partly because as many Kikuyu fought against Mau Mau on the side of the colonial government as joined them in rebellion, the conflict is now often regarded in academic circles as an intra-Kikuyu civil war, a characterisation that remains extremely unpopular in Kenya. In August 1952, Kenyatta told a Kikuyu audience "Mau Mau has spoiled the country...Let Mau Mau perish forever. All people should search for Mau Mau and kill it".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Kenyatta described the conflict in his memoirs as a civil war rather than a rebellion. One reason that the revolt was largely limited to the Kikuyu people was, in part, that they had suffered the most as a result of the negative aspects of British colonialism.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Wunyabari O. Maloba regards the rise of the Mau Mau movement as "without doubt, one of the most important events in recent African history". David Anderson, however, considers Maloba's and similar work to be the product of "swallowing too readily the propaganda of the Mau Mau war", noting the similarity between such analysis and the "simplistic" earlier studies of Mau Mau. This earlier work cast the Mau Mau war in strictly bipolar terms, "as conflicts between anti-colonial nationalists and colonial collaborators". Caroline Elkins' 2005 study, "Imperial Reckoning", has met similar criticism, as well as being criticised for sensationalism.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Broadly speaking, throughout Kikuyu history, there have been two traditions: "moderate-conservative" and "radical". Despite the differences between them, there has been a continuous debate and dialogue between these traditions, leading to a great political awareness among the Kikuyu. By 1950, these differences, and the impact of colonial rule, had given rise to three native Kenyan political blocs: "conservative", "moderate nationalist" and "militant nationalist". It has also been argued that Mau Mau was not explicitly national, either intellectually or operationally.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Bruce Berman argues that, "While Mau Mau was clearly not a tribal atavism seeking a return to the past, the answer to the question of 'was it nationalism?' must be yes and no." As the Mau Mau rebellion wore on, the violence forced the spectrum of opinion within the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru to polarise and harden into the two distinct camps of loyalist and Mau Mau. This neat division between loyalists and Mau Mau was a product of the conflict, rather than a cause or catalyst of it, with the violence becoming less ambiguous over time, in a similar manner to other situations.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Philip Mitchell retired as Kenya's governor in summer 1952, having turned a blind eye to Mau Mau's increasing activity. Through the summer of 1952, however, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton in London received a steady flow of reports from Acting Governor Henry Potter about the escalating seriousness of Mau Mau violence, but it was not until the later part of 1953 that British politicians began to accept that the rebellion was going to take some time to deal with. At first, the British discounted the Mau Mau rebellion because of their own technical and military superiority, which encouraged hopes for a quick victory.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The British army accepted the gravity of the uprising months before the politicians, but its appeals to London and Nairobi were ignored. On 30 September 1952, Evelyn Baring arrived in Kenya to permanently take over from Potter; Baring was given no warning by Mitchell or the Colonial Office about the gathering maelstrom into which he was stepping.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Aside from military operations against Mau Mau fighters in the forests, the British attempt to defeat the movement broadly came in two stages: the first, relatively limited in scope, came during the period in which they had still failed to accept the seriousness of the revolt; the second came afterwards. During the first stage, the British tried to decapitate the movement by declaring a State of Emergency before arresting 180 alleged Mau Mau leaders (see Operation Jock Scott) and subjecting six of them to a show trial (the Kapenguria Six); the second stage began in earnest in 1954, when they undertook a series of major economic, military and penal initiatives.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The second stage had three main planks: a large military-sweep of Nairobi leading to the internment of tens of thousands of the city's suspected Mau Mau members and sympathisers (see "Operation Anvil" below); the enacting of major agrarian reform (the Swynnerton Plan); and the institution of a vast villagisation programme for more than a million rural Kikuyu (see below). In 2012, the UK government accepted that prisoners had suffered "torture and ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The harshness of the British response was inflated by two factors. First, the settler government in Kenya was, even before the insurgency, probably the most openly racist one in the British empire, with the settlers' violent prejudice attended by an uncompromising determination to retain their grip on power and half-submerged fears that, as a tiny minority, they could be overwhelmed by the indigenous population. Its representatives were so keen on aggressive action that George Erskine referred to them as "the White Mau Mau". Second, the brutality of Mau Mau attacks on civilians made it easy for the movement's opponents—including native Kenyan and loyalist security forces—to adopt a totally dehumanised view of Mau Mau adherents.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Resistance to both the Mau Mau and the British response was illustrated by Ciokaraine M'Barungu who famously asked that the British colonial forces not destroy the food used by her villagers, since its destruction could potentially starve the entire region. Instead, she urged the colonial forces guard the yams and bananas and stop the Mau Mau from killing any more residents.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: A variety of coercive techniques were initiated by the colonial authorities to punish and break Mau Mau's support: Baring ordered punitive communal-labour, collective fines and other collective punishments, and further confiscation of land and property. By early 1954, tens of thousands of head of livestock had been taken, and were allegedly never returned. Detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels were finally released in April 2012.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: On 20 October 1952, Governor Baring signed an order declaring a state of emergency. Early the next morning, Operation Jock Scott was launched: the British carried out a mass-arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and 180 other alleged Mau Mau leaders within Nairobi. Jock Scott did not decapitate the movement's leadership as hoped, since news of the impending operation was leaked. Thus, while the moderates on the wanted list awaited capture, the real militants, such as Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge (both later principal leaders of Mau Mau's forest armies), fled to the forests.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The day after the round up, another prominent loyalist chief, Nderi, was hacked to pieces, and a series of gruesome murders against settlers were committed throughout the months that followed. The violent and random nature of British tactics during the months after Jock Scott served merely to alienate ordinary Kikuyu and drive many of the wavering majority into Mau Mau's arms. Three battalions of the King's African Rifles were recalled from Uganda, Tanganyika and Mauritius, giving the regiment five battalions in all in Kenya, a total of 3,000 native Kenyan troops. To placate settler opinion, one battalion of British troops, from the Lancashire Fusiliers, was also flown in from Egypt to Nairobi on the first day of Operation Jock Scott. In November 1952, Baring requested assistance from the MI5 Security Service. For the next year, the Service's A.M. MacDonald would reorganise the Special Branch of the Kenya Police, promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories, and oversee coordination of all intelligence activity "to secure the intelligence Government requires".In January 1953, six of the most prominent detainees from Jock Scott, including Kenyatta, were put on trial, primarily to justify the declaration of the Emergency to critics in London. The trial itself was claimed to have featured a suborned lead defence-witness, a bribed judge, and other serious violations of the right to a fair trial.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Native Kenyan political activity was permitted to resume at the end of the military phase of the Emergency.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The onset of the Emergency led hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Mau Mau adherents to flee to the forests, where a decentralised leadership had already begun setting up platoons. The primary zones of Mau Mau military strength were the Aberdares and the forests around Mount Kenya, whilst a passive support-wing was fostered outside these areas. Militarily, the British defeated Mau Mau in four years (1952–1956) using a more expansive version of "coercion through exemplary force". In May 1953, the decision was made to send General George Erskine to oversee the restoration of order in the colony.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: By September 1953, the British knew the leading personalities in Mau Mau, and the capture and 68 hour interrogation of General China on 15 January the following year provided a massive intelligence boost on the forest fighters. Erskine's arrival did not immediately herald a fundamental change in strategy, thus the continual pressure on the gangs remained, but he created more mobile formations that delivered what he termed "special treatment" to an area. Once gangs had been driven out and eliminated, loyalist forces and police were then to take over the area, with military support brought in thereafter only to conduct any required pacification operations. After their successful dispersion and containment, Erskine went after the forest fighters' source of supplies, money and recruits, i.e. the native Kenyan population of Nairobi. This took the form of Operation Anvil, which commenced on 24 April 1954.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: By 1954, Nairobi was regarded as the nerve centre of Mau Mau operations. The insurgents in the highlands of the Aberdares and Mt Kenya were being supplied provisions and weapons by supporters in Nairobi via couriers. Anvil was the ambitious attempt to eliminate Mau Mau's presence within Nairobi in one fell swoop. 25,000 members of British security forces under the control of General George Erskine were deployed as Nairobi was sealed off and underwent a sector-by-sector purge. All native Kenyans were taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures. Those who were not Kikuyu, Embu or Meru were released; those who were remained in detention for screening.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Whilst the operation itself was conducted by Europeans, most suspected members of Mau Mau were picked out of groups of the Kikuyu-Embu-Meru detainees by a native Kenyan informer. Male suspects were then taken off for further screening, primarily at Langata Screening Camp, whilst women and children were readied for 'repatriation' to the reserves (many of those slated for deportation had never set foot in the reserves before). Anvil lasted for two weeks, after which the capital had been cleared of all but certifiably loyal Kikuyu; 20,000 Mau Mau suspects had been taken to Langata, and 30,000 more had been deported to the reserves.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: For an extended period of time, the chief British weapon against the forest fighters was air power. Between June 1953 and October 1955, the RAF provided a significant contribution to the conflict—and, indeed, had to, for the army was preoccupied with providing security in the reserves until January 1955, and it was the only service capable of both psychologically influencing and inflicting considerable casualties on the Mau Mau fighters operating in the dense forests. Lack of timely and accurate intelligence meant bombing was rather haphazard, but almost 900 insurgents had been killed or wounded by air attacks by June 1954, and it did cause forest gangs to disband, lower their morale, and induce their pronounced relocation from the forests to the reserves.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: At first armed Harvard training aircraft were used, for direct ground support and also some camp interdiction. As the campaign developed, Avro Lincoln heavy bombers were deployed, flying missions in Kenya from 18 November 1953 to 28 July 1955, dropping nearly 6 million bombs. They and other aircraft, such as blimps, were also deployed for reconnaissance, as well as in the propaganda war, conducting large-scale leaflet-drops. A flight of DH Vampire jets flew in from Aden, but were used for only ten days of operations. Some light aircraft of the Police Air Wing also provided support.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: After the Lari massacre for example, British planes dropped leaflets showing graphic pictures of the Kikuyu women and children who had been hacked to death. Unlike the rather indiscriminate activities of British ground forces, the use of air power was more restrained (though there is disagreement on this point), and air attacks were initially permitted only in the forests. Operation Mushroom extended bombing beyond the forest limits in May 1954, and Churchill consented to its continuation in January 1955.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Baring knew the massive deportations to the already-overcrowded reserves could only make things worse. Refusing to give more land to the Kikuyu in the reserves, which could have been seen as a concession to Mau Mau, Baring turned instead in 1953 to Roger Swynnerton, Kenya's assistant director of agriculture. The primary goal of the Swynnerton Plan was the creation of family holdings large enough to keep families self-sufficient in food and to enable them to practise alternate husbandry, which would generate a cash income.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The projected costs of the Swynnerton Plan were too high for the cash-strapped colonial government, so Baring tweaked repatriation and augmented the Swynnerton Plan with plans for a massive expansion of the Pipeline coupled with a system of work camps to make use of detainee labour. All Kikuyu employed for public works projects would now be employed on Swynnerton's poor-relief programmes, as would many detainees in the work camps.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: When the mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves began in 1953, Baring and Erskine ordered all Mau Mau suspects to be screened. Of the scores of screening camps which sprang up, only fifteen were officially sanctioned by the colonial government. Larger detention camps were divided into compounds. The screening centres were staffed by settlers who had been appointed temporary district-officers by Baring.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Thomas Askwith, the official tasked with designing the British 'detention and rehabilitation' programme during the summer and autumn of 1953, termed his system the "Pipeline". The British did not initially conceive of rehabilitating Mau Mau suspects through brute force and other ill-treatment—Askwith's final plan, submitted to Baring in October 1953, was intended as "a complete blueprint for winning the war against Mau Mau using socioeconomic and civic reform". What developed, however, has been described as a British gulag.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Pipeline operated a white-grey-black classification system: 'whites' were cooperative detainees, and were repatriated back to the reserves; 'greys' had been oathed but were reasonably compliant, and were moved down the Pipeline to works camps in their local districts before release; and 'blacks' were the so-called 'hard core' of Mau Mau. These were moved up the Pipeline to special detention camps. Thus a detainee's position in Pipeline was a straightforward reflection of how cooperative the Pipeline personnel deemed her or him to be. Cooperation was itself defined in terms of a detainee's readiness to confess their Mau Mau oath. Detainees were screened and re-screened for confessions and intelligence, then re-classified accordingly.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: A detainee's journey between two locations along the Pipeline could sometimes last days. During transit, there was frequently little or no food and water provided, and seldom any sanitation. Once in camp, talking was forbidden outside the detainees' accommodation huts, though improvised communication was rife. Such communication included propaganda and disinformation, which went by such names as the "Kinongo Times", designed to encourage fellow detainees not to give up hope and so to minimise the number of those who confessed their oath and cooperated with camp authorities. Forced labour was performed by detainees on projects like the thirty-seven-mile-long South Yatta irrigation furrow. Family outside and other considerations led many detainees to confess.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: During the first year after Operation Anvil, colonial authorities had little success in forcing detainees to cooperate. Camps and compounds were overcrowded, forced-labour systems were not yet perfected, screening teams were not fully coordinated, and the use of torture was not yet systematised. This failure was partly due to the lack of manpower and resources, as well as the vast numbers of detainees. Officials could scarcely process them all, let alone get them to confess their oaths. Assessing the situation in the summer of 1955, Alan Lennox-Boyd wrote of his "fear that the net figure of detainees may still be rising. If so the outlook is grim." Black markets flourished during this period, with the native Kenyan guards helping to facilitate trading. It was possible for detainees to bribe guards in order to obtain items or stay punishment.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: By late 1955, however, the Pipeline had become a fully operational, well-organised system. Guards were regularly shifted around the Pipeline too in order to prevent relationships developing with detainees and so undercut the black markets, and inducements and punishments became better at discouraging fraternising with the enemy. The grinding nature of the improved detention and interrogation regimen began to produce results. Most detainees confessed, and the system produced ever greater numbers of spies and informers within the camps, while others switched sides in a more open, official fashion, leaving detention behind to take an active role in interrogations, even sometimes administering beatings.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The most famous example of side-switching was Peter Muigai Kenyatta—Jomo Kenyatta's son—who, after confessing, joined screeners at Athi River Camp, later travelling throughout the Pipeline to assist in interrogations. Suspected informers and spies within a camp were treated in the time-honoured Mau Mau fashion: the preferred method of execution was strangulation then mutilation: "It was just like in the days before our detention", explained one Mau Mau member later. "We did not have our own jails to hold an informant in, so we would strangle him and then cut his tongue out." The end of 1955 also saw screeners being given a freer hand in interrogation, and harsher conditions than straightforward confession were imposed on detainees before they were deemed 'cooperative' and eligible for final release.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: While oathing, for practical reasons, within the Pipeline was reduced to an absolute minimum, as many new initiates as possible were oathed. A newcomer who refused to take the oath often faced the same fate as a recalcitrant outside the camps: they were murdered. "The detainees would strangle them with their blankets or, using blades fashioned from the corrugated-iron roofs of some of the barracks, would slit their throats", writes Elkins. The camp authorities' preferred method of capital punishment was public hanging. Commandants were told to clamp down hard on intra-camp oathing, with several commandants hanging anyone suspected of administering oaths.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Even as the Pipeline became more sophisticated, detainees still organised themselves within it, setting up committees and selecting leaders for their camps, as well as deciding on their own "rules to live by". Perhaps the most famous compound leader was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. Punishments for violating the "rules to live by" could be severe.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: European missionaries and native Kenyan Christians played their part by visiting camps to evangelise and encourage compliance with the colonial authorities, providing intelligence, and sometimes even assisting in interrogation. Detainees regarded such preachers with nothing but contempt.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The lack of decent sanitation in the camps meant that epidemics of diseases such as typhoid, dysentery and tuberculosis swept through them. Detainees would also develop vitamin deficiencies, for example scurvy, due to the poor rations provided. Official medical reports detailing the shortcomings of the camps and their recommendations were ignored, and the conditions being endured by detainees were lied about and denied. A British rehabilitation officer found in 1954 that detainees from Manyani were in "shocking health", many of them suffering from malnutrition, while Langata and GilGil were eventually closed in April 1955 because, as the colonial government put it, "they were unfit to hold Kikuyu ... for medical epidemiological reasons".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: While the Pipeline was primarily designed for adult males, a few thousand women and young girls were detained at an all-women camp at Kamiti, as well as a number of unaccompanied young children. Dozens of babies were born to women in captivity: "We really do need these cloths for the children as it is impossible to keep them clean and tidy while dressed in dirty pieces of sacking and blanket", wrote one colonial officer. Wamumu Camp was set up solely for all the unaccompanied boys in the Pipeline, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys moved around the adult parts of the Pipeline.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: There were originally two types of works camps envisioned by Baring: the first type were based in Kikuyu districts with the stated purpose of achieving the Swynnerton Plan; the second were punitive camps, designed for the 30,000 Mau Mau suspects who were deemed unfit to return to the reserves. These forced-labour camps provided a much needed source of labour to continue the colony's infrastructure development.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Colonial officers also saw the second sort of works camps as a way of ensuring that any confession was legitimate and as a final opportunity to extract intelligence. Probably the worst works camp to have been sent to was the one run out of Embakasi Prison, for Embakasi was responsible for the Embakasi Airport, the construction of which was demanded to be finished before the Emergency came to an end. The airport was a massive project with an unquenchable thirst for labour, and the time pressures ensured the detainees' forced labour was especially hard.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: If military operations in the forests and Operation Anvil were the first two phases of Mau Mau's defeat, Erskine expressed the need and his desire for a third and final phase: cut off all the militants' support in the reserves. The means to this terminal end was originally suggested by the man brought in by the colonial government to do an ethnopsychiatric 'diagnosis' of the uprising, JC Carothers: he advocated a Kenyan version of the villagisation programmes that the British were already using in places like Malaya.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: So it was that in June 1954, the War Council took the decision to undertake a full-scale forced-resettlement programme of Kiambu, Nyeri, Murang'a and Embu Districts to cut off Mau Mau's supply lines. Within eighteen months, 1,050,899 Kikuyu in the reserves were inside 804 villages consisting of some 230,000 huts. The government termed them "protected villages", purportedly to be built along "the same lines as the villages in the North of England", though the term was actually a "euphemism for the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilians were corralled, often against their will, into settlements behind barbed-wire fences and watch towers."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: While some of these villages were to protect loyalist Kikuyu, "most were little more than concentration camps to punish Mau Mau sympathizers." The villagisation programme was the "coup de grâce" for Mau Mau. By the end of the following summer, Lieutenant General Lathbury no longer needed Lincoln bombers for raids because of a lack of targets, and, by late 1955, Lathbury felt so sure of final victory that he reduced army forces to almost pre-Mau Mau levels.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: He noted, however, that the British should have "no illusions about the future. Mau Mau has not been cured: it has been suppressed. The thousands who have spent a long time in detention must have been embittered by it. Nationalism is still a very potent force and the African will pursue his aim by other means. Kenya is in for a very tricky political future."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The government's public relations officer, Granville Roberts, presented villagisation as a good opportunity for rehabilitation, particularly of women and children, but it was, in fact, first and foremost designed to break Mau Mau and protect loyalist Kikuyu, a fact reflected in the extremely limited resources made available to the Rehabilitation and Community Development Department. Refusal to move could be punished with the destruction of property and livestock, and the roofs were usually ripped off of homes whose occupants demonstrated reluctance. Villagisation also solved the practical and financial problems associated with a further, massive expansion of the Pipeline programme, and the removal of people from their land hugely assisted the enaction of Swynnerton Plan.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The villages were surrounded by deep, spike-bottomed trenches and barbed wire, and the villagers themselves were watched over by members of the Kikiyu Home Guard, often neighbours and relatives. In short, rewards or collective punishments such as curfews could be served much more readily after villagisation, and this quickly broke Mau Mau's passive wing. Though there were degrees of difference between the villages, the overall conditions engendered by villagisation meant that, by early 1955, districts began reporting starvation and malnutrition. One provincial commissioner blamed child hunger on parents deliberately withholding food, saying the latter were aware of the "propaganda value of apparent malnutrition".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Red Cross helped mitigate the food shortages, but even they were told to prioritise loyalist areas. The Baring government's medical department issued reports about "the alarming number of deaths occurring amongst children in the 'punitive' villages", and the "political" prioritisation of Red Cross relief.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: One of the colony's ministers blamed the "bad spots" in Central Province on the mothers of the children for "not realis[ing] the great importance of proteins", and one former missionary reported that it "was terribly pitiful how many of the children and the older Kikuyu were dying. They were so emaciated and so very susceptible to any kind of disease that came along". Of the 50,000 deaths which John Blacker attributed to the Emergency, half were children under the age of ten.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The lack of food did not just affect the children, of course. The Overseas Branch of the British Red Cross commented on the "women who, from progressive undernourishment, had been unable to carry on with their work".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Disease prevention was not helped by the colony's policy of returning sick detainees to receive treatment in the reserves, though the reserves' medical services were virtually non-existent, as Baring himself noted after a tour of some villages in June 1956.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: On 18 January 1955, the Governor-General of Kenya, Evelyn Baring, offered an amnesty to Mau Mau activists. The offer was that they would not face prosecution for previous offences, but may still be detained. European settlers were appalled at the leniency of the offer. On 10 June 1955 with no response forthcoming, the offer of amnesty to the Mau Mau was revoked.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In June 1956, a programme of land reform increased the land holdings of the Kikuyu. This was coupled with a relaxation of the ban on native Kenyans growing coffee, a primary cash crop.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In the cities the colonial authorities decided to dispel tensions by raising urban wages, thereby strengthening the hand of moderate union organisations like the KFRTU. By 1956, the British had granted direct election of native Kenyan members of the Legislative Assembly, followed shortly thereafter by an increase in the number of local seats to fourteen. A Parliamentary conference in January 1960 indicated that the British would accept "one person—one vote" majority rule.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The number of deaths attributable to the Emergency is disputed. David Anderson estimates 25,000 people died; British demographer John Blacker's estimate is 50,000 deaths—half of them children aged ten or below.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: He attributes this death toll mostly to increased malnutrition, starvation and disease from wartime conditions.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Caroline Elkins says "tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands" died. Elkins numbers have been challenged by Blacker, who demonstrated in detail that her numbers were overestimated, explaining that Elkins' figure of 300,000 deaths "implies that perhaps half of the adult male population would have been wiped out—yet the censuses of 1962 and 1969 show no evidence of this—the age-sex pyramids for the Kikuyu districts do not even show indentations."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: His study dealt directly with Elkins' claim that "somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for" at the 1962 census, and was read by both David Anderson and John Lonsdale prior to publication. David Elstein has noted that leading authorities on Africa have taken issue with parts of Elkins' study, in particular her mortality figures: "The senior British historian of Kenya, John Lonsdale, whom Elkins thanks profusely in her book as 'the most gifted scholar I know', warned her to place no reliance on anecdotal sources, and regards her statistical analysis—for which she cites him as one of three advisors—as 'frankly incredible'."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The British possibly killed more than 20,000 Mau Mau militants, but in some ways more notable is the smaller number of Mau Mau suspects dealt with by capital punishment: by the end of the Emergency, the total was 1,090. At no other time or place in the British empire was capital punishment dispensed so liberally—the total is more than double the number executed by the French in Algeria.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Wangari Maathai suggests that more than one hundred thousand Africans, mostly Kikuyus, may have died in the concentration camps and emergency villages.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Officially 1,819 Native Kenyans were killed by the Mau Mau. David Anderson believes this to be an undercount and cites a higher figure of 5,000 killed by the Mau Mau.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: War crimes have been broadly defined by the Nuremberg principles as "violations of the laws or customs of war", which includes massacres, bombings of civilian targets, terrorism, mutilation, torture, and murder of detainees and prisoners of war. Additional common crimes include theft, arson, and the destruction of property not warranted by military necessity.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: David Anderson says the rebellion was "a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly no glory". Political scientist Daniel Goldhagen describes the campaign against the Mau Mau as an example of eliminationism, though this verdict has been fiercely criticised.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The British authorities suspended civil liberties in Kenya. Many Kikuyu were forced to move. According to British authorities 80,000 were interned. Caroline Elkins estimated that between 160,000 and 320,000 were interned in detention camps also known as concentration camps. Most of the rest—more than a million Kikuyu—were held in "enclosed villages" as part of the villagisation program. Although some were Mau Mau guerrillas, most were victims of collective punishment that colonial authorities imposed on large areas of the country. Thousands were beaten or sexually assaulted to extract information about the Mau Mau threat. Later, prisoners suffered even worse mistreatment in an attempt to force them to renounce their allegiance to the insurgency and to obey commands. Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes." The use of castration and denying access to medical aid to the detainees by the British were also widespread and common. As described by Ian Cobain of "The Guardian" in 2013:Among the detainees who suffered severe mistreatment was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of [U.S. President] Barack Obama. According to his widow, British soldiers forced pins into his fingernails and buttocks and squeezed his testicles between metal rods. Two of the original five claimants who brought the test case against the British were castrated.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The historian Robert Edgerton describes the methods used during the emergency: "If a question was not answered to the interrogator's satisfaction, the subject was beaten and kicked. If that did not lead to the desired confession, and it rarely did, more force was applied. Electric shock was widely used, and so was fire. Women were choked and held under water; gun barrels, beer bottles, and even knives were thrust into their vaginas. Men had beer bottles thrust up their rectums, were dragged behind Land Rovers, whipped, burned and bayoneted... Some police officers did not bother with more time-consuming forms of torture; they simply shot any suspect who refused to answer, then told the next suspect, to dig his own grave. When the grave was finished, the man was asked if he would now be willing to talk."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In June 1957, Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the British administration in Kenya, wrote to the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, detailing the way the regime of abuse at the colony's detention camps was being subtly altered. He said that the mistreatment of the detainees is "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia". Despite this, he said that in order for abuse to remain legal, Mau Mau suspects must be beaten mainly on their upper body, "vulnerable parts of the body should not be struck, particularly the spleen, liver or kidneys", and it was important that "those who administer violence ... should remain collected, balanced and dispassionate"; he also reminded the governor that "If we are going to sin", he wrote, "we must sin quietly."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: According to Author Wangari Maathai, three out of every four Kikuyu men were in detention in 1954. Maathai states that detainees were made to do forced labor and that their land was taken from them and given to collaborators. Maathai further states that the Home Guard in particular, raped women and had a well known reputation for cruelty in the form of terror and intimidation, whereas the Mau Mau soldiers were initially respectful of women.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Chuka massacre, which happened in Chuka, Kenya, was perpetrated by members of the King's African Rifles B Company in June 1953 with 20 unarmed people killed during the Mau Mau uprising. Members of the 5th KAR B Company entered the Chuka area on 13 June 1953, to flush out rebels suspected of hiding in the nearby forests. Over the next few days, the regiment had captured and executed 20 people suspected of being Mau Mau fighters for unknown reasons. The people executed belonged to the Kikuyu Home Guard—a loyalist militia recruited by the British to fight the guerrillas. Nobody ever stood trial for the massacre.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Hola massacre was an incident during the conflict in Kenya against British colonial rule at a colonial detention camp in Hola, Kenya. By January 1959, the camp had a population of 506 detainees, of whom 127 were held in a secluded "closed camp". This more remote camp near Garissa, eastern Kenya, was reserved for the most uncooperative of the detainees. They often refused, even when threats of force were made, to join in the colonial "rehabilitation process" or perform manual labour or obey colonial orders. The camp commandant outlined a plan that would force 88 of the detainees to bend to work. On 3 March 1959, the camp commandant put this plan into action—as a result, 11 detainees were clubbed to death by guards. 77 surviving detainees sustained serious permanent injuries. The British government accepts that the colonial administration tortured detainees, but denies liability.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Mau Mau militants were guilty of numerous war crimes. The most notorious was their attack on the settlement of Lari, on the night of 25–26 March 1953, in which they herded men, women and children into huts and set fire to them, hacking down with machetes anyone who attempted escape, before throwing them back into the burning huts. The attack at Lari was so extreme that "African policemen who saw the bodies of the victims ... were physically sick and said 'These people are animals. If I see one now I shall shoot with the greatest eagerness, and it "even shocked many Mau Mau supporters, some of whom would subsequently try to excuse the attack as 'a mistake.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: A retaliatory massacre was immediately perpetrated by Kenyan security forces who were partially overseen by British commanders. Official estimates place the death toll from the first Lari massacre at 74, and the second at 150, though neither of these figures account for those who 'disappeared'. Whatever the actual number of victims, "[t]he grim truth was that, for every person who died in Lari's first massacre, at least two more were killed in retaliation in the second."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Aside from the Lari massacres, Kikuyu were also tortured, mutilated and murdered by Mau Mau on many other occasions. Mau Mau racked up 1,819 murders of their fellow native Kenyans, though again this number excludes the many additional hundreds who 'disappeared', whose bodies were never found. Anderson estimates the true number to be around 5,000. Thirty-two European and twenty-six Asian civilians were also murdered by Mau Mau militants, with similar numbers wounded. The best known European victim was Michael Ruck, aged six, who was hacked to death with pangas along with his parents, Roger and Esme, and one of the Rucks' farm workers, Muthura Nagahu, who had tried to help the family. Newspapers in Kenya and abroad published graphic murder details, including images of young Michael with bloodied teddy bears and trains strewn on his bedroom floor.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In 1952, the poisonous latex of the African milk bush was used by members of Mau Mau to kill cattle in an incident of biological warfare.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Although Mau Mau was effectively crushed by the end of 1956, it was not until the First Lancaster House Conference, in January 1960, that native Kenyan majority rule was established and the period of colonial transition to independence initiated. Before the conference, it was anticipated by both native Kenyan and European leaders that Kenya was set for a European-dominated multi-racial government.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: There is continuing debate about Mau Mau's and the rebellion's effects on decolonisation and on Kenya after independence. Regarding decolonisation, the most common view is that Kenya's independence came about as a result of the British government's deciding that a continuance of colonial rule would entail a greater use of force than that which the British public would tolerate. Nissimi argues, though, that such a view fails to "acknowledge the time that elapsed until the rebellion's influence actually took effect [and does not] explain why the same liberal tendencies failed to stop the dirty war the British conducted against the Mau Mau in Kenya while it was raging on". Others contend that, as the 1950s progressed, nationalist intransigence increasingly rendered official plans for political development irrelevant, meaning that after the mid-1950s British policy increasingly accepted Kenyan nationalism and moved to co-opt its leaders and organisations into collaboration.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: It has been argued that the conflict helped set the stage for Kenyan independence in December 1963, or at least secured the prospect of Black-majority rule once the British left. However, this is disputed and other sources downplay the contribution of Mau Mau to decolonisation.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: On 12 December 1964, President Kenyatta issued an amnesty to Mau Mau fighters to surrender to the government. Some Mau Mau members insisted that they should get land and be absorbed into the civil service and Kenya army. On 28 January 1965, the Kenyatta government sent the Kenya army to Meru district, where Mau Mau fighters gathered under the leadership of Field Marshall Mwariama and Field Marshall Baimungi. These leaders and several Mau Mau fighters were killed. On 14 January 1965, the Minister for Defence Dr Njoroge Mungai was quoted in the Daily Nation saying: "They are now outlaws, who will be pursued and brought to punishment. They must be outlawed as well in the minds of all the people of Kenya."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: On 12 September 2015, the British government unveiled a Mau Mau memorial statue in Nairobi's Uhuru Park that it had funded "as a symbol of reconciliation between the British government, the Mau Mau, and all those who suffered". This followed a June 2013 decision by Britain to compensate more than 5,000 Kenyans it had tortured and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In 1999, a collection of former fighters calling themselves the Mau Mau Original Group announced that they would attempt a £5 billion claim against the UK on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans for ill-treatment that they said they had suffered during the rebellion, though nothing came of it. In November 2002, the Mau Mau Trusta welfare group for former members of the movementannounced that it would attempt to sue the British government for widespread human rights violations it said had been committed against its members. Until September 2003, the Mau Mau movement was banned.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Once the ban was removed, former Mau Mau members who had been castrated or otherwise tortured were supported by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, in particular by the commission's George Morara, in their attempt to take on the British government; their lawyers had amassed 6,000 depositions regarding human rights abuses by late 2002. 42 potential claimants were interviewed, from whom five were chosen to prosecute a test case; one of the five, Susan Ciong'ombe Ngondi, has since died. The remaining four test claimants are: Ndiku Mutua, who was castrated; Paulo Muoka Nzili, who was castrated; Jane Muthoni Mara, who was subjected to sexual assault that included having bottles filled with boiling water pushed up her vagina; and Wambugu Wa Nyingi, who survived the Hola massacre.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Ben Macintyre of "The Times" said of the legal case: "Opponents of these proceedings have pointed out, rightly, that the Mau Mau was a brutal terrorist force, guilty of the most dreadful atrocities. Yet only one of the claimants is of that stampMr Nzili. He has admitted taking the Mau Mau oath and said that all he did was to ferry food to the fighters in the forest. None has been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Upon publication of Caroline Elkins' "Imperial Reckoning" in 2005, Kenya called for an apology from the UK for atrocities committed during the 1950s. The British government claimed that the issue was the responsibility of the Kenyan government, on the ground of "state succession" for former colonies, relying on an obscure legal precedent relating to Patagonian toothfish and the declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1860.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In July 2011, "George Morara strode down the corridor and into a crowded little room [in Nairobi] where 30 elderly Kenyans sat hunched together around a table clutching cups of hot tea and sharing plates of biscuits. 'I have good news from London', he announced. 'We have won the first part of the battle!' At once, the room erupted in cheers." The good news was that a British judge had ruled that the Kenyans could sue the British government for their torture. Morara said that, if the first test cases succeeded, perhaps 30,000 others would file similar complaints of torture. Explaining his decision, Mr Justice McCombe said the claimants had an "arguable case", and added:


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: A "Times" editorial noted with satisfaction that "Mr Justice McCombe told the FCO, in effect, to get lost. Though the arguments against reopening very old wounds are seductive, they fail morally. There are living claimants and it most certainly was not their fault that the documentary evidence that seems to support their claims was for so long 'lost' in the governmental filing system."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: During the course of the Mau Mau legal battle in London, a large amount of what was stated to be formerly lost Foreign Office archival material was finally brought to light, while yet more was discovered to be missing. The files, known as "migrated archives", provided details of British human rights abuses (torture, rape, execution) in its former colonies during the final stages of empire, including during Mau Mau, and even after decolonisation.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Regarding the Mau Mau Uprising, the records included confirmation of "the extent of the violence inflicted on suspected Mau Mau rebels" in British detention camps documented in Caroline Elkins' study. Numerous allegations of murder and rape by British military personnel are recorded in the files, including an incident where a native Kenyan baby was "burnt to death", the "defilement of a young girl", and a soldier in Royal Irish Fusiliers who killed "in cold blood two people who had been his captives for over 12 hours". Baring himself was aware of the "extreme brutality" of the sometimes lethal torture meted outwhich included "most drastic" beatings, solitary confinement, starvation, castration, whipping, burning, rape, sodomy, and forceful insertion of objects into orificesbut took no action. Baring's inaction was despite the urging of people like Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police for Kenya for less than eight months of 1954 before he resigned in protest, that "the horror of some of the [camps] should be investigated without delay". In February 1956, a provincial commissioner in Kenya, "Monkey" Johnson, wrote to Attorney General Reginald Manningham-Buller urging him to block any enquiry into the methods used against Mau Mau: "It would now appear that each and every one of us, from the Governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from public service by a commission of enquiry as a result of enquiries made by the CID." The April 2012 release also included detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Commenting on the papers, David Anderson stated that the "documents were hidden away to protect the guilty", and "that the extent of abuse now being revealed is truly disturbing". "Everything that could happen did happen. Allegations about beatings and violence were widespread. Basically you could get away with murder. It was systematic", Anderson said. An example of this impunity is the case of eight colonial officials accused of having prisoners tortured to death going unpunished even after their actions were reported to London. Huw Bennett of King's College London, who had worked with Anderson on the Chuka Massacre, said in a witness statement to the court that the new documents "considerably strengthen" the knowledge that the British Army were "intimately involved" with the colonial security forces, whom they knew were "systematically abusing and torturing detainees in screening centres and detention camps". In April 2011, lawyers for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office continued to maintain that there was no such policy. As early as November 1952, however, military reports noted that "[t]he Army has been used for carrying out certain functions that properly belonged to the Police, eg. searching of huts and screening of Africans", and British soldiers arrested and transferred Mau Mau suspects to camps where they were beaten and tortured until they confessed. Bennett said that "the British Army retained ultimate operational control over all security forces throughout the Emergency", and that its military intelligence operation worked "hand in glove" with the Kenyan Special Branch "including in screening and interrogations in centres and detention camps".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The Kenyan government sent a letter to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, William Hague, insisting that the UK government was legally liable for the atrocities. The Foreign Office, however, reaffirmed its position that it was not, in fact, liable for colonial atrocities, and argued that the documents had not "disappeared" as part of a cover-up. Nearly ten years before, in late 2002, as the BBC aired a documentary detailing British human rights abuses committed during the rebellion and 6,000 depositions had been taken for the legal case, former district colonial officer John Nottingham had expressed concern that compensation be paid soon, since most victims were in their 80s and would soon pass away. He told the BBC: "What went on in the Kenya camps and villages was brutal, savage torture. It is time that the mockery of justice that was perpetrated in this country at that time, should be, must be righted. I feel ashamed to have come from a Britain that did what it did here [in Kenya]."


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: In October 2012, Mr Justice McCombe granted the surviving elderly test claimants the right to sue the UK for damages. The UK government then opted for what the claimants' lawyers called the "morally repugnant" decision to appeal McCombe's ruling. In May 2013, it was reported that the appeal was on hold while the UK government held compensation negotiations with the claimants.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, told parliament that the UK government had reached a settlement with the claimants. He said it included "payment of a settlement sum in respect of 5,228 claimants, as well as a gross costs sum, to the total value of £19.9 million. The Government will also support the construction of a memorial in Nairobi to the victims of torture and ill-treatment during the colonial era." However he added, "We continue to deny liability on behalf of the Government and British taxpayers today for the actions of the colonial administration in respect of the claims".


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: It is often argued that the Mau Mau Uprising was suppressed as a subject for public discussion in Kenya during the periods under Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi because of the key positions and influential presence of some loyalists in government, business and other elite sectors of Kenyan society post-1963. Unsurprisingly, during this same period opposition groups tactically embraced the Mau Mau rebellion.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Members of Mau Mau are currently recognised by the Kenyan Government as freedom-independence heroes and heroines who sacrificed their lives in order to free Kenyans from colonial rule. Since 2010, Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day) has been marked annually on 20 October (the same day Baring signed the Emergency order). According to the Kenyan Government, Mashujaa Day will be a time for Kenyans to remember and honour Mau Mau and other Kenyans who participated in the independence struggle. Mashujaa Day will replace Kenyatta Day; the latter has until now also been held on 20 October. In 2001, the Kenyan Government announced that important Mau Mau sites were to be turned into national monuments.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: This official celebration of Mau Mau is in marked contrast to a post-colonial norm of Kenyan governments rejection of the Mau Mau as a symbol of national liberation. Such a turnabout has attracted criticism of government manipulation of the Mau Mau uprising for political ends.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: The name "Kenya Land and Freedom Army" is sometimes heard in connection with Mau Mau. KLFA was the name that Dedan Kimathi used for a coordinating body which he tried to set up for Mau Mau. It was also the name of another militant group that sprang up briefly in the spring of 1960; the group was broken up during a brief operation from 26 March to 30 April.


title: Mau Mau rebellion

text: Between 1895 and 1920, Kenya was formally known as British East Africa Protectorate; between 1920 and 1963, as Kenya Colony and Protectorate.