1950s
A key watershed in Kenyan history came from 1952 to 1956, during the Mau Mau Uprising.
The Mau Mau was an armed local movement directed principally against the colonial government and the European settlers. It was the largest and most successful such movement in British Africa, but it was not emulated by the other colonies. The protest was supported almost exclusively by the Kikuyu, despite issues of land rights and anti-European, anti-Western appeals designed to attract other groups. The Mau Mau movement was also a bitter internal struggle among the Kikuyu. Harry Thuku said in 1952, "To-day we, the Kikuyu, stand ashamed and looked upon as hopeless people in the eyes of other races and before the Government. Why? Because of the crimes perpetrated by Mau Mau and because the Kikuyu have made themselves Mau Mau." The British killed over 12000 Mau Mau militants. Mau Mau carried out many atrocities with the violence on all sides reflecting the ferocity of the movement and the ruthlessness with which the British suppressed it.[25] Kenyatta denied he was a leader of the Mau Mau but was convicted at trial and was sent to prison in 1953, gaining his freedom in 1961. To support its military campaign of counter- insurgency the colonial government embarked on agrarian reforms that stripped white settlers of many of their former protections; for example, Africans were for the first time allowed to grow coffee, the major cash crop. Thuku was one of the first Kikuyu to win a coffee license, and in 1959 he became the first African board member of the Kenya Planters Coffee Union.
Despite Kenyatta's efforts to steer a middle course, the KAU became increasingly radical and Kikuyu-dominated. While he angled to give the party a multitribal profile to appease the settlers, he also managed to sacrifice some moderates in the leadership for the sake of party unity. There were defections as well. Several radicals joined an underground movement and took oaths of allegiance against the British. Oath-taking groups emerged secretly all around in the Central Highlands and, by 1951, a Central Committee was organized to - coordinate activities.
The Central Committee began murdering its opponents and attacking white-owned property in what was to become known as the Mau Mau Rebellion. The origin of the name Mau Mau is obscure (it may derive from muma, a traditional Kikuyu oath), but the insurgents never used it, calling themselves the Land and Freedom Army (LFA). The British accused the KAU leadership of involvement, but this seems unlikely, though the insurgents used Kenyatta's name in their propaganda. The LFA consisted largely of young men from the rural periphery of towns like Nyeri, Fort Hall (Murang'a) and Nairobi, and membership was overwhelmingly Kikuyu. One of the main factors prompting them into violent action was that land seizure by the settlers meant they no longer had enough land to feed themselves. Many insurgents had taken part in strikes during the late 1940s, and others were ex-soldiers who had fought for the British and learned guerrilla warfare in places like Burma.
In August 1952, following arson attacks on the homes of people who had refused to take the Mau Mau oath, the government imposed a curfew on three districts of Nairobi where support for the insurgents was strong. But in October, Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, the government's most senior African official, was murdered in Nairobi in broad daylight after making a speech condemning the Mau Mau. The British reacted by declaring a State of Emergency, and arresting any suspected insurgents. Within ten days, they had detained nearly four thousand people.
Kenyatta had played a delicate political game, condemning strikes and even oath-taking but ready to seize on any chance to exploit the situation. Now he and other KAU leaders were arrested and interned for their supposed part in the uprising. Thousands of British troops were sent to Kenya, and a Kikuyu Home Guard was formed to combat the Mau Mau, but the hardcore guerrillas fled into and lived off the jungle for months on end, launching surprise attacks at night. They relied on considerable support from the Kikuyu homesteads for supplies, intelligence reports and stolen weapons.
By early 1953, the rebels were becoming more daring. In January they murdered a settler family, the Rucks, including their 6-year-old son, and in March, a party of 83 insurgents raided Naivasha police station, releasing 173 detainees and seizing a large quantity of weaponry. Almost simultaneously, a force of some one thousand insurgents attacked the village of Lari, northwest of Nairobi, whose residents were Kikuyus loyal to the colonial regime, many of them Home Guard members. The insurgents burned down their homes and hacked to death around 84 people; only 31 survived.
The British now declared "Special Areas" in which anyone who failed to stop when challenged would be shot, and "Prohibited Areas" - including the Aberdarcs and Mount Kenya - in which all black people would be shot on sight. In April 1954 they put Nairobi under military control, rounding up all the city's Kikuyu residents and detaining 17,000 of them, before extending the operation to other Kikuyu areas. By the end of the year, there were 77,000 prisoners in British concentration camps, where they were subject to arbitrary acts of brutality and murder at the hands of British troops. At one point, a third of the entire male Kikuyu population was being held in detention.
Under emergency powers, a policy of "villagization" was also enforced: by the end of 1955, over a million people - almost the entire Kikuyu population - had been forcibly resettled in villages policed by guards and fenced with barbed wire. It was during this period that the cluster of closely related small tribes known today as the Kalenjin, acquired their name, which means "I tell you" in their common language, Nandi. Forging together the Nandi, Pokot, Elgeyo, Marakwet,Tugen and others under a single umbrella, it was largely the creation of the colonial authorities, seeking to recruit and reinforce support against the Kikuyu-dominated Mau Mau.
During the uprising, insurgents had murdered 32 white settlers and around 2000 African civilians. Fifty British troops lost their lives.The British had hanged 1090 rebels - more than in any other colonial uprising - and claimed to have killed around 11,000 guerrillas, destroying much of the documentation about the detention camps before independence. New evidence however, collected by Caroline Elkins of Harvard University, suggests that British forces killed more than 50,000 people, perhaps even 100,000. Many of these, uncommitted to Mau Mau, yet living in key locations as far as the British were concerned, were caught, sometimes literally, in the crossfire. No British officials were ever prosecuted for atrocities committed during the Emergency, nor has Britain ever apologized to Kenya for it.
Constitutional debates.
At its height in 1953, the insurgency consisted of some fifteen thousand guerrillas, but little by little the British hunted them down. By September 1956, only around five thousand remained. The end of the revolt came in October that year with the capture and execution of Dedan Kimathi, the LFA's commander- in-chief. The State of Emergency nonetheless continued until 1960, when it was abandoned after news that British troops had bludgeoned detainees at Hola detention camp, killing eleven and injuring sixty, escaped into the press and caused a scandal in Britain.
After the suppression of the Mau Mau rising, the British provided for the election of the six African members to the Legislative Council under a weighted franchise based on education. The new colonial constitution of 1958 increased African representation, but African nationalists began to demand a democratic franchise on the principle of "one man, one vote." However, Europeans and Asians, because of their minority position, feared the effects of universal suffrage. With the Emergency over, the KAU leaders still at liberty set about exploiting the European fear of a repeat episode. Anything that now delayed the fulfilment of African nationalist aspirations could be seen as fuel for another revolt.
In 1959, nationalist leader Tom Mboya began a program, funded by Americans, of sending talented youth to the United States for higher education. There was no university in Kenya at the time, but colonial officials opposed the program anyway. The next year Senator John F. Kennedy helped fund the program, which trained some 70% of the top leaders of the new nation, including the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, environmentalist Wangari Maathai.[27]