LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Mau Mau Uprising: Kikuyu Guard
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The Kikuyu, denied any major additions to their reserve and never reconciled to the loss of their original lands, began an agitation after World War II, which culminated in the Mau Mau uprising of the early 1950s. Although the rebellion did not spread to the other native peoples, it cost the lives of a few Europeans and thousands of Kikuyu, and the expenditure of millions of dollars. By the end of the emergency, in 1956, the prosettler policy was abandoned in favor of one similar to that being followed in West Africa, leading to majority rule and independence. The only difficulty in this period concerned Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu leader, who had been imprisoned for complicity in the Mau Mau uprising. The major Kenya political party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU), refused to cooperate fully until their leader was released. Once this was done (1961), full cooperation ensured Kenya's independence, which was proclaimed on December 12, 1963.
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The Mau Mau veterans allege that the British Government was negligent in it’s treatment of the detainees by knowingly allowing and even possibly endorsing their torture by British Security Forces and the African Home Guard. If the uprising is considered by police lawyers to have been a war, then the terms of the Geneva Convention concerning treatment of prisoners apply. Britain signed up to this in 1935 and ... openly condemned the treatment of British Prisoners of War by the Japanese.
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The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s was a murky part of the British military's past. The Mau Mau movement found its roots in the Kikuyu tribe. Their aim was to win back their land and personal freedoms denied them by the British colonial power at the time. Lawyers, working with Kenyan Mau Mau veterans' groups, have taken over 6,000 depositions alleging numerous major human rights abuses, including rape, torture, indiscriminate killing and theft of property. New evidence has been unearthed alleging British atrocities, on such a scale that it will require the rewriting of British imperial history. [Abstract reproduced from dvd]
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Mau Mau is a term of uncertain origin. There is disagreement among sources as to whether it is an actual word, while some claim that it is the name of a range of hills and others claim that it was created by British settlers to demean the rebels and simplify the complicated organizational structure of the insurgents. Mau Mau may be an acronym of sorts: Mzungu Aende Ulaya — Mwafrika Apate Uhuru. This Swahili phrase translates in English to, "Let the white man go back abroad so the African can get his independence." Members of the Kikuyu tribe formed the core of the resistance along with smaller numbers of Embu and Meru , but the Kikuyu did not call the rebel movement Mau Mau. It was known to them variously as "Muingi/The Movement", "Muigwithania/The Unifier", "Muma wa Uiguano/The Oath of Unity" or simply "The KCA", after the Kikuyu Central Association that created the impetus for the insurgency.
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The crisis came on the night of March 26, 1953, when two successive massacres -- one by the Mau Mau, the other by a Christian militia known as the Home Guards -- claimed more than 400 lives, mostly women and children. Anderson recounts a debate in the Mau Mau forest camps in July 1953, reflecting growing doubts about the morality and advisability of killing women and children. Did they sense that letting the pursuit of justice give way to vengeance might drown the struggle in its own blood? The spectacular expansion of the Mau Mau movement in Nairobi -- the British believed that 90 percent of the Kikuyu had taken the oath-- ... helped dilute its focus. Criminal elements crept in; coerced fund-raising and oath-taking began. With the Mau Mau political leadership jailed from the outset of the crisis, and with parallel militias arising from rebels in the forest, the movement never again had a unified leadership.
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Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words "Mau Mau" still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya's Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning. After years of research in London and Kenya, including interviews with hundreds of Kenyans, settlers, and former British officials, Elkins has written the first book about the eight-year British war against the Mau Mau.
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Kikuyu Guard