LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Mau Mau Uprising: Kikuyu Guard
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The term Mau Mau had been used as early as 1947 to refer to the intermittent but escalating Kikuyu violence that was taking place in both rural and urban areas of colonial Kenya. Later, it came to describe the anti-colonial guerrilla movement that launched a four-year revolt beginning in 1952. The movement’s grievances centred on colonial land policies, which confiscated prime farmland for white settlers while relegating Africans to overcrowded “tribal reserves”. Although the origins of the term Mau Mau are still debated, in the Kikuyu language it means “greedy eating”. Many participants in the rebellion rejected the label, instead favouring such names as Kiama Kia Muingi (the Community’s Party), Muhimu (Swahili for “important”), the African Government, and the Kenya Land Freedom Army.
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[T]he Mau Mau rebellion came out of sophisticated nationalist feelings, especially among the Kikuyus, the largest tribe in Kenya. These feelings were powered by resentment over the large tracts of farm land monopolized by whites while the overcrowded African areas had too little land to go around. Kikuyu hotheads began to unite their compatriots against the British through a traditional religious ceremony known as oathing. The oaths, reinforced by such rituals as the smearing of blood on a forehead and the chewing of a goat's innards, were regarded as so binding that an oathed Kikuyu risked supernatural vengeance if he or she betrayed the tribe. The term Mau Mau -- first coined by the British -- was probably derived from the Kikuyu word for oath.
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Defeating the Mau Mau took four years, a long time considering the inequality of the fighting forces. The British fielded three brigades at the height of the campaign, in 1954-5, in which British infantry balanced the white-officered King's African Rifles. The loyalist Kikuyu Guard was much larger but was dispersed and immobile in its village keeps. The police ... expanded. Mau Mau guerrillas may have numbered up to 15, 000 in late 1953 and 25, 000 in all over the four years. Less than one in five of them carried precision firearms however, and their casualties were heavy; over 10, 000 died.
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Most Mau Mau leaders were drawn from the ranks of the Kikuyu, one of Kenya's leading tribes. The Kikuyu had long been the country's most prosperous farmers, until the British arrived in the late nineteenth century and white settlers began to appropriate their most fertile lands. Over time, the Kikuyu were forced onto tiny "reserves" that couldn't possibly sustain them. The lucky ones were allowed to squat on settlers' farms but were forbidden from growing the most profitable crops or owning more than a paltry amount of cattle. Mechanization and a rapidly intensifying land grab soon drove many off even these meager plots.
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In the Mau Mau uprising, thirty European and twenty-six Asian civilians were killed. Of the Kenyan security forces, five hundred and ninety were killed, of whom sixty-three were European. At the height of the emergency, civilian deaths ran at about one hundred a month, the great majority of them loyalist Kikuyu. Mau Mau deaths are estimated at eleven thousand and five hundred.
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As the Mau Mau oath spread to Kenya's cities, the British declared a state of emergency on October 9, 1952. The British isolated some 20,000 Mau Mau fighters in the forest by cutting off their supply lines to Nairobi and to the Kikuyu countryside, then confronted them with a roughly equal force. Every Kikuyu who was not a loyalist was treated as a confirmed oath-taker. In a month, almost half of the 50,000 Kikuyu screened had been detained -- without a single trial having been held. The number doubled within six months.
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Kikuyu Guard