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Mau Mau Uprising: Mau Maus
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The recent Mau Mau uprising in Kenya served as story material for the 1955 British film Simba. White farmer Dirk Bogarde and his neighbors are targeted for extermination by the zealously nationalistic Mau Maus. Native doctor Joseph Tomelty, whose brother had earlier been killed under questionable circumstances, endeavors to help the whites escape the hordes, only to discover that his own father is the local leader of the insurrectionists. Given the cruelties of colonial rule in Africa, it is hard for any film to make the Mau Mau total villains, despite their own well-documented brutal treatment of their enemies. Simba downplays side-taking and ideology, choosing instead to concentrate on the adventure and suspense elements. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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The Mau Maus were a Brooklyn Puerto Rican gang operating from at least late 1954 to around 1962. According to Israel Narvaez, he and some fellow friends broke from their gang called the Apaches and created the Mau Maus. The Apaches had succumbed to heroin and Israel Narvaez and some of the others were more interested in fighting. They ... asked permission from a rival gang called "the Chaplins", if they could start a Puerto Rico gang in the area. Eventually the gang was called Mau Mau Chaplins.
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The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya has been portrayed as one of the most barbaric upraising of the twentieths century. Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins questions this accepted orthodoxy and examines the crimes perpetrated by colonial forces against Mau Mau and considerable measures that the British colonial government undertook to conceal them. The author provides a comprehensive overview of what happened inside Kenya’s detention camps as well as efforts to conceal the violence from the post-independence generation. The publication is an eye opener and therefore a big resource in attempting to set the record straight. It brings out significant lessons that both colonial and independent Kenya governments never learnt. Essentially it is the single most resource for any one seeking to fully understanding the savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire in Kenya.
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Although tens of thousands were imprisoned without trial, some suspected Mau Mau were arrested, charged and tried for their alleged crimes. But as David Anderson, a lecturer in African studies at Oxford University, reveals in a vivid and comprehensive new account of the war, Histories of the Hanged, the trials testify as much to the brutality of the British counteroffensive as to the Mau Mau crimes themselves. Anderson, whose book is based largely on the documentation of 800 capital cases of accused Mau Mau that survive in the British archives, acknowledges the huge challenge the British faced trying to uphold justice when terrified witnesses recanted their testimony and the courts were overwhelmed with the volume of cases. But he ... finds strong evidence of severe brutality by police against prisoners in 80 percent of those cases. The pressure to convict led to a complete abandonment of the most basic British principles of justice. More than a thousand men were sent to the gallows as convicted Mau Mau terrorists, many on the flimsiest of evidence.
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Mau Mau soldiers originally dressed in khaki shorts and tunics with no badges to speak of. They let their beards grow to look fiercer. They wanted to portray themselves as ferocious warriors. Mau mau organized themselves with a cell structure but many armed bands ... used British military ranks and organizations. They also had their own judges that could hand out fines and other penalties. Associating with non-Mau Mau was punishable by fine or worse.
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The supreme Mau Mau body was the Central Committee. Attached to the Central Committee was the War Office and Headquarters of the Land Freedom Army. This had authority over all the terrorists in the Colony and its chairman was officially known as the Commander in Chief, Kenya. There were other committees representing every district in the native Reserves under the Central Committee. The main job of the Committees was to collect arms, ammunition, money and recruits.
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