The Mau Mau Movement or Rebellion is the opposition of British rule in Kenya. In 1895 the British East India Company invaded and colonized Kenya. The British took land away from Kenyans and forced labor upon its people. Some Kenyans began to revolt 50 years later and the British began a brutal military campaign that included detention camps and torture. The British enacted a series of crazy taxes to ensure they would generate revenue. For instance, the hut tax. Where they forced a tax paid to the British government for each family-owned hut. This resulted in Kenyans having to work for someone else in order to pay this tax, if they didn’t pay, forced labor was their punishment. Another example was the poll tax, where Kenyans were required to work 60 days out of the year for the British government if they were not already employed by British settlers. Kenyans who originally occupied the land stolen by the British were deemed squatters, and by 1939 settlers could demand 270 days of work from these so-called squatters.
Years of this torture and exploitation spurred the growth of the resistance movement, The Mau Mau Movement in 1950. It was comprised of numerous ethnic groups within the Kenyan diaspora, but unity was promoted within the movement. The British responded by calling them savages and branded them as terrorists. The Mau Mau planned attacks on British farms, settlers, and indigenous Kenyans who were loyal to the British. In 1952, the British declared a state of emergency and began its military operations against The Mau Mau. After an eight-year battle roughly 11,000 Mau Mau were killed, while 32 British settlers were killed. Then the British set up detention camps where an estimated 160,000-320,000 Kikuyu were detained. These detention camps were “rebranded” by the British as rehabilitation camps where good citizenship was encouraged and where the people were re-educated away from the nationalist views introduced by The Mau Mau Movement. Leaked documents exposed this to be untrue. These documents confirm that detainees were isolated, tortured, raped, forced to work, and some even murdered — disease and starvation were apt to happen, and it did.