An Analyis of the Violence Utilized by the Mau Mau Rebellion

According to Clough in “The Movement and the Oaths” chapter of Mau Mau Memoirs, “the oath was strongly militant and implicitly threatened violence against Europeans and those who betrayed the movement” as well as “the oath was compulsory; people called to oathing ceremonies were not allowed to refuse or leave and were beaten and threatened with death if they tried” (98). In my opinion, if any movement requires such violent threats/actions to indoctrinate members, then the movement may be unjust in their ideology as well. Clough also states later, on page 101, “The desperation of late joiners could be fueled by fear.” If this movement was growing to this degree, to the point where some people felt compelled to join out of fear for their own safety, then they had real power to affect change just through numbers.

In “The Chief Mau Mau Propagandist”, the author covers the experiences that caused Gakaara wa Wanjau to become the main anti-colonial literary activist that shaped the political consciousness of the Mau Mau fighters. The author Lucy Waithanwa cites the mistreatment and unfair actions taken by Europeans against black Africans. “Carey Francis was a disciplinarian who punished Gakaara severally” and unfairly expelled Gakaara from his high school in 1940 (265). Later that year, Gakaara joined the war efforts as an army clerk in Ethiopia. Through this, he learned from “black servicemen from British colonies such as Nigeria, Gold Coast, Tanganyika, Uganda, Nyasaland, and Southern and northern Nigeria [that]... these servicemen portrayed a yearning for independence for the colonised peoples” (265). With such actions persisting through the war, Gakaara’s distrust grew into contempt for the British. Based on these actions, a movement such as the Mau Mau sounds more justified in their motivation. I still cannot condone their recruitment methods. That being said, the first action taken by the Forty Group Association (precursor of the Mau Mau movement) was to free Nairobi women from slaving on a terracing project which kept them separated from their children (Waithanwa 266). 

However, after reading the Report on Mau Mau letter, which states “Fanatics reserve their full hatred for those of their own kind, or nearly of their own kind, who refuse to go along on the True Way” (4), I have to say that I cannot justify the violence of this movement. They would kill their own, some of whom were just as anti-European as the Mau Mau, in order to establish the ‘needed’ tribal solidarity against the Europeans.

Works Cited

Clough, M. S. (1998). The Movement and The Oaths. In Mau Mau memoirs: History, memory, and politics (pp. 97-109). Boulder, CO: Lyne Rienner.

Reed, D. E. (1954, October 28). Report on Mau Mau [Letter to Mr. Walter S. Rogers]. Kenya, Nairobi.

Waithanwa, L. W., Mwaruvie, J., & Maina, L. M. (2017). The Chief Mau Mau Propagandist: Experiences that Prompted Gakaara wa Wanjau into Anti-Colonial Literary Activism. International Journal of Innovative Research and Development, 6(4). doi:10.24940/ijird/2017/v6/i4/mar17070