The Mau Mau Uprising
Enormous numbers of young, black Africans fought on the Allied side during WWII. Many of these were involved in campaigns in Southeast Asia, in particular the Japanese retreat from Burma. Many were stationed in India, and the Indian independence movement, led by the likes of Mohandas Gandhi, inspired them deeply. The defeat of fascist totalitarianism also promised a new future, and many young blacks returned to their colonies, only to be disappointed to discover that none of these lofty principles applied to them.
It was said in Kenya in the late 1940s that when the white man returned from war, he was given a farm, when black man returned from war, he was given a bicycle.
As the dust of WWII settled, and as India was granted independence, the liberation movement in Africa began. The Mau Mau Uprising was the first, and only war of liberation fought by the British in Africa. It was a curious affair because it was less than a war, but a great deal more than a civil disturbance.
The Central Highlands of Kenya were known then as the White Highlands. The combination of altitude and the tropics created a perfect climate, and with deep soils, a perfect agricultural landscape. This was where white colonists settled, while the Kikuyu people, the original owners of the lands, were maintained as squatters to provide labor.
It was the Kikuyu, the most politically active of the Kenyan language groups, who led popular resistance to white land occupation, and white political domination. It began on the streets of Nairobi more or less immediately after WWII, but it became the subject of such intense police action, that in the early 1950s it began to manifest as a guerrilla movement in the heavily forested hills and mountains of the White Highlands.
The Mau Mau was a deeply traditional movement, atavistic, and looking to some improbable return to a utopian past. It was intensely violent, and its main targets were what were seen as Kikuyu collaborators. Ironically, it was a Kikuyu ‘Home Guard’ that led the fight against it, supported by a British and local ‘Police Action’. What this implies is that the British would not acknowledge the uprising as a war, but civil unrest, and so emergency courts and gallows became the main weapon of war.
It was also doomed because, as a military action, it was unsupported. The Cold War had not begun in earnest, so no Chinese or Soviet weaponry was involved, and it was linked to no sympathetic neighboring countries. It was easily isolated and destroyed, and by the late 1950s, it was an irritation rather than a threat. It nonetheless brought the question of Kenyan independence to the fore and forced the British to begin negotiations. Kenya was granted independence in December 1963, and although the incoming government was reluctant to acknowledge the Mau Mau, it has since offered it some acknowledgment as being part of the independence process.