Breaking Mau Mau: British Efforts to Rehabilitate the Mau Mau and Create New Citizens of Kenya

Abstract: Facing the end of the colonial state during the Mau Mau crisis in 1950s, Britain sought to reshape native Kenyans. This process was dependent on the construction of various imaginations of the Mau Mau. The British sought to eliminate the Mau Mau “sickness” by responding in a comprehensive manner to what they saw as the issues which precipitated its development. Politically, religiously, economically, and intellectually, the British tried to control this conclusion to the colonial period and shape the future of Kenya by “rehabilitating” those “infected” by anti-British Mau Mau sentiments and create new citizens in the British image. Missionaries, teachers, economists, agrarians, doctors, anthropologists, and government officials in Kenya would contribute various constructions of the Mau Mau upon which rehabilitation efforts were based. Whitehall tried to reform or rehabilitate Mau Mau in prison work camps and in communities, freeing them from the political and psychological...Show moreAbstract: Facing the end of the colonial state during the Mau Mau crisis in 1950s, Britain sought to reshape native Kenyans. This process was dependent on the construction of various imaginations of the Mau Mau. The British sought to eliminate the Mau Mau “sickness” by responding in a comprehensive manner to what they saw as the issues which precipitated its development. Politically, religiously, economically, and intellectually, the British tried to control this conclusion to the colonial period and shape the future of Kenya by “rehabilitating” those “infected” by anti-British Mau Mau sentiments and create new citizens in the British image. Missionaries, teachers, economists, agrarians, doctors, anthropologists, and government officials in Kenya would contribute various constructions of the Mau Mau upon which rehabilitation efforts were based. Whitehall tried to reform or rehabilitate Mau Mau in prison work camps and in communities, freeing them from the political and psychological constraints of Mau Mau in a variety of while also creating a new economic and political structure in the colony which would allow those who had been successfully been rehabilitated to stay loyal to the British and maintain a privileged place in this nascent state. This essay will explore the efforts of the British to create new citizens and their efforts to define the Mau Mau upon which these responses to the conflict were based. The British government recognized the threat of Mau Mau and the implication its demands for “land and freedom” could have on their control of the State, thus they placed great emphasis on trying to understand, explain, define, and then reform Mau Mau adherents. For the British, this process was contingent upon the development of a construction of Mau Mau identity, an effort manifest in the research of colonial representatives and in their plans for “rehabilitation”. While Mau Mau was, indeed, a movement amongst ethnic Kenyans, it was also the subject of various colonial constructions. The various manifestations of this ‘movement of the mind’ which Mau Mau represented was as much a product of the minds of colonial officials, subjects, and representatives as it was a construction in the minds of the Kikuyu. These conceptions developed in tandem, informing each other, and shaping the development of the state. ‘Rehabilitation’ was at once, a response to the rebellion and a construction in the minds of colonial officials and one imposed upon the Kikuyu, one which was as much a representation of the colonials’ understanding of the conflict as it was an attempt to construct in Kikuyu minds a vision of the future that was already manifest in the minds of those colonial officials trying to shape it. These different perspectives would exist in the minds of colonials who would attempt to actualize their conception of the phenomenon in their plans for reconstruction. As the conflict progressed and conceptions of the phenomenon of Mau Mau and plans to counter the rebellion developed, the various colonial and Kikuyu constructions of Mau Mau would shape each other.Show less

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Breaking Mau Mau: British Efforts to Rehabilitate the Mau Mau and Create New Citizens of Kenya