We continue our chronological coverage of the individual games in The British Way by moving on to the British counterinsurgency campaign in Kenya from 1952-1960, although the game only covers the most intensive years from 1952-1956. While the British were beginning to gain the initiative in Malaya, they responded to rising violence and unrest in Kenya’s Central Province by declaring a state of emergency and carrying out Operation Jock Scott, a mass arrest of moderate nationalists (including Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become the first president of Kenya after independence). However, Jock Scott failed to hit the main perpetrators of the rising violence, a collection of militant nationalists, who would form an insurgency against British rule commonly known as the Mau Mau.

Of the four counterinsurgency campaigns covered in the multi-pack, the conflict in Kenya witnessed the most extreme forms of both counterinsurgent and insurgent violence. The British repression against the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu communities was particularly widespread and severe compared to their conduct in other post-WWII campaigns. Given the nature of the themes covered, some players may find the game difficult to play. We’ve striven to depict this conflict as respectfully as possible and hope this game in particular helps players learn about the colonial conflict in Kenya and more broadly why armed actors frequently choose to advance their goals by targeting civilians. Therefore, I’ve chosen to focus this article on explaining each side’s use of violence against civilians and how these have been modeled in the game.

The British Strategies of Reprisals, Detention, and Villagization:

If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly

Eric Griffith-Jones, Attorney-General in Kenya

Unlike in Malaya, where coercive counterinsurgency strategies such as population relocation were paired with a “hearts and minds” strategy, the British responded to the insurgency in Kenya with a broad array of repressive strategies to control the three main ethnic groups supporting the insurgency in Central Province, the Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu. The British used collective punishments involving fines, burnings, and detention to respond to insurgent attacks and coerce the population into ceasing their support for the Mau Mau. To further sever the Mau Mau’s connection with the population, the British relocated over 1 million Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru into protected villages in a policy known as villagization. Reprisals and abuses were common in many of these villages and often carried out by the locally recruited Home Guard militias, drawn from the same population that were being coerced. Finally, the British carried out a massive number of detentions and channeled prisoners through a process of “rehabilitation”, where those deemed less dangerous were released to the tightly controlled protected villages while those deemed more dangerous or uncooperative were sent to stricter and more brutal prisons. This system of detention centers held at one point over 70,000 detainees and was referred to as the “pipeline”.

In The British Way: Kenya, the British have these severe forms of repression at their disposal through the Pipeline Track. The Pipeline Track records the severity of the repression that the British commanders have authorized in Kenya. As the track increases, the British player may conduct the Reprisal and Relocate Special Activities in an increasing number of spaces representing the increasing development of the detention and villagization policies. Relocate can be particularly devastating for the Mau Mau, as it lowers the population value of spaces targeted and increases the number of loyalist Home Guard militia available for the British to Deploy. However, developing these coercive tools has a significant cost. These repressive policies caused a major outcry back in Britain when they were covered by reporters and members of the Labour Party such as Barbara Castle. As the quote at the start of this section indicated, British commanders could unleash brutal repression but ran the risk of a major political cost if the extent of the brutality was discovered. Therefore, each time the British player conducts the Reprisal or Relocate Special Activity they must roll once against the Pipeline Track to see if there is political and moral outrage back home. The higher the Pipeline Track, the more repressive capacity is available to the British player, but they also face a higher chance of getting caught.

Mau Mau Violence and the Kikuyu Civil War:

As with other insurgencies, the Mau Mau used significant violence to ensure compliance of the population and eliminate those deemed to be traitors to the cause or government loyalists. In Kenya, the Mau Mau is known for particularly relying on violence and terror for several reasons. First, one of the main strategies of the insurgency was to destabilize the colony and coerce the British government by committing acts of terror against white settlers in the areas surrounding the Kikuyu reserves, known as the White Highlands. Second, the conflict in Kenya quickly took on the nature of a civil war alongside a colonial war. Many elites within Kikuyu communities favored loyalism with the British, and many others rejected the violent recruiting strategies used by the Mau Mau. This allowed the British to encourage a significant loyalists movement which the Mau Mau aggressively targeted with violence. One of the most brutal acts occurred at the Lari village where a Mau Mau massacre of loyalists only led to further violence in the form of reprisals against suspected Mau Mau supporters. Finally, the Mau Mau focused much of their violence against civilians and loyalist militias, since they faced severe weapon shortages that made it impossible for them to successfully carry out many attacks against British armed forces. Unlike insurgents in other COIN games, the Mau Mau do not possess an Attack Operation, but may remove Police cubes with their Terror Operation.

Although the Mau Mau is known for violence, one must not go too far and reduce the movement to irrational violence, as the British attempted to depict the group during the war using racist framings in their propaganda. Violence against loyalists and other civilians was the Mau Mau’s main method of countering the British attempts to smash their support base with repression and divide the affected population by encouraging loyalism. In addition, the Mau Mau and their goal of independence possessed significant support among the Kikuyu population, even if not all would advocate their violent methods. Although the Mau Mau’s main form of recruiting people to their cause by administering oaths could sometimes be coercive, there were also many who took the oath out of genuine frustration with colonial rule. The group also formed more organized military forces in the vast mountain jungles of Mount Kenya and Aberdares, where they formed the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) led by Dedan Kimathi and other Mau Mau commanders.

A Note about the origins of the term Mau Mau:

The origins of the militant nationalists’ name are contested, but the most reliable origin I could find was cited in Branch’s excellent account of Kikuyu loyalism. According to Branch, the term means “greedy eaters” and was coined by a Kikuyu loyalist as a pejorative, similar to the origins of the name Viet Cong for the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. This name was chosen to convey that the militant nationalists’ strategy of violent resistance was rushing the push towards independence. The British picked up the term and used it to refer to the movement, as did other moderate nationalist leaders critical of the militants such as Jomo Kenyatta. The name is now the dominant one used to describe the movement in all recent scholarship on the conflict.

Given its origins as a pejorative, we looked into alternative names for the movement to use in the game. The best alternative contender was the ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army’ (KLFA), but we’ve decided to use KLFA on the capability card shown above and keep ‘Mau Mau’ for the player faction for several reasons. First, the term Mau Mau has been reappropriated by members of the movement over time, with one example being the formation of the Mau Mau Veterans Association in the early 2000s. Second, the KLFA primarily referred to the armed wing of the broader movement operating out of the mountain jungles. This is the most appropriate name for some members of the movement, but leaves out those who served in broader roles in the populated reserves and Nairobi. In addition, the KLFA in some ways conveys a more centralized movement than existed at the time. The movement, even its armed wing, was fairly decentralized, with several groups operating independently from each other. Finally, the name Mau Mau is a useful reminder that, while the conflict was a colonial war, it was also a civil war among Kikuyu. Although the British encouraged the civil war with their promotion of loyalism, there were plenty of Kikuyu critical of the Mau Mau movement, whether moderate nationalists or loyalists. Neither Mau Mau nor KLFA are perfect names, so we’ve decided to follow the current academic literature which continues to use the term Mau Mau (as do surviving members of the movement).

For those seeking to learn more on local Kikuyu perspectives on the war, whether Mau Mau or Loyalist, I recommend the following books: Barnett and Njama’s Mau Mau from Within, Branch’s Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya, and various memoirs by Mau Mau such as those by Waruhiu Itote (known as “General China”). British repression in Kenya has been thoroughly documented by scholars such as David Anderson in Histories of the Hanged and Caroline Elkins in Imperial Reckoning.

In the next article, we’ll conclude our series with an overview of The British Way: Cyprus.

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Previous Articles: 

The British Way: Introduction to the Multi-Pack

The British Way: Palestine