Knowledge, Administration, and Counterinsurgency in the Kenya Emergency (2014)

Undergraduate: Eric Walston

Faculty Advisor: Susan Pennybacker
Department: History

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The Kenya Emergency (1952-1960) was declared in response to an anticolonial rebellion involving disparate actors who were grouped by officials under the appellation ¿Mau Mau.¿ The British and Kenyan governments brutally suppressed the rebellion in a sustained counterinsurgency. The Emergency caused tremendous social disruption: almost the entirety of Kenya¿s Kikuyu population was interned or forcibly relocated. Throughout the campaign against Mau Mau, a liberal-paternalist rhetoric of ¿rehabilitation¿ worked to conceal systematic violence and abuses. My project addresses the relationship between knowledge and the state in the British counterinsurgency efforts and examines the role played by postwar developmentalist thinking in British constructions of ¿Mau Mau.¿ Many Europeans interpreted the rebellion as a regression into ¿savage barbarism¿ and as a challenge to British efforts to create ¿modern¿ Africans by means of development projects; some argued that it was the inevitable result of an encounter between ¿primitive¿ and ¿civilized¿ societies. A 1945 Sessional Paper had set as the general framework of the Kenyan Government ¿to meet efficiently and expeditiously the complexity of post-war conditions and the primary problems of development and reconstruction.¿ I argue in part that this discourse of ¿reconstruction¿ had a deep history in British imperial thinking since the First World War and helped determine the contours of the British reception of Mau Mau.