On the Mau Mau Uprising: From 1952 to 1960, groups of Kikuyu people known as the Mau Mau openly rebelled against British authorities in Colonial Kenya. As part of the larger decolonization process in Africa during the mid-twentieth century, the Mau Mau helped incite a significant shift in the power relations between European colonizers and their African subjects. Proximal causes of the Uprising were two-fold. First, the Kikuyu were becoming increasingly marginalized under the British. In an economic sense, this meant the Kikuyu were losing vast swaths of land to British settlers who wished to farm. Second, the British encouraged the Kikuyu to engage in wage labor (either on the farms or for the colonial railroads). And it was this kind of cultural chauvinism which led the Kikuyu peoples (Masai, Nandi, etc.) to start squatting on lands. As an open act of defiance, some of the Kikuyu (Mau Mau) began planning organized attacks against not only British soldiers, but also British settlers. These attacks blossomed into an outright rebellion by 1952, when the Colonial Governor (Evelyn Baring) declared a State of Emergency.
