Sir, – I am somewhat at a loss to know what to make of the correspondence from Roderick Bradley and Derek Reed on the subject of Mau Mau (November 21st 23rd).
Mau Mau was a paradox: an extraordinarily complex event, irreducible to simple or simplistic explanations: either a nationalist revolt against white appropriation of African land and ways of life that places it in the pantheon of anti-colonial struggle everywhere; or a blood-soaked atavistic psychosis in response to imperial progress and necessary change.
Mr Reed writes that white casualties have been written out of the record. Thirty-two European settlers died in the rebellion, and there were fewer than 200 casualties among British regiments and police who served in Kenya during that period.
More than 1,800 African civilians were killed by Mau Mau, with many more hundreds disappearing. Official figures give the number of Mau Mau dead as 12,000; more than 20,000 is the accepted figure. Mass detention, mass eviction with more than a million people displaced, mass rape, judicial murder were also features of the suppression of Mau Mau.
Mr Bradley presents Mau Mau as a united Kikuyu event. It was anything but. The British supported Kikuyu opposition to Mau Mau, arming vigilantes and styling them a home guard. But there was also a strong class element to Mau Mau: the Kikuyu were a deeply divided people, with a growing mass of the dispossessed and impoverished confronting the leadership of the chiefs and the athomi; a conflict over the meaning of Kikuyu political morality and propertied civic virtue. As Mau Mau wore on, it looked more and more like a civil war.
Whatever about Terence Gavaghan (An Appreciation, November 7th), one Dublin man who does come out of it well is a solicitor called Peter Evans who defended Mau Mau accused in the Nairobi courts, where they faced execution for having been oathed or possessing a single bullet – judicial murder.
What I know of Mau Mau suggests there is nothing to glorify on any side: it was a tragedy. – Yours, etc,