Last week I attended a three-day international conference at the University of Nairobi celebrating the 70th anniversary of the British declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya in October 1952. The theme of the conference was “Recasting Mau Mau Discourse: Reflections on the Declaration of the State of Emergency 70 years later.”
The declaration followed the need to crush the rise of an armed Mau Mau movement, an anti-colonial struggle mainly in the colony’s central and Rift Valley regions. It gave the colonial government power to respond heavy-handedly and legitimised the ban on Mau Mau as a terrorist organisation and the mass detention of adherents, suspects, and sympathisers.
