title: Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge Military Histories)
author: Huw Bennett
description: "Bennett demolishes the myth that the British army fought against the Mau Mau by trying to win the 'hearts and minds of the people'. He shows in unsurpassed detail the ways in which the army used coercion to cow the civil population into capitulation. This book is indispensable to a proper understanding of what happened in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency." <br />David French, author of The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967<br /><br />"In this first document-based study of the wars of decolonisation fought by the British Army after 1945, Huw Bennett provides a gripping, revisionist account of the campaign against Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. Britain's Army, war-weary, over-stretched, under-trained and dependent upon reluctant conscripts, held on to a philosophy of 'minimum force' in Kenya. But on the ground the 'rule of law' was bent, and sometimes broken, as the Army used whatever force it needed. Newly unearthed documents tell a story that shatters our view of Britain's Army as the 'hearts-and-minds' counter-insurgency specialists. This is more than just another colonial history, it is a commentary on the myths we still live by in post-imperial Britain. If you want to know what went wrong in Basra and Helmand, start here." <br />David M. Anderson, author of Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire<br /><br />"... Bennett is to be congratulated for an exciting, lively, readable, informed, and scholarly study of Mau Mau that both supplements and complements the growing corpus on British counter-insurgency." <br />Matthew Hughes, War in History<br /><br />"Bennett's comprehensive use of previously unseen documents - and, indeed, the weight of this evidence - will silence those who have claimed that Kikuyu oral testimonies are 'untrustworthy' or cannot serve as 'proper' evidence. The same people will argue that abuses carried out by Mau Mau are little mentioned here, but that is not the focus of Bennett's book. This is no sensationalist account of a dirty colonial war, but an exhaustively researched and carefully unpacked indictment of British conduct in one of its perennially difficult colonies. Fighting the Mau Mau is essential reading for anyone concerned with Kenya's history or the decolonization of the British Empire." <br />International Journal of African Historical Studies<br /><br />"Offers a careful dissection of the dynamic of the use of force during the insurgency, disassembling the issues surrounding minimum force and the army's behaviour towards civilians the better to put them back together. Locating the study within the 'military phase' of the Kenya Emergency (which lasted from 1952 until the capture of the Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi in October 1956), Bennett underlines the decisive role played by the army in quashing the rebellion within what was a relatively short period for a counterinsurgency campaign - although the official end of the emergency only came four years later. The issue at hand, then, is not whether the army was effective in countering the insurgency, but rather how it comported itself." <br />Michael P. M. Finch, The English Historical Review
zlib_text: TO BRENT
  
   
  
  Illustration Credits
  © Punch Ltd.
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 240
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Kenya National Archives
  © Bettman / CORBIS
  © Topham / The Image Works
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Transafrica Press
  Kenya National Archives
  © Topham / The Image Works
  Transafrica Press
  Transafrica Press
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Kenya National Archives
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 775
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Transafrica Press
  Kenya National Archives
  Kenya National Archives
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Guardian News Services
  Peace News
  Estate of Alastair Matheson
  Personal collection of Caroline Elkins
  
  Contents
  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
  PREFACE
  ONE: PAX BRITANNICA
  TWO: BRITAIN’S ASSAULT ON MAU MAU
  THREE: SCREENING
  FOUR: REHABILITATION
  FIVE: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN’S GULAG
  SIX: THE WORLD BEHIND THE WIR