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Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
RARELY DOES A WORK OF HISTORY fundamentally rewrite our notions of a country, a people, and a revolution. In Histories of the Hanged, a searing account of the final, bloody decade of British rule in Kenya, Oxford historian David Anderson presents new findings so extraordinary that they promise not only to redefine our understanding of the brutal war between the colonial government and the insurrectionist Mau Mau but also to reveal our historical dishonesty in failing to distinguish between terrorists and political insurgents.
A riveting account of the British experience in colonial Kenya, Histories of the Hanged begins much earlier than the actual hostilities, which decimated Kenya between 1952 and 1960. Explaining how thousands of British settlers began displacing native Kenyans as early as 1900, Anderson reveals how the British appropriated the most fertile Kenyan land at the beginning of the twentieth century, precipitating an exodus of Kenyans to urban areas, where poverty and deep discontent festered, particularly among the Kikuyu people. In the economic depression the followed World War II, the ardent nationalism of the Kikuyu-based Mau Mau attracted new recruits at a revolutionist pace that few could have imagined.
Anderson's astonishing piece of historical detective work reveals how, in the course of suppressing the Mau Mau revolt, Kenya's British rulers were responsible for thousands of unjustifiable killings, for gross abuses of both their own law and the laws of war, and for what are probably the most brutal episodes of legal and physical oppression in twentieth-century imperial history. In uncovering thousands of new files and court transcripts, Anderson reveals that the British, with the knowledge of both Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, committed untold atrocities against Kenyan subjects, putting over 70,000 people in prison camps and sending hundreds to the gallows without proper trial.
Uncovering the scanty evidence against the defendants, and the methods of torture by which the British extracted many of their confessions, Histories of the Hanged presents the infamous Mau Mau trials, the most perfunctory and shamefully brutal legal proceedings carried out anywhere in Britain's sprawling empire. And while the perception in the West was of the Mau Mau as bloodthirsty terrorists, intent on slaughtering innocent white civilians and harmless children, the truth is that the Kikuyu rebels killed only thirty-two white colonists and that the real aggressors in this "dirty war" were the high-ranking members of the British government.
Histories of the Hanged is a brilliantly told and deeply shocking story. eyewitness testimonies put the imperial British government on trial, and the secret history of the Mau Mau revolt is revealed in official and intelligence reports, interviews, and the personal stories of governors, guerrilla fighters, and victims. Appearing at a critical juncture in early twenty-first-century history, Histories of the Hanged may be more timely than we previously thought.
A riveting account of the British experience in colonial Kenya, Histories of the Hanged begins much earlier than the actual hostilities, which decimated Kenya between 1952 and 1960. Explaining how thousands of British settlers began displacing native Kenyans as early as 1900, Anderson reveals how the British appropriated the most fertile Kenyan land at the beginning of the twentieth century, precipitating an exodus of Kenyans to urban areas, where poverty and deep discontent festered, particularly among the Kikuyu people. In the economic depression the followed World War II, the ardent nationalism of the Kikuyu-based Mau Mau attracted new recruits at a revolutionist pace that few could have imagined.
Anderson's astonishing piece of historical detective work reveals how, in the course of suppressing the Mau Mau revolt, Kenya's British rulers were responsible for thousands of unjustifiable killings, for gross abuses of both their own law and the laws of war, and for what are probably the most brutal episodes of legal and physical oppression in twentieth-century imperial history. In uncovering thousands of new files and court transcripts, Anderson reveals that the British, with the knowledge of both Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, committed untold atrocities against Kenyan subjects, putting over 70,000 people in prison camps and sending hundreds to the gallows without proper trial.
Uncovering the scanty evidence against the defendants, and the methods of torture by which the British extracted many of their confessions, Histories of the Hanged presents the infamous Mau Mau trials, the most perfunctory and shamefully brutal legal proceedings carried out anywhere in Britain's sprawling empire. And while the perception in the West was of the Mau Mau as bloodthirsty terrorists, intent on slaughtering innocent white civilians and harmless children, the truth is that the Kikuyu rebels killed only thirty-two white colonists and that the real aggressors in this "dirty war" were the high-ranking members of the British government.
Histories of the Hanged is a brilliantly told and deeply shocking story. eyewitness testimonies put the imperial British government on trial, and the secret history of the Mau Mau revolt is revealed in official and intelligence reports, interviews, and the personal stories of governors, guerrilla fighters, and victims. Appearing at a critical juncture in early twenty-first-century history, Histories of the Hanged may be more timely than we previously thought.
406 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
89 people are currently reading
1138 people want to read
About the author
David Anderson
26 books6 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Anderson is Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford. His research interests have remained focused upon eastern and central Africa, but his published work has ranged across a wide variety of topics, from histories of environmental change to current analysis of political violence. David Anderson is co-editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
see also David M. Anderson
David Anderson is Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford. His research interests have remained focused upon eastern and central Africa, but his published work has ranged across a wide variety of topics, from histories of environmental change to current analysis of political violence. David Anderson is co-editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
see also David M. Anderson
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July 5, 2023
On the evening of March 26, 1953, the local Home Guard unit of the town of Lari in the British colony of Kenya was summoned to investigate reports of a body found an hour’s journey from the town. Arriving at the location, they found the disfigured corpse of a man left nailed to a tree next to a footpath so that he would be easily discovered. No sooner had they found him, however, then they saw fires breaking out in the direction of Lari, which they had left undefended. Hastening back to the town, they were horrified to discover dozens of people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, murdered by the armed gangs who had used the corpse to lure them out of town so they could attack the vulnerable community.
In the end, nearly a hundred people were killed in the Lari massacre, making it the bloodiest single incident in Kenya’s “dirty war” between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, and the British authorities. To David Anderson, the event was a product of far more than a struggle for independence from colonial rule, reflecting as well the deeper changes that had taken place in native African society as a consequence of British imperialism. Not the least of his achievements in this absorbing book is in showing how these larger and more relevant factors made the Mau Mau revolt not just a war of insurgency against an imperial power but a civil war among the native peoples, one that, while overlooked in popular conceptions of the conflict in contemporary Western coverage, still haunts Kenya to this day.
To demonstrate this, Anderson spends considerable space detailing the socioeconomic development of Kenya in the years leading up to the rebellion. Much of this was shaped by the land hunger of the British, who found in the highlands both fertile farmland and a climate very much to their liking. Britons unable to afford the gentry lifestyle back home could replicate it in Kenya at a fraction of the cost, thanks to the support of a colonial regime that crafted policies that favored their interests. The influx of white settlers drawn to this opportunity marginalized the indigenous Africans, who were forced into “reserves” and reorganized tribally to suit British expectations.
Resentment of British rule, coupled with population pressure and declining agricultural income, proved a fertile mix for resentment among the Kikuyu people, one of the ethnic groups native to the region. Anderson identifies three distinct political blocs within the Kikuyu community. Foremost among them were the chiefs, headmen, and Christian elders whose authority was based on their collaboration with the British colonial state. They faced opposition from two groups: Westernized moderate nationalists, and a more militant nationalist group that would serve as the foundation of the Mau Mau. Empowered by an influx of ex-servicemen from the Second World War, the latter group seized control of the moderates’ Kenyan African Union political movement in the late 1940s, turning their oath from a pledge of loyalty to a pan-ethnic movement into a commitment of support to more radical action.
The first acts of violence took place among the Kikuyu, as workers on white farms who refused to take the oath were beaten. Police investigations alerted the colonial state to the existence of the Mau Mau, who in the summer of 1950 moved to ban it. The government’s efforts to downplay the extent of the Mau Mau, however, placed the burden of the response on the conservative Kikuyu leadership in what became a contest for control over their community. Local leaders and police informers were assassinated and witnesses to these crimes were themselves murdered or intimidated into silence, frustrating legal prosecution. It was not until the murder of the first European and the assassination of a senior chief in October 1952 that the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, requested permission from London to declare a state of emergency in the colony.
What followed fully justified the label “dirty war.” The growing violence against terrified white settlers fed a dehumanizing vision among them of Mau Mau members as possessed of some form of mental illness, and added to their demands that the authorities be given a blank check to fight the insurgency. Despite priding themselves on “knowing” the Kikuyu, they erased in their minds any distinctions between the Mau Mau and the moderate nationalists, which warped what had started as an internecine conflict into a simplistic Manichean struggle over white rule that only confirmed the settlers’ unwillingness to compromise. Confessions obtained by the police from Mau Mau suspects were subsequently recanted in court as the product of torture, yet the judges generally discounted such claims (even when confronted with visible proof) and accepted the initial statements as genuine. The Home Guard militia, formed by the authorities out of a nascent vigilante movement among loyalist Kikuyu, often abused their power and sometimes behaved as little more than sanctioned criminal gangs. By the time General George Erskine, a career army officer with counter-insurgency experience, took command of operations in June 1953, the security forces were out of control, with vengeance rather than justice the goal of many of their members.
After restoring a measure of discipline to his ranks, Erskine launched Operation Anvil, which detained thousands of Mau Mau, disrupted their presence in the capital, Nairobi, and broke up the supply lines for the Mau Mau fighters in the forests. Though two more years of campaigning lay ahead, the reassertion of British authority weakened the Mau Mau’s ability to terrorize the Kikuyu populace and allowed the loyalists to reassert themselves. By the end of 1956, relentless operations aided by intelligence from Mau Mau detainees had broken up the forest armies, with the survivors scattered throughout the Kenyan countryside. For the British the price of this success was high, as the “Emergency” in Kenya lingered on until 1960, while news of the detention of thousands of Mau Mau in harsh and unsanitary conditions sparked outrage at home, fueling the drive towards independence.
By 1963 the British were gone, replaced by an elected government dominated by the former loyalists and moderate nationalists. For the Mau Mau who fought to achieve it, independence mainly brought disappointment, as instead of rewarding them for their sacrifice the country’s new president, the moderate nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, preferred to bury a divisive past. Anderson’s framing of the conflict as a Kikuyu civil war makes this understandable, as he demonstrates the lingering political sensitivity over the conflict even decades later. Drawing upon police reports, court records, and other largely untapped archival holdings in both Kenya and Britain, he constructs a comprehensive description of a conflict from which few emerged with their honor intact. His reliance on them lends a legalistic focus to his account, which exposes the hollowness of British claims for the benefits and superiority of their rule, and adds to the power of his account of the collapse of their empire in the 20th century and its legacy for the newly independent nations that emerged. It should be read by everyone interested in the history of the “dirty war” and its legacy for Kenya today.
In the end, nearly a hundred people were killed in the Lari massacre, making it the bloodiest single incident in Kenya’s “dirty war” between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, and the British authorities. To David Anderson, the event was a product of far more than a struggle for independence from colonial rule, reflecting as well the deeper changes that had taken place in native African society as a consequence of British imperialism. Not the least of his achievements in this absorbing book is in showing how these larger and more relevant factors made the Mau Mau revolt not just a war of insurgency against an imperial power but a civil war among the native peoples, one that, while overlooked in popular conceptions of the conflict in contemporary Western coverage, still haunts Kenya to this day.
To demonstrate this, Anderson spends considerable space detailing the socioeconomic development of Kenya in the years leading up to the rebellion. Much of this was shaped by the land hunger of the British, who found in the highlands both fertile farmland and a climate very much to their liking. Britons unable to afford the gentry lifestyle back home could replicate it in Kenya at a fraction of the cost, thanks to the support of a colonial regime that crafted policies that favored their interests. The influx of white settlers drawn to this opportunity marginalized the indigenous Africans, who were forced into “reserves” and reorganized tribally to suit British expectations.
Resentment of British rule, coupled with population pressure and declining agricultural income, proved a fertile mix for resentment among the Kikuyu people, one of the ethnic groups native to the region. Anderson identifies three distinct political blocs within the Kikuyu community. Foremost among them were the chiefs, headmen, and Christian elders whose authority was based on their collaboration with the British colonial state. They faced opposition from two groups: Westernized moderate nationalists, and a more militant nationalist group that would serve as the foundation of the Mau Mau. Empowered by an influx of ex-servicemen from the Second World War, the latter group seized control of the moderates’ Kenyan African Union political movement in the late 1940s, turning their oath from a pledge of loyalty to a pan-ethnic movement into a commitment of support to more radical action.
The first acts of violence took place among the Kikuyu, as workers on white farms who refused to take the oath were beaten. Police investigations alerted the colonial state to the existence of the Mau Mau, who in the summer of 1950 moved to ban it. The government’s efforts to downplay the extent of the Mau Mau, however, placed the burden of the response on the conservative Kikuyu leadership in what became a contest for control over their community. Local leaders and police informers were assassinated and witnesses to these crimes were themselves murdered or intimidated into silence, frustrating legal prosecution. It was not until the murder of the first European and the assassination of a senior chief in October 1952 that the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, requested permission from London to declare a state of emergency in the colony.
What followed fully justified the label “dirty war.” The growing violence against terrified white settlers fed a dehumanizing vision among them of Mau Mau members as possessed of some form of mental illness, and added to their demands that the authorities be given a blank check to fight the insurgency. Despite priding themselves on “knowing” the Kikuyu, they erased in their minds any distinctions between the Mau Mau and the moderate nationalists, which warped what had started as an internecine conflict into a simplistic Manichean struggle over white rule that only confirmed the settlers’ unwillingness to compromise. Confessions obtained by the police from Mau Mau suspects were subsequently recanted in court as the product of torture, yet the judges generally discounted such claims (even when confronted with visible proof) and accepted the initial statements as genuine. The Home Guard militia, formed by the authorities out of a nascent vigilante movement among loyalist Kikuyu, often abused their power and sometimes behaved as little more than sanctioned criminal gangs. By the time General George Erskine, a career army officer with counter-insurgency experience, took command of operations in June 1953, the security forces were out of control, with vengeance rather than justice the goal of many of their members.
After restoring a measure of discipline to his ranks, Erskine launched Operation Anvil, which detained thousands of Mau Mau, disrupted their presence in the capital, Nairobi, and broke up the supply lines for the Mau Mau fighters in the forests. Though two more years of campaigning lay ahead, the reassertion of British authority weakened the Mau Mau’s ability to terrorize the Kikuyu populace and allowed the loyalists to reassert themselves. By the end of 1956, relentless operations aided by intelligence from Mau Mau detainees had broken up the forest armies, with the survivors scattered throughout the Kenyan countryside. For the British the price of this success was high, as the “Emergency” in Kenya lingered on until 1960, while news of the detention of thousands of Mau Mau in harsh and unsanitary conditions sparked outrage at home, fueling the drive towards independence.
By 1963 the British were gone, replaced by an elected government dominated by the former loyalists and moderate nationalists. For the Mau Mau who fought to achieve it, independence mainly brought disappointment, as instead of rewarding them for their sacrifice the country’s new president, the moderate nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, preferred to bury a divisive past. Anderson’s framing of the conflict as a Kikuyu civil war makes this understandable, as he demonstrates the lingering political sensitivity over the conflict even decades later. Drawing upon police reports, court records, and other largely untapped archival holdings in both Kenya and Britain, he constructs a comprehensive description of a conflict from which few emerged with their honor intact. His reliance on them lends a legalistic focus to his account, which exposes the hollowness of British claims for the benefits and superiority of their rule, and adds to the power of his account of the collapse of their empire in the 20th century and its legacy for the newly independent nations that emerged. It should be read by everyone interested in the history of the “dirty war” and its legacy for Kenya today.
October 3, 2018
David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged is probably the definitive account of the Mau-Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya. If the book has a shortcoming, it's a bit skimpy on historical and ethnic background (a few terse chapters on Kikuyu grievances against British land policies) before leaping into the main narrative, but its accounts of skirmishes, atrocities and trials are meticulously documented and darkly engaging from there. Like most Western historians, Anderson finds it hard to sympathize with the Mau Mau, detailing their gruesome murderers of white settlers and black collaborators; but he finds it even harder to condone the British overreaction, which led to bloody punitive expeditions, mass arrests, summary executions and concentration camps. All this while moderate Kenyan nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta maneuvered to make their brand of political action preferable to further outbreaks violence. Much better than Caroline Elkins' sensationalized Imperial Reckoning; its minor shortcomings don't devalue its worth as a chronicle of a much-misrepresented colonial conflict.
August 1, 2016
Very interesting to find out more about the history of Kenya than I ever knew.
September 23, 2008
This is one of two books (the other is Imperial Reckoning) that explores the Mau Mau rebellion and the British response fully. The Mau Mau may not have been nationalist heroes, but the British response was brutal. Not pleasant reading, but a good corrective to any tendency to romanticize colonialism.
August 31, 2021
Meticulously researched, and told with a detachment that makes the story all the more chilling.
December 19, 2017
Deeply heartbreaking and enlightening, even/especially for me as a Kenyan. The author was quite purposeful with presenting the Mau Mau as a complicated, fractured, brave (tribalist) group (mainly) singularly joined by the goal of repossessing stolen land.
I was perpetually stunned and disgusted by how uniquely British colonialism took on incredibly and increasingly ruthless and barbaric violence as well as the intricate and wholesale invisibilization of it all.
The author was sometimes too fair with the idea that "justice" could somehow be achieved in the colonial courts but ... the premise itself is ridiculous. Colonialism itself is violence; anything built on top of it, regardless of its professionalism, legitimizes and perpetuates that violence.
Loved, loved, loved the book though. Read it :)
I was perpetually stunned and disgusted by how uniquely British colonialism took on incredibly and increasingly ruthless and barbaric violence as well as the intricate and wholesale invisibilization of it all.
The author was sometimes too fair with the idea that "justice" could somehow be achieved in the colonial courts but ... the premise itself is ridiculous. Colonialism itself is violence; anything built on top of it, regardless of its professionalism, legitimizes and perpetuates that violence.
Loved, loved, loved the book though. Read it :)
January 8, 2019
This is my first book of 2019 and it surprisingly makes it to @Reggiereads’ #2booksunder50reviews challenge having been published in 2005 with only 25 reviews on goodreads. Which I must say does not make sense to me because this is such a brilliant book, balanced and well researched.
I have over the years read histories on Kenya’s Mau Mau in different texts, journals and books and it has always been glossed over - given in generalities, as mentions as part of a wider story of the struggle of independence; but never so detailed – right down to names and dates and places and specific events. It was interesting to see all the names of the Mau Mau who were hanged published in the glossary pages, I had to go through the names to see if I could trace any of my relatives seeing that most of the hanged were from Kiambu which is where my family comes from.
The Mau Mau were militant, ruthless, cruel, and murderous in agitating for their land rights and anyone standing in their way – white settlers, fellow Kikuyu loyalists and perceived traitors – met cruel deaths. They felt justified in achieving their end via any means possible. The colonial government on the other hand, refusing to accept that Africans had legitimate grievances regarding the alienation of their land and loss of livelihood met any resistance with equal if not more brutal force – the end result, a dirty war that no party ended up the victor.
The book is quite detailed which makes it a slow read. I had to do a lot of side reading and make references but it does help that the book it ALOT of references at the back that you can refer to. The author is a true scholar and this is evident in the book.
Anderson in this compelling book provides a balanced account of the war in Kenya during the emergency period (1952-1961) and details the atrocities committed on both sides. It is not an attempt at sanitizing any side but providing a definitive account. There were no winners here, just a revelation of how cruel human beings can be to one another when we do not understand each other. This is an important book and I wish it would be incorporated more in history lessons. 4/5 stars.
I have over the years read histories on Kenya’s Mau Mau in different texts, journals and books and it has always been glossed over - given in generalities, as mentions as part of a wider story of the struggle of independence; but never so detailed – right down to names and dates and places and specific events. It was interesting to see all the names of the Mau Mau who were hanged published in the glossary pages, I had to go through the names to see if I could trace any of my relatives seeing that most of the hanged were from Kiambu which is where my family comes from.
The Mau Mau were militant, ruthless, cruel, and murderous in agitating for their land rights and anyone standing in their way – white settlers, fellow Kikuyu loyalists and perceived traitors – met cruel deaths. They felt justified in achieving their end via any means possible. The colonial government on the other hand, refusing to accept that Africans had legitimate grievances regarding the alienation of their land and loss of livelihood met any resistance with equal if not more brutal force – the end result, a dirty war that no party ended up the victor.
The book is quite detailed which makes it a slow read. I had to do a lot of side reading and make references but it does help that the book it ALOT of references at the back that you can refer to. The author is a true scholar and this is evident in the book.
Anderson in this compelling book provides a balanced account of the war in Kenya during the emergency period (1952-1961) and details the atrocities committed on both sides. It is not an attempt at sanitizing any side but providing a definitive account. There were no winners here, just a revelation of how cruel human beings can be to one another when we do not understand each other. This is an important book and I wish it would be incorporated more in history lessons. 4/5 stars.
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June 30, 2025this is a terrible history, but the reader is warned. Anderson argues that most of the early histories told the story of the Mau Mau rebellion as primitive and culturally bloodthirsty folks reacting against oppression of the British Empire. But for Anderson, while this was definitely a result of British mis-rule and selfishness in keeping all the good land, it was a also a civil war. He demonstrates how much the Kikuyu were divided in how to respond to British rule and the "loyalists" versus those who were "nationalists" weren't all the same either. He lays out the many tragic missteps that the British made and roots the longterm causes in the alienation from land that the British inflicted on the Kikuyu.
March 9, 2023
Are you one of those people who pays attention to the book titles that flash up during John Oliver episodes, then tracks them down on Goodreads and adds them to their to-read list? Guilty.
This was a really good look at a part of history I had no idea of, in the vein of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (dealing with the Belgian rule of the Congo), though of course this deals with a very isolated period in Kenya's history (though bloody and horrible, nonetheless). It's worth saying Anderson doesn't quite have Hochschild's way with words in terms of setting a scene, and this book is a much drier historical account.
In and of itself, that's not necessarily a bad thing; what I did find a bit overwhelming was the extensive cast presented to us, including people mentioned only once as part of their "trial" (these were not real trials in any sense, hence the quotation marks) who subsequently went on to be hanged. Of course, I understand the necessity of naming all of these people- in fact, it would be an injustice not to, and it certainly solidifies just the sheer number of people who died as a result of sham trials to save a dying empire's hold on a country that should have never been theirs. It did, however, make it difficult at times to keep track of all the people involved and how they all fit- particularly Kenyan political leaders who were detained but did manage to survive.
None of this is to take away from a thorough account of that time, centred heavily on those who had the most to suffer from the actions of the British. I would certainly like to pursue more reading about the history of Kenya more broadly.
This was a really good look at a part of history I had no idea of, in the vein of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (dealing with the Belgian rule of the Congo), though of course this deals with a very isolated period in Kenya's history (though bloody and horrible, nonetheless). It's worth saying Anderson doesn't quite have Hochschild's way with words in terms of setting a scene, and this book is a much drier historical account.
In and of itself, that's not necessarily a bad thing; what I did find a bit overwhelming was the extensive cast presented to us, including people mentioned only once as part of their "trial" (these were not real trials in any sense, hence the quotation marks) who subsequently went on to be hanged. Of course, I understand the necessity of naming all of these people- in fact, it would be an injustice not to, and it certainly solidifies just the sheer number of people who died as a result of sham trials to save a dying empire's hold on a country that should have never been theirs. It did, however, make it difficult at times to keep track of all the people involved and how they all fit- particularly Kenyan political leaders who were detained but did manage to survive.
None of this is to take away from a thorough account of that time, centred heavily on those who had the most to suffer from the actions of the British. I would certainly like to pursue more reading about the history of Kenya more broadly.
January 8, 2019
Well-researched, a historian's account of the Mau Mau rebellion that alternates between fly-on-the-wall courtroom transcripts and briefing documents to sweeping accounts of the decades of colonialism. It provides a thorough account of the context for and detail of the rebellion without concerning itself too much with modern Kenya until the end.
The tone is dry and sometimes wry, with an outsider's distance but the expert historian's sometimes too easy throwaways of names and events that the casual reader doesn't quite grasp.
But it provides a very informative account, jumping around chronologically sometimes confusingly to provide the proper context but resulting in an instructive whole.
Sometimes it can feel a bit surface level, but it never tries to be anything more. A great introduction to a subject I knew nothing about.
The tone is dry and sometimes wry, with an outsider's distance but the expert historian's sometimes too easy throwaways of names and events that the casual reader doesn't quite grasp.
But it provides a very informative account, jumping around chronologically sometimes confusingly to provide the proper context but resulting in an instructive whole.
Sometimes it can feel a bit surface level, but it never tries to be anything more. A great introduction to a subject I knew nothing about.
April 17, 2018
Couldn't finish it, the writing was just too dull. It's amazing that with such an interesting topic he still manages to be so boring.
December 20, 2025
“Contemporary accounts often cast it as a war against Kenya’s white settlers, with the British government in the benevolent role of protector of the empire kith and kin. This misrepresents the character of the struggle. It was certainly a war fought against white power, but it never became the race war that some thought it to be…. Contrary to public perception, only thirty-two European settlers died in the rebellion, and there were fewer than two hundred casualties among the British regiments and police who served in Kenya over these years…. The official figures set the total number of Mau Mau rebels killed at 12,000, but the real figure is likely to have been more than 20,000…. In all, at least 150,000 Kikuyu, perhaps even more, spent some time behind the wire of a British detention camp during the course of the rebellion.”
“In their anger and frustration, settlers too readily forgot that Africans were far more commonly the victims of Mau Mau violence than were whites, just as they also too readily overlooked the fact that it was Africans loyal to the government who would ultimately play the crucial role in the defeat of the Mau Mau. European society in Kenya had been too long colour-blind to see it any other way.”
5 stars. David Anderson’s 2005 “Histories of the Hanged” is still - 20 years later - an amazingly informative and well-written account of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, which Anderson calls Britain’s “dirty war”. It also nicely supplements Caroline Elkins’ “Imperial Reckoning” which covers the same period from a slightly different perspective.
The bulk of Anderson’s narrative and analysis stem from contemporary British court documents, which he’s evidently been steeping in for some time. I found the result of this approach to be really compelling. We get both illustrative case studies as well as some really convincing analysis based off of primary source documents.
For me, this analytical lens really highlights the sometimes quixotic, oftentimes cynical British attempts to use a language of law and due process to justify/hide state-sanctioned violence. On the one hand, we see a fairly explicit, sustained effort on the part of local courts to ignore an obvious pattern of extrajudicial killings and torture. The fact that there are court proceedings where judges chose to either acknowledge a confession was obtained via torture and accept it anyways, or to dismiss claims of European abuses yet accept from the very same testimony those parts of the confession which advanced European interests were pretty stark. Yet, on the other hand, I found the efforts of some in the UK government to put a stop to these excesses interesting as well. Not to excuse British imperial violence, but I think these episodes do reveal something interesting about the tension between the genuinely-held ideals of (colourblind) rule-of-law held by some in the empire, and the white-supremacist project of British settlers in Kenya. Again, not to excuse state-sanctioned murder and ethnic cleansing, just to observe that one reading of this narrative, I think, is that British actions in Kenya in the 1950s make no sense without factoring in the contemporary moral sensibilities - such as they were - of the metropole which local administrators and settlers in Kenya evidently outraged (or at least bothered).
Another point which I found quite interesting was Operation Anvil - the British effort to detain a fairly huge chunk of the Kikuyu population. This episode is more fulsomely covered in Elkin’s book “Imperial Reckoning”, but suffice it to say, it was a big deal and obviously puts the lie to any notion of being seriously subscribed to “due process” and it probably constitutes a crime against humanity. Yet, interestingly, arguably (or not?), it does seem to have worked. At tremendous human cost, no doubt, but in the final analysis the British more-or-less do seem to have effectively stamped out the insurgency. It’s interesting to note that some of the key British officials who conceived of and implemented this strategy had been personally involved with counterinsurgency efforts against Zionists in Palestine and communists in Malaya, and virtually all British officials would have been intimately aware of those episodes. As a digression, I wonder what lessons Chinese officials in charge of state security in Xinjiang might draw from this episode - or American counterinsurgency experts in South Vietnam, for that matter. But I digress.
Finally, another point which I think Anderson really drives home is that this was, in practice, more of an inter-African conflict than some kind of race war. To be sure, the violent rebels (I.e. the Mau Mau) were animated by grievances over land and wages which were the direct result of British Imperialism. For sure, white power was at the heart of this conflict. Yet it was the black loyalists who served that imperial project who became the reactionary vanguard and who bore the overwhelming brunt of that violence. The deep moral
ambiguities this resulted in are intense and interesting to read about. Who was fighting for what? Who was wronged? Who was a patriot? Who was a traitor? Who should be remembered, and how? The end of the Vietnam War, for example, feels straightforward by comparison. I feel as though the end of this conflict was an especially British phenomenon (though likely there are examples im unaware of) where upon independence/victory, the revolutionary vanguard who did most (all) of the actual fighting, finds itself largely excluded from power by a more moderate (conservative) faction keen to forget the past. I can see why the British congratulated themselves on this outcome.
I found this to be a wonderfully informative read, one which forms an interesting counterpoint to better-known “dirty wars” like the French counterinsurgency in Algeria. Highly recommended.
“In their anger and frustration, settlers too readily forgot that Africans were far more commonly the victims of Mau Mau violence than were whites, just as they also too readily overlooked the fact that it was Africans loyal to the government who would ultimately play the crucial role in the defeat of the Mau Mau. European society in Kenya had been too long colour-blind to see it any other way.”
5 stars. David Anderson’s 2005 “Histories of the Hanged” is still - 20 years later - an amazingly informative and well-written account of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, which Anderson calls Britain’s “dirty war”. It also nicely supplements Caroline Elkins’ “Imperial Reckoning” which covers the same period from a slightly different perspective.
The bulk of Anderson’s narrative and analysis stem from contemporary British court documents, which he’s evidently been steeping in for some time. I found the result of this approach to be really compelling. We get both illustrative case studies as well as some really convincing analysis based off of primary source documents.
For me, this analytical lens really highlights the sometimes quixotic, oftentimes cynical British attempts to use a language of law and due process to justify/hide state-sanctioned violence. On the one hand, we see a fairly explicit, sustained effort on the part of local courts to ignore an obvious pattern of extrajudicial killings and torture. The fact that there are court proceedings where judges chose to either acknowledge a confession was obtained via torture and accept it anyways, or to dismiss claims of European abuses yet accept from the very same testimony those parts of the confession which advanced European interests were pretty stark. Yet, on the other hand, I found the efforts of some in the UK government to put a stop to these excesses interesting as well. Not to excuse British imperial violence, but I think these episodes do reveal something interesting about the tension between the genuinely-held ideals of (colourblind) rule-of-law held by some in the empire, and the white-supremacist project of British settlers in Kenya. Again, not to excuse state-sanctioned murder and ethnic cleansing, just to observe that one reading of this narrative, I think, is that British actions in Kenya in the 1950s make no sense without factoring in the contemporary moral sensibilities - such as they were - of the metropole which local administrators and settlers in Kenya evidently outraged (or at least bothered).
Another point which I found quite interesting was Operation Anvil - the British effort to detain a fairly huge chunk of the Kikuyu population. This episode is more fulsomely covered in Elkin’s book “Imperial Reckoning”, but suffice it to say, it was a big deal and obviously puts the lie to any notion of being seriously subscribed to “due process” and it probably constitutes a crime against humanity. Yet, interestingly, arguably (or not?), it does seem to have worked. At tremendous human cost, no doubt, but in the final analysis the British more-or-less do seem to have effectively stamped out the insurgency. It’s interesting to note that some of the key British officials who conceived of and implemented this strategy had been personally involved with counterinsurgency efforts against Zionists in Palestine and communists in Malaya, and virtually all British officials would have been intimately aware of those episodes. As a digression, I wonder what lessons Chinese officials in charge of state security in Xinjiang might draw from this episode - or American counterinsurgency experts in South Vietnam, for that matter. But I digress.
Finally, another point which I think Anderson really drives home is that this was, in practice, more of an inter-African conflict than some kind of race war. To be sure, the violent rebels (I.e. the Mau Mau) were animated by grievances over land and wages which were the direct result of British Imperialism. For sure, white power was at the heart of this conflict. Yet it was the black loyalists who served that imperial project who became the reactionary vanguard and who bore the overwhelming brunt of that violence. The deep moral
ambiguities this resulted in are intense and interesting to read about. Who was fighting for what? Who was wronged? Who was a patriot? Who was a traitor? Who should be remembered, and how? The end of the Vietnam War, for example, feels straightforward by comparison. I feel as though the end of this conflict was an especially British phenomenon (though likely there are examples im unaware of) where upon independence/victory, the revolutionary vanguard who did most (all) of the actual fighting, finds itself largely excluded from power by a more moderate (conservative) faction keen to forget the past. I can see why the British congratulated themselves on this outcome.
I found this to be a wonderfully informative read, one which forms an interesting counterpoint to better-known “dirty wars” like the French counterinsurgency in Algeria. Highly recommended.
February 27, 2020
No doubt on platforms and in reports we declare we have no intention of depriving natives of their lands, but this has never prevented us from taking whatever land we want…
Sir Charles Eliot, April 1904 (High Commissioner, British East Africa)
If you want to learn about the Mau Mau Rebellion, this is not the book to read, but if you have some basic knowledge of the conflict, then this book can provide additional, important depth and detail. The tone of the book is dry, and the details make it a slow read; but it was definitely worthwhile.
Sir Charles Eliot, April 1904 (High Commissioner, British East Africa)
If you want to learn about the Mau Mau Rebellion, this is not the book to read, but if you have some basic knowledge of the conflict, then this book can provide additional, important depth and detail. The tone of the book is dry, and the details make it a slow read; but it was definitely worthwhile.
December 30, 2020
The British Establishment Doesn't Change
An excellent book. One that covers a history of the British establishment's actions and attitudes that resonate today in Britain. An excellent insight into African culture, as well as people divided by a conqueror, which instead of uniting against, turn on each other. A history of human nature and the propaganda of the state.
An excellent book. One that covers a history of the British establishment's actions and attitudes that resonate today in Britain. An excellent insight into African culture, as well as people divided by a conqueror, which instead of uniting against, turn on each other. A history of human nature and the propaganda of the state.
January 8, 2019
Good read. It is very sad how those who fought the mau mau war were treated after independence. The loyalists grabbed land and ended up doing well at the expense of the rebels. This has created problems in Kenya todate
Good read. It is very sad how those who fought the mau mau war were treated after independence. The loyalists grabbed land and ended up doing well at the expense of the rebels. This has created problems in Kenya todate
Good read. It is very sad how those who fought the mau mau war were treated after independence. The loyalists grabbed land and ended up doing well at the expense of the rebels. This has created problems in Kenya todate
March 31, 2021
Really comprehensive look at a dark period of history which I honestly had little awareness of. The book looks at source documents and goes beyond a Western narrative to analyze what and why things happened as they did.
September 13, 2022
Deep investigation and narration of the independence struggle in Kenya. It is very academic and not easy to read sometimes but very comprehensive. As a reader, you can get the main details of what happened and the extent of British atrocities in the country.
November 20, 2023
This book is great. And painful. David does a fantastic job recollecting the memories of the hanged in Britain’s dirty war in Kenya. A reminder of the atrocities committed against humanity and the deep wounds inflicted by colonialism.
May 28, 2019
A masterpiece
June 20, 2019
Brilliant account of the darkest days ever for Kikuyus collectively.
September 30, 2020
3.5 stars. Extremely well documented and compelling, could have been improved with a bit of editing
December 18, 2021
Interesting and thorough account of Britain's Gulag in Africa. Truly eye opening story of British cruelty in Kenya. Exposes the false narrative of a "good" British Empire.
January 25, 2022
read harder challenge 2022: read a history about a period you know little about
fifty two book club 2022: read a book with the author's photo on the back cover
fifty two book club 2022: read a book with the author's photo on the back cover
September 8, 2023
With the expectation to read a book about a revolution against the white colonialists, I found it very interesting to learn about a civil war.
November 14, 2024
it was alright. had to read for grad class but interesting!
December 29, 2024
Very good read. A well written history of the Kenyan struggle for independence.
June 2, 2023
Yes, the subject matter is both important and interesting. But this book was a slog to read. It took me over a month to get through it. It is quite dull and very dependent on court documents. The blurb on the back cover isn't a fair description of its contents.
Anderson paints a very sympathetic portrait of Winston Churchill, a man racist to the core, and of the colonial regime in general in a way that is somewhat similar to the Belgian whitewash in Congo: The Epic History of a People David Van Reybrouck although it luckily doesn't go quite as far.
Moreover, the descriptions of the actions carried out by the British colonial regime in particular are highly sanitized, especially if one have read Caroline Elkins' marvelous book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. More time and space is spent describing violence carried out by the Mau Mau than on the atrocities - torture, rape and murder on a massive scale - of the colonial regime and its loyalist collaborators. Several times the torture is qualified as "alleged", and in more than one instance it is pointed out that there was no evidence in court to back the claims.
And not once, if memory serves me right, is the actual content of the torture described. What did the people have to endure at the hands of their tormentors? You'd have to read Elkins to find an answer:
If one doubts the words of the black victims, the perpetrators were not shy about their actions:
Anderson is content with claiming that "violence was not exceptional but intrinsic to the system" (p. 316), but more often than not it is characterized as "cases of excess" (p. 310) of "beatings or worse" (p. 296), although it is never described what that "worse" might be. At any rate, the ones primarily guilty of "indiscipline and excess" are the African Home Guard (p. 259).
In the end he admits that:
One might also look at it this way: It should be highly surprising that a country which less than a decade earlier fights a brutal fascist dictatorship in the name of freedom and human rights, uses the same methods of that very dictatorship in their own colonies. Needless to say, the comparisons to the Nazi concentration camps which are found in Elkins' book are nowhere to be found in this one.
By the way, the black victims aren't the only ones drawing parallels to the Nazis. A British officer boasted in a letter to his former colleagues in London "about what he termed the 'Gestapo stuff'" (Elkins, p. 86), but one would have to read Elkins to learn that.
Considering the amount of time and energy that is spent on describing the minutiae of dozens of trials and the Mau Mau massacre in Lari, which gets its own 60 page chapter taking up almost one-fifth of the book, it boggles that mind that the British and loyalist massacres in Kiruara (Elkins, p. 51-52), Kandara (Elkins, p. 72), and Mununga (Elkins, p. 78-79) are not mentioned once. As for the last one, Elkins writes:
I came close to giving up several times, and this is most likely a book I will never read again. I can't say the same about Elkins' book.
Anderson paints a very sympathetic portrait of Winston Churchill, a man racist to the core, and of the colonial regime in general in a way that is somewhat similar to the Belgian whitewash in Congo: The Epic History of a People David Van Reybrouck although it luckily doesn't go quite as far.
Moreover, the descriptions of the actions carried out by the British colonial regime in particular are highly sanitized, especially if one have read Caroline Elkins' marvelous book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. More time and space is spent describing violence carried out by the Mau Mau than on the atrocities - torture, rape and murder on a massive scale - of the colonial regime and its loyalist collaborators. Several times the torture is qualified as "alleged", and in more than one instance it is pointed out that there was no evidence in court to back the claims.
And not once, if memory serves me right, is the actual content of the torture described. What did the people have to endure at the hands of their tormentors? You'd have to read Elkins to find an answer:
According to a number of the former detainees I interviewed, electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations, and as court evidence. (Elkins, p. 66)
If one doubts the words of the black victims, the perpetrators were not shy about their actions:
In the Rift Valley, for example, one settler who operated his own screening camp was known as Dr. Bunny by the locals. It was his experimental prowess when it came to interrogating Mau Mau suspects that earned the doctor his notorious nickname: the Joseph Mengele of Kenya. One settler remembers her brother, a member of the Kenya Regiment and a pseudogangster, boasting of Dr. Bunny’s exploits, which included burning the skin off live Mau Mau suspects and forcing them to eat their own testicles. Another former settler and member of the local Moral Rearmament Movement also recalled Dr. Bunny’s handiwork. He, too, remembered skin searing along with castration and other methods of screening he would “prefer not to speak of.” (Elkins, p. 67)
Anderson is content with claiming that "violence was not exceptional but intrinsic to the system" (p. 316), but more often than not it is characterized as "cases of excess" (p. 310) of "beatings or worse" (p. 296), although it is never described what that "worse" might be. At any rate, the ones primarily guilty of "indiscipline and excess" are the African Home Guard (p. 259).
In the end he admits that:
There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutionalized and systematic, and also casual and haphazard. Given the attitudes of the time, it would have been surprising if there had not been. (p. 293)
One might also look at it this way: It should be highly surprising that a country which less than a decade earlier fights a brutal fascist dictatorship in the name of freedom and human rights, uses the same methods of that very dictatorship in their own colonies. Needless to say, the comparisons to the Nazi concentration camps which are found in Elkins' book are nowhere to be found in this one.
By the way, the black victims aren't the only ones drawing parallels to the Nazis. A British officer boasted in a letter to his former colleagues in London "about what he termed the 'Gestapo stuff'" (Elkins, p. 86), but one would have to read Elkins to learn that.
Considering the amount of time and energy that is spent on describing the minutiae of dozens of trials and the Mau Mau massacre in Lari, which gets its own 60 page chapter taking up almost one-fifth of the book, it boggles that mind that the British and loyalist massacres in Kiruara (Elkins, p. 51-52), Kandara (Elkins, p. 72), and Mununga (Elkins, p. 78-79) are not mentioned once. As for the last one, Elkins writes:
The Home Guard dumped several hundred of them in the communal latrine, where “no one could dare to bury them.” In fact, some of the bodies remain there today, under a row of small shops. (Elkins, p. 79)
I came close to giving up several times, and this is most likely a book I will never read again. I can't say the same about Elkins' book.
December 17, 2008
Highly recommended - A Must for all Kenyans.
'It is a powerful message, and a timely reminder of the brutal crimes of Empire.'
'By calling for reconciliation in the early years of his presidency, Pr Mzee Jomo Kenyatta understandably sacrificed the past for the future.
But today young Kenyans know next to nothing about the Mau Mau uprising and how it led to independence.
For them, these books are an incomparable record of what happened in, and to, their country.
For others, parallels with American foreign policy today are apparent enough.'
"The stories of the Mau Mau have an unmistakable lesson for today."
'It is a powerful message, and a timely reminder of the brutal crimes of Empire.'
'By calling for reconciliation in the early years of his presidency, Pr Mzee Jomo Kenyatta understandably sacrificed the past for the future.
But today young Kenyans know next to nothing about the Mau Mau uprising and how it led to independence.
For them, these books are an incomparable record of what happened in, and to, their country.
For others, parallels with American foreign policy today are apparent enough.'
"The stories of the Mau Mau have an unmistakable lesson for today."
May 31, 2015
While the description of the book says it's a gripping narrative, the reality is much different. That doesn't mean it's not a good book - it's an excellent work of history, but like many history books, it jumps around a little bit to capture all of the stories.
The Mau Mau Rebellion was a dark time in Kenya's history and the response of the British seems to have been nearly as brutal. Anderson's focus is on the British response, but there are wide swaths of coverage of Mau Mau atrocities. Given the violence on both sides, this is a heavy book and a bit of a slower read, but if you're interested at all in colonial politics in Africa or Kenyan history in general, it's worthwhile.
The Mau Mau Rebellion was a dark time in Kenya's history and the response of the British seems to have been nearly as brutal. Anderson's focus is on the British response, but there are wide swaths of coverage of Mau Mau atrocities. Given the violence on both sides, this is a heavy book and a bit of a slower read, but if you're interested at all in colonial politics in Africa or Kenyan history in general, it's worthwhile.
December 15, 2007
Interesting topic but really poorly written. It is has a strong political bias. It is more a recounting of events and an effort to prove the British wrong at every step. I am not saying who was and who wasn't wrong, but there is no real story told in this book because the closest thing you have to a protagonist is the revolution.
Of perhaps more interest is that I read the book at the behest of a Kenyan whose family suffered greatly during the revolution. He said it was the only book that really recounted the events accurately.
Of perhaps more interest is that I read the book at the behest of a Kenyan whose family suffered greatly during the revolution. He said it was the only book that really recounted the events accurately.
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