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Mau Mau is a word of uncertain provenance. There is disagreement among sources as to whether it is an actual word, while some claim that it is the name of a range of hills and others claim that it was created by British settlers to demean the rebels and simplify the complicated organizational structure of the insurgents. Members of the Kikuyu tribe formed the core of the resistance along with smaller numbers of Embu and Meru, but the Kikuyu did not call the rebel movement Mau Mau. It was known to them variously as "Muingi/The Movement", "Muigwithania/The Unifier", "Muma wa Uiguano/The Oath of Unity" or simply "The KCA", after the Kikuyu Central Association that created the impetus for the insurgency. The fact that these names have been largely forgotten and the Revolt is still referred to by the name most probably given to it by the British is a tribute to the power of colonial propaganda . Commentators sympathetic to anti-colonialism have adopted the convention of writing "Mau Mau" Uprising to show their awareness that Mau Mau is a title imposed on the rebels, though this article will maintain the more common usage without quotation marks.
The Uprising occured as a result of long simmering economic tensions coupled with the apparent lack of peaceful political solutions.
For several decades prior to the eruption of conflict the occupation of land by European settlers had been an increasingly bitter point of contention. Most of the land appropriated was in the central highlands of Kenya, which had a cool climate compared to the rest of the country but were also inhabited primarily by the Kikuyu tribe. By 1948, one and a quarter million Kikuyu were restricted to 2000 square miles, while 30,000 settlers occupied 12,000 square miles. The most desirable agricultural land was almost entirely in the hands of settlers.
During the course of the colonial period, settlers allowed about 120,000 Kikuyu to farm a patch of land on European farms in exchange for their labor. They were, in effect, tenant farmers who had no actual rights to the land they had squatted and worked. Between 1938 and 1946, settlers steadily demanded more days of labor for access to less land. It has been estimated that the real income of Kikuyu squatters fell by 30 to 40 percent during this period, and fell even more sharply during the late 1940s. This effort by settlers, which was essentially an attempt to turn the tenant farmers into agricultural laborers, engendered a bitter hatred of the white settlers among the squatters, who would latter form the core of the highland Uprising.
As a result of the miserable situation in the highlands thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952. At the same time, a class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu lands and forged strong ties with the colonial administration was growing, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu. By 1953, almost half of all Kikuyus had no land claims at all. The result of this process was worsening poverty and unemployment, coupled with overpopulation. The economic bifurcation of the Kikuyu set the stage for what was essentially a civil war within the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau Revolt.
While historical details remain elusive, sometime in the late 1940s the General Council of the banned Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) began to make preparations for a campaign of civil disobedience involving all of the Kikuyu in order to protest the land issue. The members of this initative were bound together through oathing rituals that were traditional among the Kikuyu and neighboring tribes. Those taking such oaths often believed that breaking them would result in sudden death by supernatural forces.
The binding oaths were the focus of much speculation and gossip by settlers. There were stories about ritual cannibalism, zoophilia and necrophilia with goats, sexual orgies, ritual places that were decorated with intestines and goat eyes, and that oaths included promise to kill, dismember and burn settlers. While many of these stories were certainly wild exaggerations that helped convince the British government to send assiatance to the settlers, the oathing rituals often included animal sacrifice or the ingestion of blood and would certainly have seemed bizarre to the settlers. While later rituals obligated the oathgiver to fight and kill Europeans, the original KCA oaths limited themselves to civil disobedience.