Britain Declares an Emergency as the Mau Mau Uprising Spreads

On October 20, 1952, Sir Evelyn Baring, the newly appointed British colonial governor of Kenya, signed a declaration proclaiming a State of Emergency across the colony. The decree came in response to the brazen daytime assassination of Senior Chief Waruhiu, an influential Kikuyu leader and prominent supporter of British rule, who had been shot dead in his car on October 7, less than two weeks earlier. The colonial government blamed the murder on an underground militant network known popularly as Mau Mau, whose armed wing termed itself the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. By declaring an emergency, British administrators mobilized regular imperial forces and local colonial police to suppress an insurgent campaign that threatened the foundations of the settler-dominated regime.

The outbreak of armed revolt was the culmination of decades of dispossession and economic subordination. After establishing a protectorate in 1895 and declaring a formal colony in 1920, the British administration took over large areas of fertile land in the central highlands and Rift Valley to create the White Highlands, reserved for European settlement. Tens of thousands of indigenous Kenyans, above all Kikuyu but also members of other communities, were displaced from their ancestral grounds. Many were forced into crowded native reserves or compelled to work as low-wage squatters and laborers on European tea and agricultural estates under restrictive ordinances and pass laws.