'Constituencies of control': repertoires of coercive punishment in Kenya's Mau Mau emergency, 1952-1956

This thesis examines non-violent coercive controls used in the British counter-insurgency campaign against Mau Mau between 1952-1960. The historiography of the conflict has tended to tier interpersonal violence narratives due to the brutality and scale of bloodshed seen, meaning the wider repertoires of coercion have gone underplayed. This thesis is the first substantial work to analyse the Mau Mau conflict at a localised level with everyday quotidian controls as its focus. As such, the work makes an original contribution to our understanding of the Mau Mau emergency, and Britain’s late colonial period, by demonstrating the importance of these measures and localised constituencies of control to routine domination. These restrictions were utilised in conjunction to establish a network of punishment that reinforced one another and affected almost every aspect of Kikuyu everyday life, supported through the conspiration of administrative officers and local loyalist elites acting for mutual benefits.

In order to achieve this, the thesis makes use of the controversial Hanslope disclosure, insofar tapped for its violent content, to analyse the conceptualisation, development and application of district-level coercive policy showing it to be a firmly bottom-up process. Born in negotiation between the constituencies of control working in concert, punishments are shown to be conceived as applicable, appropriate and supposedly familiar to the Kikuyu to aid in their justification. Ultimately, this thesis reveals a more chaotic and permissively coercive structure of control, in that while interpersonal violence engendered fear, wider repertoires of coercion were the most immediate daily manifestation of domination. Thus, making an important intervention to Mau May history and wider imperial narratives.