Fighting the Mau Mau
The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency

'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.' David M. Anderson, author of Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire

'Huw Bennett leaves no stone unturned in debunking the self-serving mythology surrounding the role of the British Army in the 'Emergency'.' Morning Star

'… 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.' Matthew Hughes, War in History

'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.' International Journal of African Historical Studies

'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.' Michael P. M. Finch, The English Historical Review