Wanja Kamau was a small girl when the war broke out in the early 1950s. Her father, a Mau Mau supporter, was a prominent Murang'a businessman operating in Nairobi. By the early 1950s, he owned two buses and an American pick up truck, a house in Bahati, Nairobi and had also built a nice rural home with a cement floor for his family. His daughter narrates how her father was detained and the vehicles were confiscated by the colonial authorities and converted into military and administrative use. Their goats and other livestock were taken by home guards. The family also had shops at the local trading center, which were taken over and used for accommodation of security forces, home guards and government surveyors involved in colonial land demarcation programmes. The family of a rich man was reduced to penury and forced to live together with their neighbours in deplorable conditions in colonial concentration villages. Life in those villages was characterised by forced communal labour; digging roads and protective moats around the villages, and being forced to slash their own farm produce in order to deny Mau Mau fighters access to food but thereby creating hunger for the people in the villages. The children suffered the most as they were malnourished, jigger infested, and traumatised. Amidst all these, the children witnessed as girls were frog-matched into police posts for sexual assaults. Those who resisted were badly beaten up or killed. It also become clear that colonial counter insurgency measures resulted in great environmental degradation as whole forests were destroyed in order to eliminate spaces where Mau Mau could hide. She also says that she witnessed at least two airforce aircraft falling from the skies after being shot by Mau Mau fighters. #maumau #kenya #africanhistory #africanliberation
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WOMEN MAU MAU SUPPORTERS WERE FORCED TO SIT ON HOT IRON SHEETS - WANJA KAMAU
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