Summary: | This thesis interrogates the role of British conceptions of race, gender, and the body in the
detention camps that Britain established in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency (1952-1960).
It aims to reframe the ways we consider the violence that occurred in these camps. To date,
scholars have been largely uncritical about the ways in which masculinity operated during the
Emergency. They have not reflected on the way British masculinity affected—and was affected
by—the colonial sphere. Those that have considered gender have generally assumed that static,
timeless notions of manhood were imported to Kenya, and that tropes about manliness were
utilized unidirectionally by colonizers against colonized.
In contrast, this thesis argues that Mau Mau detention camps amplified the hierarchy of
racialized masculinity in Kenya to new extremes, resulting in physical and mental torture of tens
of thousands of detained Africans. Importantly, British men’s attempts to define and control
African detainees’ minds and bodies according to their preconceptions of race, gender, and the
body ran jointly with colonial administrators’ efforts to police their own officer corps.
Understanding how British men conceived the masculine body—particularly as it related to its
racialization (or lack thereof)—is imperative if we are to make sense of the violence done against
African men in the Mau Mau camps.
This study accordingly begins by sketching the role of masculinity in the British Empire—
particularly as it pertained to the surveillance of the Empire’s colonial troops—and then proceeds
to examine the implications of masculinity in Kenya before and during the Emergency.
Ultimately it argues that the British did not possess the cultural scripts necessary to sufficiently
make sense of what they called Kenyan “primitivism.” In the Mau Mau oathing rituals the
colonizers saw African behaviors that flouted the gender norms the British understood as
necessary to their colonial endeavour. Many of these norms were informed by codes of racial and
sexual purity. As a result, the British widely viewed Kenyan oath takers as culturally
unintelligible, as “unreal” bodies governed by illegitimate expression. During the Emergency,
violence became the overwhelming British response to this conundrum. === Arts, Faculty of === History, Department of === Graduate
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