The Role of Propaganda in the British Response to the Mau Mau Rebellion

This paper argues that the British colonial government\u27s use of propaganda played a key role in its suppression of the Mau Mau Rebellion. The government used propaganda to justify the repression and turn national and international attention away from other political issues. Governor Evelyn Baring and his administration established the African Information Service that was in charge of developing and disturbing the propaganda through film, print, and radio mediums. This essay analyses two recurrent themes in the messages: the savageness of Mau Mau and the parent-child analogy between the colonial government and Mau Mau. The government presented a savage narrative of Mau Mau by disturbing horror books containing descriptions and images of Mau Mau massacres and information regarding the sexual nature of the oathing rituals. It also utilized a parent-child analogy in its reliance on psychological reports that the Kikuyu mind was not modern. These themes justified and supported the systematic imprisonment of thousands of Kikuyu under the guise of rehabilitating them. I suggest that these messages and their powerful framing of the Mau Mau discredited their claims in the eyes of Britain and the broader international community and worked to displace from the political agenda serious issues regarding forced migration, discrimination in the urban employee sector, and of the criminalization of all Kikuyu political activities