a Twitter thread from @redfishstream

1.

On this day in 1953, the British Royal Air Force began ‘Operation Mushroom’, a two-year period of aerial bombings, dropping nearly 6 million bombs on Kenya to crush the Mau-Mau anti-colonial uprising. 🧵

2.

In 1952 a rebellion broke out against British rule in Kenya sparked by decades of anger over the British annexation of Indigenous Kenyan land. By 1948, 1.5 million Kikuyu people possessed just 518,000 hectares, while only 30.000 settlers owned 3,108,000 hectares.

3.

The Kikuyu people initiated what came to be known as the Mau Mau uprising, as they launched a series of attacks against British settlers and African colonial ‘loyalists’.

4.

The British used racist and Cold War propaganda against the Mau Mau, claiming they were driven by communism, hatred of Christianity and the "perversely evil capabilities of the African mind”. They used this dehumanization to justify decades of atrocities.

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6.

More than 110,000 Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru Indigenous people were systematically thrown into detention camps and subjected to torture, sexual abuse, forced labor, and malnutrition, in conditions that have been compared to the concentration camps used under Adolf Hitler.

7.

90,000 Kenyans were executed or tortured, and 160,000 were arrested without trial, according to the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. 32 white settlers were killed.

8.

In 2013, the British government paid out £19.9 million in compensation to more than 5,000 victims of torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising - a mere £3,000 per victim. Despite recognizing their crimes, no British officials has ever been charged.

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