Keep in mind that “the Mau Mau” reputation as some kind of primitive savagery was a deliberately racist image constructed by the British government, in direct contradiction to what their own experts had to say about the Kikuyu in general and the planning and strategy of the rebels themselves.

But that’s what the British always did…invent lurid stories about the brown people they were dominating so that nothing they did counted as “resistance to rule that makes sense” but was always some kind of atavistic, primitive aggression that required the level of civilian-targetting brutality the British always unleashed.

(In the case of the Kikuyu ut putting them in concentration camps and a lot of rape.)

Reactionary American dudes invoking the Mau Mau are confessing.