In September 1954 East African Standard reported that ‘the documentary film, Mau Mau, made by African Film Productions, Ltd., mainly for European audiences, may be shown in Kenya African locations and Reserves’. The article explained that a 16mm copy of the film had been supplied to the Department of Information, who then intended to show the film ‘to a few Kikuyu people and Europeans closely connected with the tribe. According to their reactions to it’, the report added, ‘it might be given a wider showing’ (East African Standard, 17 September 1954, 29).

The report further explained that Mau Mau had recently been shown at the Capital Cinema in Nairobi, after which the general manager ‘received many congratulatory messages and telegrams’. It had also been screened in South Africa – where it was made – and had been seen by the Prime Minister, Dr D.F. Malan. Joseph Albrecht, the Schlesinger Organisation’s resident director in Nairobi, argued that ‘the general impression is that it can do nothing but good’ and the makers were, at this time, ‘hoping to obtain a world-wide distribution’ for the film. The report explained that this would serve ‘to spread news of Kenya and stop some of the world’s misconceptions. They also believe’, it concluded, ‘that the film can do good in the coastal areas of East Africa’ (East African Standard, 17 September 1954, 29).

Mau Mau was produced by the Johannesburg-based production company African Film Productions, and directed by Donald Swanson. Swanson had come over to Africa initially to make a film for the Northern Rhodesian mining companies – Chisoko the African (1949) – but had then made two independent productions, Jim Comes to Jo’Burg (1949) and The Magic Garden (1951), which, as Jacqueline Maingard noted in her analysis of the films, take a ‘liberal stance’ and celebrate ‘modern, urban, black township experience and music culture’ (Maingard, 2007, 76).

In his 1965 book, Assignment Africa, Swanson included a chapter on his experiences in Kenya, in which he explained that he was in Kikuyuland ‘making a factual film at the invitation of the Kenya Government’. ‘I felt no compassion whatsoever for the terrorists’, he wrote, ‘for in the preceding two weeks, I had seen too much evidence of their bestial crimes against White and Black alike – the panga slashed Kikuyu child, the severed hands and disemboweled corpses of a White settler and his family on a lonely farm, the gutted mission school, the maimed and dying cattle’ (Swanson, 1965, 79, 80).

Looking back on his experiences ten years later, Swanson argued that ‘Mau Mau has won’, adding that ‘I revisited Kenya recently. It was very sad. Already, after only a year of independence, it seemed to have a seedy, run-down air’. ‘One of these days’, he concluded, ‘the Black dictators who led their ignorant people by the nose into disaster will have much to answer. And so, probably, will the Whites who, because of laissez-faire, and an inability to face facts, or a desire to avoid them, have allowed, even encouraged those patterns of desperate poverty, inefficiency, corruption and economic decline’ (Swanson, 1965, 78, 81, 85).

The film was distributed in Britain through United Artists, and was described by Today’s Cinema in March 1955 as a ‘frightening, on-the-spot story of Mau Mau terrorism’ featuring the ‘savage forces’ and ‘ruthless Mau Mau killers’ (Today’s Cinema, 14 March 1955, 7). A far more critical review appeared in Monthly Film Bulletin. The review suggested that the film’s ‘somewhat hysterical approach is reflected in the haranguing commentary and the rather obviously staged scenes of initiation rites and Mau Mau massacres’. It further argued that ‘in attributing the cause of the crisis solely to a small, discontented sect within the Kikuyu, the film ignores the wider problems of nationalism and colonialism (which are not entirely confined to Kenya) and the glibness of its conclusions is not over-convincing. Of course’, the reviewer concluded, ‘one agrees with the film’s condemnation of the vile methods of the Mau Mau marauders, but it would have been enlightening if an informed comment on the situation by an African spokesman had been included. As it is, the case is presented from a strictly European point of view’ (MFB, 1955, 78-79).

More recent historical work has challenged the official, established British accounts of Mau Mau terrorism, and has questioned, in particular, the British responses to the Mau Mau. In October 1952 the Kenyan government declared a state of emergency and British troops were brought in, mounting two concurrent responses. The first saw attacks, backed by the RAF, in the mountain forests, while a second campaign involved the establishment of detention camps, where colonial officials held Kikuyu insurgents. Official British records presented these camps as tools for Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’, educating and reforming the insurgents. However, historian Caroline Elkins has challenged this history, and argued that the number detained was more likely to be between 160-320,000 – as opposed to the officially quoted figure of 80,000 – while a further 800 enclosed villages were used to detain over a million members of the Kikuyu population. ‘I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war’, she wrote, ‘British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic: only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomizing its men, women and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilizing mission reinstated’ (Elkins, 2005, xv).

Footage from Mau Mau has subsequently been used in a number of documentaries on the struggle, including the BBC series Empire Warriors. Mau Mau is not to be mistaken with the Joe Rock and Elwood Price documentary of the same name, which was released in America early in 1955. This one-hour exploitation documentary inserted staged atrocity footage and topless ‘native’ women chased by men with machetes, which was filmed on a vacant lot in Los Angeles. It was promoted by a ‘lurid advertising campaign’ urging viewers to ‘see savage jungle atrocities that will make you gasp’ and ‘see women savaged by marauding night raiders’ (Schaefer, 1999, 287).