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Less justifiable was another Kikuyu grievance — female circumcision. As early as 1966, historians Carl G. Rosberg Jr. and John Nottingham devoted over 20 pages of a book on Mau Mau to this subject, and made clear that the Kikuyu (or at least the male Kikuyu) bitterly resented anti-circumcision crusades by missionaries.

As Kikuyu anger mounted, an outlet for it emerged in the form of politicized “oathing.” As explained by historian Jeremy Murray-Brown, generations of Kikuyu had honoured the act of giving an oath through solemn rituals that could involve blood and body parts from animals. Until the 1920s, however, nobody had applied oaths to political movements. The first political oaths, enacted by a group called the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), were innocuous and featured nothing more than a Bible, a handful of soil and a willingness to uphold Kikuyu solidarity. By the time of the Second World War, however, the Bible had been replaced with a more-traditional chunk of goat flesh. Subsequent ceremonies would go far beyond that — calling for violence, and taking on an explicitly anti-colonial tone. But the KCA would not be around for that, having been banned during the war.

What followed the KCA is murky. Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, who wrote a 1963 memoir of his involvement in the upheaval, insisted that the spread of oathing in the 1940s and early 1950s was a leaderless, grassroots phenomenon, but he may not have disclosed everything he knew. In fact, much of the oathing swirled around a successor to the KCA, the Kenya African Union (KAU), which emerged in 1944. In a 1977 book, Frank Kitson, a controversial British intelligence officer during the Mau Mau crisis, flatly blamed the KAU for subversive oathing, but that, too, was not the full story. The real trouble spot, many agree, was the Nairobi branch of the KAU, which was so packed with young violent extremists that the rest of the KAU may have been intimidated by it.