Discourses of Development and Practices of Punishment: Britain's Gendered Counter-Insurgency Strategy in Colonial Kenya

From 1952 to 1960, the landscape of Kenya was drastically changed by the British through the widespread implementation of detention camps, prisons, and strategic villages in response to the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency. Of the 80,000 detained, approximately 8,000 were female, and of the 1.2 million Kenyans forcibly resettled, the majority were female. While many colonial states targeted female insurgents, these gendered geographies of coercion were particularly pronounced in Kenya and were shaped by racialized notions of respectable and deviant femininity. Within these sites, the British introduced development and ‘rehabilitation’ schemes to encourage women and girls to embrace domestic roles in support of colonial visions of social order. Colonial officials sought to carefully code and categorize their counter-insurgency efforts, presenting the strategic villages and the rehabilitation programme in the camps as part of their wider ‘civilizing mission’ while insisting that any violence in these sites was incidental or aberrant. This framing not only ignored the reality of systematic abuses in these spaces, but also narrowly defined violence as solely a physical phenomenon. Instead, this chapter argues that violence, in its multiple dimensions, was not simply an outcome of counter-insurgency development and ‘rehabilitation’ schemes, but was rather intrinsic to them.