Operation Anvil (Mau Mau Uprising) Operation Anvil (Mau Mau Uprising) Operation Anvil was a British military operation during the Mau Mau Uprising where British troops attempted to remove Mau Mau from Nairobi and place them in Langata Camp or reserves. The operation began on 24 April 1954 and took two weeks, at the end of which 20,000 Mau Mau suspects had been taken to Langata, and 30,000 more had been deported to the reserves. In the early 1950s militant nationalism emerged in the United Kingdom's colony of Kenya in East Africa. By 1952 guerrilla attacks against white settlers and indigenous moderates, perpetrated by the "Mau
Operation Anvil (Mau Mau Uprising) Mau" movement, had proliferated the Kikuyuland region. On 20 October the colonial governor declared a state of emergency, initiating efforts by the British military to put down the insurgency. The first months of the British campaign were plagued by a lack of discipline, communication, coherent strategy, and useful intelligence and little progress was made against the Mau Mau. An assault on the Naivasha police station and a massacre of civilians in the village of Lari in March 1953 dramatically escalated the conflict. Mau Mau activity also began to surface in the city of Nairobi, which had a large Kikuyu population.