Mau Mau Uprising 1950s progressed, nationalist intransigence increasingly rendered official plans for political development irrelevant, meaning that after the mid-1950s British policy increasingly accepted Kenyan nationalism and moved to co-opt its leaders and organisations into collaboration. It has been argued that the conflict helped set the stage for Kenyan independence in December 1963, or at least secured the prospect of Black-majority rule once the British left. However, this is disputed and other sources downplay the contribution of Mau Mau to decolonisation. On 12 September 2015, the British government unveiled a Mau Mau memorial statue in Nairobi's Uhuru Park that it had funded "as
Mau Mau Uprising series of major economic, military and penal initiatives. The second stage had three main planks: a large military-sweep of Nairobi leading to the internment of tens of thousands of the city's suspected Mau Mau members and sympathisers (see "Operation Anvil" below); the enacting of major agrarian reform (the Swynnerton Plan); and the institution of a vast villagisation programme for more than a million rural Kikuyu (see below). In 2012, the UK government accepted that prisoners had suffered "torture and ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration". The harshness of the British response was inflated by two factors. First, the