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
Mau Mau Uprising them "protected villages", purportedly to be built along "the same lines as the villages in the North of England", though the term was actually a "euphemism[] for the fact that hundreds of thousands of civilians were corralled, often against their will, into settlements behind barbed-wire fences and watch towers." While some of these villages were to protect loyalist Kikuyu, "most were little more than concentration camps to punish Mau Mau sympathizers." The villagisation programme was the "coup de grâce" for Mau Mau. By the end of the following summer, Lieutenant General Lathbury no longer needed Lincoln bombers for raids because