Here a British historian offers an account of the Mau Mau Rising which focuses upon the personal frustrations experienced by individual Kikuyu in changing times and not the grievances of a colonised people against their colonial overlords.

The Mau Mau (Kenya, 1952-1956)
This fermentation of Kikuyu discontents […] was symbolised by the rash of Mau Mau ‘oathing’ ceremonies’. […] the Mau Mau oath became notorious for its symbolic elements, such as the holding of earth to the navel, the daubing of animal blood, and the (alleged) performance of sexual acts.

A satisfactory explanation for Mau Mauism must begin by focusing on the complex emotions of the individual Kikuyu, particularly those who, by the later 1940s, had recognised that their quintessentially modern and material aspirations were not going to be met. The growth of education, townships and cash incomes after the mid-1930s had given rise to a petty consumerism which proceeded to smash itself on the post-war rocks of stagnant employment prospects and inflationary shortages of goods. The only solution to this impasse was to secure control of the colonial state and gear its operations to the sectional needs of the Kikuyu cadres.

But there was an acute dilemma implicit in such anti-colonial revolt: it meant striking out against the source of that modernity which was, in itself desirable. Thus the displacement of the white man’s rule was, in an important sense, also a displacement of the African mental world as it had been shaped in recent times. The traditional character of the Mau Mau oath was an attempt at collective distancing from western colonial values, and as a means of psychological reintegration fro African individuals, prior to an assault on the established colonial order. In this way unity could be forged and the complexity of motives resolves.

[…] UK intervention became necessary. From this moment on settler power was a broken reed, and the initiative lay with the civil and military representatives of the metropole. Paradoxically, the chief contribution of the Mau Mau to Kenyan decolonisation was not to break British rule, but to reconsolidate the UK’s hold over recalcitrant expatriate communities, just at the point when metropolitan interests were beginning to question the value of the whole colonial enterprise. (Holland, op. cit., 1985, p.147.)