The name is absent

majority of them in some eight hundred Emergency villages scattered
throughout the Kikuyu countryside.”⁸⁵

The number of female prisoners required the colonial government to establish
and build facilities to accommodate them. Women in prison or detention camps
were punished for several months, even though most of the women were first
time offenders.

The prisons and detention camps were spaces being used to institute
rehabilitation in the eyes of the colonial authorities. This process often involved
the process of Mau Mau oath cleansing. The women were expected to renounce
Mau Mau as a part of rehabilitation and acknowledgement of wrong doing. In
addition, women participated in classes on various topics including domestic
work, agriculture, and healthcare. The goal was to provide African women with
Western education and ideas, after all most were already very educated in these
areas. It is unclear how these classes were interpreted by the women and what
they meant to them. The missionaries were also involved in this rehabilitation
process by conducting services and counseling women prisoners. As Santoru
suggests, rehabilitation was a two step process involving: 1) the destruction of
the ways of Mau Mau; and 2) the construction of colonial fashioned gender roles
that were being diffused through the classes, the reward system in prison, and
missionary activity.⁸⁶ While in prison, women gave birth, were sentenced to
solitude, and some died from conditions of exhaustion, beatings, and
malnutrition. In prison women had such duties as transporting stones, digging,

⁸⁵ Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 219.

⁸⁶ Santoru, The Colonial Idea of Women. Also, Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 229-232.

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