It’s all too easy to think about colonialism as something that occurred centuries ago, resolved in the dim twilight of history and bearing little import on current interests. But as we examined in our last two entries on Stephen Rangazas’s The British Way, both the Palestinian and Malayan “emergencies,” as they were euphemistically known, are relatively fresh historical atrocities whose reverberations can still be felt today.

The same goes for British imperial behavior in Kenya. Indeed, the imperial incursions into Kenya were a 20th century phenomenon. Missionaries and British corporate interests began settling East Africa in the late 19th century, but the incorporation of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya only occurred in 1920. Over the next three decades, British abuses reached a fever pitch. It was no surprise when an undermanned and underequipped group of rebels named the Mau Mau began to terrorize the countryside.

Skirmishes around the Reservations.

The causes of the Mau Mau rebellion are inscribed directly onto the map of Rangazas’s third scenario, although they can be difficult for the untrained eye to detect. There are effectively four types of terrain in this portrayal of Kenya. To the south is Nairobi, the sole city on the map. Nearby, but not so near that they can be reliably connected to Nairobi, are two mountain ranges, the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. This short but crucial distance represents a relatively untouched concept in the COIN Series: supply. In order to gain resources, the Mau Mau must connect their mountain bases to the city. It’s an increasingly difficult proposition that reflects the dire straits the rebellion finds itself in from the very beginning. Not unlike the first phase in the historical response to the uprising, it behooves the British player to clear the city as soon as possible.

But there are two other types of provinces. At a glance, they seem identical, both representing open and arable terrain. But there’s a telling distinction. A handful of territories are labeled in black with a small R next to them. These are reservations, the land the native population was corralled onto once the British declared Kenya a colony. The others, labeled in telling white, are the White Highlands, land granted to settlers, including veterans, at such a disproportionate rate that by 1948, 1.25 million Kikuya owned 2,000 square miles of farmland, while 30,000 British settlers owned 12,000 — a population density of two and a half white settlers per square mile compared to over 600 native farmers. Unlike the logistical colony of Palestine or even the resource extraction of Malaya, the wealth of Kenya was the land itself, and it had been steadily dispossessed over the better part of three decades.

There were other abuses. Local farmers were reduced to slavery of various stripes, either at gunpoint or through a system of incentives that levied burdensome taxes on anyone who didn’t acquiesce to low wages on white farmsteads. The natives tribes, meanwhile, were subjected to onerous legal proceedings without representation, being shuttled back and forth between reservations whenever incoming settlers intended to claim more land. Communiques from the colonial government urged white households to stop flogging their laborers so severely, but stopped short of actually enforcing those requests.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a great deal of the Mau Mau’s approach in The British Way revolves around to treat those white-labeled provinces. The Mau Mau can agitate anywhere on the map, but terror attacks on reservations are significantly less impactful than those on the White Highlands. The Mau Mau were as merciless as their occupiers had been; they mutilated cattle and massacred families. In the portrayal offered by Rangazas, this is a two-edged sword. Attacks on settler territories can’t be kept under wraps like violence on the reservation, and gradually chips away at British political will. But this also quickly leads to a handful of policies on the British side that will unleash horrors across the entire country.

The “rehabilitation” pipeline.

The principal recurring theme of The British Way deals with our perception of British colonialism. Even as recently as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, the British have been touted as modeling a “hearts and minds” approach to occupation.

But there’s scant evidence of such gentle overlordship. Perhaps the harshest examples can be found in Kenya. Owing to the touted success of villagization in Malaya, the British swiftly implemented collective punishments for the Mau Mau attacks. The colonial office of Kenya requested the same latitude that had been granted in southeast Asia. Although these requests were initially declined, local forces were first bolstered and then empowered.

In game terms, these emergency powers take a couple of forms. As in the Malaya scenario, the British can once again relocate indigenous populations into fortified settlements, preventing reservations from providing essential recruits to the Mau Mau. Much like every other entry in the COIN Series, enormous suffering is masked by the movement of a few tokens. Over a million people were pressed into these villages across only fifteen months. Torture, malnutrition, and disease were common. U.S. President Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather returned from his time in the camps an aged man who could only move with assistance.

On the surface, colonial forces touted this as a “rehabilitation pipeline.” An unassuming track in the map’s bottom corner gestures toward the reality. Early on, the British player is limited in how many reprisals and relocations they can perform. Little by little, this track escalates from emergency powers to all-out gulags. One judge in Nairobi compared the camps to Bergen-Belsen. European journalists and politicians eventually received word and also criticized the program. Before long, even imperial apologists grumbled about excesses in Kenya. In the latter cases, the issue wasn’t the torture or relocation itself, but that such programs couldn’t be kept under wraps. The Attorney General of Kenya, Eric Griffith-Jones, advised torturers to remain dispassionate and limit their beatings to the upper body rather than sodomizing their prisoners, dragging them behind trucks, or murdering them outright, adding “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.”

As ever, the event cards present a historical cross-section.

Rangazas captures this political reality through subtle but effective touches. Because victory is tracked as political will rather than raw control or allegiance, a variety of activities can have double consequences. While it may be effective in the short-term for the British to employ reprisals and relocations, these collective punishments can leak out into the wider world to generate outrage, sapping their overall political will rather than shoring it up.

At the same time, the Mau Mau are portrayed as somewhat doomed from the start. Unlike the British, they’re forced to tend to a dwindling supply of resources. As part of their effort to isolate the Mau Mau, the British established a wide cordon between the mountainous jungles and populated areas. Similarly, the in-game British can break the connection between the mountain regions and Nairobi. These tenuous supply lines highlight the imperiled nature of the rebellion. The Mau Mau have local knowledge and tribal connections on their side, including perhaps the series’ most effective activity, the raid, which permits them to move down from a mountain and make an attack all in one activation. But as their supplies dwindle, even raids become an ill-afforded luxury. Without some severe missteps on the British player’s part, the Mau Mau is likely to wither on the vine.

However, this shouldn’t be mistaken for imbalance. Rather, it highlights the skill with which Rangazas deploys the COIN System in this scenario. This series has always suffered from its limited scope. The most timely example can be found in the discussion surrounding Brian Train’s A Distant Plain. After the United States withdrew from Afghanistan to catastrophic consequence in 2021, many were quick to point out that Train’s model of war in Afghanistan was flawed. Except the possibility of catastrophic withdrawal was an essential component of what Train had been arguing in the first place. In A Distant Plain, victory for the Coalition may well be victory in name only. By withdrawing their troops at a crucial moment, the Coalition appears successful while leaving the Afghan Government woefully unprepared for a Taliban resurgence. Not coincidentally, Mark Herman’s Fire in the Lake regurgitated that sour bellyful to provide a possibility of U.S. victory in Vietnam. These represent the George Aiken approach, the “declare victory and get out” method, a victory of washed hands rather than a permanent success.

But there’s a critical disconnect between how we conceptualize victory on the table in A Distant Plain or Fire in the Lake and how military operations and nation-building exercises play out in real life. Put another way, understanding these games requires players to understand both the ludic meaning and the rhetorical meaning of their win-states at the exact moment that these meanings are placed at odds with one another. To win as the Coalition or United States is to lose, but to lose in a different sense than if those games’ insurgent factions sweep them from the map.

Raids emerge from the mountains.

The British Way, thanks in part to its optional campaign structure, suffers from no such disjuncture. The Mau Mau can “lose” the military conflict and still “win” the long-term battle to oust the British from Kenya. In fact, there’s very little option for the Mau Mau to win an outright military victory. Although raids and terrorism can remove police cubes, the tan cubes representing the British military are untouchable. The only recourse for the rebellion is to incur more damage than the British are willing to repair.

One could argue that this was the historical outcome. To be sure, many have argued that very thing. The Mau Mau were crushed alongside thousands of innocent Kenyans, but the British still determined that the price of continued occupation was too high. The first Kenyan government was quick to disavow the Mau Mau. Today, many in Kenya herald them as revolutionary heroes. History, it turns out, is complicated, especially when it comes to binary assessments like victory and defeat. The British Way introduces nuance to the system, allowing these conflicts a greater degree of granularity in how they portray colonial and anti-colonial warfare.

Speaking of complicated victory conditions, next time we’ll take a look at the final scenario in The British Way, and how everybody can win and lose at the same time.

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A complimentary copy was provided.