J. C. Carothers's appointment in 1954 as a one-man commission of inquiry into the Mau Mau rebellion immersed him directly in the world of political strife. On 21 October 1952, a state of emergency had been declared in Kenya. In the next six years a total of thirty-two European settlers were killed, along with sixty-three members of the security forces. British soldiers and Kenyan police in turn killed over eleven-and-a-half thousand purported members of the Mau Mau. In addition, several hundred Africans were hanged. British troops detained over ninety thousand Mau Mau suspects, and torture was widely used. The emergency jolted the British government and helped to bring forward independence for the colony, finally achieved in 1963.

The historiography of the Mau Mau has changed several times since the 1950s, and there have been a number of dramatic shifts in the ways in which the movement has been understood. The Mau Mau was confined largely to a single tribe, the Kikuyu, and it gained its impetus from that tribe's claims to the area of Kenya then known as the White Highlands. The Kikuyu first laid claim to this land, which they believed had been illegally appropriated by white settlers, in 1913, and in 1920, under the leadership of Harry Thuku, the Kikuyu Association was formed with the intention of forcing the issue of its return. The colonial government was slow to respond to these demands, and it was only in 1932 that the Kenya Land Commission was appointed to investigate all aspects of landholdings in the colony.