The Image of Africa
By the late 1940s Kenya had become a favoured location for film-makers requiring Technicolor skies, smiling natives and lions that roared on cue, an exotic backdrop for Hollywood stars with manly chests playing big white hunters. King Solomon’s Mines brought Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. But Mogambo was the big one. At Christmas in 1952 Nairobi’s Government House hosted Clark Gable, Grace Kelly and Gardner. Gardner’s husband Frank Sinatra sang ‘White Christmas’ to a perspiring audience that included the Governor Sir Evelyn Baring and his wife Lady Molly. Kenya also attracted the world’s attention that year when Princess Elizabeth, on a tour with Prince Philip, learned at Treetops Safari Lodge that her father George VI had died and that she was queen. It would later win renown from the discovery of the oldest human ancestor by the naturalists and archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and Joy Adamson’s story about the orphaned lion cubs she successfully returned to the wild, as told in the book Born Free, which so many children won as a school prize.1 Into this colonial idyll intruded the Mau Mau ‘emergency’, which confronted two characters so representative of their respective cultures at that time as to merit the term ‘paradigmatic’.
The Barings occupied Government House in Nairobi for seven years, starting in September 1952, though Sir Evelyn’s appointment came six months earlier. He had injured his hand and, besides, letters from his predecessor Sir Philip Mitchell were more concerned with the delicacies of how to socially sidestep divorcees than with unrest in the colony. Though aged only sixty-one, the outgoing Governor was an exhausted man who had ceased to travel through his vast domain. His Directorate of Intelligence and Security was similarly confined to Nairobi, which largely explains why warnings about trouble ahead, including detailed reports from Louis Leakey, were ignored.2
The youngest son of Lord Cromer, the ‘Maker of Modern Egypt’, Evelyn Baring had every advantage in life, not the least being the enormous wealth of the banking branch of the family, which he affected to disdain. Educated at Winchester, the traditional factory for senior British civil servants, he achieved a first-class honours degree in history at New College, Oxford, before following in his father’s footsteps to pursue a career in the empire. His earlier career was spent in the Indian Civil Service, where work involved widening his competence as a magistrate, and play included sticking wild pigs with a lance and dodging the annual ‘fishing fleet’ of hopeful girls sent out to look for husbands by ambitious parents. But there was no chance of Baring being hooked, as he explained to his eccentric mother Katie: ‘snobbery, that most excellent of failings, protects your son absolutely’.3
Connections and nepotism guaranteed steady promotion, but in 1933 an attack of amoebic dysentery, which permanently damaged his liver, forced him to abandon India. He spent six years working for the family bank in London, during which time he married Molly Grey and so joined himself to her extremely distinguished family. When Evelyn was made a peer in 1960 he took the title of Baron Howick in honour of the manor Molly had inherited from her most famous ancestor, the reforming Prime Minister Charles Earl Grey.
By now among the best-connected individuals in Britain, Evelyn joined the Foreign Office in 1938 and in 1942, aged only forty, he was appointed governor of Southern Rhodesia as Sir Evelyn. In its laudatory account of why the youngest ever colonial governor had been appointed, the Daily Telegraph commented that Baring was ‘a man of the world, a good mixer and has the advantage of a fine physique’. He was indeed strikingly tall and slim, and hence known in Africa as ‘the Great One’. Something of the rarefied atmosphere the Barings inhabited is conveyed by the story that, when they boarded a warship bound for Durban, Lady Molly handed the welcoming admiral her handbag, taking him for a porter.
Evelyn would spend the next seventeen years in Africa, first in Southern Rhodesia, then as high commissioner in South Africa, simultaneously governor of the African enclaves of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, and finally as governor of Kenya. Molly ensured that wherever they went the country-house lifestyle of their grand home in Northumberland was replicated. In Rhodesia and Kenya the Barings lived in the high colonial manner in Salisbury and Nairobi, having to endure a suburban villa only in Pretoria. There, unusually in their limited experience of lesser humanity, they could hear their neighbours’ gramophone. In general the seigneurial manner worked well with black Africans, less so with the white settlers.
By 1944 Baring had wearied of Southern Rhodesia, where the name of the game was to prevent the local English settlers from emulating their Dutch Afrikaner neighbours by formalizing racial discrimination. Molly’s cousin, the Dominion Secretary ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne (Marquess of Salisbury from 1947), appointed Baring to the high commission in South Africa. There Baring cultivated the friendship of the elderly Prime Minister Field Marshal Jan Smuts, a member of the British cabinet in the two world wars, a big player in the shaping of the post-war world in which both believed the empire could play a key role.
In June 1948 Smuts was ousted by the Afrikaner National Party, which regarded him as a traitor to their race, severing Baring’s access to the top level of South African government as it embarked on the creation of apartheid. Baring’s lordly manner also became a decided political liability. In 1952 the Conservatives moved him to the lesser post of governor of Kenya.
The Making of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta
The man Governor Baring chose to confront rather than co-opt was born circa 1889 as Kamau wa Ngengi in the village of Gatundu, centrally located in what was then known as British East Africa. He was a member of the Kikuyu tribe, who constituted only about 20 per cent of the black African population but who occupied much of the best farmland and were the most advanced in terms of agricultural practice and their willingness to adapt. As he was to all intents and purposes an orphan, his medicine-man grandfather, Kungu wa Magana, became the formative figure in his young life.
At about the age of twelve, his grandfather sent him as a boarder to a Church of Scotland Mission school twelve miles north-west of Nairobi. While there he learned to read and write, was trained as a carpenter and took the name John Peter in Christian baptism, which he changed to Johnstone Kamau. He was also initiated into his tribe through ritual circumcision, rejecting a choice between the two identities and becoming a man of two worlds. Moving to Nairobi, he dressed in raffish Western clothes but affected a colourful beaded belt, called a kinyata in Kikuyu, the first step in constructing the identity by which he became famous.4
Kamau worked first as a jobbing carpenter, before joining the Nairobi Public Works Department as a peripatetic meter reader, purchasing a motorbike, a bit of land and a shack he called Kinyata Stores. Literate and persuasive in English, he rose quickly in the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a political organization formed in 1924 to present the concerns of the Kikuyu to the colonial government. Land was the principal grievance. It was the Kikuyu’s misfortune that their lands were those that white settlers most coveted in terms of climate and quality of soil. After the First World War there was an influx of settlers, many of them former military men who knew little about farming and even less about the local culture. They imagined the land was vacant of humanity, not realizing that African pastoralists practised transhumance, moving back and forth over hundreds of miles to find grass and water, and that the Kikuyu shifted their farms to avoid soil depletion.
Additional vexations included whites’ lack of respect for ancestral burial grounds, sacred trees and the like. Although the element of semi-legal dispossession was as great an irritant here as elsewhere in the world, it was not a simple morality tale of white villainy as trumpeted in recent works of ahistorical advocacy. On the reserves Kikuyu chiefs and elders disposed of substantial lands, and were just as keen on protecting their property from squatters and their herds from the skeletal beasts of their poorer fellows as any white farmer. Furthermore they had their tribal police, officially recognized by the British authorities, to back them up. Rebellious young males were encouraged to leave, for this was as much an inter-generational conflict within the Kikuyu as it was a rebellion against white rule.5
A substantial part of the Kikuyu population became rootless, eking out a living as squatters on white farms. All had to carry a record of their birthplace, fingerprints, employment history and wages in a small tin strung around their necks. Those who became squatters on white-owned property found themselves subjected to forced labour, in particular the important task of excavating terraces to prevent soil erosion. The squatters’ small herds were constantly subjected to veterinary procedures designed to stop diseases jumping to prize European livestock. They were tolerated so long as the white settlers did not know how to make the land they occupied profitable, but once they mastered such cash crops as coffee or tea, and developed large beef and dairy herds, it was time for the squatters to go. Since they were unwelcome back on the Kikuyu reservations, which had their own demographic pressures, many younger Kikuyu migrated to the slums of Nairobi, where they became a restive underclass, while those in regular employment were radicalized by trade unions protesting against the dire wages they received.
Young Kamau worked his way up to secretary-general of the KCA, editing its newspaper Muigwithania and making an impressive presentation on Kikuyu land problems to the Hilton Young Commission in Nairobi in 1928. The association sent him to London the following year to represent Kikuyu interests directly to the Colonial Office. Apart from a brief return visit in 1930–1 to see his wife Grace Wahu and their young children, Kamau would remain in Britain until 1946, using the name Johnstone Kenyatta and marrying an Englishwoman while his presumably more informal African marriage was still in being. Whatever transformed him into one of the most revered African nationalist leaders largely happened in the dingy London bedsits he inhabited for sixteen years of cold and hardship, alleviated by handouts from his white liberal and Presbyterian friends.
In 1929 he paid a brief visit to Bolshevik Russia, returning there in 1932–3, where as ‘James Joken’ he attended the Lenin School and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (thereby following in the steps of Ho Chi Minh), whose offerings included paramilitary training and indoctrination in Marxist-Leninism. Like many another black African he soon discovered that Russian racism was of an even more virulent kind than he had encountered in Britain. As to the supposed indoctrination, when a South African Communist accused him of being ‘petty bourgeois’, he replied, ‘I don’t like the petty thing. Why don’t you say I’m a big bourgeois?’6 ‘James Joken’ left Russia abruptly when Stalin reversed the orthodox Communist line on imperialism to court the Western powers after the advent of Hitler in Germany.7
Although Britain’s MI5 knew that Communism had little appeal to Kenyatta, the colonial administration in Kenya was to make much of his time in Moscow. In fact it left almost no imprint on him and was merely one of the identities he tried out, encouraged to dabble in Marxism by the clever African Americans and Trinidadians he met in London, and, unlike the majority of Western ‘useful fools’, permanently put off it by his experience of Stalin’s police state.
In fact Kenyatta was very far from being ‘progressive’. Although he remained a Christian, he broke with the Church of Scotland for its condemnation of the Kikuyu practice of female circumcision, which privately he opposed. This was a clever tactical move, in line with the KCA’s pose as the defender of ancestral ways against Western interlopers and their agents, the tribal chiefs, whose authority of course rested on tradition. Independent schools, staffed by teachers who refused to observe the Church’s line, were created to rival the mission schools.8
During his long sojourn in London Kenyatta eked out a modest living, as a spear-waving African extra in Alexander Korda’s 1934 film Sanders of the River, while attending classes by the great anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski at the LSE. Under Malinowski’s guidance, he produced Facing Mount Kenya in 1938, a hymn to the primordial paradise that was East Africa before the disruptive white serpent arrived. Parts of the book are intensely lyrical, as when thunder and lightning are attributed to the creaking joints of Ngai the sky god as he stepped from one mountaintop to another.9 It was a brilliant work of semi-fiction, with academic trappings.
For the cover the nearly-fifty-year-old author posed wearing a cloak and brandishing a fake spear, with a beard modelled on that of the Emperor Haile Selassie. With the aid of a friend Kenyatta went through the alphabet trying combinations of sounds until they alighted on Jomo as the appropriate name to accompany Kenyatta.10
While Kenyatta settled into the role of stage African, affecting a fez and cloak, large garnet rings on his fingers and a silver-topped cane as well as his trademark beaded cummerbund, the fecund Kikuyu were bursting through the demographic limits of their territorial reservations, at the same time as the white settlers were expanding their holdings, a process accelerated by the boom in commodity prices following the outbreak of war in 1939. More demobbed British soldiers flooded into Kenya after 1945 to benefit from a scheme to expand agricultural settlement. By contrast, many of the 75,000 demobilized Kenyan African soldiers who had fought for Britain drifted into heavily segregated Nairobi, by now much more than a dusty or muddy railhead, where some of them joined criminal gangs.11 Moreover, 100,000 squatters without any firm title were displaced from prime agricultural land to more remote and infertile territory between 1946 and 1952.12 To bolster their solidarity the squatters took binding oaths, a practice adopted from men radicalized by the slums of Nairobi.
This was all a world apart from the sleepy West Sussex village of Storrington, where Kenyatta spent the Second World War tending tomatoes and lecturing to army educational classes. In 1942, by now divorced, he married the thirty-two-year-old Edna Clarke, whose parents had been killed in a bombing raid. After sixteen years in England, Kenyatta had astute things to say about the inhabitants. ‘The English are a wonderful people to live with in England,’ he wrote to his daughter Margaret, the child he had had with Grace Wahu.13
The 1941 Atlantic Charter seemed to promise much, bringing in its wake much frothy talk on the BBC about the future of European colonies. To the official response that it was a question of fitness for self-governance, Kenyatta and his fellows, like Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast, responded, ‘who is to be the judge of our fitness, and by what standards will this verdict be pronounced?’ In September 1946 Kenyatta bade farewell to his Edna and their own child and set sail for East Africa. At Mombasa he was reunited with Grace Wahu and their two children, a son aged twenty-five and the eighteen-year-old Margaret. At each stop on the journey to Nairobi women made the Kikuyu trilling sound every time he alighted, which suggests a considerable degree of prior mobilization and organization. Tribal connections ensured that Kenyatta’s future was bright when he was made head of an Independent Teachers’ College, with a view to training teachers who he hoped would become a future political network. In June 1947 Kenyatta became president of the Kenyan African Union (KAU), which since the banning of KCA in 1940 had become the main vehicle of Kikuyu nationalism. Although he would have preferred to embrace the other major tribes, the Kamba, Luo and Masai, they so feared Kikuyu domination that they preferred to stick with the British. While Kenyatta was undoubtedly the movement’s figurehead, within the KAU much more radical figures slipped into leadership positions. Kenyatta himself was under permanent police surveillance and had to be very cautious, but the more obscure actors suffered no such inhibitions. From early 1952 the bodies of police informers began to appear as the KAU radicals cleaned house.
The Setting
The settlers’ behaviour as they fanned out in the White Highlands between Nairobi and Lake Victoria could be brutal. One colonial official reported: ‘there is no atrocity in the [Belgian] Congo – except mutilation – which cannot be matched in our Protectorate’.14 Once colonial policing was introduced such behaviour died down, but the settlers learned to institutionalize their power through domination of the all-white Legislative Council introduced in 1920. By the 1930s they numbered around 30,000, and they undoubtedly put their stamp on the country. A gulf of incomprehension divides contemporary Britons from those times. Most whites were wiry, hardworking farmers living in glorified shacks, with enough Swahili to say ‘jambo’ (hello) or ‘kwa heri’ (goodbye) to the help. But the richest indulged in every kind of vice, which gave the whole of Kenyan white society an international reputation for tawdry scandal.15 As Evelyn Waugh noted when he visited in 1930 as a special correspondent for The Times, this was like generalizing the antics of a handful of upper-class rakes in Belgravia or Mayfair to the clerks and managers of London.16
Although the settlers spoke constantly of the superiority of white civilization, there was not much of it in evidence among them, as visiting intellectuals like Julian Huxley sneered. They were devoted to sports and to heavy drinking in hotels and clubs, with the abrupt sunsets acting like a starting pistol. The places where they gathered were strictly segregated. When a customs officer played tennis with an Anglo-Indian doctor at the Mombasa Sports Club, he was taken aside and told he was an embarrassment to the European community. As a Jew, Alderman Izzie Somen could not join the exclusive Nairobi Club even after he became the mayor of the city.17 By the mid-1940s the settlers had organized as a proto-party called the Electors’ Union, with Michael Blundell as their sophisticated spokesman.
Of the Barings, the American travel writer John Gunther wrote: ‘Sir Evelyn is one of the most aristocratic aristocrats I have ever met . . . [He and his wife] were fastidious, generous, with beautiful manners and refinement – healthy people too – but they made Government House in Kenya resemble a stately island lost in time, drowned in forces nobody could comprehend.’18
The last point was also true of a British intelligence-gathering operation confined to Nairobi. Among the Kikuyu, oaths had long been used to cement contracts involving land or marriage, with ‘unhealthiness’ the penalty for infringements. Christianity meant that oaths were sworn with a Bible in one hand. The more radical members of the KAU developed the oathing ceremonies of the displaced squatters into a means of political mobilization. At some point members of protection rackets in the Nairobi slums began to take oaths among themselves and (under duress) from those they preyed on. For that was the literal meaning of the term Mau Mau – ‘greedy eaters’ being a plausible translation – that came to be applied to the Kikuyu resistance movement against egregious white domination. Their oaths drew on animist practices and glorified gang rituals.
Such rituals appealed to the Mau Mau’s core supporters: rural have-nots and urban ‘wild boys’ impatient with the slow traditional path to becoming a fully fledged man through acquiring a stake in society as it existed. Coerced oath-taking spread through the Kikuyu community, with the object of deterring people from becoming police informers and to create an informer-free space in which to operate their criminal enterprises. Oaths were administered at night, under arches of banana leaves studded with sheep’s eyes, and involved animal and human menstrual blood, urine and animal parts. Sometimes participants were obliged to commit bestiality. When naked husbands and wives took the oath, they were bound together by the intestines of goats. Unsurprisingly, Europeans concluded that something darkly demonic or at least essentially pathological was afoot, whereas African loyalists tended to view the Mau Mau as ‘lost boys’ or reckless delinquents. By 1950–1 the most advanced oaths had become a call to bloody revolution:
If I am sent to bring in the head of my enemy and I fail to do so, may this oath kill me.
If I fail to steal anything I can from a European may this oath kill me.
If I know of an enemy to our organization and I fail to report him to my leader, may this oath kill me.
If I ever receive any money from a European as a bribe for information may this oath kill me.
If I am ever sent by a leader to do something big for the house of Kikuyu, and I refuse, may this oath kill me.
If I refuse to help in driving the Europeans from this country may this oath kill me.
If I worship any leader but Jomo, may this oath kill me.19
Acknowledging Kenyatta as a symbolic figurehead was no proof that he either initiated or directed Mau Mau violence. In fact, the head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was categorical that ‘Our sources have produced nothing to indicate that Kenyatta, or his associates in the UK, are directly implicated in Mau Mau activities, or that Kenyatta is essential to Mau Mau as a leader, or that he is in a position to direct its activities.’ Its leadership was much more decentralized and self-selecting and hence difficult to track than would have been the case had it been the handiwork of one man.20
Initially, Mau Mau violence was deployed against those Kikuyu loyalists who refused to take such oaths; many of them were Christians who regarded such rituals as satanic. Following prosecutions of those who administered such oaths, in August 1950 the Mau Mau society was proscribed, without the colonial government having much of an idea of what it was. Attacks on loyalist Kikuyu continued, and there were dozens of cases of arson on remote farms, where the dry grass suddenly blazed up. When the police investigated such incidents, they encountered a wall of silence, with the result being a Collective Punishments Ordinance in April 1951, under which recalcitrant villages could be fined the huge sum of £2,500.
The government also encouraged what wits called ‘Her Majesty’s Witch Doctors’ to administer counter-oaths, based on anthropological ‘traditions’ invented by Louis Leakey. In return for their fees, these elderly gentlemen used a goat’s hoof or sacred stone to induce the oath taker to vomit out the Mau Mau oath, although usually this involved a spit and the words ‘I emit it’, all helped along with a few prods of the rifle butt by African policemen.21 In mid-May 1952 the first mutilated corpses appeared, usually of informers, with those who reported finding the bodies also murdered.22 In a particularly shocking incident, a Kikuyu Christian who refused such an oath was strangled to death. A couple of weeks after his burial, Mau Mau insisted his neighbours exhume the corpse, which they were obliged to hack to pieces, touching decomposing parts to their mouths.
With Baring yet to grace his colony with his presence, the acting Governor Henry Potter yielded to settler pressure for drastic measures to deal with these incidents of murder and arson as well as more general unrest. In September 1952 curfews were introduced, printing presses were controlled and the police were allowed to attest a suspect’s confession in court. Judges soon realized that these were being beaten out of people, although none of them allowed this to lead to acquittals.23 Within a week of Baring’s arrival in the colony the paramount chief of the Kiambu district was ambushed and shot dead as his car returned from a session of a Native Tribunal in which he sat as a judge. Baring attended his funeral, catching sight at the graveside of Jomo Kenyatta, who a few weeks before had denounced Mau Mau in front of a crowd of 30,000 people.
The initial British response was to attempt to ‘nip the insurgency in the bud’ through massive coercion. Unlike in Malaya, the authorities in Kenya did not have the option of deporting their enemy to their country of origin. Sir Percy Sillitoe of MI5 and his top team were brought in to make Special Branch intelligence collection more efficient, but although many of the tactics employed in Malaya were adopted in Kenya they were not part of an overall, integrated plan. For this Baring’s arrogance bears the primary responsibility. As the number of killings mounted, he requested authorization from London for a state of emergency. In preparation for Operation Jock Scott, a list of 150 names of people to be arrested was compiled, at the head of which was Jomo Kenyatta.
On 20 October 1952 the 1st Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was flown in from Egypt, to reinforce the eight battalions of King’s African Rifles present in the theatre. At midnight the Kenyan police picked up two-thirds of the 150 people on the list. Moderates awaited arrest, while the real radicals like Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge escaped into the forest. Kenyatta was arrested at his residence in the school compound at Githunguri and flown to Lokitaung, a remote desert station near the Ethiopian border. He had his own small house, alongside another where four guards from a different tribe lived. Meanwhile senior policemen toiled through the ton and a half of papers they had scooped up during his arrest, finding nothing incriminating.24 In a legalized farce, Kenyatta and five KAU colleagues were relocated to a remote area called Kapenguria, technically as free men, where they were rearrested so that they could be tried in obscurity rather than in Nairobi in whose vicinity their alleged offences had been committed. They were charged with controlling and directing Mau Mau, and became notorious as ‘the Kapenguria Six’.
Ransley Thacker, formerly of the Supreme Court of Kenya, was picked to preside over the trial. He requested and received a secret payment of £20,000 to ensure his future safety in Kenya. An impressive defence team included a member of India’s upper house and Denis Pritt, a British Marxist MP and Queen’s Counsel. Every obstacle was put in the defence team’s way, starting with locating them in a town thirty miles from the court, where even getting a meal was complicated by the colour bar against Pritt. The prosecution case was flimsy, reliant on one witness who claimed to have seen Kenyatta administer an oath – on a date before Mau Mau had been legally proscribed. Thacker was biased and vindictive against the defendants and their counsel, frequently repairing to Nairobi for consultations. Six years later it transpired that the prosecution’s chief witness had been paid to perjure himself in return for an airfare to England, the fees for a university course, subsistence for his family and a guaranteed job back in Kenya.
After the initial hearings, Thacker went to Nairobi to ponder whether to dismiss or proceed. Whatever doubts he had were dispelled when the Mau Mau slaughtered a young couple called Roger and Esme Ruck on their remote farm. Hitherto, when the Mau Mau had struck at Europeans (and it is worth bearing in mind that the thirty-two Europeans killed in the emergency were fewer than those who died in road accidents) the victims had been elderly loners who were easy prey. Roger and Esme were hacked to death with panga knives on the veranda of their home; their six-year-old son Michael met the same fate in his bed amid his toys. A thousand white settlers descended on Government House in an ugly mood. A middle-aged woman screamed, ‘There, there, they’ve given the house over to the fucking niggers, the bloody bastards!’ when the visiting Sultan of Zanzibar was incautious enough to appear on the balcony, while below him enraged settlers pressed against African policemen guarding the Barings, burning them with cigarettes. At a mass meeting in Nakuru bullish settlers demanded that 50,000 Kikuyu be shot to avenge the Rucks.
Thacker returned to Kapenguria in a grim mood. The lead prosecutor spent a fortnight smearing Kenyatta as a Soviet stooge, and trying to fabricate a connection with Mau Mau. The background continued to militate against dispassionate justice. In March 1953 several hundred Mau Mau killed seventy-four men, women and children in the loyalist village of Lari, committing unspeakable atrocities. The following day, relatives of the victims in the Home Guard and Kenya Police Reserve struck back at suspected Mau Mau sympathizers in the area, killing a far greater number. Thirty miles away, another Mau Mau gang attacked a police post in Naivashu, making off with a significant cache of weapons and freeing 170 Mau Mau suspects from an adjacent detention camp.
Thacker found Kenyatta and the others guilty and sentenced them to seven years’ hard labour. They were sent back to Lokitaung, which had been converted into a prison, its barbed wire augmented by Kamba guards, who hated the Kikuyu inmates, while the local Turkana tribesmen were told they could hunt down and kill escapees. In Kenyatta’s absence the authorities destroyed his college at Githunguri and pulled down his home at Gatundu. Aged sixty, he was spared manual labour and instead functioned as the group cook while tending vegetables. On completion of his sentence in April 1959 he was restricted to a purpose-built colony at Lodwar, where he could move only 800 yards from his dwelling.
Johnnie Shows that Bwana is Boss
Kenyatta’s personal fate was separate from that of Mau Mau, although imprisonment accelerated his transformation into nationalist leader in waiting. The partial decapitation of the Mau Mau political leadership was accompanied by collective punishments, mass screening and a special tax levied on the Kikuyu to subsidize the costs of fighting the Mau Mau. In active Mau Mau hotspots livestock was confiscated, notionally to encourage informants to come forward. In a very tense atmosphere, even innocent events could turn deadly. When a large group of Kikuyu gathered to witness a dumb boy miraculously cured, a much outnumbered party of African policemen panicked at the sight of so many pangas and shot sixteen of them dead. As a result of this incident the police were ordered to use buckshot rather than bullets.25
From the end of 1952 Mau Mau raids quickened. On Christmas Eve there were five separate attacks on senior African members of the Church of Scotland, in which the victims were speared or hacked to death. On New Year’s Day 1953, two white bachelor farmers were killed when fifteen Mau Mau burst in before the victims could rise from the dinner table to get their guns. For this was a society where it had become advisable to have a loaded revolver near to hand at all times as detailed instructions called ‘Your Turn May Come’ advised: ‘The speed with which you can have a gun in your hand may well mean the difference between life or death.’26 Robert Broadbent, the MI5 security liaison officer in Nairobi, slept with a revolver under the pillow, blissfully unaware that a Mau Mau arms cache was hidden in his own kitchen.27 ‘Women Put Guns in their Handbags’ figured as a headline in Britain’s right-wing Daily Mail, which along with the left-wing Daily Mirror gave regular coverage to events in Kenya.28
In line with what the French military were doing in Algeria, the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya were declared prohibited zones, where anyone was liable to be shot. The definition of a weapon was extended to agricultural tools or a spear that the bearer might have had innocent reasons to possess. On the Kikuyu Reserve those who failed to respond to a challenge could be shot too. During the first three months of 1953 thousands of Kikuyu loyalists were encouraged to join Home Guard militias to defend people and property against Mau Mau attacks. More and more Kikuyu were screened to identify Mau Mau activists and supporters, who were held in an ever larger number of detention camps. The constant harassment served as a recruiting sergeant for the Mau Mau cause – if you were going to be treated as Mau Mau, you might as well join them.29 So did the policy of expelling squatters from the Rift Valley or from the slums of Nairobi. They were not welcome in the Kikuyu reservations and often joined the Mau Mau bands for want of any alternative.30
Britain had signed the Geneva Convention in 1949, though it contrived to avoid ratifying it until 1957 to allow itself as much latitude as possible in dealing with insurgents. Similarly, Britain may have been one of the original signatories to the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, but it ensured that derogations existed to exempt its colonies from it. However, the development of global mass media meant that the metropolis could no longer turn a blind eye to what happened at the behest of local colonial authorities. In both Algeria and Kenya the traditional collusion failed.31
In 1952 the local authorities requested the blueprints for gallows to be built beyond Nairobi.32 By mid-1953 capital crimes included administering or participating in Mau Mau oaths, membership of Mau Mau gangs, being found in possession of arms, ammunition and explosives or being discovered in the company of such persons. With so many suspects being detained the wheels of justice turned too slowly in the eyes of the settler community and the majority Kikuyu loyalists, which presented the authorities with the challenge of pre-empting vigilante justice. In response the British government gave in to Baring’s request for a series of Emergency Assize Courts.33
It was not the finest hour for British jurisprudence. The judges, who sat alone in these courts, gave credence to dubious confessions and to the evidence of witnesses who had survived Mau Mau massacres by keeping their heads down. In one notorious case where the accused had the seemingly watertight alibi that he had been in jail during the massacre at Lari, the police were on hand to testify that on the day in question he had escaped for a few lethal hours. The judge sentenced him to death, although the conviction was quashed on appeal.34 The seventy-one men executed for the Lari massacre were only the first to be hanged in a draconian and largely successful effort to prevent Kenya succumbing to lynch law. In normal times half of the death sentences passed in Kenya were commuted to terms of imprisonment. Of the 1,468 Mau Mau convicted of capital crimes, 1,068 were hanged. By contrast there were 226 hangings in Malaya and only twelve Zionist terrorists executed in Palestine between 1938 and 1947. Although in both cases more British civilians, policemen and soldiers lost their lives than in Kenya, the threat of mass vigilantism was absent.
The Mau Mau murder of the Ruck family intensified white-settler pressure on Baring to involve them more intimately in the anti-Mau Mau campaign. The settlers formed a United Kenya Protection Association, with its own seventy-man ‘Commando’ or death squad. To counter such pressures, the War Office despatched Major-General Robert ‘Looney’ Hinde, who in 1944 had been removed from his brigade command in Normandy, as director of operations. Hinde declared that ‘we must heed the example of Malaya and ensure that repressive measures do NOT result in an unbridgeable gap of bitterness between us and the Kikuyu’. His stated plan was to prevent the spread of Mau Mau, stop terrorist attacks and ‘stamp out Mau Mau and the ideology behind it’. But when the Mau Mau murdered a farmer who had been a wartime soldier and POW, Hinde’s sympathies swung towards settlers who wanted to wage a ‘gloves off’ war in which vengeance would be meted out by their own police force and the Home Guard militias. Once it became apparent that he was prepared to tolerate vigilantism, Hinde was sacked. However, the police continued to kill with impunity, joking that simama (halt) meant ‘goodbye’.35
Hinde was replaced by Lieutenant-General Sir George ‘Bobbie’ Erskine with the title of commander-in-chief. His early military career had started in Ireland and India. He went on to win the DSO at El Alamein in 1942, although later in Normandy Montgomery lamented his lack of aggression on the battlefield. He made up for it as commander of British forces in Egypt in 1949–52, using considerable force to suppress nationalist guerrillas in the Canal Zone. Erskine had a low estimation of some of his own forces and took a violent dislike to the ‘middle class sluts’ as he described the white settlers – and he did not just mean the women. He kept a written authorization to declare martial law in his spectacle case, which he opened and snapped shut whenever the settlers tried his patience.
Erskine immediately stopped the practice of keeping scorecards of Mau Mau killed and paying £5 per kill by way of bonus. He dismissed the brigade commander of the King’s African Rifles and court-martialled KAR Captain Griffiths for shooting two Kikuyu prisoners. Unable to make the charge of murder stick, Erskine insisted the court try him for torture instead, because he had cut trophy ears from the victims before murdering them. Griffiths spent five years in a British prison, an almost unique case when most British personnel who committed acts of barbarity were never even indicted. Erskine was exceptional too in that he was firmly of the opinion that Mau Mau was not an atavistic cult, which was how Colonial Secretary Lyttelton, Governor Baring and most of the settlers perceived it. Instead he regarded it as the product of maladministration and brutal policing, not to speak of the economic exploitation practised by the settlers.
In late June 1953 Erskine launched Operation Buttercup. This was a large-scale probing mission that took in the villages of the Kikuyu reserve at Fort Hall as well as the adjacent forested areas where the Mau Mau operated. To increase spatial coverage, Erskine agreed that the police needed beefing up, incorporating the white-officered Home Guard, which added another 25,000 men and women to the settlers’ own all-white Kenya Police Reserve, which was in turn augmented with imported ‘Kenya Cowboys’ from the European war’s flotsam and jetsam. Stationed in encampments surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, the Home Guard performed badly: they tried to buy off the Mau Mau with arms and ammunition, and tended to bolt at the first sign of trouble. They also extorted money and goods from the Kikuyu they were supposed to be protecting. In yet another precursor of events in Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, the pervasive violence served as cover for both sides to settle private scores.
Under close press scrutiny, Erskine made it a priority to seek the moral high ground, in which endeavour he was aided by the barbarity of the Mau Mau. So the conflict was cast as a struggle against savagery rather than against Communism, the usual suspect, to prevent the internationalization of the conflict by meddling Americans or Nehru’s India striking poses at the UN.36 Evidently, the behaviour of some elements of the security forces undermined the claim. To sort out the police, who were the worst offenders, Arthur Young, the London Police Commissioner who had been successful in Malaya, was appointed Kenya’s new commissioner of police, arriving in March 1954. One of his first acts was to restore the autonomy of the Criminal Investigation Department to investigate police abuses and atrocities. Young lasted until December. Two innocent Kikuyu farmers were tortured and killed at a loyalist interrogation centre, with the connivance of British officials who falsified evidence and committed perjury. Although a judge unravelled the truth, Baring suppressed the written judgment. Young resigned and returned to London, and was with difficulty persuaded to tone down a resignation letter that blamed Baring for what the police had been doing.37
In Kenya white judges and juries more usually found excuses for whatever the police did, assuming that wholesale bureaucratic cover-ups did not prevent such incidents reaching court. Brian Hayward, the nineteen-year-old leader of a screening team sent to Tanganyika in October 1953 to vet 8,000 Kikuyu being repatriated to Kenya, was found to have systematically tortured those he suspected were Mau Mau with the aid of ten African members of his team. One victim was so badly beaten that he begged to be killed. The judge showed much sympathy for the defendants: ‘It is easy to work oneself up into a state of pious horror over these offences, but they must be considered against their background. All the accused were engaged in seeking out inhuman monsters and savages of the lowest order.’ Hayward was convicted and given a token sentence that he served by working for twelve weeks as a clerk in a hotel. Baring compounded matters by reinstating him as a district officer, although Erskine later managed to have him dismissed.38
Meanwhile, in January 1954 the army captured Waruhiu Itote, known as General China because of his wartime service with the KAR in Burma. Disorientated after demobilization, Itote had been oathed in 1950, before becoming an administrator of oaths himself, and an experienced Mau Mau killer. In August 1952 he moved to the forests, from which he launched a series of fearsome raids to massacre government loyalists, their wives and children. Finally his band ran into an army patrol and, after being shot twice and injuring his leg, he surrendered. Surprised to be treated well and offered his life, Itote revealed everything he knew, including the fact that he had commanded 4,000 men, the largest single concentration of Mau Mau. On Prime Minister Churchill’s instructions he was prevailed on to relay surrender terms to his comrades in the forests. A KAR unit not informed of this arrangement ambushed a large group of Mau Mau on their way to surrender, driving the rest back into the hills.
In April 1954 Erskine launched Operation Anvil, based on the 1946 Operation Agatha, when the Zionist leadership had been rounded up in Palestine. In the small hours of 24 April some 20,000 British and African troops interdicted all movement in and out of Nairobi. For four weeks the security forces screened the entire male population, paying special attention to the Kikuyu inhabitants of the densely populated sub-districts of Bahati, Pumwani and Kariokor, before turning to the predominantly Asian suburb of Eastlands out near the airport. Basic inspection of an array of documents Kikuyu were required to have about them led to suspects being taken to a transit camp at Langata, one of three camps erected prior to the operation. Notes were made on each individual, which frequently developed into a substantial file. Tribal elders and hooded informers were brought in to identify Mau Mau, a practice that left plenty of room for mere malice.
Alleged Mau Mau were moved to two camps at Mackinnon Road and Manyani where, in line with Allied classification of Nazis in post-war Germany, they were designated ‘black’, ‘grey’ and ‘white’. Most of the ‘blacks’ and ‘greys’ were subject to emergency detention orders under which they could be held without trial for two years. Twenty-four thousand people, roughly half the adult male Kikuyu population of Nairobi, were detained. By the end of 1954 there were 70,000 in captivity. The greatest number formally detained in Malaya had been 1,200, in Palestine 500.39
While Anvil certainly dampened down Mau Mau activity in the capital, it was a desperately indiscriminate operation that swept up even brave Christian opponents of the terrorists. Richer Kikuyu often evaded detention by doling out bribes, but others were taken away, leaving Home Guard units free to loot their shops and homes. The Home Guard became a permanent intimidating presence in some of Nairobi’s slums, but at least the remaining inhabitants could drink beer and smoke cigarettes, which the Mau Mau had banned on pain of death or mutilation. This was one of the many ways in which the Mau Mau had alienated potential supporters. Another was their campaign to burn down Church schools, which outraged the vast majority who recognized that education was the only way to achieve prosperity.
The Nairobi operation was matched by the creation of protected villages in Central Province, another strategy copied from Malaya, and designed to isolate the Mau Mau from their food and supplies. People who had traditionally lived in scattered settlements were scooped up and their villages burned. They were corralled into tight groups of around 500 people, after first having to build the new round huts themselves, together with excavating the spike-filled moats that surrounded them.40 By the end of 1955 there were 804 such villages, containing 1,050,899 people. It is worth noting that, as a proportion of the target population, this eclipsed what the French did in Algeria or the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique.41 The wretched inhabitants of these villages were subjected to all manner of chicanery and coercion by the Home Guard protecting them. A further disgusting detail is that since many of the inmates were women, whose husbands were in detention camps, they were frequently raped.42
The Mau Mau were forced into harsher environments such as swamps and the deep forests, where their morale and discipline crumbled. Although this terrain was too altitudinous for the sole available helicopter, the RAF was licensed to drop much bigger bombs (weighing 500 or 1,000 pounds) than the twenty-pounders used on areas where the Mau Mau were mixed up with civilians. In September 1954 a Mau Mau leader called Gitonga Kareme surrendered after twenty of his gang had been obliterated by RAF bombing. Between November 1953 and June 1954 the RAF killed or wounded 900 Mau Mau insurgents.43 British troops also tracked the Mau Mau into the forests. They destroyed a Mau Mau gang lurking in the Dandora Swamp, capturing its leader, Captain Nyagi Nyaga, and although he was extremely co-operative with his CID and Special Branch interrogators, he was sentenced to death and hanged along with sixteen of his comrades. Nyaga was a seasoned fighter, but many of his co-accused were either men whom Mau Mau had sprung from a prison – and had little choice in joining the society – or who claimed they had been kidnapped and press-ganged. That defence did not save them, even when one of the hard-core Mau Mau fighters confirmed it was true.
The last Mau Mau redoubts were in the forest of the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya, where trees gave way to dense bamboo as one got higher, and the bamboo gave way to hard scrabble and rock. Here Mau Mau bands established well-concealed camps, ringed by sentries and provisioned by volunteers from nearby villages. They learned how to use animal or bird sounds to communicate, and while their British opponents lumbered noisily through the undergrowth laden with heavy gear, the Mau Mau could run for up to seventy miles a day. They made do with berries and plants, and overcame Kikuyu taboos to eat elephant or monkey meat. The ability to extract honey from African beehives was a much prized skill. Gradually they replaced their ragged uniforms with items fashioned from furs and animal hides. But, like the Chinese Communists in Malaya’s jungles, they were increasingly prone to paranoia and depression.44
Major infantry operations such as Operation Hammer in February 1955 involved a sharply worsening cost-benefit ratio for the attacking force. In Hammer nine battalions killed 161 Mau Mau, which worked out at £10,000 per kill. Out of this impasse emerged the innovation, pioneered by the then Major Frank Kitson, of false-flag operations or ‘pseudo gangs’, initially involving Kikuyu loyalists from the Kenya Regiment, and then rebels who had been successfully turned to operate against their former Mau Mau comrades. Contrary to myth there was little role for white policemen and settlers ‘blacking up’ with actors’ greasepaint or burned cork for these missions.45 In October 1956 Ian Henderson, a white Special Branch officer, used Kitson’s methods to track down the able if psychopathic Dedan Kimathi, the only major Mau Mau leader still at large. He became the last Mau Mau member to be hanged when he was executed in Nairobi prison on 27 December 1956.46
In June 1957, Sir Evelyn passed on to the Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd a secret memorandum written by Eric Griffiths-Jones, the Attorney-General of Kenya. The memorandum described the abuse of Mau Mau detainees. Sir Evelyn wrote a covering letter stating that inflicting a ‘violent shock’ had been the only way of dealing with Mau Mau insurgents.
Though the Mau Mau uprising had been militarily defeated by this date, its aftermath was deeply embarrassing for the British government, which found itself arraigned by both domestic and international opinion. The reasons arose from the so-called rehabilitation process or ‘Pipeline’ into which Mau Mau suspects were fed and shunted between camps whose regime notionally reflected whether they were categorized as ‘grey’ or ‘black’. The camp gates were emblazoned with such historically unfortunate exhortations as ‘Labour and Freedom’, as well as ‘He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped’. These camps were barbed-wire compounds dominated by watchtowers, with images of the young Queen Elizabeth II juxtaposed to those of Jomo Kenyatta, who within a few years she would be greeting like a long-lost uncle. Loudspeakers boomed out commands and exhortations day and night.
The Kenyan concentration camps bear comparison with the worst, excepting Nazi death camps. They were places where people were dehumanized and randomly brutalized (or just murdered) by men over whom the colony’s authorities exercised no control whatsoever. They undermined the British people’s belief that their colonial regimes were superior to those of their European competitors, let alone the idea that the British ‘don’t do that sort of thing’. It in no way diminishes British responsibility that many Kikuyu loyalists enthusiastically supported and participated in the process.47
There was both a scandal and a government cover-up. Despite being systematically smeared for their efforts, a few local whistleblowers brought the disgraceful conditions in the Kenyan detention camps to the attention of Labour politicians at Westminster such as Fenner Brockway, Barbara Castle and John Stonehouse. Just when the metropolitan and colonial governments thought they had bluffed their way past a succession of scandals in Kenya, they were hit by the worst of them all. It had a history.
In 1957 senior members of Baring’s administration had decided drastically to reduce in number the 30,000 or so detainees who were still classified as ‘black’. By overestimating the capacity of Kikuyu land to support released detainees it would be possible to free large numbers of them, provided they could be psychologically broken first. That put the spotlight on the most irremediably ‘black’, who were thought to exert an untoward influence on the less committed majority. Special measures would have to be employed to break that core group of recalcitrant Mau Mau, who were reclassified more precisely as Ys and Zs or even Z1s and Z2s, the latter being the most stubborn.
To effect this new course, dubbed Operation Progress, Carruthers ‘Monkey’ Johnston, the Minister for African Affairs in Nairobi, appointed thirty-four-year-old District Officer Terence Gavaghan as head of rehabilitation. Gavaghan’s only obvious qualifications were that he was very large and extremely brutal. The Kenyan Attorney-General Eric Griffith-Jones helpfully provided a specious lawyerly distinction between ‘compelling’ and ‘punitive’ force, which led to the policy being tacitly approved by both Governor Baring and Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd.48
In November 1958 the Kenya Commissioner for Prisons imparted the new line to Commandant G. M. Sullivan, newly appointed to Hola detention centre on the Tana River, which housed the worst of the worst detainees. He received support from John Cowan, the Senior Superintendent of Prisons, as he set about breaking those detainees who were still refusing to work. Cowan suggested saturating the place with a riot squad of Africans who would outnumber the detainees by five to one, and Johnston and the Minister for Internal Security and Defence authorized it. In February 1959 massive force was used to induce eighty-five detainees to work after they had sat down on the ground. Eleven of them were beaten to death by guards with pickaxe handles. When news of the atrocity reached Nairobi, Baring and the senior officials involved conspired to pass off the deaths as the result of drinking contaminated water, and quickly shunted the affair over to a supposedly compliant magistrate’s inquest. When a doctor and nurse who were present testified that the men had been beaten to death, Baring instituted merely disciplinary, as opposed to criminal, proceedings against Sullivan and his deputy Walter Coutts. He even recommended Cowan for an MBE. The smooth lawyerly scum who legitimized these acts remained entirely unaffected.49
News of the latest outrage filtered back to British politicians, partly through the good offices of Kenyatta’s lawyer Denis Pritt. Starting with credulous reports in the East African Standard, by June 1959 the ‘Hola Scandal’ had made Time magazine in the US. The subject of Hola occupied an all-night debate in the House of Commons on 27–28 July. Hitherto Lennox-Boyd had been able to deflect Labour calls for a public inquiry into conditions in Kenya’s camps. When the government sought to defend its clumsy cover-ups with reference to the ‘morale’ of the colonial civil service, one Labour member countered with the dubious claim that ‘we cease to rank as a great power, but moral power we still have’. He also acidly commented that ‘of course the colonial civil servants were jolly good chaps, and it was very unfair to attack them, whatever they did. That is what [Dr] Crippen’s friends said: they all said that he was an extremely nice chap, but, after all, he had murdered his wife.’
More dangerously for the Colonial Secretary, the Tory MP Enoch Powell – who had resigned from the Treasury eighteen months before – was also incensed.50 Powell was known to his own leader as the ‘Fakir’, and Macmillan had even asked for him to be seated further down the Cabinet table to avoid his staring eyes. It has to be said that the detestation was mutual, since Powell thought the Prime Minister was a Whig ‘actor-manager’ and not a true Tory.51
Powell had decided by the early 1950s that the Commonwealth was a sham, and that, without India, which he loved, empire was beyond Britain’s means. In the early hours of the morning he rose to speak and in his flat Midlands accent forensically demolished the claim by Lennox-Boyd, Baring and others that one could not use metropolitan methods to counter an African insurgency. Attempts to justify the deaths at Hola by calling the victims ‘sub-humans’ met his withering scorn: ‘I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil on the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgement on a fellow human-being and to say, “Because he was such and such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.”’ Acceptance and assignment of responsibility for one’s actions were part and parcel of the representative government which Britain sought to introduce to Africa. Finally, Powell attacked the moral relativism of applying different standards to different peoples. ‘We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man on man, rests on opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern, depends on the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’52 If anything induced the British to pack up and go, it was the moral disaster that it had inflicted on itself, a disaster British politicians and civil servants systematically covered up until 2012 by destroying or doctoring the written records of the former colony.
The eventual settlement also engraved injustices into independent Kenya. The Swynnerton Plan of late 1953 proposed the creation of a solid class of Kikuyu yeoman farmers, allowed to grow cash crops such as coffee. With so many Mau Mau suspects in detention, it was a simple matter to resurvey land and to reward loyalists with solid title to the vacant holdings of detainees. This meant jobs for the willing boys on a grand scale. Loyalist Kikuyu of humble means were blessed with much official favour in terms of trading licences or loans to purchase something as modest as a bicycle. The administration operated whitelists as well as blacklists for employers, who were encouraged to discriminate on behalf of loyalists. Loyal Kikuyu were recruited into the lower reaches of the administration, whence they rose higher and were favoured when the colonial regime gerrymandered an anti-Mau Mau electorate in the transition to Kenyan independence. The aim was to ensure that, when Mau Mau detainees were released, they would never attain the critical mass needed to dominate the majority, something over-insured by denying them the Certificates of Loyalty without which one could not vote. As a measure to prevent a possible breakdown of law and order it was a great success. However, the structure became the backbone of the authoritarian, bureaucratic and deeply corrupt state that Kenyatta would impose on independent Kenya, which his successors have done little or nothing to reform. Kenya was one of those colonies where the Americans were content to allow the British free rein. The developing Cold War forced them to think about Africa in a more focused way. But in the beginning policy towards this huge continent was almost a blank slate as its affairs did not concern them.