The paths to confrontation of the chapter title refer to the two main regions of British Africa—East and South—to which fight strategies were applied after 1945. Communal tensions and political impasse fuelled violent dissent in both places during the 1950s. First, the chapter considers the differing ways in which black majority rule was blocked in the Central African Federation (CAF) of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (now Malawi). The Federation’s acrimonious ten-year existence was punctuated by sporadic internal disorder that prompted declarations of state of emergency in its component territories in early 1959. The introduction of martial law did not, on this occasion, signify a British decision to fight for continued colonial control. It pointed instead to the worsening conflict between the imperial authorities and the local white settler elite in the Rhodesian territories, a confrontation set to escalate even further in the 1960s. Finally, the chapter turns northwards to British East Africa to explore Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. In some ways similar to the Madagascar uprising, Mau Mau had quintessentially colonial origins—settler privilege, contested access to land, and racially-framed structures of law and entitlement. Yet the rebellion was misrepresented as something else entirely: a fanatical tribalism that laid bare the underlying primitivism of Kenya’s majority people, the Kikuyu.1 Here, too, extreme repression ensued. Again redolent of Madagascar, the co-option of Kenyans into the ensuing state violence represented a low point in British ‘fight’ strategy.
There is a case, so far as the halting strides of British decolonization are concerned, for thinking of ‘a short 1950s’ bookended by the election victory of Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in October 1951 and the appointment of the reformer Iain MacLeod as Harold Macmillan’s Colonial Secretary in October 1959. Over the intervening eight years three successive Conservative governments courted their favoured nationalist collaborators and picked fights with others they deemed too radical. British military force and covert interventions were used with seeming abandon, not as a last resort, but as a first—to restore the Shah of Iran in 1953, to prevent left-wing victory in the Latin American colony of British Guiana that same year, and, more generally, to ramp up counter-insurgency efforts in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus.2 In this sense, the attempt to overthrow Egypt’s Colonel Nasser in November 1956 fitted a broader trend. Certain Conservative ministers were also willing to defend white settler privilege in southern Africa in a way that their Labour opponents found increasingly repugnant.3
In the case of the Central African Federation (CAF) of Southern Rhodesia and the protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, it is particularly difficult to untangle ‘fight’ from ‘flight’. The three territories were federated in January 1953 in a state-building exercise the objective of which was never wholly agreed between the participant governments. Ironically, one of its main designers was Andrew Cohen, the far-sighted Colonial Office mandarin often credited with formulating schemes for the peaceful dismantling of Britain’s African empire.4 Welded together against the wishes of its African majority populations and against the advice of the colonial governors in Lusaka and Zomba, the federation would last a decade before crashing to destruction leaving a tangled wreck of constitutional debris to pick through as the component territories went their separate ways.5 Bitterness about the Federation’s demise was strongest among Southern Rhodesia’s whites, by 1963, well on the road to rebellion. Yet it was their politics that made the Federation so toxic.
During the CAF’s ten-year existence meaningful reforms were withheld from black Africans while, at the same time, the white settler minority, and especially those in Southern Rhodesia—consistently the most intransigent ‘nationalist’ constituency in Central Africa—was shamelessly placated. (Southern Rhodesia contained by far the largest settler population of the three federated territories—close on 200,000, next to Nyasaland’s 9,000 and Northern Rhodesia’s 70,000.) The majority of Southern Rhodesia’s whites were neither wealthy farmers nor civil servants but skilled workers. Their employment prospects and economic status were threatened by the Africanization of local industry. In Northern Rhodesia, whose all-important copper-belt was dominated by three part-British-owned mining conglomerates, company interest in promoting opportunities for their African labour force clashed with the preferential status once accorded to white mine-workers through an industry colour bar.6 To be sure, post-war British governments had diminishing means to restrain settler demands, whether in the labour market or in matters of politics and cultural privilege. Colonial Governors wielded executive power in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, but Southern Rhodesia had been internally self-governing since 1923. Its model of white rule based on a narrow franchise and a firm grip on the levers of local economic power was always liable to spread to its two neighbours once the Federation took shape. Confusion persisted over the division of responsibilities between Britain, the three territorial administrations, and the new federal authorities even so. ‘Defence’, for example, was a federal matter, policing remained in the hands of individual territorial governments, and the British government maintained direct interests in both. These overlapping jurisdictions would cause intense friction between all sides from 1958 onwards as the choice between oppression or conciliation of the African majority in all three federated territories became urgent. Much clearer was that the apparatus of federal government would be settler built and settler led. Once established, the Federation enjoyed law-making powers, British Ministers and Whitehall officials scrutinizing legislation but not initiating it.7
The underlying tensions between government in London and Salisbury over the wisdom and purpose of a territorial amalgamation were of long standing. A Central African Council set up in wartime to contain pressure for the amalgamation of the two Rhodesias was sidelined when hostilities ended. But the white-dominated governments in Salisbury and Lusaka acquired a stronger financial hold over mining-company profits, internal trade, and the crucial rail network linking the three Central African territories with one another and with South Africa.8 Meanwhile, the ‘danger’ presented by the post-war immigration of thousands of Afrikaner South Africans—perceived as even more reactionary than their Anglophone cousins north of the Zambezi—mounted steadily.9 This allowed Rhodesian settler politicians like Sir Godfrey Huggins and Roy Welensky, successive leaders of the United Federal Party (UFP), to make the case for federation as a ‘better than’ solution next to the creeping influence of apartheid. Some British ministers, backed by officials of the Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), which handled the Federation’s administrative business, were happy to go along with this.10 Negotiators on both sides colluded in making a white-dominated federation between Southern and Northern Rhodesia, with Nyasaland thrown in, appear a reasonable compromise rather than the institutionalization of settler domination that it actually was.
Why, then, did successive Conservative governments, various Whitehall departments and a broad spectrum of British political and press opinion consider the federation scheme a good idea? The answer was that, in the eyes of its British sponsors, far from making inter-racial conflict more likely, the federation seemed to offer ‘a middle way’ between racial authoritarianism in the South African style and the surrender of Britain’s Central African interests to black nationalist regimes. The CAF supposedly offered a different, gradualist route to racial harmony. The Federation’s settlers were supposed, eventually, to share power with ‘moderate’ African representatives.11 Such multi-racialism, integral to the Conservative Party’s approach, not only to the CAF but to Kenyan politics as well, turned out to be a pipe-dream.12 From the outset Southern Rhodesian settler leaders exploited the apparatus of federal rule to weaken countervailing British authority and thereby ensure continuing white supremacy. For them, the Federation was both the prelude and the means to transform its component territories into a white-governed Dominion, a greater Rhodesia whose racial politics would approximate South African standards, not British.
But the CAF’s chequered history was never reducible to a two-way fight between settler reactionaries and British liberal reformers; far from it. On the one hand, African nationalist groups, including Southern Rhodesia’s African National Congress, Joshua Nkomo’s breakaway Zimbabwe African Peoples Union, and their northern cousin, the Zambia African National Congress led by Harry Nkumbala and Kenneth Kaunda, rejected cooption on principle. Each proved their fitness to govern through quite extraordinary forbearance in the face of mounting repression.13 On the other hand, Westminster politicians, mainly on the Conservative right, sympathized with settler fears of reverse discrimination under black majority rule. White farmers were unlikely to thrive under such a regime. Many produced tobacco and foodstuffs on well-run estates employing large numbers of African labourers. Agricultural revenues were fundamental to Southern Rhodesia’s prosperity. What would happen if the land made productive by the white pioneer was no longer farmed efficiently? The countryside might be destabilized, the cities flooded with unemployed. The security services and some Foreign Office personnel fretted about Communist infiltration facilitated by African nationalist fellow-travellers.14 Most of all, for Cabinet ministers, the CRO and the Colonial Office, the Federation, once established, acquired a status akin to an inconvenient stretch of green belt: worth protecting to a point, but an obstacle to the pressures of modernization. When push came to shove, it was not worth fighting over.
Avoiding conflict in Central Africa proved impossible, however. The British did little initially to block the Federal government in Salisbury from reconfiguring the CAF constitution to block democratic reform. Indeed, it fell to the protectorate governors, particularly Sir Arthur Benson in Northern Rhodesia, to warn against devolving too much authority to the federal authorities, especially in relation to policing, internal security, and the detention of political opponents.15 ‘States of emergency’ designed to stifle African protests such as pithead strikes and a boycott of beer halls in Northern Rhodesia’s copper-belt in 1956 and 1957 were periodically enacted even so.16 In response, between 1957 and 1959 African nationalist parties in all three Federation territories coalesced around three central concerns: the institutional basis of discrimination, the threat of Federation independence under settler control, and the barriers to reform within the CAF next to the gathering pace of decolonization elsewhere. In their eyes, federal rule, its agenda always set by Southern Rhodesia’s settlers, was the enemy.17
By the start of 1959 the fundamental choices in Federation politics had narrowed as a result. In place of a middle way, only two markedly different routes to independence seemed open, one leading to South African-type reaction, the other to Ghana-style black majority rule.18 With the nationalist parties moving towards open confrontation of federal rule, the threat of African political violence was exploited, and certainly exaggerated, by the Southern Rhodesian and Nyasaland governments to justify a clampdown. With strong encouragement from Welenky’s federal administration, longing to make martial law the pretext to take unilateral control over internal security matters, states of emergency were declared in all three territories between 25 February and 11 March. Opposition parties were banned, hundreds of activists locked up. Pre-eminent among them was Dr Hastings Banda, the Edinburgh-trained GP and Church of Scotland elder, who had returned home to the territory where disturbances went furthest to resume direction of the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC).
‘On-the-spot’ colonial officials watched the people of Nyasaland mobilize against British and white Rhodesian domination with a mixture of shock and surprise. Historian Megan Vaughan highlights the persistence among colonial health professionals, psychologists, magistrates, and police of crudely racist stereotypes about Africans, their mental acuity, and supposed lack of initiative. Commenting on the incidence of suicide, or rather, its presumed absence, in Nyasaland, Vaughan notes that ‘“Africans” were generally held to be a happy-go-lucky “race” of people with few cares in the world.’ They were alleged to attribute any worries they did have to the malign influence of others, ‘via the medium of witchcraft or the intervention of spirits’. ‘African people’, so the argument went, ‘did not suffer from introspection and guilt, and so one rarely encountered depressive illness among them.’19 These layers of prejudice and lazy thinking about Africans lacking political conviction were gradually stripped away by well-organized popular protest and a resilient NAC leadership.
Nyasaland’s Emergency made plain what critics—African, British, and American—had known for some time: the Central African Federation was unworkable.20 Divisions between the individual territorial administrations and Welensky’s federal government had been allowed to fester in the absence of clear direction from London. For the defenders of the Macmillan government’s approach this was commendable light-touch restraint; for his opponents it was woeful indecisiveness. Macmillan’s anxiety to avoid having to say or do anything definitive was understandable. For one thing, there was a general election coming in October 1959. For another, Welensky’s supporters believed that the British government would concede independence to the Federation within the next year or so; a dangerous hostage to fortune because internal African opposition was proving stronger than anticipated. Banda’s noisy, but largely non-violent return to Nyasaland politics as chief opponent of the Federation may have precipitated the Emergency.21 But his two core arguments had been incontrovertible for years. Firstly, Nyasaland, an overwhelmingly black country lacking the mineral wealth of Northern Rhodesia, was a poor fit within the Federation. Secondly, it was manifestly unjust for Nyasaland’s three million blacks to be governed in the interests of a settler community numbering under 10,000. Unfortunately, releasing Nyasaland and allowing it to chart its own course to independence, logical and ethically defensible though it was, remained politically inexpedient for politicians in London and Salisbury. The plain fact was that if Nyasaland went the entire Federation would collapse. Northern Rhodesia’s nationalists would demand the same freedoms. Their Southern Rhodesian counterparts would be emboldened to challenge settler authority once and for all. Even more likely was that Welensky’s federal government would take pre-emptive action, proclaiming Dominion status in defiance of Britain’s failure to stand up for its kith and kin in southern Africa.22
In the histories of British and French decolonization, few nightmare scenarios came to fruition much as their doomsayers predicted. But Central Africa came close. Ultimately, the rulers of Southern Rhodesia, rather than the Federation as a whole, rebelled against British authority, declaring unilateral independence in November 1965, a subject examined in Chapter 10. The Central African Federation had imploded over two years earlier, a victim of its internal contradictions. Its dissolution was rendered inevitable earlier still: by the disastrous manner in which the Nyasaland crisis unfolded in 1959. Sir Robert Armitage was the protectorate’s governor at the time. An administrator with previous experience of emergencies in the Gold Coast and Cyprus, he was wary of ceding responsibility for the maintenance of internal order to Welensky’s federal government and the white Rhodesianled security forces at his disposal. But his hand was forced by worsening clashes between police and Banda’s supporters, as well as purported evidence of an NAC plot to attack key installations and assassinate leading Europeans. The territorial governors and the federation executive met in Salisbury, first on 20 February 1959, then a week later on the 27th to discuss emergency powers. In between times, police reinforcements from Northern Rhodesia and Tanganyika, in addition to regular troops from Southern Rhodesia, began moving into Nyasaland. Most were in place by 26 February.23
By this point Welensky’s party colleague Sir Edgar Whitehead, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, had resolved to move against his territory’s ANC organizers. Hundreds were detained in nationwide police sweeps authorized under Southern Rhodesia’s new emergency provisions. Sir Arthur Benson, still Governor of Northern Rhodesia, refused to act in similar fashion against the Zambia nationalists in his territory. He insisted that local police could handle the nationalists’ occasional acts of intimidation and Northern Rhodesia’s ANC could be outlawed without recourse to martial law.24 It was intimidation from another quarter that Benson feared rather more. On 4 March he complained to London of a ‘most spectacular and coordinated campaign’ by the federal government to force him into declaring an emergency in Northern Rhodesia. Its object was to seize control over all aspects of internal security.25
According to Benson, Welensky and other members of the Federal government were ‘flushed’ with a pride ‘that swelled them up like frogs’ after Armitage, the Crown representative, conceded that only the federal authorities could protect a British domain.26 Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd seconded Benson’s determination ‘to avoid if humanly possible’ any comparable resort to emergency rule in Northern Rhodesia. But Lennox-Boyd’s principal objective was to prevent the backstairs wrangling over the crackdowns from leaking out. He cabled Benson with the following advice on the 5th:
It is, as I know you realise, of vital importance at this moment that no whisper of Federal pressure to declare a State of Emergency should get out. So I hope you will be able to avoid press conferences where all (repeat all) of us can say things which give rise to conjecture. I have often been caught out this way!27
The tragedy was that Governor Armitage opted to follow Whitehead’s example, not Benson’s.28 He authorized a crackdown against Banda’s NAC, similar to that conducted against the Southern Rhodesia ANC. In the first act of Nyasaland’s state of emergency on 3 March 166 NAC members were arrested. They included a dishevelled Hastings Banda, bundled into a police vehicle still in his pyjamas. Far from silencing dissent, Operation Sunrise unleashed a wave of protests. In the worst single incident, on the morning of the 3rd a contingent of King’s African Rifles, part of the newly-arrived reinforcements, shot dead twenty demonstrators at Nkata Bay on the shores of Lake Nyasa. News of the killings reached London at much the same time as reports arrived from Kenya indicating that eleven Kenyan detainees had been beaten to death at a Mau Mau detention camp in Hola.29 Two massacres in a single day; Operation Sunrise gave way to imperial sunset within a matter of hours.
Downing Street was left reeling by the damning press coverage and international outcry over this bloody turn in colonial policy. Barbara Castle and Jim Callaghan led stinging Labour Party attacks, which accused ministers of turning a blind eye to murder.30 On the night of 5 March, in what was his preferred method of letting off steam—privately—Macmillan took up his pen to write his latest diary entry. He railed against ‘extremist native leaders’, British Socialists and their acolytes in the Manchester Guardian and The Observer. They were all out to embarrass him by highlighting the ‘most regrettable division of responsibility’ in the Central African Federation. The Prime Minister closed with a classic ‘note to self’: ‘I must try to get the facts and take a hand in this affair, or it may prove really difficult as well as politically damaging at home.’31 Macmillan’s government duly sought refuge in the bureaucratic devices customarily used to defuse criticism—an inquiry commission and a consultation exercise. Neither went to plan.
The undeclared purpose of both investigations was, as Macmillan put it, ‘to keep Parliament and public steady’. To further the cause, secret political intelligence about NAC subversion was hastily compiled into a White Paper to prove that the Nyasaland clampdown was justified.32 The Prime Minister meanwhile returned to his other, larger preoccupations: the emerging Cold War crisis over Berlin, a partial French withdrawal from NATO, heightened tension in the Middle East, and a Cyprus settlement.33 Central Africa, for all its devilish complexity, was still small beer. Macmillan, though, was shrewd enough to recognize that this could change. In early June he set up a Cabinet Africa committee to review colonial affairs week by week; its aim: ‘to give us a grip on the situation’.34
The Nyasaland inquiry commission led by Lord Justice Sir Patrick Devlin began its work in early April 1959. The Cabinet meanwhile closed ranks over continuing press and parliamentary criticism of its lapses in Kenya and Central Africa although, behind the scenes, Lennox-Boyd offered to resign from the Colonial Office.35 All of this changed in mid July when Devlin published his findings. They were brief—and devastatingly blunt. The Governor’s pretexts for invoking emergency powers were inadequate and, by implication, bogus; the repression they unleashed excessive. The NAC, the legitimate voice of majority opinion, had been strangled in what had become, albeit temporarily, ‘a police state’. Macmillan vented his spleen at the Devlin Report in his diary. This time he focused his ire on Devlin personally. He lambasted the judge’s naïve streak. He damned Devlin’s disloyalty, allegedly traceable to Catholic Irish roots and a Jesuit priest brother. And he accused Devlin of vindictiveness. This he ascribed to Devlin’s resentment at having missed out on the post of Lord Chief Justice. No wonder the Prime Minister concluded that Devlin’s report was ‘dynamite’, which ‘may well blow this Government out of office’.36 Any remaining hopes that Hugh Gaitskell’s Labour Party might agree a bipartisan approach to African problems evaporated.37 After winning the October 1959 general election, Macmillan did hold further meetings with Gaitskell, Aneurin Bevan, and Jim Callaghan in November in a last-ditch effort to win Labour’s backing for the government’s Central Africa policy, but to no avail.38
Explosive they certainly were, but there was no way to argue with Devlin’s conclusions without seeming ridiculously out of touch. Luckily for the government, their other defensive move—the consultation exercise—offered some respite. Macmillan and the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations Lord Home had selected former Conservative minister Sir Walter Monkton to lead an investigative commission into the Federation’s troubles and future prospects. This at least gave a breathing space. It would be over a year before the Monkton Commission report confirmed what most impartial observers already knew. The clunking constitutional machinery of the Central African Federation had turned into a blundering instrument of repression blocking the road to black majority rule.39
Only the shock of the Nyasaland Emergency in 1959 compelled a fundamental reconsideration of Britain’s ‘strategy’ for departure from Central Africa. Its limitations, so candidly described by Devlin were amplified by South Africa’s harsh racial divides and shocking political violence. The shooting of scores of unarmed pro-ANC protesters outside Sharpeville police station on 21 March 1960 finally exploded the myth of austere but well-intentioned white paternalism in southern Africa. During the early 1960s, after twenty years of pandering to settler demands—tellingly described by one historian as ‘government by blackmail’—it became clearer still that white diehards demanding fight not flight were the more serious obstacle to ending empire on British terms.40
Time and money spent on gathering intelligence about nugatory African nationalist links with the Communist bloc would have been better devoted to monitoring what the settlers might do to block franchise reform and democratic elections.41 Fuller information about the underlying sources of settler fears would also have been useful. British policymakers were perhaps too dismissive of the visceral panic that gripped southern Africa’s settler communities as the bloodletting of decolonization elsewhere edged ever closer. As novelist Doris Lessing remembers, for white Rhodesians Mau Mau was like ‘a burglar alarm in a rich house’. Growing concern with personal security reached fever pitch in response to news of renewed racial violence during the Congo Crisis in 1960. Iron bars were added to farmstead window-frames. Volunteer home guards began patrolling white neighbourhoods after dark.42 Back in Britain, Kenyan and Rhodesian settlers, once viewed as representing all that was best about their home country, were becoming an embarrassment, out of touch with the home country to which they claimed attachment.43 Historian Will Jackson sees three areas in which distinctly colonial facets of Kenyan settler experience emerge clearly. In the physical and emotional hardships of colonial life and family separation; in the prevalence of hostile, anxious feelings towards African neighbours, servants, and workers; and in the growing awareness that white domination hung by a thread. It was this final quality that imposed exacting standards to behave as ‘Europeans’ should in front of ‘the natives’.44 These were people never entirely ‘settled’ in their colony of choice. To adapt Lessing’s insight about Southern Rhodesia’s whites, settlers were in exile, not from Britain, but from Africa.45 For all that, a striking feature of Mau Mau violence was the intra-African focus. Settlers were certainly integral to this Kenyan conflict, but most escaped the worst of it. We need to consider why.
The Mau Mau rebellion was a revolt centred among Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. It was also the dirtiest of Britain’s colonial fights, ‘the great horror story of Britain’s empire in the 1950s’ as historian David Anderson describes it. Sir Evelyn Baring’s Nairobi government introduced sweeping emergency powers on 20 October 1952. This followed numerous killings of pro-administration figures, including Kenya’s paramount chief Waruhiu wa Kungu.46 An experienced colonial administrator, Baring was the son of Lord Cromer, a famed Victorian pro-consul in Egypt. Following in his father’s footsteps, Baring had the gravitas to play patrician governor in Kenya.47 But the transformation in the colony’s security apparatus that he oversaw soon acquired a momentum of its own.48 The regular Kenya Police, a white-dominated Kenya Police Reserve, and, subsequently, a ‘Home Guard’ of Kikuyu loyalists led the fight against Mau Mau. Emergency powers allowed them to detain suspects without trial, to prohibit access to operational zones, and to impose curfews.49 As in Malaya, a revitalized Police Special Branch led the intelligence war against Mau Mau, relying on local informants for leads. Within three months of the declaration of the Emergency an additional twenty-seven police stations were built in the Kikuyu ‘reserves’. By late 1953 the combined police forces had trebled in size from approximately 7,000 to almost 21,000.50 British troop reinforcements were also brought in.
The expansion of local security forces was merely the thin, cleaner end of the wedge. Kenya’s Emergency Regulations, their scope steadily extended, underpinned wholesale human rights abuses. These included over a thousand hangings after peremptory trial, mass population removal, lethal beatings, sexual torture, and a network of detention camps, the principal examples of which are shown on Map 9. It was the most ruthless repression in any British colonial dependency after the Second World War.51 The rebellion itself was largely spent by 1956. And Dedan Kimathi, the titular leader of the Mau Mau fighters based in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains, went to the gallows in February 1957. Yet it was only three years later, on 12 January 1960, that the Emergency was declared over. By this point hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had passed through the camp system. Once released, many found their families gone, their homes broken, their access to land denied. Any appreciation of why the British authorities, metropolitan and colonial, approved all of this must, therefore, engage with the origins of Kikuyu grievances, the nature of the revolt itself, and the methods of repression adopted.
Logically enough, the account begins with the first President of independent Kenya, Johnstone (Jomo) Kenyatta. As general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), an early voice of moderate Kenyan nationalism, a young Kenyatta sailed for Britain in February 1929.52 His aim? To make the case that the Kikuyu formed a coherent society dispossessed and fragmented by colonial government and the white settlement it upheld. His trip, an early example of direct African anti-colonial lobbying in London, went unrewarded. Leftist anti-colonialists had little time for the minutiae of African sociology, which seemed to stress ethnic particularity over class solidarity. Conservative parliamentarians simply denied him appointments. Colonial Office specialists, better informed about what the Kikuyu were suffering, still rejected Kenyatta’s arguments about a fairer distribution of agricultural land and labour. Deeply frustrated, he departed for Moscow where he began a brief flirtation with the Comintern. This, too, ended in disillusionment.53
Returning to London in 1933, Kenyatta turned to academic study. Two years later he enrolled with the Polish exile Bronislaw Malinowski for a postgraduate diploma in social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Much like the Trinidadian intellectual George Padmore, with whom he shared interests in Marxism and anthropology, Kenyatta was convinced that the European powers still regarded Africa as a continent to be divided and exploited at will.54 The work he produced under Malinowski’s supervision was ultimately published as Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu in 1938. Perhaps read by only a few hundred fellow specialists at the time, Kenyatta’s thesis revealed the singularity of his vision. He explained the complexity of Kikuyu land-holding, its distinct individual and collective forms, its regulation by mbari or sub-clan elders, and the rules governing its transfer between families. The core argument was devastatingly simple: the British were wrong to presume that ‘tribal land’ could be alienated without undermining the very foundations of Kikuyu society.55 It was a theme to which Kenyatta and other, later supporters of Mau Mau would revert time and again in the years ahead. Colonial capitalism, with white settlers its willing foot-soldiers, was denying Kenyans the capacity to acquire and bequeath their key source of wealth and social independence. Colonial rule meanwhile robbed Kenyans of decision-making responsibilities, as much in the domestic and familial sphere as in the realm of national politics. For Kikuyu this social autonomy was a measure of adult status. Mau Mau was about individual self-respect and a household’s ‘capacity to produce and eat’.56
Map 9. Kenyan ‘White Highlands’ and main detention camps.
Following established colonial precedent, the Conservative governments in office throughout the eleven years separating Mau Mau’s outbreak from Kenya’s independence in December 1963 insisted that the rebellion was a purely internal issue, a matter for Kenyans and Britons alone; an ‘Emergency’, not a war. But as the Dutch had discovered to their cost in Indonesia and as the French would soon realize in North Africa, the convenient fiction that decolonization struggles could be handled without outside involvement or hostile international reaction was unsustainable. The reconfiguration of the post-war international system into mutually antagonistic Cold War blocs militated against it. So did US concern about the long-term strategic alignment of independent African and Asian states. The United Nations, its membership expanding to include newly-independent, often non-aligned countries, including former colonial giants India and Indonesia, as well as black African states led by Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, took an interest. The UN’s affiliate health and aid agencies were another influential African presence. Other Non-Governmental Agencies, the Red Cross and Oxfam prominent among them, were working in Kenya already. Indeed, as the conflict escalated they were probably better informed about life inside detention camps and embattled Kikuyu villages than many Colonial Office advisers.57 Finally, both sympathetic allied powers and generally unsympathetic colonial nationalist movements elsewhere in British Africa were watching to see how Mau Mau would affect Britain’s capacity to maintain imperial control elsewhere.
Partly because British characterizations of Mau Mau were so emotive and partly because this is a book comparing British and French colonial experience, the reader may find it useful to see what French observers thought of Britain’s repression of Mau Mau. On 13 January 1953 French Consul Beaudouin reported from Nairobi that Kenya’s settler community in the so-called ‘white highlands’ (largely former Maasai land heavily populated by Kikuyu whose ancestral lands had been alienated to whites) was close to revolt. Settler landowners felt unprotected. Night-time attacks on isolated farmhouses, often organized in collusion with servants and house-boys, were a more or less weekly occurrence. The sense of being cornered was all pervasive. The rhetorical analogies with hunting were no accident. As Patricia Lorcin observes in her study of women settlers in colonial Algeria and Kenya, ‘women lived and imagined their lives in ways that reflected both the values and customs of their homelands and the opportunities and experiences of their “adopted” land … In Kenya it was the British traditions of the landed gentry with their class convictions and their love of the hunt. Wild animals were … essential to the creation of Kenya’s nostalgic space.’58 Now it seemed that it was the settlers themselves who were at bay. The killing of the Ruck family—husband Roger, wife Esme, and six-year-old son Michael—at their farm in Kinangop on the night of 24 January 1953 raised settler outrage to fever pitch.
The much larger population of Britons living in the Kenyan capital also felt increasingly insecure and joined the chorus demanding instant retribution.59 Those concentrated in classier Nairobi suburbs, described by one historian as resembling ‘the better part of Woking’, complained of the colonial government’s ineffectiveness in halting both Mau Mau attacks and the more general breakdown of strict inter-racial deference for which Kenya was renowned.60 There were other, less privileged settler voices as well. Kenya’s ‘poor whites’ were equally anxious about black dissent, albeit for different reasons. After 1945 Kenya’s settler community not only grew in number, but became poorer and more urbanized. ‘Poor whites’, for decades the classic outsiders of colonial settler society, became starkly visible. Usually described in terms of transgression—of racial boundaries, of social norms, of economic minima—the lowest strata of white settler society was highly problematic. Their poorer circumstances subverted the official rhetoric of modernization and unravelled finely woven settler myths of respectability and moral superiority. As Jackson puts it, in the figure of the ‘poor white’ degeneracy and deviancy converge.61
The influx of new settlers in the late 1940s produced greater social diversification in the settler population, a diversity typified by the unprecedented numbers of single, white working-class men and women drawn to Nairobi and Mombasa. Working in low-paid occupations, the women as typists, hair-dressers, receptionists, and shop-assistants, the men as garage mechanics, building-site labourers or store-men, these new settlers were closer to modern-day economic migrants than the hardy pioneers who stride through settler literature. They had little in common socially or culturally with Kenya’s ‘old hands’. But they were generally apprehensive of rapid socio-economic change, fearful of being displaced by cheaper African labour. Alongside them was another discrete band of new settler immigrants. These were civil service and commercial retirees from India, who moved to Kenya in large numbers after Indian independence to retain their colonial lifestyles. They tended to be even more reactionary. Few had much recent experience of life in Britain or of changing British attitudes to empire. In Will Jackson’s words, ‘As aristocrats and socialites were replaced by demobilised soldiers, economic migrants, and retirees from the Raj, what had always been (and remained) the sine qua non of settler Kenya—the maintenance of distance between colonisers and colonised—began to dissolve. At the same time, Africans—urbanised, and politicised as never before—impinged on those spaces previously demarcated white.’62 Little wonder, then, that both the well-to-do settler and their poorer cousins were unimpressed by the post-war stewardship of Governor Sir Philip Mitchell. He was a conservative administrator to be sure, but one who spoke an unwelcome language of development and multi-racial partnership.63 Far from preserving the racial difference in which all strata of Kenya’s settler society placed such value, Mitchell began dismantling it.64
This more permissive environment allowed Jomo Kenyatta’s fledgling Kenya African Union (KAU—the post-war reincarnation of the KCA) to grow in the late 1940s. It also opened up political space for the KAU’s radical offshoot, the Mau Mau (literally translatable as the ‘greedy eaters’ of chiefly elders’ authority). Mau Mau’s emergence was problematic for KAU leaders. They struggled to bridge the cultural and generational divides between their rural supporters in Kikuyuland and the more confrontational trade union activism and youth politics of post-war Nairobi.65 Even so, what startled the colonial administration most about the character of the non-violent KAU was its apparently ‘pantribal’—for which we might read ‘national’—basis of support.66 What alarmed them about Mau Mau was precisely the reverse: its sectarian violence and it secretiveness.67
These two features coalesced in British official minds thanks to highly sensationalist reports of Mau Mau oathing ceremonies in which tens of thousands in central Kenya pledged support, often in small groups and frequently under duress.68 Equally effective as instruments of political mobilization and social discipline, oathing ceremonies drew on Kikuyu religious practice. Earlier dramatic increases in the numbers making oaths of allegiance to the KAU were instrumental to the efforts of younger, Nairobi-based militants to usurp the party’s established leadership of rural elders typified by Kenyatta and another senior Kikuyu chief, Koinange wa Mbiyu. By 1951 the party was profoundly radicalized and moving rapidly towards anti-British and internecine violence.69
Where declarations of support for the KAU were conventionally political and limited in number, Mau Mau oathing was ritualized and conducted on an enormous scale. Exaggerated, vulgarized accounts of these newer oathing ceremonies became staples of settler conversation and British press accounts. Their garishness sought to demonize Mau Mau by proving the movement’s backwardness, deviancy, and cruelty. Numerous reports from district administrators, officially-sponsored ethnographers and government-appointed psychologists interpreted oathing through the cosmologies as early modern witchcraft. Ceremonies, which often involved animal sacrifice and the eating of raw goat meat, were interpreted in highly sexualized terms as frenzied acts of satanic depravity.70 New initiates, estimated to number around ninety per cent of the population in parts of Kenya’s Central Highlands, were thereby represented as having been duped. Either they were coerced into compliance or they fell into a trance-like state in which all reason and inhibition was lost.
Not surprisingly, a propaganda war soon developed over the meaning and validity of Mau Mau oaths, and of the movement they endorsed. If, as British official statements insisted, followers of Mau Mau had succumbed to a form of collective psychosis, corrective treatment rather than colonial reform was what was required. So-called ‘counter-oathing’ ceremonies became a central plank of counter-insurgency strategy. Theatrical public recantations were organized in which Mau Mau detainees ceremonially repudiated their earlier vows—sometimes kissing a male goat’s foot, spitting and then spurning Mau Mau allegiance. Such performances, instrumental to British ‘rehabilitation’ of their Kenyan captives, perpetuated the idea that the Mau Mau was closer to a cult than a political quest for ‘land and freedom’, the movement’s core slogan.71
Despite the obsession with its covert practices, Mau Mau had other, more pragmatic origins. It was rooted among Kikuyu agricultural labourers living as squatters on settler estates. They identified colonial authority, white landowners, and chiefly elders as obstacles to their acquisition of land, personal status, and wealth—components of what Kenya scholars term ‘self-mastery’.72 Household wealth, individual opportunity, marriage, procreation, and peer recognition of one’s status as an autonomous adult: these were the prerequisites to successful transition through the life stages of Kikuyu culture. All were bound up with the availability of land and livestock resources that were harder than ever to come by. Population growth added to overcrowding in the districts colonially designated as Kikuyu ‘reserves’. In response some thirty per cent of Kikuyu left these areas to become squatters contracted to work for white landowners in the White Highlands of west-central Kenya. The injustice inherent to their legally marginalized and landless status became starkly apparent immediately after the Second World War as white farmers, anxious to take advantage of higher prices for agricultural produce, began evicting squatters to expand their holdings.73 At a time when development initiatives elsewhere in the British Empire sought to break down racial barriers to wealth creation, the White Highlands remained a colonial throwback—the exclusive preserve of a settler over-class.
As Kenyatta had warned, the structural iniquity of Kenya’s colonial farming economy provoked cultural degradation by undermining customary Kikuyu practices of capital accumulation and household consolidation. Long-established patterns of rural life, gender relations, and generational deference were ruptured, pushing Kikuyu society into crisis.74 To borrow Caroline Elkins’ well-chosen words, in ‘Kikuyu notions of being: landlessness was anathema to indigenous civic virtue’.75 Mau Mau, then, was closer to a conventional peasant revolt against unsustainable agricultural economics and unjust rural politics than the ritualistic cult of irrational bloodlust depicted in sections of the British press from late 1952 onwards. The Daily Mail was particularly sensationalist in its coverage of the conflict.76 But animal-loving British readers were also sickened by images of European-owned cattle slashed with traditional panga knives and left crippled and bleeding to death.
Images of dead children killed in the same way were deemed too extreme for UK publication but were used in Swahili pamphlets distributed by government officers in Kenya.77
By March 1953 it was clear that reasoned discussion in Nairobi or in Whitehall about Kikuyu grievances was out of the question. Settler anger was inflamed by delays in Kenyatta’s criminal trial. As KAU president, he was falsely accused of masterminding the rise of Mau Mau.78 Some of the rowdiest settlers even threatened to lynch Kenyatta’s defence lawyer Dennis Pritt, accusing him of collusion with a murderous fanatic.79 Ridiculous accusations, but indicative of the pervasive sense of terror caused by isolated Mau Mau killings. These attacks were, in turn, becoming more audacious, particularly in the areas surrounding the Aberdare Mountains where policing operations were concentrated. It was there in the village of Lari that the worst massacres of the entire war occurred on the night of 26 March.
Lari’s local chief Makimei, an authoritarian figure, had organized a loyalist Home Guard before the Emergency was declared. Local support for Mau Mau was strong, particularly among ex-squatters who had returned to the Rift Valley region landless and poor. On the night in question Home Guard members were lured away from the village, leaving their families unprotected. Several Mau Mau gangs converged on Lari burning the huts of loyalist families and killing anyone trying to escape. 120 were murdered. Most were women and children who either died in the flames or were hacked down as they fled. This first massacre was immediately followed by another as the returning Home Guard wrought vengeance on suspected Mau Mau supporters. Again no family members were spared. In all, some 400 people died in and around Lari in a night of bloodletting that exposed the fault-lines between residents and returnees, haves and have-nots that were tearing Kikuyu society apart.80 Revenge attacks continued over subsequent days and weeks. Mass trials of Mau Mau allegedly involved in the original massacre also made a mockery of basic evidential standards, confirming that the colony’s judicial system was becoming a key instrument of repression.81
Watching events unfold, the French Foreign Ministry noted that the quickening rhythm of killings and retribution indicated that the revolt had turned a dreadful corner before Kenyatta and five co-accused KAU leaders were finally convicted in early April. The five sentenced alongside Kenyatta were Fred Kubai, a Kikuyu trade unionist; Richard Onieko, a former Nairobi city councillor; Bildad Kaggia, Secretary of the KAU’s Nairobi section; Paul Ngei, another KAU activist; and Kunga Karumba, a member of KAU executive committee.82 Their imprisonment made little difference. Far from Mau Mau activity decreasing, attacks grew more sophisticated and deadly. Ironically, because of the security crackdown, fighters of Mau Mau’s Land Freedom Army (LFA) had greater access to automatic weapons, most of them stolen during ambushes on isolated Home Guard posts manned by loyalist Kenyan auxiliaries. LFA bands like those in the Mount Kenya forests expanded during 1953.83 The largest was estimated at 300 strong, capable of shooting it out with the army patrols sent to track them. But the fighters of Mount Kenya had other priorities. Led by Waruhiu Itote, the infamous ‘General China’, a former King’s African Rifleman who had served in the Burma campaign, they targeted loyalist villages, Home Guard encampments and mission schools.84
Itote’s past military training was not unusual. Increasing numbers of ex-servicemen joined Mau Mau bands, including Askaris with recent experience of the Malayan Emergency. The forest war gradually turned the British way even so. Fighters moved further into the forests during late 1953 to escape detection. Their support networks in the villages of the Kikuyu reserves were tightly locked down by loyalist paramilitaries, making it harder for Mau Mau to procure food, weapons, and new recruits. And when fire-fights did take place the security forces usually prevailed, sometimes capturing young men exhausted, half-starved, and with harrowing personal testimonies of enforced recruitment.85 General China himself was shot and captured on 15 January 1954. Sentenced to hang, he was reprieved in exchange for cooperating with Special Branch officers in tentative negotiations intended to coax remaining rebel units into surrender. His change of fortunes personified the conflict’s shifting balance.86
Within the confines of Nairobi assassinations of policemen and local officials persisted throughout 1953. The slum quarters of Pumwani and Bahati became virtual no-go areas for whites. Once again the French diplomatic advice was sobering. Removing Kenyatta from the equation was no solution because his work was already done. The KAU’s political education programme and Mau Mau indoctrination reached further into Kikuyu society than the colonial authorities had realized. Even if it were possible, reversing this process would take years.87
British security operations certainly intensified following General Erskine’s arrival as commander.88 By August 1953 Nairobi commanded his attention. The problems the British confronted—and the way they depicted them—anticipated the challenge of urban insurgency in Algiers, which climaxed four years later in 1957.89 Much as in the later Algerian case, the success of military operations in rural areas, in this case, in Kenya’s Fort Hall district, displaced insurgent activity to the capital city. Home Guard auxiliaries were better armed and were given leeway to conduct additional rural sweeps, notably south of Nyari. Meanwhile, Nairobi police, assisted by regular army units, began what French observers described as a series of ‘gargantuan round-ups’ to clear Nairobi’s three principal shantytowns of Mau Mau sympathizers. ‘Operation Ratcatcher’ relied on hooded informants, the so-called gikunia, to identify suspects. It was a process open to abuse. Few British officials could converse with Kikuyu detainees. Their reliance on translators, intermediaries, and informants left ample room for mistakes and score-settling while opportunities were missed to gather intelligence about impending attacks.90 Colonial Information Service propaganda pointing to Mau Mau killings of fellow Kenyans and the risk of falling living standards proved equally ineffective. Mau Mau boycotts of European goods and services proliferated. And drive-by shootings in hijacked taxis eliminated several of Nairobi’s higher-profile loyalists.91
Security force killings outside the capital quickened in late 1953.92 Official statistics listed a death toll averaging 50 to 120 Kenyans per week. Actual figures were probably higher. In Nairobi, meanwhile, Mau Mau organizers imposed a bus boycott that severely disrupted the city’s economy. The French diplomatic observers saw only one solution: military saturation to filter out rebel suspects.93 In fact, Erskine went further. Additional police were joined by an extra battalion of troops, the prelude to a grim shift in the conflict’s dynamics. As a first step, economic migrants and slum dwellers, many of them recent Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru arrivals, faced security ‘screening’, a combination of searches and identity checks, interrogation, and the use of informants to pinpoint alleged Mau Mau supporters. Screening offered the pretext for a massive programme of population removal and mass detention.
Formally proposed on 22 February 1954, Operation Anvil was depicted as a logical response to the uncontrolled growth in Nairobi’s population and the heightened criminality that resulted. Mau Mau attacks were presented, not as political violence, but as the delinquency of an indolent under-class.94 Only the drastic solution of mass population transfer, Erskine claimed, would break Mau Mau’s grip over the Kikuyu. In detention camps remote from the corruptive effects of the city the process of re-indoctrination and social re-integration could begin. The obvious contradiction here between the denial that Mau Mau had rational political objectives and the recognition of the need for long-term political re-education was not something that Erskine’s commanders acknowledged. Anvil, they insisted, was a matter of law and order, not political struggle.95
Whatever the case, its results were dramatic. Mau Mau’s urban support networks were broken; security force intelligence gathering transformed. But the hunt for Mau Mau fighters was now tied to a population control programme whose pillars were mass detention and ruthless counter-terror.96 By the time Erskine was replaced in early 1955 the insurgency was set to change again.97 With violence once more concentrated in the countryside, the rebellion’s internecine character emerged more strongly. The mass detentions integral to Anvil also heralded British repression of unprecedented intensity. Numbers of convicted Mau Mau hanged or awaiting execution climbed rapidly through the hundreds, reaching a figure of 1,090 by 1960.98 It was this harsh legal regime alongside the internal dynamics of the detention camp system that increasingly consumed British—and French—government and media reportage of the emergency from 1955 onwards.99
Figure 12. Mau Mau detainees packed off to detention camps in specially-modified army lorries during Operation Anvil in February 1954.
The disjuncture between the moral universe of Mau Mau adherents and the operating assumptions of their British and Kenyan loyalist opponents lies at the heart of the changing nature of repressive violence in the four discrete environments in which it was practised between 1953 and 1960. First among these were the forested areas of Kenya’s Central Highlands, seen at the time as the war’s military ‘front-line’ but increasingly marginal to its outcome. Second was the capital, Nairobi. Kenyan refugees and economic migrants flooded into the city’s fast-expanding shantytowns from outlying provinces in the grip of the security force clampdown. Their arrival connected the networks of rural insurgency to the politics of urban deprivation and criminality in Eastlands, home to the capital’s sprawling African estates.100 This urban dimension to Kenya’s insurgency peaked in early 1954 when, as we have seen, it was robustly challenged by Operation Anvil, the gargantuan military operation to isolate and evict the city’s newcomers.
Anvil accelerated Mau Mau’s transformation from limited emergency to outright civil war, a shift that was exemplified by two quite different locales, each of them critical in shaping Kenya’s longer-term future. One of these—the third in my list of four—was the detention camps. Their size and number increased after Anvil to such an extent that a vast system of incarceration, what Caroline Elkins has memorably labelled Britan’s ‘colonial gulag’, became a key arena in the contest between Mau Mau followers and the Kenyan authorities.101 The largest of them, at Mackinnon Road and Manyani, were situated on the railway line connecting Nairobi and Mombasa. Designed to serve as reception centres in which Mau Mau suspects could be filtered out, both were soon filled to bursting. Sanitation was minimal. Epidemics struck. By the end of October 1954 Manyani, which only opened months earlier, contained 760 prisoners suffering from typhoid. An additional 63 had died already. Camp medical reports were also highly politicized documents, the probability being that the camp authorities concealed those inmates who died from beatings among the statistics for typhoid fatalities.102 Manyani and the other detention camps were predominantly, although not exclusively, male in composition.103 Official figures suggested that up to 80,000 people passed through them, a conservative figure that perhaps underestimates the total number of inmates by as much as a quarter of a million.104 It is, though, worth recording that the Prime Minister, Macmillan, believed the lower figure, comforting himself that the ‘original’ 80,000 detainees had fallen to under 1,000 by the time of the Hola killings in 1959.105
With so many men detained, their original rural settlements were left largely populated by women, children, and the elderly. These denuded communities, struggling to survive became the fourth site of conflict as the colonial administration embarked upon a massive exercise in social engineering. This time people were herded into ‘Emergency villages’ guarded by loyalist, pro-administration auxiliaries. It was a brutal process. The scope of Kenya’s emergency regulations, which, in practical terms, it fell to local Home Guard units to enforce, had opened an enormous grey area in which collective punishment and local settling of scores became permissible. ‘Suspect’ settlements were burned, land and livestock seized, and families, on occasion, separated. It was here in the rural heartland of Kikuyu society that the equation between violence and the reordering of power went furthest. Within the new villages, beatings, rape, and requisition, predominantly conducted by loyalist Home Guard, became sufficiently commonplace to qualify as systematic. Less visible but also devastating, denying access to food was another favoured weapon against recalcitrant families.
The changing environs of Kenya’s counter-insurgency go some way to explaining how a fight, supposedly mounted against terrorism, degenerated into a systematic assault on the colony’s majority ethnic group. But to pin down the British rationale for such extreme measures one needs to consider the political arguments between the proponents of heightened repression and the advocates of other, lesser, alternatives. These disputes were never reducible to a clear divide between hard-liners, many of them members of Kenya’s 29,000-strong settler community, including most of their eleven representatives on the colony’s Legislative Council, versus the proponents of Malayan-style ‘hearts and minds’ or ‘rehabilitation’ (the synonym generally preferred by officials in Kenya at the time). The reason why the hard-liner vs moderate equation makes little sense is that remarkably few civilian or military personnel conceded the validity of Kikuyu grievances. Instead, the main fault-line within British and settler politics was over the permissible extent of repression under the legislative restrictions of Kenya’s ‘Emergency Regulations’.
Even the supporters of rehabilitation posited that Mau Mau suspects had to be broken down psychologically before they could be built back up into responsible colonial subjects.106 After 1954’s mass sweeps and detentions, rehabilitation was championed by Thomas Askwith, head of Nairobi’s native affairs office. A committed Quaker and former district officer, he was appointed Commissioner of Community Development on the strength of his writings about Kenyan social welfare and family cohesion.107 Askwith sat alongside the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers and social anthropologist Louis Leakey among others on a ‘Sociological Committee’ that strove to identify Mau Mau’s deeper causes and, by extension, its remedies. Carothers, formerly the superintendant at Kenya’s one psychiatric hospital, was especially virulent in his diagnosis of Mau Mau as a form of collective mental breakdown in Kikuyu society, which, he insisted, was suffering the ill-effects of colonial modernization too rapidly imposed.108 Convinced that the movement was sustained by the psychological traumas inculcated through oath-taking, collective intimidation, and fear of denunciation, Carothers, Askwith, and their colleagues helped devise the screening, counter-oathing ceremonies, and community development projects that were supposed to mend Kikuyu society.109 The inquisitorial foundations of this strategy were most apparent in the detention camps. Suspects were identified—and often literally daubed—as either ‘white’ (innocent and eligible for immediate release), ‘grey’ (having confessed their involvement), or ‘black’ (unrepentant intransigents). Those categorized as ‘grey’ thus began their journey along the so-called ‘pipeline’ of political re-education, hard labour, and strict camp discipline identified as prerequisites to eventual rehabilitation.110
A system with the dubious moral underpinnings of the Victorian prison system, ‘rehabilitation’ was always less than the sum of its parts. For one thing, the detention camps lacked trained personnel to make the pipeline system work. For another thing, the detainees themselves developed their own educational programmes and other strategies of passive resistance in defiance of the camp authorities.111 By late 1956 repeated camp riots, the settlers’ clamour for stronger punishments, and the burgeoning detainee population combined to discredit ‘rehabilitation’. Blunter instruments of enforced compliance took its place. The transition was symbolized by the ‘dilution technique’, a euphemism for harsher camp regimens, the nub of which was the brutalization and systematic humiliation of prisoners culminating in confessions beaten out of detainees by their guards.112
Just as the camp system and the new villages programme drove a wedge into Kikuyu society, so the overwhelming majority of Mau Mau war victims came from that same community. Village elders and other prominent community members that refused to take Mau Mau oaths figured among the earliest casualties. Deaths among villagers on either side of the Mau Mau-loyalist divide later overtook the numbers killed in army and Kenya police operations in the conflict’s first eighteen months. In total, thirty-two white settlers were murdered. Most died in a spate of attacks on farmsteads spanning eight months between November 1952 and July 1953. Fewer than 200 members of the regular security forces—army and police—lost their lives. An additional 1,920 African ‘loyalists’ were also recorded as killed. The number of rebels killed remains unknown and estimates move upwards from the official figure of 11,503 ‘terrorist’ deaths, certainly a tremendous underestimate.113
The shocking disproportionateness of these figures should remind us of at least four singularities in British responses to Mau Mau. First is the correlation between the concentration on Mau Mau’s European victims among settlers, colonial officials, and the judiciary and the resultant extension of Emergency Regulations that laid the foundations for killings, torture, and other abuses by the security forces and their loyalist auxiliaries. Second is the fact that, although members of Churchill’s government, including the Colonial Secretaries Oliver Lyttelton and Alan Lennox-Boyd, and the Prime Minister himself questioned the usefulness of heightened repression, they never overruled the Nairobi government’s endorsement of it.114 Equally, while some settlers, notably the owners of larger, more profitable estates, were willing to countenance multi-racialism and Kenyan independence, their ‘new Kenya group’ was overshadowed by others who saw compromise as treachery.115
A third factor arises here: the changing nature of the war itself. From 1954 onwards direct military involvement in Kenya’s counter-insurgency gave way to increased Home Guard involvement. This Africanization of the conflict signalled the transition to internecine warfare between loyalists and their opponents. Sir Arthur Young, a veteran of the Malayan counter-insurgency, appointed as Kenya’s new Commissioner of Police in 1954, found this reliance on loyalist paramilitaries intolerable. He resigned in January 1955 complaining that police powers were unlawfully arrogated to Home Guard units that habitually committed dreadful crimes. Most shocking of all, some provincial and district administrators connived in the process, certain that Home Guard violence—including rape and murder—was destroying the Mau Mau presence in rural communities.116 When set alongside the abuses committed within the camps’ ‘pipeline’ system, this civil war aspect to villagization points to the fourth important factor: Mau Mau does not really fit the conventional chronology of British decolonization ascribed to it. Interpreting its course through the lens of Emergency powers enforced and eventually lifted ignores the uncomfortable truth that the war was increasingly waged between Kenyans, on Kenyan terms. Its aftermath lingers in Kenya’s distribution of power, wealth, and influence to this day.117
Permit me to bring the last couple of chapters together in this brief conclusion. Madagascar, Mau Mau, the Central African Emergencies; at one level, these instances of colonial fight reveal similar patterns of conflict escalation, government manipulation and shocking disregard for human life. Party political leaders victimized and jailed after sham trials; draconian punishments for insurgents; destruction of rural communities: between Madagascar and Kenya, in particular, the similarities seem strong. Dig deeper, however, and any idea of a generic model of fight responses in post-war black Africa collapses. The Madagascar rebellion remains the most obscure of the Emergencies examined here. Partly nationalist in inspiration, substantially orchestrated by members of the dispossessed Merina elite, the insurrection’s regional concentration in the island’s eastern farming corridor suggests that it was as much a rural revolt against the harshness of the colonial labour regime as anything else. It was the islanders’ dual misfortune to rebel at a time when the Fourth Republic’s rulers were gearing up to fight a major colonial war in Indochina and, second, to be situated at the midway point taken by expeditionary force units heading to Vietnam. France, in other words, had both the will and the means to crush the uprising over the summer of 1947.
Mau Mau emerges, at one level, as a multi-stage counter-insurgency drive pursued with quite staggering intensity under ruthless Emergency Regulations. Directed at first by the army, the police, and their African auxiliaries operating in Central Kenya and, during 1954 especially, within greater Nairobi, the fight over Kenya changed its terms after Operation Anvil. From 1955 the military took a back seat while the civil administration, local security forces, and Kikuyu loyalist Home Guard played a greater role in the screening process, the camp system, and the enforced villagization programme until the Emergency’s official end in 1960. Explaining who held responsibility for what takes us only so far, however. The horrors of the Mau Mau conflict stemmed from the wide margin left for abuses by the powerful against the powerless in each of its phases. The breadth of the Emergency Regulations encouraged first the regular security forces, then the loyalist auxiliaries and camp administrators to go beyond a strictly demarcated counter-insurgency campaign. The result was a sustained onslaught against Kikuyu society, which uprooted hundreds of thousands, incarcerated tens of thousands, and executed, tortured, or otherwise abused thousands more.
The sheer brutality of state-sponsored violence sets Mau Mau apart in British, if not in wider European, colonial decolonization. Yet the war involved cannot be wholly understood as one conducted on British terms to defend either white settlers or Britain’s colonial and commercial interests. For Mau Mau was also a Kenyan civil war. It was an intra-Kikuyu struggle between loyalists and their Mau Mau opponents over which British officials and security forces exercised only partial influence. Throughout the Central Kenya provinces worst affected by the bloodletting, killings, rape and intimidation, land seizures and local networks of power were all privatized, in the sense of being either conducted or refashioned without formal state sanction. This is emphatically not to suggest that the British authorities did not know what was taking place. The shocking fact is that British governments and their colonial administrations chose to condone this violence and the disfigurement of Kikuyu society even though they could not control it.118
As for Central Africa, John Darwin’s damning verdict on the procession of failures during emergency rule in Nyasaland is telling: ‘perpetrating a mini-Amritsar [massacre] on day one; being forced into an imperial (not even a local) inquiry within days; selecting as chief inquisitor the judge who was least likely to take a relaxed view of boisterous colonial methods; suffering the inquiry’s public dismissal of the official reason for declaring the emergency; and finding the political views of the “extremists” against whom the emergency had been declared vindicated by the inquiry as an accurate expression of local opinion’.119 Little wonder that the 1959 crackdown in the Central African Federation, although expiated to a degree by the resumption of negotiation with the nationalist leaderships in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, would slide into the crisis of white settler rebellion further south in Salisbury. The days when imperial government could be assured by the alternation of repression and limited dialogue with favoured clients had long gone. Fight and flight were becoming stark alternatives, not reciprocal elements that could be combined.
