2 ‘Mau Mau’ as a Historical Phenomenon

Problems of Definition

The historical phenomenon generally known as ‘Mau Mau’ was the product of so complex a combination of socio-economic determinants that it defies any straightforward categorisation and remains open to widely divergent interpretations. I described ‘Mau Mau’ in the previous chapter as ‘an armed struggle waged by the Gikuyu peasantry against the British colonial forces’. That seems the most accurate one-sentence description available; but it was not only the Gikuyu who were involved, nor were all the participants peasants, and, by its very silence on the subject, such a description negotiates the very complex terrain of the relationship between ‘Mau Mau’ and the tradition of African nationalist protest in Kenya far too easily. A glance at some of the verdicts on ‘Mau Mau’ will make the complexities of categorisation apparent.

The concluding paragraph of Bildad Kaggia’s autobiography Roots of Freedom, published in 1975, declares: ‘The “Mau Mau” struggle, whether one likes it or not, will stand in history as one of the greatest liberation struggles in Africa.’1 This is the polar opposite of Ione Leigh’s verdict twenty years earlier: ‘There has been an attempt to disguise Mau Mau as a liberation movement against oppressive Colonial rule. It is no liberation movement. It is an evil, malignant growth, a dark, tribal, septic focus, and it has to be destroyed.’² The hysteria informing Leigh’s account is seen in the feverish build-up of epithets, but before one reacts by whole-heartedly accepting Kaggia’s verdict it is necessary to ask what is meant by ‘liberation struggle’. Is it defined in terms of what was achieved, or in terms of what the participants aimed at? If ‘liberation’ was seen as Kenya’s ‘independence’ from British rule, what precisely was that supposed to signify? Here the ideology of the forest fighters – in so far as ‘it’ can be reconstructed from formal programmatic demands, an assortment of written autobiographical pieces and oral fragments – will be crucial. One cannot of course, assume that a unified, non-contradictory ‘Land Freedom Army ideology’ can be empirically read off from the movement’s demands and positions any more than it could be from some reductionist model of ‘peasant ideology’.

What Kaggia calls a ‘liberation struggle’ is held by Anthony Clayton to be: ‘. . .a protest an unusual form of nationalism in which one people, the Kikuyu, protested in a Peasants’ Revolt against an unequal economic structure supported by discriminatory laws and institutions’.3 While Clayton is clearly right in seeing the economic structure as the basic source of the struggle it is obviously absurd to talk about ‘the Kikuyu’ as a socially undifferentiated group. It is essential to try to establish which social groups played an active role in the struggle, on which side, and for what reasons. Clayton’s ‘unusual form of nationalism’ also begs the questions, firstly, as to the extent to which a movement consisting in the main of the members of one of a number of different ‘peoples’ in a country can be seen as ‘nationalist’, and, secondly, as to whether nationalist ideology is compatible with the concept of a peasants’ revolt.

Further difficulties become apparent when one considers other verdicts. Oginga Odinga refers to the Emergency as ‘a time of revolutionary war in Kenya’;⁴ Barnett talks of the ‘Mau Mau Revolution’;⁵ Richard Yankwich asserts that ‘the Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a civil war among the Kikuyu’, a view which (Sir) Philip Mitchell held at the time, ‘there is certainly today a form of civil war between Kikuyu and Kikuyu’;⁶ Edmond Keller classifies ‘Mau Mau’ as social banditry;⁷ and Buijtenhuijs, in an extended discussion of the terminology of insurrection, concludes that ‘Mau Mau’ should be defined as a revolt rather than a rebellion or revolution.⁸ While the theoretical analysis and categorisation of the armed struggle is not, in itself, particularly germane to my thesis, the questions about organisations and ideology which have to be answered in making such distinctions certainly are. And the terminology is ideologically important. Being able to classify ‘Mau Mau’ as a Gikuyu ‘civil war’, to take just one example, lays the onus for the violence on the Gikuyu and thereby enables settler and administrator alike to slough off responsibility both for the bloodshed and for the social conditions which fostered it.

The verdicts arrived at by historians are obviously indicators of the ideological categories in accordance with which historical data are selected and surveyed. ‘Mau Mau’ remains an extremely sensitive area in Kenyan politics and historiography. The oppositions are clearly defined: ‘Mau Mau’ either was, or was not, responsible for bringing Kenya’s ‘Independence’; ‘Mau Mau’ was either a legitimate resort to violence on the part of a frustrated nationalist movement, or it was a purely tribal manifestation, motivated, according to at least one critic, by Gikuyu expansionism.⁹ The ‘historian’s’ position, the ideology of the history of ‘Mau Mau’ to which he or she subscribes, is determined by such factors as class, specific professional practice, participation or non-participation in the movement, relationship with the Kenya government (whose attitude to ‘Mau Mau’ has been highly ambivalent since Independence),¹⁰ and ‘tribe’ (i.e. Gikuyu or non-Gikuyu).

The difficulties confronting anyone wishing to give an account of ‘Mau Mau’ are compounded by the almost complete absence of first-hand accounts of the Emergency written by Africans on the government side, and by the fact that, because the vast majority of forest fighters were illiterate, there are very few contemporary accounts of their sense of the movement and its aims.

The aim of this chapter is two-fold. Firstly, I need to give an account of ‘Mau Mau’ as a historical phenomenon which can be used as a yardstick against which to measure the extent of the myth-making in both the fiction and the ‘non-fictional’ accounts. In the first part I look briefly at firstly, the ‘causes’ of the revolt in particular the land dispute; secondly, the organisational structure of ‘Mau Mau’ and its relationship to Kenyan African nationalist movements of the previous decades; thirdly, the measures taken by the government and settlers in response to the revolt; and, finally, the social composition of the movement. This last will make it possible to arrive at some conclusions where categorical definition is concerned. This is not intended as an exhaustive account and must focus in particular on those aspects of the movement which have featured prominently in the settler myth-making. In the second part of this chapter I look at the various ways in which ‘Mau Mau’ has been interpreted by contemporary writers and subsequent historians, focusing again on those aspects of a very large topic which are of greatest relevance to a study of the fiction. The separation of colonial interpretations of ‘Mau Mau’ ‘history’ from ‘colonial ideology’ in this and the following chapter is obviously an artificial one, used simply in the interests of organising an otherwise unwieldy body of material, and it seemed appropriate from time to time in this chapter to make some initial comments on the functions served for colonial settler ideology by certain interpretations of ‘Mau Mau’ history.

I refer to ‘Mau Mau’ as a ‘revolt’ because it was clearly neither a ‘rebellion’ nor a ‘revolution’ in any sense that seems to me analytically useful. A rebellion can be defined as a movement aimed at correcting ‘abuses’ in existing social, political and economic structures without bringing the structures themselves into question. In having independence under an all-African government and the return of the ‘alienated’ land as its aims, ‘Mau Mau’ was clearly placing itself in the position of questioning the existing political and economic structures. A revolution can be defined as a successful overthrow of, rather than simply an assault on, existing political and social structures. In other words it must achieve a restructuring of the relations of production through the conquest of state power and civil hegemony by a previously subordinate fundamental class or alliance of fundamental classes. ‘Mau Mau’ was defeated militarily; its success lay in that it showed conclusively that the Kenyan settler community was wholly dependent on Britain and incapable of Southern Rhodesia-style self-government. It hastened Kenya’s ‘independence’ but, as will be shown in Chapter 6, ‘independence’ did not involve a fundamental shift of class power, though it did involve some political restructuring, some new patterns of class-formation and realignment, and it did place a much heavier responsibility on the new dominant bloc to attempt to construct adequate institutions of hegemony in the nationalist’ idiom. Crucially, however, the forest fighters were not rewarded with the land for which they had been fighting. In so far as a ‘revolt’ can be defined, somewhat simplistically, as an unsuccessful revolution –i.e. a struggle which does not succeed in winning even nominal forms of workers’ and peasants’ power – ‘Mau Mau’ was a revolt.

‘Causes’ of the Revolt

Land and Landlessness

In so far as one can ever single out any ‘main cause’ of a social phenomenon as complex as ‘Mau Mau’, one would have, in this instance, to cite landlessness. The clearest signification of this is perhaps the title ‘Land and Freedom’ army assumed by the forest fighters. Most of the ‘Mau Mau’ songs in the songbooks which featured so prominently in Kenyatta’s trial were, according to Peter Evans, ‘about land – land needed to feed the people, land which had once been theirs, and was theirs no longer’;11 the desire for land is the one common denominator in all the accounts of ‘Mau Mau’ aims to be found in the autobiographies of the forest fighters;¹² many accounts of the oath of unity show that the first vow sworn was a vow to fight for the return of the ‘stolen’ lands;¹³ the demand that ‘land must be given to those who have none’ was one of the forest fighters’ demands in the ceasefire negotiations;¹⁴ and, significantly, it was the 1951 Land Petition that was seen by leaders of the movement as the last chance for Britain to respond to a non-violent approach to constitutional reform in Kenya. The petition, as Spencer puts it, was ‘a final effort at constitutional solution to the land problem, the failure of which would justify violent attempts at reform’.¹⁵

The settlers countered the Gikuyu claim that their land had been stolen by arguing that the land they had taken was empty; Sir Philip Mitchell, the Governor, shared their view: ‘It is a historical fact that the lands we have turned into farms and towns were vacant lands when we came here.’¹⁶ Where any concession was made to African ownership it was argued that the land had belonged to the Maasai, as in Majdalany’s: ‘They did not have to displace anybody because there was nobody there except for some nomadic Masai.’¹⁷ ‘The assertion that they colonized an empty land’ is, as Monica Wilson points out ‘the typical “settlers’ myth” ’.¹⁸

Both the opposing views depend to some extent on myth-making. The 1934 Carter Land Commission’s recommendation of an award to the Gikuyu of 16,520 acres of ‘good agricultural land’ in compensation for 109½ square miles ‘taken away’ from them was an official acknowledgement that a significant amount of Gikuyu land had been ‘alienated’.19 Sorrenson reveals that by 1905 60,000 acres of Gikuyu land in the Kiambu-Limuru area had been ‘alienated’ and that some 11,000 Gikuyu had been dispossessed in the process.²⁰ But Sorrenson also asserts that:

In terms of area, the losses of the Kikuyu and Kamba were not extensive, amounting to temporary grazing grounds plus some small areas of agricultural land, like the homesteads in the Kiambu-Limuru district. The greater part of the land alienated to Europeans was taken from the three pastoral tribes, the Masai, the Nandi and the Kipsigis.²¹

The ‘White Highlands’ did not consist entirely, or even largely, of land stolen from the Gikuyu, but there can be no doubt that a sufficiently large area of land was taken, and compensation, where it was paid at all, was sufficiently derisory (2s 8d per acre for cultivated land),²² to provide the substance for the myth of the stolen lands. But the significance to the Gikuyu of the ‘alienation’ of their land, and the importance of land as a cause of the revolt in 1952, extend far beyond the specific questions of which Gikuyu families lost their land to whom and when. Its major importance lay, firstly, in that it prevented the Gikuyu peasantry from expanding territorially as its numbers increased and, secondly, in the sense of insecurity it brought with it. Much of the ‘alienated’ land was unused; Barnett gives the following figures:

By 1934 some 6,543,360 acres of land had been alienated for occupation by 2,027 settlers; an average of 2,534 acres per occupant, of which only 274 acres were actually under cultivation. As late as 1940 there remained over one million acres within the White Highlands which lay unused for either crops or pasture.²³

Van Zwanenberg asserts that: ‘At no time before 1940 was more than 10% of the total area [of] . . . alienated land under cultivation, while another 20% was used for cattle ranching.’²⁴ The situation in 1948, when the ‘Mau Mau’ oathing ceremonies began to get under way, was such that fewer than 30,000 whites, of whom only some 3,000 owned agricultural holdings and plantations in the White Highlands,²⁵ were in possession of more arable land than over a million Gikuyu. Barnett puts it another way: ‘In 1952 . . . about 0.7% of the entire population, a figure which includes all Europeans, held what Perham has estimated to be “20% of the best land”.’²⁶

The economic rationale behind this situation was conveyed perfectly by Lord Delamere (who himself owned 176,768 acres²⁷ of the White Highlands, and whose own Laikipia estate provided, in 1936, a perfect example of undeveloped land²⁸) in his recommendation to the 1912 Labour Commission. If the Africans were to be successfully forced onto the labour market, he said, ‘their reserves should be cut in order to prevent the Africans from having sufficient land to make them self supporting. If the Africans had enough land, and therefore stock and produce for sale, they would not be obliged to go out and labour for others.’29

The counterpart of the undeveloped land in the Highlands was the over-utilised land in the reserves. Some measure of the burden placed on the land in the reserves can be gained from Barnett’s figure of 777 people per square mile as the population density of the Kiambu district in 1948.³⁰ David Gordon sums up the situation in the immediate post-war years:

In the African reserves a combination of accumulated administrative neglect, increased population densities, and African producers’ efforts to take advantage of the increased opportunities offered by the wartime conditions were resulting in severe land deterioration. Population in many of the Kikuyu and Nyanza districts was extremely dense, with the result that the traditional land tenure systems were beginning to break down. Moreover, with the stabilization and expansion of the European mixed-farms, settlers moved to limit the numbers and activities of African squatter farmers in the Highlands, thus driving more people to the overcrowded reserves.³¹

Moreover, the Gikuyu peasants in the reserves also had to suffer the sense of insecurity bred by uncertainty as to their rights to the land remaining to them, and by perpetual fears that more was about to be ‘alienated’. Though no large areas of Gikuyu land were, in fact, ‘alienated’ after 1906, Gikuyu peasants were still being forced off their land as late as 1940 when over six hundred Gikuyu had 945 acres at Tigoni taken from them on the recommendation of the Carter Land Commission.³² Moreover, the proposal that further substantial areas of land should be taken from the Gikuyu remained on the settler agenda for a long time after 1906. Thus, for example, the 1919 Economic Commission recommended that the reserves should no longer ‘be regarded as sacrosanct’, and that the ‘natives’ should be concentrated in areas ‘sufficient, but no more than sufficient, for their requirements’ leaving ‘the interspersed tracts not needed for native occupation as available for white settlement’.³³ A 1921 Supreme Court ruling on the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance held, of the land in the reserves, that: ‘all native rights in such reserved land disappear – natives in occupation thereof becoming tenants at will of the Crown’.³⁴

The effect, in emotional terms, of the ‘alienation’ of their land on those who underwent the process is well conveyed by Koinage:

When someone steals your ox. it is killed and roasted and eaten. One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence.³⁵

If the stolen land is a bitter presence for those who simply look at it, it is doubly bitter to those who have to work it; as Charity Waciuma puts it:

The labourers on the estates . . . became bitter, bitter to the roots, about the strangers who came and took their land. Before the White Man came they had the right to use part of the hundreds of acres of their clan land and now they had to beg a tiny plot as if they were strangers in the country of their forefathers.36

The situation of the Gikuyu peasant forced to work as a wage labourer on his ancestral lands is poignantly fictionalised by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in the characterisation of Ngotho in Weep not, Child.³⁷ J.M. Kariuki would seem not to be overstating the case when he says of those who lost their land: ‘. . .they felt deep grievances over the land which had been taken from them, land without which they could have no religious or social security’.³⁸

Land and the Lari Massacre

Land was not only the main bone of contention in the revolt as a whole, land disputes were also directly responsible for some of the more publicised incidents of the Emergency. Chief among these was the ‘Lari Massacre’. It is worth pausing to examine Lari before going on to discuss the other causes of the revolt: firstly, because this event provides an excellent illustration of the extent to which discussion of the whole period has to take cognisance of Gikuyu landlessness; and, secondly, because this chapter is concerned with examining the historical background to the events on which the myths about ‘Mau Mau’, nurtured by Europeans in Kenya and communicated to Europe by the news media, were based, and Lari is perhaps the best example of calculated myth-making to be found.

On the night of 26 March 1953, a group of homesteads on the Lari ridge was attacked by a large body of men: men, women and children were killed with pangas and huts were burned with all their occupants; that night an estimated 97 people died. Fred Majdalany (whose State of Emergency claims in its sub-title to be The full story of Mau Mau’ although not a single member of the movement would appear to have been consulted) in a melodramatic account of the massacre, unfortunately much too long to quote in full, provides a good example of the highly emotive writing which characterises the ‘histories’ of ‘Mau Mau’ written by settlers and their sympathisers. To give just a brief example, he says of one of the victims: ‘Before removing her arm her attackers had first sliced off the head of her baby and in turn had lifted the little body to their lips to quaff its blood. They had then hacked off her arm and left her to die.’³⁹ Majdalany’s is an obviously fictitious ‘staging’ of the scene – he could not know the order and form of events – and the archaism and theatricality of ‘quaff’ perhaps signify an unconscious recognition of this. Majdalany provides the clue to Lari’s importance when he says: ‘Lari shocked and moved the world. Lari was the definitive horror by which every other act of Mau Mau would be measured.’⁴⁰ Lari shocked and moved ‘the world’ because it was deliberately made the centre-pin of the settler propaganda campaign which constituted it as ‘the definitive horror’. That it was a horror there can be no doubt – though just how much of the horror ‘Mau Mau’ was responsible for is open to very considerable doubt. Unfortunately it is quite impossible now to assess exactly who was responsible for ‘the wreckage’ and the ‘terrible sight’ which Evans describes as being shown to the press the next day.41

The accounts of Lari given in the ‘Mau Mau’ autobiographies range from the implicit acceptance in ‘Mau Mau’ General that a massacre had taken place (‘ “Avoid such a massacre again”, he [Gitau Matenjagwo] asserted’⁴²), with a suggestion that home guards had been partly responsible, to Karigo Muchai’s much more definite: ‘In Lari there was a massacre on 26 March 1953, but most of the blood was on Government hands.’⁴³ Muchai says:

Some of our fighters attacked the village of Chief Luka, killing the chief, one headman and a certain home guard and burning down their huts. Some of the family of these men may have been trapped inside their huts and died in the flames. Later, in the very early hours of the morning, the security forces . . . entered the location in large numbers, setting huts on fire, slaughtering many innocent people – men, women and children – and shooting suspects.⁴⁴

The motive, as Njama puts it, was ‘to disdain Mau Mau for the mercilessly unjust killing of women and children, thereby causing the sympathisers to think that the Mau Mau have lost sight of their enemies’.⁴⁵ Wachanga alleges: ‘Only white soldiers were sent to Lari where they killed many of the people and animals. . . In their rage, they even killed home guards. They also slaughtered pregnant women by cutting the babies from the wombs. The government then used the massacre as anti-Mau Mau propaganda.’⁴⁶

What is clear is that the government propaganda line was to suppress the evidence that Lari was, as the London Sunday Times reported that weekend, ‘a local affair’;⁴⁷ to claim to have intercepted, conveniently too late, a document sent out by the ‘Mau Mau’ central council demanding that delegates from all districts be sent to take part in the raid;⁴⁸ and, thereby, to place responsibility on the ‘Mau Mau’ movement and the Gikuyu tribe as a whole. It is quite certain that allegations that the raid was led by General China, and/or Dedan Kimathi are untrue.⁴⁹ And if, as we have seen, the evidence which we have on other aspects of the incident cannot be said to be definitive one way or the other, what does become clear is the systematic discursive transformation of ‘Lari’ to which the Kenya government resorted.

A glance at the relevant colonial history shows that the attack was directed specifically against the Lari ‘chief’, Luka Wakahangara.⁵⁰ Luka had been moved to Lari from Tigoni in 1940 when the island of un-‘alienate’ Crown land near Limuru mentioned earlier, surrounded by resentful white farmers, had been ‘exchanged’ for a block of land at Lari. The Tigoni land-holders originally refused to move as other Gikuyu families had claims to the land at Lari. Luka, however, relented, moved, and was made ‘chief at Lari. The others refused to move, were forcibly evicted, and Luka’s two main opponents were detained for three years for their pains. Luka, who had become a symbol of betrayal, threw in his lot with the government and assisted in the establishment of one of the first two home guard posts in Kiambu. Lari was an attack by a group of landless peasants on a symbol of oppression who was also, not coincidentally, a land-holder. The attack was the resolution of a longstanding vendetta over land; it almost certainly had nothing whatever to do with the ‘Mau Mau’ leadership; and it only concerned members of the movement in so far as they were the landless peasants involved. Support would seem to be lent to this interpretation by the Kiambu DC’s admission at the end of 1953, the first full year of the Emergency, that half the murders in the district during the past year had been due to land cases.51

The historical background to Lari, which was obviously known to the government, and which accounted for those taking part being local men, was not only totally ignored but would seem, by its absence from all colonial accounts of the event, to have been deliberately suppressed. ‘Lari’ was, from this point on, to operate as a trigger mechanism capable of instantly activating the ‘dark’ side of the settler myth of primitivism/atavism: its function was to short-circuit any attempt at a political reading of ‘Mau Mau’, and to invalidate in advance any future criticism of settler or ‘security force’ actions against the Gikuyu – or indeed (such were the resources of irrationalism it was in a position to tap, and such was the syllogistic structure of the myth itself) against any African in Kenya. The settler accounts of the revolt make it clear that ‘Lari’ became an infallible instrument for closing down awkward conversations, since, if the questioner failed to respond to the signal, blind (out)rage became permissible. Mythic discourse has need of key signifiers like ‘Lari’ whereby it can cut itself off from all accountability.

Economic, Social and Political Discrimination

The structure and function of settler myths is one thing (and will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter) and the combination of pressures which ultimately forced the ‘Mau Mau’ revolt is another. Although the unequal distribution of land in Kenya was the primary material factor underlying the ‘Mau Mau’ revolt, it was only one aspect of the ‘unequal economic structure supported by discriminatory laws and institutions’ referred to by Clayton. In the first place the ‘alienation’ of land need not, in itself, have affected the traditional way of Gikuyu life so severely. Brett points out that:

The Chagga of north-eastern Tanganyika also lost much of their land to German settlers and lived a very crowded existence on Kilimanjaro. But their ability to produce Arabica coffee, a highly valued cash crop, made it possible for them to retain their economic autonomy despite the demands for labour emanating from the settler communities nearby.52

But the Gikuyu were not allowed to grow coffee – as Tignor puts it:

State and settlers were equally aware of the fact . . . that if Africans were allowed to grow coffee, they would become competitors to the European farmers and more importantly that Kikuyu labor would be concentrated in the reserves on African cultivation rather than available for work on European estates.⁵³

Not only were black farmers not allowed to grow certain crops, they were even discriminated against when it came to selling those crops they were allowed to grow. Furedi argues that one of the main complaints of the squatters was the low price that the Maize Marketing Board offered for their produce: The African squatter received 14 to 15 shillings per bag from the European landlord. Europeans received 32 shillings per bag as a result of Government subsidies. Very often the European sold his squatters’ maize for a profit which more than covered his wage bill.’⁵⁴

Race discrimination pervaded life in colonial Kenya: from medical facilities,⁵⁵ to education,⁵⁶ to income.⁵⁷ The economic position of many Gikuyu was extremely precarious: Rosberg and Nottingham estimate that while the real value of African income grew at an average 1% per year between 1922 and 1952 the population growth was about 3%.⁵⁸ This would obviously mean that black living standards were steadily deteriorating under colonialism. Where urban dwellers were concerned, Sharon Stichter reveals that between May 1948 and May 1953 the cost of living for Africans rose by some 60%, while the minimum wage in Nairobi rose by only some 50%, and she cites the Carpenter Committee Report which concluded that approximately one half of all urban workers in private industry and one fourth of those in the public services were ‘in receipt of wages insufficient to provide for their basic, essential needs’.⁵⁹ Not to mention those of the large numbers of unemployed whom the wage-earners had to support.⁶⁰

The causes of ‘Mau Mau’ were socio-economic, not ‘psycho-pathologica’ as the settlers and their apologists tried to maintain. They can be summed up as: land-hunger, widespread poverty, and the lack of any significant political representation to which they could look for constitutional solutions to their problems. Africans had six representatives in the Legislative Council in 1952, all appointed by the Governor, against 14 elected European representatives.⁶¹ These reasons for participating in the revolt are well articulated in the autobiographies of the fighters themselves. Muchai, hoping for a piece of land and civil treatment from government and settlers on his return from the war (he had, after all, been constantly told that he was fighting for democracy, and it did not seem too much to hope that that democracy would be extended to cover Kenya) found instead: The life I returned to was exactly the same as the one I left four years earlier: no land, no job, no representation and no dignity.’62 As succinct a summing-up of the causes of the revolt as one could find. Mohamed Mathu links cause with effect very directly:

By paying the African slave wages for his labour, denying him access to secondary and higher education, removing from him the best land in Kenya and treating him with less respect than a dog, the white man of Kenya had created over the years a resentment and hatred amongst Africans which had to explode into violence.⁶³

Origins and Organisation of the ‘Mau Mau’ and History of the Oath

Having outlined the general structure of exploitation and repression which placed the revolt on the agenda, I can turn my attention to trying to establish precisely what ‘Mau Mau’ was. This task is complicated by the fact that the declaration of the State of Emergency on 20 October 1952, and the arrest of 187⁶⁴ African nationalist leaders, would seem to have altered the character of the movement fairly considerably.

‘Mau Mau’ after October 1952 can be described, firstly, as those (for the most part Gikuyu peasants) who took to the forests to wage an armed struggle against both the colonial forces and their Gikuyu ‘loyalist’ supporters and, secondly, those known to the government as the ‘passive wing’ who, from the reserves and Nairobi, supplied food, arms, shelter, and recruits to the forest fighters. All would have sworn the ‘Mau Mau’ oath of unity.

Distinguishing ‘Mau Mau’ from other political organisations in Kenya prior to October 1952 is much more difficult. One can start by considering ‘Mau Mau’ ideology as expressed in the political demands made by the fighters in the forest, but this first necessitates tracing the lineage of ‘Mau Mau’ political demands back to the first important urban African political organisation established in colonial Kenya, the East African Association founded in 1919, whose aim was ‘to secure tenure of the land that remained to the Africans and to effect the return of the land that had been taken’.⁶⁵

The East African Association was closed down in 1922 and its place was taken by the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in mid-1924. The KCA had three main concerns: constitutional reform which would allow Africans a share in the political direction of Kenya; the return of land ‘alienated’ for white settlement; and the assertion of the worthiness of Gikuyu tribal custom.66 This last was seen, in particular, in the Association’s defence of female circumcision in the face of the Church of Scotland missionaries attack on that custom in 1929. The KCA continued to agitate unsuccessfully for reforms to the discriminatory colonial dispensation throughout the 1930s, was banned in 1940, allegedly on the grounds that it had been in communication with the Kings enemies in Ethiopia,⁶⁷ but continued as an underground organisation throughout World War II in spite of the detention of its leaders. In 1944 a new, country-wide, African political organisation was founded, the Kenya African Union (KAU), which gained the support of many members of the banned KCA when Jomo Kenyatta assumed its presidency in 1947. The KAU continued the African nationalist demands for constitutional reforms where KCA was forced to leave off when it was banned, and the KAU was, in its turn, proscribed in June 1953, after the declaration of the Emergency.

Barnett and Njama’s account of ‘Mau Mau’ ideology’⁶⁸ (corroborated by a reading of Maina wa Kinyatti’s collection of ‘Mau Mau songs’⁶⁹) makes it clear that the principal ‘Mau Mau’ objectives were the return of the ‘stolen’ lands, and ‘independence’ which was seen in terms of African self-government. Barnett talks of ‘the oft-repeated demands of the Movement for higher wages, increased educational opportunities, removal of the color-bar in its variety of discriminatory forms, return of the alienated lands and independence under an all-African government’.⁷⁰ As these were also the two main objectives of the African nationalist movement whose evolution I have just sketched, it is clear how ‘Mau Mau’ can, where the ideological need arises, be interpreted simply as a direct development of Kenya African nationalism. Up to October 1952 ‘Mau Mau’ can, when just one of its several faces is looked at, be seen as an increasingly militant nationalist response to years of frustration at the refusal of the colonial government to redress grievances over land or to listen to demands for constitutional reform. As Oginga Odinga puts it: ‘Kenya nationalism turned violent because for thirty years it was treated as seditious and denied all legitimate outlet.’⁷¹

If one looks to the ‘Mau Mau’ oaths, which defined membership of the movement, for the definitive characteristic which will distinguish ‘Mau Mau’ from earlier Kenya political organisations, one again finds it very difficult to separate ‘Mau Mau’ from the KAU and, particularly, the KCA. Oathing had played an extremely important role in pre-colonial Gikuyu society and was, as Jomo Kenyatta put it in Facing Mount Kenya, ‘the most important factor controlling the court procedures’.⁷² Given this traditional background it was an obvious step for Gikuyu leaders to appropriate oathing to political ends in the colonial era when they needed a guarantee of Gikuyu loyalty to their political associations. The leaders of the KCA introduced an oath of loyalty in 1926 but, as Rosberg and Nottingham point out, it was an oath sworn on the Bible, it had few traditional elements and it appeared to be modelled on the oath of loyalty to the King which had to be sworn by members of the Local Native Councils.73

John Spencer provides the clearest account of the subsequent development of the oath, one which dovetails very well with that in M. Tamarkin’s account of ‘Mau Mau’ in Nakuru.⁷⁴ The early KCA oath was used through the 1930s until a resurgence of interest in the association, and its reconstitution in 1938, saw a fundamental change whereby the Bible was replaced by the blood and meat of a goat as the central symbol. Towards the end of World War II the caretaker leaders of the now banned KCA, remembering Harry Thuku’s about-face during detention, made the detained KCA leaders swear this oath of loyalty on their release, and the released leaders took over the organisation of a renewed oathing campaign. These KCA leaders, joined by Kenyatta on his return from England, were known as the ‘Mbari’. The object at that stage was to gain enough support for the party to enable effective pressure to be put on the government to lift the 1940 ban. Towards the end of 1948, the KCA leaders introduced new elements into the oath, drawn from the oath sworn by the Gikuyu who had been ‘resettled’ at Olenguruone who, in 1943–4, had devised an oath of unity to guarantee their solidarity in their refusal to comply with agricultural regulations imposed on them by the government It was the merging of the Olenguruone oath with the KCA loyalty oath, as revised in 1938, which produced the ‘Mau Mau’ oath of unity. As disillusionment with the KCA’s and KAU’s constitutional approach gathered momentum and the direction of African nationalism in Kenya became increasingly militant so the pattern of oathing changed from the oathing of select individuals known to be trustworthy, which had been KCA policy, to mass oathings intended to gain the support of the whole Gikuyu ‘tribe’. Here the oathing of women was a significant departure from tradition and an important contributing factor to such military success as ‘Mau Mau’ achieved.⁷⁵

This change in the pattern of oathing would appear to be crucial in defining ‘Mau Mau’. The oath of unity was, by Tamarkin’s account the KCA oath: ‘People who took the oath after mid-1951, regarded it as the Mau Mau oath, although it was still the KCA oath. For this, the press and government’s anti-Mau Mau propaganda were largely responsible.’⁷⁶ Talking about Nakuru, and there is no evidence to suggest that Nakuru was exceptional in this regard, Tamarkin says that the KCA committee controlled most oathing ceremonies performed in the town and on bordering farms until about mid-1951.⁷⁷ Thereafter control of oathing was taken over by a ‘Militants’ committee’, impatient with the lack of militancy of the KCA elders, who wanted to use the oathings to instil not only unity and commitment but also militancy. ‘Mau Mau’ would, then, have to be distinguished from the KCA not in terms of the form of the oath but in terms of the militancy of those directing the oathing campaign.

In so far as there was a central ‘Mau Mau’ organisation it was based in Nairobi. In June 1951 a group of militant trade union officials (most notably Fred Kubai, J.M. Mungai and Bildad Kaggia) took over the largely inactive Nairobi branch of the KAU, in spite of Kenyatta’s attempts, as President of the KAU, to prevent this.78 Their intention, according to Spencer, was both to use the KAU ‘as a cover for their underground oathing and arms-collecting activities and to develop the KAU as a strong, country-wide, officially recognised body which could represent Africans in Kenya when the expected confrontation with the British took place.⁷⁹ In the second half of 1951 (paralleling the Nakuru development outlined above) these Nairobi branch officials were also, according to Spencer, building an organisation to control the rapidly spreading oathing. This was headed by a Central Committee, of which Kaggia and Kubai were members,⁸⁰ known as Muhimu, which in turn set up a two-tier organisation below it whereby ‘the middle layer, known as the “30 Group" (because it had 30 members), acted as a liaison between the Muhimu and the district and location oathing leaders’.⁸¹ The success of these precautions in protecting the secrecy of the Central Committee, necessitated by the August 1950 proscription of the ‘Mau Mau Association, is attested to by the general uncertainty surrounding the identity of the leadership in most of the writings about ‘Mau Mau.

It is important, in view of the settler myths on which the colonial fiction about ‘Mau Mau’ is based, to note that Kenyatta did not ‘manage’ ‘Mau Mau’. Anyone reading a transcript of the Kapenguria trial, even in such abbreviated form as that provided by Montague Slater, cannot but sympathise with Mr Pritt’s (the defence counsel’s) speculation that the prosecution case must have been ‘the most childishly weak case made against any man in any important trial in the history of the British Empire’.⁸² While Kenyatta had assisted in the gradual spread of the KCA oaths immediately after his return from England, he would appear to have been ideologically opposed to the use of violence,⁸³ and by 1952 he had very little to do with ‘Mau Mau’. Spencer argues that ‘when Muhimu was formed its leaders put Kenyatta’s name into the oath and people swore that they would act on his behalf; yet except for the occasional reports of the work of the Committee, Kenyatta knew little about it’.⁸⁴ Indeed, according to Kaggia, Kenyatta deliberately chose to know ‘little of what went on in the “Mau Mau” Central Committee meetings’.⁸⁵ Buijtenhuijs, analysing Kenyatta’s attitude towards ‘Mau Mau’ in 1952–3, suggests that he started off being timidly opposed to the violent aspects of the movement but, possibly fearing for his life, eventually yielded and let things take their course. He concludes that: ‘One could say that Jomo Kenyatta was unanimously elected leader of the Mau Mau movement but for a single abstention: his own.’⁸⁶

Besides the KCA Mbari group and the Central Committee in Nairobi, a further group which has to be taken into consideration in defining ‘Mau Mau’ before October 1952 was the squatter movement in the ‘White Highlands’, most fully described by Frank Furedi. It was this group which was largely responsible for such acts of violence, more than a little premature as far as the urban leadership was concerned, as were used by the government to justify the declaration of the Emergency. Furedi traces the development from 1929 onwards of the squatters’ resistance to the European settlers’ attempts to eliminate them as independent producers. ‘Throughout the thirties squatters went on strikes, illegally occupied European-owned land and refused to accept many of the settlers’ attempts to restrict their agricultural activities.’87 After World War II the settlers intensified their campaign against the squatters by systematically reducing the squatters’ land and stock and by a three-fold increase in the number of days labour per year required of them. There was no compensating increase in wages, which in 1950 averaged 11 shillings a month; this figure gains significance from the fact that four years earlier the Labour Commissioner of Kenya had estimated that squatters would ‘need twelve shillings per month just to exist’.⁸⁸ As Tamarkin puts it, ‘the squatters were perhaps the most suppressed, dispossessed and insecure social group in Kenya, especially in the postwar years’.⁸⁹

Having no claims to land in the reserves, or anywhere else, the squatters were particularly vulnerable to the threat of eviction, and the increasing insecurity resulting from landlessness was a dominant determinant of the growing militancy of their actions. Furedi outlines the formation of a movement between 1945 and 1952 which threw up a leadership that adopted a militant strategy from 1950 onwards. This consisted of a campaign of cattle-maiming and other farm sabotage. The settler outcry which resulted was the main factor responsible for the declaration of the State of Emergency. The squatter movement depended for its solidarity on the taking of an oath (having as a model the successful use of the oath at Olenguruone) which would appear to have been the KCA oath, administered initially under the direction of the Mbari. But it is important to avoid a simplistic conflation of this squatter movement with ‘Mau Mau’; not only because it evolved its own leadership and obviously acted independently of instructions from Nairobi but also because the impetus behind the oathing among the squatters would seem to have been different from that among those in the reserves and Nairobi. As Furedi suggests, quoting Lucien Bianco, the oathing undertaken by the squatter movement ‘can best be understood in terms of the peasantry’s need to defend itself’.⁹⁰ The thrust behind ‘Mau Mau’ among the squatters would seem to have been essentially defensive, stemming from their sense of the imminent dissolution of their livelihood.

Given the difficulty of distinguishing between those who had sworn the ‘Mau Mau’ oath under the auspices of the essentially conservative and constitutional KCA, those who swore it as part of the militant oathing campaign of June 1951 – October 1952 organised from Nairobi, and those who swore the oath as members of the squatter movement, and given the fact that, as is quite clear, at the time of the declaration of the Emergency there was no centrally co-ordinated movement capable of organising a successful revolt against the colonial government (as John Spencer puts it: There simply was no central body that controlled all the oathing, all the collection of arms and ammunition, the arson, the raids on European farms, and the sundry acts of violence that were to increase during KAU’s last years’91), the best definition of ‘Mau Mau’ before October 1952 would seem to be that offered by Tamarkin, who describes ‘Mau Mau as those ‘groups and leaders who had advocated the employment of organised violence in pursuit of their political, anti-colonial cause, and who had started to organise themselves to that end prior to the declaration of the State of Emergency in October 1952’.⁹²

One further aspect of ‘Mau Mau, its ‘tribal’ composition, needs to be looked at here (its social composition will be examined later), again in response to a settler myth. An indispensable component of the ‘tribalist’ myth (whereby ‘tribe’ signifies ‘primitivism and atavism’, which in turn signifies a ‘pre-politica’ social structure, which means that ‘Mau Mau’ cannot have a nationalist dimension) is the assertion that ‘Mau Mau’ was exclusively Gikuyu. This may (as in Majdalany⁹³) or may not carry the rider that it aimed at Gikuyu domination of the other tribes. The movement was predominantly Gikuyu because settler colonialism had placed their whole way of life more completely in the firing-line than it had the life of other groups. It was for this reason that the prime need was for specifically Gikuyu symbols and forms in oathing ceremonies designed to unite the ‘tribe’ behind the movement. But Corfield admits that thousands of Kamba as well as a number of Luo and Maragoli had been oathed,⁹⁴ 10% of the ‘hard core’ detainees in the notorious Hola camp in 1959 were Luo,⁹⁵ and contrary to one of the settlers’ most cherished myths, Maasai also took part Maina wa Kinyatti points out that Ole Kisio, who was a ‘Mau Mau’ general, was a Maasai,⁹⁶ and Wachanga asserts: ‘By 1952 the government still thought that only Gikuyu had taken oaths, but some Wakamba and Maasai had taken the oaths as well.’⁹⁷ While 90% of Gikuyu men and women are generally estimated to have taken the first oath, and while there was little mass support from other ‘tribes’, the allegation that ‘Mau Mau’ was exclusively ‘tribalist’ cannot withstand analysis. All the evidence from the ‘Mau Mau’ songs⁹⁸ lends support to Barnett’s assertion that while the ‘Land’ component of the twin ideological goals of Land and Freedom may well have related largely to specifically Gikuyu interests, the ‘Freedom’ was conceived of in nationalist, and not ‘tribal’, terms.⁹⁹ It is also worth bearing in mind in this connection Christopher Farrell’s point that the Gikuyu, living in separate communities on the different ridges, did not have enough contact among themselves or with other ‘tribes’ to develop a cultural consciousness and community of interests which could lead to their having a sense of themselves as a separate ‘tribe’.100 Gikuyu ‘tribalism’, if by that we mean a sense of corporate linguistic/ethnic identity, was itself a product of colonialism.

Conduct of the Campaign: ‘Mau Mau Atrocities’ and State and Settler Repression

The State of Emergency was purportedly declared (very much too late in the settlers’ eyes – e.g. ‘The movement was well advanced and overwhelmingly successful before the Government awoke to its dangers’¹⁰¹) in the face of an immediate threat to the safety of the state. Figures are, however, available which show quite conclusively that in 1952 there were fewer murders and ‘serious woundings’ in Kenya than in previous years, and that, while there was a steady increase in the number of cases coming before the Kenya courts from 1948 to 1951, in 1952 the number actually declined.¹⁰² Peter Evans, writing in 1954, suggested that:

The present situation is the result of an attempt to crush the emerging political organizations of the Africans, and to stifle their demands for a ‘new deal’ in the post-war world. It was, I believe, European resistance to necessary change which created Mau Mau; it has been the application of repression and counter-terror which has inflated it to its present size.¹⁰³

And Buijtenhuijs’s research led him to the same conclusion about the declaration:

The measures taken by Sir Evelyn Baring on 20th October 1952 are better explained in the light of the settlers provocative campaign against the African political leaders than as a product of any real threat offered by the Mau Mau movement . . . Sir Philip Mitchell was right . . . there was no organized revolutionary movement in Kikuyuland ready to unleash a widespread revolt¹⁰⁴

Sir Evelyn Baring, who had been appointed ten days before the declaration, would appear to have been taken in by the settlers who, having looked to Salisbury as their model ever since 1923, were making one more in a long line of attempts to entrench their monopoly of political power, this time by decapitating the growing African political movements.¹⁰⁵

With the declaration of the State of Emergency and the arrest of the African leaders a revolt was precipitated Barnett asserts, and Rosberg and Nottingham and Buijtenhuijs are entirely in agreement with his conclusion, that

Contrary, then, to those writings and official pronouncements which have viewed the emergency declaration as a response to an already initiated revolution, I am obliged by the data to take the position that it was the major precipitant of, rather than a reaction to, Kenya’s ‘Mau Mau revolution’.106

This will obviously be crucial to a categorisation of ‘Mau Mau’.

Clayton argues that the declaration of the Emergency ‘generated a large number of recruits to the insurgent cause’.¹⁰⁷ This was partly because a large number of Gikuyu squatters were evicted from, or preempted eviction by leaving, farms on the White Highlands, and returned to the reserves.¹⁰⁸ The inevitable result was foreseen by the Governor:

Should many thousands of Kikuyu suddenly be turned off the farms. . . the Reserves would be swamped, and the result would be an horde of hungry men, women and children wandering round the country. These would soon become desperate; they would swell the numbers of existing gangs, and form new ones.¹⁰⁹

This, barring the terminology, was precisely what happened But it was not the only reason for the movement from the reserves to the forest Barnett who sees the beginning of the revolt as dating from early 1953 with this movement,¹¹⁰ says:

the majority of those who entered the forests did so primarily out of fear of remaining in the reserves. Collective punishment forced confessions, general mistreatment by the security forces and the fears and frustrations generated by the dual role forced upon most passive supporters of the movement . . . simply drove many peasants into the forests.¹¹¹

Barnett whose doctoral thesis represents the most detailed investigation into the ‘Mau Mau’ guerrilla forces to date, estimates that those forces numbered perhaps 30,000 people at the height of the revolt,¹¹² while Buijtenhuijs suggests that ‘somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 peasants were involved in armed struggle over the course of the emergency’.¹¹³

It took government forces numbering over 50,000 in 1953–4,¹¹⁴ who had everything from poisoned arrows (‘Another terrorist wounded by poisoned arrows was captured’¹¹⁵) to heavy bombers at their disposal, four years, from the declaration of the State of Emergency to the capture of Dedan Kimathi in October 1956, to suppress the armed revolt The forest fighters received no foreign help whatsoever,¹¹⁶ were largely untrained, hopelessly ill-equipped and poorly armed, but the eventual success of the government forces was not due to military superiority. It can be attributed, rather, to the cutting-off of the forest fighters from their sources of supply, which was effected by the confinement of up to 90,000 Gikuyu in detention camps¹¹⁷ and by the compulsory ‘villageisation’ of the Gikuyu reserves – with forced labour on the digging of trenches right round Mt Kenya and the Aberdares, and the confiscation of livestock, thrown in for good measure. ‘Villageisation’, which meant the destruction of the formerly scattered Gikuyu homesteads and the erection of houses in fortified camps to take their place, involved a traumatic break from the Gikuyu traditional way of life, and even when it was not accompanied, as it often was, by a 23 hour curfew, it resulted in widespread famine and death in the reserves.118

The myths about ‘Mau Mau’ which were the core of government and settler propaganda have, I suspect, created an exaggerated notion of the number of whites killed in the Emergency. There were in fact just 32 European civilian deaths. As Goodhart, who was anything but a ‘Mau Mau’ supporter (as his terminology makes clear), pointed out: ‘During the Emergency more Europeans were killed in traffic accidents within the city limits of Nairobi than were murdered by terrorists in the whole of Kenya.’¹¹⁹

The notion that tens of thousands of Gikuyu were killed by ‘Mau Mau’ (as one finds, for example, in Ruark: ‘And hundreds, then tens of hundreds of Kikuyu were slain coldly for refusing to accept the Mau Mau oaths¹²⁰) is merely an adaptation of one element of the set of core propositions constituting the ‘Mau Mau’ myth to the propaganda necessities of the ‘hearts and minds’ phase of the British military and political campaign. It is a product of the strategy of dividing armed guerrilla fighters from their civilian base – a classic feature of all ‘counter-insurgency’ strategies – and requires that the general myth of barbarism/atavism should now be restricted in its application, no longer to the whole ‘tribe’ or all Africans, but only to the ‘evil’ and ‘desperate’ men in the appropriate darkness of the forest.

The official figure for the number of blacks killed by ‘Mau Mau’ was 1,819, which was just under one sixth of the 11,503 alleged members of ‘Mau Mau’ killed by government forces.¹²¹ Even by the official figure, seven times as many ‘Mau Mau’ were killed as captured. This compares interestingly with the ratio of 2:1 under not dissimilar conditions in Malaya,¹²² and lends support to Rawcliffe’s contention that ‘it was the deliberate policy of the security forces to kill rather than to wound and capture’.¹²³ Corfield’s figure has, however, been hotly contested. For example, Maina wa Kinyatti says: ‘The contention by the British that 11,000 Africans died is grossly erroneous. A conservative estimate is that at least 150,000 Kenyans lost their lives, 250,000 were maimed for life and 400,000 were left homeless.’¹²⁴ While it was obviously in the colonial government’s interests to minimise the number of deaths caused by the security forces, it was a structural impossibility of colonial-racist discourse to produce an underestimate of the number of blacks killed by ‘Mau Mau’.

Anti-settler violence, when it came to Kenya, was committed with extreme bloodiness – as was inevitable when, as so often, pangas were the only weapons blacks were allowed access to. Much of the horror occasioned by ‘Mau Mau’, and the mythical extremes of, for example, Goodhart’s ‘brother butchered brother with evident enjoyment’,125 can be attributed to the bloodiness of the killings. But it appears to be another structural falsehood of the myth that ‘Mau Mau’ generally killed with unnecessary bloodiness and savagery, as suggested by Ione Leigh: The murders have been so savage, the mutilation of bodies so horrifying, the photographs of victims with gashed heads, hacked off limbs, flayed bodies and exposed intestines so gruesome, that it is almost impossible to believe that human beings could be capable of such atrocities.’¹²⁶ As Kariuki points out, ‘someone killed by a panga looks in worse shape than someone killed by a rifle, because a panga will not kill cleanly’.¹²⁷ (Ngugi Kabiro provides a wry comment on Kariuki’s own terminology when he says: ‘Killing with a stengun . . . is somehow looked upon as “cleaner” than killing with a panga.’¹²⁸) Moreover, a Dr Wilkinson (who, according to Buijtenhuijs, belonged 100% to the European school) examined the bodies of some 210 people allegedly killed by ‘Mau Mau’. He concluded: ‘The commonest method of killing with a panga was the infliction of about six blows over the head. . . This method was used so frequently that it suggested that the terrorists had been trained to kill in this way. The method certainly ensured a quick and certain death for their victims.’¹²⁹ It is also worth noting, with colonial fiction in mind, that Wilkinson’s survey showed that only four of the 210 bodies had been mutilated, which compares favourably with the government forces’ habit of cutting off the hands of those they killed and taking the hands back to the police stations for fingerprinting.¹³⁰

Any discussion of ‘Mau Mau atrocities’ should also bear in mind that it is a now amply documented feature of all ‘counter-insurgency’ campaigns from Vietnam to Namibia that ‘native auxiliaries’ are used to commit systematic atrocities against both captured guerrillas and the civilian population, either for ‘exemplary’ purposes or, in the guise of guerrilla fighters, to sow division.

Rawcliffe, writing as early as 1954, presents a damning indictment of the settlers’ response to ‘Mau Mau’: ‘The settlers had, from the start advocated complete ruthlessness in suppressing the insurrection . . . many of the settlers took the law into their hands and there were numerous instances of suspects being shot on the flimsiest pretext.’¹³¹ The rationale was provided by Michael Blundell, the settler leader, who asserted that the problem would not be cured ‘until we make it much more painful and distasteful to be a member of Mau Mau than it is to support the Government’.¹³² Evans relates that after the settlers’ march on Government House early in 1953, Blundell announced to a cheering throng of Europeans: ‘I am glad to tell you that I now, at long last, bring you your shooting orders.’¹³³

Some indication of how the ‘shooting orders’ were interpreted by the ‘security’ forces is given by a Manchester Guardian report which quotes one Captain Griffiths as telling ‘a company sergeant-major that “he could shoot anybody he liked provided they were black” ’.134 Griffiths was convicted and cashiered for ‘torturing two prisoners who died, but his was not a unique approach. Hunting and shooting ‘Mau Mau’ was apparently regarded as some kind of sport. Evans quotes an East African Standard report: The total bag of the four-day operation is 25. . . Several of these prisoners had been run to earth as the Masai morani do with game in their native plains.¹³⁵ While the terminology is the reporter’s, it is given ample vindication by the army’s choice of the code name for the operation – ‘Longstop’. Clayton records that ‘within a week of assuming command, Erskine had become appalled at the ‘‘indiscriminate shooting” which he found to be taking place in several British and K.A.R. [King’s African Rifles] units – scoreboards recording “kills" (but no evidence of the nature of these kills) were being kept by some battalions’. Clayton goes on: ‘The practices included. . . a £5 reward for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent.’¹³⁶ Anything better calculated to encourage indiscriminate shooting it would be hard to imagine. The whole approach is perhaps best summed up in Frank Kitson’s comment: ‘Soon after, three Africans appeared walking down the track towards us: a perfect target. Unfortunately they were policemen.’¹³⁷

Such ‘security’ force action led to a widespread fear of genocide among the Gikuyu, as testified to by Charity Waciuma: ‘. . .the settlers wanted to kill every Kikuyu, every living soul, and to be finished with them and their land troubles for ever’;¹³⁸ and Mohamed Mathu: ‘. . .it was a common belief that the Europeans were trying to exterminate the whole Kikuyu people’.¹³⁹ As Barnett puts it:

A significant sector of the European settler community tended to interpret the emergency declaration and legislation as promulgating a sort of ‘open season’ on Kikuyu. Embu and Meru tribesmen. Forced confessions, beatings, robbery of stock, food and clothing, brutalities of various sorts and outright killings were frequent enough occurrences to arouse a fear in the hearts of most Kikuyu that the intent of Government was to eliminate the whole tribe.¹⁴⁰

In the process of making it ‘more painful and distasteful to be a member of Mau Mau than it is to support the government’ the pain and distastefulness were extended, through the ‘screening’ process (whereby those who had taken the ‘Mau Mau’ oath were supposedly distinguished from those who were merely suspected of having taken it), to the whole Gikuyu ‘tribe’. It was Blundell, again, who described the process of screening as: ‘. . .nothing more than intensive and sustained interrogation, using every possible known trick of the interrogator’.¹⁴¹ Sir William Worley, Vice-President of the Court of Appeal for East Africa, by contrast, described screening teams as using ‘unlawful and criminal violence’ which is the ‘negation of the rule of law’.¹⁴²

The ‘tricks of the interrogators’, in Blundell’s term, which became known to the courts of Kenya, included the slicing off of ears and the boring of holes in eardrums; the pouring of paraffin over suspects who were then set alight; the flogging of suspects until they died; and the burning of eardrums with lighted cigarettes.143 So rife were instances of brutality that a British parliamentary delegation to Kenya in 1954 felt constrained to report: ‘. . .brutality and malpractices by the police have occurred on a scale which constitutes a threat to public confidence in the forces of law and order’.¹⁴⁴ The due processes of the law were themselves accelerated to the point where they were somewhat less than discriminating. In July 1953 the Attorney General said: Tn the past two months no less than 10,000 Mau Mau cases have been brought before the courts – an average of one case disposed of every two minutes.’¹⁴⁵ The sentences ‘disposed of’ entailed, as often as not, seven years imprisonment. 1,015 people were executed for ‘Mau Mau’ offences prior to April 1956; of these 297 were for murder, 337 for unlawful possession of arms and 222 for oath offences, i.e. for administering ‘Mau Mau’ oaths.¹⁴⁶

In the face of all this, Corfield’s list of ‘Mau Mau atrocities’ has a somewhat hollow ring; he cites, for example, ‘torture before murder’, ‘cutting off the ears of persons who had not taken the oath’, ‘death by hanging’.¹⁴⁷ When it came to ‘atrocities’ there was nothing the maintainers of ‘Law and Order’, the forces supposedly guaranteeing the ‘security’ of the people, could learn from their opponents. For every atrocity alleged against ‘Mau Mau’, from castration to mass murder, there is evidence of equivalent actions, usually on a much wider scale, by the ‘security’ forces. Thus, for example, for Lari (if one accepted that ‘Mau Mau’ was responsible) one could cite Kayahwe where, shortly after Lari, government forces surrounded 94 forest fighter recruits who surrendered, were told to take off their clothes, and were then shot, leaving only two survivors.¹⁴⁸

In view of the history of the repression of colonial rebellions elsewhere it would probably not be necessary to lay such emphasis on the violence of the settler response to ‘Mau Mau’ were it not that the colonial fiction to be dealt with is, for the most part, informed by the same attitude as that adopted by Majdalany, in what is probably the best known popular ‘history’ of ‘Mau Mau’. Majdalany’s comment on British parliamentary protests at such incidents as those outlined above is: ‘But in Britain’s post-war colonial emergencies, the discrediting behind their backs in Parliament of the soldiers on the job, was to become a popular occupation of the lunatic fringe of the extreme left.’¹⁴⁹

Social Composition of the ‘Mau Mau’ Movement

Any attempt to give an adequate historical account of a movement like ‘Mau Mau’ must take its social composition into account. Until recently one of the major weaknesses of historical analyses of ‘Mau Mau’ has been the tendency to talk of ‘the Kikuyu’ as though the tribe were a socially (and presumably, therefore, ideologically) undifferentiated group. Barnett one of the historians who does regard social differentiation as important, has argued that this was, in fact, the case:

. . .labor-exporting peasantries such as the Kikuyu tended to develop as relatively homogeneous aggregates. Lacking the economic and social stratification characteristic of cash-cropping peasantries, the Kikuyu were inadvertently provided with a broad base of common interests and life circumstances. It is here suggested that this ‘levelling’ effect of European settlement . . . greatly increased the likelihood of unified political action among the Kikuyu.150

It is obviously very difficult to square this with Robert Whittier’s assertion: ‘By the time the Second World war broke out, the tribe had been split into two groups – those who supported and those who opposed the colonial government.’¹⁵¹ Barnett does qualify ‘homogeneous’ with ‘relatively’ but his argument begs the whole question of Gikuyu collaboration with the government during the Emergency, and leads the reader away from attempting to find answers to questions about which social groups supported ‘Mau Mau’, which were ‘loyalists’, and why – questions (which Whittier points towards) which are crucial to an understanding of ‘Mau Mau’.

Furedi takes issue with Barnett’s argument and maintains that the very opposite was the case: ‘. . .the colonial impact on the Kikuyu resulted in progressive social differentiation. Not surprisingly support for the Mau Mau movement was uneven and was based on a mosaic of social interest.’¹⁵² I want, in this section, to look briefly at that ‘mosaic of social interest’ and at some of its ideological implications. It will be convenient to follow my earlier scheme and look at the KAU and KCA first, followed by support for ‘Mau Mau’ in Nairobi, and the composition of the squatter movement in the Highlands. There are as yet very few studies of the social composition of ‘Mau Mau’, all of them regional, so one has to rely on Tamarkin’s study of Nakuru; on Furedi for the White Highlands; and on Stichter and Furedi for Nairobi.

In the White Highlands support for the KCA came, so long as it remained a selective underground organisation, from ‘educated Kikuyu, skilled artisans, traders and other prominent local figures’,¹⁵³ while support for the KAU ‘was restricted to newly educated Africans, many of whom were in white collar employment or were self-made business men’¹⁵⁴ who were happy to admit that they had joined the KAU for business purposes. Furedi points out that the educated African clerks and businessmen were a privileged group during the colonial era whose political opposition to the colonial system was based largely upon the restrictions imposed upon the logical development of their roles and ambitions. This ‘new African middle class’ had a stake in the colonial structure, they saw themselves, by virtue of their education, as the logical leaders of the blacks, and they enthusiastically endorsed the KAU orientation towards gradual constitutional reform.155 The KAU was itself a somewhat elitist body, having started life in Nairobi in 1944 as the Kenya African Study Union. Its leaders – Furedi mentions Kenyatta and Koinage in particular – were ‘members of a class of young, privileged, well-educated Africans’ whose interests ‘in their roles of recipients of privileges . . . led them to oppose the politics of popular movements like those of trade unions’.¹⁵⁶ They were replaced as nationalist leaders during the Emergency by an equally ‘well-educated group of young leaders, many of whom had travelled outside of Kenya’,¹⁵⁷ among whom Tom Mboya and J. Kiano were numbered. ‘Their political style’, by Furedi’s account, ‘was defined by the interest of their class – independence as soon as possible, with a minimum of structural change.’¹⁵⁸ Maina wa Kinyatta sums the KAU leadership up as: ‘. . .petty-bourgeois nationalist in its conceptions of the politics and socio-economics of a Kenyan society to come. As far as the political system was outlined, its horizon was constitutionalist, reformist at best and parliamentary.’¹⁵⁹

Tamarkin’s study of ‘Mau Mau’ in Nakuru shows marked social distinctions between its leadership and the KCA and KAU leadership. The KAU leaders were educated men recently settled in Nakuru; the KCA leadership were semi-educated or uneducated but had long associations with Nakuru, some ‘were established traders, though by no means prosperous business men’.¹⁶⁰ The ‘Mau Mau’ leaders, by contrast, were generally young men in their twenties; almost all were self-employed, mostly as petty traders; most had settled in Nakuru after the war, generally coming from the surrounding districts where they had been squatters; they were largely uneducated and unaffected by the European missions.¹⁶¹

Turning to Nairobi, we find that, according to Sharon Stichter:

Broadly speaking, Kenya’s Kikuyu workers, who were numerically predominant in the work force and especially in the central city of Nairobi, supported the rebellion. The Kikuyu unskilled manual workers actively participated, while the skilled ones were more likely to provide ‘passive’ support. Those few Kikuyu workers who did not support Mau Mau were generally white-collar.¹⁶²

This, as Stichter points out, runs counter to Fanon’s categorisation of urbanised workers as opportunist and non-revolutionary. Besides the workers, who were often only semi-proletarianised to the extent that they were migrants who retained some, however marginal, land rights in the reserves, there was the Gikuyu lumpenproletariat, generally having no ties to the land, who overwhelmingly supported ‘Mau Mau’. Spencer’s account of the spread of the oath to Nairobi is significant in this regard. It was first given to 24 trade union leaders; then to a carefully selected group of what Kubai called ‘criminals’ who were given the job of collecting arms; then to the Nairobi taxi drivers; then to some four hundred prostitutes who were told to collect whatever information would help the movement.163 Stichter suggests that urban support for ‘Mau Mau’ was determined to some extent by ‘agrarian romanticism’: ‘. . .the hope of regaining access to their traditional means of production and returning to peasant status’.¹⁶⁴ As far as the trade unions were concerned, the ones supporting ‘Mau Mau’ oathing were those representing skilled or semi-skilled workers, and those whose leadership or active membership was predominantly Gikuyu; those representing white-collar workers, Gikuyu and non-Gikuyu, did not support the revolt.¹⁶⁵

In the ‘White Highlands’ the social base of the movement consisted, according to Furedi, ‘of at least two distinct social strata: the rank and file of the movement. . . was made up of Kikuyu squatters; the majority of the activists came from the ranks of the more skilled farm labourers, artisans and petty traders’.¹⁶⁶ Gikuyu in the Highlands overwhelmingly supported ‘Mau Mau’, to the extent that it proved impossible to establish a core of ‘loyalist’ Gikuyu to fight ‘Mau Mau’. This, Furedi points out ‘was not the case in the Kikuyu Reserve. There, a group of missionary educated Kikuyu literati, land-owners and businessmen, closely tied to the colonial system, constituted the basis for a class of collaborators.’¹⁶⁷ Furedi’s categories are imprecise but his general point is clear enough.

This brings us to the so-called ‘home guard’, formed in March 1953, of ‘loyalists’ who were seen by the settlers as a base for the ‘reconstruction of the Kikuyu people’.¹⁶⁸ Membership of the ‘home guard’ was clearly class based: Sorrenson, for example, reports that an analysis of 900 members carried out by J.D. Campbell, the DC at Githunguri, revealed that all the leaders and two-thirds of the remainder were ‘above average wealth’, while 23 of the 25 leaders and 299 of the others were described as ‘rich’ or ‘very rich’. There were, as Sorrenson goes on to say, a few wealthy supporters of ‘Mau Mau’ – nationalist ideology interpellates a wide range of subjects – but they were very much the exceptions.¹⁶⁹

Ng’ang’a reveals that the first 1,000 people to become home guards were all missionary adherents, this he attributes to a particular brand of religious fanaticism among the ‘Ahonoki’ (the ‘saved’) followers of the African Inland Church and the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, who were persuaded by the missionaries that Satan was working through ‘Mau Mau’. ‘Other people who became home guards were those who were wealthy and educated and who had become the beneficiaries of the colonial administration. These included the chiefs and their children, traders, “enlightened” farmers, teachers and other government servants.’¹⁷⁰

The benefits of being issued with a Loyalty Certificate were considerable. They are enumerated by Ng’ang’a as follows:

A person with a Loyalty Certificate could not usually be prosecuted for any action against a non-Loyalist: he could be exempted from paying school fees; he could travel without a pass and he could become a member of land consolidation, school, church and other committees. This certificate also enabled the holders to plant coffee and other cash crops, to obtain licences to own trading plots in market areas and to obtain vehicle licences.171

Land consolidation, in particular, afforded the ‘loyalists’ the opportunity to enrich themselves, and was, in fact, seen by the colonial administration as a way of rewarding the ‘loyalists’ for their loyalty – the result was that ‘more than half of the land was given to less than two percent of the population’.¹⁷²

Ng’ang’a argues that the deliberate ‘creation of a class of bourgeoisie and landed gentry [sic]’ was designed to provide a counter-revolutionary antidote to the detainees once they were released, and to establish a group which could be groomed to take over the government administration once the British left.¹⁷³

It is important with the fiction in mind, to pause for a moment to consider the colonial myth that ‘Mau Mau’ was specifically anti-Christian, as seen in Ione Leigh’s: ‘The aims of the Society are to destroy Christianity and to murder or expel the Europeans.’¹⁷⁴ There is no evidence to back Leakey’s assertion that ‘it became customary to include a clause in the Mau Mau oath, directed, in so many words, against Christianity’.¹⁷⁵

Far from attempting to destroy Christianity, one finds ‘Mau Mau’ incorporating Christian symbolism in the oathing ceremonies, as in Njama’s account, ‘to end the ceremony, blood mixed with some good smelling oil was used to make a cross on our foreheads,’¹⁷⁶ and one finds frequent recourse to Christian tradition throughout Njama’s account of his life in the forest. Buijtenhuijs, who points out that only one European missionary was killed during the course of the revolt and cites sources which suggest that it was deliberate ‘Mau Mau’ policy to spare the lives of Catholic priests,¹⁷⁷ would seem to put his finger on the crux of the matter when he says: ‘We get the impression that the majority of the Mau Mau fighters were very much less anti-Christian than the Kikuyu Christians were anti-Mau Mau.’¹⁷⁸

It is certainly clear that many of the home guards were Christians; this did not stop that body committing so many ‘irregularities’ that Mr Justice Cramm, in a judgement in the Supreme Court in May 1955, commented:

The Kikuyu Home Guard is an illegal body. Looking at the evidence, there exists a system of Guard Posts manned by Headmen and Chiefs, and there are Interrogation Centres and Prisons to which the Queen’s subjects, whether innocent or guilty, are led by armed men without warrant and detained and, as it seems tortured until they confess to alleged crimes, and are then led forth to trial on the sole evidence of these confessions – it is time that this court declared that any such system is constitutionally illegal and should come to an end, and these dens be emptied of their victims and those Chiefs exerting abritrary power checked and warned.179

The colonial government’s response was to make the home guard legal.

The ‘Mau Mau’ forest fighters, then, consisted in the main of landless Gikuyu peasants (Buijtenhuijs estimates that by 1953 50% of the population of the Kikuyu reserve was landless)¹⁸⁰ and semi-skilled or unemployed workers from the towns, mainly Nairobi. They had, initially, massive support from the Gikuyu squatters in the White Highlands, from the poorer peasants in the reserves and from blue-collar Gikuyu workers and the Gikuyu lumpenproletariat. The leadership came, in general, from trade union organisers, petty-traders and artisans. There was very little support for the movement from the relatively few educated Gikuyu. (Whittier asserts that ‘only three men throughout all the forest groups . . . could boast of a secondary education’.¹⁸¹) Mohamed Mathu strikes a note in his autobiography which is repeated again and again throughout the accounts of ‘Mau Mau’ given by those who participated: ‘. . .the vast majority of educated Gikuyu quickly detached themselves from the revolution. . . Why did these men abandon us in our hour of greatest need?’¹⁸²

Towards a Categorical Definition of the Movement

The aims of the ‘Mau Mau’ movement, as expressed in the songs and the demands made by the leaders of the forest fighters, were the regaining of the land ‘alienated’ to white settlers and the attainment of freedom from colonial rule. That these were the general aims of the movement would seem to be confirmed by the autobiographies. Three of the four quotations to follow come from members of the rank and file, only Njama could be said to have been a leader. Karigo Muchai describes ‘the things we Kikuyu fought and died for’ as ‘a decent job or a piece of land to cultivate so that I can provide for my family and see to it that my children go to school and have an opportunity for a better, richer life than my own’.¹⁸³ As far as Mohamed Mathu is concerned, ‘we would throw off white-settler rule and after winning our independence the land would be ours, salaries would rise and education would be free’.¹⁸⁴ Njama saw the movement’s aims as being to ‘achieve African freedom, recover the stolen lands and the expelling of the white man.’¹⁸⁵ While Muriithi quotes himself as saying:

I will not give up until Njoroge can go to Nairobi without being stopped: not until Kabuchi can go to school at the Prince of Wales . . . not until I see Kenyatta as the Governor. . . we shall not rest until we are free. That means free to travel without a kipande [identity card], free to own the estates now run by Europeans.¹⁸⁶

In arriving at a categorical definition of ‘Mau Mau’ it is important to bear in mind Barnett’s suggestion that the movement into the forests was less a single general movement than a series of local and regional movements:

. . .overall strategy and long-range aims were either absent or very confused during this period [immediately after the Emergency declaration]. . . Concerned primarily with conditions and events in their home locations, most groups established themselves in adjacent sections of the forest fringe.187

Barnett continues: ‘During this early period, relations between the various fighting groups within the forest, reserve and Rift Valley were unstructured and contact between them was slight and sporadic.’¹⁸⁸

Such unity as did come to the movement in the forest, as manifested in the formation of large camp clusters, was not much more than momentary, and was always distinctly fragile, as Njama’s account makes clear. Nor were the reasons behind the unification primarily related to nationalist ideology. Barnett argues that the ‘structural tendency towards unification [was] grounded in the fact that all revolutionary forest groups were faced with both a common set of life-circumstances and a structurally unified enemy’.¹⁸⁹ He then goes on to say:

This tendency was reinforced among guerilla forces both by the shared ideological base and central-command orientation of the Movement prior to the emergency and by the traditional Kikuyu pattern whereby military age-regiments cut across and linked the various local communities within a subtribe.¹⁹⁰

While the shared ideological base was, in part at least, nationalist, it is important to note that it was not the primary impetus behind the unification.

Unification under the ideological banner of ‘forma’ nationalism was of brief duration and, as Mau Mau From Within bears witness, had to be striven for hard by the few leaders with some Western education. The fragile unity in the forests broke down, as Barnett and Njama make clear, as a result of an ideological split between the literate and the non-literate leaders.¹⁹¹ This boiled down, in essence, to the rejection by the non-literate leaders of the state-building/parliamentarist ‘Freedom’ component, in favour of the peasant/Land component, in the forest fighters’ ‘nationalism’. After the break-down of unity the forest fighters again found themselves in small, locally based groups. As I have argued elsewhere, it was at this stage that ‘Mau Mau’ came closest to being definable as social banditry.¹⁹²

‘Mau Mau’ as an insurrectionary phenomenon was, then, essentially a peasants’ revolt triggered off by the declaration of the State of Emergency and the eviction of the squatters from the farms on the White Highlands. Analysis of the phenomenon is complicated by the fact that most of the peasants who participated had received a rudimentary politicisation in the context of a goal which happened almost accidentally, to coincide in a large measure with what actually transpired: an armed revolt which led ultimately to ‘independence’ – that vessel of so many incompatible dreams – under an all-African government The structural fracture occasioned in part by the arrest of the nationalist politicians but more importantly perhaps, by the disruption of the squatter movement prevents any convincing application to the forest fighters of the label ‘national liberation movement’ with the sense of depth and continuity that that would imply. While Njama and Maina wa Kinyatti, among others, show convincingly enough that Kimathi and other leaders conceived of the revolt in aggressive (if abstract) nationalist terms (Kimathi: ‘We want African self-government in Kenya now’)193 there is not enough evidence to suggest that the move to the forest can be read as an index of widespread nationalism in this sense and was not instead a largely defensive action on the part of the peasantry.

The fact that there was continuity in the administration of the ‘Mau Mau’ oaths should not be allowed to confuse the issue. The movement to the forest, as Barnett argues, ‘was by and large a reaction to external stimuli rather than the unfolding of a well-laid plan for revolutionary action or guerilla warfare’.¹⁹⁴ The fact that the evidently uncoordinated groups in the forest at the beginning of the Emergency saw the continuation of oathing as one of their prime functions makes it clear that the oaths should be seen not as evidence of a mass mobilisation engineered by increasingly militant nationalist politicians, but rather as a continuation of the movement for solidarity among the peasants – itself becoming more militant under pressure – begun at Olenguruone and growing out of Gikuyu traditions of resistance. Categorical definition of ‘Mau Mau’ would seem to hinge on the three months immediately after the declaration of the Emergency. During this period the importance of the oath would seem to have consisted not so much in the entry it gave into a national liberation movement as in the practical guarantee of loyalty and food supplies from those in the reserves which it appeared to afford to those in the forests or about to enter them.

We can conclude, then, that the years 1947–52 saw the simultaneous development of a peasant movement among the squatters, whose logical outcome was a peasants’ revolt, and the elaboration of an increasingly militant rank and file nationalism amongst proletarians and semi-proletarians in Nairobi, Nakuru and elsewhere, whose resort to violence might have developed into a national liberation movement had there been a fundamental convergence between the disparate elements and no defection on the part of the educated petty-bourgeois leadership. But we seem to be continually forced back to the conclusion that that cirumstances surrounding the declaration of the Emergency in 1952 to a large extent pre-empted the logical development of a war of national liberation, while at the same time immeasurably accelerating the impetus of the peasants revolt

IDEOLOGIES OF THE HISTORY OF ‘MAU MAU’

The Colonial Interpretation and ‘Mau Mau’ Oathing Ceremonies

I turn now to the ideology of the history of ‘Mau Mau’ and the different ‘explanations given for the movement; this will provide a perspective against which the interpretations of ‘Mau Mau’ put forward, or assumed, by the fiction can be set. I start by looking at the ‘official’ interpretation (i.e. that of the Kenyan settlers and government) which informed the colonial fiction. While the government interpretation was not monolithic, as evidenced by economic and agricultural reforms implemented during the Emergency which were a tacit recognition of the rational economic causes of the revolt the public rhetoric of government spokesmen cannot be distinguished from that of the settlers, as will be seen. The way in which the colonial interpretation of ‘Mau Mau’ fitted into the wider pattern of colonial ideology in its Kenya variant can be seen from the next chapter.

The causes of the revolt were, as we have seen, socio-economic and political and amounted, to put it crudely, to the economic exploitation and administrative repression of the Gikuyu by the white settlers and the colonial state.195 In terms of the ideology of trusteeship and protection whereby the settlers justified their presence in Kenya to themselves, it was not possible to accept this interpretation of the causes of the revolt, though they were far from unaware of it Thus one finds Ione Leigh, for example, making such statements as: ‘It is idle to believe that the underlying cause of the present disturbance is economic. . . The Mau Mau have made no demands for economic advancement – what they require is the whole of Kenya, and the expulsion or massacre of all Europeans.’¹⁹⁶ The official line on the causes of ‘Mau Mau’ was dependent to an astonishing degree on the mere reproduction and constant reshuffling of the basic terms of the core myth: ‘primitivism’, ‘atavism’, ‘regression’, ‘savagery’ and, of course, ‘darkness’. Thus the 1954 British Parliamentary Delegation returned from Kenya persuaded that ‘Mau Mau intentionally and deliberately seeks to lead the Africans of Kenya back to the bush and savagery, not forward into progress’;¹⁹⁷ the ‘Voice of Kenya Organisation’ declares: ‘In its very nature Mau Mau is a reversion of barbarism’;¹⁹⁸ Blundell suggests that ‘Mau Mau’ was ‘a collapse of the African mind in face of the pressures to which the modern world and its technology was subjecting it’;¹⁹⁹ Sir Patrick Renison saw Kenyatta as a leader into ‘darkness and death’;200 while in Corfield’s judgement it was ‘an atavistic tribal rising aimed against western civilisation and technology and in particular against Government and the Europeans as the symbols of progress’.²⁰¹

The quintessential account along these lines, striking in its medievalism (and particularly significant in that it comes from the Governor of Kenya who retired in 1952) is Sir Philip Mitchell’s. He attributes the revolt to:

. . .the black and blood-stained forces of sorcery and magic, stirring in the vicious hearts and minds of wicked men and, as the churches and the schools spread over the land, whispering to them ‘Kill, Kill, Kill for your last chance in Africa is at hand. . .’ The light is spreading and these dark and dreadful distortions of the human spirit cannot bear it.²⁰²

Lest the language of the witch-hunt should fail to impress 20th century metropolitan audiences, the colonial government had more sophisticated professionals as a standby who could be relied on to elaborate a psychopathology of ‘Mau Mau’, faithful to the tenets of the core myth.

The image of ‘Mau Mau’ projected by government propaganda, and reflected in almost all colonial accounts of ‘Mau Mau’ from 1954 onwards, owed a great deal to a pamphlet The Psychology of Mau Mau written by Dr J.C. Carothers, M.B., D.P.M., who was imported in his professional capacity as psychologist and psychiatrist to see, in his words, ‘how far some experience in Africa and some knowledge of psychology and psychiatry might throw light on the Mau Mau movement’.²⁰³ Some measure of the settlers’ relief at being served up with a comforting ‘scientific’ account of the movement can be seen from the fact that Car-others’s report ran to at least seven impressions before it had even been considered by the government. Carothers concluded that ‘Mau Mau’:

. . .arose from the development of an anxious conflictual situation in people who, from contact with the alien culture, had lost the supportive and constraining influences of their own culture, yet had not lost their ‘magic modes of thinking. It arose from the exploitation of this situation by relatively sophisticated egotists.²⁰⁴

The first part of this pot-pourri of pseudo-psychoanalytic, sociological and anthropological jargon would, of course, apply equally well to all the African ‘tribes’ whose encounter with colonialism failed to produce ‘Mau Mau’; and the second part is inoperative without the first But from then on ‘Mau Mau’ was ‘conclusively proven’ to be the result of the Gikuyu tribe’s failure to come to terms with Western Civilisation, and its consequent regression into a primitive past.

One of the main political purposes to which Carothers’s report was turned was its use as the central ideological prop of the significantly named ‘rehabilitation programme to which ‘Mau Mau’ detainees were subjected. The rationale behind ‘rehabilitation’ was given by T. Askwith, who was responsible for the programme:

Very large numbers have had to be detained in special camps, not because they have been convicted in the courts, but because their behaviour has been such as to indicate that they would be a danger to law and order if they were not restrained It is the same principle as is applied to mad people or those suffering from an infectious disease. Such people must be prevented from mixing with others so that they do not harm them. . .205

How this official doctrine was interpreted by the settlers can be seen in:

One thing is certain. Those Kikuyu who are incurably afflicted by Mau Mau must be as rigorously isolated as lepers. They must be kept in the forests and there exterminated one by one so that they can never again contaminate the healthy. And those of the stricken who have been proclaimed cured must be carefully watched for any signs of another epidemic.²⁰⁶

The correspondence between this prostitution of science to quasi-genocidal political goals and the language of Nazi exterminism must be more than coincidental. I shall examine the question of ‘overlaps’ and structural similarities between fascist and settler-colonial ideology in more detail in the next chapter.

In defining ‘Mau Mau’ as ‘atavistic’, ‘primitive’ etc., the settler interpreters focused most of their attention on the ‘Mau Mau’ oaths. No other single aspect of the movement generated so much European myth-making or such extremes of emotive writing. To give just one example, lone Leigh says: ‘The ritual has become more and more bestial in character. With its blood lust and its revolting obscenities, Mau Mau is now raging across the country.’²⁰⁷ In view of the extent to which the colonial fiction dwells on the oaths it is necessary to describe them briefly and assess the accuracy of the settler accounts of them.

Settler anxiety had it that there were as many as eleven different ‘Mau Mau’ oaths. The forest fighters and the ‘Mau Mau’ leadership appear to have recognised only three: the first oath, the oath of unity, which was sworn by all members of the movement and the second, so-called platoon, or ‘Batuni’, oath which was sworn by the forest fighters and committed the swearer to kill when necessary, are described in detail in all the ‘Mau Mau’ autobiographies. A third, ‘leaders”, oath is mentioned by Kariuki and Wachanga and was clearly far less powerful in its effect on its recipients than the Batuni oath.

There is fairly general agreement among both colonial and Gikuyu writers as to the ritual and the vows involved in the first ‘Mau Mau’ oath – even if there is not the same agreement as to its meaning or significance. The ritual generally involved removing all European-made articles from the body; wearing a bracelet or necklet of twisted grass or goatskin; passing under an arch made of banana-stems, maize-stalks and sugar-cane; taking seven sips from a hollowed-out banana stem containing a mixture of goafs blood, soil, the undigested contents of the goat’s stomach, and crushed grain; pricking first the eyes of the dead goat, and then seven sodom apples, seven times with kei-apple thorns; taking seven bites of the goat’s thorax; and inserting a piece of reed into the seven holes of the goat’s ngata.208 The ritual was usually concluded by the administrator making the sign of the cross on the initiate’s forehead with the mixture of blood and grain. The ritual was an elaborate, and carefully formulated, synthesis of elements from the traditional initiation ceremony, from traditional oathing rituals, and from Christianity, and was designed as an initiation rite which effectively elevated the movement to the status of the ‘tribe’. Thus one finds Kariuki describing his feelings after his second oath: ‘My initiation was now complete and I had become a true Kikuyu with no doubts where I stood in the revolt of my tribe’;²⁰⁹ and Njama says: ‘I had been born again in a new society with a new faith.’²¹⁰ There was clearly not the faintest trace of witchcraft or satanism.²¹¹

The ritual of the Batuni oath would appear to have been different in only one major respect Kariuki’s account is typical of the accounts given in the autobiographies. The oath administrator, he says, ‘told me to take the thorax of the goat which had been skinned, to put my penis through a hole that had been made in it and to hold the rest of it in my left hand in front of me’ while repeating the oaths.²¹² Barnett explains the significance of this:

. . .the sexual acts or symbols performed or invoked while swearing an oath were calculated violations of acknowledged taboos designed, in both traditional and modern usage, to revolt and inspire awe and fear in the initiates or accused . . . the more vile or repulsive were the acts performed while swearing an oath . . . the stronger and more binding did such an oath become.²¹³

The logic of this could unquestionably have led to some of the practices attributed by European writers to the ‘advanced’ oathing ceremonies. But it is equally clear that it would only have required predispositions such as that of Ione Leigh, ‘sex and drinking figure largely in all native ceremonies; these are matters which they understand’,²¹⁴ for the innocuous practices described by Kariuki to have assumed the proportions of the obscenity, perversion and bestiality alleged by the settlers.

The accounts of the oaths in the various ‘Mau Mau’ autobiographies are widely consistent as to the details of the ceremonies and oaths and entirely consistent as to the moderation of the ‘official’ oaths. They provide no shred of substantiation for, and militate against the credibility of, allegations such as that made by Corfield when he claims that it was a ‘common feature’ of the Batuni oath for the initiate to swear ‘when killing to cut off heads, extract the eyeballs and drink the liquid from them’.215 This is not to say that there may not, especially towards the end of the years in the forest, have been some oathing ceremonies which departed significantly from those originally sanctioned by the ‘Mau Mau’ leadership; Barnett however, concludes that these would have been:

. . .the exceptions, and the results of individual deviancy and proclivities among the more opportunist and/or magico-religious elements on the fringe of the organized movement. Government propaganda made much of these exceptional cases – trying to convey the notion that these were normal oathing practice and, hence, condemn the movement.²¹⁶

Settler accounts of the so-called‘advanced’ oaths, the other nine or so, were all based on confessions made under torture. One element of the colonial myth (which can be derived either from the idea of mental incapacity, or that of twisted cunning depending on circumstances) had it that the African is a congenital liar, as Stoneham expressed it: ‘. . .the black man has a perverted dislike of truthfulness; he will lie even in his own despite’.²¹⁷ It was, however, apparently logical to disbelieve everything a Gikuyu said except when he was being tortured The irony of this was that Carothers himself, in pointing to a connection between the oaths and witchcraft, made the point that:

The conduct of these trials was wholly foreign to modern ideas of justice, and the ‘facts’ of witchcraft are mainly known to us from confessions extracted under torture; confessions moreover in which the judges were not satisfied until an expected pattern of confession was produced.²¹⁸

Making what is for us the obvious connection would appear to have been a structural impossibility for the ideology within which Carothers and his disciples were operating.

The settler accounts of the ceremonies, whether fictional or ‘non-fictional’, are invariably obsessively concerned with cultivating an atmosphere of nightmare and (sexual) horror whose indebtedness to the vocaulary and imagery of popular Gothic and sex-violence literary genres is clearly evident Goodhart says, for example: ‘The taking of oaths would be solemnified with bestial ceremonies, which included the munching of human brains and intercourse with dead goats. To complete the atmosphere of horror, the “oathing chapels” would be decorated with intestines and gouged goats’ eyes.’²¹⁹ And Ione Leigh prefaces her account of the first oath with: ‘Live cats and dogs and certain parts of human bodies are sometimes nailed to Mau Mau altars.’²²⁰ Not only was there no ‘Mau Mau’ counterpart to an altar, any more than there was justification for Goodhart’s ‘chapel, but the rationale behind the ritual, discussed earlier, would have left no room in the ceremonies for the trappings of live cats and dogs nailed to the furniture. There is obviously a calculated innuendo in the unspecified ‘certain parts’ of human bodies, doubtless designed (consciously? unconsciously?) to work on castration anxieties in her male readers. One more example must suffice, this time from Corfield’s ‘History’:

Suffice to record that the use of menstrual blood and public intercourse with sheep and adolescent girls were a common feature of most of these ceremonies. . . The effect of these orgiastic ceremonies, which took place in deep forest clearings by the flickering light of bonfires, on those present must have been overwhelming.221

Clearly the imagery of Salem, Massachusetts, had passed successfully through the Gothic-horror form to touch a very powerful chord in the settler writers. It need hardly be noted that the discursive need for ‘bonfires’ does not exactly coincide with the fighters’ real need for extremely tight security arrangements in oathing ceremonies.²²²

The conscious and unconscious fears articulated in these texts – as indeed in Conrad’s treatment of the ‘savages’ in Heart of Darkness – are part of a complex oral heritage in Western European culture, finding contemporary expression via the familiar images and symbols of capitalist mass culture. In historical moments conducive to intense projection of guilt and anxiety, any number of selections and combinations can take place along the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the linguistic repertoire of this culture, but the stock remains narrowly limited. Within these fixed limits there is no end to what can appear next to what: witches, savages, cats and dogs, pudenda, crosses, heads on posts, cannibals (the constant image of ‘Mau Mau’ as a reversion to cannibalism is most strikingly seen in Leigh’s: ‘Pregnant women had their stomachs slit open and the child extracted to be served up to Mau Mau leaders’²²³), Calibans (‘the mad, bloodstained Calibans of Mau Mau’²²⁴), fire and storm, Satan, etc. The important thing to note is that the dynamic of selection/combination is above all mythic/literary – it is a self-enclosed system ‘working itself so intensely and with so minimal a critical understanding of its own procedures for arriving at ‘truth’ that its value as evidence must be rated very low indeed. This is why, as regards the representation of ‘Mau Mau’, no real distinction can be drawn between the non-fictional and the fictional modes employed by the settler writers.

However, it is probably still worth explicitly drawing attention to the positive side of the oathing in the light of Amilcar Cabral’s observation that: ‘The study of the history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture, consolidated progressively into a successful or unsuccessful attempt to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people, as a means of negating the oppressor culture.’²²⁵ This tendency is clearly visible in the development of the oath outlined above. Oaths such as ‘I will never leave a member in difficulty without trying to help him’²²⁶ had the effect of reviving the traditional pattern of village life, centring on communal help, which had fallen largely into abeyance under the impact of colonialism. Moreover the oaths re-established a rigid code of moral behaviour. Members swore, among other things, ‘never [to] cause a girl to become pregnant and leave her unmarried’, ‘never [to] marry and then seek a divorce’, never to drink European beer or smoke cigarettes.227 Sleeping with prostitutes was forbidden and rape was a capital offence. It is perhaps a measure of the extent to which this code was adhered to that there is – astonishingly – not one allegation of the rape of a white woman in all the settler accounts of ‘Mau Mau’. (Though this may equally well be related to the very concrete fear, in the context of settler ideology, of ‘inviting the worst’ by mentioning it)

Kariuki, describing the rules of the South Yatta and Lodwar detention camps, reports that: ‘No one who was in the hard-core group was allowed to meet with a woman, to drink alcohol or to take the Indian hemp drug (bhangi).’²²⁸ Comparing the ordinary criminals, called the mahuru, with the ‘Mau Mau’ he says:

Mahuru is the word for carrion crows and they were given this name because they could steal and quarrel, fight and commit sodomy with each other: they had no discipline and they were like the vultures who have no shame and eat the filth and garbage and the flesh of dead things. The ‘Mau Mau’ convicts were a tight society, with high moral standards and stern discipline.²²⁹

This is supported by all the other ‘Mau Mau’ accounts of the detention camps.²³⁰

Rosberg and Nottingham go so far as to claim that: ‘In most parts of Kiambu, even during the Emergency, oaths remained an instrument of moderation and indeed control.’²³¹ But the most striking claim for the positive value of the ‘Mau Mau’ oaths is given by Buijtenhuijs:

To the Kikuyu people, subjected to a bewildering rhythm of social and cultural change, the Mau Mau movement offered, through its renewal of initiation, a secure anchorage at a critical moment. Here we are getting very far from the negative interpretation of the Mau Mau movement which one often finds in the literature, but the facts show that the first Mau Mau oath was in many respects a very positive phenomenon, and by no means the ‘monstrous and nauseating perversion Sir Philip Mitchell would have us believe. It stands as a striking witness to the great vitality and the spirit of initiative of which the Kikuyu people gave evidence throughout the colonial period.²³²

The ‘history’ of ‘Mau Mau’ written by settlers and their sympathisers was determined, then, by the ideological need to find, and focus exclusively on, an interpretation of ‘Mau Mau’ which would exonerate colonialism itself from any responsibility. Such histories relied of necessity exclusively on anti-‘Mau Mau’ sources.

Post-Independence Accounts: ‘Mau Mau’ Autobiographies and ‘Progressive’ and ‘Reactionary’ Nationalist Interpretations

When it comes to the ‘Mau Mau’ autobiographies it has to be remembered that none of these was written during the Emergency; they were all written with benefit of hindsight up to twenty years after the events they describe. They are to some extent determined by bitterness at the failure of the Kenya government to reward or acknowledge the forest fighters adequately: e.g. Mathu’s, ‘I would also warn them [‘those African leaders who now condemn Mau Mau’] that we did not make these sacrifices just to have Africans step into the shoes of our former European masters.’233 These accounts are bound to be determined to a greater or lesser extent by the writers’ social circumstances at the time of the telling; in other words their ideology of the history of ‘Mau Mau’ will have been determined to some extent by events subsequent to those they are writing about.

Special mention must be made of Njama who, in the present state of the literature on ‘Mau Mau’, will inevitably be the star informant when it comes to the day-to-day existence of the forest fighters. Njama’s account as an admirer of Kimathi (which is to some extent offset by Wachanga’s and Gikoyo’s²³⁴ accounts as admirers of Mathenge), is determined in large measure by the ideology of the literate/nationalist side of the previously mentioned ideological divide between the two groups of forest fighters. The contradiction between the two sides is perhaps best seen in Njama’s account of the komerera:

One of the Kenya Regiment’s achievements was to disperse our warriors into many small sections out of which grew many incapable self-styled leaders whose leadership was (concerned with) how to get food and how to hide. We called these groups komerera. . . They robbed and disturbed our associates in the reserves . . . and administered some absurd and illegal types of oaths.²³⁵

Njama goes on to report:

At Chieni the [forest fighters’] court heard a dozen cases of the komerera leaders, among which one of them was sentenced to death after admitting that he had administered a strange oath to some itungati [warriors] compelling them to abandon their leaders and never again to serve any leader who did not participate in fetching food and firewood, building his own hut and carrying his own luggage.²³⁶

While it is possible that the ‘strangeness’ of the oath consisted in the ritual involved, it seems more likely that it was what was sworn to that Njama regarded as ‘strange’. Njama’s account here, as elsewhere, would seem to be informed by a leadership ideology which is distinctly elitist and owes a good deal to the example of British practice, military and civil (one thinks immediately of the ranks assigned to the fighters and of Kimathi’s adoption of the prime minister title and establishment of the ‘Kenya Parliament’). This is clearly in contradiction with a distinct strain of ‘democratic resistance on the part of some of the rank and file forest fighters – a contradiction which Njama seeks to gloss over by making the latter’s position appear perverse. It is notable in this connection that Mathenge refused to accept a rank.237 While the oath in question may not have been ‘good discipline’ from a military point of view, there is nothing ‘strange’ about it to anyone not preoccupied with hierarchical structures of authority. Njama’s account of the komerera leads one to suspect that the label was given to politically rebellious factions of the Land and Freedom Army as a convenient way of avoiding the question of certain weaknesses/bourgeois models of organisation and political ideology which their dissent throws into focus.

Njama consistently expresses the Nationalist/Freedom component of the forest fighters’ ideology. He quotes himself, for example, as telling the forest fighters: ‘. . .we are not fighting for regions or clans or tribes. We are fighting for the whole Kenya, including our enemies as Home Guards and all the Africans employed in the enemy forces.’²³⁸ This is informed by, and in turn informs, the ‘Nationalist’ interpretation of ‘Mau Mau’ which itself has a progressive and a reactionary wing; it is opposed by what we may call the ‘revolutionary’ interpretation, which rejects the teleological character of the nationalist accounts. I conclude this chapter by looking very briefly at both nationalist interpretations.

The most obvious representatives of the ‘progressive’ nationalist interpretation of ‘Mau Mau’ are Rosberg and Nottingham whose whole book The Myth of Mau Mau’ is aimed at showing that ‘Mau Mau’ was a direct extension of African nationalism: ‘It is our contention that the history of Kikuyu protests against aspects of the colonial state may be more clearly understood as the history of a developing nationalist movement’²³⁹ More recently Maina wa Kinyatti has produced a vigorous defence of this position in his article (whose claim is summarised in its title): ‘Mau Mau: The Peak of African Political Organization in Colonial Kenya’. The weakness of this interpretation is pointed to by Edward Steinhart:

By focusing on the leadership, the communicators, be they chiefs or political party leaders, we have accepted an interpretation of anti-colonialism as ‘African nationalism’, a movement to expel the aliens and restore ‘national’ independence. If instead we look within the protest movements, at leaders and followers alike, we are apt to discover that the impulses which the leaders organise and interpret are profoundly anti-authoritarian and revolutionary rather than anti-foreign and ‘nationalist’ A ‘myth of popular insurrection’ may lead us further and deeper in our understanding of twentieth century movements of protest and liberation than the failing ‘myth of nationalism’ has brought us.²⁴⁰

There has not to date, been enough looking ‘within the protest movement’.

The other main line of interpretation of ‘Mau Mau’, the ‘reactionary’ nationalist one, has been categorised by Maina wa Kinyatti as ‘the University of Nairobi school of thought’. Within the context of an overwhelming need to defend the neo-colonial order as the achieved terminus of national aspiration, and hence to devalue all forms of militant struggle, its treatment of ‘Mau Mau’ is, as Maina points out, essentially similar to the colonial view of the revolt: ‘Mau Mau’ is held to be ‘a primitive Gikuyu movement’; ‘a Gikuyu Chauvinistic and tribalist organisation’; ‘Gikuyu nationalism as opposed to Kenyan nationalism’, and so on. Maina wa Kinyatti quotes W.R. Ochieng: ‘Mau Mau was definitely not a nationalist movement. . . [it] had no nationalist programme. . . [and was] a primarily Kikuyu affair.’241 Professor Ogot concludes his study of ‘Mau Mau’ hymns: ‘. . .because of their exclusiveness, they cannot be regarded as the national freedom songs which every Kenyan youth can sing with pride and conviction’.²⁴² (This would appear to be a direct contradiction of his earlier statement: ‘As Barnett has rightly pointed out, in their political dimension, these [‘Mau Mau’] demands were an expression of African nationalist ideology.’²⁴³) An extreme example of this line is seen in Tabitha Kanogo, writing as a graduate student in the History Department at Nairobi, who says: ‘The African tribes were not the only ones to shoulder the Kikuyu burden. The settler tribe had its share of the load.’²⁴⁴ Kanogo presents ‘Mau Mau’ as the product of a Gikuyu ‘expansionist motive’ and uses a Colonial Report on Native Affairs as her main source.²⁴⁵ The characteristic aim of proponents of this line of interpretation – whether overtly anti-Gikuyu or not – is always to diminish the role of ‘Mau Mau’ in bringing Kenyan independence. Thus, while Kipkorir can say ‘ “Mau Mau” was the means by which the twin pegs of British imperialism in Kenya were dismantled. . .’²⁴⁶ he can also assert that ‘for a variety of reasons, 1958 must be regarded as the crucial year in the political history of pre-Independence Kenya,’²⁴⁷ and, ‘the “Mau Mau” Emergency was certainly responsible for the precise timing of the conclusion of British rule in Kenya but it must always be remembered that Kenya was the last of the East Africa territories to obtain formal Independence’.²⁴⁸

The social conditions of neo-colonial Kenya determining the ideologies of the history of ‘Mau Mau’ which produced the interpretations outlined here will be sketched in Chapter 6. Here it is necessary only to point to the essential differences in the way the movement has been interpreted, as it is those differences which determine the major divergences between the different bodies of fiction written about ‘Mau Mau’.

Notes

1. B. Kaggia, Roots of Freedom (Nairobi, EAPH, 1975), p. 196.

2. I. Leigh, In the Shadow of the Mau Mau (London, W.H. Allen, 1954), p. 217.

3. A. Clayton, Counter-Insurgency in Kenya 1952–60, (Nairobi, Trans-Africa Publishers, 1976), p. 1.

4. Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (London, HEB, 1967), p. 121.

5. D.L. Barnett and K. Njama, Mau Mau From Within (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1970), p. 20.

6. R. Yankwich, ‘Continuity in Kenya History: Negative Unity and the Legitimacy of the Mau Mau Rebellion’, Some Perspectives on the Mau Mau Movement, Special issue of Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), ed. W. Ochieng and K. Janmohamed (Nairobi, Kenya Literature Bureau, 1977), p. 356. Other essays in this volume will be cited as coming from Kenya Historical Review, V, 2 (1977); P. Mitchell, African Afterthoughts (London, Hutchinson, 1954), p. 266.

7. E.J. Keller Jr., ‘A Twentieth Century Model: the Mau Mau Transformation from Social Banditry to Social Rebellion’, Kenya Historical Society, 1 (1973), pp. 189__205.

8. R. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’ (The Hague, Mouton, 1971), pp. 407–17.

9. Tabitha M.J. Kanogo, ‘Rift Valley Squatters and Mau Mau, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2 (1977), p. 251.

10. See R. Buijtenhuijs, Mau Mau Twenty Years After (The Hague, Mouton, 1973), Chapter 4 in particular.

11. P. Evans, Law and Disorder (London, Secker & Warburg, 1956), p. 118.

12. E.g. K. Muchai, The Hardcore (Richmond B.C., LSM Press, 1973), pp. 14–16; M. Mathu, The Urban Guerilla (Richmond B.C., LSM Press, 1974), pp. 11–12.

13. E.g. J.K. Muriithi and P.N. Ndoria, War in the Forest (Nairobi, EAPH, 1971), p. 5; Mathu, p. 11.

14. E.g. Waruhiu Itote, Mau Mau General (Nairobi, EAPH, 1967), p. 156; Barnett and Njama, pp. 350–2.

15. J. Spencer, ‘KAU and “Mau Mau”: Some Connections’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), p. 211.

16. P. Mitchell, ‘The Governor of Kenya Points to the Future’, Kenya Controversy (London, Fabian Colonial Bureau, 1947), p. 7.

17. F. Majdalany, State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau (London, Longman, 1962), p. 10.

18. M. Wilson, p. 3.

19. Kenya Land Commission Report, Command Paper 4556 (London, HMSO, 1934), p. 129.

20. M.P.K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country (Nairobi, OUP, 1967), p. 18.

21. M.P.K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi, OUP, 1968), pp. 229–30.

22. Sorrenson, Land Reform, p. 18.

23. Barnett and Njama, p. 32. See also E.A. Brett, Colonialism and Under-development in East Africa (London, HEB, 1973), pp. 172–5.

24. R. Van Zwanenberg, ‘Kenya’s Primitive Colonial Capitalism – The Economic Weakness of Kenya’s Settlers Up to 1940’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, IX 2(1975), p. 279.

25. D.H. Rawcliffe, The Struggle for Kenya (London, Victor Gollancz, 1954), p. 18.

26. D.L. Barnett, ‘ “Mau Mau”: The Structural Integration and Disintegration of Aberdare Guerilla Forces’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1963, p. 37.

27. Sorrenson, Origins, pp. 232–8.

28. Van Zwanenberg, p. 291.

29. Evidence and Report of the Native Labour Commission, 1912–13 (East Africa Protectorate Government Publication), p. 108.

30. Barnett, p. 37.

31. D.F. Gordon, ‘Mau Mau and Decolonisation: Kenya and the Defeat of Multiracialism in East and Central Africa’, Kenya Historical Review,V, 2 (1977), p. 333.

32. C.G. Rosberg and J. Nottingham, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (New York, Praeger, 1966), p. 287.

33. Ibid., p. 43.

34. Sorrenson, Land Reform, p. 28.

35. Quoted ibid., p. 74.

36. Charity Waciuma, Daughter of Mumbi (Nairobi, EAPH, 1969), p. 52.

37. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep not, Child (London, HEB, 1964, reset 1976).

38. J.M. Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee (Nairobi, OUP, 1963), p. 21.

39. Majdalany, p. 141.

40. Ibid., p. 147.

41. Evans, p. 170.

42. Itote, ‘Mau Mau’ General, p. 132.

43. Muchai, p. 24.

44. Ibid.

45. Barnett and Njama, p. 137.

46. H.K. Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga, ed. R. Whittier (Nairobi, EALB, 1975), p. 60.

47. Sunday Times, London, 29 March 1953, p. 7, col. 1.

48. See e.g. Leigh, p. 87.

49. A. Marshall MacPhee, Kenya (London, Ernest Benn, 1968), p. 131.

50. My account here is drawn from Rosberg and Nottingham pp. 286 92.

51. Sorrenson, Land Reform, p. 101.

52. Brett, p. 173.

53. R.L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya (Princeton UP, 1976), p. 292.

54. F. Furedi, The Social Composition of the Mau Mau Movement in the White Highlands’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, I, 4 (1974), p. 493.

55. E.g. ‘In Government and mission hospitals there is roughly one bed for every 102 Europeans – and only one for every 768 Africans and Arabs.’ P. Bolsover, The Truth about Kenya (London, The Communist Party, 1953), p. 7.

56. It was stated in the House of Commons in 1954 that the average amount spent on a white child’s education in Kenya in 1952 was £49.6s as against 3s for black children. See G. Delf, Jomo Kenyatta (London, Victor Gollancz, 1961), p. 156.

57. In 1953 the annual per capita income of whites in Kenya was 25 times that of Africans: £660: £27. Delf, p. 156.

58. Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 206.

59. Sharon B. Stichter, ‘Workers, Trade Unions, and the Mau Mau Rebellion’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, IX, 2 (1975), p. 267.

60. F. Furedi, ‘The African Crowd in Nairobi: Popular Movements and Elite Politics’, Journal of African History, XIV, 2 (1973), p. 281.

61. Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 232.

62. Muchai, p. 14.

63. Mathu, p. 15.

64. Spencer, p. 215.

65. Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 43.

66. For a clear and detailed account of Gikuyu politics 1920–50 see Rosberg and Nottingham Chs. 2–6 on which my account is based.

67. Barnett and Njama, p. 39.

68. Ibid., pp. 198–202.

69. Maina wa Kinyatti, Thunder, particularly part 1 ‘Mobilization songs’, pp. 11–49.

70. Barnett and Njama, p. 199.

71. Odinga, p. 123.

72. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London, Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 223.

73. Rosberg and Nottingham, pp. 245–6.

74. M. Tamarkin, ‘Mau Mau in Nakuru’, Journal of African History, XVII, 1 (1976), pp. 119–34.

75. For an account of the role played by women in ‘Mau Mau’ see K. Santilli, ‘Kikuyu Women in the Mau Mau Revolt: A Closer Look’, Ufahamu (1977), pp. 143–59.

76. Tamarkin, p. 127.

77. Ibid., p. 126.

78. Spencer, p. 208.

79. Ibid., p. 209.

80. Kaggia, p. 114.

81. Spencer, p. 212.

82. M. Slater, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (London, Secker & Warburg, 1955), p. 143.

83. Cf. Spencer, pp. 214–5.

84. Spencer, p. 214.

85. Kaggia, p. 113.

86. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement Mau Mau’, p. 170. Translations from the French are mine.

87. Furedi, Social Composition, p. 491.

88. Ibid., p. 493, summary and quotation.

89. Tamarkin, p. 129.

90. Furedi, Social Composition, p. 496.

91. Spencer, p. 127.

92. Tamarkin, p. 121.

93. Majdalany, p. 70; ‘. . . the new revolutionary movement was a wholly tribal manifestation aimed at tribal domination, not a national liberation movement.’

94. F.D. Corfìeld, The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, an Historical Survey, Cmd. 1030 (Nairobi, Government Printer, 1960), pp. 205–17.

95. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 317.

96. Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Mau Mau: The Peak of African Political Organization in Colonial Kenya’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), p. 306.

97. Wachanga, p. 9. See also Stichter, p. 269.

98. See Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Political Organization’, pp. 308–9 as well as Thunder; B.A. Ogot, ‘Politics, Culture and Music in Central Kenya: A Study of Mau Mau Hymns, 1951–56’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), p. 277.

99. Barnett and Njama, p. 200.

100. C. Farrell, ‘Mau Mau: A Revolt or a Revolution?’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), p. 193.

101. Leigh, p. 13.

102. Evans, p. 27; Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 194.

103. Evans, p. 4.

104. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 195.

105. Gordon, p. 345.

106. Barnett and Njama, p. 72; Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 277; Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 192.

107. Clayton, p. 5.

108. Rosberg and Nottingham (p. 286) quote a government estimate of 100,000.

109. Leigh, p. 83.

110. Barnett, p. 67.

111. Ibid., p. 73.

112. Ibid., p. 74.

113. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 244.

114. For precise composition see Clayton pp. 23–5.

115. Quoted Evans, p. 280.

116. Despite, for example, allegations about supplies of arms from Ethiopia such as that to be found in G. Bennett and A. Smith, ‘Kenya: From “White Man’s Country” to Kenyatta’s State 1944–1963’, History of East Africa’ Vol. III, ed. D.A. Low and A. Smith (Oxford, Clarendon, 1976), p. 131.

117. Odinga, p. 124.

118. D. Mukaru Ng’ang’a, ‘Mau Mau, Loyalists and Politics in Murang’a, 1952–1970’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2 (1977), p. 369; Wachanga, p. 90.

119. P. Goodhart and I. Henderson, The Hunt for Kimathi (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1958), p. 17.

120. R. Ruark, Something of Value (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1955), p. 389.

121. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 223.

122. Clayton, p. 54.

123. Rawcliffe, p. 69.

124. Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Political Organization’, p. 297.

125. Goodhart and Henderson, p. 17.

126. Leigh, p. 12.

127. Kariuki, p. 96.

128. Ngugi Kabiro, Man in the Middle (Richmond B.C., LSM Press, 1973), p. 50.

129. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 287.

130. Clayton, p. 42; Barnett and Njama, p. 217.

131. Rawcliffe, p. 66.

132. The Times, London, 12 December 1952, p. 6, col. 6.

133. Evans, p. 90.

134. Manchester Guardian, 26 November 1953, p. 7, col. 3.

135. Evans, p. 163.

136. Clayton, p. 38, both quotations.

137. F. Kitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs (London, Barrie & Rockliff, 1960), p. 27.

138. Waciuma, p. 130.

139. Mathu, p. 17.

140. Barnett p. 67.

141. M. Blundell, So Rough a Wind (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 199.

142. Quoted, Evans, p. 274.

143. Ibid., pp. 259–77.

144. Report to the Secretary of Statefor the Colonies by the Parliamentary Delegation to Kenya, Jan. 1954, Cmd. No. 9081 (London, HMSO), p. 7.

145. Evans, p. 235.

146. Clayton, p. 54.

147. Corfield, p. 168.

148. Wachanga, p. 85; Barnett and Njama, p. 355.

149. Majdalany, p. 187.

150. Barnett and Njama, p. 35.

151. R. Whittier, ‘Introduction to Wachanga’s The Swords of Kirinyaga, p. xiii. See also the comments on Gikuyu social stratification in Chapter 6.

152. Furedi, Social Composition, p. 486.

153. Ibid., p. 495.

154. Ibid., p. 497.

155. Ibid., pp. 497–8.

156. Furedi, African Crowd, p. 286.

157. Ibid., p. 288.

158. Ibid.

159. Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Political Organization, p. 291.

160. Tamarkin, p. 128.

161. Ibid., p. 129.

162. Stichter, p. 260.

163. Spencer, p. 205.

164. Stichter, p. 264.

165. Ibid., p. 265.

166. Furedi, Social Composition, p. 502.

167. Ibid., p. 498.

168. Blundell, So Rough a Wind, p. 136.

169. Sorrenson, Land Reform, p. 108.

170. Ng’ang’a, p. 368.

171. Ibid., p. 366.

172. Ibid., p. 371.

173. Ibid., p. 373.

174. Leigh, p. 13.

175. L.S.B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau (London, Methuen, 1954), p. 26.

176. Barnett and Njama, p. 119.

177. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, pp. 333–4.

178. Ibid., p. 333.

179. Tom Mboya, The Kenya Question: An African Answer, Fabian Tract 302 (London, Fabian Colonial Bureau, September 1956), p. 17.

180. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 97.

181. Whittier, p. viii.

182. Mathu, pp. 16–17.

183. Muchai, p. 85.

184. Mathu, p. 12.

185. Barnett and Njama, p. 115.

186. Muriithi, p. 20.

187. Barnett and Njama, p. 153.

188. Ibid., p. 155.

189. Ibid.

190. Ibid.

191. Ibid., Chapter XX, particularly p. 456.

192. D. Maughan Brown, ‘Social Banditry: Hobsbawm’s Model and “Mau Mau”. ’, African Studies 39, 1 (1980), pp. 77–97.

193. Quoted Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Political Organization’, p. 307.

194. Barnett and Njama, p. 149.

195. For an analysis of the very real complexities of the relations involved, particularly those between the settlers and the colonial state, which my account does not have the scope to do justice to, see, in particular: Lonsdale, J., ‘State and Peasantry in Colonial Africa’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Peoples History and Socialist Theory (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 106–17; Lonsdale, J. and Berman, B., ‘Coping with the Contradictions: The Development of the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895–1914’, Journal of African History, 20 (1979), pp. 487–505, and ‘Crises of Accumulation, Coercion and the Colonial State: The Development of the Labor Control System in Kenya, 1919–1929’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 14, 1(1980), pp. 55–81.

196. Leigh, p. 211. See also Blundell’s comment that Lyttleton (Secretary of State) ‘. . .had committed himself to the clear cut view that there were no economic causes behind the growth of Mau Mau’, So Rough a Wind, p. 109.

197. Parliamentary Delegation Report 1954, p. 4.

198. Behind Mau Mau, The Voice of Kenya Organisation (Nairobi, n.d. but probably 1953), p. 1.

199. Blundell, So Rough a Wind, p. 171.

200. Quoted Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 318.

201. Corfield, p. 220.

202. Mitchell, African Afterthoughts, p. 260.

203. J.C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi, Government Printer, 1954), p. 1. The 7th impression carries the caveat on the title page: ‘Published for information, but has not yet been considered by Government.’

204. Ibid., p. 15.

205. T.G. Askwith, Kenya’s Progress (Nairobi, Eagle Press, 1958), p. 77.

206. J.W. Stapleton, The Gate Hangs Well (London, Hammond, 1956), p. 209.

207. Leigh, p. 45.

208. Barnett and Njama gloss ngata as: ‘The bone which connects the head and the spinal column of the goat and contains seven holes’ (p. 502).

209. Kariuki, p. 30.

210. Barnett and Njama, p. 121.

211. This was suggested by many of the settler writers and apologists, e.g. J. Cameron’s statement that ‘Mau Mau’ was a ‘fearsome conspiracy of violence, with a strong core of witchcraft and satanism.’ The African Revolution (London, Thames & Hudson, 1961), p. 61.

212. Kariuki, p. 28.

213. Barnett and Njama, p. 126.

214. Leigh, p. 44.

215. Corfield, p. 167.

216. Letter from D.L. Barnett to Buijtenhuijs, quoted Buijtenhuįjs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 294.

217. C.T. Stoneham, Mau Mau (London, Museum Press, 1953), p. 30.

218. Carothers, p. 14.

219. Goodhart and Henderson, p. 17.

220. Leigh, p. 46.

221. Corfield, p. 167.

222. The forest fighters even had a rule, according to Itote (Mau Mau General, p. 289) that ‘at night, cigarettes must be covered or smoked within a house.’

223. Leigh, p. 87.

224. Jack Ensoll, ‘Now It Can Be Told’, Kenya Weekly News, 10 February 1956, p. 24.

225. Amilcar Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, Return to the Source (New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 43.

226. Barnett and Njama, p. 131.

227. Ibid., p. 119.

228. Kariuki, p. 83.

229. Ibid., p. 139.

230. E.g. Muchai, p. 43.

231. Rosberg and Nottingham, p. 247.

232. Buijtenhuijs, Le Mouvement ‘Mau Mau’, p. 264.

233. Mathu, p. 87.

234. G.G. Gikoyo, We Fought for Freedom (Nairobi, EAPH, 1979).

235. Barnett and Njama, p. 221.

236. Ibid., p. 479.

237. Wachanga, p. 29.

238. Barnett and Njama, p. 335.

239. Rosberg and Nottingham, p. xvii.

240. E.I. Steinhart, ‘The Nyangire Rebellion of 1907: Anti-Colonial Protest and the Nationalist Myth’, Protest Movements in Colonial Africa: Aspects of Early African Response to European Rule (New York, Syracuse University Eastern African Studies Program, 1973), p. 68.

241. Quotations and summary from Maina wa Kinyatti, ‘Political Organization’, p. 303.

242. Ogot, ‘Politics, Culture and Music’, p. 286.

243. Ibid., p. 277.

244. Kanogo, p. 251.

245. Ibid., pp. 250–1.

246. B.E. Kipkorir, ‘Mau Mau and the Politics of the Transfer of Power in Kenya, 1957–60’, Kenya Historical Review, V, 2(1977), p. 325.

247. Ibid., p. 324.

248. Ibid., p. 326.