Aagaard African Adventures

When someone has been through a war and experienced the earth-shattering and gruesome details firsthand, he is often reluctant to talk about it. The WWII veteran does not readily share his tales with “outsiders,” nor does the Vietnam vet. The pain of recollection and the fear of being misunderstood or not appreciated are very real to all these heroes. Finn was very much the same; I knew he had been involved in the Mau Mau movement, the Kenya native people’s fight for independence, but when I asked him about it early in our marriage, something in his voice told me not to go there. He would sometimes tell funny stories about cleaning his gun in the back of the chemistry lab at college, and I had seen a picture of his mother, who knew nothing of firearms, with a huge holstered handgun strapped to her side. He never told any specific details; he clearly did not want to talk about it.

Imagine my surprise when, while listening to CDs on which he’d recorded some stories only a few months before he died, I heard him talk at length about his memories from the Mau Mau period. It was clear from his voice that it cost him a lot to recall that stage of his life, but it was obvious that he wanted to share it with us, else he would not have told any of it. This was not a story he was proud of, but it was very much part of his life and no doubt influenced who he became later. The following pages are pretty much quotations from his tales recorded in December 1999.

Mau Mau started in 1952 when they arrested Jomo Kenyatta. He was the big man among the Kikuyu, the largest and most advanced tribe in Kenya. He was tried and convicted of instigating and leading a subversive, murderous organization. Its name is a mystery; no one has ever been able to explain the origin. A state of emergency was declared by the British government. The aim of the Mau Mau was to get rid of all the Europeans, the whites, kick them out. You can’t really blame them for that; the Europeans had come in and taken over their country and said ‘We are lords and masters’ without so much as a by-your-permission. ‘It is for your own good,’ they said, but who was going to believe that?

They went about it in a distasteful, terrorist manner, killing men, women, and children; they hacked them to pieces—it was rather messy. They would attack isolated farms and plantations. Kikuyus were often employed by these farmers because they were good, intelligent workers. The Mau Mau would show up at a farm whose servants would either already be members or would be intimidated into going along. The houseboy would come in to the room with the soup as the family sat down to dinner, and right behind him was a bunch of “Micks,” the nickname given to gang members. They brandished their pangas (machetes) and chopped everyone up, then looked for guns that were stashed away in the closets and corners before they went on their merry way.

People eventually learned not to let the servants in after dark, keep guns locked up, bar windows, and leave security lights on. The British government hired a lot of young police officers and sent troops in to help in the operations against the Mau Mau uprising.

The official number of casualties in the period from 1952 to 1957 was an appalling 11,500 Kikuyu, 1,920 other Africans, 95 Europeans (or whites), and 29 Asians. The uprising was much more a civil war than a racial one. Gripping terror was everywhere; Robert Ruark grasps and describes the atmosphere eminently well in his two books Something of Value and Uhuru. Before hearing Finn’s stories just before he died, I had never quite understood why he did not like me to read the former and would not even have the latter in the house; apparently he did not want to expose me to this dark side of history. Long before the hunting ban, when we casually discussed what we should do if and when we left Kenya, he was adamant about not moving to any other African country. He insisted it would be like going from the frying pan into the fire; he did not want his children to go through the terror that he had endured while Kenya fought for its independence. Modern weaponry and help from outside would make similar fighting thirty to forty years later much more dangerous than what he had encountered during the Mau Mau uprising. Time after time he was proven right as one African nation after another went through struggles for independence; he did not want to subject his family to what he felt were inevitable consequences.

The Mau Mau tried to get all the Kikuyu into the fold as it were; it was done by oathing. The oaths were quite disgusting and worked on people’s superstitions and fears. The old tribal societies were full of taboos, unclean stuff; if you were involved in taboos you would become cursed. To touch a corpse was unclean, and you had to see a witch doctor to get cleansed by providing the required number of goats, sugar for brewing beer, shillings for the old gentleman’s trouble. If someone died inside his hut, it too was considered unclean and the hut had to be destroyed. This is why in the old days, if someone was about to die, the family would hurriedly bring the sick person outside and leave him under a tree with water and some food, and then the hyena would take care of the matter. In this way you neither touched a corpse nor were you forced to destroy the hut.

Mother’s milk was taboo for a man, as was menstrual blood, so the Mau Mau, to break down and tie these people entirely to them, used menstrual blood and other strong taboo items in their oathing ceremonies. The people who took these oaths would feel that they now were completely divorced from tribal society; the only place they would be accepted was in the Mau Mau. Much like gangs of today. They had little choice—it was ‘Take the oath or take the chop’—so a large proportion of the Kikuyu joined the movement, however unwillingly. There were, however, some very brave Kikuyu, particularly Christian converts, who refused to take the oath; they were martyred, killed for their religious beliefs. Others, loyalists who did not take the oath, eventually formed home-guard units to protect villages from the terrorists.

It was due to the Mau Mau uprising and the raiding of isolated white farms and rural police stations that gun laws came into being in Kenya. Before this time you were supposed to have a gun license, but it was merely a form of taxation. The district officer would record your gun and its serial number so they could have some record if it was stolen. Nobody questioned how many guns you had; you could own any number you wanted. The new law stated that either the gun had to be on your person, within your control, or it must be locked up in a police-inspected and approved gun safe. Another option was to have your guns stored at the police station, free of charge. If a gun was stolen from you and you had been careless—for example, left it in your vehicle—you would be prosecuted, which under the circumstances was an understandable and responsible attitude.

It was because of these new gun laws that Finn and his college classmates, who were all part of a home-guard unit, brought their guns along to class. They all carried the sporting rifles they had brought from home. The local police inspector would periodically come up to the college and call the male student body out to go on patrol or chase a gang of “Micks” reported in the area; thus they constantly had to be on the ready.

At Egerton College I carried my old 8x60 to classes. My good friend Mike Williams had a sporterized .303. I remember the dismay of the chemistry teacher, who was fairly new out from England, when he realized that I was sitting on the back bench in his lab cleaning my 8x60, looking through the barrel and wiping it out, while he was lecturing on amino acids or something of similar interest. He was perfectly shocked and horrified and blew up. We all thought he was making an awful fuss over nothing at all. For a while I had a .22 Hornet. One evening while walking back to the dormitory on the college grounds, a little steenbok was standing there just asking to be shot. So I hammered him and brought it to the cook, saying: “Meat—serve it to us!” I was later told that the Principal of the college, who was also fresh out from England, on hearing the shot dived under his bed. How much truth was in that report I do not know.

Mike Williams, apart from his .303, also had a .22. He had the bad habit of putting a round in the chamber, holding the trigger back, and gently closing the bolt. It was a stupid way to carry a gun, with the firing pin resting on the primer. One day Mike was carrying the gun slung from his shoulder in that condition when the strap broke. The rifle dropped straight down, hit the ground, and fired. Mike looked around and exclaimed: “I wonder where . . .” when suddenly he clutched his shoulder. The bullet had entered his armpit and gone out through the top of his shoulder without hitting any bone or major blood vessel. He was lucky! He spent a couple of days in the sanatorium. I don’t know if they poured him full of iodine or what sort of horrible things they did to him.

While we were still at Egerton College, all the boys were in the police reserve. If a gang came over to that country, John Toft, the local police inspector, would come up and collect us to go chase the gang. We would grab our guns, get into some sort of uniform, and go chase the Micks around. We carried our own sporting rifles and were certainly not ill-prepared. I remember one such incident when we were called and dashed off. The gang was supposed to be close- by, but it turned out that they were not. We tracked them up the Mau Hills, through the bamboo, up to the top about ten thousand feet, where we caught up with them. I was not in front; someone else was point man, a young, local farmer who was carrying a shotgun loaded with Triple A, which has about thirty-seven pellets to a load, not a very big pellet. He also carried a .45 Colt service, a big double-action revolver that I envied him for; I wanted that revolver! I was carrying a .32 Beretta as my handgun at the time.

Across the glade we saw the gang’s sentry, one man standing looking in our direction, so our point man flung up his shotgun and fired. The fellow dropped! It was almost one hundred paces—could the shotgun have killed at that distance? It turned out that two pellets had hit him, one at the base of the throat and one somewhere else. One pellet had done it. I guess it was his time to go.

The gang had fled and it was getting dark, so we put the body up in a tree and found a village nearby that was half Masai and half Kikuyu. This was on the border of Masai land and Kikuyu land where quite a bit of intermarriage occurred. There were no men around. At ten thousand feet it started to get a bit chilly, even though we were at the equator; I was wearing shorts and a shirt with a thin safari jacket over it; due to the urgency of the mission, I had not even brought a sweater. I looked around and found a hut with an old crone sitting by a fire in the middle of the room; I thought, It is cozy and warm in here—this will do just fine!—and sat down by the old crone, smiling and trying to be friendly. Suddenly I felt something on my legs and looked down; they were black with fleas. This was obviously not a good solution, so I left hurriedly and built a fire outside. Someone had stripped the corpse we had stuck up the tree; he had been wearing a couple of raincoats and other clothes under that. I grabbed one of the overcoats and put it on, even if it had a hole with some blood around it. The whole night I lay by the outside fire, roasting one side while the other froze; none of us slept well—not a happy memory.

The next morning we went off to see if we could get on the tracks of the gang again, but found it pretty hopeless. John Toft said: ‘We need fingerprints from the fellow we killed so we can have him identified.’ We did not want to carry the whole body with us; we took it down from the tree and told one of the trackers, an Ndorobo from a forest hunting tribe, to cut the hands off. He pulled out his simi, or short sword, and sliced those two hands off as neatly as if he did it every day. An impressive feat when you think of all the wrist bones and tendons involved. John stuck the hands in his pack, and off we went.

This was fairly common procedure with the security forces. If you killed a Mau Mau way up in the forest and had to have him fingerprinted, you took the hands off the corpse and brought them back. Then the newspapers got hold of this information and made quite a hullabaloo about security forces collecting grisly trophies from deceased guerrillas, and the practice had to be stopped. Thereafter, we had to take the whole fingerprinting outfit, ink, the appropriate forms, and the plate on which to spread ink. Some poor chap had to carry all this gear so you could fingerprint correctly.

While I was still at Egerton we were doing a patrol one day and got into some village. There were Mau Mau recruiters present who started running as soon as they saw us. We shouted at them to stop, but they didn’t; consequently one of them collected an 8mm in the back of the head. Messy! If the stupid fool had not run, we would have checked his kipande, an identification paper that had his thumb print, name, and where he was born. He had nothing on him that indicated he was a Mau Mau, but the intelligence we had was that he was a recruiter and a fairly big noise in the Mau Mau. If he had not run, we would have looked him over, examined his papers, and let him go. But running proved fatal.

The Mau Mau produced a lot of homemade guns using water pipe with shotgun cartridges for ammunition. These firearms could be quite effective at short range; a sharpened door bolt driven by a band of innertube set off the shotgun cartridge. After one shoot-up, one such homemade gun was found, well blown up, with an antitank-gun cartridge stuck in the chamber. The case was all split up and blood was all over the place!

The Micks raided some police stations with success early on during the Emergency. In the process they got some Lancaster submachine guns and rifles and even a few Bren guns, and a lot of ammo, but the police soon learned not to let this sort of thing happen. After one fight with the rebels, the police recovered a Holland and Holland shotgun of pretty good grade (side-by-side double sidelock, of course) and a Purdey best-quality .318 bolt-action rifle, plus a bolt-action Mauser .22. The gang had obviously raided someone who had pretty good taste in firearms.

When I was through with Egerton College, I joined the Kenya Regiment and went through three months of training camp. Later I served in the Operations Company, which to begin with was in Masai land. If someone got murdered or the Mau Mau were rumored in the area, we would take off and try to catch them. I never got much action there, but do remember an incident in which it was reported that a Masai herdsman had been killed by the thugs and that some of his cattle had been taken. Other Masai had retrieved the remaining cattle, but had not bothered with the corpse. First things first: In their minds live cattle were more important than a dead body. We were asked to go out the next morning and bring the body back, but search as we did, we could not find a trace of it. There was some blood on the grass, and finally we found a flat piece of bone, a part of the skull, all that the hyena had left. The Mau Mau had taken his clothes and his spear; the hyena had cleaned up the rest of him.

In the Kenya Regiment we carried the British army equipment of the day. We were issued Number 5 Lee-Enfield rifles, a shortened version of the so-called jungle carbine.

Noncommissioned squad leaders could draw a Sterling 9mm submachine gun. There were a few M1 carbines around that the officers usually grabbed; there was one Bren gun per squad. A patrol was usually a squad of half a dozen fellows with a tracker or two; with them there would be a Bren gun and probably a submachine gun and rifles. The order was given out that the Sterling must not be fired at full automatic, only in repetition—in other words, semiautomatic; otherwise people would fire wild bursts and miss completely. Contacts with the Mau Mau at that stage were fleeting; they would fire a few shots and be gone. It was more like hunting dangerous game than anything else; you had to make the most out of fleeting opportunities, and the officers did not want misses. So the submachine gun had to be aimed and fired semiautomatic; if you fired in bursts you had some explaining to do to the commanding officer. We would bump into rhino and buffalo from time to time in the forest; I would feel quite safe with that Bren gun slung across my chest with a full magazine on it.

Normally we went out with provisions for a three-day patrol; that was really as much as you wanted to carry, particularly in rough going, up the mountains, in high altitudes through the bamboo, slipping and sliding. We carried ponchos that made half a shelter tent and a sleeping bag. The pack was mostly full of food and a couple of sets of underwear and—an important item—spare socks. We had what was called C-rations; a lot of it was canned and very heavy. We would sort through these rations before a patrol and throw out potatoes and some of the cans and add rice and curry powder and canned stew or bully beef. Our main meal would be in the evening; we had hard, dry crackers for breakfast and a lot of tea. The British army cannot move anywhere without its tea, and a lot of sugar.

Camp would not be made until it was pretty much dark—and only if it was reasonable and there were no signs of Micks around; the darkness would hide telltale evidence of smoke. Someone would be carrying an aluminum saucepan, and we would pour everything into it—rice, whatever meat we had, curry powder—and stir it all up and call it goulash. It tasted jolly good most of the time at the end of the day! If there were no signs of unwelcome neighbors, we often would not post sentries, but if there was any reason to suspect terrorists in the area, we would take turns; one guy would remain awake and alert.

The British government hired a lot of young men as police; we called them “Two-Year Wonders.” Each had a two-year contract, and a lot of them stayed on after the Emergency. One of these was a good friend of ours, Bob Cronchy, who served at a remote police station and saw quite a bit of action. His favorite weapon was a Tommy gun; I don’t know where he found it, but he loved that gun. “Give a man a burst with that, and you cut him in two!” he would say. On one occasion an isolated farm was attacked by the Mau Mau and Bob was called out; they had radiotelephones by then. As he approached the scene, the Micks ambushed him and started shooting up his Land Rover, so he engaged the hand throttle (Land Rovers had hand throttles in those days) and bailed out, letting the vehicle go on for the thugs to shoot at while he did a flank attack and saved the situation.

After a while the Mau Mau found that they just could not fight the security forces; they simply were not capable. Kikuyu land was in the center of Kenya; there was no way the Communists or any other outside forces could get to the terrorists with weapons and other supplies and reinforcements, though I am certain they would have loved to do so. Consequently, there was no outside help, no AK-47s or any other sophisticated heavy artillery, and no military expertise provided to the rebels.

I was still attached to the Kenya Regiment when I was sent to the Tribal Police Combat Unit up in Kikuyu land, where we did patrols and ambushes and such. At that stage the Mau Mau were all in the forest, but they would come out at night and go into the cultivated fields and steal whatever they could in the way of food. We would ambush likely routes and try to catch them. One of my ambushes had luck, which did not happen very often. We got some guys down; there was a bit of shooting. I was using the 9mm Sterling submachine gun and managed to get a few bullets into someone, who became deceased. We dragged him out of there and put him across the hood of the Land Rover and drove him in triumph to the local police station.

You heard many grisly tales during this period. A couple of Ndorobo forest guards had the misfortune of being caught by the Mau Mau, who killed them and worked their bodies up and down with machetes, slashing and cutting. The victims were pretty messy when found, and it made you angry enough to want to wipe out the whole Kikuyu nation. For a while, anyway, one would have been happy to kill any Kikuyu one came across. What they did was strictly unnecessary, except that is the way people can be, especially the more primitive ones.

Then you heard about the Lari Massacre, in which the Mau Mau went into a village that was mostly composed of loyalists who had not joined their movement. They killed everyone, men, women, and children, and split pregnant women’s wombs open—nasty, messy. Again for a while after that you would have been happy to exterminate any Kikuyu in sight.

But on the whole, I can’t blame them. If I had been a young Kikuyu at that time, I might have been a Mau Mau; they had a right to fight for what was basically independence. The white man had come into their country and said, “We are lords and masters here—you will do what we tell you.” If someone tried that in this country, wouldn’t you fight too? I can’t blame them for revolting, but some of the ways they did it were pretty revolting.

Oh, well: “Things done long ago, and ill done.”