| Mau Mau Uprising | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
| Mau Mau[1][2][A] | British Army Kikuyu Home Guard |
||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| * Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi * Field Marshal Musa Mwariama * General China (Waruhiu Itote) * Stanley Mathenge |
* Sir Evelyn Baring (Governor) * General Sir George Erskine * Sir Kenneth O'Connor (Chief Justice) |
||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| Unknown | 10,000 regular troops (African and British) 21,000 police, 25,000 Kikuyu Home Guard[3][4] | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| Mau Mau:[5]
Killed: 10,527; Captured: 2,633; Surrendered: 2,714; Civilians killed: African 1,826. With estimates of a total of 50,000 from all sides;[6] |
British and African security forces:
Killed: 200 Wounded: 579 Civilians killed: African 1,800; Asians 26; Europeans 32; Civilians wounded: Africans 918, Asians 36, Europeans 26.[3] |
||||||
The Mau Mau Uprising (also known as the Mau Mau Revolt, Mau Mau Rebellion and the Kenya Emergency) was a military conflict that took place in Kenya[B] between 1952 and 1960. It involved a Kikuyu-dominated anti-colonial group called Mau Mau and elements of the British Army, auxiliaries and anti-Mau Mau Kikuyu.[1][7]
The movement was unable to capture widespread public support.[8] The capture of rebel leader Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 signalled the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau uprising, and essentially ended the British military campaign.[9]
The conflict arguably set the stage for Kenyan independence in December 1963.[10] It created a rift between the European colonial community in Kenya and the Home Office in London,[2] but also resulted in violent divisions within the Kikuyu community.[11][12]
Contents |
The origin of the term Mau Mau is uncertain. According to some members of Mau Mau, they never referred to themselves as such, instead preferring the military title Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA).[13] Some publications, such as Fred Majdalany's State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau, claim that it was an anagram of Uma Uma (which means "get out get out") and was a military codeword based on a secret language-game Kikuyu boys used to play at the time of their circumcision. Majdalany goes on to state that the British simply used the name as a label for the Kikuyu ethnic community without assigning any specific definition.[14]
As the movement progressed, a Swahili acronym was adopted: "Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru" meaning "Let the European go back to Europe (Abroad), Let the African regain Independence".[15] J.M. Kariuki, a member of Mau Mau who was detained during the conflict, postulates that the British preferred to use the term Mau Mau instead of KLFA in an attempt to deny the Mau Mau rebellion international legitimacy.[16] Kariuki also wrote that the term Mau Mau was adopted by the rebellion in order to counter what they regarded as colonial propaganda.[15]
The contemporary view saw Mau Mau as a savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult, an expression of unrestrained emotion rather than reason. Mau Mau allegedly sought to turn the Kikuyu people back to "the bad old days" before British rule.[17] By the mid-1960s, this view was being challenged by memoirs of former Mau Mau members and leaders that portrayed Mau Mau as an essential, if radical, component of African nationalism in Kenya, and by academic studies that analysed Mau Mau as a modern and nationalist response to the unfairness and oppression of colonial domination (though such studies downplayed the specifically Kikuyu nature of the movement).[18]
There continues to be vigorous debate within Kenyan society and among the academic community within and without Kenya regarding the nature of Mau Mau and its aims, as well as the response to and effects of the uprising.[19][20] Nevertheless, as many Kikuyu fought against Mau Mau on the side of the colonial government as joined them in rebellion[12] and, partly because of this, the conflict is now often regarded in academic circles as an intra-Kikuyu civil war,[11][20] a characterisation that remains extremely unpopular in Kenya.[21] Some academics argue that the reason the revolt was essentially limited to the Kikuyu people was, in part, that they were the hardest hit by British colonialism and its effects.[22]
Wunyabari O. Maloba regards the rise of the Mau Mau movement as "without doubt, one of the most important events in recent African history."[23] Oxford's David Anderson, however, considers Maloba's and similar work to be the product of "swallowing too readily the propaganda of the Mau Mau war",[24] noting the similarity between such analysis and the "simplistic"[24] earlier studies of Mau Mau. This earlier work cast the Mau Mau war in strictly bipolar terms, "as conflicts between anti-colonial nationalists and colonial collaborators".[24] Harvard's Caroline Elkins' 2005 study has met similar criticism, as well as being criticised for sensationalism.[25][26]
It is often assumed that in a conflict there are two sides in opposition to one another, and that a person who is not actively committed to one side must be supporting the other. During the course of a conflict, leaders on both sides will use this argument to gain active support from the "crowd". In reality, conflicts involving more than two persons usually have more than two sides, and if a resistance movement is to be successful, propaganda and politicization are essential.[27]
Throughout Kikuyu history, there have been two traditions: moderate-conservative and radical.[28] Despite the differences between them, there has been a continuous debate and dialogue between these traditions, leading to a great political awareness among the Kikuyu.[28][29] By 1950, these differences, and the impact of colonial rule, had given rise to three African political blocks: conservative, moderate nationalist and militant nationalist.[30] It has also been argued that Mau Mau was not explicitly national, either intellectually or operationally;[31] Bruce Berman argues that, "While Mau Mau was clearly not a tribal atavism seeking a return to the past, the answer to the question of "was it nationalism?" must be yes and no."[32] As the Mau Mau rebellion wore on, the violence forced the spectrum of opinion within the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru to polarise and harden into the two distinct camps of loyalist and Mau Mau.[33] This neat division between loyalists and Mau Mau was a product of the conflict, rather than a cause or catalyst of it, with the violence becoming less ambiguous over time,[34] in a similar manner to other situations.[35][36]
The principal item in the natural resources of Kenya is the land, and in this term we include the colony's mineral resources. It seems to us that our major objective must clearly be the preservation and the wise use of this most important asset.[37]
The primary British interest in Kenya was its land which, observed the British East Africa Commission of 1925, constituted "some of the richest agricultural soils in the world, mostly in districts where the elevation and climate make it possible for Europeans to reside permanently."[38] Though declared a colony in 1920, the formal British colonial presence in Kenya began with a proclamation on 1 July 1895, in which Kenya was claimed as a British protectorate.[39]
Even before 1895, however, Britain's presence in Kenya was marked by dispossession and violence. During the period in which Kenya's interior was being forcibly opened up for British settlement, an officer in the Imperial British East Africa Company asserted, "There is only one way to improve the Wakikuyu [and] that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies",[40] and colonial officers such as Richard Meinertzhagen wrote of how, on occasion, they massacred Kikuyu by the hundred.[41] This onslaught led Churchill, in 1908, to remark: "surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale."[42]
Kenyan resistance to British imperialism was there from the start—for example, the Kikuyu opposition of 1880–1900—and continued throughout the decades thereafter: the Nandi Revolt of 1895–1905;[43] the Giriama Uprising of 1913–4;[43] the women's revolt against forced labour in Murang'a in 1947;[44] and the Kalloa Affray of 1950.[45] (Nor did Kenyan protest against colonial rule end with Mau Mau. For example, in the years that followed, a series of successful non-violent boycotts were carried out).[46]
The Mau Mau rebellion can be regarded as a militant culmination of years of oppressive colonial rule and resistance to it,[47][48] with its specific roots found in three episodes of Kikuyu history between 1920 and 1940.[49] All of this is not, of course, to say that Kikuyu society was perfect, stable and harmonious before the British arrived. The Kikuyu in the nineteenth century were expanding and colonising new territory and already internally divided between wealthy land-owning families and landless families, the latter dependent on the former in a variety of ways.[50]
You may travel through the length and breadth of Kitui Reserve and you will fail to find in it any enterprise, building, or structure of any sort which Government has provided at the cost of more than a few sovereigns for the direct benefit of the natives. The place was little better than a wilderness when I first knew it 25 years ago, and it remains a wilderness to-day as far as our efforts are concerned. If we left that district to-morrow the only permanent evidence of our occupation would be the buildings we have erected for the use of our tax-collecting staff.[51]
A feature of all settler societies during the colonial period was the ability of European settlers to obtain for themselves a disproportionate share in landownership.[52] Kenya was thus no exception, with the first white settlers arriving in 1902 as part of Governor Sir Charles Eliot's plan to have a settler economy pay for the recently completed Uganda Railway.[53][54] The success of Eliot's planned settler economy would depend heavily on the availability of land, labour and capital,[55] and so, over the next three decades, the colonial government and settlers consolidated their control over Kenyan land, and 'encouraged' Africans to become wage labourers.
Through a series of expropriations, the colony's government seized about 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km2; 11,000 sq mi) of land, some of it in the especially fertile hilly-regions of Central and Rift Valley Provinces, areas later known as the White Highlands due to the exclusively-European farmland which existed there.[55] "In particular," the British government's 1925 East Africa Commission noted, "the treatment of the Giriama tribe [from the coastal regions] was very bad. This tribe was moved backwards and forwards so as to secure for the Crown areas which could be granted to Europeans."[56] Coupled with an increasing African population, the land expropriation became an increasingly bitter point of contention. The Kikuyu, who lived in the Kiambu, Nyeri and Murang'a districts of Central Province, were the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's land expropriation and European settlement;[57] by 1933, they had had over 109.5 square miles (284 km2) of their potentially highly valuable land alienated.[58] The Kikuyu did mount a legal challenge to the expropriation of their land, but a Kenya High Court decision of 1921 cemented its legality.[59]
As mentioned, the colonial government and White farmers also wanted cheap labour[60] which, for a period, the government acquired from Africans through force.[58][61] Confiscating land from Africans itself helped to create a pool of wage labourers, but the colony introduced measures that forced more Africans to submit to wage labour: the introduction of the Hut and Poll Taxes (1901 and 1910 respectively);[58][62] the establishment of reserves for each ethnic group, serving to isolate each ethnic group and exacerbate overcrowding;[63] the discouragement of African's growing cash crops;[58] the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1906) and an identification pass known as the kipande (1918) to control the movement of labour and to curb desertion;[58][64] and the exemption of wage labourers from forced labour and other compulsory, detested tasks such as conscription.[65][66]
African labourers were in one of three categories: squatter, contract, or casual.[C] By the end of WWI, squatters had become well established on European farms and plantations in Kenya, with Kikuyu squatters comprising the majority of agricultural workers on settler plantations.[55] An unintended consequence of colonial rule,[55] the squatters were targeted from 1918 onwards by a series of Resident Native Labourers Ordinances—criticised by at least some MPs[67]—which progressively curtailed squatter rights and subordinated African farming to that of the settlers.[68] The Ordinance of 1939 finally eliminated squatters' remaining tenancy rights, and permitted settlers to demand 270 days' labour from any squatters on their land.[69] and, after WWII, the situation for squatters deteriorated rapidly, a situation the squatters resisted fiercely.[70]
In the early 1920s, though, despite the presence of 100,000 squatters and tens of thousands more wage labourers,[71] there was still not enough African labour available to satisfy the settlers' needs.[72] The colonial government duly tightened the measures to force yet more Kenyans to become low-paid wage-labourers on settler farms.
The colonial government used the measures brought in as part of its land expropriation and labour 'encouragement' efforts to craft the third plank of its growth strategy for its settler economy: subordinating African farming to that of the Europeans.[58] Nairobi also assisted the settlers with rail and road networks, subsidies on freight charges, agricultural and veterinary services, and credit and loan facilities.[55] The near-total neglect of African farming during the first two decades of European settlement was noted by the East Africa Commission.[73]
The hatred toward colonial rule was hardly stemmed by the wanting provision of medical services for Africans,[74] nor by the fact that in 1923, for example, "the maximum amount that could be considered to have been spent on services provided exclusively for the benefit of the native population was slightly over one-quarter of the taxes paid by them".[51] The tax burden on Europeans in the early 1920s, meanwhile, was "absurdly" light.[51]
Kenyan employees were often appallingly treated by their European employers—sometimes even beaten to death by them—with some settlers arguing that Africans "were as children and should be treated as such". Amongst other offences, it was widely acknowledged that few settlers hesitated to flog their servants for petty offences. To make matters even worse, African workers were poorly served by colonial labour-legislation and a prejudiced legal-system. The vast majority of Kenyan employees' violations of labour legislation were settled with "rough justice" meted out by their employers. Most colonial magistrates appear to have been unconcerned by the illegal practice of settler-administered flogging; indeed, during the 1920s, flogging was the magisterial punishment-of-choice for African convicts. The principle of punitive sanctions against workers was not removed from the Kenyan labour statutes until the 1950s.[75]
The greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in our hands. . . . This land we have made is our land by right—by right of achievement.[76]
Until the mid-1930s, the two primary complaints were low African wages and the kipande.[24] From the early 1930s, however, two others began to come to prominence: effective and elected African-political-representation, and land.[24] The British response to this clamour for agrarian reform came in the early 1930s when they set up the Carter Land Commission.[77] The Commission reported in 1934, but its conclusions, recommendations and concessions to Kenyans were so conservative that any chance of a peaceful resolution to African land-hunger was ended.[47][78] In Nyanza, for example, the Commission restricted 1,029,422 Africans to 7,114 square miles (18,430 km2), while granting 16,700 square miles (43,000 km2) to 17,000 Europeans.[79] By the 1930s, and for the Kikuyu in particular, land had become the number one grievance concerning colonial rule,[24] the situation so acute by 1948 that 1,250,000 Kikuyu had ownership of 2,000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 British settlers owned 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²).
As a result of the situation in the highlands, thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952. At the same time, there was a small, but growing, class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu lands and forged strong ties with the colonial administration, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu.
Around 1943, residents of Olenguruone radicalised the traditional Kikuyu practice of oathing, and extended oathing to women and children.[80]
The first attempt to form a countrywide political party occurred on 1 October 1944.[81] This fledgling organisation was called the Kenya African Study Union (so named to mask its anti-colonial politics); its inaugural chairman was Harry Thuku, who soon resigned his chairmanship.[81] There is dispute over Thuku's reason for leaving KASU: Bethwell Ogot states that Thuku "found the responsibility too heavy";[81] David Anderson states that "he walked out in disgust" as the militant section of KASU took the initiative.[82] KASU changed its name to the KAU in 1946.
By the late 1940s the Kikuyu were a deeply divided people, increasingly in conflict among themselves as well as with the colonial political and economic order.[83]
The failure of the KAU to attain any significant reforms or redress of grievances from the colonial authorities shifted the political initiative to younger and more militant figures within the African trade union movement, among the squatters on the settler estates in the Rift Valley and in KAU branches in Nairobi and the Kikuyu districts of central province.[83]
In May 1951, the British Colonial Secretary, James Griffiths, visited Kenya, where the Kenya African Union (KAU) presented him with a list of demands ranging from the removal of alleged discriminatory legislation to the inclusion of 12 elected black representatives on the Legislative Council that governed the colony's affairs. Griffith proposed a Legislative Council in which the 30,000 white settlers received 14 representatives, the 100,000 Asians (mostly from South Asia) got six, the 24,000 Arabs one, and the 5,000,000 Africans five representatives to be nominated by the government.
Between 1952 and 1956, when the fighting was at its worst, the Kikuyu districts of Kenya became a police state in the very fullest sense of that term.[4]
Sir Philip Mitchell retired as Kenya's governor in summer 1952, having turned a blind eye to Mau Mau's increasing activity.[84] Through the summer of 1952, however, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton in London received a steady flow of reports from Acting Governor Henry Potter about the escalating seriousness of Mau Mau violence,[84] but it was not until the later part of 1953 that British politicians began to accept that the rebellion was going to take some time to deal with.[85] At first, the British discounted the Mau Mau rebellion because of their own technical and military superiority, which encouraged hopes for a quick victory.[85] The British army accepted the gravity of the uprising months before the politicians, but the army's appeals to London and Nairobi initially fell on deaf ears.[85] On 30 September 1952, Sir Evelyn Baring arrived in Kenya to permanently take over from Potter; Baring was given no warning by Mitchell or the Colonial Office about the gathering maelstrom into which he was stepping.[84] On 3 October, Mau Mau probably claimed their first European victim when they stabbed a woman to death near her home in Thika.[84] A week later, on 9 October, Senior Chief Waruhiu had been shot to death in broad daylight in his car.[86] Waruhiu had been one of the strongest supporters of the British presence in Kenya, and had profited accordingly. His assassination gave Baring the final impetus to request permission from the Colonial Office to declare a State of Emergency (see below).[87]
Aside from military operations against Mau Mau fighters in the forests, the British attempt to defeat the movement broadly came in two stages: the first, relatively limited in scope, came during the period in which they had still failed to accept the seriousness of the revolt; the second came afterwards. During the first stage, the British tried to decapitate the movement by declaring a State of Emergency before arresting 180 alleged Mau Mau leaders (see Operation Jock Scott below) and subjecting six of them to a show trial (the Kapenguria Six); the second stage began in earnest in 1954, when they undertook a series of major economic, military and penal initiatives. The second stage had three main planks: a large military-sweep of Nairobi leading to the internment of tens of thousands of the city's suspected Mau Mau members and sympathisers (see Operation Anvil below); the enaction of major agrarian reform (the Swynnerton Plan); and the institution of a vast villagisation programme for more than a million rural Kikuyu (see below).
On 20 October 1952, Governor Baring signed an order declaring a State of Emergency. Early the next morning, Operation Jock Scott was launched: the British carried out a mass-arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and 180 other alleged Mau Mau leaders within Nairobi.[88][89] Jock Scott did not decapitate the movement's leadership as hoped: news of the operation was leaked. Thus, while the moderates on the wanted list awaited capture, the real militants, such as Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge (both later principal leaders of Mau Mau's forest armies), fled to the forests.[90] The day after the round up, another prominent loyalist chief, Nderi, was hacked to pieces,[91] and a series of gruesome murders against settlers were committed throughout the months that followed.[92] The violent and random nature of British tactics during the months after Jock Scott served merely to alienate ordinary Kikuyu and drive many of the wavering Kikuyu majority into Mau Mau's arms.[93]
Three battalions of the King's African Rifles were recalled from Uganda, Tanganyika and Mauritius, giving the regiment five battalions in all in Kenya, a total of 3,000 African troops.[88] To placate settler opinion, one battalion of British troops, from the Lancashire Fusiliers, was also flown in from the Egypt to Nairobi on the first day of Operation Jock Scott.[94]
In November 1952, Baring requested assistance from the Security Service. For the next year, the Service's A.M. MacDonald would reorganise the Special Branch of the Kenya Police, promote collaboration with Special Branches in adjacent territories, and oversee coordination of all intelligence activity "to secure the intelligence Government requires".[95]
Our sources have produced nothing to indicate that Kenyatta, or his associates in the UK, are directly involved in Mau Mau activities, or that Kenyatta is essential to Mau Mau as a leader, or that he is in a position to direct its activities.[96]
In January 1953, six of the most prominent detainees from Jock Scott, including Kenyatta, were put on trial, primarily to justify the declaration of the Emergency to critics in London.[90][97] The trial itself was claimed to have featured a suborned lead defence-witness, a bribed judge, and other serious violations of the right to a fair trial.
African political activity was permitted to resume at the end of the military phase of the Emergency.[98]
Militarily, the British defeated Mau Mau in four years (1952–6).[99] The onset of the Emergency led hundreds, and eventually thousands, of Mau Mau adherents to flee to the forests, where a decentralised leadership had already begun setting up platoons.[100] The primary zones of Mau Mau military strength were the Aberdares and the forests around Mount Kenya, whilst a passive support-wing was fostered outside these areas.[101] In June 1953, General Sir George Erskine arrived and took up the post of Director of Operations, where he revitalised the British effort. His predecessor, Sir Alexander Cameron, became his Second in Command. In late 1953, security forces swept the Aberdare forest in Operation Blitz and captured and killed 125 guerrillas.
By 1954, Nairobi was regarded as the nerve centre of Mau Mau operations.[102] A major British military action came on 24 April 1954: Operation Anvil. Anvil was an ambitious attempt by British military forces to eliminate Mau Mau's presence within Nairobi in one fell swoop. 25,000 members of British security forces under the control of General Sir George Erskine were deployed as Nairobi was sealed off and underwent a sector-by-sector purge. All Africans were taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures, whereafter those who were not Kikuyu, Embu or Meru were released; Kikuyu, Embu and Meru remained in detention for screening.[D] Whilst the operation itself was conducted by Europeans, most suspected members of Mau Mau were picked out of groups of the Kikuyu-Embu-Meru detainees by an African informer. Male suspects were then taken off for further screening, primarily at Langata Screening Camp, whilst women and children were readied for 'repatriation' to the reserves (many of those slated for deportation had never set foot in the reserves before). Anvil lasted for two weeks, after which the capital had been cleared of all but certifiably-loyal Kikuyu; 20,000 Mau Mau suspects had been taken to Langata, and 30,000 more had been deported to the reserves.[103]
Already overcrowded, Baring knew the massive deportations to the reserves could only make things worse. Refusing to give more land to the Kikuyu in the reserves, which could be seen as a concession to Mau Mau, Baring turned instead in 1953 to Roger Swynnerton, Kenya's assistant director of agriculture.[104][105][106] The projected costs of the Swynnerton Plan were too high for the cash-strapped colonial government, so Baring tweaked repatriation and augmented the Swynnerton Plan with plans for a massive expansion of the Pipeline coupled with a system of works camps to make use of detainee labour. All Kikuyu employed for public works projects would now be employed on Swynnerton's poor-relief programmes, as would many detainees in the works camps.[104][107]
A variety of persuasive techniques were initiated by the colonial authorities to punish and break Mau Mau's support: Baring ordered punitive communal-labour, collective fines and other collective punishments, and further confiscation of land and property. By early 1954, tens of thousands livestock had been taken, and were allegedly never returned.[108]
It would be difficult to argue that the colonial government envisioned its own version of a gulag when the Emergency first started. Colonial officials in Kenya and Britain all believed that Mau Mau would be over in less than three months.[109]
When the mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves began in 1953, Baring and Erskine ordered all Mau Mau suspects to be screened. Of the scores of screening camps which sprang up, only fifteen were officially sanctioned by the colonial government. Larger detention camps were divided into compounds. The screening centres were staffed by settlers who were appointed temporary district-officers by Baring for their task.[110]
Thomas Askwith, the official tasked with designing the British 'detention and rehabilitation' programme during the summer and autumn of 1953, termed his system the Pipeline.[111] The British did not initially conceive of rehabilitating Mau Mau suspects through brute force and other ill-treatment—rather, Askwith's final plan, submitted to Baring in October 1953, was "a complete blueprint for winning the war against Mau Mau using socioeconomic and civic reform."[112] What developed, however, has been described as a British gulag.[113]
The Pipeline operated a white-grey-black classification system: 'whites' were cooperative detainees, and were repatriated back to the reserves; 'greys' had been oathed but were reasonably compliant, and were moved down the Pipeline to works camps in their local districts before release; and 'blacks' were the so-called 'hard core' of Mau Mau. These were moved up the Pipeline to special detention camps. Thus a detainee's position in Pipeline was a straightforward reflection of how cooperative the Pipeline personnel deemed her or him to be. Cooperation was itself defined in terms of a detainee's readiness to confess their Mau Mau oath. Detainees were screened and re-screened for confessions and intelligence, then re-classified accordingly.[114]
[T]here is something peculiarly chilling about the way colonial officials behaved, most notoriously but not only in Kenya, within a decade of the liberation of the [Nazi] concentration camps and the return of thousands of emaciated British prisoners of war from the Pacific. One courageous judge in Nairobi explicitly drew the parallel: Kenya's Belsen, he called one camp.[115]
A detainee's journey between two locations along the Pipeline could sometimes last days. During transit, there was frequently little or no food and water provided, and seldom any sanitation. Once in camp, talking was forbidden outside the detainees' accommodation huts, though improvised communication was rife. Such communication included propaganda and disinformation, which went by such names as the Kinongo Times, designed to encourage fellow detainees not to give up hope and so to minimise the number of those who confessed their oath and cooperated with camp authorities. Forced labour was performed by detainees on projects like the thirty-seven-mile-long South Yatta irrigation furrow.[116] Family outside and other considerations led many detainees to confess.[117][118][119]
During the first year after Operation Anvil, colonial authorities had little success in forcing detainees to cooperate. Camps and compounds were overcrowded, forced-labour systems were not yet perfected, screening teams were not fully coordinated, and the use of torture was not yet systematised.[120] This failure was partly due to the lack of manpower and resources, as well as the vast numbers of detainees. Officials could scarcely process them all, let alone get them to confess their oaths. Assessing the situation in the summer of 1955, Alan Lennox-Boyd wrote of his "fear that the net figure of detainees may still be rising. If so the outlook is grim."[120] Black markets flourished during this period, with the African guards helping to facilitate trading. It was possible for detainees to bribe guards in order to obtain items or stay punishment.[116]
[T]he horror of some of the so-called Screening Camps now present a state of affairs so deplorable that they should be investigated without delay, so that the ever increasing allegations of inhumanity and disregard of the rights of the African citizen are dealt with and so that the Government will have no reason to be ashamed of the acts which are done in its own name by its own servants.[121]
By late 1955, however, the Pipeline had become a fully operational, well-organised system. Guards where regularly shifted around the Pipeline too in order to prevent relationships developing with detainees and so undercut the black markets, and inducements and punishments became better at discouraging fraternising with the enemy.[122] The grinding nature of the improved detention and interrogation regimen began to produce results. Most detainees confessed, and the system produced ever greater numbers of spies and informers within the camps, and others switched sides in a more open, official fashion, leaving detention behind to take an active role in interrogations, even sometimes administering beatings.[122] The most famous example of side-switching was Peter Muigai Kenyatta—Jomo Kenyatta's son—who, after confessing, joined screeners at Athi River Camp, later travelling throughout the Pipeline to assist in interrogations.[123] Suspected informers and spies within a camp were treated in the time-honoured Mau Mau-fashion: the preferred method of cold-blooded murder was strangulation then mutilation: "It was just like in the days before our detention", explained one Mau Mau member later. "We did not have our own jails to hold an informant in, so we would strangle him and then cut his tongue out." The end of 1955 also saw screeners being given a freer hand in interrogation, and harsher conditions than straightforward confession were imposed on detainees before they were described as 'cooperative' and eligible for final release.[122]
In a half-circle against the reed walls of the enclosure stand eight young, African women. There's neither hate nor apprehension in their gaze. It's like a talk in the headmistress's study; a headmistress who is firm but kindly.[124]
While oathing, for practical reasons, within the Pipeline was reduced to an absolute minimum, as many new initiates as possible were oathed. A newcomer who refused to take the oath often faced the same fate as a recalcitrant outside the camps: they were murdered. "The detainees would strangle them with their blankets or, using blades fashioned from the corrugated-iron roofs of some of the barracks, would slit their throats", writes Elkins.[125] Camp authorities preferred method of capital punishment was public hanging. Commandants were told to clamp down hard on intra-camp oathing, with several commandants hanging anyone suspected of administering oaths.[122]
Even as the Pipeline became more sophisticated, detainees still organised themselves within it, setting up committees and selecting leaders for their camps, as well as deciding on their own "rules to live by". Perhaps the most famous compound leader was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki. Punishments for violating the "rules to live by" could be severe.[116]
European missionaries and African Christians played their part by visiting camps to evangelise and encourage compliance with the colonial authorities, providing intelligence, and sometimes even assisting in interrogation. Detainees regarded such preachers with nothing but contempt.[126]
The number of cases of pulmonary tuberculosis which is being disclosed in Prison and Detention Camps is causing some embarrassment.[127]
Sanitation in the camps was often appalling, and epidemics of diseases like typhoid swept through them. Official medical reports detailing the shortcomings of the camps and their recommendations were ignored, and the conditions being endured by detainees were lied about and denied.[128][129][130] A British rehabilitation officer found in 1954 that detainees from Manyani were in "shocking health", many of them suffering from malnutrition,[131] while Langata and GilGil were eventually closed in April 1955[132] because, as the colonial government put it, "they were unfit to hold Kikuyu . . . for medical epidemiological reasons".[132]
While the Pipeline was primarily designed for adult males, a few thousand women and young girls were detained at an all-women camp at Kamiti, as well as a number of unaccompanied young children. Dozens of babies were born women in captivity:[133] "We really do need cloths for the children as it is impossible to keep them clean and tidy while dressed on dirty pieces of sacking and blanket", wrote one colonial officer.[134] Wamumu Camp was set up solely for all the unaccompanied boys in the Pipeline, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys moved around the adult parts of the Pipeline.
Short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging—all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[135]
There were originally two types of works camps envisioned by Baring: the first type were based in Kikuyu districts with the stated purpose of achieving the Swynnerton Plan; the second were punitive camps, designed for the 30,000 Mau Mau suspects who were deemed unfit to return to the reserves. These forced-labour camps provided a much needed source of labour to continue the colony's infrastructure development.[136] Colonial officers also saw the second sort of works camps as a way of ensuring that any confession was legitimate and as a final opportunity to extract intelligence. Probably the worst works camp to have been sent to was the one run out of Embakasi Prison, for Embakasi was responsible for the airport, the construction of which was demanded to be finished before the Emergency came to an end. The airport was a massive project with an unquenchable thirst for labour, and the time pressures ensured the detainees' forced labour was especially hard.[122]
At the end of 1953, the Administration were faced with the serious problem of the concealment of terrorists and supply of food to them. This was widespread and, owing to the scattered nature of the homesteads, fear of detection was negligible; so, in the first instance, the inhabitants of those areas were made to build and live in concentrated villages. This first step had to be taken speedily, somewhat to the detriment of usual health measures and was definitely a punitive short-term measure.[137]
In June 1954, the War Council took the decision to undertake a full-scale forced-resettlement programme of Kiambu, Nyeri, Murang'a and Embu Districts to cut off Mau Mau's supply lines.[138] Within eighteen months, 1,050,899 Kikuyu in the reserves were inside 804 villages consisting of some 230,000 huts.[139] The government termed them "protected villages", purportedly to be built along "the same lines as the villages in the North of England".[140] While some of these villages were to protect loyalist Kikuyu, "most were little more than concentration camps to punish Mau Mau sympathizers."[141] The villagisation programme was the coup de grâce for Mau Mau:[141] by late 1955, Lieutenant General G.L. Lathbury felt so sure of final victory that he reduced army forces to almost pre-Mau Mau levels.[142]
Whilst they [the Kikuyu] could not be expected to take kindly at first to a departure from their traditional way of life, such as living in villages, they need and desire to be told just what to do.[143]
The government's public relations officer, Granville Roberts, presented villagisation as a good opportunity for rehabilitation, particularly of women and children, but it was, in fact, first and foremost designed to break Mau Mau and protect loyalist Kikuyu, a fact reflected in the extremely limited resources made available to the Rehabilitation and Community Development Department.[144] It also solved the practical and financial problems associated with a further, massive expansion of the Pipeline programme.[145] The removal of people from their land through villagisation hugely assisted the enaction of Swynnerton Plan.[141] The villages were surrounded by deep, spike-bottomed trenches and barbed wire, and the villagers themselves were watched over by members of the Home Guard, often neighbours and relatives. In short, rewards or collective punishments such as curfews could be served much more readily after villagisation, and this quickly had an impact on breaking Mau Mau's passive wing.[146] Though there were degrees of difference between the villages,[147] the overall conditions engendered by villagisation meant that, by early 1955, districts began reporting starvation and malnutrition.[148] One provincial commissioner blamed child hunger on parents deliberating withholding food, saying the latter were aware of the "propaganda value of apparent malnutrition".[149]
From the health point of view, I regard villagisation as being exceedingly dangerous and we are already starting to reap the benefits.[150]
The Red Cross helped mitigate the food shortages, but even they were told to prioritise loyalist areas.[149] The Baring government's medical department issued reports about "the alarming number of deaths occurring amongst children in the 'punitive' villages", and the "political" prioritisation of Red Cross relief.[149] One of the colony's ministers blamed the "bad spots" in Central Province on the mothers of the children for "not realis[ing] the great importance of proteins", and one former missionary reported that it "was terribly pitiful how many of the children and the older Kikuyu were dying. They were so emaciated and so very susceptible to any kind of disease that came along".[132] Of the 50,000 deaths which John Blacker attributed to the Emergency, half would be children under the age of ten.[6]
The lack of food did not just affect the children, of course. The Overseas Branch of the British Red Cross commented on the "women who, from progressive undernourishment, had been unable to carry on with their work".[151]
Disease prevention was not helped by the colony's policy of returning sick detainees to receive treatment in the reserves,[150] though the reserves' medical services were virtually non-existent, as Baring himeslf noted after a tour of some villages in June 1956.[152]
Kenyans were granted nearly all of the demands made by the KAU in 1951.
On 18 January 1955, the Governor-General of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, offered an amnesty to Mau Mau activists. The offer was that they would not face the death penalty, but may still be imprisoned for their crimes. European settlers were appalled at the leniency of the offer. On 10 June 1955 with no response forthcoming, the offer of amnesty to the Mau Mau was revoked.
In June 1956, a program of land reform increased the land holdings of the Kikuyu.. This was coupled with a relaxation of the ban on Africans growing coffee, a primary cash crop.
In the cities the colonial authorities decided to dispel tensions by raising urban wages, thereby strengthening the hand of moderate union organisations like the KFRTU. By 1956, the British had granted direct election of African members of the Legislative Assembly, followed shortly thereafter by an increase in the number of African seats to fourteen. A Parliamentary conference in January 1960 indicated that the British would accept "one person – one vote" majority rule.
At least 1,800 African civilians along with 200 British soldiers and policemen and 32 European settlers were killed by the Mau Mau.[11] The colonial government believed the number of Kenyans killed from all instances to be 11,503,[5] but David Anderson believes that the true figure is likely more than 20,000.[11] Elkins claims it is as high as 70,000 or that they could be in the hundreds of thousands.[153] Elkins' numbers, however, have been solidly rebutted by the British demographer John Blacker, in an article in African Affairs, in which he demonstrated in detail that Elkins' numbers were over-estimated and that the total number of African deaths was around 50,000.[6] Blacker's article deals directly with Elkins' claim that up to 300,000 Kikuyu were "unaccounted for" at the 1962 census, judged by comparative population growth rates for other ethnic groups since the previous 1958 census. Of particular note is the number of hangings authorised by the colonial courts: by the end of the Emergency, the grand total was 1,090.[154] At no other time or place in the British empire was capital punishment used so liberally—the total is more than double the number executed by the French in Algeria.[154]
Atrocities were inflicted by all sides.
Mau Mau militants were guilty of widespread atrocities. At Lari, on the night of 25–26 March 1953, Mau Mau forces herded 120 Kikuyu into huts and set fire to them, killing any who attempted to escape.[155] Kikuyu were also tortured, mutilated and murdered by Mau Mau in large numbers.[156]
A British officer describes his actions after capturing three known Mau Mau:
I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don't remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn't tell me where to find the rest of the gang I'd kill them too. They didn't say a word so I shot them both. One wasn't dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn't believe me but all he said was 'bury them and see the wall is cleared up.'[157]
Contrary to African customs and values, [Mau Mau members] assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man's inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides.[156]
Settler groups, displeased with the government's response to the increasing Mau Mau threat created their own units to combat the Mau Mau. One settler with the Kenya Police Reserve's Special Branch described an interrogation of a Mau Mau, suspected of murder, which he assisted: "By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him."[158]
As many as 150,000 Kikuyu were screened by the British and Kenyan authorities.[4][159] As noted above, screening was a major source of human rights violations and caused great resentment.
[E]lectric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence.[160]
After the discovery of the Lari massacre (between 10 pm and dawn that night), colonial security services retaliated on Kikuyu suspected of being Mau Mau.[161] These were shot, and later denied burial. There is also evidence that these reprisal shootings continued for several days. (See the reports of 21 and 27 men killed on 3 and 4 April, respectively.)[162]
Thirty-two British civilians were murdered by Mau Mau militants. The most well known Mau Mau victim was Michael Ruck, aged six, who was murdered along with his parents. Newspapers in Kenya and abroad published graphic murder details, including images of young Michael with bloodied teddy bears and trains strewn on his bedroom floor.[163]
In 1952 the poisonous latex of the African milk bush was used by members of Mau Mau to kill herds of cattle in an incident of biological warfare.[164]
Though Mau Mau was effectively crushed by 1956, it was not until the First Lancaster House Conference, in January 1960, that African majority rule was established and the period of colonial transition to independence initiated.[165] Before the conference, it was anticipated by both African and European leaders that Kenya was set for a European-dominated multi-racial government.[165]
There is continuing debate about Mau Mau's and the rebellion's effects on decolonisation and on Kenya after independence. Regarding decolonisation, the most common view is that Kenya's independence came about as a result of the British government's deciding that a continuance of colonial rule would entail a greater use of force than that which the British public would tolerate.[166] Another view downplays the contribution of Mau Mau to decolonisation,[167] while others contend that as the 1950s progressed, nationalist intransigence increasingly rendered official plans for political development irrelevant, meaning that after the mid-1950s British policy increasingly accepted African nationalism and moved to co-opt its leaders and organisations into collaboration.[98]
Sarah Obama, President Barack Obama's grandfather's wife told him that her husband was imprisoned for six months and tortured before being tried in a British court.[168][169] The records of the trial were not kept as colonial documents older than six years were destroyed by the British.[168] Based on the account contained within his memoirs, The Times suggested that his antipathy to British colonialism may be increased due this.[170] Several prominent media organisations suggest that the return of a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House by Barack Obama, loaned by the British government to his predecessor, is related to his grandfather's mistreatment.[171][172][173]
Several former Mau Mau have attempted to sue for compensation from the British government,[174] and their lawyers have documented about 6,000 cases of human rights abuses.[175] The British government has stated that the issue was the responsibility of the Kenyan government, on the grounds of "state succession" for former colonies. Around 12,000 Kenyans had sought compensation.[176] In July 2011, a British judge ruled that the Kenyans could sue the Foreign Office for their alleged torture.[177] Explaining his decision, Mr Justice McCombe said the claimants had an "arguable case" and it would be "dishonourable" to block the action.[178]
The fact that it has always been British policy to withdraw or destroy certain sensitive records prior to Independence has never been advertised or generally admitted.[179]
In 2011, papers documenting the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt, and which had been 'missing' for fifty years, were uncovered in connection with the above-mentioned legal case.[179] In 2006, lawyers for Leigh Day, the legal firm representing the Kenyan litigants, submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request for "a final tranche of documents relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau held by the Public Record Office" that the government was "refusing to release"; the FCO response explicitly denied the existence of missing files, stating that all information they had held had been transferred to The National Archives.[180] (The Treasury Solicitors' response to Leigh Day went even further by stating that not only were all relevant documents with The National Archives but that they were also in the public domain).[180] It was only the persistence of a handful of FCO officials, notably Edward Inglett, and a witness statement by Professor David Anderson in December 2010 alleging "systematic withholding by HMG of 1500 files in 300 boxes taking up 100 linear feet", that eventually resulted in their coming to light in January 2011.[181] It is not the first time a UK government department has systematically withheld files regarding British crimes during the Emergency—and not the first time that Professor Anderson has been involved in challenging it.[182][183]
[I]t has been admitted in the House of Lords that the Foreign Office "irregularly" holds 9,500 files from 36 other former British colonies. Do these hold further horrors yet to be revealed of colonial mis-
deeds? The discovery of this vast tranche of documents has prompted historians to suggest that a major reappraisal of the end of Britain's empire will be required once these materials have been digested—a "hidden history" if ever there were one.[184]
Upon their discovery, Foreign Secretary William Hague requested Anthony Cary, a former British High Commissioner to Canada, to conduct an internal review into why the documents, known as migrated archives, had not been spotlighted by the FoI requests.[180] In a highly sympathetic report the next month, Cary nonetheless judged that despite the involvement of relatively junior staff who had been genuinely ignorant about the contents of the files, there had been more knowledgeable staff who were perfectly aware of the documents' importance but who had chosen not to share their widsom.[180] "It was perhaps convenient to [think] that the migrated archives . . . did not need to be consulted for the purposes of FOI requests, while also being conscious of the files as a sort of guilty secret, of uncertain status and in the 'too difficult' tray", Cary concluded.[180][185] After making Cary's report public in May 2011, Hague declared his "intention to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions."[186]
The documents had been flown out of Africa on the eve of Kenya's independence because they "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government".[180][187] "Embarrassment hardly covers it," remarked a Times editorial, noting that "the covert history of colonial administration in Kenya bears comparison to the methods of torture and summary execution in the French war in Algeria."[188] Between 1963 and 1994 the files were stored in Hayes repository; in 1994 they were moved to Hanslope Park, to save on storage costs.[180] In 1967, in 1974, and again in 1982, Kenya asked for them to be released, but the UK refused.[180][187]
Amongst other things, the records confirmed "the extent of the violence inflicted on suspected Mau Mau rebels"[190] in British detention camps documented in Caroline Elkins' otherwise flawed study.[191] Baring himself was aware of the "extreme brutality" of the sometimes-lethal torture meted out—which included "most drastic" beatings, solitary confinement, starvation, castration, whipping, burning, rape, sodomy, and forceful insertion of objects into orifices—but took no action.[115][190] Baring's inaction was despite the urging of people like Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police for Kenya for less than eight months of 1954 before he resigned in protest, that "the horror of some of the [camps] should be investigated without delay".[121] Commenting on the papers, David Anderson stated that the "documents were hidden away to protect the guilty",[187] and "that the extent of abuse now being revealed is truly disturbing."[184] "Everything that could happen did happen. Allegations about beatings and violence were widespread. Basically you could get away with murder. It was systematic", Anderson said.[21][192] The Kenyan government sent a letter to Hague insisting that the UK government was legally liable for the atrocities.[187] The Foreign Office, however, reaffirmed its position that it was not, in fact, liable for colonial atrocities,[187] and argued that the documents had not "disappeared" as part of a cover up.[193] Edward Inglett made an unofficial, personal apology for the Foreign Office's "misplacing [the] documents".[181]
Main criticism we shall have to meet is that 'Cowan plan' which was approved by Government contained instructions which in effect authorised unlawful use of violence against detainees.[194]
The release of these documents has sparked similar actions from veterans of other anti colonial struggles, such as the EOKA campaign against the British occupation of Cyprus.[195][196]
Partisan questions about the Mau Mau war have . . . echoed round Kenya's political arena during 40 years of independence. How historically necessary was Mau Mau? Did its secretive violence alone have the power to destroy white supremacy? or did it merely sow discord within a mass nationalism that—for all the failings of the Kenya African Union (KAU)—was bound to win power in the end? Did Mau Mau aim at freedom for all Kenyans? or did moderate, constitutional politicians rescue that pluralist prize from the jaws of its ethnic chauvinism? Has the self-sacrificial victory of the poor been unjustly forgotten, and appropriated by the rich? or are Mau Mau's defeats and divisions best buried in oblivion?[197]
Members of Mau Mau are currently recognised by the Kenyan Government as freedom/independence heroes/heroines who sacrificed their lives in order to free Kenyans from colonial rule.[198] The Government of Kenya has proposed Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day) to be marked annually on 20 October (the same day Baring signed the Emergency order).[199] According to the Kenyan Government, Mashujaa Day will be a time for Kenyans to remember and honour Mau Mau and other Kenyans who participated in the fight for African freedom and Kenya's independence.[198] Mashujaa Day will replace Kenyatta Day; the latter has until now also been held on 20 October.[200]
This official celebration of Mau Mau is in marked contrast to a post-colonial norm of Kenyan governments passing over Mau Mau as a symbol of national liberation.[31][201] Such a turnabout has attracted criticism of government manipulation of the Mau Mau uprising for political ends.[202]
We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.[203]
It is often argued that Mau Mau was suppressed as a subject for public discussion in Kenya during the periods under Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi because of the key positions and influential presence of some loyalists in government, business and other elite sectors of Kenyan society post-1963.[204][205] Unsurprisingly, during this same period opposition groups tactically embraced the Mau Mau rebellion.[12] As noted, Mau Mau's politicisation within Kenya appears to continue up to the present.
A The name Kenya Land and Freedom Army is sometimes heard in connection with Mau Mau. KLFA is not simply another name for Mau Mau: it was the name that Dedan Kimathi used for a coordinating body which he tried to set up for Mau Mau. It was also the name of another militant group that sprang up briefly in the spring of 1960; the group was broken up during a brief operation from 26 March to 30 April.[206]
B Between 1895 and 1920, Kenya was formally known as British East Africa Protectorate; between 1920 and 1963, as Kenya Colony and Protectorate.[207]
C "Squatter or resident labourers are those who reside with their families on European farms usually for the purpose of work for the owners. . . . Contract labourers are those who sign a contract of service before a magistrate, for periods varying from three to twelve months. Casual labourers leave their reserves to engage themselves to European employers for any period from one day upwards."[62] In return for his services, a squatter was entitled to use some of the settler's land for cultivation and grazing.[208] Contract and casual workers are together referred to as migratory labourers, in distinction to the permanent presence of the squatters on farms. The phenomenon of squatters arose in response to the difficulties of Europeans in finding labourers and of Africans in gaining access to arable and grazing land.[55]
D During the Emergency, screening was the term used by colonial authorities to mean the interrogation of a Mau Mau suspect. The alleged member or sympathiser of Mau Mau would be interrogated in order to obtain an admission of guilt—specifically, a confession that they had taken the Mau Mau oath—as well as for intelligence.[209]