Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Evelyn Baring appeared in person and pedigree to be a most capable colonial leader, a man who could navigate Kenya through the Mau Mau storm. He was dashing, strikingly tall and handsome, and particularly majestic when he wore his full gubernatorial regalia, including an oversized white helmet topped with ostrich plumes. Baring’s name offered a distinct cachet to the title “His Excellency the Governor of Kenya.” Born into Britain’s distinguished imperial and financial family, he was the son of the famed Lord Cromer, known as the “Maker of Modern Egypt,” whose imperious behavior earned him the other, less honorific nickname of “over-Baring.” But Evelyn hardly knew his father. Lord Cromer was already in his early sixties when Evelyn was born, and then spent much of his time in Egypt, leaving his young son behind in Britain. Evelyn was thirteen when his father died in 1917. Since that time, he spent much of his life trying to relive his father’s career. After taking First Class Honors at Oxford in modern history, Baring joined the Indian Civil Service, whose decentralized style of colonial rule made a lasting impression on the young administrator. It was in India that Baring honed his understanding of land-based politics and rural administration. He then moved on to Britain’s Foreign Office, which dispatched him to the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia and then finally to South Africa, where he took over the coveted post of high commissioner.7

  Despite his formidable background in imperial governance, the vicissitudes of late colonial Kenya would vex Baring from the moment he arrived in the colony. He was foremost a colonial bureaucrat whose prior success was largely due to his carefully measured, methodical style of governance. In most circumstances this style and these skills were exactly what was needed to run Britain’s far-flung empire. But the Emergency in Kenya would present different challenges. It would demand quick and decisive action by the colony’s governor. There would be no time to ruminate while the events of Mau Mau were unfolding at breakneck speed. Lord Cromer would have been well suited for the job but, in several ways, Baring was not his father’s son. He lacked “over-Baring’s” rough-and-ready mentality; his mind was better suited to his favorite leisure pursuits of wildflower collecting and bird-watching. Finally, he was devoid of the oratory skills that would be needed to ingratiate himself with the local settler population. And though patrician in stature, Baring was hardly robust. He had contracted a severe case of amoebic dysentery in India that had left him with bouts of disabling intestinal pain and severe exhaustion, accompanied by depression, for the remainder of his life. 8 Baring must be characterized, then, as the colonial ideal on paper, a patrician figure who at least superficially seemed to represent everything that was exemplary about British colonial rule—even if he was not the most well-suited man for the job of governing Kenya during the crisis of Mau Mau.

  His Excellency Sir Evelyn Baring inspecting the troops

  The news of Waruhiu’s assassination reached Baring in the middle of his Central Province tour. The governor hurried back to Nairobi and, only a few hours after the senior chief had been murdered, he cabled the Colonial Office seeking permission to declare a State of Emergency. Baring knew Waruhiu had been one of the strongest supporters of Britain’s colonial enterprise in Kenya. The senior chief had embraced Western values, having become a devout Christian, an advocate of British law and order, and one of the most outspoken critics of Mau Mau—earning him the epitaph in the British press of “Africa’s Churchill.”9 He also was always careful to look the part of a black Englishman, dressing impeccably in a crisp European suit, pressed oxford shirt, tie, and hat.

  Mau Mau adherents loathed Waruhiu and the other senior Kikuyu chiefs who controlled their lives and reaped the benefits of colonial patronage. The senior chief’s death was civil justice according to Mau Mau, and so most of Kikuyuland did not mourn, but rather celebrated his murder with dancing and songs, some of which are still remembered today. Simply mentioning the name Waruhiu prompts some former Mau Mau adherents to burst out: “I will never sell out my country, or love money more than my country. Waruhiu sold out his country for money, but he died and left his money.”10 For Baring, the senior chief’s death was an outrage that could not be ignored. For the next ten days Governor Baring and Colonial Secretary Lyttelton fired secret memoranda back and forth, working through the details and justifications of the impending State of Emergency.11 They were convinced it would be over before it started—three months at best. Decapitate the movement and introduce a few more restrictive measures, they reasoned, and Mau Mau would fall apart. The Emergency would in fact be a blessing, avoiding bloodshed by getting rid of the Mau Mau leadership, so bringing peace to Kenya.

  Senior Chief Waruhiu’s funeral was as much a stage for Kenya’s unfolding drama as it was a somber testimonial to a fallen servant of the British Crown. Almost everyone of political importance attended, including both Jomo Kenyatta and the governor, posturing and sizing up the other side. Kenyatta and Baring stood near each other but did not exchange a single word just days before the governor was to sign the arrest order for Mau Mau’s alleged mastermind.

  With Operation Jock Scott, Kenya’s State of Emergency was officially launched. This code-named assault was directed at Kenyatta and 180 other identified leaders of Mau Mau. In the early morning of October 21, 1952, scores of Kenyan policemen, white and black, zealously carried out their arrest orders, rousing suspected Mau Mau protagonists like Paul Ngei, Fred Kubai, and Bildad Kaggia, handcuffing them, and hauling them off to Nairobi police station. Not surprisingly, Kenyatta was given special treatment. With great melodrama, scores of police officers escorted him from his home in the middle of the night and drove him to a waiting plane at the military airfield outside of Nairobi. As the plane took off and passed over the Aberdares, Kenyatta was convinced he was going to be ejected into the forest below, where his body would never be recovered.12 Instead, he soon found himself in total isolation more than four hundred miles to the north of Nairobi, at a place called Lokitaung—an arid and desolate region where the Turkana pastoralists herded their livestock. There simply could not have been a more remote or inhospitable spot in Kenya.

  Operation Jock Scott ushered in the colony’s rapid decline. Contrary to official wisdom, Mau Mau did not collapse with the arrest of the politicals, but instead turned more violent as the movement’s leadership passed into the hands of younger men, the same men who for months had been pushing Kenyatta and others to adopt a more radical, revolutionary course. Baring and Lyttelton had managed to remove the one person who had been tenuously keeping the young militants in check; in fact, Mau Mau only gained strength when Kenyatta the heroic Kikuyu leader also became, literally overnight, Kenyatta the martyr. Although his political leanings were more moderate than the majority of Mau Mau, Kenyatta became a potent and unifying political symbol. For Mary Nyambura, who lived outside of Nairobi in an area known as Banana Hill, Kenyatta was the man who “would liberate me from the [colonial] district officer who was forcing me to work” the youthful Hunja Njuki thought Kenyatta was “the leader fighting to give me a rightful share of my land” and then there was the elderly Magayu Kiama, born before the turn of the century, who believed “[Kenyatta] would destroy the local chief” who had been harassing his wife and helping himself to Magayu’s goats.13 For every Mary, Hunja, and Magayu, there were hundreds of thousands of other Kikuyu men and women who had their own reasons for joining Mau Mau, and who saw them embodied in Kenyatta, the unjustly detained and rightful leader of the Kikuyu people. It is here that Baring and Lyttelton made their other gross miscalculation. Colonial racist orthodoxy refused to allow for independent African thought, let alone sophisticated social and economic grievances. At the start of Mau Mau Kenya’s governor, the colonial secretary, nearly all colonial administrators in the colony, and certainly most of the local settlers underestimated the political sophistication of the ordinary Kikuyu. While recognizing the depth of Kikuyu anger, they thought it was the result of Kenyatta’s manipulations and the so-called spell of the Mau Mau oath, rather tha
n an outgrowth of legitimate complaints rooted in individual circumstances.

  As Governor Baring signed the Emergency order on the evening of October 20, twelve aircraft carrying the first contingent of British ground troops landed at Nairobi’s Eastleigh airfield. Hundreds of baby-faced soldiers from the Lancashire Fusiliers drove their military vehicles through the streets of the capital to reassure the local Europeans and, in theory, intimidate Mau Mau adherents. At first, this gunboat diplomacy appeared to work as initially there was no major combat. Mau Mau appeared to be a phony war. In reality, this period was the calm before the storm as Mau Mau, caught unprepared by Baring’s declaration, went through several months of military buildup both in and outside of the forests of the Mount Kenya and Aberdares mountain ranges, about fifty miles north and west of Nairobi. With the Emergency now in effect, hundreds and eventually thousands of Mau Mau adherents fled to these forests, where a fragmented leadership had begun to establish individual platoons before the Emergency started, and was now responsible for taking young men and women who had never seen combat and turning them into soldiers. Some of these leaders had served in the British army during World War II, had been in combat in Southeast Asia, and were able to draw on their prior military experience to organize their troops in the forests. They adopted British ranks—using titles like field marshal, general, major, and lieutenant—and attempted to instill strict discipline, though they did not always follow their own rules.14 Outside of the forests, Mau Mau adherents organized an intricate, passive-wing operation that would provide intelligence, weapons, food, and other supplies to the forest fighters. It was the size of this passive-wing organization that reflected the grassroots depth of the movement.

  British soldiers on patrol in Nairobi

  The relative calm in the forests was shattered by a series of gruesome, high-profile murders. In late October on the farming plateau above Naivasha the disemboweled corpse of Eric Bowker, a settler and veteran of both world wars, was found in his home—the brutal nature of his murder a sure sign of a Mau Mau attack, according to the local whites. Less than a month later, an elderly couple living at the edge of the Aberdares forest, near Thomson’s Falls, were sitting down for their after-dinner coffee when they were attacked with machetes by Mau Mau guerrillas. The husband, retired naval commander Ian “Jock” Meiklejohn, collapsed while loading his shotgun and died two days later. His wife, a retired doctor, survived despite extensive mutilation of her torso and breasts.15 Four days later Tom Mbotela’s body was found in a muddy pool of water near the Burma Market in Nairobi. An outspoken critic of Mau Mau and an African-appointed member of the City Council, Mbotela was reviled by many Africans and had already escaped one assassination attempt. During the hustle of morning commuting and trade, hundreds of market goers had passed his body until it was discovered by a European passerby. That evening the Burma Market, named in recognition of the Africans who had served on the Burma front during the war, was burned to the ground. According to witnesses, it was the local police who torched the stalls, infuriated by Mbotela’s death and the defiant indifference, if not complicity, of the locals.16

  The European community in Kenya was justifiably terrified by these events. Many living in the White Highlands were on isolated farms without telephones and far from police assistance. They were a tiny white minority, and the fear of “the night of the long knives” that had hung over their colonial idyll for so long was finally upon them. They demanded quick and summary justice against Mau Mau. A “pathological atmosphere”—as Dame Margery Perham, the Colonial Office’s own Oxford tutor, called it—had already been present before the Emergency and was now intensifying as settlers started taking the law into their own hands.17 Governor Baring stood by, although fully aware of ongoing settler justice and the formation of vigilante groups throughout the Rift Valley and around Nairobi. Settlers, with the help of the Administration, were exacting revenge on Mau Mau suspects in unspeakable ways. In the wake of the attacks on Bowker and the Meiklejohns, Baring wrote to the colonial secretary “of Europeans taking drastic action on their own” and went on to forewarn that “this might even lead to something like civil war.”18

  In the midst of this growing settler hysteria, the colonial government, in a risky move, decided to prosecute Kenyatta along with five of his so-called deputies: Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, Achieng’ Oneko, and Kungu Karumba.19 On the one hand, an acquittal would have surely created mayhem in the colony, transforming the already uncontrollable settler outrage into virtual anarchy. On the other, a conviction would be interpreted by the Kikuyu as yet another travesty of British colonial justice. There was a viable alternative to trying these men. With the powers of detention that were at his disposal as governor, Baring could easily have kept them safely locked away, as he would later do with many of the others arrested during Jock Scott. But there was a strong sense from the Colonial Office in particular that a trial was necessary, if only to placate some of the anticolonial critics at home who were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the Emergency. Evidence to be introduced in court could offer the legal justification for the Emergency that the government so desperately needed—provided, of course, there was a conviction.20

  But from the moment Kenyatta was arrested, Baring and his legal advisers knew they had little credible evidence with which to prosecute him. Even after a ton and a half of documents, books, and papers had been confiscated from Kenyatta’s home and picked apart by colonial officials, there was virtually nothing.21 Ultimately, and with the slimmest of evidence, the government decided to charge Kenyatta and the others with “managing an unlawful society”—or, in layman’s terms, fomenting a revolution. The evidence in hand provided no basis for a conviction, at least not under British standards of impartial justice. But this was Kenya, and the system of justice accorded to Africans had been a travesty for years. Of course, the stakes were much higher, and those responsible for orchestrating Kenyatta’s trial were top-level colonial officials in Kenya, including Baring himself.

  Although six men were on trial, the only one who mattered to the government was Kenyatta, whose alleged crimes occurred in Kiambu. Technically, his case should have been tried in a Nairobi courthouse. Fearing demonstrations, as well as an onslaught of unwanted publicity, the government instead sent the trial to Kapenguria, one of Kenya’s most remote outposts. Thirty miles north of the settler town of Kitale, near the Ugandan border, Kapenguria had no rail service, hotel, phones, restaurants, or running water. In fact, it did not even have a courthouse. In haste, the government converted an old school building for what would be the trial of the century in Kenya. Kapenguria’s isolation and restricted-area status meant that the government could control who came in and out of the town, a power that would be of utmost importance as the trial progressed. The legal technicality of venue, however, was hanging in the balance and required taking Kenyatta to Kapenguria, releasing him from custody, and then rearresting him. Though this maneuver did not change the fact that his alleged crimes had been committed in Kiambu, apparently it was enough to satisfy local legal opinion.

  Still, there remained the issue of evidence. Even with the new venue the colonial government had a very weak case—a problem easily solved through a few well-placed bribes. In the first instance, Baring helped to fabricate, or at the very least influence, the so-called witnesses to Kenyatta’s crimes by offering them healthy financial incentives. Writing to Lyttelton in November 1952, he said, “Every possible effort has been made to offer them rewards.”22 This approach was also taken with the special magistrate brought in to hear and pass judgment on the case, one Ransley Thacker, QC. Judge Thacker had spent twelve years as a member of Kenya’s Supreme Court and was the former attorney general of Fiji. As special magistrate in this case, he would be both judge and jury for the Kapenguria Six, as the defendants came to be called. The aging, potbellied, and bespectacled Thacker apparently had no qualms about selling his verdict long before the trial began. He insisted
upon twenty thousand pounds to ensure a conviction, and in what must be described as one of his most self-incriminating moves as governor, Baring complied. The bribe, in fact, did not go through the attorney general’s office in Kenya, as others had, but rather was appropriated by Baring himself from a special Emergency fund.23

  Before their opening argument, Kenyatta’s attorneys already knew that Thacker had his mind made up. Indeed, the defense counsel team was a formidable group of advocates—all of whom viewed the trial as simply groundwork for the eventual appeal they would be filing with the Privy Council back in Britain. Leading the team was the robust and gray-haired Dennis Lowell Pritt, QC, one of Britain’s most able, and notorious, trial lawyers. Pritt was as well known for his courtroom theatrics as he was for his communist sympathies, which hardly helped Kenyatta, who was already suspected of socialist leanings. Needless to say, the settlers hated Pritt from the moment he stepped off the plane from London—particularly since there were thousands of Africans gathered at the airport to welcome him, counsel for their beloved Kenyatta.