Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Baring did not seek to disband the Vigilance Committee, but rather wanted to be certain it was incorporated into his government and protected by the same laws that would also shield his police force from outside scrutiny and possibly later prosecution for Emergency abuses. By appointing settlers like Todd as temporary officers, he bestowed on them the protection of the Crown in return for their manpower and local knowledge.

  By his own account, Todd and his fellow screening officers felt they needed shielding by the colonial government to do their interrogation work effectively. He candidly remembers, “I did not believe in obtaining information under threat of violence, although there are cases where such methods are necessary, such as in a case of emergency.”5 Typically, screening would begin with a long question-and-answer session, but Mau Mau suspects generally sat silently or were “sullen and arrogant,” as one settler described them.6 Occasionally, the interrogators would give up, frustrated and exhausted, and either release the suspect for final deportation to the reserves or hold him for another round of screening. The more likely scenario, though, was similar to the experiences of Njama Ireri, Ndiritu Kibira, and Kirigumi Kagunda—three detainees who years later described what had happened to them. Bound to a chair in the screening center at Subukia, Njama Ireri was tortured by a white settler and several Kikuyu loyalists. Although he recognized the Africans as some of the workers with whom he had labored on the Subukia Estate, Njama did not know the Mzungu, or European, who extinguished cigarettes on his back during the interrogation. Today he still bears the scars of the cigarette burns and walks with a limp from the beatings given him by his loyalist interrogators.7 Njama’s experience in the screening center was hardly unique. At the Kiringiti Estate in Molo, Ndiritu Kibira was working as a gardener when he was rounded up with nearly one hundred other Kikuyu workers and shipped by lorry to the Bahati screening center in Nakuru. There, according to Ndiritu,

  we were taken to a camp in a farm [Bahati] owned by a settler whom we had nicknamed Nyangweso. That was where we were screened. We would be asked whether we had taken the oath, and those who denied having taken it were beaten badly until they were forced to confess or at least gave them some information. Many died from the beatings…. The black askaris [guards] were the ones who were doing most of the beating, but the white settlers and policemen were there as well, directing it and also beating us.

  Kirigumi, a Kikuyu squatter who was forcibly removed from the Rift Valley, recalled his screening experience.

  We would be sent to the camp where we would be interrogated. To be interrogated meant to be beaten. It wasn’t just to be asked questions. It was to be beaten—holding yourself like this. You would be hit there…. You would be beaten here [on the stomach and back] very hard. You would also place your legs thus, and be hit on this ankle and the other which would go this way and was hit again to go back. Then you would be asked to stand up and someone else would take your place. 8

  Scores of former Mau Mau adherents whom I interviewed offered similar recollections. Teams made up of settlers, British district officers, members of the Kenya police force, African loyalists, and even soldiers from the British military forces demanded confessions and intelligence, and used torture to get them. If the screening team was dissatisfied with a suspect’s answers, it was accepted that torture was a legitimate next resort. According to a number of the former detainees I interviewed, electric 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.

  Identifying who exactly perpetrated screening crimes is difficult largely because the Kikuyu oath takers knew their interrogators often only by nicknames. Though they rarely knew a European’s name, they could generally identify a screener’s colonial affiliation based on his uniform: a German-style SS cap meant he was part of the Kenya Police; the Kenya Regiment uniform was also distinctive, as was that of the members of the Administration, many of whom the locals knew well before Mau Mau. The Kikuyu nicknamed nearly every colonial agent who had an impact on their lives, whether bad or good, a practice that had been ongoing throughout Britain’s occupation of the colony. For the Kikuyu victims of screening, nicknames not only identified someone but were also a form of empowerment. How better to insult a much-hated young settler than to call him Muru wa Itina, or the Son of the Buttocks? Not surprisingly, his father was simply Itina, or the Ass. But when the Emergency started, less humorous and more sinister names appeared, like Kiboroboro, or the Killer. There was also More More, the Whip, the Man with No Shirt, and the One with the Crooked Nose. This list goes on and on and would become more impressive when Mau Mau suspects began filling the detention camps, where even fewer Kikuyu knew the Christian names of the British camp commandants or the African warders.

  Self-described screening experts like Christopher Todd claimed to know merely by the look of a suspect whether or not he or she was Mau Mau. When a suspect refused to talk, the screeners used this extraordinary intuition to justify their use of the third degree. Todd would later boast of his screening prowess: “When I became more practiced, I could get a very good idea as to how many oaths a man had taken just by looking at him. There was something about the ideas and whole demeanour, an aura of evil which emanated from the man or woman which showed the state of utter degradation to which a once normal human being had been reduced by the foul oathing ceremonies.”9 Most British settlers and colonial administrators agreed there was a sense of evil that manifested itself in devil-like eyes and sinister and sullen expressions—they called it the Mau Mau look. Margery Perham, on visiting some of the Mau Mau detainees, noted “the dark look upon their faces, which seemed to add an extra darkness to the colour of their skin, and their look of settled hatred as they sat motionless on the ground.”10

  Bahati and Subukia, where Todd was stationed, were not the only screening centers using abusive tactics. There existed dozens of technically illegal, or unregistered, screening centers throughout the Rift Valley and Central provinces. In fact, of the scores of interrogation facilities in both the settled areas and the reserves, only fifteen were ever officially sanctioned by the colonial government. Governor Baring knew that illegal screening centers were operating and tacitly approved of them, partly because he had neither the manpower nor the funds to establish additional government-sponsored interrogation units.11 Some of these centers were actually mobile, like the one operated by the local settler R.E. Fellowes. Together with a team of other settlers and Kikuyu loyalists, Fellowes would travel from farm to farm in the White Highlands and conduct massive, on-the-spot screening.12 Most of the screening operations took place in permanent sites, generally in the offices of the Administration or in outposts on settler farms. In the Rift Valley, for example, one settler who operated his own screening camp was known as Dr. Bunny by the locals. It was his experimental prowess when it came to interrogating Mau Mau suspects that earned the doctor his notorious nickname: the Joseph Mengele of Kenya. One settler remembers her brother, a member of the Kenya Regiment and a pseudogangster, boasting of Dr. Bunny’s exploits, which included burning the skin off live Mau Mau suspects and forcing them to eat their own testicles.13 Another former settler and member of the local Moral Rearmament Movement also recalled Dr. Bunny’s handiwork. He, too, remembered skin searing along with castration and other methods of screening he would “prefer not to speak of.”14

  Margaret Nyaruai, a young woman at the time of Mau Mau, was taken to the screening hut on the estate of her settler employer near Kabaru not long after the start of the Emergency. There she was beaten by a white man whom the Kikuyu had nicknamed Karoki, or He Who Comes at Dawn, and by the young settler turned British colonial officer nicknamed YY. While being screened, Margaret was asked:

  Questions like the number of oaths I had take
n, where my husband went, where two of my stepbrothers had gone (they had gone into the forest). I was badly whipped, while naked. They didn’t care that I had just given birth. In fact, I think my baby was lucky it was not killed like the rest…. Apart from the beatings, women used to have banana leaves and flowers inserted into their vaginas and rectums, as well as have their breasts squeezed with a pair of pliers; after which, a woman would say everything because of the pain…even the men had their testicles squeezed with pliers to make them confess! After such things were done to me, I told them everything. I survived after the torture, but I still have a lot of pain in my body even today from it. 15

  Margaret’s confession did not earn her release. Instead, Karoki forced her to labor without pay on his estate throughout most of the Emergency. From time to time the screening teams, hungry for any information, continued to interrogate her, often thrusting hot eggs into her vagina to force her to talk.16

  Ratcheting up the violence in the screening centers were the Kikuyu loyalists who worked side by side with the British colonial officers to interrogate Mau Mau suspects. Many loyalists were known by the local settlers, members of the Administration, and the Mau Mau adherents for their ruthlessness. Nonetheless, the British colonial government was utterly dependent upon them for their knowledge of Mau Mau activities; interrogations would have been impossible without them. On one level, they became the henchmen for the European officers in charge of screening operations. With few exceptions, the loyalists beat and murdered Mau Mau suspects on command; other times they tortured the oath takers without any prompting or supervision. But some loyalists had been conscripted into colonial service and for this reason were less reliable deputies. There were also those who dangerously played both sides, loyalist during the day and Mau Mau by night, either in an attempt to save their own skins or opportunistically to hedge their bets before knowing who would be the eventual victor. And then there were the true double agents, as Mau Mau called them, oath takers who had infiltrated the colonial government by joining the Home Guard. The ruse did not always work; in some cases when Home Guards refused to follow orders, they suffered detention and torture just as the Mau Mau suspects they had helped detain. In Kiamariga, for example, Kamau Githiriji remembered that he and five other men had been arrested and brought behind the district commissioner’s office. There the “white man in charge,” as Kamau remembered him, “ordered [the loyalists] to shoot us, but [they] refused to comply. For that, they were relieved of their duties.” The same white man then loaded the loyalists on the back of the lorry with Kamau and the other Mau Mau suspects and sent them all to Nyeri Prison, where they were held for several weeks before being transferred to Athi River Detention Camp.17

  Loyalist behavior was motivated by much more than simply desiring to follow the orders of their white superiors. Many of them hated the Mau Mau and everything they represented; the oath takers had launched a direct attack on the loyalists’ privilege, and greed, and targeted most of their aggression on those individuals who had collaborated with the British and allegedly profited at the expense of their Kikuyu neighbors. Loyalists were determined to eliminate Mau Mau, or as one former Home Guard from Kiambu district stated bluntly, “I wanted to kill them all; they wanted to ruin everything.”18

  By empowering the loyalists to participate as equals in the screening operations, the British colonial government was fueling a smoldering civil war in Kikuyuland and providing loyalists with the opportunity to settle old scores. They could identify adversaries as belonging to Mau Mau, torture them during interrogation, and confiscate their property. In some cases the loyalist interrogators stood barefaced in front of Mau Mau suspects, identified them as oath takers, and beat them senseless, sometimes killing them.19 In other cases, loyalists’ identities were protected, and they became the notorious hooded informants of Nairobi and the White Highlands. Their heads covered with a gakunia, or sack, the loyalists would peer out at the accused Mau Mau through two small eyeholes. Colonial officers directed countless screening parades in which lines of Mau Mau suspects filed past the hooded loyalists. His identity protected, the loyalist could send a man or woman off to a screening center or a detention camp with a nod of the head. One former Mau Mau suspect recalled such a screening parade that took place outside Nairobi during the early years of the Emergency.

  We went through a kind of identification parade, whereby one was ordered to pass in front of a parked vehicle inside which there was a person in a hooded, flowing robe. The informer’s face was completely covered, except for the eyeholes. When a suspect passed in front of the vehicle the informer would say “yes” and the suspect would be sent aside, or “no” and the suspect would be allowed to go past…. In my case, the informer said “no” and I was allowed to go past, but for only a few steps because seconds later I heard someone call, “Hey, you man with a long coat; arrest that man in the long coat.” I then felt someone grab me by the collar of my coat and I was put into the enclosure where those arrested were being held.20

  Colonial authorities were keenly aware of the civil dimension of Mau Mau and knowingly exploited it in the reserves. Many of the chiefs had begun organizing their own private police forces for protection of themselves and their families, and these private armies merged with some several hundred Tribal Policemen, an organization formed in the late 1920s and composed mostly of the sons and close relatives of the chiefs and headmen. By 1953 the colonial government had recognized these groups as so-called islands of resistance to Mau Mau and therefore ready recruits in the war against it. Baring gave Major General Hinde authorization to convert these private militias into the officially sanctioned Home Guard, or Kikuyu Guard, but first the chiefs and the local British district officer had to vet each potential recruit. Refusal to serve actively in the anti–Mau Mau campaign rendered a Kikuyu, a priori, a Mau Mau. To become a colonial-appointed Home Guard meant you were, in theory, willing to fight and kill your oath-taking neighbor. Local senior chiefs—like Njiiri and Ignatio in Fort Hall, Muhoya in Nyeri, and Makimei of Kiambu—would vouch for their mercenaries and then force each one to kuhungwo mahuri, have their “lungs cleaned.” In other words, they had to proclaim openly that they had never taken a Mau Mau oath.

  Still, in the early days of the Emergency, Mau Mau retained the upper hand in the reserves, often savagely attacking many of the loyalist leaders. In late October of 1952 Mau Mau murdered Chief Nderi. The district commissioner struck back, levying a collective fine of nearly ten thousand head of livestock on all suspected Mau Mau adherents in the area; he later redistributed the livestock to the local loyalists. Undeterred, Mau Mau also targeted loyalist informants for elimination. In Fort Hall a district officer reported:

  There was one murder of an old man at Ruathia; he was chopped in two halves because he had given evidence against Mau Mau in Court at Fort Hall. Further down the road the whole family of a Chief’s retainer had been murdered because the retainer had given evidence, and down in the river below Gituge we found the corpse of an African Court Process Server who had likewise been strangled for informing against Mau Mau. 21

  Other attacks were against loyalist witnesses slated to testify against Mau Mau in local courts. Several such potential witnesses were hacked to death, burned inside their huts, or they simply disappeared.22 Then came the infamous Lari Massacre of March 1953, during which ninety-seven loyalists, most of whom were members of Chief Luka’s family, were slaughtered. Within a month, the colonial government armed some 20 percent of the Home Guard with shotguns and provided them with uniforms and rations. Major General Hinde recruited Colonel Philip Morcombe and appointed him commander of the Home Guard. Eventually, nearly the entire corps of Kikuyu Home Guard, numbering some fifteen thousand in early 1953, would be armed with precision weapons or spears and out-fitted with uniforms and easily recognizable silver armbands. Hinde also insisted that the Home Guard should come under the day-to-day command of European officers, or district officers, Kikuyu Guard. Many of thes
e officers were recruited directly from the ranks of the British settlers; others were career colonial servants. Thus those in day-to-day charge of the Home Guard were not trained military personnel but local settlers out of the Kenya Regiment or career colonial officers, most of whom were quite junior.

  One such junior officer was J.A. Rutherford, who in 1954 took it upon himself to compile a history of the Kikuyu Guard and the Europeans responsible for its activities. Utterly disdainful of the oath takers, Rutherford and his fellow district officers were dedicated to maintaining the morale of the Home Guard, despite the fact that they knew the loyalists were routinely “pay[ing] off many old scores against Mau Mau.”23 The colonial government knew that loyalist fitina, or intrigue, was rampant in the reserves. Most colonial officers believed the loyalists were as justified as the British colonizers in brutalizing the Mau Mau. Rather than trying to stop loyalist predation, they worried more about keeping their Kikuyu supporters firmly on the side of the colonial government. Rutherford was hardly circumspect in pointing out how he and his fellow colonial officers supported the loyalists.

  The District Officers in the field were quick to sense this feeling [of low morale] and made it clear that the Government would have to take definite action to maintain the loyalty and aggressive spirit of the Guard. Action was soon taken. The Guard was told that its members would, when conditions improved, receive preference in every possible way and be considered before the masses who, by their oathing and obedience to Mau Mau ways would have to work their passage back to recognition. Words were not enough. The Guard was given material assistance in a number of ways…. The Guard was never paid because it was felt that would make them mercenaries whereas they were in fact engaged in eradicating a disease which afflicted the majority of their tribe. They were assisted in a number of ways; they were let off the Special Tax the tribe had to pay as its contribution to the costs of the Emergency. They were helped with the school fees of their children; they were given free issues of clothes from time to time. Where the battle did not allow any form of trade to be carried on, such as the export of wattle bark or charcoal, they only were given permits. 24