Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  In return for their active help in suppressing Mau Mau, the colonial government guaranteeed the loyalists the best of everything—the biggest and most fertile plots of land, trading licenses, tax exemptions—not to mention carte blanche to settle old scores with their Mau Mau neighbors, even if that meant torturing and murdering them. Mau Mau were getting what they deserved, as O. H. Knight, a district officer in charge of the Kikuyu Guard in Kitale, made perfectly clear: “I have just been reading the unmentionable foulnesses of the Mau Mau oaths, and I can only say, in the words the Jews used against St. Paul, ‘Away with such fellows from the earth, for it is not fit that they should live.’”25

  By the spring of 1953 the Kikuyu loyalists were working side by side with British forces to cleanse the Kikuyu countryside of the Mau Mau scourge. The Home Guard had become an officially recognized armed unit, fighting on behalf of the colonial government, which needed these loyalists to defeat Mau Mau in the reserves. Together with members of the Kenya Police Reserve, the Kenya Regiment, the King’s African Rifles, British military forces, and officers from the Administration, the Home Guard joined in launching the screening campaign that so terrorized the suspected Mau Mau population in the Kikuyu reserves and the White Highlands. Ostensibly, the British forces were in Central Province to hunt down the armed guerrillas operating in and near the forests. But in practice little distinction was made between the Mau Mau forest fighters and the civilian population. They were all Mau Mau savages, and treated as such. In southern Kiambu the Kenya Regiment launched a murderous campaign from its post in Thigio, near the Rift Valley escarpment. Farther north, in what was then called Fort Hall (today Murang’a District), there were numerous massacres like the one at Kiruara in November 1952. In 1953 a series of yet more assaults was launched against the civilian population at the hands of the British-led forces. Thousands of young men, both white and black, cut their battle teeth in the Kikuyu reserves—men like Idi Amin, whose King’s African Rifles company had been dispatched from nearby Uganda to fight in the war. Then in 1954 came the massacre after the Mau Mau attack at Kandara, in the heart of Fort Hall District. Once the battle was over, the “British security forces just went crazy,” recalled one woman who survived. “They had stripped the local people naked and started beating them. Some were led off and shot; others were executed right there. Later, the whites ordered them buried beneath the road and tarmaced it over again. But for a long time you could see the dried blood that had oozed to the surface and out of the sides.”26

  Similar episodes unfolded in Nyeri District. In March 1954 the King’s African Rifles massacred a reported twenty-two civilians—an event that apparently led to a court-martial, though the relevant files still remain sealed in Britain’s Public Record Office.27 In many locations, the wives and mothers of the Mau Mau guerrillas were often targeted by the British security forces. When Molly Wairimu was awakened in the early morning hours to the sound of rifle butts breaking open her door, she knew she had been singled out. “There were many young British soldiers and some African soldiers as well,” she later recalled. She then went on, describing the events that followed.

  They informed me that they had just killed my husband at a place called Muumbuchi, and then they started beating me. They were using their gun butts to hit me. One would hit me, and the blow would throw me to the other, who would hit me and throw me to the next. Nobody cared about where they were hitting me. I was beaten until I was confused and I didn’t care anymore if they killed me. My two-year-old son, who had been woken up by the noise and my screams, ran to me, passing between the legs of the soldiers. As I was being thrown by the blows, from one soldier to the next, my son was trying to hide himself between my legs. They were then shouting at me, telling me that they were giving me the independence that my husband had gone to get for me. They did not seem to care that there was a small child, scared to death and screaming his head off. As I was being thrown from one soldier to the next, my son fell down and was trampled by the frenzied soldiers…. I was beaten so much that my body had grown numb, until I could no longer feel the pain. They then took me outside, and the last thing I saw was my son’s [dead] body lying on the floor of my house.28

  The collective devotion that these troops displayed in terrorizing the locals is striking. Many of the members of these forces had been officially instructed to hate. Throughout Central Province, men and women recalled drills that impressed a dehumanized image of Mau Mau into the minds of the British forces and encouraged them to take violent action. “They would parade up and down the main road here in their rows with their backpacks on,” recalled a man from southern Kiambu. “The white man in charge would shout, ‘Who are the bloody savages?’ and the other white soldiers and their black askaris would respond, ‘Mau Mau.’ He would then say, ‘What are your orders?’ and they would reply, ‘Kill them.’”29

  But this state-sanctioned terror hardly eliminated Mau Mau from the reserves. The local populations had established, and through all the terror continued to operate, an intricate supply line to the Mau Mau guerrillas in the surrounding Mount Kenya and Aberdares forests. Food, ammunition, intelligence, medical supplies, and clothing were all collected and disbursed to the forest fighters. Prearranged sites, or postas, as many former Mau Mau adherents called them, were the distribution method of choice, though there were other far riskier handoffs. In some instances, women would wrap bullets around the thighs of their infants, tie the young children onto their backs with a cloth, and make a delivery to the forest edge. Older children, too, were used as conduits. Many were scouts, collecting information and passing it to the forest fighters through a relay system. As one man who was ten at the start of the war recalled, “We would run around chasing our hoops, looking like we were playing. But in fact we were listening all of the time and knew how to convey information to the fighters in the forest. Sometimes we were given guns and ammunition to take to them because the British officers didn’t usually suspect that children like ourselves would be carrying these things.”30 On other occasions, the guerrillas might come in the middle of the night demanding supplies. The owner of the targeted homestead had no choice but to comply, despite the fact that such an encounter put everyone in jeopardy.

  Oathing also continued. Despite tightened surveillance, Mau Mau adherents in the reserves organized nighttime oathing ceremonies, often indoctrinating the recently arrived repatriates whom the colonial government had forcibly removed from the White Highlands, and elsewhere, at the start of the war. Even if those coming to the reserves had already joined the movement, their new neighbors took no chances. A homestead would be chosen for the oathing, and young children would be left outside to scout the perimeter for Home Guards or British patrols. Inside, with the requisite banana leaves and sacrificial goat, the oath administrator would begin. Though there were variations in the ritual process, it was invariably punctuated by political instructions, the meaning of which were clear—at least according to those who took the oath. Muringo Njooro was among those who were indoctrinated during these upheavals, and, according to her recollection, the oath administrator led them through the ceremony where they ingested the meat and blood of the slaughtered goat. After the ceremony, she said,

  [we were] told that we were fighting for our land, the land of the Kikuyu, which had been taken by the white people who had taken it for themselves. They could do whatever they wished with the land. A white man could come and declare land for miles as his, without having to ask for anybody’s permission or buying it from us. If you as a Kikuyu happened to graze on that land the white man declared as his, you could be beaten or killed. That was where the anger started…. We could see that we were being oppressed, because when something belonging to you had been taken by someone else and then you are treated like slaves on the land that once was yours, you’re bound to feel angry about it, aren’t you? 31

  The step-up in oathing reflected the hardening ideological battle lines of the war. There continued to be a siza
ble minority of Kikuyu Christians who refused to take the oath. “It was not because we disagreed with the principles of Mau Mau,” one such devout Christian later recalled. “It’s just that we had taken the blood of Christ, so taking the blood of the goat would have been blasphemous.”32 Mau Mau adherents often dealt swiftly with these Christians, though not without cause—at least according to the oath takers. “We generally left the Christians alone,” recalled one forest fighter. “But if they informed on us, we would kill them and sometimes cut out their tongues. We had no choice. If they had just kept quiet, we would not have bothered them. But you know, it was impossible for them to be neutral. The British would not allow it.”33

  Then there were those oath takers who became, in the language of the time, migaru, or turncoats. The fear of the colonial government or the temptation of material gain, or both, compelled some of these Mau Mau adherents to defect and join the ranks of the Home Guard. As the war progressed, scores of poor Kikuyu fought actively against their former Mau Mau comrades as loyalists enforcing British law and order. There were men like Frederick Kinyanjui who, with no land of his own, decided to give up and join Chief Mathea’s Home Guard unit in Kiambu. “It was because of the beating I received, and the pain of seeing my wife being beaten until she miscarried what would have been our firstborn baby,” he said. “I decided to confess in order to save my life, to have a chance of getting other children. I would have died without leaving any children.”34

  But few gave in during the early years of the war. To break Mau Mau support in the reserves, the colonial government continually turned up the heat. First came forced communal labor. When this was not enough, Baring ordered collective punishments and the further confiscation of property and land. According to Emergency Regulations, the governor could issue Native Land Rights Confiscation Orders, whereby “each of the persons named in the Schedule…participated or aided in armed or violent resistance against the forces of law and order” and therefore had his land confiscated. Additionally, colonial officers in the Kikuyu districts could seize livestock and other items, like bicycles, from suspected Mau Mau sympathizers. By early 1954 tens of thousands of cattle, goats, and sheep were taken and, according to many former Mau Mau adherents, never returned.35 In the North Tetu Division of Nyeri District, for example, Wachehu Magayu later recalled: “The British officer would come with the Home Guards and take our animals, calling us the bloody Mau Mau. They said that our cows were getting their wiyathi [independence], and that we would get ours if we weren’t careful. But there was nothing that was going to get me to give up. The British took our land, and we wanted our freedom back, and I had taken the oath and was prepared to die for it.”36

  Magayu Kiama never expected to survive screening. Facedown in a pool of his own blood, Magayu raised his head, only to be kicked in the face again and finally knocked unconscious by one of the Home Guards in Aguthi Location, in Nyeri District. When he came to, he was naked and slumped over in a ditch of cold, insect-infested water.37 Here he was left to await more screening in a ndaki, or pit, inside one of the Home Guard posts that had sprung up all over the Kikuyu reserves. Initially, these posts were an easy target for Mau Mau attacks, because they were poorly designed and sited by the chiefs. After 1953 Baring’s government overhauled the posts, and they became the physical symbols of loyalist power in the reserves. Magayu likened the one in his location to a fortress. The post was surrounded by a huge trench filled with wooden spikes, the high walls were laced with barbed wire, and a watchtower soared above the rest of the structure (a trademark for all of the posts throughout the Kikuyu reserves). Magayu also recalled several buildings within the post: a large courtyard, the same place where he had first been beaten, and a long row of individual cells where the ndaki was located. He remained in his cell for nearly ten days and was screened daily by the Home Guards and a European officer before finally being sent to detention.

  Magayu, like thousands of other Mau Mau suspects, was picked up and brought to the post for screening, with the specific objective of extracting a confession and intelligence. There was, however, a callousness in the behavior of the white and black interrogators that exceeded the mere objectives of war. Few escaped the Home Guard posts, whatever the age or gender. Undoubtedly, the screening task was massive, and to some degree the loyalists and the handful of overseeing colonial officers had to have been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers they were required to screen. Yet the use of sadistic screening techniques reported by numerous survivors and other eyewitnesses suggests that the loyalist Home Guards and their white superiors took perverse pleasure in their various physical assaults on Mau Mau suspects. Word quickly spread among the locals about what awaited them in the Home Guard posts, and many struggled fiercely to stay out. Living in Mathira at the start of the Emergency, Ndiritu Goro remembers the scene in late 1953 at the gate of the post in his location: “I held on to a fence post with both my hands, and refused to go. The Home Guards pried my fingers from the post and overpowered me. We were headed to where Ngotho’s dead body was; they had just shot him dead. When we neared the place, Allan, the headman, loaded his gun, ready to shoot me.”38 Unlike Ngotho, Ndiritu lived. Another headman named Kiana intervened, though his reasons were not entirely sympathetic. He wanted additional information and realized Ndiritu was more valuable alive than dead.

  Home Guard post and watchtower in Kianjogu village, Nyeri District

  The loyalists’ violent anger was not solely reserved for screening sessions in the Home Guard posts but was also expressed all over the markets and homesteads of Kikuyuland. There were instances where all pretense of intelligence gathering was dropped and retribution took on a naked and brutal face. When Mau Mau forces murdered one of Senior Chief Njiiri’s sons in Fort Hall in early 1953, the consequences for the local Mau Mau population were devastating. For most members of the Administration, the senior chief epitomized colonial loyalty; he was their darling who ruled over the most substantial island of Mau Mau resistance in Fort Hall’s biggest location, Location 2. J. A. Rutherford praised him endlessly, and Frank Loyd, Fort Hall’s district commissioner at the time, later recalled, “Senior Chief Njiiri was a bedrock for colonial values. We needed more people like him; he was a true example and leader of loyalist forces.”39

  Among the local population, however, the senior chief was known largely for two things: his wives—he had over sixty of them—and his cruelty. When his son was killed by General Kago, one of the legendary Mau Mau guerrillas fighting in the Aberdares, he unleashed his rage. Kago and his forest gang had made their attack not far from the village of Mununga, near the forest edge. Within a few days the senior chief and the district officer in charge of the local Home Guard entered Mununga with several hundred Home Guards from Njiiri’s stronghold of Kinyona. They were not, however, seeking to screen the locals for knowledge about Kago or the assassination. Instead they told the men, all of whom had already been forced for several months to dig a trench between their village and the forest, to put down their tools and make their way to the market. Before many of them could reach the market square, they saw smoke coming from the surrounding huts. The Home Guards were burning everything in sight: homes, crops, bicycles. Then the gunshots began. Everyone scattered, but the Home Guards had formed a cordon around the village, and no one could escape. One eyewitness, Njuguna Robinson Mwangi, who was a teenager at the time, recalled the massacre (as he termed it).

  When the first round of shooting was over, the European Home Guard leader called each Home Guard one by one and asked him how many bullets he had used. He then replaced the used bullets with new ones. He then instructed [the Home Guards] to start beating without using their guns, so they started using their pangas [machetes] and clubs. My father was beaten mercilessly and could not walk…. So many people were killed. The Home Guard did not want to pass over the dead, so they tried to walk around them, but they couldn’t, there were just too many. They then called all of the survivors to the market square, wher
e they were being paraded one by one in front of the shops. When a person reached a certain point, he was just shot dead. I was in that very line. I saw a small passageway between the shops and took a chance. I ran and they shot at me, but they missed. I hid in the forest, and when I came out there was nothing left, just ash and smoke where our village used to be. 40

  Other survivors of Mununga recall similar stories of Njiiri’s revenge. Along with Njuguna, Karuma Karumi and Paul Kimanja vividly remember the day, and the corpses that remained.41 The Home Guard dumped several hundred of them in the communal latrine, where “no one could dare to bury them.”42 In fact, some of the bodies remain there today, under a row of small shops. The rest of the dead were left exposed, to be consumed by hyenas and other local wildlife. Many survivors believed the massacre was meant as an example for other Mau Mau supporters in the district. News of it spread, and even some fifty years later Kikuyu men and women from throughout the region remembered what happened at Mununga and insisted that other forms of British colonial revenge were widespread. “Mununga was not an isolated incident,” recalled Muthoni Waciuma. “There was Kiruara, the massacre after the battle of Kandara, and many other such attacks by the colonialists and the Home Guards happening all over the Kikuyu reserves.”43