Imperial Reckoning
Page 12
In the early years of the Emergency two men working for the British government in Fort Hall were renowned for enforcing colonial control. The first was Sam Githu, better known as Sam Speaker because of his rapid speech. Later it was said that his nickname took on another meaning: Speaker could make anyone talk. Also called the “horror of horrors,” the “face of the devil,” and more commonly “pure evil,” he was a loyalist from Chomo in Fort Hall who had risen through the ranks of the local colonial government. At the start of the Emergency, Speaker was an assistant district officer who appeared to occupy a multitude of roles other than his official one of clerical staff. Working alongside him was a young British settler nicknamed YY by the local Kikuyu. Around twenty years of age at the start of the Emergency, YY and his reign of terror were legendary from Fort Hall all the way through to northern Nyeri District, a distance stretching some fifty miles. Like the sons of many settlers, YY joined the Kenya Police Reserve when the war began and from the start advocated harsh justice for any civilians suspected of Mau Mau sympathies. He was a Napoleonic figure who more than made up for his diminutive stature with his imperial bravado. Dressed in a police uniform complete with a black leather sash and hat pulled down closely over his eyes, YY walked carrying a riding whip, which he snapped in time with his pace.
In 1953 Speaker and YY moved throughout Fort Hall, helping direct massive screening parades and individual interrogation sessions. In some instances they personally disposed of suspects, often making an example of them for the rest of the Kikuyu population. On one occasion in early 1953 they brought two suspects to the Kandara police station. Prior to the Emergency, the building had been the dispensary and home of the local clinician and his family; when Mau Mau started, the police took over the dispensary space but allowed the man and his family to remain in their attached living quarters. From their window, the two daughters had a perfect view from which to witness what went on at the police station when YY arrived with two Mau Mau suspects. Muthoni Waciuma, the younger of the two sisters, recalled:
We were standing right next to our fireplace, resting our chins on the bricks and looking directly at the police station; it was just a few feet away. We then saw Kamiraru [YY] pull up with two men. They took the first man and hooked him up to the engine of the Land Rover while it was still running and his body just shook all over. But they weren’t finished with him…. Kamiraru and some other Kikuyu Home Guard took him over to the generator that was in the back of the police station’s garage. They then hooked him up to this generator and electrocuted him. After that, Kamiraru and Speaker turned to the other man, who was still standing there. They tied him to the back of the Land Rover and made him run behind them as they drove off. He was running, and of course he falls. They drove him until he died in pieces. That was being done to really show people that if they didn’t confess and give up Mau Mau that that would be their fate. I have never seen anything so cruel. And we were scared stiff, so we did everything we could not to have something like that done to ourselves. You just kept quiet. It was really a traumatic time…. There was so much suffering. People will not believe that we have survived such things. A lot of atrocities like this one were done. 44
This example typifies the priority given by white and black alike to inflicting punishment and suffering upon the population of Mau Mau suspects, and the extent to which the brutality was intentionally committed in plain view. While some screening was conducted behind closed doors, it was also a public spectacle, empowering the perpetrators and terrorizing the civilian population.
Local police preparing to screen Mau Mau suspects, November 1952
Baring generally refused to do anything to rein in the Home Guards’ sadistic tactics, arguing along with his officers in the field that wrist slapping or prosecutions would undermine loyalists’ morale. However, in one rare instance six Home Guards were tried in late 1954 for brutally forcing confessions and for summarily executing a Mau Mau suspect in the Ruthagati Home Guard post in Nyeri District. Presiding over the case, Judge A. L. Cram convicted headman Eliud Muriu and the five other Home Guards of murder. In explaining his verdict, Cram deplored the system that permitted the Home Guards to arrest anyone at will, torture the individual until extracting a confession, and then either try the victim solely on the basis of the forced confession or use the same confession as a pretext for sending the suspect to a detention camp. The men on trial were guilty of not just murder; they were committing atrocities on what Cram believed to be a daily basis. He focused particularly on the Home Guard post at Ruthagati, which he said resembled the “stronghold of a robber baron,” and elaborated that
it was a barbed wire enclosure surrounded by a staked moat and provided with a drawbridge—a primitive keep, in fact. The sort of place from which prisoners could not readily escape, and it was presided over by [Headman Muriu] and a team of men who had one function in life and that was to extort statements or confessions by fear and if necessary by violence from every hapless person sent or brought there, innocent or guilty…. The reign of terror is well advanced [in this area]. 45
Predictably, Cram absolved the district commissioner from any wrong-doing, remarking that “the DC states he made it amply clear that his instructions were that no violence of any sort was to be used in extracting confessions.”46 But just days before Cram handed down his verdict, G. Hill, the district officer in charge of Eliud Muriu and the rest of the Home Guard at Ruthagati, wrote a memorandum denouncing the prosecution of the six loyalists, arguing, “The conclusion is that the K.G. [Kikuyu Guard] may consider it better to join the Mau Mau and reactivate the fighting war than stay in a post and be liable to serious charge.”47 Far more damning, though, was his argument that the colony’s attorney general, John Whyatt, had “no personal knowledge or experience of the physical side of the war”—implying that physical violence was justified given the nature of Mau Mau.48 Hill well knew what was going on in the Home Guard posts, and it would have been likely that he informed his superior officer, the district commissioner. Throughout the Emergency, variations on Hill’s argument, that only those in the field truly understood the mitigating circumstances of colonial violence, would be used time and again to justify brutality and avoid prosecution.
Screening abuses were also being perpetrated in nearby Tanganyika, where a British judge adamantly supported the view that colonial violence was justified during Mau Mau. In October 1953, Governor Baring dispatched Brian Hayward and twenty-one African loyalists to the Northern Province of Tanganyika, to which thousands of Kikuyu had earlier migrated after the British colonial incursion. Tanganyika’s governor Edward Twining greatly feared that Mau Mau would spread to his colony. Hayward and his men came to screen local Kikuyu and repatriate any of the so-called bad hats back to Kenya, where they would be detained. All of nineteen years old, Hayward was the son of a British settler in Kenya who had been steeped in local white beliefs about Mau Mau. Baring picked Hayward for his firsthand experience in screening. He was already a temporary district officer in charge of screening in the Kikuyu reserves and had been sent on a brief tour of the screening centers in the Rift Valley (like Subukia and Bahati) before leaving. In less than a week, Governor Twining reported to the Colonial Office that “rumours were heard that the screening teams were being very rough with the Kikuyu, and a European farmer—Colonel Minnery—confirmed these rumours.” Unlike Baring, who refused to follow up on such allegations, Twining ordered an immediate, official investigation that revealed
violence, in the form of whipping on the soles of the feet, burning with lighted cigarettes and tying leather thongs round the neck and dragging the victims along the ground, had been used on the interrogated. Between 170 and 200 were interrogated, of whom at least 32 were badly injured, and others received some injury. Hayward himself took an active part in the chastisement of the Africans and is said to have threatened to shoot one man after pointing his revolver at him. 49
Hayward and ten African members of the screenin
g team pleaded guilty on all twenty counts of assault occasioning “actual bodily harm.” Most revealing, though, were the judge’s summary remarks. In passing sentence, he told the courtroom, “It is easy to work oneself up into a state of pious horror over these offenses, but they must be considered against their background. All the accused were engaged in seeking out inhuman monsters and savages of the lowest order.”50 He fined Hayward one hundred pounds, which was paid by a local group of settlers, and sentenced him to three months’ hard labor, which Hayward performed by doing clerical work in a hotel. The loyalist screeners were fined one hundred shillings and sentenced to a day of imprisonment.51
By and large, any limits placed on screening techniques were introduced independently by a handful of white colonial officers or, occasionally, a Kikuyu Home Guard. Early in 1953, Magayu Kiama was accused by the local Kamatimu, or Home Guards, of harboring Mau Mau fighters in his home. He recalled “two white men and several African soldiers” burning down his house. Magayu continued: “My wife was shot. A lady visitor was shot, and several suspected Mau Mau fighters were shot. Their bodies were burned in the inferno. I do not know who came to take my children away, or my wife. I was in shock, and I spent the night outside my burned-out homestead. In the morning, the police came for me, and I was taken to the chief’s camp, where I stayed several days.” Like other suspects held there, Magayu was slated for summary execution. A white officer intervened just in time. He reprimanded the chief, according to Magayu, saying, “I had not been at fault, because it just happened that Mau Mau came to my house to demand sheep for slaughter…. That was what I had told [the chief]. I could have been killed, were it not for [this white officer]…. [But still] I had been badly beaten and could hardly walk. The Home Guard in charge lied to the white officer that I was sick, to hide the fact that I had been beaten.”52
In Pascasio Macharia’s case, he was picked up by the Kenya Police and Home Guard in Nyeri and shipped to his home location in Fort Hall District, where he befriended a Kamba guard who then saved his life. At the Kahuro camp, he remembers,
I was removed from the truck. The order was given by the headman from my place, who said that I was to be beaten because I was the worst person. The askaris set on me and beat me until I fell unconscious, and they left me for dead. When they locked up the others, I was left outside, but some guards were there, just in case I regained consciousness. I came to…and looked around, and I noticed someone smoking. I asked him for a cigarette. It was a Kamba askari. I then asked him for a drink of water, and he gave me one…. Just before dawn, the guards who had been guarding me wanted to put me into a pit that was close by. They dragged me toward it, but fortunately, the same Kamba who had given me the cigarette appeared and told them to leave me alone. 53
But Pascasio’s troubles were not over. He was then sent to the office of the Criminal Investigation Department, or CID, where local Home Guards and a white officer interrogated him some more. “Things were bad there; they were exterminating a lot of people,” Pascasio said. Luckily, his uncle was a friend of the headman, who agreed, for two crates of beer, to spare Pascasio’s life. Instead of a single bullet to the head, the local execution style of choice, according to Pascasio, he was transferred to a detention camp.54
Had Baring wanted to control the abuses, he would have had a difficult time imposing his authority on the diverse multitude who had a hand in screening. Interrogators included the European settlers, the district commissioners and their officers in the White Highlands and reserves, the Home Guard, a separate phalanx of security forces under Erskine’s command, as well as the Special Branch and the Criminal Investigation Department, who were effectively the colony’s gestapo, according to one member of the force.55 The local colonial press, generally sympathetic to the forces fighting Mau Mau, particularly in the early days of the Emergency, published an article titled “Law and the People,” in which it raised the matter: “That any member of the public held in custody as a suspect can be handed over to a body which has no standing or statutory duty in the investigation of crime, for the purpose of extracting confessions or evidence that the police have failed to obtain by normal method of examination, is something which should cause very real concern.”56
The Kenya Police, of which the Kenya Police Reserve and the Special Branch were parts, were a special category. Many whites in the police force were a lowbrow corps of recruits who, in keeping with their racist up-bringing, routinely roughed up the local Africans. With the Emergency, the ranks of the police swelled more than twofold, with white officers like YY coming either from within the settler population, or from a pool of British recruits with few career alternatives other than a post in remote Kenya, or from Rhodesia and South Africa, where similar law-and-order policies were applied to the so-called native populations. Side by side with the whites were African recruits, most of whom came from remote parts of Kenya and who were untrained in policing policies. These new white and black policemen were wholly unprepared for the Emergency situation in Kenya. Even Baring remarked that “the members of the Kenya Police Reserve were tough, that the Police Force was rotten.”57
Many Europeans in the police force felt entitled to any means at their disposal to fight the war against Mau Mau. Interrogating men and women as they pleased, they created among the Kikuyu a terror of capricious violence. In his autobiographical account of the Emergency, William Baldwin candidly recalls the callousness of the Kenya Police. Himself a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, Baldwin was a nomadic young American seeking adventure in Africa. He seems to have found it in Kenya, where he proudly worked to rid the colony of the Mau Mau baboons, as he called them, freely admitting to murdering Mau Mau suspects in cold blood during eight different interrogations. Some he slowly killed with a knife while forcing other suspects to watch.58 Former Mau Mau suspects living as far south as Thigio in Kiambu District and as far north as the northern edge of Nyeri District, a hundred miles away, confirmed scenarios similar to the young American’s account, leaving little doubt that his behavior was typical. John Nottingham, the young British district officer who was outspoken both during and after the Emergency about his colleagues’ behavior, underscores this point. In a 1987 interview for Grenada television’s End of Empire documentary, Nottingham emphasized:
I think there was nothing that the local Europeans in these various organizations didn’t do…. I’ve seen old men kicked into my office in Nyeri by settler sons who are very surprised that I should feel this was the wrong thing to do. The only crime the gentleman had committed was to take an oath. I’ve seen KPR [Kenya Police Reserve] in charge of, for example, Kiriaini police station in Murang’a District, just put eight people against a wall and had them shot…. There were really no limits that they wouldn’t go to. 59
Police brutality during screening and throughout everyday life was hardly a secret in Kenya or in Britain. In March 1953 Tony Cross, a temporary British officer posted at Gekondi Police Station in Nyeri, sent a letter to his former colleagues at Streatham Police Station in South London bragging about what he termed the “Gestapo stuff” that was going on in the ranks of the police force and Home Guard. Soon picked up by the press in London, the letter made the headlines in the South London Press and the Daily Worker.
We have formed 3 home guards on this manor, each about 50 strong—and they get out and bring in the information—some are pretty good—then we go out and raid, and knock a few off—don’t ask me why—just because the home guard say they are bad men—of course some are wanted—anyways after persuasion they usually confess something. It’s not uncommon for people to die in the cells—these home guards are unmerciful bast—s. Since I’ve been here I inspect all prisoners brought in—and if they are a bit dubious I refuse to have ’em—get called to a dead body the next day—and proceed normally. The rule here is if you are on patrol and you find some men hiding in the bush—you call upon them to stop and if they don’t—they are shot—or rather shot at—these boys I’ve got are
such rotten shots they can’t hit anything—so I grab the first bloke’s rifle and have a go—anyway I’ve been giving them some intensive training and they are getting better now. 60
Like Cross, other police officers offered accounts of brutality. In one case, Peter Bostock wrote that it was “quite common to shoot prisoners ‘while [they were] trying to escape’” and that one officer had told him proudly that he “got nine of the swines [sic] in that way.” After recalling various acts of terror, Bostock then went on to report, “I can truthfully say that only one act of cruelty towards a Kikuyu ever revolted me during my service in the Police. With two other Europeans I was questioning an old man. His answers were unsatisfactory. One of the white men set his dog at the old fellow. The animal got him to the ground, ripped open his throat, and started mauling his chest and arms. In spite of his screams, my companions [i.e., fellow police officers] just grinned. It was five minutes before the dog was called off. I can still hear that old man’s screams.”61
Then there were the South African imports Heine and Van Zyl, two Special Branch officers who were known as particularly sadistic torturers, no small distinction given the situation in Kenya.62 In fact, some British settlers nicknamed the Special Branch “Kenya’s SS” because of its notoriety for torturing Mau Mau suspects behind closed doors. Nottingham highlights this police unit in his description of the screening camps.
When you come to what happened in the various camps, the screening camps, whether they were the local areas, the police stations or whether they were the bigger camps and so forth again there were very few limits that people seemed to observe. The Mau Mau Investigation Center at Embakasi outside Nairobi was nothing less than a torture area which used everything. And it was run by the Special Branch and I would say people were killed there without any news of this being allowed to escape or anything happening at all. 63