Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  There is little in the colonial record documenting what happened at the famous Mau Mau Investigation Center, the brainchild of the Special Branch. If there were records, they have been destroyed or are still to be declassified. “This [Mau Mau Investigation Center] is where we liked to send the worst gang members when we captured them sent to the forests,” recalled one settler who had joined the ranks of the Kenya Regiment sent to the Aberdares. “We knew the slow method of torture [at the Mau Mau Investigation Center] was worse than anything we could do. Special Branch there had a way of slowly electrocuting a Kuke—they’d rough up one for days. Once I went personally to drop off one gang member who needed special treatment. I stayed for a few hours to help the boys out, softening him up. Things got a little out of hand. 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.”64

  Rhoderick Macleod, a British settler, member of the Kenya Police Reserve, and brother of Iain Macleod, the future colonial secretary, summed up the attitude of many members of Kenya’s police force and the Administration in the reserves when he commented: “[The Emergency] was a state of anarchy, in which the book did not work. It was as simple as that.”65 Worse, everyone seemed to know about colonial violence and to condone it, at least tacitly if not explicitly. Fitz de Souza, a respected attorney in Nairobi and defender of Jomo Kenyatta, remembers that a consensus of British political leaders in the colony endorsed a shoot-to-kill policy: “[The idea of shooting people on the spot] was quite, quite, quite widely spread. I was surprised to find that many reasonable educated people, some of them in fact later became members of Parliament and to a very responsible position in independent Kenya, supported this idea of arresting a hundred people from nowhere, just shooting thirty, and sending the seventy to tell the tale of who was the boss.”66

  Screening was not only a way to terrorize the Mau Mau population. Though hardly a streamlined system even by the end of the Emergency, screening made it possible for the colonial government to amass huge files of information about Mau Mau activities. Torture, or fear of it, compelled oath takers to give details about their oathing ceremonies, including names or revealing the locations of the caches of arms or food supplies for Mau Mau fighting the forest war. Some of this intelligence was accurate and some pure fiction, fabricated on the spot by Mau Mau suspects trying to save themselves. The colonial government nevertheless used the information to convict some thirty thousand Kikuyu men and women of Mau Mau crimes and sentence them to prison, many for life. “Far from being concerned about possible disregard of human rights,” Cyril Dunn, a correspondent for the Observer, would later comment, “Europeans here [in Kenya] are apt to argue that British notions of justice are inapplicable. A letter this week in a local newspaper is typical. ‘It is stark nonsense,’ the writer says, ‘to treat these rebels as legitimate belligerents, and to apply to them all the subtleties and intricacies of British law.’”67

  The vast majority of Mau Mau cases were heard in Emergency assize courts, where due process was suspended, the defense had little if any access to the evidence in the case, and the defendants themselves were often tried en masse and identified for the court not by name but by large numbers hanging around their necks. Along with those convicted and imprisoned, the makeshift court operations in place throughout the Emergency found over one thousand Mau Mau suspects guilty of capital offenses and sent them to the gallows. This is a startling number of executions, given the often slim evidence offered by the prosecution. However, the suspects tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by the Kenyan system of justice comprised only a very small percentage of those who ultimately would die at the hands of the British colonial government during the Emergency.

  The forces unleashed by the screening campaign revealed a darker side of British colonialism than had earlier been seen in Kenya. Virulent racism was certainly endemic to the colony, as was a profound righteousness—a sense that the British were morally superior not only to black Africans but to all other races as well. Kenya’s so-called native laws were already notoriously harsh, and would become even more so in the years to come. There were even massacres during the early years of colonization, like the one Richard Meinertzhagen boasts about, in which some one hundred Kikuyu were murdered as the interior was opened up for British settlement.68 But what happened during the early years of Mau Mau was different. The dedication to torture and killing during screening operations stands apart. The ubiquity of screening from the rural areas to the urban center of Nairobi meant that even those in the colonial government and the local European community of settlers and missionaries who were not directly involved with suppressing Mau Mau had to have been aware of the brutality of the screening process.

  The British colonizers continuously defined themselves and their Mau Mau antagonists as polar opposites. How better to save Britain’s civilization in Kenya than to eradicate the elements who threatened the colony’s very foundation? Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Mau Mau had few defenders, except for the small minority of Asian lawyers like Fitz de Souza and Sheikh Amin. Today, when reflecting on the number of Mau Mau suspects killed from the start of screening in late 1952 to the end of detention in 1961, de Souza says: “By the end I would say there were several hundred thousand killed. One hundred easily, though more like two to three hundred thousand. All these people just never came back when it was over. This was a form of ethnic cleansing on the part of the British government, and there is no doubt about that in my mind.”69

  From the start the colonial government fought fiercely to deny any wrongdoing in Kenya, and when caught red-handed, Governor Baring and Colonial Secretary Lyttelton cited mitigating circumstances. At the time, men and women did not talk in terms of guilt or responsibility, because their crimes in the screening centers, police stations, and Home Guard posts were not crimes as far as they were concerned. Mau Mau forced them to fight violence with violence. In effect, they were compelled to do the unthinkable when confronted by the barbaric behavior of the Kikuyu oath takers. Casting themselves as hapless victims, rather than perpetrators of crimes, the British colonial agents sought to evoke sympathy, not condemnation. British reaction was hardly different from that of any other regime trying to face down accusations of wartime crimes. In his reflections on Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Americans in Vietnam, Jan Philipp Reemtsma suggests: “The problem is that societies confronted with their own armies’ war crimes often try to get rid of the problem, first by denying the existence of the crimes (it’s unjust and insulting to be accused of having committed such crimes), or, if the crimes cannot be denied any longer, by lowering the standards. In both ways people try not to give up the correspondence between reality and self-image in order to be a ‘civilized’ society, even in war time.”70

  In the case of Mau Mau, the British colonial government was doubly determined, in accordance with colonial rhetoric, to maintain civilization’s upper hand over the African savages. Civilization was, after all, the whole point of Britain being in Kenya in the first place. But if British settlers and those who acted on their behalf were as barbaric as Mau Mau, how could Britain justify its continued presence in and exploitation of the colony? Even the newly arrived temporary officers and young brash settlers, or the Kenyan Cowboys, as the foreign journalists called them, believed to some degree in Britain’s paternalistic ethos, or its civilizing mission. In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary—for instance, the castration of a Mau Mau suspect—the British and their loyalist supporters maintained the illusion that their actions were the epitome of civilized behavior. It was as if by insisting loudly enough, and long enough, they could somehow revise the reality of their campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide.

  At the end of 1953, the Emergency was still in its early stages. Though screening was widespread, there were still but a few thousand detainees in the camps, and the barbed-wire villages had ye
t to be conceived. But violence against Mau Mau suspects during screening was so extreme, and so widely applied, that there could have been little doubt that it would spill over into the evolving Pipeline of detention camps that was now starting to take shape. The symbiosis between the bloodthirsty views of the British colonizers and the Kikuyu loyalists had already produced the conditions and the drive to destroy, quite literally, the Mau Mau. Although the detention camps in Kenya would never systematically aim to eliminate a whole population as did the Nazi death camps, the conditions were in place by 1953 to transform a fledgling camp system into a far broader locus of torture, hard labor, and killing. Protagonists in this setting were the tens of thousands of Mau Mau suspects who were dehumanized by the British even before they set foot in the camps. While enduring screening, men and women were often reduced to looking and smelling like the animals they were claimed to be. By relentlessly subjecting the minds and bodies of Mau Mau suspects to violence during screening, the British colonizers and their loyalist sympathizers were able to confirm in their own minds that the oath takers were subhuman and themselves paragons of civility.

  • Chapter Four •

  Rehabilitation

  IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1953, CANON T. F. C. BEWES OF THE CHURCH MISSIONARY society held a press conference in London. Addressing a host of journalists, he accused British security forces of routinely using the third degree, as he called it, to extract intelligence and to impress upon Mau Mau adherents the strength of colonial power. He offered the example of Elijah Gideon Njeru, a former missionary teacher, who had been beaten by Jack Ruben of the Kenya Regiment and Richard Keates of the Kenya Police Reserve, along with several of their African askaris, or guards. Bewes stated that Njeru was suspected of being Mau Mau and had been “taken away and beaten, [the beating] continued to make him confess and he died under beating.” He went on to add that “this is not repeat not an isolated case.” When members of the press pushed the canon for more details of the third degree, he said he had extensive evidence of the use of “excessive force by settlers, military forces, [and] police,” and that he and the archbishop of Canterbury would deliver this evidence to Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton.1

  Canon Bewes’s credibility was unimpeachable. He had been a missionary in Kenya for twenty years, from 1929 to 1949, where he lived in Central Province and worked extensively with the Kikuyu. He had, in his words, “established close relationships with many Kikuyu. I was in and out of their huts in the evenings; sat round their fires; exchanged jokes and riddles with elders; fished and hunted with the lads…. Our Kikuyu friends showed great interest in our children. We grew to love them, understand their language, share their thoughts.”2 In 1950 he was living in London, serving as the African secretary for the Church Missionary Society, when he began receiving numerous dispatches from his Anglican missionaries in Kikuyuland describing the “increasing difficulty and tension” there. He decided to return to Kenya to view the deteriorating conditions firsthand, and on January 5, 1953, he left London for the Kikuyu reserves. Bewes returned to England three weeks later, though not before meeting privately with Governor Baring to express his grave concern about what he called the “extreme pressure being used by the Authorities, Police or Home Guard.”3

  Bewes committed his discussion with Baring to a “private and confidential” report that has survived archival purgings. The report, still in the files of the Colonial Office in London, describes the missionaries’ concern for their tiny remaining flock of devout Kikuyu Christians, many of whom were growing more afraid of the colonial forces than they were of Mau Mau. When Canon Bewes mentioned this fear to local police, one British officer responded, “Good, that is what we want; when they are more afraid of us we shall get the information we want.” To his horror, Bewes realized that terror was being used to intimidate, and eliminate, both Mau Mau adherents and the few remaining Kikuyu Christians. In his private memorandum to Baring, he reiterated:

  I reported to you [Governor Baring, during our visit before my return to England] certain statements given by European police themselves. One spoke to me of the methods used by himself to extract information—putting an up-turned bucket on a man’s head and then beating it with a metal instrument for up to half an hour when the man usually burst into tears and gave the information if he had any…. A second policeman had reported to a missionary concerned that a fellow European policeman had picked up a man, had him laid on the ground with his legs apart, and had him beaten on the private parts in an attempt to extract a confession…. Further information along this particular line was that some of the police had been using castrating instruments and that in one instance two men had died under castration, and one had gone to hospital…. The same castrating instrument—a metal one had also been reported as being used to clamp on to the fingers of people who were unwilling to give information, and that if the information was not given the tips of the fingers were cut off. This information was given to me from such widely separated sources that I am sure it was at least based upon fact. 4

  The canon was initially reluctant to go to the media with this damning information, writing to the governor, “I am very anxious that information of this kind should not go into the Press for I am sure that we must do all that we can to prevent inflammation of passions on either side [of the Mau Mau war].”5 We can only assume that Bewes’s press conference resulted from Baring’s refusal to take concrete action. The canon went public because no one in the British colonial government would listen to him.

  Granville Roberts, chief strategist in the East African Public Relations Department of the Colonial Office, knew how damning Bewes’s public accusations were. From the start of the Emergency, the colonial government had made a concerted effort to manage information coming out of Kenya and especially to minimize the impact of any statements about or accounts of torture. In the wake of the canon’s press conference Roberts wrote, “It is unnecessary for me to say how very damaging to the Government accusations in these terms are particularly in view of the fact that Bewes told Press he would not give many details but left to go ‘straight to the Archbishop with whom he would be completely frank.’ This implies that he could have told [a] much worse story if he cared.”6 Roberts was proved absolutely right as Bewes and the archbishop did go on to tell a “much worse story” privately to the colonial secretary, the basic details of which had already been spelled out in his earlier memorandum to Governor Baring.

  The colonial government’s response of obstruction and obfuscation was becoming predictable. Governor Baring and the Colonial Office first sent secret memoranda back and forth determining how best to handle the ensuing queries from the House of Commons, finally agreeing on a response that would become standard for years to come: “The Governor is investigating the matter.”7 Interestingly, in the same report discussing the public-response language, Baring wrote to the colonial secretary that “there is every reason to believe that this is a case where a Mau Mau man was beaten in order to get information vital in the public interest and died in consequence, although this consequence was not to be expected.”8 The initial internal inquiry conducted by R. A. Wilkinson, a first-class magistrate, urged that the offense be viewed in the light of the panic caused by the recent Ruck murders that had “horrified the whole country.” In his recommendation, Wilkinson wrote that the British perpetrators had “quite obviously suffered considerable punishment in the form of worry and remorse.” More to the point, British colonial interests had also to be considered. “I do not in any case consider that it is in the public interest,” he concluded, “that such action [i.e., prosecutions] should be taken at the present time, when all must unite in the effort to restore this country to a state in which such circumstances as these could not arise.”9

  The public response in Britain to the beating to death of Elijah Gideon Njeru made a trial difficult to avoid. Ruben and Keates—the two Europeans charged with manslaughter in the case—were tried in September 1953. The jury found them
not guilty of the manslaughter charge though guilty of the much lesser offense of “assault occasioning actual bodily harm.” They were fined fifty pounds and one hundred pounds, respectively. According to the Reuters report at the time, “The jury had recommended mercy ‘having regard to the full circumstances of the Emergency and consequent heavy responsibilities placed on a small section of the community.’”10 Judge Rudd, who presided over the case, endorsed the jury’s decision, saying he was sympathetic to its viewpoint, and added, “As far as I am concerned I do not think I would have imposed a very much greater sentence even if the conviction had been of manslaughter.”11

  The verdict caused Canon Bewes to reconsider the public nature of his reproach. The missionaries in Kenya, like elsewhere in Britain’s empire, were dependent upon the colonial government’s goodwill, and never more so than during the Emergency, when the governor could use his wide-ranging powers to remove missionaries from the colony or greatly circumscribe their activities. The colony’s relationship with the churches was, nonetheless, one of mutual dependence as the colonial government relied on the missions to underwrite many of the social costs of Britain’s civilizing role. Throughout the Mau Mau war Christian missionaries would carefully balance their outrage over colonial violence with their need to maintain the favor of the government; they wanted above all else to continue God’s work in upholding Britain’s civilizing mission. In hindsight, it is not surprising that Bewes’s press conference was the last of its kind. Moving forward, most missionaries would spend much of the Emergency privately lobbying Governor Baring and the Colonial Office rather than airing their complaints in the public arena. Even then they clearly feared reprisals. When bringing another “incident,” as Bewes called it, to the attention of the colonial secretary in October 1953, he wrote, “I would rather the matter were dropped altogether than that anybody should think I had raised it—and this refers to the Governor in particular.”12