Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Timorousness of the missionaries aside, the public debates over screening abuses did inflict damage on the British colonial government, coming as they did at a time when Governor Baring was using with increasing regularity his powers to detain Mau Mau suspects without trial. As of July 1953, he had sent over fifteen hundred suspected Mau Mau politicals and militants to the “internee camps,” as they were first called. Each of the detainees was incarcerated without trial under Governor’s Detention Orders, or GDOs, something that would later distinguish them from the growing camp population of “lesser Mau Maus.” The expanding detainee population was a reflection of the Crown’s inability to prosecute cases effectively against Mau Mau suspects, so that a GDO functioned as the “next best thing” to a conviction. The colonial government routinely failed to amass enough evidence to convict the vast majority of Mau Mau adherents, often owing to the disappearance or murder of witnesses for the prosecution. As the mechanisms of justice hit a wall, ongoing screening operations still continued to produce thousands of cases against Mau Mau suspects, ranging from consorting with terrorists to possessing ammunition to administering or taking an oath.

  The Kenyan courts, financially and administratively strapped like the rest of the colonial government, could not possibly prosecute all these cases. While some of those arrested for directing Mau Mau activities were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, Governor Baring used his power of detention without trial for the greater majority of the suspected Mau Mau leaders. At the start of the Emergency Baring and his attorney general divided the leading Mau Mau suspects into two categories: Class I comprised “persons against whom criminal proceedings can be instituted with reasonable success,” and Class II was meant for those against whom there was scant evidence for a conviction and who were therefore destined for permanent detention without trial.13 This meant that men like Bildad Kaggia and Paul Ngei stood trial and were found guilty, along with Kenyatta, for organizing the Mau Mau society, while others such as the Koinange brothers and James Beauttah, who were arguably as involved in the Mau Mau movement, if not more so than those who had been convicted, were detained without trial under a GDO.

  During the first year of the Emergency there was only a handful of detention sites for Mau Mau suspects. Some detainees were held in the prisons originally meant to house common criminals that dotted the colony, but the majority were kept in barbed-wire, heavily guarded internee camps. Two of the camps, Athi River and Kajiado, were located just outside of Nairobi and were reputed to hold some of the most politically active and dangerous detainees. The other main camp was on the remote island of Lamu, just off the northern coast of Kenya in the Indian Ocean. Lamu held those Mau Mau politicals considered to be the most militant. The majority of these detainees had been routinely screened at Athi River and then transferred to the island camp, going first in an enclosed railcar and lorry, then, once at the coast, shackled beneath the deck of a boat.14

  The threat posed by the politicals to colonial society in Kenya was more ideological than military. The men and women at Lamu, Athi River, and Kajiado were the core of the Mau Mau intelligentsia, unlike most Mau Mau adherents who would begin filling the camps a year later. For the most part their arrest proved that the colonial government’s intelligence was correct, at least according to the testimony of some of the camps’ detainees, among them oath administrators, Mau Mau committee leaders, passive-wing organizers, and Kikuyu culture brokers—men like the famous Gakaara wa Wanjau, who had dedicated his life to writing and publishing Kikuyu cultural and political history in the years prior to Mau Mau.15

  Detention without trial was a violation of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights and its Five Protocols, to which Great Britain was a party. The Convention had been drafted in the wake of World War II with the intention of averting future catastrophes like those in the Nazi concentration and Japanese POW camps. It took as its starting point the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was put into force in September 1953. From the start of the Emergency in Kenya, British colonial officials internally debated the applicability of human rights accords like the European Convention on Human Rights and its Five Protocols to their subjects in the empire, despite the extension of the Convention to British territories, including Kenya, in October 1953. They decided ultimately not to challenge the scope of the Convention but rather to invoke a derogation clause. Article 15 of the Convention permitted an abrogation from the accord in times of war or other extreme public emergency that threatened the life of a nation, though such derogations were to be limited “to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation.”16

  The scope of the European Convention extended beyond the question of detention, outlining a list of basic human rights that had to be protected under any circumstance. For example, Article 3 of the Convention states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”17 In addition to the European Convention, there was the aforementioned UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the UN Convention Against Torture, which prohibited the use of torture under any circumstance, including states of emergency. The Geneva Conventions were also in effect during Mau Mau, stipulating that during war “at any time and in any place whatsoever” the following were prohibited:

  (a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

  (b) Taking of hostages;

  (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment. 18

  The colonial government treated Mau Mau detainees as prisoners of war. Governor Baring was clear on this point when he wrote the Colonial Office in July 1953, “[Mau Mau suspects] are a type who in another form of action, would become prisoners of war.”19 The establishment of the War Council in Kenya, for the formulation and execution of British wartime strategy against the Kikuyu, clearly suggests that colonial officials considered their engagement with Mau Mau to be a war. While the colonial government could derogate the European Convention on the issue of detention without trial, it could do so only while a State of Emergency was ongoing, and even then any form of torture or inhumane treatment was strictly prohibited not solely by the European Convention but by other international human rights accords as well.

  The detention of Mau Mau suspects without trial seemed perfectly reasonable to many colonial officials. Most thought Africans and Asians not yet civilized, and therefore not entitled to the rights and obligations that went along with the postwar notions of international citizenship. Additionally, Mau Mau suspects were thrown into a category all their own. Their bestiality, filth, and evil rendered them subhuman, and thus without rights. The British argued that Mau Mau threatened not just the life of the colony but that of British civilization as well. Detaining these subhuman creatures amounted not only to saving Africans from themselves but also to preserving Kenya for civilized white people. The world had heard variations of this logic before, most recently when nearly 50 million people had lost their lives in the fight against fascism for the preservation of liberal democracy. Yet only seven years after the end of World War II, Britain found itself in a curious position of constructing its own labyrinth of detention camps in its fight to preserve colonial rule in Kenya.

  The colonial government had to justify, at least rhetorically, its use of detention without trial and respond to the allegations of torture being used in a handful of camps already in operation. In Britain, anticolonial critics were beginning to mount an offensive against the Emergency Regulations in Kenya. Leading the attack against the Conservative government’s colonial policies were Opposition Labour MPs, particularly Barbara Castle and Fenner Brockway. With her fiery red hair, Barbara Castle would come to spearhead Opposition outrage over the British government’s policies in Kenya, particularly detention without trial. Castle was a self-described fighter who, having been born into a socialist family, would eventually blaze her way “th
rough the political jungle to the Cabinet.”20 From the early years of the Emergency she was relentless in her criticism of the British colonial government, emphasizing that “you were chasing a sense of complacency and cover up by the government in Kenya and at home that made one realise that there was something very wrong.”21

  Castle was certainly not alone, as various Labour MPs joined her condemnations and strident pursuit of the truth. Foremost was Fenner Brockway. In 1950 he had traveled to Kenya, where Jomo Kenyatta, the colony’s best-known African intellectual and hence suspected troublemaker, served as his escort throughout Nairobi and the Kikuyu reserves. In the Kikuyu district of Kiambu the Labour MP spent extensive time with former senior chief Koinange and his sons. Koinange was already infamous in colonial circles, having been discharged from government service for his “disloyalty.” According to Baring, he was reputed to have become “progressively more extreme in his political views, violently anti European and one of the hierarchy of the Kenya African Union.”22 Not surprisingly, local whites in Kenya were shocked when Brockway declined to avail himself of the comforts of a local European hotel, opting instead to accept the invitation of the ex–senior chief to stay with him and his wives in their traditional boma in Kiambu. It was there that the former senior chief explained to Brockway, by way of a Kikuyu parable, why there was so much anger in his reserve. “When someone steals your ox, it is killed and roasted and eaten,” Koinange said. “One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence.”23

  Not long after the start of the Emergency, Brockway returned to Kenya with fellow Labour MP Leslie Hale, largely to investigate the arrest and imprisonment of Koinange. The colonial government had charged him and one of his sons with the murder of Senior Chief Waruhiu. Both were acquitted only to be sent to detention, and despite Brockway’s vehement protests they remained there throughout much of the Emergency. For the Colonial Office, the former senior chief was a difficult case. He was nearly eighty years old and held under conditions that were by all accounts horrendous. He had been convicted of no crime; nor had any effort been made to address his conditions in detention or the constant threats that were made against his life by European members of the police force.24 Brockway’s visit confirmed for him, as well as for Castle and others in the Opposition, that only a few whites in Kenya or Britain believed Mau Mau to be anything other than a reversion to atavistic tribalism. The Colonial Office’s response to the Koinange case reflected this sentiment.

  The colonial government could not, however, silence Labour Opposition quite as easily as it did the Christian missionaries. In fact, the postwar period had ushered in a new era of knowledgeable and persistent debate in Parliament over colonial issues, debate forced by Labour Party members and other politicians and activists on the left. In 1954 Brockway established the Movement for Colonial Freedom and through this interest group consolidated the work of several Labour MPs, as well as organizations like the Congress of People Against Imperialism.25 Protest against colonial policies throughout Africa, including detention without trial in other British colonies like Nyasaland, became the focus for many in the British government’s Opposition. The Labour Party had a history of extraparliamentary organizations that targeted colonialism. The Fabian Colonial Bureau, founded in 1940, was the first of such groups that provided the Labour MPs with the research, networking, and publications necessary to influence the nature of British colonial rule throughout the empire.26

  By the early 1950s, though, there was a shift in British anticolonial organizations as the Opposition began forming movements to more stridently challenge Churchill’s Conservative government. A highly vocal minority was disgusted by the continuation of British colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere, particularly in the wake of the Second World War and the Atlantic Charter. In 1952 the Reverend Guthrie Michael Scott founded the Africa Bureau, bringing together an unprecedented group of diverse individuals interested in advising and supporting Africans who wished to oppose, by constitutional means, British colonial rule.27 A group of Kenyans living in exile—led by Mbiyu Koinange, a son of the detained former senior chief, and Joseph Murumbi—formed the Kenya Committee to target the Emergency injustices.28 Together with Brockway’s Movement for Colonial Freedom, these organizations represented significant departures from the original Fabian Colonial Bureau. Whereas the bureau sought to influence the direction of colonial development policies, the postwar, anticolonial organizations wanted to expose the injustices of colonialism and bring the anachronistic form of governance to an end. Together they provided blanket coverage of the Mau Mau Emergency, galvanizing public awareness and empowering the Opposition in the House of Commons with the information necessary to challenge the Conservative government’s depiction of events in Kenya. As early as 1953, charges that “Africans have been arrested and detained without trial…[and] have been, and are being, abused and evicted and gaoled and flogged and hanged, and shot before trial, amid sounds which almost amount to shouts of glee from the dominant race,”29 were being unleashed, and the British government could not ignore them.

  Even before the British colonial government took the extraordinary step of detaining the entire Kikuyu population, Mau Mau was exposing the hypocrisy of British trusteeship. In September 1953 Hugh Fraser, the Conservative MP and parliamentary undersecretary to Oliver Lyttelton in the Colonial Office, was dispatched to Kenya to evaluate the situation and assess what could be done to defuse charges of British misrule. On the one hand, the colonial government was straining to maintain its benevolent image as the advocate and protector of African interests in Kenya, and elsewhere in its empire, while, on the other, it was justifying its need for absolute power under Emergency Regulations. In his final report to the Colonial Office Fraser was unequivocal about what the colonial government needed to do in Kenya, and specifically addressed the growing detention camp problem. “Although there are only…about 1,500 detained, the number of detainees may well increase by June next year to some 25,000–40,000,” Fraser wrote. He then went on to emphasize, “Should such numbers have to be involved, I have stressed to HE [His Excellency Governor Baring] the importance of the word ‘Rehabilitation,’ and machinery for this purpose is being set up.”30

  To understand the significance of Fraser’s statement, we need to assess what exactly he meant by “Rehabilitation,” as well as the “machinery” that was being established “for this purpose.” In the spring of 1953 Governor Baring and his ministers had turned their attention to mounting a kind of psychological assault against the Kikuyu. According to extensive memoranda written at the time, there was support within the colonial government for an alternative course in defeating Mau Mau, one that did not rely entirely on violence and repression. The civilizing mission, Britain’s raison d’être for colonizing the Kikuyu people, could be introduced to the masses of Mau Mau adherents through a program called rehabilitation. This strategy would offer social and economic change to those Kikuyu who confessed their oaths and then cooperated with colonial authorities in the detention camps, and eventually in the Emergency villages in the Kikuyu reserves. Rehabilitation would be the inducement needed to lure the Kikuyu away from Mau Mau savagery and toward the enlightenment of Western civilization. It would offer Mau Mau adherents opportunities far more alluring than those offered by their own movement. Rehabilitation was to become the colonial government’s campaign for the hearts and minds of the Kikuyu.

  This would not be the first time that the British government undertook a hearts-and-minds campaign to reorient detainees toward a more Western and civilized way of thinking. During and after the Second World War the British attempted to de-Nazify German prisoners of war in order to cleanse them of their fascist and anti-Semitic beliefs. At the same time the British undertook similar psychological campaigns throughout their empire as part of a larger effort to repress postwar, anticolonial uprisings
. During the late 1940s and 1950s nationalists in Malaya, for instance, were demanding their independence, and the British responded by declaring a state of emergency as a way of fighting for their colonial subjects’ hearts and minds. These antecedents would have great influence on the shape and direction of the Mau Mau rehabilitation program that was evolving in Kenya in 1953. There is no reference in Britain’s declassified colonial files, however, to the Chinese communists’ reorientation of their POWs toward an Asian, socialist way of thinking during the Korean War. In fact, the Americans and British both denounced Chinese ideological reorientation efforts as brainwashing, a psychological and physical trauma. But whether derisively labeled brainwashing or euphemistically termed hearts and minds, the psychological campaigns undertaken in each situation were strikingly similar: they were experiments in disciplinary power aimed at forcing individuals to reject their own ideas and adopt the purported superior beliefs of their captors.

  Of all the British hearts-and-minds precedents, the one undertaken in colonial Malaya ultimately most influenced Kenyan policy. The Federation of Malaya, under the leadership of its governor, General Sir Gerald Templer, had already provided Baring and his ministers with a blueprint for Emergency Regulations. Malaya had been under a state of emergency since 1948, and its British colonial officials had exported to Kenya much of their legal work in drafting all-empowering Emergency legislation. On the issue of rehabilitation Baring also looked to the Asian colony, believing Templer was offering sound civic and social improvements to the communist insurgents and their supporters as a way of luring them back to the capitalist and civilized ways of their British colonizers. Baring telegrammed the general several times, asking to borrow a Malayan civil servant with experience in designing and mounting a hearts-and-minds campaign. Templer refused but did agree to host one of Kenya’s colonial officers in Malaya and tutor him in the ways of rehabilitation. By the summer of 1953 Baring needed to dispatch someone to Malaya immediately so he hand-selected Thomas Askwith, who was by all accounts the most logical choice.