A leader among the small group of liberal-minded settlers and administrators who were disturbed by the racial injustices of British colonialism, Askwith stood alone in his empirical knowledge of African impoverishment and in his perseverance for reform in Kenya. For most Europeans in the colony, Africans were meant to be field hands or houseboys, not social and political equals. But for Askwith and his friends, the inequities of the government’s land and labor policies, not to mention its color bar, which segregated Kenya’s racial groups and prevented Africans from patronizing most restaurants, hotels, and even taxicabs, somehow had to be redressed. In 1946 Askwith, along with Ernest Vasey, Derek Erskine, and a handful of others, founded the United Kenya Club, a multiracial social club where men and women of all colors could socialize and dine.31 In light of the extraordinary economic inequalities in Kenya this club may appear to have been a minor achievement, but in the context of the time and place its founding was revolutionary.
Askwith’s pedigree did not betray a young man destined to question the racial divides and injustices of Britain’s empire in Kenya. Born in 1911, Thomas Garrett Askwith was educated at Haileybury and then went on to read engineering at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. There he became a passionate sculler and oarsman, and eventually distinguished himself as one of the foremost athletes of his time. His image appeared on a Gallagher cigarette card in a series commemorating Britain’s sporting heroes, where he was featured with other greats like Fred Perry, Harold Larwood, and Sir Malcolm Campbell. He confirmed his prowess on the river with his crew victories at the University Boat Race, the Grand Challenge Cup, and the prestigious Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley. He was also a member of the Great Britain Eight in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and later in the 1936 Olympic Games—or “Hitler Games,” as Askwith called them—in Berlin. When later recounting this episode, he vividly remembered, “As the German athletes saluted their führer, I felt physically sickened by what it represented. It affected me in a way that I’m not sure I can describe.”32
After the Berlin Games Askwith set off for Kenya to a future that he called “invigorating, rewarding…disturbing, disheartening.”33 A member of the Colonial Service, he initially spent ten years in the Kikuyu reserves as a district officer before taking on the job of municipal native affairs officer for Nairobi, a posting that changed the course of his career. It was there that he witnessed firsthand the lives of the African urban poor and observed conditions scrupulously ignored by most Europeans in the colony. For Askwith, the urban slums epitomized the racial inequities upon which Britain had built its colony in Kenya. Two years later he took on the job of commissioner of the Community Development Department and also became principal of the Jeanes School, Kenya’s adult-education institute for Africans, from which he promoted his concepts of African betterment and social change. Askwith’s endorsement of self-help principles—the notion that given the proper knowledge and tools Africans could actualize their own improvement—underwrote his approach to community development. His belief in the potential for African advancement and his practice of racial inclusion caused him to be marginalized within official and unofficial circles throughout his career. That he was ostracized for his belief in racial equality has been confirmed by many of his peers. Petal Erskine Allen, a longtime British settler from one of Kenya’s most distinguished colonial families, later remarked, “Tom was about a century ahead of his time, and even then most whites in Kenya will probably think Africans are of a lesser form of life than they are.”34
In a heavy summer rainfall that Askwith recalled being “eerily cleansing and foreshadowing,” he boarded a British cargo plane for Singapore. By the end of his whirlwind fortnight tour he had observed various reform measures under way in Malaya’s detention camps and rehabilitation centers, Emergency villages, approved schools for young offenders, and prisons. Templer’s staff briefed him on their attempts to secure a lasting peace in Britain’s Asian colony through the reeducation and resettlement of the communist insurgents and their supporters.35 Askwith’s observations in Malaya would later provide the outline for similar Emergency policies in Kenya. According to his rather idealized tour report, issued in August 1953, the detention camps in Malaya were regarded not as punitive institutions but as opportunities to alter the attitude of the communist sympathizers and reinstill confidence in the British colonial government. The administrative structure of Malaya’s camps emphasized rehabilitation. Templer had created a temporary Detention Camps Department under the Ministry of Defence which was completely separate from the Prisons Department. Askwith made careful description of this part of the Malayan system by noting, “It would not only be wrong in principle for detainees, who are not convicts, to be placed under the Prisons Department, but also it would detract from the value of the rehabilitation process itself. The rules and principles governing rehabilitation are quite different from those concerning convicts, and it was felt that they were incompatible.”36
The classification of detainees was especially critical to Malaya’s apparent success, according to Askwith. Police Interrogation Units labeled detainees “black” or “grey,” depending upon their level of communist indoctrination. “Blacks” were hard-core Reds who could not be redeemed and who were therefore deported. “Greys” had weaker communist sympathies and thus were ushered through a series of rehabilitation stages, each punctuated with greater opportunities for reeducation and voluntary, paid employment. Askwith also saw immeasurable value in positive interactions between the officers and detainees. For him the quality and training of the staff would be the key to the success of any similar program in Kenya, and he noted in his report that “the value of teaching [in the camps and villages] was…secondary to the desire to teach.”37
In Malaya rehabilitation appeared to stretch beyond the confines of the camps, which symbolized for Askwith a commitment at the highest levels to implementing Britain’s civilizing mission throughout the colony, and particularly in those areas most affected by the State of Emergency. Colonial officials in Malaya seemed to be embracing reform. According to Askwith:
It was generally recognised [in Malaya] that the rehabilitation process could not expect to succeed by itself, unless concrete evidence were given by the Government that it could offer a better future than that promised by the Communists…. The Government’s over-riding purpose is to remove bitterness among the detainees and general public and to build a better life by meeting the social, economic and political needs of those who form the bulk of the Communist supporters, namely the poor sections of the community. It is almost universally felt that only thus can the ideological war be won. 38
In effect, rehabilitation was one part of a comprehensive strategy for reconstructing Malayan society, with the work in the camps linked to rural development and social reform measures in the Emergency villages. Those who suffered from communist intimidation in the countryside also needed relief and reform. Moreover, the colonial government had to create future homes and employment opportunities for former detainees in Malaya. The captured hearts and minds of reformed communist insurgents could be lost if they were released into a hostile or impoverished situation.
Governor Baring, delighted by Askwith’s findings and his enthusiastic commitment to the principles of rehabilitation, officially appointed him in charge of a Mau Mau psychological and civic reform program in October 1953. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Askwith’s appointment occurred on the heels of Hugh Fraser’s visit to Kenya and his written directive on “the importance of the word ‘Rehabilitation.’”39 Thereafter, Askwith’s title was expanded to commissioner for community development and rehabilitation, and so too were his responsibilities.40 He found himself overseeing the hearts-and-minds campaign for some fifteen hundred persons already detained under Emergency Regulations, nine thousand convicts imprisoned for Mau Mau offenses, and, as Baring put it, “the many ex-squatters, and persons returned to the reserves as a result of screening, together with the waverers normall
y domiciled in the reserves.”41 To finalize rehabilitation policy, Askwith, Baring, and others in the colonial government evaluated precedents both outside of and within Kenya. They assumed the nature of confinement and the rules for the psychological reform of POWs and rebellious civilian populations transcended, to some degree, the peculiarities of individual settings.
In practical terms this meant Askwith did not have to reinvent the wheel but could borrow large portions of his hearts-and-minds program from other campaigns. Among them, the Malayan precedent was still the most important, largely because General Templer had already accomplished the difficult task of streamlining earlier psychological efforts targeted at POWs. Askwith’s impressions from his tour of Malaya, and particularly of Templer’s emphasis that “the problem…was one of rehabilitation and re-settlement or re-employment, not rehabilitation alone,” were fundamental to his vision of Emergency reform in Kenya.42 But to adopt the Malayan policy in toto was going to be problematic. As much as the principles of confinement and the tactics of psychological reform appeared to transcend local particularities, each situation was also unique and had to take into account differences in political circumstances as well as the social and cultural characteristics of the imprisoned or detained population. Mau Mau was not communism, and Africans were not Asians.
For Askwith, the difficulties he faced in Kenya were far more challenging than those that existed in Malaya. First, Templer was able to use the deportation option. More than half of the thirty thousand detainees in Malaya were repatriated by the British colonial government to China, where the communists welcomed back their “victims of imperial persecution” with open arms.43 Those remaining in the Malayan camps had much “softer” communist sympathies and were easier to convert to the Western or British way of thinking. In Kenya, despite vociferous arguments from Baring advocating deportation to remote islands in the empire, the Colonial Office in London ruled that Mau Mau adherents “belonged to the territory.”44 Unlike many of the Malayan communists, who had allegedly immigrated to the British colony from China, the Kikuyu had been born in Kenya and therefore could not be exiled outside the colony’s borders. In other words, Kenya had to deal with its “black” detainees, whereas Malaya for the most part did not.
Askwith also correctly perceived that the reabsorption problem of reformed detainees would be far more difficult in Kenya than it had been in Malaya.45 Already over one hundred thousand Kikuyu had been forcibly deported from their homes outside Kikuyuland and were returning to the overcrowded reserves, the same places to which rehabilitated detainees would later be returning upon release from Kenya’s camps. Employment opportunities and expanded landholdings would have to keep pace with the release of the detainees. If this were not possible, Askwith predicted, “rehabilitation [would] be a waste of time, money and effort.”46 While job creation for Kenya’s African population was challenging enough, the land issue was another story altogether. For the settler population, there was no land issue in Kenya. The colonial government supported this self-serving view and continued to uphold the earlier Carter Land Commission finding that the Kikuyu had ample land for subsistence production, a preposterous assertion.47
Finally, there were the oaths. Even for Askwith, whose liberal mind recognized the socioeconomic dimension of Kikuyu unrest, the “oath represented everything evil in Mau Mau.”48 He wrote that Mau Mau adherents had “tortured minds,” and insisted that any reeducation program could not begin until their demented psyche had somehow been reached.49 The European community in Kenya was in complete agreement with Askwith that Mau Mau was a kind of disease or filth that affected the bodies and minds of those who took the oath; it was a type of contagion or “mind-destroying disease.”50 Mass detention provided a form of quarantine where those afflicted with the Mau Mau infection could be diagnosed and treated.51
Long before launching rehabilitation, the colonial government enlisted the help of an expert to explain the causes of, and potential remedies for, the so-called disease of Mau Mau. The governor sought the advice not of a historian, an anthropologist, or an expert in political science, but rather that of an ethnopsychiatrist. A member of Baring’s government, Charles Mortimer, commissioned the famed Dr. J. C. Carothers, Britain’s expert in ethnopsychiatry, to write a report on Mau Mau and its causes. Ethnopsychiatry, or the study of the psychology and behavior of non-Western people, was a colonial science born at the end of the nineteenth century right alongside British colonization in Africa; it faded away around 1960, not coincidentally at the time of independence for most African nations. At its most basic level, ethnopsychiatry employed terms like normal and pathological to describe groups of people, terms which corresponded rather neatly with racial categories whereby whites were always the definition of normal against which pathological blacks were defined and therefore analyzed by the colonial psychiatrists.
Carothers’s investigation in Kenya provided “hard scientific evidence” supporting the settlers’ beliefs about themselves and about Africans, and about Mau Mau adherents in particular. In his thirty-five-page report titled “The Psychology of Mau Mau,” Carothers argued that Mau Mau was not political but psychopathological, certainly a validation for the colonial government and one quoted time and again by the governor and the colonial secretary. Like so many others, Carothers was appalled by the oath, describing it as similar to those believed to be performed by witches during the European Middle Ages. On the question of whether the oath takers were redeemable, he looked not to the Kikuyu and their history under British colonial rule but rather to the literature on psychopathology. Carothers felt that the worst Mau Mau, as with hard-core criminal psychopaths, could not be saved, though the less indoctrinated, the ones suffering the milder forms of Kikuyu psychopathic behavior, could be reformed using the principles of Christian stewardship.52 Redemption soon became a subtext that ran through the discussions of a hearts-and-minds campaign in Kenya, with the oath and its confession as the non-negotiable focal points of rehabilitation policy and practice. For many contemporary commentators, confession was evidence of the Christian principles that underwrote the reform program; but the emphasis on confession can be found nowhere else in Britain’s other hearts-and-minds campaigns, although the principles of Christian theology were certainly present. In Kenya, as tempting as it is to attribute rehabilitation’s emphasis on confession to the colony’s Christian influences, it was actually more strongly rooted in a particular psychology—a perceived psychology—of the Kikuyu people.
It is here that the famed Louis Leakey made a profound contribution to the rehabilitation plan, one that would soon have a great impact on the lives of Mau Mau detainees. Leakey, the well-known archaeologist who had grown up among the Kikuyu, spoke their language, and had even been circumcised with one of their age groups, was uniquely positioned within Kenyan society. During Mau Mau Leakey became the British authority on Kikuyu customs, supplementing the work of Carothers with his own self-professed, unique knowledge of the Kikuyu. In his book Defeating Mau Mau, Leakey suggested that traditionally among the Kikuyu the power of an oath could be removed if the initiate confessed having taken it; a traditional cleansing ceremony was then needed to rid his mind and body of the oath’s polluting vestiges.53 Askwith championed Leakey’s idea of confession and insisted that a Mau Mau adherent could not partake in any rehabilitation activities until he or she confessed the oath, or, as he put it, “vomit[ed] the poison of Mau Mau.”54
But Askwith diverged from Carothers and Leakey, and nearly every other European in the colony, on the causes of Kikuyu discontent. For Askwith Mau Mau grievances were legitimate and not the result of some kind of mass psychosis. In his internal reports he punctuated the urgent need for juvenile and adult education, unemployment relief, housing programs, increased wages, social security, and, most important, expanded opportunities to acquire land. Moreover, Askwith emphasized the negative effects of the color bar and the bitterness it engendered among all Africans in Kenya.55 When W. H. Chin
n, the social welfare adviser to the colonial secretary, toured Kenya in 1951, he commented upon the colonial government’s obvious lack of commitment to the development and welfare of the colony’s African community. He emphasized that a coordinated policy of social development was imperative to the relief of African poverty and to what he called the “training process of citizenship.” In a scathing report he explained that “the services which are needed by all communities cannot be provided on an ad hoc basis or be dependent on the vagaries of political maneouvres; they must be accepted as government policy and as part of the Development Plan for the Colony.”56 Chinn had hardly minced words: Britain needed to take a hard look at its civilizing mission in Kenya. But Mau Mau was evidence that the colonial government ignored Chinn’s recommendations, and in early 1953 Askwith made many of the same points that Chinn had offered two years earlier when he wrote to Baring and the colonial secretary.
The present Mau Mau disturbances are an indication of how badly Kikuyu society has become disrupted through the impact of European civilisation, and of Government policy practised up to the present…. Maladjusted individuals whether they become so through economic, social or ideological causes are very susceptible to such disruptive movements as Mau Mau. It is therefore in my view most important that a plan for Social Welfare should be evolved. Social work in civilised countries became the safeguard of society. Without it hardship would, as it has in the past, lead to brigandage and even revolution.57
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