Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Looking back at his work during the summer and fall of 1953, Askwith remembered those months as being “the most inspiring and even optimistic time of [his] years in the colonial service.”58 He delivered his final draft for rehabilitation to Baring in October 1953, and it was a complete blueprint for winning the war against Mau Mau using socioeconomic and civic reform rather than destructive violence. The oath takers, behind the barbed wire of detention, would confess their Mau Mau oaths, and in return the colonial government would offer them many of the reforms that it had failed to deliver during the first half century of colonial rule. With Askwith’s plan, detention would not be a punitive measure but an opportunity for British colonizers to introduce dramatic changes. Behind the barbed wire the Kikuyu would confess their oaths and then walk in lockstep with the well-trained rehabilitation staff toward redemption and progress. A recipe of paid physical labor, craft training, recreation, and civic and moral reeducation would produce governable men and women.

  Askwith termed the system of detention and rehabilitation the Pipeline, denoting a Mau Mau adherent’s progression from initial detention through ever more benevolent rehabilitation activities to ultimate release. The process would begin at the transit camps, where teams of Europeans and Africans would screen and classify each Mau Mau suspect. Those considered “white” would be repatriated to the African reserves; those labeled “grey” or “black” would be consigned to the reception centers, also known as holding camps. Screening would continue, and those still considered “grey” would be moved along to works camps, where detainees would confess their oaths voluntarily. Kikuyu elders and former Mau Mau adherents would induce a detainee’s confession through “reason, cajoling, or ridicule.” Once confessed, a “grey” detainee would spend his or her day performing voluntary, paid labor on some of the colony’s development projects. Evenings would be spent with the rehabilitation staff in reeducation classes. A marked change in attitude would lead to a detainee’s movement down the Pipeline and eventual transfer to an open camp in his or her home district. There, rehabilitation would continue with instruction by local chiefs and headmen, who would decide on a detainee’s final release. Those classified as “black,” however, were destined for the special detention camps. These camps would hold the hard core and the politicals, most of whom were considered beyond redemption. Even prior to Askwith’s appointment Baring had ordered the construction of permanent exile settlements within Kenya for this brand of irreconcilable detainee.59

  Askwith’s rehabilitation policy was ultimately as much about communal reform as it was about changing individuals. The dependents of those in the Pipeline also needed opportunities for social and civic improvement. Askwith called the Kikuyu family the “foundation of African life,” though he and most other colonial officials thought that many of the women and children were as steadfastly Mau Mau as the men, if not more so.60 Hope for a peaceful future hinged on the reconstruction of African motherhood in the British image, with Askwith emphasizing: “It will be necessary to cleanse the women in the same way as the men before they are permitted to rejoin them, as there is evidence that wives have in many cases persuaded their husbands to take the oath and are often very militant. They are also said to be bringing up their children to follow the Mau Mau creed. It is therefore more important to rehabilitate the women than the men if the next generation is to be saved.”61 The colonial government zeroed in on Kikuyu women and children with a plan to pursue a dogmatic program that would break them of their allegiance to Mau Mau and convince them of the benefits and superiority of the British way of life. The plan was for the community development and probation staff to go to the reserves to oversee the rehabilitation of the Kikuyu family. There they would introduce communal confessions, or confessional barazas, that would purge the women of their Mau Mau indoctrination and ready them for home-craft, child-care, and agricultural classes.

  Despite Baring’s public enthusiasm and Askwith’s commitment, the Mau Mau war was certainly a peculiar moment for liberal reform. At the very time that Askwith was drafting his rehabilitation program, screening abuses like the ones in Bahati and Subukia were taking place with the public’s knowledge in Kenya, and to a lesser degree in Britain as well. Askwith was hardly oblivious to all the violence going on around him but simply could not reconcile the dreadful behavior of his fellow colonial officers, the settlers, and the loyalists with his passionate belief in Britain’s civilizing mission. “I knew, I knew, but how can I say it…” he recalled in later years. “I just believed in our higher purpose. The oaths were terrible, and we had so much better to offer them. I thought our own bad hats [those perpetrating colonial violence] would come around.”62

  Rehabilitation presumed Britain’s inherent moral superiority over the Kikuyu, something Askwith never questioned. When they first thought of introducing a hearts-and-minds campaign, Baring and Lyttelton viewed it as the antithesis of physical violence and summary justice. British colonial violence, however, could and did take many forms, and rehabilitation was no less coercive than some of the brute-force tactics employed in screening operations by Britain’s colonial agents. Rehabilitation was an expression of cultural hegemony that assumed Britain’s inherent superiority over anything Kikuyu. Nevertheless, on a relative scale rehabilitation was certainly much preferred to, say, the electric-shock torture being used by the Special Branch at the Mau Mau Investigation Center, or castration, or the other forms of physical brutality routinely used during interrogation.

  Despite what he knew was going on around him, Askwith’s belief in rehabilitation would be unshakable. Out of the ashes of Mau Mau, a reconstructed Kikuyu society would arise and with it the threat of any future uprising stymied. The commissioner had reason to believe that others, including the governor, shared his vision of an impending social counterrevolution.63 In fact, one month after Askwith submitted his final rehabilitation outline to Baring and Lyttelton the colonial government endorsed it as official policy. The governor made a public spectacle of his government’s adoption of a hearts-and-minds campaign, splashing it all over the papers in Kenya, Britain, and elsewhere with the help of Granville Roberts and the public relations offices in Nairobi and London. Even today, if one visits the Public Record Office in London or the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, there are piles of documents describing Mau Mau rehabilitation, its official launching, and its purported successes. Somehow all of these files managed to survive the purgings.

  It appeared that Askwith was poised to become one of the great liberal influences in the late colonial empire. The few historians writing about rehabilitation in Kenya have accepted the colonial government’s assertion that it adopted liberal reform in the Pipeline, describing Askwith’s revolutionizing role and his program as an example of the civilizing mission, albeit carried out under unusual and strained circumstances.64 A close read of the historical evidence suggests, however, we need to reexamine the colonial government’s agenda and the events that were unfolding in Kenya in the early 1950s. Had there been a broad consensus supporting Askwith’s plan, the circumstances of the Emergency would have rendered its implementation difficult, at best. Budgetary constraints, staffing difficulties, the endless repatriation of Kikuyu back to their reserves, screening, and ultimately detention together stretched the British colonial government in Kenya as never before.

  From the start rehabilitation hardly elicited widespread support. If prior to Mau Mau the Kikuyu had been at least a generation away from becoming equal citizens prepared to rule Kenya, then once the oath taking began it was not even worth speculating on how long it would take to transform them into governable citizens, let alone future leaders of the colony. Not long after the start of the Emergency Michael Blundell commented on the changing sentiment in Kenya.

  In general there is a quiet and steady swing by all shades of European opinion over to the right and quite moderate people have been shocked out of thoughts of eventual partnership by the horrible barbarities which have
come to light from the Mau Mau leaders. People are beginning to question whether all Africans however soft spoken and educated are not just the same and whether they are wise to talk about any future relationships with them other than on the basis of strict discipline and rule. I find it hard to counter these arguments as long as our policy is dictated from UK with all its emphasis on political advance regardless of the state of the African people themselves. 65

  For many Europeans who earlier had been considering civic equality in Kenya, Mau Mau erased all doubt, confirming the inherent savagery of Africans and their unreadiness to assume the privileges and benefits of citizenship.

  At its most liberal, Kenya’s European community advocated a slow, measured pace of reform. The East African Women’s League—a conservative voluntary association and mouthpiece for the majority female settler opinion—argued, “The basic fact was not that the African had been held back by racial discrimination, but that he had traveled too far too quickly.”66 The settler women were not alone in believing that an accelerated path toward Western progress had numerous unforeseen and objectionable consequences for the Africans. While Askwith advocated drastic, rapid change, other British colonial officers and settlers saw a type of civilizing retrenchment as the direction to take. European members of the Legislative Council, such as N. F. Harris, pressed for a reevaluation of citizenship in light of Emergency events: “Throughout the British Empire, the Empire which was created by those people who have brought humanity to a great number of places in the world, it is in this Empire that a peculiar uprising of violence is apparent. I wonder whether, in fact, we have not—I say we, I mean the British—have not brought humanity to the people throughout the world, rather quicker than they and we ourselves have learnt the lessons of citizenship.”67 For Harris and others, the Kikuyu were trapped in what was then called a “crisis of transition.” Neither primitive nor modern, they were caught in a kind of civilizing limbo. In the language of the day, the Kikuyu were suffering from “detribalization,” and most Europeans in Kenya doubted whether rehabilitation was the solution to the problem. Even a relative moderate like Elspeth Huxley equivocated.

  The oath-taker is forced deliberately to flout the very deepest of his tribal tabus, to take actions which plunge him into so bottomless a pit of degradation that there can be no cleansing, no climbing back into the community of decent men. He is damned forever in his own eyes and therefore desperate, hopeless, irreclaimable. What a weapon of psychological warfare! It is impossible not to feel that a mind, or minds, diabolic in their ingenuity still control enemy strategy and that the gentle—perhaps genteel—minds of high officials operate on a level so different that the two cannot mesh. Courses in civics, training in carpentry, can they reclaim these self-condemned people?68

  A settler sharpening her target skills

  This skepticism over reform grew as Mau Mau’s alleged savagery seemed to reach unmentionable proportions. Hardly a European in the colony believed Mau Mau to be human beings. They held the oath takers in utter contempt for their apparently obscene, primitive rituals and love of killing. In early 1953, just a few months into the Emergency, Ronald Sherbrooke-Walker went to visit friends in Kenya and candidly remarked upon the local attitude toward Mau Mau.

  What do the settlers say? They know the primitive East African mentality and that “black brother” is a thousand years behind the European in outlook, and the “Kuke,” who are causing the present trouble, are much inferior to the other Kenya tribes in moral qualities. If Europeans were to abandon the country voluntarily, or be squeezed out politically, without the Pax Britannica it would revert to blood-thirsty barbarism. If they are to remain, the policy of appeasement over the past few years must be halted. Justice must be done more promptly and effectively—and it must be seen to be done. The slow careful process of British justice, so cherished at home, is neither understood nor appreciated by the African mind molded by centuries of rough tribal discipline. This outlook is not changed to order by a dose of the three R’s, nor yet by what may often be no more than a veneer of Christianity. 69

  By the end of 1953 the hard-line demand for summary retribution and for control of the Mau Mau population prevailed everywhere, making the adoption of rehabilitation, at least as outlined by Askwith, almost laughable.

  This was especially true in the Kikuyu districts where the Administration, the elite cadre of colonial servants that had dedicated itself to uplifting the so-called hapless natives and tutoring them in the ways of British civilization, felt overwhelmed and betrayed by Mau Mau’s rising tide. With Mau Mau the Kikuyu had become disobedient and ungrateful. Their movement touched personal nerves, challenging not just British colonial domination but the purported benevolence of the British colonial officers on the spot. The provincial and district commissioners moved quickly to revise their old patterns of control, though some did so with a rage that startled observers. As John Nottingham, a district officer during the Emergency, commented, “There was a dreadful trend in the districts, particularly condoned by the older Administration. You see, rehabilitation or reform, however you wish to call it, had no chance. You must understand that it had no real place in their Mau Mau. They wanted to remind the Africans who was boss, and they did it. They did some terrible, terrible things.”70 Some in the Administration advocated a policy of initial retribution rather than reform in the Kikuyu areas. F. D. Homan, the district commissioner for Meru, was clear on this point.

  Before any palliative measures are introduced Mau Mau must be crushed. We must lead from strength and not attempt to “finesse,” for any other approach will be interpreted as weakness. As Winston Churchill said “We can afford to be generous in Victory”—but we must be quite certain first that we have won…. It must be clearly stated and obvious to everyone—not only the Kikuyu but also every other tribe—that any interim measures for displaced persons etc are either punitive (in the case of known bad characters) or at any rate framed on a bare maintenance basis. 71

  Others administering the Central and Rift Valley provinces were more restrained in their prescriptions for controlling Mau Mau, but no less determined to restore order using the heavy hand of colonial authority.72

  It is clear that the colonial government was constructing detention camps in Kenya for punitive rather than rehabilitative purposes. The dominant eliminationist attitude toward Mau Mau overshadowed, even from the outset, any reconstructive hearts-and-minds campaign. Moreover, the liberal plan called for an accelerated civilizing process whose pace exceeded all acceptable limits for the colonial government and for the local settlers. Implementing Askwith’s plan and carrying it to its logical conclusion would quite simply have meant African self-government. In 1954 for the British colonizers to agree to a hastening of colonial retreat in Kenya was unthinkable.73 In fact, the colonial government’s main concern was to retain power and reaffirm its position of dominance in the face of Mau Mau, rather than to prepare the colony for some kind of immediate multiracial, liberal democracy.74 Most ministers within Baring’s government envisaged a post-Emergency Kenya where African loyalists would be rewarded and co-opted into the colonial system as instruments of collaboration and control, the purveyors of Mau Mau would be eliminated, and the “rehabilitated” Kikuyu would be granted positions as disciplined subjects, but not citizens.

  Governor Baring made several crucial decisions that quickly revealed the true nature of the Pipeline. While he publicly endorsed Askwith’s rehabilitation program, the governor refused to approve an administrative structure for the camps that was a critical ingredient in rehabilitation’s success. Askwith demanded that the colonial government create an independent department of detention and rehabilitation that would have full oversight over the custody and rehabilitation of the detainees. Baring and his ministers would not consider it. They viewed the detainees as offenders who had endorsed the unthinkable, a violent and savage challenge to the legitimacy of British colonial rule. They instead placed all detainees in the custody
of the Prisons Department and its commissioner, John “Taxi” Lewis.75

  In the years to come, Askwith would be virtually powerless to control or influence the Pipeline he helped to create. He would provide the staff for rehabilitation, but Taxi Lewis would remain fully in charge of the camp commandants, the warders, and the administration of all of the facilities within the Pipeline. On any points of conflict between the two departments, and there would be countless in the years ahead, Lewis and his men would have the final say. A committee of independent observers would eventually recognize the incompatibility between liberal reform and the mission of the Prisons Department, issuing the strong reminder that “the object of detention is not to punish but to rehabilitate.”76 This suggestion, which came years later at the end of the Emergency, reflected a misunderstanding of the basic purpose of the Pipeline. From the point of view of most British colonizers, Mau Mau adherents were not ready for even the most rudimentary elements of rehabilitation. Indeed, one thought prevailed in Kenya and Britain: how could such savages possibly be remade to be like us, their civilized British colonizers? First they would have to be punished, forced to confess their oaths, and eventually trained to conform; then perhaps in a generation or so they would be ready for the basics of citizenship training on the British model. The actual detention camp structure in Kenya was critical in implementing this version of Britain’s civilizing mission.