Mass roundup of Mau Mau suspects in the Rift Valley, November 1952
Apart from the Pipeline, Baring was pursuing several other blatantly punitive and arbitrary official policies. While publicly lauding Askwith’s rehabilitation plan, the governor unleashed a policy of forced communal labor. Liberal reform was intended to extend beyond the Pipeline and into the Kikuyu reserves, where the family, the presumed “foundation of African life,” would be uplifted; instead colonial officers on the spot were forcing all Kikuyu men and women to labor, often as a form of collective punishment. Under Emergency law the Kikuyu had to work unpaid ninety days a year on communal projects like bracken clearing, trench digging, and the much-hated land terracing program. If they refused, they could be fined up to five hundred shillings or imprisoned for six months.77 Work refusal cases rarely made it to court, and Mau Mau suspects instead remember being terrorized by the district officers and the Home Guard, who forced them to work.78 “Even before the Emergency villages,” Marion Wambui Mwai later recalled at her home in Nyeri District, “we went out nearly every day to build the terrace. The loyalists just whipped you and whipped you. Even if you dug faster, they whipped you. They treated us just like animals—and the white officer who oversaw the project would just march about, grinning at our suffering.”79
The colonial government argued that communal labor was for the benefit of the Kikuyu community, and that the Africans actually enjoyed it. In fact, communal labor was a form of punishment that the Administration in the reserves wielded liberally, and one that several commentators likened to the slave labor policies of the Third Reich. Kenya’s communal labor regulation was a violation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, which stipulated that communal labor could be required only for sixty days per year, and only from able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. British Labour MPs voiced their outrage on the floor of the House of Commons, as well as in partisan tracts. Fenner Brockway’s condemnation was particularly powerful.
When the Nazis carried out collective punishments against the Jewish race during the war, British politicians of all parties, preachers of all denominations, writers of all schools of thought—all voiced their indignant protest. The immorality of punishing innocent people was universally recognised. Now, only a few voices are raised in protest, although the principle is exactly the same. 80
Criticism also came directly from the ILO, which likened Kenya’s forced communal labor to outright enslavement.81
The British colonial government’s agenda in Kenya had two faces: the one it presented to the world and the sinister one that it tried to conceal from the public. From the very start of the Emergency colonial officials planned to detain permanently thousands of alleged Mau Mau leaders and intellectuals, people of influence whose presence threatened to expose the illegitimacy of colonial rule and potentially incite the anger of the much needed loyalists. Several senior chiefs petitioned Baring and the Colonial Office to ensure the permanent banishment of the Mau Mau leadership, as well as the confiscation of their land and other property. In one case a group of prominent loyalists wrote:
We feel most deeply that if any of the detained leaders of Mau Mau, or any who receive and serve sentences of imprisonment, or any who are at present at large and who may be arrested in the future, are later allowed to resume life among us once more, they will, inevitably, endeavour to reorganise a similar movement, perhaps under some other name…. We therefore most respectfully and sincerely petition Your Excellency to take such steps as may be necessary to insure that no leader of Mau Mau who is sentenced, shall later return to live among us, and further, that no leader of Mau Mau who may have been detained and against whom there is evidence to satisfy Government that he or she is such a leader, shall be later released and allowed to come back to live among us…. If such people do eventually return, we are convinced that they would cause further troubles and try to bring about further dissention between the people and Her Majesty’s Government. 82
The loyalists clearly had self-serving motivations consistent with the long-term plans of the British colonial government to retain domination and control through unlimited powers of arrest and detention. Colonial Secretary Lyttelton endorsed a policy of detaining permanently twelve thousand Mau Mau politicals and other irreconcilables who could not be coerced into supporting Britain’s continued rule in Kenya. Provided no one “belonging to the colony” was deported, but rather permanently exiled to detention sites within the four corners of Kenya, the Colonial Office approved of “the Kenya Government’s policy of building on the ‘loyalists’ to the exclusion of ex-Mau Mau leaders.”83 This meant that men and women picked up and detained at Athi River, Kajiado, and Lamu camps had no hope of ever being released.
Even with the permanent removal of the Mau Mau leadership Baring was still insecure about his government’s ability to rule without the use of arbitrary legislation. At the same moment when he was publicly endorsing liberal reform, the governor was preparing, with the help of the Colonial Office, post-Emergency laws that would legalize the continued use of detention without trial and communal labor. This legislation would also mandate control over African political organization, the circumscription of African movement, and the marketing of African labor. All of these authoritarian and arbitrary laws were eventually enacted in late 1959 and early 1960, further emphasizing the British colonial government’s continued unwillingness to commit to reform.84
Had they embraced Askwith’s program for rehabilitation and his vision of a multiracial future, surely Baring and the colonial secretary would not have envisioned a continued dependence upon arbitrary powers after the lifting of the Emergency. D. F. Malan, the prime minister of the new apartheid government in South Africa, applauded Kenya’s use of force and arbitrary rule, and saw it as a model for his own apartheid regime. In his condemnation of the British colonial government Brockway was quick to point out, “Perhaps the severest comment upon the Kenya Government’s repressive measures has been the exultant remark of Dr. Malan in South Africa that a British Colony has given him an example of how to treat discontented Africans. The policy of the Kenya Government, supported by Mr. Oliver Lyttelton and the British Government, may destroy Mau Mau only to increase Mau Mauism.”85
In hindsight, the most surprising turn of events of all would have been Governor Baring’s implementation of Askwith’s program. The introduction of rehabilitation, as Askwith defined it, would have required a complete shift in the public’s perception of Mau Mau, the authoritarian nature of the British colonial government, and its plans for continued imperial domination in Kenya’s post-Emergency future. The rehabilitation program enjoyed scant financial support, requiring Askwith to beg other departments and outside donors for contributions. Staffing was minimum, and supplies, from footballs to chalkboards, were hard to come by. There was no indication of the colonial government’s dedication to the hearts-and-minds campaign in Kenya. Detainees themselves remember little about colonial-sponsored rehabilitation other than the odd football game, loudspeakers blaring colonial propaganda through the camps, and government pamphlets that provided the latest “news” of the success of colonial forces in the forests and the fairness of Britain’s land policies in the reserves.
In keeping with its wish to maintain appearances, the British colonial government highlighted at every turn its endorsement and the purported successes of rehabilitation. When colonial officials would stand accused of torture or misconduct in detention camps or Emergency villages, Governor Baring and the colonial secretary would proudly hold up the success of rehabilitation as mitigation for any “one-off” offenses that may have occurred. Colonial logic had the world believing that the violation of the basic human rights of hundreds of thousands of people could be excused merely because there now existed a bogus and largely nonperforming program of liberal reform. With the notable exception of a handful of humane and reform-minded colonial officers detailed to the Pipeline, rehabilitation wa
s nowhere to be found in the camps or barbed-wire villages of colonial Kenya. Whatever term is given to Askwith’s program—rehabilitation, hearts and minds, liberal reform, the civilizing mission—its implementation was largely a sham. With the camps filling up and public criticism mounting, the British colonial government would not deviate from its misleading rhetoric, deliberately extolling rehabilitation as a legitimating ideology in order to mask the increasing violence and brutality of detention without trial in Kenya.
• Chapter Five •
The Birth of Britain’s Gulag
The purging of Mau Mau suspects in Nairobi during Operation Anvil
THE EVENTS OF APRIL 24, 1954, WOULD IRREVOCABLY CHANGE THE detention camp system in Kenya and the lives of tens of thousands of Mau Mau suspects. On this day Britain’s military forces, under the command of General Sir George Erskine, launched an ambitious operation to reclaim full colonial control over Nairobi by purging the city of nearly all Kikuyu living within its limits. Quite befittingly, the assault was called Operation Anvil.
In the early morning of Nairobi’s “D-day”—as Anvil’s launch was called—Erskine began deploying nearly twenty-five thousand security force members whose mission was to cordon off the city for a sector-by-sector purging of every African area.1 The general took his cue from a similar “clean-up” conducted by the British military before the Second World War in the then Palestinian city of Tel Aviv, where the element of surprise was the key to its success. Likewise in Nairobi, the entire population—African, Asian, and European—was caught off-guard, and what happened next has been described as nothing short of “Gestapolike.”2 Loudspeakers affixed to military vehicles blared directives: pack one bag, leave the rest of your belongings in your home, and exit into the streets peacefully. In some cases, the targets of the sweep had no time to pack. People were picked up on the street or at their places of work, or the security forces knocked their front doors down with swift kicks and rifle butts. All Africans were then taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures, where employment identity cards were used to determine tribal affiliations. The Kikuyu, as well as the closely related Embu and Meru, were separated from the rest of the city’s African population in preparation for on-the-spot, ad hoc screening,3 while members of other ethnic groups were most likely released and returned to their homes or places of work.
Nelson Macharia was one of the thousands of Africans caught up in the purge. He had been working as a mechanic at an Asian car-repair shop in order to support his wife and children, who were living on a small plot of land in the reserve in Fort Hall. “I was arrested on April 24, 1954, at the garage where I worked,” Nelson later recalled. “I had no time to collect any of my things, but I was lucky. When we arrived in the large place surrounded by coiled barbed wire in the middle of Nairobi, there were many people who had obviously been beaten and harassed. They were shaking from fear. When I saw them, I knew we were in trouble, though I had no idea the kind of trouble that lay ahead of us.”4 From there, he and the others were marshaled through a screening parade, where a Kikuyu loyalist—his identity protected by a hood, or gakunia—sealed a person’s fate within a matter of seconds. As Nelson later explained:
There were many white police officers about, and I was made to pass in front of the gakunia behind the others, in a long file. The person inside the sack, which had holes made in it, would look at you, and if he nodded his head, that meant that he had recognized you [as a Mau Mau], and you would be whisked away by the white officers and put into the screened-in lorry with the rest of the magaidi [dangerous people]. But if he shook his head, it meant that he had not recognized you, and you would be set free for repatriation to the reserves. In my case, he nodded his head, and I was taken to Langata Screening Camp, where I was interrogated some more before I was sent to detention. 5
Langata Screening Camp was the temporary destination for many of the Mau Mau suspects rounded up during Anvil. Like Nelson, Karue Kibicho was also taken there after he was removed from his home on River Road. Karue was typical of thousands of young Kikuyu men who had migrated to the city in the years prior to the Emergency. Born on the farm of Bwana Baker in the Rift Valley Province, he never knew life in the Kikuyu reserves, living instead as a squatter on land that neither he nor his father ever had any chance of owning. “I felt like the world was closing in on me,” Karue later recollected. “After the [Second World] War things were getting worse for us on Bwana Baker’s farm, and I knew I had to leave to find better work, so I went to Nairobi. It was the only place for me to go.” But on April 24, he too was picked up. According to Karue and others, “the operation was carried out by only white police officers [security force members], whom we had nicknamed ‘Johnnies’…. They did everything like forcing us into the barbed-wire enclosures, they took our valuables, all the time calling us ‘bloody Mau Mau.’”6 Eventually, he too walked through a screening parade, which, though carried out by a European officer rather than a Kikuyu loyalist shrouded in a gakunia, was just as capricious and deterministic as the one experienced by Nelson. Along with the eight other men with whom he had shared a room on River Road, Karue was taken to the bus station.
The former bus station…[was] near where the Hilton Hotel stands today. Coiled barbed wire had been used to surround the place. That was where we were divided according to our tribes. Everyone who was not Kikuyu, Embu, or Meru was taken away, whereas those who were Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru remained. Each of us then passed in front of a white officer, who scrutinized us without asking anything. He would then hand a person a card that was either red or white in color. There was nothing written on the cards; they were just blank. After getting the card, we would go to another white officer, who after noting the card’s color would point us to different directions. Those who had white cards would be shown one way, while those holding red cards would be shown another. In my case, I was handed a red card, which I soon realized meant that I was to be detained. We were later loaded onto buses which took us to Langata Camp, where we were put into tented compounds. We knew we had been arrested because of our involvement with Mau Mau, because we were demanding our land and freedom. We did not have to be told. 7
Dozens of people whom I interviewed had been picked up during Operation Anvil, and each one recalled similar moments of confusion, fear, and verbal and physical abuse. If they moved too slowly, or too quickly, they were beaten with clubs and rifle butts. If they spoke in the screening parades, they were often shipped directly to detention. If a Mau Mau suspect protested his rough handling, he would be hauled off and put in one of the “special police vehicles” several of these suspects were never again seen.8 Others remember the difficult separation of families—men being taken off in lorries for more screening at Langata, women and children sent to different lines for repatriation back to the reserves. “It was an unimaginable time,” recalled one Kikuyu man. “I was standing inside the lorry holding on to the screen that surrounded the whole vehicle, designed to keep us from escaping. I could see my people being abused by the ‘Johnnies.’ Then a team of hooded screeners passed by the vehicle and hissed at us. When the lorry pulled away, I could see the ‘Johnnies’ looting the houses of those they had just picked up, taking the valuables left behind for themselves. The whole thing was just…God help me.”9
Nairobi was the linchpin in Britain’s military campaign against Mau Mau, and Erskine was determined to capture it once and for all. He firmly believed that “it had become the main Mau Mau supply base from which the terrorists obtained recruits, money, supplies and ammunition,” and he was hardly alone in his sentiments.10 There was an unusual consensus in the ranks of both the military and Baring’s civilian government that the colony’s capital was the nerve center for Mau Mau operations. Nearly three-quarters of the city’s African male population of sixty thousand were Kikuyu, and most of these men, along with some twenty thousand Kikuyu women and children accompanying them, were allegedly either “active or passive supporters of Mau Mau.”11 According
to British colonial officials, Nairobi was gripped by a “breakdown in respect for law and order,” and Mau Mau adherents were murdering “loyal Kikuyu, Kikuyu-government-servants, suspected informers, and leading African personalities who were unsympathetic to the movement.”12 They were purported also to be perpetrating a host of other crimes, including armed robberies, the intimidation of potential witnesses, the levying of “protection money,” and the organization of boycotts of government-run buses and European products. Worse, one of the British colonial government’s greatest nightmares was becoming a reality: the Kikuyu were taking advantage of the tight living quarters of Africans in Nairobi to recruit members of other ethnic groups, particularly the Kamba, into the Mau Mau movement.13
Nearly two weeks later Erskine considered Operation Anvil largely finished. From the military’s point of view, it was a complete success. A fortnight of relentless roundups, screenings, and deportations had cleansed Nairobi of all Kikuyu, except for those few who were considered “clean,” had long-term contracts with European employers, and adequate housing within the city’s limits. By the end of the operation and its mop-ups, Britain’s security forces had sent over twenty thousand Mau Mau suspects for further screening at Langata Camp and deported nearly thirty thousand more back to the Kikuyu reserves, where the Administration would have to find some way of accommodating them.14 Once the general’s men had cleansed Nairobi and the surrounding areas of suspected Mau Mau supporters, their job was finished. The responsibility of detaining the Mau Mau suspects and somehow getting them to acquiesce to British colonial authority rested with Governor Baring and ultimately with the colonial secretary.
Imperial Reckoning Page 17
