It would be difficult to argue that the colonial government envisioned its own version of a gulag when the Emergency first started. Colonial officials in Kenya and Britain all believed that Mau Mau would be over in less than three months. They were prepared to handle a few thousand of the political detainees who were being held under Governor’s Detention Orders, but as yet had no plans to incarcerate the countless other “lesser Mau Maus.” Yet when the movement did not collapse with the arrest of its presumed leadership, or shrink at Britain’s initial show of force, the colonial government had to rethink its plan. As the situation worsened, the harsh Emergency directives already in place began to seem inadequate.
Long before Anvil, Governor Baring knew a major crisis was brewing in the Kikuyu reserves. Before 1953 they were already overcrowded and on the verge of ecological collapse, had been so for years, and were hardly capable of absorbing what would become a total influx of some 150,000 repatriates with no prospect of employment and no land on which to grow food. The repatriates alone constituted an administrative and fiscal nightmare for Baring, a nightmare only made worse by the steadily increasing number of Mau Mau suspects recommended for detention by the screening teams.
At no point did the British colonial government consider expanding the boundaries of the Kikuyu reserves. Time and again Baring strictly adhered to his edict that Mau Mau must not be rewarded with a concession to demands for more land.15 There was, then, only one way around the population problems caused by repatriation. The governor had to find a way to make the reserves more agriculturally productive.
Adding to this seemingly unsolvable problem was the governor’s inherent indecisiveness, which rendered him, at times, absolutely paralyzed by the complexities facing him. He needed an expert, and he turned to R. J. M. Swynnerton, Kenya’s assistant director of agriculture, who in late 1953 drew up a five-year African land development plan. The Swynnerton Plan was intended not only for the agricultural reconstruction of Kikuyuland, the central Kikuyu homestead, but also for the improvement of all African farming and grazing areas throughout the colony. With Baring’s leadership, Swynnerton secured a £5 million concession from the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, and with it planned “intensified agricultural development in all African Areas of Kenya with due emphasis to the loyal tribes.”16
Deportations of Mau Mau suspects from Nairobi
The Swynnerton Plan began from the premise that Africans were destructive and ineffective custodians of their own land. Colonial officials assumed that Africans needed agricultural experts to show them how to cultivate and herd efficiently, despite the fact that they had successfully managed their land and livestock for centuries before the British arrived. The plan dovetailed neatly with the colonial government’s intransigence on Mau Mau demands, and especially its refusal to expand the boundaries of the reserves. If the Kikuyu could only be shown how to make better use of their land, so the logic went, then its carrying capacity could be expanded and more people could subsist off of the small holdings. Swynnerton’s plan described a variety of projects—like bench terracing, soil conservation, bracken clearing, and paddocking—that ostensibly would increase productivity in the Kikuyu reserves. Along with these measures were numerous agricultural projects designed to develop previously uninhabitable areas in Kikuyuland for future resettlement. Locales where no one could or wanted to live, some malaria-infested and others drought-plagued, would somehow be rendered fit for human habitation and would contribute further to easing overpopulation in the reserves.
The Swynnerton Plan did not stop there. The colony’s leading agricultural expert also believed that the small landholdings that marked the Kikuyu landscape were inefficient, and that only through a process of landholding consolidation and legal deeding could agricultural productivity be maximized. The poorer Kikuyu—many of whom already formed the backbone of Mau Mau—had been fighting the colonial government on this issue for years, for they knew full well that such a policy would largely benefit their wealthier, loyalist neighbors and lead inevitably to their own further impoverishment. The dictatorial powers of the Emergency permitted Swynnerton to decide that “former Government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country.”17 The colonial government was preparing to create permanent socioeconomic divisions within Kikuyu society based on access to land. In the future landed and landless (or land poor) Kikuyu would divide largely along the fault line between loyalist and Mau Mau. Most British colonial officials, Baring included, thought Swynnerton offered the panacea for all that ailed the colony. His unique brand of intense agricultural development, a veritable agrarian revolution, appeared to offer hope for solving the Kikuyu land crisis. It was also, however, a shameless reward scheme aimed at affirming the loyalists as effective, future instruments of colonial collaboration.18
How was Baring going to fund all of Swynnerton’s proposals? As a result of the earlier forced removals from the White Highlands, there were already over eighty thousand repatriated Kikuyu in the reserves who were unemployed, had little if any land, and needed income from relief work. The provincial commissioner, Carruthers “Monkey” Johnston, made staggering cost estimates for funding even the barest measures needed to prevent starvation and ecological collapse.19 Even the governor and his newly formed Reconstruction Committee—created specifically to address the crisis in the Kikuyu reserves—had arrived at their own, equally enormous cost projections. Over £2 million were needed simply to cover projected relief expenses for the coming two years. This amount exceeded Swynnerton’s total budget for all Kikuyu agricultural reconstruction. Lack of money would continue to be a decisive issue, having devastating consequences for the Kikuyu.20
Repatriation was punctuated by daily tragedy: children separated from their parents, death from starvation and disease, suffering from exposure and dysentery, and the sheer chaos and uncertainty of the whole ordeal. Unable to ignore this growing catastrophe, Baring scrambled in the fall of 1953 and came up with another solution: the Four-Point Plan.21
First, the remainder of unwanted Kikuyu in the European settled areas would be parked in the transit camps until spaces could be made available in the reserves. Second, the basis for the flow of repatriates would henceforth be regulated by the results of screening. Priority for places in the reserves was given to those considered more cooperative, with no more than twenty families per month to be repatriated from any given transit camp. Third, a scheme for poor relief in the Kikuyu districts was outlined: Kikuyu labor would be directed only toward projects that were included in the Swynnerton Plan, and the repatriates would be paid on a sliding scale, based on age and gender.
But reality frustrated Baring’s plans before they could even be put in place. The transit camps were already overflowing with repatriates and were completely ill equipped to handle thousands more of them for months on end. Moreover, whatever the labor schemes the Kikuyu were enrolled in, the governor still did not have the funds to pay for relief programs on any regular basis. Over the years, I’ve interviewed numerous Kikuyu who were forcibly removed from the Rift Valley and sent back to the reserves during the early years of the Emergency. To a person they worked on relief gangs, though few recollect ever receiving wages or rations for their labor. For nearly all of them their most enduring memory was scraping together enough money to pay the special or punitive tax that was levied by the colonial government against all Mau Mau suspects living in and returning to the reserves. Revenues from this tax were to be used to help fund the relief programs.22 Baring’s plan to reestablish colonial control—which included expanding the carrying capacity of Kikuyuland—was at this point cut loose from the purported objectives of the Four-Point Plan. Had the welfare of the repatriates been a consideration, if not a goal, then the governor would have stopped or at least slowed forced removals. Instead, the so-called relief progr
ams were in fact designed to make use of cheap or free repatriate labor for Swynnerton’s agricultural programs in the Kikuyu reserves.
The last item of the Four-Point Plan was the blueprint for the impending expansion of detention camps. It is in this regard that Baring made the decision to create works camps throughout the colony that would use detainees as a cheap labor source. As with the repatriates, he saw no problem in using the massive, captive workforce at his disposal. In fact, the governor was about to put thousands of beaten and half-starved Mau Mau suspects to work, not only on the agricultural redevelopment programs proposed by Swynnerton but also on numerous others suggested by the Public Works Department.
At first, there were ostensibly two types of works camps, though distinguishing between them would have been difficult. The first type were located within the Kikuyu districts and were intended for poor relief rather than punishment. They held dozens of homeless, repatriated families who were considered to have “soft” Mau Mau sympathies. The first three of these camps—Githunguri, Aguthi, and Fort Hall—were, within a matter of weeks, pushed beyond their combined capacity of two thousand people. Living conditions were makeshift, and the colonial government’s complete disregard for sanitation or hygiene standards inevitably created much suffering for those forced into them.23 Nevertheless, thousands of Kikuyu who languished in the squalor of the transit camps anxiously awaited vacancies in the new works camps in Central Province in a desperate hope for improved conditions.
Then there were the works camps located outside of the Kikuyu districts. These were designed for the thirty thousand Mau Mau suspects whom screening teams had already deemed unfit for return to the reserves. These camps were explicitly punitive. The camps housed alleged oath takers who fell somewhere between the extremes of the repatriate suspected of having “soft” Mau Mau sympathies and an internee who might qualify for transfer to the political or hard-core detention camps. This middling category of Mau Mau adherent was produced by the saturation crisis in the reserves. Because of limited space available in the Kikuyu areas, screening teams and the Administration were making more disciplined decisions about the numbers and nature of those who were to be repatriated.24 Many Mau Mau suspects destined for works camps were no more committed to the movement, and some even less so, than those who had been repatriated to the Kikuyu reserves during the early months of the Emergency.
Forced labor was a constant in both types of camps. Although the colonial government had no difficulty forcing detainees to work, it risked the scrutiny of the international community. Whereas the European Convention on Human Rights could be derogated, in part, by citing the wartime and emergency clauses, the International Labour Organization (ILO) Forced Labour Convention caused the Colonial Office much greater concern. The ILO’s position was crystal clear: when a person is incarcerated without trial, he or she cannot be made to work. The colonial secretary himself explicitly recognized that the “proposal [of detainee labor] was contrary to the letter of the International Convention on Forced Labour,” and knew that his office would have to “refute any allegation that [the detainees] are being used as ‘slave’ or ‘cheap labour’ for the profit of Government.”25 The colonial government could easily have been accused of using forced labor for political and economic gain, an accusation which would of course have been true, but which Colonial Secretary Lyttelton needed to avoid.
To get around this problem, Governor Baring and the colonial secretary once again looked for help within Britain’s own empire. It seemed that General Templer was already violating the ILO Convention in Malaya, though he managed to do it on a reduced scale by creating a two-tiered system of works camps. Templer sent his cooperative detainees to so-called ordinary works camps, where they volunteered to work on labor projects and were supposedly paid an appropriate wage. Those detainees who were uncooperative were sent instead to special detention camps, where they could be forced to work but were also paid. The logic behind this charade was that there were far more detainees working voluntarily—at least in theory—in the ordinary works camps than were being forcibly made to work in the special detention camps. In effect, the colonial government in Malaya was violating the ILO Convention only some of the time.26 Lyttelton urged Baring to adopt a similar system, emphasizing that “the number subject to compulsory labour [would be] reduced accordingly.”27
After Templer’s system was exported to and implemented in Kenya, neither the ILO nor the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on Forced Labour ever once charged the British colonial government with violating the Convention. Nonetheless, Lyttelton knew his government was “in technical breach of the forced labour conventions.”28 Even Kenya’s minister for defense, Jake Cusack, plainly stated in reference to detainee labor, “We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department” (emphasis in original).29
With Swynnerton’s Four-Point Plan in place and with a green light for forced labor, a grand design was beginning to emerge. The works camps, though still in their formative stage, were going to fit into Governor Baring’s broader strategy of overhauling the colony’s African political economy and transforming it into the basis for continued British colonial rule. It almost sounds like a lofty colonial goal—except that there was a State of Emergency going on. The forced removal, repatriation, and detention of Mau Mau suspects would over time be integrated into the colonial government’s broader plan of agricultural reconstruction, land reform, and overall modernization of Kenya. Emergency or not, the development of the colony was going to be carried out on the collective back of the suspected Mau Mau population.
It was at this juncture in the spring of 1954 that the fledgling Pipeline was impacted by Anvil’s mass arrests. Forced by the momentum of the roundups to redirect temporarily his attention and resources away from the works camps, Baring and the Public Works Department began preparing vast “reception” facilities for the thousands of new Mau Mau suspects. Langata’s capacity was expanded to over ten thousand, while two new reception centers, one at Manyani and the other at Mackinnon Road, were also established. Both of these camps were located in one of Kenya’s most arid and desolate regions. Manyani was an enormous site, nearly three miles long by half a mile wide. It was, like most of the camps in the Pipeline, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers and patrolled by armed guards with police dogs. Farther toward the Indian Ocean coast stood Mackinnon Road, constructed from an old military airplane hangar remodeled for the new arrivals with dozens of separate compounds divided by thick barbed wire. With the addition of the two new reception centers, technically there was space for another fifteen thousand detainees.
But General Erskine grossly underestimated the number of Mau Mau suspects who would be slated for these camps. Initially projecting no more than a total of twenty thousand new detainees, by May of 1954 there were over twenty-four thousand Mau Mau suspects in the Langata, Manyani, and Mackinnon Road camps alone—a thirteenfold increase in the number of detainees held at the beginning of the year.30 New intakes were coming in daily, by the lorryload, busload, and via railroad freight cars. Although these arriving hordes were largely a result of Erskine’s military operations, the general and his forces were not to blame for all of them. Thousands were also being shipped in from the European settled areas and the Kikuyu reserves by Baring’s men in the Administration.
At first, only the governor had the power to issue detention orders, but in time it became impossible for him to keep up with the numbers of pickups, while also managing the escalating crisis in the reserves. Thus he delegated the powers of detention, previously reserved solely for him, to members of the Administration. This meant that the provincial and district commissioners could issue the lesser detention orders, or Delegated Detention Orders (DDOs), to any African suspected of Mau Mau sympathies or any African they simply wanted out of their areas.31 By the end of 1954 the British colonial government reported that the detainee population had risen to over fifty-two thousan
d—an increase of 2,500 percent from the beginning of the year.32
The growing population in the Pipeline included not only detainees held without trial in the camps but also those convicted of Mau Mau–related crimes and sent to prisons. In fact, the Pipeline would eventually process thousands who were tried and convicted of Mau Mau offenses in the colonial courts. The vast majority of these cases were brought in front of Emergency assizes, where the colonial prosecutors almost wholly abandoned evidentiary procedure. The suspects and their lawyers—if one were even present—were prohibited from mounting any reasonable defense, as the courts were created to enforce swift rather than impartial justice. Most of the attorneys representing Mau Mau defendants came from a small cadre of sympathetic Asians based in Nairobi. These were men like Fitz de Souza, who today recalls:
[I had] no time to prepare a defense. These suspects were generally being brought up on trumped-up charges. Evidence was often planted, prosecution witnesses were brought in at the last minute, and we were not even allowed to cross-examine them when they did testify. There was no discovery at all. We just showed up to represent our clients, who were not even identified by name, but rather by a number. There was little we could do to help them, other than argue for lesser sentencing. These men were sentenced to prison—sometimes for a lifetime of hard labor—through a mockery of the legal system. 33
With sentences ranging from a few months to life the convicts would be sent to one of the Mau Mau prisons within the Pipeline. The prisons were virtually indistinguishable from the system’s detention camps, except that labor routines were reputedly harsher. The most notorious of these prisons was already in operation at the time of Anvil. Located at Embakasi, it held nearly two-thirds of the Mau Mau prisoners, all of whom were being forced to build the colony’s new airport, still in use today and since renamed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Most people flying into Kenya today will land on its runway.
Imperial Reckoning Page 18
