Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  At the end of their sentences virtually none of these Mau Mau prisoners, whether at Embakasi or elsewhere, would be released. They were instead sent to the camps, or—in the language of the time—they were “Form C’ed.” With the stroke of a pen, this administrative procedure transformed prisoners into detainees. Along with most of the Mau Mau suspects held without trial, they were destined for either Manyani or Mackinnon Road.34

  The reception center set the tone for the rest of a detainee’s Pipeline experience. In the case of Nelson Macharia it was filled with uncertainty and personal degradation. After being picked up at the Asian garage, he spent three weeks at Langata. There detainees were strip-searched upon arrival. “The askaris and white officers took away all of our money and valuables, which they were searching for and removing from our clothes and bodies,” Nelson later recalled. “We were being ordered to hand over our money and valuables voluntarily, but if you said that you did not have any, the white officer would order the askaris to search you and your things, even inside our boots and also in our mouths and anuses.” From Langata, Macharia, along with several hundred other detainees, was loaded into an enclosed railcar for the overnight trip to Manyani. When they arrived they were greeted by “the askaris, who were arranged in two rows as far as the eye could see,” Nelson remembered. “We then passed between them in a file. By then we had nothing but the clothes which we were wearing. The askaris on either side were beating us with batons as we passed between them, making us run faster.” From there he was forced through a cattle dip full of disinfectant while the askaris pushed heads under the solution—sometimes for too long. “You know, many people couldn’t swim,” Nelson reminded me, “and the dip was very deep so they just didn’t make it. Others were held under by the askaris and drowned.”35 After the detainees were thoroughly sanitized, the dehumanizing process continued as they were paraded into a large open area and ordered to strip and place their clothing in a collective pile. Each detainee was issued a single pair of yellow shorts and two blankets, which would be their only clothing, or covering, for the duration of their stay in Manyani, a location known for its hot days and very cool nights. In addition, each detainee was given a metal band, on which was etched a number, to be worn around the wrist. For the remainder of their time in the camps, this would be their official identification.

  Mau Mau suspects arriving at Langata Camp

  Nelson’s experience was hardly unique. Dozens of other former detainees whom I interviewed recalled similar intake processes, as they were called, at Manyani. Karue Kibicho, who had been picked up earlier on River Road, was one of them. Like Nelson, he was transferred from Langata in an enclosed railcar that was “stifling from lack of fresh air and the fact that so many of us were crammed in the car.” He remembered “Johnnies” on the train who would pass through the detainees, “stepping on [their] heads, hands, testicles—just anywhere they felt like.”36 They were ostensibly there for security but also managed to help themselves to whatever valuables the detainees still carried. In Karue’s case:

  I had saved for several years for a very expensive watch that I had so admired and longed for in Nairobi, which was taken from me by one of the “Johnnies” who escorted us on the train. First he had wanted to buy it from me, but when I declined to sell it to him he took it by force, twisting my arm and yanking it off my wrist, then stuffing it in his pocket with the rest of the things he had stolen. But it was just as well he took it because even if I had sold it to him the money would have been taken from me during the searches at Manyani. 37

  Karue too arrived at the reception center to find two rows of askaris, the cattle dip, and a pervasive atmosphere of strict control and violence. The process was humiliating, but that was the point. “Before we were handed our yellow shorts we all stood there, young and old men alike, dripping wet from the dip and naked,” he recollected. “They decided to search us again, for what reason I couldn’t fathom because we had been searched so many times already. The white officers instructed the askaris to search every part of our naked bodies, to check every one of our orifices. It was sin enough to be standing there with our elders without our clothes, but then to have those kinds of things done to us.”38

  The reception center at Mackinnon Road was hardly better. Karega Njoroge was transferred there after he had been picked up in the Anvil sweep. He had been living in the Bahati area of Nairobi when the loudspeakers announced that everyone was to exit their homes and file into the nearby barbed-wire enclosure. After three days the screeners came, took one look at him, and pointed in the direction of a screened-in lorry. He was sent to the railway station, where he was handed a stale loaf of bread, herded into the car by several “Johnnies,” and shipped off for the overnight journey to Mackinnon Road. The next morning, when the door rolled open, “I couldn’t believe what was happening before us,” Karega later told me. “There were hundreds and hundreds of askaris, and dozens of white officers shouting to them, ‘Piga, piga sana’ [Beat them, keep beating them]. It was a very rough time. We were ordered to take off our clothes; we were searched thoroughly and then given a pair of yellow shorts and a blanket, but no shirts. The white officers then ordered all of our clothes and belongings to be put into an enormous pile. They then burned them all right in front of us.”39

  Karega stayed at Mackinnon Road for over a year, which was typical for most detainees held at the reception centers. This was not the British colonial government’s intention. The initial plan had been to quickly screen and classify the detainees, issue them individual detention orders—as most had been arrested under communal detention orders, a violation of the Geneva Conventions—and transfer them either up or down the Pipeline.40 But the screening teams were overwhelmed by the numbers detained during Anvil, and subsequent military and civilian operations, and could not keep up.

  Screening teams—made up of Europeans and Africans from the Prisons Department, Special Branch, CID, the Community Development and Rehabilitation Department, as well as dozens of Kikuyu loyalists from the reserves—all converged on Langata, Manyani, and Mackinnon Road to classify the Mau Mau suspects using the white-grey-black system. The initial screening at the time of arrest was only an introductory interview. Now the screening teams conducted more thorough interrogations to determine how committed a suspect was to the Mau Mau cause. “Whites” were clean and repatriated back to the Kikuyu reserves, “greys” were considered more compliant oath takers and sent down the Pipeline to ordinary works camps in their home district, and “blacks” were the so-called hard core who went up the Pipeline for softening up in the special detention camps.

  Even at this early stage, there was a definite logic to the planned organization of the Pipeline, which was predicated on the idea of detainee cooperation, and by cooperation the colonial government meant confession. Teams were constantly screening and rescreening detainees, hoping both to soften them up and to squeeze more intelligence from them. Detainees would be moved up or down the Pipeline, depending on their levels of cooperation, which would correspond with their classifications. When “blacks” began softening up, screening teams would reclassify them as “greys” and send them down the Pipeline, whereas any “greys” starting to express increased Mau Mau sympathy would be relabeled as “blacks” and transferred to harsher up-Pipeline camps. Theoretically, the colonial government’s ultimate goal was to transform as many Mau Mau suspects into “whites” as possible and to exile the remainder to remote camps in the colony.

  Detainees came to dread the constant screening to determine whether their Mau Mau sympathies had changed. The screening teams sought confessions and intelligence, and were willing to employ corrupt and brutal interrogation methods to get the answers they wanted. Baring knew of their objectives and described their techniques to the colonial secretary as being “a rough and ready method of interrogation.”41 Suspects were whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, forced to eat feces and drink urine—all at the hands of the screening teams. “I was ben
t over the screening table at Manyani with my hands on my head,” recalled one man who today lives in the Kariokor section of Nairobi. “I had lost sensation in my legs because of the beating with the rubber hose, and I was very weak. They were demanding that I tell them about Mau Mau activities in my home area in Kandara. I still refused, and the Ngombe [i.e., nickname for European settlers enlisted in the Kenya Regiment] ordered an African askari to take scorpions which were everywhere in the camp and force them into my back private part. I was soon writhing from the pain. I began telling them everything; I made up stories naming people. If I didn’t, I was going to die.”42

  The screening teams at Manyani and Mackinnon Road could devote hours or days to a single suspect before finally issuing him an individual detention order and assigning him to a color category. One month after Anvil, only 10 percent of Mau Mau suspects at these two reception camps had as yet been screened and classified. It would take well over a year before the screening teams finished with those picked up during the sweep of Nairobi.43 With very little movement out of the reception centers, there was no space for new intakes, a problem that could be solved only by further overpopulating the camps.

  Extremely close quarters invariably created unhealthy conditions, and within a few months a major typhoid epidemic swept through Manyani Camp. The spread of infectious disease there and elsewhere in the Pipeline came as no surprise to the colony’s chief medical officer, Colonel W. G. S. Foster. He had written a lengthy memorandum to Baring and the colonial secretary detailing the abhorrent sanitary conditions in the Manyani and Mackinnon Road camps, arguing that security and expediency had been given priority over health standards. Camp officials refused to allow detainees to dispose properly of human and other waste outside of the detention wires, and the quality and quantity of the camps’ water supplies were not even close to acceptable standards.44 Baring’s chief secretary, Richard Turnbull, agreed with Foster’s assessment of the “night soil problem,” noting:

  The essence of this problem was that the buckets were brimming with urine as well as faeces—not even Blondin [French tightrope walker] himself could be expected to carry them without making an abominable mess. Once a proper system of keeping solid and liquid excrement apart has been instituted, the matter will be fairly easy to handle through…Night Soil trenches. The first trench we inspected was too near the camp, the second seemed sufficiently far away. In view of the very difficult nature of the soil and the lack of supervision available, it is unlikely that a manual working party could keep pace with the requirements. 45

  Health officials were also needed in the Pipeline, despite Baring’s concern that such postings would be viewed by some as a reward to Mau Mau. The War Council concurred, calling the camps a “sanitary menace,” though again offered very little in the way of financial or administrative resources to address the problem. Taxi Lewis knew his Prisons Department was not heeding Foster’s warnings, conceding “the Medical Department cannot be answerable for the health of the inmates at either [Manyani or Mackinnon Road] Camp.”46

  When the first cases of typhoid appeared in May 1954, Governor Baring denied publicly the incidence of the disease and instead lauded the rise of Manyani Camp as “a million Sterling aluminium and steel ‘town’…that stretch[ed] like some futuristic factory for three miles and is over half a mile wide.”47 But by September it was clear that the spread of typhoid in Manyani had reached epidemic proportions and that the entire camp would have to be quarantined. Publicly, official press releases from the colonial government maintained that the camp had state-of-the-art sanitation facilities, fresh water, and proper medical care. Nearly every internal assessment of the outbreak emphasized the opposite, with one memorandum clearly stating, “The camp was not completely finished when the detainees went in and some of the sanitary arrangements were incomplete.”48 Compounding this problem was the increase in Manyani’s population, from a reported 6,600 immediately following Anvil, to over 16,000 at the time of the quarantine, well beyond its theoretical capacity of 10,000.49

  The colonial government was inundated with hostile inquiries. Several members of the Labour Party blasted the Colonial Office, decrying the outbreak as “appalling” and demanding a thorough investigation.50 Organizations on the left petitioned the colonial secretary, “In view of what happened in the Camps of this nature in Germany during the war…[we insist] that emergency action be taken to end this system of detention, before the outbreak spreads and becomes completely out of control.”51 Mainstream and even relatively conservative newspapers like the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Scotsman also carried news of the outbreak and suggested strongly that remedial action was necessary.

  Leading the charge to defend Britain’s colonial image was Alan Lennox-Boyd. In July 1954 Lennox-Boyd took over from Oliver Lyttelton as head of the Colonial Office. He brought with him a High Tory imperialist attitude that impressed even the most conservative members of his party. An imposing man in every respect—standing nearly six and a half feet tall and with a penchant for fastidious self-grooming—Lennox-Boyd was a master of disinformation, as the Manyani outbreak would subsequently prove.

  He and Governor Baring would quickly prove well-suited colleagues. They shared an aristocratic pedigree and ruling-class sense of duty, albeit one perverted by a high-minded sense of authoritarian righteousness. Lennox-Boyd was a descendant of the Napier family, was educated at the elite Sherborne School, and went on to read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he forged friendships with numerous future politicians and high-level colonial officials, Baring among them. Intensely ambitious, after Oxford he moved into mainstream politics with the help of another friend he met during his university days, Winston Churchill. Churchill helped to position Lennox-Boyd within the Conservative Party and paved his way to an eventual seat in the House of Commons and later the Colonial Office. The future colonial secretary walked in lockstep with his mentor, embracing nearly every Churchillean view on empire, from the dislike of India’s independence in 1947 to the prime minister’s famous position that “he had not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”52

  Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd inspecting the Home Guard

  The new colonial secretary had no intention of facilitating self-government in any of Britain’s colonial territories and instead considered himself a “brake” on the process of decolonization.53 His open and unabashed ruling-class approach to empire led him to dismiss the ordinary Africans as backward and wholly unprepared in the 1950s for independent rule. From the perspective of this imperious man at the helm of the Colonial Office, the end of empire in Kenya was a least a generation away. His sentiments were shared by most in the Conservative government and of course by local colonial officials and settlers.54 Critics considered him the epitome of the right wing, with Labour MPs like Barbara Castle commenting that Lennox-Boyd was “imbued with the conviction that the British ruling class, both at home and overseas, could do no wrong.”55 Politics aside, the new colonial secretary clearly held two standards in the empire: one for the civilized British and another for their imperial subjects. On this point his biographer, in an exhaustive review of Lennox-Boyd’s political career, suggested that the seamy side of empire bothered the colonial secretary little: “If the maintenance of British control over people not yet ready to govern themselves occasionally necessitated use of force, this did not in itself disturb him. The methods of law-enforcement employed in the colonies sometimes appeared unacceptably harsh to the British public; but they were, he maintained, generally in accordance with the standards and expectations of the colonial peoples themselves.”56

  This ethos infused Lennox-Boyd’s decision making and provides some context for his later political maneuverings. Time and again he would be forced to respond to allegations of brutality and cover-up in Kenya, and each time he would deftly navigate through the press and the House of Commons with responses that ranged from minor spins on the
truth to outright lies. The colonial secretary was joined by Baring in their collective goal of maintaining British colonial rule in Kenya. Lennox-Boyd would routinely and unquestioningly back his governor and their men on the spot in the Pipeline, in the European settled areas, and in the Kikuyu districts. Until Lennox-Boyd left the Colonial Office in late 1959, he and Baring unhesitatingly shared a kind of “ends justifies the means” philosophy toward the some 1.5 million Kikuyu allegedly infected with Mau Mau.

  Lennox-Boyd’s version of the typhoid outbreak set the precedent for all of his future responses to allegations of negligence and brutality in Kenya. After a well-choreographed and highly publicized visit to East Africa—complete with a staged tour of Manyani—the colonial secretary stood on the floor of the House of Commons and announced that the outbreak “was not due to the camp water supplies or sanitation, or to any failure to take proper health measures.”57 The spread of the disease, he countered, was due to personal contact with detainees who were already infected prior to their transfer to the camp. In an outright misrepresentation of the medical and administrative reports he had received from Kenya, Lennox-Boyd implied that the camp was a model facility for maintaining the detainees’ physical and mental well-being.

  As Lennox-Boyd was appearing before Parliament, medical personnel were putting their limited resources to work to improve the camp’s sanitation and drainage systems, such as existed, and its water supplies. The most important person in this whole operation, at least according to the detainees, was a European officer nicknamed Kihuga, or the Busy and Watchful One. “He was the most remarkable, humane man I met in the camps—he tried to save us from the typhoid and even the beatings,” David Githigaita later remarked.58 In the end, though, Kihuga’s valiant efforts could not avert the pending disaster. Lennox-Boyd reported that 63 people had died of typhoid in Manyani and another 760 were infected with the disease.59 These numbers seem low based on the observations of detainees who were in the camp at the time of the outbreak. Harun Kibe, in particular, had a unique vantage point as he was one of dozens of Mau Mau suspects who had medical experience prior to detention, and who as a result was conscripted by Kihuga in his effort to sanitize the camp and treat those infected. Harun recollected hundreds of detainees perishing from the disease: “Every few days there were a dozen, sometimes as much as two [dozen] taken to be buried or incinerated. We worked day and night to control the outbreak. I had never seen anything like it, and I haven’t since.”60 Another former detainee, Phillip Macharia, was part of the burial working party and later recalled: “Our group alone buried over six hundred bodies. I lost count when we were around five hundred or so; I had just grown too tired. I’d say about two-thirds of these corpses were a result of the typhoid because they had no marks.”61