The typhoid problems hardly ended with the epidemic in Manyani. Soon cases were being diagnosed in Mackinnon Road and Langata, though Baring, the final arbiter in Kenya, personally made the decision not to quarantine either of these facilities. He was anxious instead to move detainees, once they were classified, out of the reception centers to works camps in order to free up space for the continuous flow of new pickups. But the works camps were expanding only slowly prior to Anvil, and the rapid influx of new detainees meant Baring had to create dozens of new camps in order to accommodate the many “greys” and “blacks” coming out of Manyani, Mackinnon Road, and Langata.
To manage the crushing flow of human traffic, Baring established the Working Party, which included representatives from various departments with an interest in the camps—with the notable exception of Askwith and his Department of Community Development and Rehabilitation.62 Chaired by Taxi Lewis, the prisons commissioner, the Working Party sought to maximize detainee labor by siting camps as near to agricultural or public works projects as possible but dismissed any camp plans requiring lengthy start-up times, regardless of their potential labor benefits. With some one thousand new pickups per week, there was simply no time to lose.63 But there was little consensus in the Working Party, only compounding the human traffic problem; members of the Administration from Central Province were the most notably strident in some of their objections, largely because all the “grey” detainees were slated to filter through works camps in their districts before their final release. This meant, for example, that if a “grey” detainee originally came from Fort Hall, he would be sent to a works camp in Fort Hall District where he would labor and continue to confess before his final release. Initially, however, the district commissioners from Kiambu and Nyeri flatly refused to have any expanded system of works camps in their areas. The so-called poor relief camps that Baring had established earlier had proven an administrative disaster, and the DCs complained bitterly during the months before Anvil of the financial and staffing burdens that these camps were generating. The Nyeri DC hardly minced words when he wrote, “The establishment of Works Camps covering ‘Operation Anvil’…has gone off at half cock and once again the Administration holds the baby…. Now it appears that all accounting, payment of salaries, acquisition of equipment, etc., etc. as well as the construction of the Camps falls to the lot of the Administration.”64
Funding and administrative support were clearly the issue. Without additional financial assistance, the DCs from Kiambu and Nyeri refused to cooperate and rejected the creation of additional works camps in their districts—something that was well within their right given the administrative structure of the colony. Consequently, the Working Party was forced to create an elaborate system of works camps in nearby Embu District on the Mwea Plain for all the “grey” detainees originating from Kiambu and Nyeri districts. There these detainees would labor on the massive Mwea/Tebere irrigation scheme, a project that had been outlined by Swynnerton and that was aimed at developing rice cultivation in the previously uninhabitable and malarial region. In time, however, all the DCs in Central Province would agree to the works camps in their districts largely because it meant that they—along with local Kikuyu loyalists—would have the final say over whether a detainee would be released or sent into exile.65
The colony’s Treasury, in charge of approving or more often declining requests for funds for the camps, wielded the greatest influence over the pace and scope of Pipeline expansion. The Ministry of Defence and its Prisons Department, which continued to bear the greatest administrative responsibility for the camps, and the Finance ministry had radically different opinions on the need to create additional works camps. On the one hand, Finance Minister Ernest Vasey, who was desperately trying to keep the colony solvent during the Emergency, asserted that the government was “planning too many ‘Works’ Camps in the Central Province.”66 Jake Cusack and Taxi Lewis, on the other hand, were watching the detainee population steadily grow and responded to Vasey, “It is clear that we are not planning too many ‘Works’ Camps in the Central Province and, in fact,…we should proceed with our examination of the extra…extensions.”67 But the Treasury had already granted over £1 million for Pipeline expansion, and nearly all of it had been exhausted within a matter of months. Additional camps had to be built, though the necessary funding simply was not there.68
In its attempts to solve the problem of inadequate financing, the Working Party cut nearly every corner possible. Cusack ordered labor gangs to be transferred from reception centers at Manyani and Mackinnon Road to locations around Kenya so that they could build most of the works camps from the ground up. These labor gangs worked under grueling conditions to complete more than twenty camps in less than three months. “When I was selected I thought I was going home,” remembers one former detainee. “I had only taken one oath and knew I didn’t belong with some of the others [i.e., hard-core Mau Mau]. Instead they took us to Embu, where they worked and beat us like dogs, from sunrise until dark. We built our own prison. Can you imagine?”69 Only the bare necessities like barbed wire and perimeter trenches—proper sanitation and sleeping barracks were of secondary concern—were in place before the Prisons Department began moving large numbers of detainees out of the reception centers and into the works camps in Embu and elsewhere. Detainees sometimes arrived at a camp to find nothing. This seems to have been more the norm for the remote camps, like the one on Mageta Island in Lake Victoria. There, the first batch of detainees arrived in shackles in the cargo hold of a boat. When they were taken ashore, they spent days building perimeter trenches and watchtowers, uncoiling barbed wire, and digging isolation pits before their shackles were removed and they were allowed to walk freely within the confines of the new facility.70
Camps also became incubators for a variety of infectious diseases, despite warnings from local medical officials. Kenya’s director of medical services, T. F. Anderson, issued recommendations ranging from proper sanitation facilities, water supplies, and construction materials to medical staffing, inoculations, and nutritional requirements.71 Nearly all were ignored. In June 1954, Kenya’s minister of local government, health, and housing, Wilfred Havelock, alerted the governor to public health risks resulting from the Pipeline’s hasty expansion: “As can be imagined a number of matters to do with Health have been neglected…as the speed at which the camps have been erected and occupied have prevented any particular attention to this aspect…. In the Central Province, however, there seems to be little co-ordination, and there is no single person who is prepared to help to get the requisite work done on the health requirements in camps.”72
Eventually, H. Stott, the medical adviser to Kenya’s Labor Department, was appointed to coordinate the health and sanitation requirements in the Pipeline—hardly a one-man job. He found a myriad of problems and attributed them not just to a lack of resources but also to the refusal of many officers in the Administration to address the health issues. In his November 1954 “Report on Health and Hygiene in Emergency Camps,” Stott wrote that members of the Administration held lower health and sanitation standards for Africans than they did for themselves.73 Combined with their overall distaste for Mau Mau and the constraints of the Emergency, it is not surprising that the provincial and district commissioners, and their subordinates, ignored the medical recommendations. In place of the suggested corrugated iron, mud and wattle and recycled canvas became the building materials of choice for many of the camps. The camp compounds were routinely filled above capacity. Detainees slept on the ground, often one on top of the other. Stott was fully aware of the detainees’ close quarters, constantly reminding Taxi Lewis “that a minimum of 20 square feet floor area be provided for each inmate” (emphasis in original).74 Water supplies were also abysmal. Detainees remember drawing drinking water from drainage ditches, swamps, and muddy boreholes. On numerous occasions Stott himself noted that water “purity [was] not all that could be desired,”75 and European camp commandants ofte
n concurred. At Waithaka Camp, for example, the officer in charge reported “the water [in this camp] is unfiltered and comes directly from a highly contaminated river.”76
Despite Scott’s efforts, infectious diseases continued to be ubiquitous in the Pipeline. Pulmonary tuberculosis was widely reported, with Kenya’s director of medical services remarking, “The number of cases of pulmonary tuberculosis, which is being disclosed in Prison and Detention Camps is causing some embarrassment.”77 The overcrowded conditions, together with the detainees’ weakened immune systems, exhaustion from forced labor, and poor access to proper clothing or blankets, facilitated its spread. To reduce the incidence of tuberculosis, camp officials needed to reduce the number of detainees in each compound. The Medical Department decided to adopt a policy of repatriating all infectious detainees back to the reserves. In effect, they were trading one public health crisis for another. Detainees suffering from not only tuberculosis but also typhoid, pneumonia, leprosy, and measles were repatriated to the overcrowded Kikuyu districts, where accommodations were arguably tighter than those in the camps.78
Waterborne infections—particularly dysentery, diarrhea, and other “epidemic intestinal diseases”—also ran through the camps.79 So too did vitamin deficiency, with cases of scurvy, pellagra, kwashiorkor, and night blindness afflicting some detainees.80 Adjustments to their rations and vitamin supplements would generally cure such ailments, though detainees typically suffered for weeks or months before camp authorities took action. Others were not so lucky, dying from the painful effects of these nutritional diseases, which could have been remedied with expedient and proper medical care.81
Detainees thus lived in infernal conditions. They often slept and ate in the same room where toilet buckets overflowed with urine and feces. With poor sanitation and worse ventilation, the air quality was wretched. Bedbugs infested the detainees’ blankets, and lice their hair. Their rations generally consisted of maize meal, with an occasional piece of meat or vegetable thrown in—a diet that was often reduced or completely taken away as a form of punishment. In short, living conditions in many of these camps were unbearable, which was of course the point.
Already stretched thin, the colonial government recruited the vast majority of camp commandants from within the ranks of the European population in Kenya. Local settlers were more than eager to enlist in the fight against Mau Mau, alleviating Baring from the costly process of overseas recruitment. Many of these settlers were often officers in the Kenya Regiment and the Kenya Police Reserve, and brought with them an already hardened stereotype of Mau Mau savagery and varying degrees of the now typical eliminationist attitude that dominated settler opinion. Scores had also served their apprenticeship in the Kikuyu reserves, screening Mau Mau suspects and generally terrorizing the local population. For their part, British colonial officers, many of whom appeared to share the sentiments of their settler counterparts, took charge of those camps not under the control of the settler recruits.
Virtually all camp commandants carried guns, viboko (rhino whips), or clubs, or all three. Today former detainees still carry vivid memories of the commandants’ weapons and their use during roll calls. Regardless of where they were in the Pipeline, roll call meant squatting in groups of five with their hands clasped over their heads. The European commandants would then walk through the lines, counting and beating the detainees with clubs or viboko. “The whole thing was just so ridiculous,” recalled one former detainee from Lodwar. “Whitehouse [the European in charge] would just count us over and over again. We would be there in the hot sun, and our feet were burning from the sand and the heat. You couldn’t move your hands to wipe your face, because that would just invite him to beat you. Every time [there was roll call] he liked to pick one or two of us, and just go crazy beating the person. But we never knew who it would be; you’d just pray it was someone else.”82
Then there were the guards. Some were recruited from the European population in Kenya, others from Britain, and by all accounts they represented the “bottom of the barrel.” Those drawn from the Kikuyu loyalists, or from other African ethnic groups within the colony and neighboring Tanganyika, were hardly paragons of efficiency or virtue. Most of these guards considered the camps the best of all possible bad employment options, even if they were underpaid, worked in dreadful circumstances, and were, they thought, surrounded by human waste in the form of the detainees. Many of the guards considered the camps revolting, even more so because they were isolated from the rest of the colony in some of Kenya’s most remote and inhospitable places—locations that were “Conradesque,” as one camp official called them.83
Loyalist guard keeping watch over Mau Mau suspects at Langata Camp from an observation tower
“The horror” of Kenya’s heart of darkness was then hyperbolized by the specter of evil cast over the camps by the detainees themselves. Many guards seemed to fear the detainees greatly. Camp commandants repeatedly told them that the Mau Mau were cannibals and that unless they beat the detainees into submission, they would be eaten.84 At once empowered and maddened by the confining atmosphere of the camps, many of the guards, not surprisingly, beat, tortured, and murdered the detainees without, it seemed, any remorse.
It would be wrong to view these men, along with the handful of female guards, merely as victims of an ugly system. Although they often complied with orders to beat or torture the detainees, guards also had options. They could choose to be brutal, or they could opt to be compassionate, or even kind. Some former detainees were adamant that guards from certain African ethnic groups were notoriously harsh, but others said there was no consistent pattern. There is, however, one point of consensus: without exception, ex-detainees pointed to the Kikuyu loyalists as the most brutal. The vast majority of these loyalist guards were assigned to the works camps in the Kikuyu districts where they had immense power not just in the day-to-day operation of the camps but also in the final release decisions.
Like the guards, the moral fiber of the camp commandants also varied greatly. In contrast to those who were cruel or sadistic, there were other camp commandants who were singled out by former detainees for their kindness. Major James Breckenridge from Athi River Camp is legendary among the ex-detainees today, who still praise his humanity and concern for the well-being of the detainees in his camp. Echoing the sentiment of many other former detainees from Athi River, Eric Kamau recalls, “We all respected him very much. He and his wife, who was also at the camp, tried very hard to treat us like human beings—to them we weren’t animals but humans like them.”85 Still others were cruel one minute and normal, as some of the detainees termed it, the next. Regardless, the fate of the detainees was in the camp commandants’ hands. They could beat them, provide them with proper clothing, force them to work harder, give them five minutes’ rest, torture them, or offer them rewards in return for their cooperation. In the end, the choices were left to the individual in charge.
For the Pipeline to function efficiently, it also needed the cooperation of some of the detainees themselves. The noted German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky wrote about the establishment of absolute power in the Nazi concentration camps, emphasizing that it was not a simple matter of a minority of people establishing dominance over the lives of the majority. Instead, the Nazis needed help from within. In his work, Sofsky stressed that “by making a small number of victims into its accomplices, the regime blurred the boundary between personnel and inmates…. Had it not been for the self-administration and the collaboration of the prison-functionaries [i.e., detainees], discipline and social control would soon have buckled and collapsed.”86 This characteristic of camp life was notable not just in the Nazi system but also in that of the Soviets, and it later would be employed in Kenya’s Pipeline as well.87
Some detainees were tempted to collaborate with colonial oppression and were offered in return rewards and privileges that elevated them above the other detainees. These detainees helped to keep the Pipeline going and enabled authoritie
s to exert more efficient control over the camps. In some cases those who had not confessed were nevertheless relieved from their hard labor and given jobs cleaning commandants’ offices, cooking for them, or, if literate, performing clerical duties such as organizing files and typing. Then there were those detainees who had admitted their Mau Mau sympathies to the screening teams and were now willing to cooperate. These men, and less frequently women, often underwent a complete metamorphosis. As they changed from detainee to collaborator, their carriage, habits, and manner of communication also changed. Most refused to recognize their former compound mates, perhaps from shame or self-loathing. They were often as cruel as their former captors, brutalizing detainees, demanding their confessions, and often informing on their Mau Mau activities both before and during detention. The most famous example of this was Peter Muigai Kenyatta—Jomo Kenyatta’s own son—who after his confession joined the ranks of the screening team in Athi River Camp and eventually traveled throughout the Pipeline interrogating other detainees.
Imperial Reckoning Page 20
