Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  One question about the Pipeline remains unanswered: where were Askwith’s men in all of this? If the colonial government was implementing rehabilitation on a scale even close to its public proclamations, we should see its evidence in budgetary allocations and manpower on the ground. In reality, there was very little of either. In Kenya’s Development Plan for 1954–57, Ernest Vasey allocated the Community Development and Rehabilitation Department £103,000, or 0.5 percent of the colony’s total budget. This amount was to be spent not only on Mau Mau rehabilitation but also on other community development projects throughout Kenya. This is in contrast to the allocation for the “maintenance of law and order,” which totaled over £2 million, or 20 percent of Kenya’s budget.88 The hypocrisy did not escape the notice of newspapers in Britain. The Liverpool Post, for example, commented, “For nearly one-fifth of a development programme to comprise expenditure on capital installations necessary for the preservation of law and order is nothing less than tragic, but such are the realities of the contemporary situation.”89

  During his euphoric days drafting the rehabilitation plan, Askwith was looking for the “right type of man” for his staff—someone who was “Christian, idealistic, practical, with a keen desire to help Kikuyu to adjust themselves to the new conditions.”90 In time, he was happy to take whomever he could get on his limited budget. Askwith’s so-called rehabilitation team would number over five hundred, but more than half of these individuals were designated for the screening teams.91 People like Peter Muigai Kenyatta and the notorious Isaiah Mwai Mathenge, David Waruhiu, and Jeremiah Kiereini would all technically be employees of the Community Development and Rehabilitation Department but hardly fit Askwith’s profile of the “right type of man.” To add to their burden, Askwith’s staff was theoretically responsible for the reform of not only the detainees in the Pipeline but the rest of the colony’s suspected Mau Mau population as well.

  There were few rehabilitation officers to carry out Askwith’s program. Manyani, for example, had one rehabilitation officer for ten thousand detainees, and many camps had none at all.92 In total, Askwith had some 250 men and women working on the rehabilitation of nearly 1.5 million Kikuyu, a ratio of 1 to 6,000. Without adequate funding for waste disposal and clean water supplies, allocations for even the most meager rehabilitation staffing, recreational materials, and educational supplies would have been unthinkable. But at the heart of the issue was the attitude that pervaded the Pipeline’s conceptualization and implementation. Most of those people overseeing and executing the expansion of the camps and prisons simply did not believe in rewarding Mau Mau, and certainly not in offering them any kind of hearts-and-minds campaign. Many of them wanted the detainees to be absolutely miserable, and in extreme cases they wanted them to die.

  Administratively, within the Pipeline Askwith and his rehabilitation officers were always subordinate to the Prisons Department and were relatively powerless when trying to alter the system.93 On several occasions Askwith appealed to Jake Cusack, Kenya’s defense minister, about the violence, stating in one instance: “The other worry is about the thug attitude of a number of Prison Officers. We have constantly had to make representations about the beating up of convicts and detainees in the past and our staff have made themselves pretty unpopular in the process. We claim that you cannot successfully rehabilitate a man in the evening if he is to be knocked about the next day.”94 Despite the colonial government’s sunny depiction of detention camp life, the Pipeline was not oriented around any kind of hearts-and-minds campaign. Privately, Kenya’s Defence Ministry emphasized this point when its secretary wrote, “There may be a [rehabilitation] programme, but I have never seen it.”95

  By the end of 1955 the Pipeline was fully in place. With its completion came a consolidation of the camps and prisons, characterized by standardization within the system. The centralized bureaucracy, located within the Prisons Department, was finally established and with it the stabilization of a formal camp structure. The Pipeline could now stand completely on its own.

  We will never know exactly how many Mau Mau camps and prisons the colonial government constructed in Kenya. There is no single extant document that lists them all. Moreover, camps and prisons were constantly opened and closed—new ones often arising and old ones shutting down as works projects were finished, and as other projects in new locations were started. By carefully studying the remaining colonial files, and cross-referencing them with interview data and documents from private and missionary archives, I was able to compile what I believe to be a near-complete listing of the camps and prisons in the Pipeline.96 There were over one hundred in all, not including the scores of camps run by loyalist chiefs, and others run by private settlers—technically illegal under international law—scattered throughout the Rift Valley and Central provinces.

  Defining accurately each camp’s particular function within the integrated Pipeline system presents a challenge. Some camps were up-Pipeline, or special detention camps only for “blacks,” and others were down-Pipeline camps, or ordinary works camps, for “greys.” There were also the reception centers, which Governor Baring later renamed holding camps to reflect the fact that detainees housed there often ended up staying for months or even years. There were also camps set aside for non-Kikuyu Mau Mau suspects—particularly Kamba and Maasai. Many of these oath takers either had married Kikuyu or had lived in close proximity to them in Nairobi. Finally, all the way up the Pipeline were the exile camps; at the other end were the chiefs’ camps, or open camps, to which “grey” detainees were transferred from the ordinary works camps as a final step before their release.

  Because each camp had a specific function within the Pipeline, detainees would not be moved about haphazardly, but rather according to their profiles, that is, according to their degree of demonstrated cooperation, their ethnicity, and their district of origin. For example, most “blacks” were sent to camps like Lodwar, Manda Island, Takwa, and Saiyusi, though Kamba and Maasai “blacks” were sent to Mara River, Kajiado, or South Yatta. By the end of 1955 a “grey” detainee from Fort Hall would never be sent to, for example, Aguthi or Mukurweini in Nyeri District, save by accident, because all “grey” detainees heralding from Fort Hall were sent to works camps in Fort Hall, those from Kiambu District to works camps in Kiambu, those from Nyeri District to works camps in Nyeri, and so forth. This is because the British colonial officers and local loyalists wanted to have the final say over whether a particular detainee from their district was ultimately released. Camp sequencing therefore had a very explicit rationale.

  In general the Pipeline was a system for adult male suspects only. Exceptions were those women considered too “black” or hard core to be repatriated to the reserves. Instead, they were sent to the colony’s only all-female detention camp at Kamiti, which, once built in late 1953, would be the place where the vast majority of women, totaling a few thousand in all, were detained in the Pipeline. Included in this number were countless girls under the age of puberty; not included were the dozens of babies born to the female detainees, many of whom had been in Kamiti for years.

  In comparison to the number of girls, there were far more unaccompanied male children in the Pipeline, though there was only one camp set aside for them at Wamumu. The total number of boys detained went, not surprisingly, unrecorded, or at least the records are no longer available. Certainly, hundreds if not thousands of these children never saw Wamumu Camp. There simply was not enough room for them, and they instead lived and moved through the other camps with the adult population. (See appendix for diagram of the operating Pipeline circa January 1956.)

  When fully assembled, the Pipeline came to embody British colonialism in Kenya, for it was the final step in a longue durée of increasing authoritarianism in the colony. For decades before the Emergency, British colonizers sought to control the African population through a complex, apartheidlike set of laws dictating among other things where Africans could live, where and when they could move, what c
rops they could grow, and what social places they could frequent. Virulent racism and European self-interest prejudiced the colonial justice system, and punishments typically included public floggings, stiff fines, and long prison terms. Indeed, Kenya had one of the most notoriously harsh penal systems in all of Britain’s African colonies. When these repressive measures were not enough to thwart the growth of Mau Mau, the colonial government declared a State of Emergency, enacted dozens of draconian regulations, and began employing terror as a means to subdue the suspected Mau Mau population. In many ways, it was this exploitative and repressive system itself that had helped to fuel the growth of Mau Mau, and it would take the final consolidation and bureaucratization of absolute colonial power in the form of the Pipeline to break it.

  Confession was the sine qua non for a detainee’s release. The purpose of detention in Kenya was not necessarily to keep the Mau Mau suspects alive but to force them to confess through a punishing routine of forced labor and brutality. In terms of productivity this pattern ultimately revealed an inherent contradiction. A tension emerged between the need for ever greater supplies of labor, without which it would be impossible to continue the colony’s infrastructure development, and the competing impulse to punish, debilitate, and even exterminate the Kikuyu population. Exhausting labor routines, beatings, torture, food deprivation, all used to force confession, could and often did render detainees incapable of working. The British colonial government’s works camps in Kenya were not wholly different from those in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia; they functioned on what Wolfgang Sofsky called “the economy of waste.”97

  The Pipeline was a microcosm where the contradictions and antagonisms between Kikuyu and European societies in Kenya were brought to a boiling intensity, and the world behind the barbed wire rendered utterly transparent, for the first time, the dark side of Britain’s colonial project. The hypocrisies, the exploitations, the violence, and the suffering were all laid bare in the Pipeline. It was there that Britain finally revealed the true nature of its civilizing mission.

  • Chapter Six •

  The World behind the Wire

  Mau Mau suspects congregated around the gallows at Thomson’s Falls Camp before their final departure to the Pipeline

  The “state of nature,” it turns out, is not natural. A war of everyone against everyone must be imposed by force.

  —TERENCE DES PRES, The Survivor

  LIKE SCORES OF OTHERS WHO PRECEDED HIM, NDERI KAGOMBE STOOD in front of the entrance to Compound 6 of Manyani’s “A” Camp wearing only a thin pair of yellow shorts and the reddish metal wristband that bore his detention number, x21437. He felt nauseous from the insecticide he swallowed in the cattle dip, or possibly from the public spectacle of cavity searches he had endured. Or perhaps it was just the whole intake ordeal. Forty-five years later, he could not quite remember which. “Besides, it didn’t really matter once I was hustled into the compound,” he recalled, “because Wagithundia was waiting there. It was as if Satan himself stood in front of us, and everything else vanished from our minds.”1

  Wagithundia was one of the most notorious guards in Manyani Camp.2 He had been recruited to work in the Pipeline from neighboring Tanganyika, and, like many detainees, Nderi believed Wagithundia had been selected in part because of his extraordinary physical appearance. “It was horrific just to look at him,” Nderi remembered. “There was something wrong with his skin, some kind of disease that made you want to look the other way. He was the ugliest human being I have ever seen.”3 And for many who passed through Compound 6, it was difficult to disentangle Wagithundia’s unsightliness from his behavior. “He was born with animal instincts,” recalled one former detainee. “He was not a human being; he looked and behaved like a diseased animal.”4 He also seemed to possess a sixth sense, quietly stalking detainees when they were most vulnerable. In one instance he appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, when a detainee was relieving himself on a toilet bucket. “I felt a presence in front of me,” the man remembered, “and the next thing I knew he took me by the shoulders and jammed me into the bucket. My entire bottom was folded inside and I couldn’t get out…. I was stuck there in a bucket of human waste. That is why we called him Wagithundia—it means ‘he who appears’—because he would appear just like that.”5

  Wagithundia was not a wholly independent operator, but rather the right-hand man to one of Manyani’s British camp officers—a young settler who had a very personal stake in the Emergency. “This Mzungu [European] was a very bitter man,” recalled Nderi. “He had come from the Rift Valley, where his mother had been killed by Mau Mau. That was why he was always mistreating us and giving Wagithundia orders to do the same. He used to call us ‘bloody Mau Mau’ and told us that we all deserved to die.”6 Nicknamed Mapiga, or the Beater, this young settler turned Compound 6 into the hazing site for hundreds of detainees who had been classified “black” and were considered by the screening teams to be the worst of Manyani’s lot. He and Wagithundia devised countless ways to humiliate and torture.

  Detainees were frog-marched around the compound and beaten until blood ran from their ears. On other occasions their ankles were shackled together and they were made to “hop up and down like bunnies” until their skin tore away, leaving their flesh hanging about the leg constraints. Detainees were awakened at all hours of the night; other times they were forced to stand endlessly, and any flinching or attempt to sit down was met with a rain of blows from the African guards.7 There were denials of food that could last for several days, sometimes ending with forced consumptions. As Nderi later explained, “We would be starved for as many as six or seven days; then Mapiga would have the askaris bring in huge quantities of porridge and force us to eat it. Having not eaten for so long, it was very painful. Sometimes Wagithundia would have the other detainees hold a man down, and then he would start jumping on the man’s stomach. It was a terrible sight, because the person was screaming with pain and would often die from the ordeal.”8

  For those detainees labeled “black”—ostensibly the worst of the Mau Mau “savages”—the rituals of the first intake procedure were not enough. Special treatment was needed to complete the dehumanization process and to transform them into social nonentities. It was within select compounds like Compound 6 that the newest principle of the Pipeline was unmistakable. Its idiom was intense pain and degradation. Only through physical suffering and humiliation would detainees, “blacks” in particular, achieve their new socially dead status.9

  The violence did not end with indoctrination. These tortures were a kind of public spectacle, often conducted in the open barbed-wire areas for all to see. For men like Pascasio Macharia, the only thing worse than being in Compound 6 of Manyani was being assigned to Compound 1, where he and the others had a clear view of what was taking place at the hands of the camp officer and Wagithundia. Certainly, Compound 1 was not immune from the usual beatings and deprivations, but for Pascasio, as for most detainees, mere floggings hardly merited mentioning. The routine violence and brutality of Manyani, as in the rest of the Pipeline, had become banal. It was the more outstanding forms of torture that stood out in their minds, and in Pascasio’s case what was happening just across the barbed wire in Compound 6 was, in his words, “completely unimaginable.”10 It was there that one particular incident left a lasting impression he later recounted in great detail.

  One day the askaris brought in a group of “black” detainees which included Chief Peterson and his headman, Gathumbi. You see the Chief and his headman had actually sided with Mau Mau, and from what we could tell they had been discovered by the authorities and they were now in the camps with the rest of us. When they were brought to Compound 6, that was where I saw the worst kind of sadistic punishment being meted out to detainees. Something happened in that compound that I had never seen before, and which I shall forever remember. When the whole group of detainees was herded inside, they were told to remove all their clothes and leave them in the corner of the compound�
�. Then the askaris set on them, beating them indiscriminately with clubs and mattock handles, chasing them around the compound. Those people were beaten and chased so badly, we kept saying to each other that they would only survive through a miracle. Then Peterson, who was a fat man because he had formerly been a chief, became so dark in his complexion we thought he was going to die. But then, the askaris brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called one by one, Peterson first. The askaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down. That’s when Wagithundia, who was the painfully ugly guard from Tanganyika, started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it in with a stick. Then the other askaris would put water in, and then more sand, and Wagithundia kept cramming it in with a stick. They kept doing this back and forth, alternating between the sand and the water, occasionally lifting Peterson so he could breath. Mapiga, the Mzungu officer in charge of the camp, was standing there the whole time, ordering them to keep shoving the sand and water and stick in his anus. Eventually, they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound. 11

  Other reception camp personnel lacked neither enthusiasm nor inventiveness in their own vocation of torture. At Mackinnon Road, for instance, Kenda Kenda took charge of indoctrinating the “black” detainees. Like Mapiga, Kenda Kenda was a young European settler whose nickname reflected his penchant for singling out the ninth in a line of detainees. “You see,” explained one man from Nyeri District, “he would come into the compound for the ‘blacks’ and scream for a head count. Everyone would line up in rows of five, squatted with their hands on their heads. He would then count us—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—whacking us each on the head with a club. Then he would reach number nine, and whomever that ninth person was he would beat them mercilessly. He particularly liked stomping people, and there would be blood and sometimes brains splattered everywhere.”12 Kenda Kenda—or Nine Nine—rightly earned his name, though he was known for much more than his stomping prowess. “He really liked barbed wire,” remembered one detainee who had spent several months in Mackinnon Road. “He would take the ‘blacks’ just after they came into the camp and start screaming for them to squat in fives, he would start counting, and then the unfortunate ninth man was sometimes rolled inside a coil of barbed wire by the askaris and Kenda Kenda would start kicking him around, screaming at the man, calling him a ‘bloody Mau Mau.’”13