By the time detainees at Manyani, as well as Mackinnon Road, were transferred out of the hazing compounds, the Pipeline’s language of force had been literally impressed upon them. Nderi left Compound 6 with only a faint memory of the world he had left behind but a few months earlier, when he had been living in the Bahati area of Nairobi. There he had owned two small shops that sold restaurant supplies, and supplemented his income with a lucrative subletting business. By the standards of the times he was successful, saving some money while also supporting his wife and children back in Nyeri. But after Compound 6 “it was as if my former world had left my mind,” Nderi recollected. “Before my arrest I had taken the oath and was helping to organize some of the supplies for Mau Mau. I had reached a point in my life where I could not go any further. The white man was keeping me down, so I joined Mau Mau…. But then I was picked up, taken to Manyani, and after two months with Wagithundia and Mapiga, how can I put it? I was completely disoriented. My whole body was numb, and I was moving in this kind of fog. I could hardly remember my name or where I had come from. I just thought I was going to die, though I wasn’t certain when or how it was going to happen.”14
Like many who passed through Compound 6, Nderi survived, although he would spend his next five years in detention, ultimately moving through seven different camps. Nearly every mode of available transportation was used to move Nderi around the gulag. Always shackled, he was loaded into enclosed railcars, the hulls of cargo ships and old military planes, and the backs of caged-in lorries. The journeys often took days, with little or no food and seldom any sanitation facilities for detainees.15 Regardless of what camp he was in, Nderi would always awaken to a piercing, predawn siren, or the shouts of the guards, after which he would take his breakfast of watery porridge before marching out for a day of forced labor. Over the years he would work on a trunk road, an airport, an irrigation scheme, and a hospital, as well as in various quarries and on bench terraces and other agricultural projects. At the end of each day he would march back to his compound, usually hustled along by the clubs of the camp guards and the vituperation of the British officers in charge. Night could be a relief, though often sleep was interrupted by unannounced inspections, or a camp loudspeaker blaring British colonial propaganda, or, on Mageta Island, a constant refrain of “God Save the Queen.”16
Having survived Wagithundia and Compound 6, Nderi soon became expert in the internal order evolving in the Pipeline’s compounds. The detainees’ world had its own committees, codes of conduct, language, and networks—it was a virtual community created and run by the detainees themselves. This new social world fought against the onslaught of colonial power inside the Pipeline. A collective strategy of survival emerged from the brutality imposed upon the detainees; it was as if misery itself forged their collective will to resist the colonial government’s demands for confession and cooperation.
Survival was not enough. Had it been, most would have confessed and submitted to colonial demands. Denouncing Mau Mau and kowtowing to the screening teams would obviously have helped avoid further torture or death. Detainees submitted themselves to the control and discipline of their Mau Mau peers not only because there was greater safety within a group but also because such organization afforded maximum resistance—the group being stronger than the sum of its members. Together, they could eventually exit the camps without having betrayed their own beliefs; they would outlast the colonial government and its infernal Pipeline. The detainees wished for more than mere survival. They demanded to live on their own terms.
That such a secret universe could evolve clearly signaled weakness in the Pipeline camp system. Despite brutal efforts by camp authorities to destroy their prior social existence, the detainees found maneuvering room within the camps that allowed them to organize. This was particularly true during the aftermath of Operation Anvil, when the colonial government struggled to consolidate the camp system. Compounds were overcrowded, forced labor systems not yet perfected, screening teams not fully coordinated, and the use of torture not yet systematized. This period lasted until late 1955, when the Pipeline became a fully operational, well-organized system. For the first three years there were greater opportunities for the Mau Mau adherents to try to negotiate and redefine their world behind the wire. The effects of this early detainee organization would persist right up to the dismantling of the Pipeline in 1960.
The detainees were attempting to turn colonial power against itself. A proliferation of detainee committees was at the heart of this subversion, and they evolved independently of, and in opposition to, the official structure of the camps. In many compounds there were dozens of committees, organizing and governing nearly every facet of the detainees’ lives. There was the welcoming committee, the judicial committee, the rehabilitation committee, the debate committee, the mending committee, the medical committee; the list went on and on.
Overseeing all was the executive committee. Selected by the detainees, its members were often singled out because of their ability to arbitrate disputes, their knowledge of colonial and international law, and their understanding of the political scene in both Kenya and Britain. This generally meant that the head of the executive committee, the effective compound leader, was well educated and spoke English. In time, this person not only came to represent authority among his peers but also would be recognized by camp authorities as the unofficial spokesman for his fellow detainees. Complaints about the lack of food or soap or water, overflowing toilet buckets, particularly sadistic guards, unreasonable work quotas—all of these were channeled to the camp commandant through the compound leader.
Perhaps the most famous compound leader was Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, or J. M., as he was popularly known. In many ways J. M.’s beginnings were similar to those of thousands of other detainees. The son of impoverished squatter parents, J. M. was born on a European settler’s farm in the Rift Valley in 1929. There he was destined for a life of sharecropping had it not been for his mother’s persistence and his own good fortune, in the form of a winning sweepstakes ticket, which paid his school fees. By the time of his arrest in October 1953, the now twenty-four-year-old J. M. had had a secondary education, owned a hotel in Nakuru, and was actively involved in Kikuyu politics. It was, though, his seven years in detention that would catapult him from the role of a political lightweight to that of a populist politician on the national stage, an unmistakable man of his people. His leadership among the detainees in the Pipeline earned him a reputation for fighting for the oppressed—something that would carry him into Kenya’s Parliament at independence.17
J. M. wrote a memoir, Mau Mau Detaineee, depicting life and survival in Britain’s gulag. It is one of the few autobiographical documents that give us a vivid picture of the world behind the wire. The work includes a description of J. M.’s first stay in Manyani Camp in the summer of 1954, where he was elected the leader of Compound 13. There he presented numerous requests to the camp commandant, reminding him in one face-to-face meeting that the detainees regarded themselves “in the same way as prisoners of war and [that] I…knew all about the Geneva Convention.”18 In the wake of this appeal a visiting committee, which included the minister for local government, health, and housing, Wilfred Havelock, was sent from Nairobi to inspect the camp. This was not an unusual response, as Governor Baring had previously sent numerous deputations to the camps to investigate conditions and to assess the progress being made in breaking down the detainees’ allegiance to Mau Mau. What was different this time, according to J. M.’s account, was that he was allowed to present to the visiting committee, in quite candid terms, the detainees’ complaints. J. M. told them, among other things, how detainees “were made to cut the sticks with which they were later beaten.”19 In the wake of his revelations, as he later wrote, “I was left in little doubt that these criticisms were unwelcome to the camp officers for on the next morning, lying on a bench, naked save for my yellow shorts, I was given twenty-four strokes by a warder in the presence of Marlow [p
seudonym used by J. M.], one of the camp officers who earned the nickname from us of Mapiga.”20 The public spectacle of this punishment left a deep impression, particularly on other compound leaders. According to J. M., “many of [them] decided against being outspoken after what had been done to me.”21 Others shared the sentiment. “We had to stand up for ourselves,” another detainee recalled, “but it was very dangerous. Depending on who was in charge, they might change things or they might beat you senseless for speaking out.”22
For the detainees, controlling their own society also meant drafting and enforcing what they called “rules to live by.” These were codes of conduct that guided social behavior and, wherever possible, replaced camp authority with detainee discipline. In so doing, the detainees were, curiously, mimicking some of the disciplinary tactics of the guards and British officers. Of course, the punishments meted out by the detainees were never as brutal or capricious as those of the camp personnel. Through self-policing and discipline the detainees sought to avoid, or at least minimize, the so-called justice of the guards and European officers, and the insecurity it created.
Detainee norms forbade everything from chastising the guards to stealing, physically fighting, and lying to their peers. While the men in large reception centers like Manyani generally had separate sets of rules in each compound, some of the smaller works camps instead had a single code of conduct that governed everyone. There were the famous Twelve Laws of Lodwar and the Ten Rules of Yatta. In the case of Mageta Island, the detainees had a rule book that they passed between the camp’s two compounds, adding to and amending it over time. In the Mageta Manifesto, as some detainees called it, spitting was forbidden, as was urinating and defecating outside of the toilet bucket. Detainees were not permitted to malinger when walking to and from the camp worksite; nor could they circumvent the ration line.23
Overall there was not a lot of variation between the social norms in different camps, and those that did arise tended to reflect some unique condition in a particular camp. In several Manyani compounds, for example, where detainee after detainee recalled the unbearable heat and duststorms, drinking another man’s “cool water” was specifically forbidden. Presumably, the prohibition of stealing did not sufficiently capture the seriousness of taking a person’s water after he had cooled it down. “You see,” explained Nderi,
the water that we received at Manyani was always hot. The whole place was just boiling—the dust and the sun were unbearable. You couldn’t cool yourself down by drinking hot water, so a man would spend a very long time passing it between two tins. These were the same tins we were issued, and we ate our porridge and drank our water out of them, and used them to dig ballast on the work projects…. Sometimes a person would borrow another man’s tin and pass the water back and forth using his own as well, and this would cool the water down. But when you were hot and tired, this was a very long process…. To take such water from someone was very, very serious. 24
The punishment for stealing could take several forms. Each compound generally held its own court, presided over by the compound leader and several other judges. In some cases, specific laws were enforced with equally specific punishments. For example, any offender convicted of spitting or urinating in the compound was often made to clean the toilet bucket, sometimes for several days.25 This could be particularly unpleasant, because camp authorities provided no water or soap for the toilet bucket brigades, the detainees having to clean out the human waste using their hands, sticks, and sand. There was also the dreaded knee march. This punishment was decreed by the courts to anyone starting a fight with another detainee, or who was insolent with one of the camp authorities. The offender was forced to shuffle bare-kneed back and forth across the compound, and, depending on the case, the march could go on for an hour or more. In particularly egregious circumstances the detainee was stripped of his clothing and had to carry a tin filled with stones on his head while crawling on his knees. This was always done in plain view for its humiliating effect.26
The harshest forms of justice were shunning and ostracism, punishments meted out after severe or repeated infractions. During a period of shunning all other detainees kept their distance from the offender, and at night he was forced to sleep alone in the corner, the toilet bucket his only companion. Already isolated from the group, the ostracized offender was then taunted unmercifully about any apparent physical or social weakness. In one case, a man was harassed incessantly for days about what another detainee called “his oddly shaped testicles.” “It went on and on and on,” this man continued. “It got to the point that you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He had been caught stealing from our food rations so many times that the punishment was warranted, but we were all happy when it came to an end.”27
To ensure their survival, the detainees needed to do more than create a camp self-government. They had to engage with camp personnel, particularly the guards. While the British officers administering the camps set the overall tone, the guards patrolled the compounds, escorted the detainees to labor sites, enforced the work pace, reported rule infractions, issued the food rations, and controlled the riot sirens. But engagement was difficult because the guards were taught and retaught to hate the detainees, told over and again that they were cannibals, and marched through parade drills that reinforced the colonial government’s version of Mau Mau savagery. “We used to be forced to sit and observe their processions,” recalled one detainee, “whereby the British officers in charge would march the guards through the camps and shout questions. ‘Who is the enemy of government?’ and the guards would respond in unison, ‘The enemy of government is Mau Mau.’ The white men would then shout, ‘Who is your enemy?’ and they would respond together, ‘Our enemy is Mau Mau.’ They would then be asked, ‘Who eats the flesh of young children?’ and they would shout, ‘The flesh eater is Mau Mau.’”28
The guards had their own agendas, personalities, and beliefs. Despite brainwashing by their superiors, they were not the pure automatons their commandants hoped for. Individual personality had much to do with this, but so did the miserable circumstances in which the guards lived. It was one thing to be taught to hate the people you were holding in detention; it was quite another to live on such poor rations and meager earnings that your daily plight often resembled theirs. With morale low, the guards sought to improve their own conditions, and it is hardly surprising that, given the few available options, they turned to the detainees.
There were often immensely tangled relations between the two groups. Beating the detainees one minute, the guards might illicitly trade with them the next. Black markets were well established in the camps, and the commandants were virtually powerless to control them. Detainees exchanged their blankets, food rations, and homemade items, like wooden spoons and jewelry crafted from corrugated iron, for cigarettes, snuff, pens, paper, medicine, newspapers, and a host of other items. The black markets, said one former detainee, were like “the Burma market in Nairobi”29—one of the largest markets in the city.
Black markets operate through trust, nowhere more than in prison, but in the Pipeline duplicity was also par for the course. Double-dealings were common, with detainees ripping blankets in half and passing them off as whole, guards mixing snuff with animal manure, or substituting a bag of the much-hated red sorghum for maize meal. Cheating the guards became a kind of recreation for the detainees and was seen as honorable, whereas cheating mates in one’s compound was an abomination. In spite of the deception, black market lore has become as much a part of the Pipeline’s history as screening or forced labor. Whether a camp was for “blacks” or “greys,” politicals or women, where there were guards and detainees there was a black market for almost anything.30
The black market extended to bribery, with detainees trading prized items like sugar or tea or cigarettes for favors from the guards. In some instances, the detainees purchased goods from the camp commissaries with “token money,” or the wages they received for their labor. But
not all detainees were paid; token money was the exception rather than the norm. Instead, many detainees relied on packages sent from home, which generally were permitted, containing censored items that would be put to wide use, often starting with a “postage fee” to the guard who delivered the package. Detainees caught speaking or singing would hand over some flour, or perhaps a pinch of snuff, to avert a beating or, worse, a report to the camp commandant. When recalling his perpetual need for cigarettes, an addiction shared by many other detainees, Phillip Macharia immediately recalled a moment when he was caught passing a note to the next compound: “The guard asked me if I wanted to be beaten or if there was something I might have to persuade him to change his mind. I liked to smoke, so I had several Jets [the brand of that time] in my pocket and handed them to him with some matches. He took them all but lit two, handing me one, and we smoked those two Jets together.”31
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