Missionaries were contributing directly to the detainees’ cynicism about Christianity. On Sundays and some weekday evenings, missionaries would enter the compounds to preach cooperation with the government, the need to confess oaths, and, most important, that to become good Christians like the British, the Kikuyu had to reject Mau Mau. “They used to preach and preach and preach,” one animated man said as he stood up in parody of a missionary. “‘Receive Christ’s salvation and leave everything about the oath behind; become one with Him, and you will be redeemed.’ These preachers would stand there for hours saying such things with their Bibles in their hands. We just sat there and listened to them and couldn’t believe our ears. Hah, the hypocrisy of it all only made us more determined not to give in.”55
On Sundays, when most detainees did not have to labor the whole day, the collective air of the Pipeline was filled with lessons from the Bible and Christian urgings to confess Mau Mau sins. Preachers took to the loudspeakers to broadcast their message throughout the camps. Some detainees logically viewed these men of the cloth as working hand in glove with the colonial government. They were seen as trying to oppress Mau Mau minds just as the camp authorities were attempting to do the same with their Mau Mau bodies. Many detainees had already recognized the insidious partnership between Christianity and Britain’s civilizing mission, but in the camps it became utterly transparent. For Muraya Mutahi, who had spent several years fighting in the forests before his detention, it was “in the camps where we fully realized that Christianity had been used so as to make us blind to the injustices that were being done to us. We composed a song that we would sing at night that went, ‘We were told to close our eyes, and we obeyed, and as we did so, all of our land was taken from us. Now, that is the reason why we are crying.’ We realized that we had been fooled, and we weren’t going to be fooled again.”56
The detainees had nicknames for these men of God. One was renowned for starting every sermon with “Confess and believe in the Gospel,” so the detainees christened him just that: “Confess and believe in the Gospel.”57 Then there was the elderly white preacher from the Africa Inland Mission who seemed to have made Manyani his second home. With a captive audience of over ten thousand detainees and a loudspeaker system at his disposal, Sundays were a bonanza for him as he went on for hours about the evils of Mau Mau and the need for Christian repentance. “He used to preach to us,” recalled one man who had been held in the reception center for two and half years, “telling us how we would never be released unless we confessed the Mau Mau oath, how our quest for independence was futile. We tried not to listen to him, but he just went on and on.”58 Caught up in his own enthusiasm, the missionary would repeatedly sing his favorite hymnal verse: “We shall live forever with Jesus in Heaven.” Without fail he would end with great inflection on the last word, earning him his nickname Matuini, or Heaven.59
There were also dozens of Africans, mostly Kikuyu, who would come to preach the Gospel and exhort detainees to confess and repent. There were Nyenjeri and Phillips, who used to accompany Matuini to Manyani Camp, there was Brooks in Mackinnon Road, Mwangi in South Yatta, and scores of others up and down the Pipeline. Perhaps the most famous was Obadiah Kariuki, who would later, after independence, become bishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya. Sporting his driving goggles—which made him look like a “bespectacled frog,” according to one British camp officer—Reverend Kariuki traveled thousands of miles on his motorcycle as he journeyed to various sites in the Pipeline, preaching and observing the situation in the camps.60 The detainees had mixed feelings about this specific group of African Christians. There were some, like the Presbyterian minister from Nyeri, Charles Muhoro, who would preach the Gospel but avoid any mention of the Mau Mau oath, or confession. According to many detainees, he was also Mau Mau, having taken the oath and now refusing to do anything actively to thwart the movement.61 But the detainees called most of the others stooges. It was bad enough that they blasphemed Mau Mau, but several clergy were also known to be Home Guards—men actively fighting with the colonial government against Mau Mau and personally profiting from their colonial alliances. “Did the British think we didn’t see this hypocrisy?” one former detainee asked. “These men preaching Christian brotherhood were some of the same ones fighting against us and benefiting from our losses.”62 Others were alleged to be working closely with the camp authorities in the more brutal approaches to forcing confessions. Detainees reported some of the preachers, both black and white, would sit in with the screening teams as they used a variety of techniques to get the detainees to cooperate. It appears as if most were providing only intelligence to the screening teams, rather than an additional rough hand in the softening-up process. This did not diminish the antipathy that the former detainees still feel toward the missionaries today. In fact, a sentiment expressed by one former Mau Mau adherent sums up the beliefs of others: “Even the preachers were also screeners. They would observe how people were receiving their preaching, and they would go and make reports about it to the screening teams. They were not just coming to preach. No, they had other reasons.”63 These suspicions were not ill-founded. There is written evidence that the missionaries were constantly providing the colonial government with information about the camps and the various levels of detainee cooperation.64
The Catholics impressed the detainees as being in a category all their own. Wearing their long robes, the Fathers would often preach with a gun holstered around their waist—or, in one case, “with a Bible in one hand and gun in the other.”65 The Catholics seemed to epitomize Christian hypocrisy. In the reserves they were known for preaching during the day and going out on active patrols at night to hunt down the Mau Mau, a point confirmed in colonial documents as well as in missionary records.66 In the camps they endorsed a route to redemption that seemed off-limits to their Protestant counterparts. “We liked it when the Protestants came,” remarked one former detainee. “Not because we agreed with what they said but because the guards would leave us alone. They would never beat us in their presence.”67 But the Catholics were different. In a kind of twentieth-century inquisition, some Fathers would preach and demand confessions of all Mau Mau sins while the African guards would chase and beat the detainees with clubs and whips. According to Elijah Gikuya, for one Sunday morning service in Manyani he and all of the men in his compound were taken to “attend a prayer session in a large hall which was in the camp. We were escorted there by the guards. While there, I don’t know what provoked them, but the guards came inside and started beating people mercilessly. It was chaos, with people trying to cover themselves from the blows. The Catholic priest just stood there continuing to preach as if nothing was happening. Since then we never trusted another one of the Catholics.”68 Many of the camp officials seemed to prefer the fathers to the Protestant preachers despite the fact that few of them were themselves Catholics. As the British camp commandant at Tebere reported in early 1954, “My experience is that Roman Catholic Missions in East Africa inculcate into their flocks considerably more wholesome discipline than most other missions and cause less embarrassment to Government.”69
Predictably, the effect of Christian preaching in the camps was often counterproductive. But it would be inaccurate to argue that missionaries were solely responsible for the detainees’ rejection of Christianity and the resurgence of traditional Kikuyu worship. Certainly, many of the detainees came into the Pipeline with a renewed or strengthened belief in Ngai and their mythical creators, Gikuyu and Mumbi. These religious figures were often invoked in Mau Mau oathing ceremonies prior to the Emergency and were the source of much collective psychological strength during the early days of the war. Not surprisingly, it was the detainees’ experiences in the camps that served to catalyze their religious transformation. When Nderi Kagombe later reflected on this spiritual shift, it made perfect sense to him.
When you understand that you are being oppressed, then you make changes. We had taken the oath because we had realized t
hat the leadership of the white man was only oppressing us more and more, and that we had a color bar which was as bad as that one which existed in South Africa. So we decided to take the oath and unite against the white man. In detention, we abandoned Christianity entirely, and we began praying in the traditional Kikuyu way. We used to raise our hands in the air, facing the direction of Mount Kenya, and prayed and praised Ngai saying, ‘Thaai thathaiya Ngai thaai’ [Praise, Praise, God Praise]. 70
Like Nderi, many other detainees beseeched Ngai for guidance, asking Him for protection in the camps. They also invoked His protection of everything of importance—wives, children, livestock, and of course their land—while they were locked away. Together these were not just sources of material wealth but also the symbols of their Kikuyu manhood, perpetually under assault in the Pipeline.
Night was the greatest opportunity for group prayer in the compounds. Under the cover of darkness the detainees would kneel together side by side, facing Mount Kenya, holding each other’s hands and raising their arms high in the air. “It was an amazing thing,” recalled Nderi. “All of these men crouched on the floor with their heads up toward the sky and their hands linked and outstretched…. Sometimes I felt myself straining, trying to reach to Him with my hands and my mind.”71 He and the others would repeat various prayers, many of which had been scripted in the camps.
Hymns were also composed, and detainees would bribe the guards or calculate their comings and goings, strategically deciding the best moments to sing. But even with careful planning they were often caught, and the consequences could be devastating. Some guards did nothing for a cigarette or two; other times they only yelled at the detainees to be quiet. But they might set on the detainees and beat them or bring the infraction to the attention of the camp commandant. In the case of Wilson Njoroge, his entire compound at Mackinnon Road was caught singing:
Ngai we beseech you to be the judge,
If the white men defeat us it is you who will have been defeated
We shall be full of joy
When the House of Mumbi will be receiving her land back.
The next morning he was singled out as an example by Kenda Kenda. After being beaten with mattock handles by the askaris, Wilson was taken to the small cells and dumped into a pit, filled with water and animal carcasses. “I was there for four or five days, I can’t really remember which,” he said. “It was a very trying time because I had no food and the only water there was to drink was just what was there in the pit. I remember spending much of the time reciting prayers. Not Christian ones but the kind that our ancestors would have said and that we would say during Mau Mau, the ones to Ngai. There was one in particular that I repeated over and over again.
I pray to you Ngai, with my eyes facing Kirinyaga [Mount Kenya]
Where our forefathers used to face when praying for rains,
and rains used to come.
We pray that you grant us victory because we believe that if we win,
You will have won.
But if we lose, it is you who will have lost.72
For the detainees, it was virtually impossible to separate the Kikuyu belief system from the meaning and power of the Mau Mau oath. The oath, like their indigenous religion, was transformed and its importance heightened with every day spent in the Pipeline. The oath had united the adherents long before they were detained; its ritual, the ingestion of blood and goat meat, and the symbolic rebirth of Kikuyu into Mau Mau members were all critical to establishing cohesion in the movement. Yet when colonial authorities like Askwith, Leakey, and Governor Baring decided to make the oath the focal point of the struggle behind the wire, they infused it with yet new meaning, further elevating its importance to the Kikuyu and transforming it into the ultimate symbol of unity and resistance in the camps.
Like the clandestine prayer sessions, oathing ceremonies also took place in the Pipeline, though they were less common, for it was basically impossible for the detainees to obtain the necessary oathing paraphernalia. They especially needed banana leaves and a sacrificial goat. But in characteristic form, detainees improvised. Instead of leaves, blankets were tied together and held aloft in the shape of an arc. They bought animal blood and entrails on the black market, using them to replace the goat. There was also bribery, perhaps the biggest facilitator of the oathing ceremony in the camps. Guards demanded a huge honorarium to turn the other way; the equivalent could be as much as several packs of cigarettes or a few days’ worth of the compound’s rations. This alone was enough to keep oathing in the Pipeline at a minimum.
The oath was largely taken by the uninitiated entering the camps. Many of these innocent men were mistakenly swept up by the colonial government and thrust into the Pipeline. There they could either take the oath or face the wrath of their fellow detainees. In the compounds the non–oath takers could easily be identified because there were certain signs or phrases that were known only by those who had taken the oath. “If you held up two sticks to someone in the sign of the cross,” one man recalled, “then the person who was a Mau Mau knew to say, ‘I am a true Kikuyu.’ If he didn’t, then you knew he had not taken the oath.”73 There were apparently other ways of knowing. One man recounted that by scratching his head a certain way those around him who were Mau Mau would respond by rubbing their left earlobe. Once someone was aware that an uninitiated man was in their midst, he would declare, “There are fleas in this place!”74—a warning to others not to talk about the oath.
In the compounds the oathing ceremony was generally conducted in conjunction with a prayer session to Ngai, invoking Him to aid in their unity. “We would gather and pray in our Kikuyu way,” said Nderi. “Then we would prepare those who were taking the oath, stripping them down and telling them about the ways of Gikuyu and Mumbi whose land it was that we were fighting for. We beseeched Ngai for the strength we needed. Then the oath was given, and it unified us; it made us one. In the camps it was an indescribable oneness that we were forbidden to break.”75 But there were those detainees, mostly devout Christians, who refused to take it, and their fate was similar to some of those who refused to accept the oath outside of the camps—they were often killed. The detainees would strangle them with their blankets or, using blades fashioned from the corrugated-iron roofs of some of the barracks, would slit their throats. “You see,” Nderi went on, “we could not be in the company of those who were not bound together. They would betray us, and we would be defeated. The oath was the most important thing for us. Without it we were nothing.”76
We should not romanticize the anticolonial struggle in the Pipeline. There was divisiveness of the kind that invariably arises in any resistance movement, particularly in those in the pressure cooker of such extreme conditions as existed in the camps. There undoubtedly was a kind of “us versus them” mentality, pitting the detainees against the many faces of British colonial authority. Creating committees, instituting social norms and discipline, working to educate fellow compound members—these were all attempts to protect the unified Mau Mau social body. But the history of the Pipeline is not only a story of collective resistance and survival. It is also one of disagreement, self-interest, and excruciatingly difficult moral choices. The poisonous reality of the detainees’ everyday lives, the hunger, hard labor, torture, affected each person differently, as did their degree of belief in the purpose and strength of the Mau Mau movement. Some detainees broke down, even after years of resisting, confessing their oaths and cooperating with camp authorities.
What determined a person’s breaking point? This is a question that perplexed many within the colonial government. Thousands upon thousands of Mau Mau suspects were deprived of their rights, sent to slave labor camps, stripped of every shred of human dignity, worked sometimes to death, beaten senseless, tortured, and murdered. Still, many refused to confess. Particularly during the first year after Operation Anvil camp officials had little success in forcing detainees to cooperate.
Part of the colonial authority’s fa
ilure was self-inflicted. Screening, processing new intakes, and issuing individual detention orders required huge amounts of administrative manpower and financial resources. Camp officials simply could not keep pace with the roundups and intakes, let alone carry through with the much tougher challenge of forcing detainees to cooperate. Compounding these problems was the constant flow of new arrivals into the Pipeline—all of whom were being indoctrinated into the detainees’ world. Many colonial officials believed that the camps were “saturated,” and that some detainees were “going sour” and becoming “blacker” while others were “sitting behind barbed wire pondering the pros and cons of anti Government subversity.”77 In the summer of 1955—over a year after Anvil—Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd assessed the situation and wrote, “I fear that the net figure of detainees may still be rising. If so, the outlook is grim.”78
Imperial Reckoning Page 24
