In time, though, officials in Kenya improved their efforts at making the Pipeline an unbearable experience. By the end of 1955 the colonial government was much better equipped to deal with the detainees and turned its full attention to breaking them. Colonial officials had managed to bring a measure of rational organization to the labyrinth of camps now fully in place. Intelligence was shared and coordinated, making screening far more effective, work quotas were clearly spelled out, transfers were tracked more effectively, and the Prisons Department successfully delegated some of its powers to the Administration in the district works camps.79 With these changes detainees found less and less room to maneuver, and survival became increasingly more difficult. The collective will to resist gradually began to break down as individual survival instincts took over.
The well-oiled colonial propaganda machine fed on the detainees’ fears and concerns. Pamphlets in the vernacular were circulated through the compounds, pointing out the fairness of the Carter Land Commission, as well as correcting the “misguided” belief that African land had been stolen by the British. At the same time, loudspeakers would blare warnings about ongoing land confiscations in the reserves, describing how land taken from Mau Mau sympathizers was being redistributed to those who were loyal to the British colonial cause. “Confess and Save Your Land” was one broadcast that the British colonial government played throughout the Pipeline, and is still bitterly remembered today by many of the former detainees.80 So too are the news programs that constantly blared updates of Mau Mau losses in the forests, and the imprisonment of Jomo Kenyatta. Pictures of Her Majesty in full regalia were hung up throughout the compounds alongside images of Kenyatta in shackles, wild-haired and looking dazed and pathetic. Obviously, the implied contrast between civilization and savagery could not have been more stark. Home Guards who were imported from the reserves were used by camp authorities to relate local news over the public address system. These Kikuyu loyalists sliced straight to the detainees’ manhood, announcing that their wives were suffering and needed their protection. “These Kikuyu scum would announce throughout the camp that so and so’s wife had given birth to a child with loyalist blood,” Nderi recalled, “or that his wife had left him for the comforts of the Home Guard post.”81
The colonial government clearly had time on its side. Detention camps are a waiting game; given enough time, they will eventually transform human beings into something they never imagined possible. When reflecting on his experience in the Soviet gulag, Gustaw Herling concluded that “there is nothing…a man cannot be forced to do by hunger and pain.”82 Having spent months or years in the Pipeline, former detainees expressed sentiments that were strikingly similar. “There is only so much a man can bear,” Phillip Macharia said when recalling why he confessed his oath. He had been detained for nearly two years, spending most of his time at Manyani making ballast at the work site, overcoming several bouts of pellagra, living in filthy clothes, and listening to British colonial propaganda day in and day out. “I felt as though I could no longer persevere with life. I had been beaten; I watched others being tortured and killed. I just couldn’t take it any more.”83 For Phillip, the breaking point came when he and some other detainees were caught by the guards reading a scrap of newspaper. As punishment, they were forced to put toilet buckets on their heads and run to the site where they were to be dumped and cleaned. “We had excrement and urine running down our faces and backs; all the while the guards were beating us with their clubs to make us go faster. A few days later I was taken to screening, and this time I confessed my oath to get out of the hell I was living in.”84
Though most stories of detention culminated with the moment of confession, each account was as much about a man’s individual metamorphosis as it was about his ultimate decision to cooperate and save his own life. Hungry, more and more detainees began to steal rations from weaker men. Desperate to avoid punishment, they implicated others for camp violations that were, in fact, their own. Some tried to escape and were sometimes successful, while knowing full well that camp authorities would exact unimaginable retribution on the detainees left behind. Exhausted, individuals would feign illness and head to the camp infirmary—one of the true absurdities of the Pipeline. There, they would be examined and sometimes allowed to rest. Their comrades still marched off to hard labor but with the added burden of having to fill the work quotas of those left behind.85
Other detainees routinely compromised with their captors to secure a better life for themselves in the camps. Some collusions were more subtle than others. There were, for example, the fundis. These were men who had particular skills and who used them to angle for the relatively benign opportunities open to them in the camps. Prior to detention they were mechanics, agricultural assistants, carpenters, clerks, medical staff, and houseboys. Behind the wire, they built torture cells and fixed vehicles, typed transfer and screening documents, ran the infirmaries, and kept the British officers in their clean and neatly pressed khaki uniforms. In their relatively comfortable jobs these detainees avoided the harsh labor routines endured by the others, received favors in the form of extra food or cigarettes or even clothes, and at a very basic level were critical to the functioning of the Pipeline’s oppressive system.86 Over time many of their peers grew to dislike them, sharing the sentiments of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who asked in his Gulag Archipelago, “What trusty position did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of compulsion?”87
It was the fundis who were instrumental in creating hierarchies in the camps, based upon the privilege and wealth they derived from their soft jobs. Through favoritism or theft they amassed items like pens and paper, cigarettes, newspapers, and tea. With these they dominated the black market, routinely buying off guards, and ultimately increasing their chances of individual survival. It was not unusual for a fundi to be a compound leader, though any leadership role secured by popular acclamation would tend to evolve into a kind of despotic control. Just as a detainee’s status in the compound determined where he slept, that is, his distance from the toilet bucket, the fundis and their coteries generally amassed for themselves such luxuries as were available to detainees. Unequal relationships were part of the Pipeline’s fabric from its earliest days. The social cleavages between those detainees who cooperated and those who did not widened over time as the effects of sustained detention, hard labor, starvation, and torture broke down the collective efforts at unity.
Other detainees simply became the favorites of the camp officers, assuring them a special quality of protection. At one of the camps, one man recalled, “[I was caught] speaking to the camp commandant’s ‘wife,’ as we called this particular detainee. The guard took me and beat me unconscious, but told the other man he [the guard] could not touch him by order of the commandant.”88 This does leave one wondering what exactly the relationship was between the camp’s commandant and his favorite detainee, or “wife.” In oral testimonies several men spoke elliptically about homosexuality—both among themselves and between camp personnel and the detainees. It certainly must have existed, but the extent of such sexual relations is unclear. One fact is certain: some detainees served the domestic needs of the camp officers, spending more than a night or two in their quarters. Others traded sex with guards to ensure their protection, and some—particularly the younger men—found both protection and affection by becoming the so-called junior wives of fellow detainees, particularly the fundis.89
There were others in the Pipeline for whom—in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, who wrote extensively on moral life in concentration camps—“staying human [was] more important than staying alive.”90 Random acts of kindness, or “ordinary virtues” as Todorov calls them, are found throughout the annals of Britain’s gulag. There are recollections from former detainees of men giving their day’s food ration and blankets to those who were so ill and weak they were near death. Detainees traded cigarettes for vitamins with the intention of giving them to their co
mpound mates who were suffering from scurvy. In Mara River a man painstakingly hoarded and cooled water to bathe a fellow detainee whose body was covered with boils. Some detainees were crippled with pellagra and dependent on others to help them walk and work. In one case “there was this man called Mwangi who had come from the Rift Valley,” recalled Phillip Macharia. “He spent every day for almost a month carrying this man with pellagra on his back, back and forth to the labor site at Mara River. Because of the pellagra this detainee had scabs all over his legs and could hardly walk, he was in so much pain. Once he arrived at the quarry, Mwangi would set him down, and we would allocate him the job of picking out the debris from our ballast loads. It is difficult to imagine the strength it took for Mwangi to bear the heavy load of another on his back. Mind you, the work site was a very long walk from the camp.”91
Within the Pipeline’s crucible, moral choices daily confronted the detainees. As some placed self-interest before everything, others put their own survival at risk to maintain what one detainee called “human dignity and friendship.”92 What is most striking in the oral testimonies is the degree to which detainees wrestled with their commitment to Mau Mau, on the one hand, and their desire to save themselves, on the other. Of course, the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive. The compound detainee organizations, codes of conduct, and oathing were all designed to protect collectively the detainees. There was safety in numbers, and together they could mount a more effective defense against the onslaught of British colonial authority.
Nevertheless, the extreme and sustained conditions of detention have a way of eroding social contracts at their very foundations. Camp committees became less effective and detainee norms harder to enforce as the proverbial “law of the jungle” began to eclipse ordinary virtues and collective solidarity. Although the decay was slow, and probably difficult to track, detention was nonetheless as unnatural a state for Mau Mau as for any other people struggling to prevent a social breakdown and the formation of unhealthy and destructive hierarchies and personal interests. What control the detainees had managed to establish was slipping, and the colonial government, quite opportunistically, took advantage, adding even more pressure designed to turn the detainees against themselves.
Variations on the divide-and-rule policy had been used for some time. Screening teams had routinely told detainees that compound mates had “sold them out” when in fact they had not. Camp commandants purposely put detainees of different ages and geographic backgrounds together in the same compounds, thinking their differences would create divisions. Some of these tactics were effective, but none yielded the kind of result that came when camp authorities started to make widespread use of those who had begun to break down and confess. Some were recruited into the system as compound informants; others became the notorious “surrenders”—those detainees who after confession joined the camp screening teams, providing vital intelligence as well as softening-up support. Already pushed to the brink, detainee cohesion faced its most difficult challenge from these two by-products of the camp divide-and-conquer strategy.
Today, former detainees recall informants and surrenders with disgust and despair. They are described as sellouts, traitors, CIDs—a play on the British colonial government’s Criminal Investigation Department—and, perhaps worst of all, Home Guards. Some informants were passed off by camp authorities as new transfers, whereas others, after privately confessing to the screening teams, returned to their old compounds to spy. From wherever the threat came, the detainees did their best to try to detect “the rats in the compounds.”93 When they did, the result was always the same: informants were summarily executed by the detainees. “It was just like in the days before our detention,” one detainee explained. “We did not have our own jails to hold an informant in, so we would strangle him and then cut his tongue out.”94 He pointed out that the law in the camps was the same, and the preferred method of execution was still strangulation. When reflecting on the murders of informants, this detainee, like many others, considered them moral acts that prevented the worsening of their already difficult conditions. Despite camp authorities often collectively punishing a compound for killing a spy, one detainee insisted that “it was better to be beaten than to let an informant live, because they were like a poison sure to kill us.”95
Some informants did have great success in providing their superiors with detailed information about Mau Mau activities in the compounds. This information in turn strongly influenced the colonial government’s camp policies. As early as 1954 Governor Baring had written to Lennox-Boyd about the “Mau Mau organization” in the camps with its “Chairman” and “Mau Mau rules,” but neither he nor his subordinates had yet to appreciate fully the pervasiveness of the detainees’ world.96 This changed with the more effective use of the government’s “eyes and ears,” or “stool pigeons,” as colonial officials called informants.97 Once the Special Branch began reporting “sufficient evidence of Mau Mau activities within Detention Camps,” screening requirements changed.98 From the end of 1955 forward, all screening teams were ordered to “take into account not only whether the individual concerned has confessed to his or her Mau Mau activities before detention but also whether he or she has provided information about anything that took place during the period of detention.”99 Moreover, screeners were encouraged to abandon any “set forms of questions” because, as one official commented, “[they] would be useless as the Mau Mau Committees most certainly have their own set form of answers.”100 The commissioner of prisons, Taxi Lewis, also directed his men to take control of the “illicit oathing” problem that was far more widespread than anyone had initially thought.101 In translating this directive, several of his camp commandants interpreted their order in the same way: they publicly hung suspected oath administrators in the camp compounds, leaving them to dangle on display for several days.102
The presence of informants predictably resulted in a climate of distrust among detainees, who started hiding their camp identities, that is, their detention numbers, from the others. The reason for doing this was, as David Githigaita explained, fairly obvious.
At Manyani, we would not leave our detention numbers uncovered, because if one of the secret informers whom we could not identify saw the numbers, he could use you to make himself look better by reporting that you were the one persuading other detainees not to confess or that you were the one leading prayers to Ngai. We had to keep those numbers covered using an aluminum metal plate which we made from the roofs. You see, a detainee’s name without his detention number was useless, because even if one’s name was called several times, without calling his number he would not answer. There were many detainees who shared names, but the numbers could not be the same. 103
Oathing, prayer sessions, singing—all of these collective acts that helped to forge and maintain unity became less practiced as detainees feared being betrayed by one another. Mau Mau activities did not cease altogether, but the colonial government succeeded in separating the “weaker members from the herd.”104 In the language of the time, camp authorities targeted the “waverers.”105
They also targeted the guards. Camp authorities more and more shuffled guards around the Pipeline, cutting short any relationships they might forge with the detainees.106 They also introduced an effective system of reward and punishment intended to shut down black markets and the widespread bribery. The guards’ quality of life improved when Askwith’s rehabilitation officers redirected their limited funds and manpower away from the detainees and toward the guards. Memoranda ordering rehabilitation officers to organize classes, football matches, and the like exclusively for the guards became more common each year. There were special “fun days” with prizes and ribbons for the strongest and fastest warders. The Prisons Department also agreed to exempt all of its loyalist African staff working in the Pipeline from their hut taxes and gave them additional support for their dependents, some of whom were living with them in the camps.107 However, not all attempts to imp
rove the guards’ loyalty to the Crown were quite as accommodating. The threat and use of punishment also went a long way toward building a self-policing culture among guards. For instance, a British officer at Waithaka Camp, tipped off by an informant, caught a guard trading cigarettes with some detainees through the wire of a compound. Rather than order the legal use of twelve strokes with a cane, the officer pulled out his gun and killed the guard and then did the same to one of the detainees. At Waithaka black market dealings reportedly receded for many months.108 It would be ridiculous, of course, to suggest that illicit trading and bribery disappeared altogether in the Pipeline, but with the shift in policies and the help of the informants it did diminish over time.
Surrenders stepped in where the informants left off. Integrated as members of the camp screening teams, they provided their own vital knowledge and with their colleagues made use of the intelligence passed along by informants. “It became much more difficult to talk around the questions of the screening teams when more of the surrenders started joining them,” recalled Nderi Kagombe. “We could no longer use the same kind of false confessions that we had once used; they knew when we were lying because they had accurate information on what we had been doing in the compounds and during the time before we were detained. The surrenders would just keep harassing us and harassing us.”109 The surrenders went well beyond verbal interrogation. They took to the loudspeakers where they named names, and gave their own long confessions about Mau Mau activities both before and during detention. The surrenders also zealously participated in beating and torturing the detainees—many of whom were their former compound mates or neighbors from the rural areas. Former detainees recall these so-called sellouts as being some of the worst among the Africans who tortured them. “They wanted to prove that they were really part of the government,” one man pointed out. “But, you understand, don’t you, that they were very ashamed at what they had done; they beat us because they hated themselves for what they were doing. They were also afraid that if they didn’t force us to confess and give in, we would come back to kill them for having turned on us and on Mau Mau.”110
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