Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  When pondering why some men turn against others, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi came to this conclusion: “If one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept.”111 Levi’s observation applies equally to the detention camps in Kenya. Informants and surrenders were both rewarded handsomely, and with more than just their survival. During the course of my research I identified several men who had decided to join ranks with the camp system once they had confessed, but only a few were willing to speak with me and only then on the condition of anonymity. When asked why he became an informant, one man replied simply, “Because the camp commandant made sure I was given things. Back at home I was assured that my land was protected, and I was also provided with two goats and a cow when I returned to my home. In return I had to report everything that was happening…. It was a very dangerous job, and I earned what was given to me. You know, I wasn’t the only one who accepted these things in return for my help; there were many of us.”112

  When ordinary threats did not compel enough of them to join the ranks of the camp system, the colonial government also used extortion. “I was told that if I didn’t cooperate they would take my land and kill my family,” recalled another man from Kiambu District. “I conducted my work as a surrender, screening and beating people because I was trying to save myself and my family. Imagine, I had confessed to get out of Manyani, but that was just the start of my problems.”113 In some camps, in fact, there was an explicit policy: detainees who wanted to be released had to join the ranks of the Home Guard and fight actively against their former comrades either in the camps or back in the reserves.114 Yet no matter how much these former detainees cooperated with the British colonial government, they would never ascend to the top of the loyalist hierarchy outside of the camps. Their status as former Mau Mau adherents would brand them forever in the eyes of their British colonizers.

  Some men joined the screening teams because of their Christian conversion. Though many of the detainees could not bear to hear the missionaries preach, a few did listen and internalized their message. “These men became real Christian fanatics,” explained a detainee from Nyeri Distict. “They accepted everything the preachers said and then joined the screening teams. They would generally not beat us, but they also did not stop the other people screening us from doing it. The whole time they would be saying things like ‘accept the blood of Christ’ and ‘vomit the poison of Mau Mau.’”115 The actions of these converted detainees betrayed an astonishing transformation. Perhaps some had been waverers from the start. Perhaps for them Ngai was impotent in explaining the wretched situation they were enduring. Others must have simply believed the missionaries’ preachings, that Mau Mau had led them astray and only Christianity could rescue them from the hell in which they were living. To the other detainees their change was a total, Judas-like betrayal.

  Ultimately, detainees confessed to save themselves, however broadly defined. Some would break down in front of the screening teams, others would raise their hands in the compounds to be escorted away by the guards, and some wrote their detention numbers down on a slip of paper and placed them in the camp’s confession box. But such gestures of cooperation were the first step in the very long journey out of the Pipeline. One wonders if detainees might have reconsidered their decision to confess had they known what awaited them in the works camps in their home districts. “Confessed greys,” as they were called by the colonial government, would be transferred to works camps to be worked over, once more, before their final release.

  The works camps were erected to sift through the population yet again, searching for those with some shred of intelligence that could be used to further consolidate the Pipeline and obliterate whatever Mau Mau organization remained outside of it. Like everywhere else in the Pipeline, works camps were also dedicated to labor. There was, however, one critical difference. The torture, both physical and psychological, in the works camps was intimate, for these camps were located in a detainee’s home district in the reserves. The colonial officers running the works camps and the guards, the vast majority of whom were local Kikuyu loyalists, all personally knew the detainees.

  “It was not enough just to confess your oath,” Hunja Njuki recalled when reflecting on his time at Aguthi Camp. “No, they worked us and beat us constantly to get more information out of us and to make certain we were clean of Mau Mau. I had spent so many years in detention it didn’t matter anymore, but Aguthi…There the men beating us were the same Kikuyu who were our neighbors. They had taken our land and our women, but that wasn’t enough.”116 Hunja had spent nearly five years in the Pipeline before he arrived in the works camp at Aguthi. Arrested in early 1953, when he was a single twenty-five-year-old working at a sawmill near the Mount Kenya forest, he was convicted by one of the local kangaroo courts of feeding the so-called terrorists and sentenced to three years in the Mau Mau prison at Embakasi.

  Embakasi was one of the worst destinations in the Pipeline, according to Hunja and several others who had been imprisoned there. Colonial officials at the prison were under enormous pressure to complete the airport, a massive project that had a limitless need for labor, before the end of the Emergency.117 Camp commandants—like Major Helo, Kabui (the White-Haired One), and Mlango wa Simba (the Entrance to the Lion)—seemed to consider it their duty to work the convicts to death. Production pressures combined with the pervasive exterminationist attitude toward Mau Mau to create a uniquely perverse environment, even for the Pipeline. Major Helo, for example, had a habit of forcing the convicts to kneel down every evening and pray to God that they would live another day. He called them all “bloody Mau Mau savages,” while his comrade Mlango wa Simba preferred to inform the convicts, “You all will die a terrible death,” often making good on his threat.118 Many went mad at Embakasi, some committing suicide, others self-mutilating. Recalling his time there, Hunja broke down, regained his composure, and slowly described the place known as “Satan’s Paradise.”

  Let me assure you that no single group that arrived at Embakasi left with the same number. Many of them had to die; that was the order of the place. People used to be killed, not because of the sickness in other camps, though that happened sometimes, but because of the beatings. The askaris and the Wazungu [Europeans] did not need any good excuse in order to beat a Mau Mau to death. Some people used to go crazy in the morning during our porridge when they remembered that they would go to the field to do the backbreaking work. Some would go mad and pick up the toilet buckets and start splashing everybody while at the same time screaming. Some would place their hands on the ndaba [soil carriers that moved on rails] so as to sever their limbs and escape from the work. Because it did not matter whether one worked hard or not, or whether one carried hundreds of basins full of soil, because if the askari looked at him and decided to beat him, he would just set upon him with his club. The work and the beatings at Embakasi were incomparable with anything I had witnessed before or ever since.119

  “Form C’ed,” or transferred to detainee status, at the end of his sentence, Hunja was sent to Manyani, where he spent nearly two more years before he finally confessed. “I could not persevere with life any more,” he later recalled. “I had worked too much. I had buried too many bodies. I felt defeated.” The screening team reclassified him from “black” to “grey” and recommended his transfer down the Pipeline. With scores of other cooperative detainees, Hunja spent two days in an enclosed railcar en route to Sagana station—the Pipeline’s hub for the works camps in the three Kikuyu districts of Kiambu, Murang’a, and Nyeri, as well as those in neighboring Embu and Meru. Once there, reception teams of British officers and guards separated the detainees according to their districts of origin and sent them on, via lorry or chain gang, to their final destination. Should any of these men have had the inclination to look up when they arrived at their destination, they would have
seen the arch of the gate, on which would be emblazoned a slogan. At Aguthi Camp detainees were greeted with large letters that read, “He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped.” Fort Hall’s main camp—which the detainees called Kwa Futi—bore the sign “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” For a time at Ngenya Camp the gate was decorated with the command “Labor and Freedom.”120 These slogans hardly evoke images of the rehabilitation paradise being peddled by Governor Baring and the colonial secretary to the media and anticolonial critics; instead, they recollect the one at Solovetsky in the Soviet gulag that read, “Through Labor—Freedom!,” and of course Auschwitz’s infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free).

  Hunja arrived at Aguthi Camp in the midst of an afternoon downpour. Along with other inductees, he was held down by the askaris, his head shaved and his clothes and shackles removed. They were then greeted by the camp commandant—a man the detainee’s nicknamed Karuahu, or the Mongoose. Standing in front of his newest lot, he announced, “You have just entered a works camp, and you are going to learn the meaning of this term.”121 This forbidding welcome was an accurate introduction to an average works-camp day: building terraces up the steep ridges, marching long distances to break stones in a quarry, and at other times performing what one man called “nonsense work.” “You know,” Hunja said, “we would be ordered sometimes to take our basins to go and empty the river and would spend the whole day scooping water out and dumping it on the bank. Other times we would dig very large holes and then fill them up again. Karuahu just wanted to make us miserable, and he was very good at it.”122

  There was incentive in the works camps to comply and fully acquiesce. Karuahu and the other commandants could always send a detainee back up the Pipeline to the so-called hard-core camps. Unrepentant men also faced the risk of summary executions. To be released, detainees had to convince the local screening teams and the camp personnel that they were fully purged of their Mau Mau sympathies, and that they had divulged all of their knowledge of past Mau Mau activities. In practice, this was an incremental process. Even in the works camps many men tried their best to avoid naming names, providing as much false intelligence as possible. Camp authorities knew this and would move detainees through several compounds in a single works camp, each successive compound assigned to detainees who had evinced greater cooperation. Cooperation entailed not only working hard, singing Christian hymns enthusiastically, and shouting anti–Mau Mau propaganda, but also providing truthful and accurate intelligence.

  In Hunja’s case it took him nearly two years to reach the so-called release compound. But even then, he was still not headed straight for home. Instead, he was handed over to his chief, who himself operated a mini–detention camp—or, in British colonial parlance, an open camp. There detainees like Hunja would stay for several weeks, sometimes more, kept under the watchful eyes and loose clubs of the loyalists. As was the case everywhere in the Pipeline, detainees were a ready and free source of labor. From the open camps they were sent to the loyalists’ farms—drawing water, tending livestock, and planting crops. They built miles of bench terraces and cleared bracken for the chiefs, often while being taunted by the Home Guards for their Mau Mau pasts and the uncertain economic and marital futures that awaited them when they returned home.

  Aguthi Camp gate slogan: “He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped.”

  The Pipeline was based upon the principles of organized terror, violence, and degradation, all applied in an environment where space, time, and social exchange were completely organized and routinized. Mau Mau suspects were subjected to constant control: when they woke up, when they ate, when they were head-counted, when they went to work, how long they labored, when they urinated and defecated, when they went to sleep. Freedom was eliminated, and violence, or the threat of it, was part of every waking and sleeping moment.

  Each camp or prison was a closed universe where Mau Mau suspects were confined and where those in command operated with a free hand. In fact, it was this free hand that led to enormous variation in experiences in the Pipeline world, with the personalities, antagonisms, and dependencies of the camp commandants, the guards, and the detainees shaping official policies to create closed societies that were, to varying degrees, unique to each camp. Nonetheless, the purpose of the camps was the same throughout the Pipeline: to force Mau Mau suspects together, to destroy their social ties outside of the camp, and to devastate their lives, all with the ultimate goal of breaking their resistance and forcing them to comply with British colonial rule.

  Nevertheless, at the close of 1956 there were still tens of thousands of resolute detainees in the Pipeline continuing to stand up to torture, humiliation, deprivation, and harsh labor. They refused to break, their time in the Pipeline making them more resolute and determined in their commitment to Mau Mau. Increasingly embittered by the colonial government’s treatment, they would not, in the words of one man, “give the camp authorities the satisfaction” of forcing them to confess.123 Some like Nderi continued to pray to Ngai and to conspire against the screening teams, despite the increasing numbers of informants and worsening camp conditions. “We decided not to speak any longer,” he later recalled, “after being beaten so much and seeing many of our comrades die. We decided nothing would change our minds; nothing mattered to us anymore. We were prepared to die.”124 Eventually, Nderi would move out of Manyani and up the Pipeline, only to break, as others would. Although the will of these men was strong, so was the grip of the colonial government.

  • Chapter Seven •

  The Hard Core

  Letter from Mau Mau prisoners at Embakasi, December 1956

  In the case of subversive leaders it is quite clear that steps must be taken in some way for their neutralization or liquidation.

  —ELECTORS’ UNION, August 1952

  Those who have not had the opportunity of interviewing the hard core Mau Mau to whom I refer, can have little conception of their mental attitude. They are, to say the least of it, homicidal lunatics and should be treated as such. It would be dangerous in the extreme to release, under any circumstances, men of this type, and the person who does so should be required to answer for those murdered, as victims there will surely be. To release these psychopathic, hard core lunatics would be tantamount to opening the doors of Broadmoor.

  —G.E.C. ROBERTSON, community development officer in charge of screening Mageta Island and Saiyusi camps, May 19551

  FROM THE START OF THE EMERGENCY THERE WAS NEVER A QUESTION in the minds of Governor Baring, the colonial secretary, their men on the spot, or the settlers that the Mau Mau leadership had at all costs to be eliminated. As the war stretched on, the impulse to eradicate the movement’s leaders shifted to include permanently eliminating all hard-core detainees. Every individual Mau Mau who refused to cooperate with the colonial government in the Pipeline, and who therefore constituted a threat to the long-term viability of British rule and influence in Kenya, was ipso facto hard-core. This included the original Mau Mau intelligentsia who had been detained early in the Emergency during Operation Jock Scott, the presumed secondary and tertiary organizers whom the colonial government arrested in later operations, and the captured forest fighters and leaders of the passive wing. It also included those detainees who as a result of their experiences in the Pipeline had been hardened into strong unrepentance. As they were reclassified by the screening teams, these detainees were relabeled militants, politicals, or, in the introductory quotation from G. E. C. Robertson, one of the reformers from Askwith’s Community Development and Rehabilitation Department, “homicidal lunatics.”

  There were various techniques for dealing with the hard core. Some, according to a former settler who was a member of the Kenya Regiment, “were handpicked out of the camps.” He went on, “We would be given word that we were needed at, say, the camps out in Lake Victoria, and we would go and pick up a few of the filthy pigs and bring them to one of the interrogation centers set up by the CID. These were the hard-core
scum, the ones who wouldn’t listen to anyone and [were] causing trouble. So we would give them a good thrashing. It would be a bloody awful mess by the time we were done…. Never knew a Kuke had so many brains until we cracked open a few heads.”2 Former detainees also recall several of their compound mates in the up-Pipeline camps being led away and never returning. “At first we just thought they were taken to be screened,” recalled Wilson Njoroge. “But when they failed to return, we asked if they had been transferred. [The British officer in charge] just smiled and said, ‘Oh no, they have found their wiyathi [freedom], and you’ll soon join them if you don’t start cooperating.’”3

  With incomplete documentation in the official archives, we will likely never know if targeted eliminations were part of the colonial government’s policy. What is apparent, however, is the support and energy the colonial government invested in the plan to exile permanently twelve thousand of the hard core, or irreconcilables, as they were also called. Baring, in particular, obsessed over the exile policy, believing that future loyalist support and British control over the colony depended on it. In late 1954 he created the Resettlement Committee, one of whose responsibilities was overseeing the design and creation of exile camps. Soon plans were under way to deal with the “unrepentant hard-core Mau Mau detainees,” as the committee called them. They were “evil” and destined to spend the rest of their lives in some inhospitable parts of Kenya. The largest exile settlement was slated for the area of Hola, located on the malarial Tana River, in Coast Province. There, detainees “of a less evil disposition” would be allowed to bring their families; the others would remain separated from their wives and children for the rest of their lives.4