Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Baring consistently reminded European settlers and Africans alike that exile camps and settlements would be lasting features of Kenya’s landscape. In a widely publicized speech given in Nyeri District in January 1955, the governor announced to the crowd: “The Government’s policy regarding irreconcilables has already been declared. On 8th September last year, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr. Lennox-Boyd, stated in Nairobi that he could say on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government that irreconcilables would not be allowed to return. He said ‘there is no question whatsoever of irreconcilables being allowed to return to areas where loyal Kikuyu live.’”5

  These high-level officials were making assurances about permanent exile knowing full well that such policies were in violation of international conventions. H. Steel, a legal adviser from Britain’s Home Office, voiced concern to both the Colonial Office and Foreign Office that the long-term exile policies in force in Kenya were problematic.6 The colonial government had managed to derogate the European Convention on Human Rights and to enforce its policy of detention without trial because there was a State of Emergency in place. Once Governor Baring were to lift the Emergency, however, the Convention could no longer be sidestepped. Moreover, if colonial officials were planning on forcing detainees in permanent exile to work, which was exactly the plan, then they would be in continued violation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention. But “national security” was to take priority over any conventions to which Britain was a party. The colonial government believed it could not maintain power in Kenya if such arbitrary measures as detention without trial were not at its disposal. In the words of one of the Colonial Office’s undersecretaries, William Gorell Barnes, “If we are to maintain our authority in Kenya…there can, I fear, be no doubt that in one way or another the Governor will need to be given these powers.”7

  The Hola exile plan was a massive undertaking. Even with an unlimited supply of detainee labor at its disposal, it was not until late 1955 that the colonial government could even break ground. The African Land Development Board, or ALDEV, had to survey and design engineering plans for irrigating some twenty thousand acres of previously uncultivated land. To start the development, hundreds of men were removed from their compounds at Manyani, shackled, and transferred to the banks of the Tana River, where they were forced to dig an eleven-mile canal by hand.8 The plan was to develop a fully economic rice-growing scheme that would support up to seven thousand exiled detainees, along with as many as twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand of their dependents. To strike a preemptive blow at any future “public danger,” as Governor Baring termed the potential release of these hard-core detainees, he and his men on the spot were creating a community for them and their families in the middle of nowhere.9

  The colonial government’s fears were justified. If the masses of Mau Mau detainees were empowering themselves through the spread of knowledge in the Pipeline, then the so-called politicals, especially those arrested during the early days of the Emergency, were turning the camps into classrooms for anticolonial organization and future action. Locked up together, they took advantage of their confinement to discuss the illegitimacy and inequities of colonial rule, the hypocrisies of loyalist support and reward schemes, and the need for a land reform system that was free from control by colonial self-interest.10 In the words of Eric Kamau, a political detainee at Athi River, “We were planning for our release, when we would take over the country and implement the ideas we were putting together in the camps.”11 These men were clearly a threat to the future of Britain’s trusteeship in Kenya, rendering them, a priori, subversive criminals. These troublemakers were viewed as preying on the inherent backwardness of the Kikuyu masses, who were, according to colonial officials, incapable of deciding between right and wrong. Baring and Lennox-Boyd were not, according to their own rhetoric, proposing exile camps for British political gain, but were instead merely protecting the majority of Africans from these allegedly manipulative, self-interested leaders. For Baring and Lennox-Boyd, it was simply one more regrettable and unavoidable consequence of the White Man’s Burden.

  In the wake of the Kapenguria trial those believed to be the most evil of the Mau Mau masterminds were safely locked away in the desert wilderness of Lokitaung. It was there that Jomo Kenyatta, Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, and the three others, having been convicted by the corrupt Judge Thacker of using their “power and influence over the less educated Africans [to implement] this foul scheme of driving the Europeans from Kenya,” lived in total isolation.12 If the colonial government’s objective was for these six men to dwell in utter discomfort, it was realized. Conditions at Lokitaung were bleak. It was a lifeless place of sandstorms and hellish heat. The Mau Mau prisoners had no outside human contact other than with their warders and the British officers in charge, and possibly with an occasional nomadic Turkana herdsman.

  Days were filled with work, generally of the nonsense sort. For months the men at Lokitaung labored on a purposeless trench, then moved to making ballast. During 1954 and 1955, they spent each day breaking rocks into tiny pieces, enough to fill six four-gallon tins a day. Exempt from this work was Kenyatta, whom camp officials had classified as “fit for light duties.”13 He became the designated cook for the group, a comparatively easy task, though as Bildad Kaggia later pointed out, “in such a hot climate [cooking] was more tormenting than hard labour.”14 Like thousands in the Pipeline, these so-called managers of Mau Mau also suffered variously from malaria, pellagra, dysentery, and dehydration. Just twenty miles south of the Sudanese border, Lokitaung had an average rainfall of less than one inch per year. There was a chronic shortage of water, and the prisoners found their rations constantly reduced, making bathing or washing clothes an occasional luxury. But, as Bildad Kaggia pointed out years later, “had the local district officer not had a swimming pool filled with clean water, maybe there would have been more for us to drink.”15

  The men of Lokitaung knew they were facing years of enforced isolation. Colonial officials seemed to delight in reminding them, over and over again, that they would be locked away “indefinitely.” Strict discipline was enforced, and while the prisoners did not endure the extensive physical tortures suffered by other detainees, they were subjected to other kinds of abuse and deprivation. For this elite group of Africans, though, it was the radical shift in the quality of their lives that affected them most. As Jomo Kenyatta later reflected:

  There are more subtle ways of breaking a widely-traveled man whose life had been rich, and dedicated, and full of promise: the psychology of nothingness, the impeccable correctness of prison discipline and nomenclature, like a slap of contempt, the absence of human contact, slow passage of remorseless days of torridity and dust and meaningless surroundings. There was nothing green, nothing cool, nothing creative, nothing demanding, nothing at all. 16

  Kenyatta’s prison experience began to differ from that of his fellow convicts at Lokitaung. It was not long before he was isolated socially and later physically from the other men. By 1954 the group included two new convicts, Kariuki Chotara and the famed General China, who had been wounded and captured by the British security forces in the forests of Mount Kenya. It had also lost one of the original Kapenguria Six. Achieng’ Oneko was sent to Manda Island Camp as a detainee after his Kapenguria conviction was overturned, the justices believing that as a Luo, Oneko was incapable of directing Mau Mau. Despite Oneko’s departure, the character of the group changed little. The majority wanted to use their time in Lokitaung to discuss structures and articulate ideologies that would remake Kikuyu and Kenyan society once they were released. Despite all that was said to them, they held hope that they would one day be free, and that they would assume their roles as leaders of the country. They sought to transform their oppressive prison experience into an opportunity to plan the future challenge to the power of the colonial state. At Lokitaung they even created their own National Democratic Party with officers, a constitution, ministerial positions
, and even a party slogan: Liberty, Equality, and Justice.17

  Kenyatta was not one of us in prison. He had married a woman whose father was a chief, and because of that when we went to prison, he was often on the side of the conservatives and the government. I became the leader of the group in his place, though we were all disappointed…. The camp commandant later separated him from us because of our arguments. One day he and Chotara got into a fistfight, allegedly because Kenyatta was selling some of our food to the askaris, but it was also because we didn’t agree with his politics. 18

  Kenyatta, however, stayed out of prison politics. Paradoxically, at the same time that the “cult of Kenyatta” was spreading through the Pipeline, this presumed martyr to the Kikuyu cause was apparently jettisoning any anti-European or antiloyalist politics. In a situation where prisoners were desperate for human contact and spirited discussion, Kenyatta refused to join the prisoners’ political party. He did not agree with their agenda. Lokitaung seemed to render transparent Kenyatta’s true political leanings, which were, according to the other men, scarcely in line with Mau Mau doctrine. Kaggia, in particular, has been vocal about Kenyatta’s conservative and even loyalist sympathies.

  That Kenyatta needed to be separated, perhaps for his own safety, was a known fact in certain administrative circles in the British colonial government. Later reflecting on this, Askwith said simply, “Kenyatta was not a militant, and the other Mau Mau leaders knew this…. It just took government some time to come to terms with this when circumstances forced the governor and others, like myself, to radically alter their view of this man.”19

  It was the thousands of other hard-core men and women who posed the much larger problem for the colonial government. Regardless of their label—militants, fanatics, politicals, lunatics, irreconcilables, obdurate savages, hard-core scum—these detainees spent years in the Pipeline before Hola or any of the other proposed exile settlements were ready. Many men and even some women who entered the camps as ordinary Mau Mau were radicalized by their desperate conditions and by their fellow detainees. Rather than capitulating, they became more resolute. As one former detainee put it, “Even when I had been reduced to nothing, I knew I couldn’t give in. To save myself for what? A life with no land. A life under the thumb of the Wazungu and those African stooges. In my mind, that was no life. For many years I thought there was nothing they could do to me that would make me cooperate. I thought for certain I would end up like so many others. Dead.”20

  Governor Baring personally signed the detention orders for the first wave of this hard-core group. They were arrested in the early days of the war and shipped to the outskirts of Nairobi, where Taxi Lewis’s men had prepared two “internee camps,” as they were then called—one at Kajiado and another, larger one at Athi River. Among those awaiting their arrival was S. H. La Fontaine, an officer in the Administration who was in charge of camp organization and discipline. At his side was David Waruhiu, the son of the recently assassinated Senior Chief Waruhiu. Young Waruhiu was becoming a favored loyalist, and Governor Baring eventually appointed him a temporary district officer. Throughout the Emergency he was in charge of all screening operations at Athi River Camp. In later years, he would take his father’s place as the darling of the colonial government, a true exemplar of loyalism and British, Christian values.

  The detainees christened Athi River the “Queen’s Lodge” and its renowned screening officer Mtoto wa Waruhiu, or Waruhiu’s Child.21 For their part, the governor and his Resettlement Committee considered Athi River a “holding camp for the deeply indoctrinated Mau Mau” and pursued a policy of screening, segregating, and “reeducating” these detainees not because they foresaw releasing them but because they were viewed as excellent sources of intelligence.22

  Mau Mau intelligentsia were not ordinary detainees. According to official reports, “a high percentage of them appeared well above the average in intelligence and education.”23 As in other camps in the Pipeline, they had developed their own committees and rules; they also became particularly adept at fabricating false information and then carefully coordinating their stories for the screening teams. La Fontaine would need to marshal all of the resources at his disposal to break these men, a point that hardly escaped him. Only “by hard work and discipline, by propaganda, by mass education and other means,” he wrote, would the British colonial government succeed in its objectives at Athi River.24

  The variety of forces that converged on the Queen’s Lodge made it unique. There were dozens of Christian missionaries, including Reverend Howard Church, who eventually became the camp’s ideological training officer, and Father Colleton, who assumed the post of educational officer. Most curiously, Alan Knight—the leader of Kenya’s branch of Moral Rearmament, or MRA—became camp commandant at Athi River, answerable only to La Fontaine and the governor himself. MRA espoused a kind of ersatz Christian faith, pushing a doctrine of personal justification through works alone. The doctrine espoused four absolute standards: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Typically, MRA focused its conversion efforts on a society’s leaders. Under Knight’s camp command it became one of several Christian messages deployed against the detainees at Athi River. Together the various missionaries pummeled the detainees with lectures, sermons, and nightly public broadcasts that blared the message of the Lord. Or, in the case of MRA, the message of Frank Buchman—the movement’s founder and spiritual leader.25

  Former detainees scarcely recall Athi River as a site of spiritual awakening, perhaps because they were cycled through an endless regime of physical and psychological coercion. Knight himself insisted, “Rigid discipline is the keynote of Athi, and hard work the basis of everything…. A man whose body is disciplined and subject to control, will be more open to subjecting his mind to control.”26 Detainees were forced to work, and if they refused, their rations were reduced. They might spend days with no food and then, half starved and dehydrated, they could be subjected to hours of preaching and lectures on Christian ethics and the virtues of Britain’s civilizing mission. Camp officials also imported scores of Home Guards from the Kikuyu districts, who took to the camp broadcasting system, denouncing Mau Mau and publicly dividing detainees into “murderers, thugs, leaders, and fellow travelers,” according to Father Colleton.27 Screening teams, led by Mtoto wa Waruhiu, himself an ardent MRA convert, worked the detainees over as well, interrogating them incessantly. As one man who was held at Athi River for over a year recalled later:

  Waruhiu would stand outside of a compound and shout, “People who killed my father, you come with me.” The person singled out would then be taken for screening. When my turn came, they beat me with kicks, a hose, and anything else they could get their hands on. They jumped on me, while Waruhiu would demand to know what I knew, telling me to confess. The whole time making fun of me and laughing at my suffering. After that I urinated blood for several days. Because I refused to talk, I was again forced out to work, which I did so they would feed me. 28

  Following a detainee’s willingness to work, he would be separated and put into a compound with others who were softening up. In total there were ten compounds at Athi River, nine of them holding one of three categories of political detainee. Camp officials and screening teams labeled them “A—Hard Core, B—Old & Stupid, and C—Reclaimable.”29 But even with constant shuffling of As, Bs, and Cs, there often appeared to be little difference in political attitude between the various compounds. As one colonial official reported, “They employed similar phrases and a common manner in denying any knowledge of Mau Mau,” and went on to warn of “the clannishness of the detainees who have a common idea and ample time to work out their plans.”30 This, despite the fact that Knight and his men were bringing everything they could to bear on the Mau Mau suspects. They screened them, starved them, humiliated them, worked those they could, and inundated everyone with masses of Bibles, MRA literature, and Christian handouts that were passed out for “compound reflection time.”31

  Much of
this material was put to use as toilet paper, but some of it was read. The story of the Israelites, beginning with Exodus, was a favorite among the Athi River detainees, as it was for other men in the Pipeline. It had a remarkable impact upon many of the Mau Mau suspects, one that could not have been intended by the missionaries. Many of the politicals were familiar with the Old Testament prior to being arrested, but their time in the camps prompted them to reinterpret the Bible within the context of their tightening repression. They created their own liberation theology, likening themselves to the children of Israel.32 As one man later told me, “Sometimes we would be issued with Bibles, the Gideon Bibles. But we would only read the verses we liked, which we repeated over and over again. We particularly liked the verse in the book of Lamentations, chapter seven which talks of Prophet Jeremiah’s lamentations because of the children of Israel. We liked it because it seemed to apply very well to our case, and the way we were being punished just like the Israelites.”33 Later in the Emergency many Athi River men were transferred to other hard-core camps, taking their Bibles with them. But at camps like Mageta, G. E. C. Robertson scarcely considered the “homicidal lunatics” under his charge capable of extracting political meaning from religious texts. Writing to Askwith in late 1956, he observed: “Another very interesting matter disclosed during the month [of September 1956] was the significant fact that many apparently hard-core Mau Mau possessed Bibles and used them solely for practising soothsaying.”34