Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Though detainee cooperation was not widespread among the hard core, there were some notable confessors. At the top of the list was Peter Muigai Kenyatta, Jomo Kenyatta’s son, who became an enthusiastic colonial supporter, joining forces with the screening teams and undergoing a transformation similar to that of other surrenders at Manyani, Mageta, Mara River, and elsewhere. In the case of the younger Kenyatta and some of the other politicals as well, one wonders how much they had actually changed. In other words, was Peter simply his father’s son? He visited his father in detention to inform him of his screening activities at Athi River and to seek his approval.35 The elder Kenyatta must have granted his blessing because Peter bore a red star on his breast pocket for nearly the entire Emergency, the colonial government’s symbol for detainees at Athi River who surrendered and joined the screening teams. The other detainees ridiculed these political surrenders, derisively calling them the Wise Men of the Star and warning Peter in particular that his father, Mzee Kenyatta, would deal with him when the war was over. It was not until years after the Emergency that former detainees would realize how grossly they had miscalculated both father and son.

  With scores of other Athi River detainees, Gakaara wa Wanjau was given no warning of his imminent transfer. He was headed for the worst of the hard-core camps on Manda Island, a place located in the Indian Ocean just off Kenya’s northern coast, and notable for its overwhelming heat and humidity, voracious mosquitoes, and virulent strain of malaria. The journey took three days. The detainees traveled in a relay of different transports—lorries, enclosed boxcars, and a cargo ship, the latter two inadequately ventilated, with toilet buckets overflowing and food and water “considered luxuries by the British officers in charge,” according to Gakaara.36 When he and the others finally arrived, they found they were in prestigious company. After Lokitaung, Manda Island and nearby Takwa held the colony’s most subversive and therefore elite politicals, men who created enormous problems for the colonial government not just outside of the camps but within them as well.

  That Gakaara was shipped to “Mau Mau University,” as colonial officials called Manda Island, was no surprise. He was among the 181 Mau Mau politicals originally arrested during Operation Jock Scott, and an intellectual driving force behind the rise of Kikuyu nationalism after the Second World War. He had been educated at the Tumutumu Presbyterian mission in Nyeri and went on to Alliance High School, an important training ground for other African politicians, like Paul Ngei and Achieng’ Oneko. He then joined the British army.37 Embittered by his wartime experience, he later wrote, “I knew that this war was not our war. I could not, however, stand aloof from the maltreatment of and discrimination against black servicemen practiced by the British imperialists. It is not possible to give an indication here of the magnitude of that maltreatment and discrimination.”38 When he returned, he channeled his energies into writing and became the first great homegrown intellectual living in rural Kenya. He wrote and published books, songs, pamphlets, and a monthly magazine in the Kikuyu vernacular, all with an anticolonial message.

  Gakaara was not alone. In the years immediately before Mau Mau there was a proliferation of newspapers and magazines published by Kikuyu intellectuals—men like Henry Muoria Mwaniki, Bildad Kaggia, and John Cege.39 Gakaara was gifted in his use of idiomatic forms, proverbial turns of speech, and analogy. To the ordinary reader, particularly a colonial censor, his writings would appear innocuous, though for Kikuyu they were politically charged. The government eventually banned Gakaara’s writings as subversive. Catapulting him to the top of the “black list” was surely the publication in August 1952 of his Creed of Gikuyu and Mumbi. A glance at it reveals how closely Gakaara modeled it on the Christian creed, and how clever this intellectual was in integrating literary and biblical form with anticolonial politics.

  I believe in God the Almighty Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth. And I believe in Gikuyu and Mumbi our dear ancestral parents to whom God bequeathed this our land. Their children were persecuted in the era of Cege and Waiyaki by the clan of white people, they were robbed of their government and their land and relegated to the status of humiliated menials. Their children’s children had their eyes opened, they achieved the light of a great awareness and they fought to restore their parents to their seats of glory. And I believe in the holy religious ceremonies of Gikuyu and Mumbi, and I believe in the good leadership of Kenyatta and Mbiyu and the unbreakable solidarity between the Mwangi and Irungu generations and the oneness of the nine full Gikuyu clans and the everlastingness of the Gikuyu Nation. 40

  Gakaara’s writings have influenced generations of Kikuyu. Later postcolonial politics and culture would draw inspiration from his essays and poetry, books and songs. But in the context of this story, the diary that Gakaara kept during his years in the Pipeline is the most significant work in his otherwise remarkable literary production. That he was able to write, keep safe, and eventually publish this diary was extraordinary, given the conditions of the camps. During the first four years of his detention, he kept a small wooden box that contained a false bottom. In it he hid several sixteen-page exercise books into which he recorded his experiences and those of the other detainees, first at Athi River and then at Manda Island. In 1956, when he was transferred back to Athi River, Gakaara feared the box would be confiscated. He bribed a warder to take it to his shop at Karatina, where he planned for his wife to recover it once she was released from detention. The plan worked. Many years later he added a recollection of his final four years of detention to the original diary, making his completed account, titled Mau Mau Author in Detention, vital historical evidence.

  In it, Gakaara describes Manda Island as a hotbed of conflict. The detainees were well aware of their rights as defined under international law and refused initially to cooperate in any way. The colonial government had listed the site as a special detention camp and could therefore, based upon its earlier exercise in legal gymnastics, force the detainees to work. When the men refused, food rations were cut. When they still refused, water was eliminated. Camp officers would order beatings and a trip to the punishment cells for the most minor or even imagined infractions. Men like La Fontaine and Dr. Alfred Becker, the camp’s community development officer, or Askwith’s man on the spot, wanted compliance, not just with work orders but with their demands for intelligence. The idea was that the one begat the other. A degree of cooperation in the fields or the local public work project would lead, so the theory went, to an eventual breakdown in resistance and finally to the divulgence of vital information.

  Camp officials were successful. Some men buckled under the pressure and deprivations and agreed to work. In return, they were separated from the other “noncooperators”—as the government labeled them—in Compound 1 and transferred to Compound 2, or the “cooperator” compound. There, they were provided with adequate rations, allowed to take a limited number of correspondence classes with universities in England and South Africa, and enjoyed more freedom to move about the island. As at Athi River, this policy reflected a divide-and-rule strategy tailored to conditions in the camp. Still, colonial officials constantly searched for new ways to drive a wedge between detainees. One favored approach was to call in David Waruhiu and his screening teams from Athi River, who were later praised endlessly by Alan Knight for their ability to “break those evil men at Manda Island.”41

  There was also the “Becker Touch.” Officials in the Colonial Office used this phrase to describe Dr. Becker’s unorthodox methods of persuasion and overall dealings with the detainees.42 In early 1954, for instance, he launched his Operation Bibi. As the community development officer, he was ostensibly responsible for the rehabilitation and moral uplift of the detainees in Britain’s “concentration camps,” as Becker liked to call them.43 In fact, Becker and several men from the CID were in charge of the interrogation center on nearby Lamu Island. Detainees would be brought in from Manda, and, along with the usual strong-arm tactics, Becker would tell them that thei
r wives and children were starving in the reserves, living in poverty, and being physically and sexually abused by the Home Guards. Their Mau Mau politics and obstinacy were at the root of this suffering, he would tell them. If they cooperated, they could go home and protect their loved ones. Such ploys, combined with other, more traditional methods of persuasion, sometimes worked. Several of the politicals began confessing and were moved along to Compound 2. Of course, none were released. They were still destined for permanent exile.44

  Gakaara was among those in Compound 1 who would not cooperate. Along with others, he devised various strategies to defend against the colonial offensive. Over and over again they refused to participate in any labor project, incensing the British officer in charge, Commandant Martin. The situation came to a head when the commandant stood outside the compound and declared:

  You are great fools because you have failed to realize that you were isolated in this remote island because the Government had given up on you, and you were now being left to your fate; it was your business if all of you died. Look on every side: you are surrounded by the sea. Where could you escape to? We need not even keep a substantial number of guards on this island. A guard manning the watchtower would suffice—to pass on information when any one of you drops dead so that his body could be collected for dumping into the sea. 45

  Turning on his heels, Martin departed, telling the noncooperators that their food and water would be left for them outside the compound gate and could be picked up only on the way back from a full day’s work. The detainees refused. For days they went without food rations, but it was the lack of water in the extraordinary heat of Kenya’s tropical coast that soon became unbearable. Under the cover of darkness, the men decided to dig a well. With the injured and weak standing watch, the rest used their hands and tin cups to scoop down twelve feet until they hit muddy water. At daybreak, blankets covered the well sufficiently to dupe the guards during their many inspections. It was not long, however, before the men of Compound 1 became seriously ill from their unclean water supply. Hunger also took its toll, and the few pieces of meat and loaves of bread smuggled in from Compound 2 were not enough to keep them alive. Many were too weak to stand; some were urinating and defecating blood; others became delirious. In the end they broke, agreeing in return for food and water to work on a new addition to Britain’s gulag to be built on the other side of the island.46

  The detainees’ most powerful weapon at Manda was their political know-how. This political sophistication was what made them so dangerous to the colonial government in the first place, and this did not change in the camps. It was there, inside the wire, that Gakaara and many of the others continued doing what they did best. They wrote. More specifically, they wrote letters, dozens and dozens of letters. These men were clearly aware that external attention was imperative if their situation stood any chance of being improved. They chronicled conditions in the camps and smuggled the correspondence out through a variety of methods. They bribed guards, folded letters into the pages of the educational correspondence books, and even stuffed notes into bottles that were then tossed into the sea. They targeted British colonial politicians of any persuasion. Pleas for a reprieve in work routines, an end to coercion, increased rations, and greater access to reading material were all posted to Governor Baring and the colonial secretary, ministers in the local government and members of Kenya’s Legislative Council, Labour MPs and members of the Kenya Committee living in Britain, as well as Queen Elizabeth herself.

  Letter writing was not limited to Manda Island. Though many of the most sophisticated politicals were confined in that camp, scores of lesser Mau Maus were scattered throughout the Pipeline. Men like J. M. Kariuki, whom the British colonial government considered to be less politically dangerous, were shipped off to Manyani with tens of thousands of other detainees. There J. M. assumed the role of compound leader, presenting collective complaints to the camp commandant and apprising the other detainees of their rights. He and others like him also began letter-writing campaigns. When these men were transferred up and down the Pipeline, along with them went their knowledge of anticolonial politics and the art of correspondence. Soon, detainees all over Kenya were writing. By the end of the Emergency hundreds of these letters had reached virtually every high-level colonial official and many in Parliament as well.

  Several files of these letters managed to escape the official purge. The Kenya National Archives in Nairobi contains hundreds of letters written by detainees, their contents ranging from indignation over detention without trial, to absolute desperation when chronicling camp conditions, forced labor, torture, starvation, and murder. These letters are key pieces of historical documentation from this period. Many offer rich details about life in the camps and validate later oral testimonies and the handful of existing memoirs. But their significance is greater. With these letters the colonial government, including the governor and colonial secretary in London, could never credibly claim to have been in the dark about the tragedy of the Pipeline. Colonial officials at the highest level were intimately aware of its brutal details.

  Letter signed “Yours Black African Detainees in Manyani Camp”

  “What is the meaning of the word emergency? Is emergency inhuman deeds?”47 “Is it the British law that when they have got the captives not to get enough food?”48 “Where does custration [sic] come from? Is that the democrat law?”49 “Is this the British system or the Nazi system?”50 These are just a few of the questions detainees posed in their letters. They wanted the governor, the colonial secretary, and others to explain the meaning of British colonial law and democratic civilization, because the Pipeline world in which they were living seemed to them a travesty of these ideals. It was a universe where rehabilitation was synonymous with brutality and British colonial rule an abrogation of basic human rights. These letters reveal that within the camps British hypocrisy had nowhere to hide; human action and colonial rhetoric were clearly understood by detainees for what they were.

  Detainees did not write abstractly about torture. They gave colonial officials detailed accounts of what was being done to them, and who was doing it. According to their illicit correspondence, detainees were beaten by warders, camp commandants, officers in charge, rehabilitation teams, and screening teams. Among their weapons of choice were “permabox handles and rifle buts [sic],” rhino whips, batons, and chains. At Athi River the men from Compounds 5 and 10 wrote to Taxi Lewis, the commissioner of prisons, “We hope the time is ripe when everyone in this country is prepared to make friendship amongst all races in Kenya. We therefore ask the government to safe [sic] us in this Camp of Athi River Detention Camp, from the practice which is going on since last week.” They then went on to describe the new practice of “night screening.” Interrogation teams would enter the compounds late at night and

  persons to be screened are handcuffed with their hands on their backs, then water starts to be poured on them 4 debes at a time in every hour’s time. Then at 12 midnight soap is smeared on the head and by pouring water it gets to eyes of the detainees punished paining as anything when it gets into the eyes. At the same time pliers is also applied to work as the apparatus of castrating the testicles, and also at the ears. All these is done so as to make everyone attended to confess whether true or not to oblige him (them) to agree to what has been alleged against someone whether is true or not true as a result that none can resist these deeds some do confess and say yes so as to safe themselves from the troubles and hardships. 51

  Letters document that torture was not unique to Athi River but was commonplace up and down the Pipeline, and conditions were abysmal nearly everywhere. In Mageta Island Camp, which colonial officials used as one of the destinations for the worst hard core, detainees wrote often to the governor and to Kenya’s attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, reporting on one occasion:

  An officer of the Special Branch who is now at Mageta is now badly beating detainees when interrogating them…. Heavy beatings take pl
ace and even some of detainees have their testicles pulled…. It seems to us that he was sent here for torturing us and that is against the British Government laws. When detainees are taken to the Screening Officer far apart from the camp they are punished and beaten badly. Instead of their being taken to the Hospital, their put in cell and denied food for several days. These beatings are not done secretly as it led by Camp Commandant and he himself plays a great part in it, who ought to act against beatings, instead he is encouraging these beatings. 52

  In one letter a detainee in the holding camp at Manyani related some of the methods employed by the camp commandant and his chief warder. “I have been beaten badly,” he wrote, “and tortured terribly in Manyani Camp. I was tortured in Compound No 6 and the mode of torture used was being beaten while necked [sic] climbing on each others back, sand and water being put into the rectum and other methods only fit to be done to animals and not to human beings; besides, I was suffering from amebic dysentery during those years.”53 This account is strikingly similar to more recent oral testimonies chronicling life in Compound 6, and the work of Wagithundia and Mapiga.54

  Sexual violence was clearly a recurring theme in the detainee letters, much as it would be in later oral testimonies. Sexually abusing the detainees—whether through sodomy with foreign objects, animals, and insects, cavity searches, the imposition of a filthy toilet-bucket system, or forced penetrative sex—was one part of the broader dehumanization process that struck at the core of white fear. Throughout European colonial rule in Africa white men were terrified of the black man’s purported sexuality. According to European myth, all black men had gargantuan-sized penises, and given the chance, these well-endowed “savages” would rape white women. Called the black peril, the African man’s alleged sexual prowess was certainly a threat to European male sexuality and, by extension, to Europe’s ability to establish and maintain dominance over their African colonies. Land was also at the heart of European domination. It was not just a critical material resource for the colonizers, but as with the Kikuyu, land was one of the fundamental bases of manhood for the European settlers in Kenya and elsewhere. Because land had held both economic and social meaning for the settlers, when Mau Mau adherents demanded it be returned they were not just threatening the material well-being of the British; they were affronting their masculinity as well. It’s hardly shocking, then, that within the context of Mau Mau British colonial agents targeted the symbols of Kikuyu manhood: their land, their women, their children, and their bodies.