Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Their reorientation began with Kamiti’s intake procedure. They were strip-searched, scrubbed down, fingerprinted, and photographed. From there they were sent for screening, where they often encountered Mahuru, or the Eagle, for the first time. This was the nickname given to Katherine Warren-Gash—the officer in charge of screening at Kamiti Camp—because of her piercing eyes and the way she preyed upon them in the screening huts like “defenseless mice,” according to one woman.107 Mahuru was, in fact, the daughter of a settler who reportedly lived near the Delamere Estate. She spoke fluent Kikuyu, told the detainees to call her Gathoni (a typical Kikuyu name), and like Louis Leakey prided herself on her knowledge of Kikuyu traditions and presumed superstitions. Her screening tactics ranged from ordering beatings and ration reductions to threatening the lives of those children accompanying, as well as those born to, their mothers in the camp. She even requested and received from Askwith several “lions’ claws as a bit of hoodoo in connection with her screening of Mau Mau women.”108

  Metal bracelets etched with detention numbers were standard issue in Kamiti. Some women had as many as three identical bands affixed to their wrists. In a camp where different categories of Mau Mau detainees were held altogether, multiple banding was an important identification system. Women with one metal band were classified as “black,” those with two were various shades of “grey,” and those with three were designated as “white.” The detainees were dispatched to one of five separate compounds within the camp, each corresponding to the screening classifications as well as to a different and symbolic animal, a personal touch bestowed by Warren-Gash herself. Wearing their single bracelets, “blacks” were sent to the hiti, or hyena, compound, which consisted of seventy-five nyumba ndogo, or small individual cells where women were kept individually or in small groups of up to four or five. Then there was the mburi, or goat, compound for the “dark greys.” The names of the three remaining compounds corresponded to the life cycle of the cow: “greys” were passed along to the compound labeled njau, which is the Kikuyu word for a calf too young to determine its sex; “light greys” were promoted to the mori compound, named for a cow that has just entered its milking stage; and finally the “whites” went to the ng’ombe compound, that is, the compound named for the fully mature cow.109

  Such symbolism was not lost on the women of Kamiti. They disliked Warren-Gash’s appropriation of their culture. As one woman from Kiambu District later described, “Our cooperation was being equated to different animals that had important meaning to us as Kikuyu. This only irritated us, because we knew Mahuru was trying to be clever. She pretended like she was one of us, but no true Kikuyu woman would behave as she did.”110 In time, Mahuru’s tactics would become more coercive, perhaps in response to the subsequent intake of the hardest of the hard core. Shifra, Helen, and the other so-called hardened women from Athi River were among the last to be sent to Kamiti. They were left with their single metal bracelets, etched 98 and 99, and sent to one of the individual cells of the hyena compound, where they would spend the next two years alongside several notables like Shifra Wairire Gakaara, the wife of Kikuyu intellectual Gakaara wa Wanjau.

  Secured to the waist of every woman at Kamiti was a tin mug. It was their most precious possession, because without it they could not eat or drink. Most detainees were issued their mug at intake, but some found themselves without one and spent their first disorienting days in the camp trying to procure one. As at other camps, there was a black market at Kamiti, and a tin mug would fetch a high price. New arrivals were left with little choice but to trade one of their two issued blankets, exchanging warmth and comfort for food. The nearby male convicts were also active in this black market. Messages would be sent to them through the guards, in Kamiti both male and female, or tossed into their work brigades as they passed by. Using metal sheeting from the roofs of their barracks, the convicts created mugs that were highly coveted, because they were larger than those issued by the prison administration.

  As elsewhere in the Pipeline, porridge was the basis of the Kamiti diet. Detainees received a mugful at breakfast and another at dinner. Bean stew was sometimes a supplement, though it generally contained insect larvae.111 Most of the women suffered from nutritional-related ailments, with night blindness, boils, and other painful skin ailments the most common symptoms.112 So, too, were hard, bloody stools. During colder months exposure was also a serious problem. Many women slept together; in fact, Helen and Shifra huddled together under their combined four blankets every night they spent in the camps. From their first Pipeline stop at Kajiado to Athi River to Kamiti they never spent a night apart. Today, they are convinced that this was the key to their survival.

  Everyone worked at Kamiti. The camp had four different work details: digging and moving murram (hardened asphaltlike earth), toilet bucket cleaning, cutting grass and tending the vegetable garden, and off-loading and burying dead bodies. Camp officials assigned the majority of detainees to the murram project, by all accounts grueling work. The warders marched the women out to the digging site, where they were divided up into a kind of assembly-line production. A third of the women were given mattocks for breaking up the hard encrusted soil, another third shovels to dig it out, and the remainder large metal basins that were filled with the murram. This last group was expected to carry the heavy loads on their heads, while running, in order to dump the murram at a site about a quarter of a mile away. The sisters from Fort Hall both worked on this gang, later remembering vividly their years of labor. In her animated oral testimony, Shifra recalled their work, while simultaneously dramatizing it.

  We would start work in the morning with no rest. Stopping would mean a thorough beating, and no one cared whether a detainee was killed by beating. One would start carrying the murram in a tin basin, and it had to be filled properly until the guard was satisfied. Then one would be ordered to run, all the way to the field, pour it out and run back to the quarry without stopping, the whole day. When we could, we would sing songs to ourselves about the hard work, and when singing we would momentarily forget how tired we were. One used to go like this. ‘We used to carry murram in basins, We used to carry murram in basins, Until our necks got bent, And then we carried it in our dresses.’ 113

  Her recollection was similar to countless other women, all of whom recalled the enormous difficulty they had raising the murram-filled basins above their heads and the beatings they received while struggling to do it.

  Detainees and convicts did strategize to minimize some of the labor, even if they could not avoid it entirely. One favored tactic was to jump on top of the tin basins, creating a dent in the bottom. This made for easier head portage as well as a lighter load. Winnie Mahinda, who had been arrested at her home in Nyeri District, recalled: “To reduce the number of trips which we made carrying the murram, we would decide to try to slow down our pace. Someone in the gang would call out, ‘Walk like a chameleon,’ and we would all start walking like a chameleon. Of course, the askaris would eventually start beating us to move us along, but we managed to get some rest.”114 There was also something that Winnie and others called “goat droppings.” Using this tactic, they would reach into the basins that they were holding on their heads and scoop some of the murram out to lessen their load. “Looking back on the road we had taken,” Winnie went on to say, “it would be full of murram, which looked like goat droppings. We would arrive with only a little murram to our destination. Sometimes the askaris beat us for it; other times they didn’t. They would also discover sometimes that we had bent the undersides of our basins. They would inspect them—or we would say they were screening the basins, because they would beat them to repair the dents with the mattocks handles, though not without a few blows for us as well. But we would still bend them again, and the whole thing would start all over.”115

  The toilet bucket and garden duties were the most coveted at Kamiti. Despite the foul nature of the work, cleaning human waste was a far better assignment than bearing the
heavy murram loads, which left many crippled, some permanently. Women jockeyed for the toilet bucket and garden jobs, knowing full well that success could mean survival. For many months Winnie had been part of the waste brigade, going from compound to compound with forty other women gathering the buckets and carrying them on their heads to the disposal site. “We would start by draining the urine from the solid feces,” Winnie recalled. “We would use brooms to prevent the feces from pouring over.” Then, she continued,

  we would combine the solid waste into the buckets, lift them onto our heads again, and carry them out to the dumping area, which was a considerable distance from the camp. The guards would often be chasing us and whipping our legs, which made the runny waste go down our faces. The gang which was involved with cutting grass used to heap it like four walls made of grass, resembling a room. A lot of grass would be heaped to a height of about five feet, and into the area enclosed therein was where we dumped the contents of the buckets…. The whole time we used our bare hands and the ends of the brooms to clean out the feces. 116

  After a few months, the grass-cutting and garden workers would take the composted human waste and use it as fertilizer for the camp’s vegetable garden. The women on this brigade were generally the cooperative “light greys” and “whites,” their job a reward for good behavior. “It was quite incredible,” recalled one former detainee who was responsible for digging the human manure. “We would lift it with our shovels, and this steam would rise, and the stench was unbearable. But it made for very good fertilizer. We grew many vegetables, though they were not for us. They were eaten by the warders, and some were sent outside of the camp.”117

  The burial gang was considered the worst punishment at Kamiti. Truckloads of bodies would be brought to the camp, sometimes once or twice a day, other times every other day or every few days. The high stacks of bodies were either dumped on-site or left in a pile in the back of the truck, forcing the women to climb on top for off-loading. The dead were men and women, old and young. Some had been shot, others visibly tortured, and some emaciated from starvation. Male convicts held at Kamiti dug large burial pits, both within and outside of the complex, into which the women deposited the bodies.118 As Mary Nyambura, a convict and later detainee from Kiambu District, recalled, “Some of these bodies were heavy for us women, and we would have to lift them, sometimes three or four of us at a time. It was terrible; sometimes a woman would recognize someone she knew, and she couldn’t do anything. If she started weeping, the askaris would just starting beating her.”119

  Punishment took other forms as well. Mahuru and other white officers were known for physically abusing the detainees, but more often than not they ordered the African warders to do the work for them. “The whites were very cunning,” Helen insisted. “They generally did not carry out such acts but gave orders to the Africans to do it. Even when people were being killed, a white man would stand there watching.”120 There was Ngindira (the Stuffer), an African male guard who was renowned for forcing women into their compound by kicking them between the shoulders with his spiked boots. He was often accompanied by Nyagaki, so nicknamed because of her cleanly pressed Khaki uniform. This female Kamba guard had a distinct penchant for beating women on the head until they fell unconscious. Sexual torture was widespread, particularly in screening sessions, where women would have various foreign objects thrust into their vaginas, and their breasts squeezed and mutilated with pliers.121 It is hardly surprising that many former detainees and convicts from Kamiti expressed sentiments similar to those of Gakaara wa Wanjau’s wife, Shifra. “Detention was hell,” she said. “It was meant to kill us. We only came out by the grace of God.”122

  Many women brought their young children with them to the camp, and others gave birth there. After completing a day’s work on the toilet bucket brigade, Lucy Mugwe delivered a son in the barracks of the goat compound. In retrospect, Lucy found it incredible she carried full term considering the weight of the buckets she had been carrying and the whippings she endured during screening. After her delivery “the women contributed pieces of their old dresses,” she later recalled. “I also cut pieces of canvas from the tent windows. We had to survive somehow. I had to be very careful not to get caught stealing the canvas because if I had it would have meant severe punishment.”123 In 1955 camp officials estimated that about 15 percent of the four thousand female detainees and convicts had at least one child in the camp with them.124 If these estimates are correct, nearly six hundred children were in Kamiti. Their mothers had to find some way of clothing, feeding, and protecting them from the host of communicable and nutritional diseases that periodically swept through the camp.

  It was the rare child who survived Kamiti. Camp officials occasionally allocated lighter work duties to mothers, while the old and infirm women—or the kuba kuba, as the other detainees called them—were put in charge of minding the children remaining in the compounds while their mothers were digging murram, burying dead bodies, or cleaning out waste buckets. Askwith’s men inspected the camp from time to time, compiled alarming reports about the state of these children, and scrambled to come up with the funds simply to clothe them. They were mostly unsuccessful, leading one official to report, “We really do need these cloths for the children as it is impossible to keep them clean and tidy while dressed in dirty pieces of sacking and blanket. I have successfully clothed several of the children but I am now very short of material.”125 Infants especially succumbed to disease and starvation, as their mothers were incapable of producing enough breast milk because of poor rations and strenuous work. In Mary Nyumbura’s case her young child died while strapped to her back. Other mothers would return from their day’s work to find their child dead.126

  Many surviving women from Kamiti are convinced that camp officials were intent on killing their children. Colonial officials did little to provide for their welfare, but many former detainees feel the children’s deaths were not solely from neglect. They recalled infants and young children being lined up for inoculations, as camp officials called them. But within twentyfour hours some of these children were dead. “They would be given medicine one day,” Shifra Gakaara later insisted, “and the next day you would hear that three, four, or five of them were dead. Every morning, when the barracks were unlocked, the askaris would ask, ‘How many children have died?’ That was what made many women shed tears. A lot of children were buried at Kamiti.”127 In fact, camp officials singled out the most recalcitrant Mau Mau adherents assigned to the burial brigade to take charge of disposing of these children’s corpses. “They would be tied in bundles of six babies,” Helen recalled, “and each of us selected was ordered to take the bundle and bury it with the rest of the bodies in the big graves.”128

  The sisters from Fort Hall and the other women at Kamiti wrote letters. They petitioned all of the usual characters, including the governor, the colonial secretary, Taxi Lewis, as well as Barbara Castle, whose reputation for helping detainees was widespread in the Pipeline. They petitioned for fair trials, an end to the screening sessions, and the return of their stolen land. “We wanted our freedom,” Lucy Mugwe later remembered. “Our experience in detention made us hate the British even more, and we wrote to officials telling them that.”129 In their correspondence the women of Kamiti also made very specific complaints and charges about their condition and the fate of their children. In one letter, for example, a woman from the camp wrote:

  Infants and young children [are] underfed. They are not given enough milk, and are fed on unbalanced diet. They cry all the day long. Women are made to cook for themselves but they are not given enough food. Some women die because of brutal treatment in the prison. There are many diseases amongst the prisoners now. T.B. and typhoid are the commonest. Many women have died of these diseases. The officers torture our women and force them to confess things they don’t know. We start work at 6 a.m. and come back at 6 p.m. or even at 7 p.m. We are constantly beaten while working. We are sent to work in European farm
s many miles from the camp and we have to go there on foot, and we have to run, and those who walk slowly because of bad health are beaten up. Children are neglected when they are ill, and they just die like animals. 130

  If press reports and government handouts are to be believed, Warren-Gash was spearheading an emotional and physical revolution in the camp. In April 1956 the Sunday Post ran a story championing the alleged success of Kamiti, stating:

  Mrs. Gash said that confession and rehabilitation of woman detainees at Kamiti was proving “better than a course of beauty treatment.” The women arrived at the prison “sullen, sour, unpleasant, and downright ugly.” But af ter confession and rehabilitation they lifted their heads, and many of them became “really pretty.”…The final screening was done by [Mrs. Gash] herself, with questioning, done indirectly but based on confidential individual dossiers. 131

  By all accounts the screening officer was obsessed with her own power. Warren-Gash was the ultimate gatekeeper, insisting that she have the final say over any detainee’s downgrading in classification as well as her ultimate release. Despite her official title Warren-Gash also took control of all rehabilitation activities in the camp, such as they were. Much later, when recollecting his subordinate’s work, Askwith expressed considerable dismay. “Warren-Gash at first appeared to be the ideal person to run things at Kamiti, but she would prove otherwise. But she wanted the job, and with so few even partly qualified people I kept her there and hoped to influence activities in the camp as best as I could.”132