Mind bending was also a Kamiti tactic. Anti–Mau Mau propaganda blared through the loudspeakers, posters of a deranged-looking Kenyatta hung throughout the camp, and pamphlets touting the virtues of confession and the benefits of British colonial rule were distributed to the various compounds. Films demonstrating the greatness of Britain were also shown, with one camp official reporting that “the Coronation film [has big reactions], showing the Might and Majesty of the Commonwealth.”133 Chiefs and district officers from the Kikuyu reserves paid visits to the camp, urging the women to confess so they could return home to “save their families from the hardships of the Emergency.”134 Warren-Gash even took to the road, traveling to Kikuyu country to track down the family members of her detainees, urging them to write letters to their recalcitrant mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts telling them to denounce Mau Mau so they could be released. On many occasions she was successful.135 “[These letters] were,” one woman recalled, “terribly difficult for us. They were sometimes much worse than the beatings and tortures. You see, beating was how they were reforming us in Kamiti. But the words of our children and mothers and fathers who needed us because most of our husbands were also detained…many women broke down because of them and confessed so they would be released.”136
All women, confessed or not, were also barraged with Christian preaching. Missionaries seeking to save Mau Mau souls made their pilgrimages to Kamiti, where their captive audience had no choice but to listen to the words of the Lord. Many women liked when the preachers came, if only because they were relieved of a few hours’ worth of work. Like the men, many preferred to use their complimentary Bibles as a toilet paper supply, and to pray in what they called the traditional Kikuyu manner. “We used to pray in the form of songs, praying to the God of Kirinyaga to help us triumph in the struggle,” Helen Macharia recalled. “We prayed that we had full trust in Him, Ngai, the God of the Kikuyu, and that if we triumphed it was He who would have triumphed, and if we lost our loss would be His.”137 During Christian hymn services, the women also sometimes altered words and verses, rendering the songs “subversive,” according to one government report. It went on to declare “this practice is extremely dangerous to the maintenance of good order and discipline…. The singing of hymns in Kikuyu is prohibited in this prison and detention camp.”138
Thereafter, singing became a major offense. This is not to say that women ceased composing and singing their songs. Guards were bribed, others were sympathetic, and still others were too lazy to enforce camp rules. Singing was an expressive form of empowerment that was both inspirational and soothing. There was also a collective component to their musical composition that encouraged group solidarity and commitment to the Mau Mau cause. Generally, the songs were composed ad hoc in the compounds and in the labor gangs, and today they are still remembered by the women from Kamiti. In one of the most widely recalled verses, the women provide a window into the conditions of the camp and the goals of their struggle. Today, they can still sing:
There is no fun in detention
It eliminated our firstborns.
Children of elders stay at home,
Ngai is great, we shall go home.
Even if you looked around from the door,
You would not see a white person.
It is only the children of Mumbi who are crying,
Ngai is great, we shall go home.
When we are in jail the warders say,
Let the years be more.
And we say it shouldn’t be that way,
And we pray to our God to deliver us so that we may go home.
Ngai is great, we shall go home.139
Eventually, many of the women at Kamiti would go home, though not before they had been thoroughly cleansed. Once a woman had been broken by the endless cycle of physical and mental torture, and then confessed, she began her journey to the ng’ombe, or “white,” compound, in part by attending classes taught by a handful of rehabilitation officers. Ironically, instruction largely focused on developing good domestic skills, like proper hygiene, nutrition, and mending clothes. But even these courses were limited. In 1955 Kenya’s Treasury cut by half the meager rehabilitation funding for the camp, affecting significantly the work of Askwith’s men and women.140
All reform in Kamiti seemed an afterthought, with the notable exception of Christian conversion. Confessed detainees were required to attend missionary-led courses in Bible study before their release. This Christian rehabilitation culminated in an actual cleansing ceremony organized by the Christian Council of Kenya. Three large ceremonies of this kind were held at Kamiti, with the inaugural a kind of Christian jamboree presided over by the archbishop of Mombasa, the Reverend Leonard Beecher. Held in September 1955, this cleansing ceremony apparently rid nearly one hundred confessed female detainees of their Mau Mau sins once and for all. Wearing his full Anglican regalia, Archbishop Beecher stood in front of the repentant women and engaged them in the following dialogue.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you confess that you have taken the Mau Mau oath (or oaths)?
RESPONDENTS: I do.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you truly repent of this sin (or these sins)?
RESPONDENTS: I do.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you renounce these oaths and put them from you forever?
RESPONDENTS: I do.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you seek forgiveness through the blood of Christ our Saviour?
RESPONDENTS: I do.
ARCHBISHOP: Will you now stand firm with the people of Christ in worship and witness?
RESPONDENTS: I will.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you affirm that, by the help and grace of God, you will confess the faith of Christ, and fight against the world, the flesh and the devil?
RESPONDENTS: I do.
ARCHBISHOP: Do you promise to attend regularly further instruction in the Christian faith?
RESPONDENTS: I do. 141
With these affirmations and the blessings of the archbishop as well as Mrs. Warren-Gash, the women would be transferred to the custody of their local chiefs and eventually sent home.
Some detainees, like the sisters from Fort Hall, refused to confess. Like the hard-core men, these so-called obdurate and irreconcilable women were slated for permanent exile in remote places like Hola. In retrospect, though, there was very little difference between the prospect of Hola and a return to a Kikuyu reserve, because under Emergency Regulations release from the Pipeline hardly spelled freedom. When the confessed and cleansed women returned to Central Province, they found their homes destroyed and their families, along with hundreds of thousands of other Kikuyu, rounded up and detained in the Emergency villages. These former detainees would live like the rest of the Mau Mau population in the reserves, that is, behind barbed wire and under the strict control of the Administration and local loyalists. Long days would be spent on forced communal labor projects. There was extreme overcrowding in the huts, little food, a host of diseases, and still torture and death. Many wondered why they had bothered to cooperate at Kamiti, for when they returned home they realized that they had simply traded one form of detention for another.
• Chapter Eight •
Domestic Terror
Emergency village guarded by Home Guard, Nyeri District
DRIVING NORTH OUT OF NAIROBI IN THE DIRECTION OF MOUNT Kenya is by any standard a remarkable journey. The contrast between the urban congestion of the country’s capital and the scenic beauty of Central Province, the heart of Kikuyuland, is stunning. Within a few miles from the city, the hubbub gives way to a serenity punctuated by a rural landscape of lush banana trees, maize crops, and modest mud-and-wattle homesteads. Looking up from the main road, one cannot help but marvel at the men and women cultivating their small plots on the steep ridges that carve through the countryside. After passing through Kiambu District, the road turns to Murang’a and then to Nyeri and the foothills of Mount Kenya. There are indications of poverty, particularly when passing through some of the smaller towns like Karatina. But nowhere does
the beauty and rhythm of rural life in Kikuyuland betray the devastation that ravaged its people some fifty years ago.
It is hard not to marvel at nature’s ability to conceal the past. At once it can rejuvenate a war-torn society while disguising the physical scars of conflict. As a result, searching for evidence of the Mau Mau era in Kenya’s Central Province is challenging—that is, if one chooses not to get out of one’s car to speak to the people living there. From the southern reaches of Kiambu to the northernmost region of Nyeri, most Kikuyu people, particularly women, recall the Emergency years in Kikuyuland as a period of total destruction. The colonial government ordered their homes destroyed and detained them and their children in barbed-wire villages that dotted the countryside, where they were forced to labor under deplorable conditions. By the end of the war torture, exhaustion, disease, and starvation would claim the lives of tens of thousands of these rural people.
When giving their oral testimonies, many Kikuyu women struggled while searching for a vocabulary capable of describing the brutalities of the Emergency. In most Kikuyu survivor testimonies the problem of vocabulary, of being able to summon the right words to describe the past, frustrates efforts to document personal tragedy.1 Those women who had been detained in the villages, and who now sought to convey their bitter memories to an outsider, were faced with a great challenge. In their oral accounts, they had to transport the listener back in time to re-create a war-torn world that was now completely absent from the bucolic landscape. “Look around you,” one woman implored. “Even if you closed your eyes—how can I explain?—you cannot imagine what we lived through. How can I possibly explain it to you? All you know of this place is what you see today—the shambas [farms] and the vegetation, our homes, and our livestock. I have to take you to places that no longer exist to explain their meaning…. How can I make you understand what the British and their Home Guards did to us? I cannot begin to tell you what we experienced in those villages.”2
The war in the Kikuyu reserves was bitter from the start yet became worse over time. From the beginning of the Emergency the colonial government followed an explicit policy of dividing the Kikuyu people into one of two camps: either one supported the colonial authority, or one fought against it. One was either a loyalist, fighting actively on the side of the forces of British law and order, or a Mau Mau. Civil tensions seethed in Kikuyu country long before the start of the war, and in many ways these tensions were a wellspring of Mau Mau. The oath takers were enraged by the privileges of the colonial-appointed chiefs and their retainers, linking them directly to the injustices of British colonial rule and to the presence of white settlers. But as war unfolded, the chasm between Mau Mau and loyalists widened, and civil anger took on a violent dimension never before seen.
In June 1954 the War Council took the extraordinary action of mandating forced villagization throughout the Kikuyu reserves.3 By the end of 1955, less than eighteen months after the measure’s introduction, 1,050,899 Kikuyu were removed from their scattered homesteads throughout Central Province and herded into 804 villages, consisting of some 230,000 huts.4 As with so many other control policies in Kenya, General Templer’s use of barbed-wire villages to suppress the communist threat in Malaya in the early 1950s had inspired Baring and his officers. In Britain’s Asian colony, hundreds of thousands of civilians were removed from their homes and forced into barbed-wire villages, effectively cutting off their supply lines to the communist guerrillas. Of course, Malaya was not the first place where the British had employed such tactics. Alfred Milner had used them in his campaign against the Afrikaners during the Boer War at the turn of the century, directly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of women and children from disease and starvation. Somehow Templer’s approach was perceived as kinder and gentler, if only because he claimed to be introducing reform measures that would “win the hearts and minds of the people.”5
Emergency village with loyalist compound visible on hillside, Nyeri District, circa January 1956
The policy was adopted in the Kenyan villages as well. As Labour critics questioned the fate of the detainees’ dependents in the reserves, and rumors of terror in the Kikuyu countryside, public relations officer Granville Roberts trumpeted the colonial government’s role as benevolent trustee. The Colonial Office repeatedly justified the use of enforced villagization by emphasizing the supposed long-term benefits of rehabilitation.6 The Kenya Information Office publicized speeches by comparatively liberal settler representatives like Michael Blundell in which it was suggested that villagization was an unprecedented opportunity for the introduction of liberal reform and British civilizing values.7 For his part, Askwith believed that the rehabilitation of the women and children was critical to the success of the social counterrevolution that he envisioned. By early 1955 he began shifting his focus away from the Pipeline and toward the Kikuyu reserves. When Askwith wrote that “more and more the department is changing over from rehabilitation in the camps to rehabilitation in the villages which is in fact community development,” the subtext of his message was clear.8 By returning to his department’s roots in the rural areas, he hoped to wield more influence over at least one facet of the war. He soon began lobbying Baring and the colonial secretary for additional funding and manpower, stressing, “There has been a shift of emphasis from camps and prisons to districts where increasing pressure is being applied to the passive wing by Community Development Officers carrying out an intensive programme of education, construction, and recreation in the villages.”9 Nothing came of his requests. By the middle of 1955 there were only six full-time community development officers for women in all of Central Province. Together with four part-time officers and one voluntary officer, as well as eight African assistants, these community development officers were expected to carry out the rehabilitation of the entire population of “Mau Mau–infected” women in the reserves.10
For the colonial government to tout this effort as a far-reaching hearts-and-minds campaign was duplicity at its finest. Granted the slimmest of staff and virtually no funding, Askwith lobbied not just his own government but also international donors for assistance. Still, there was barely enough funding to cover salary costs, let alone supplies. Both frustrated and dismayed, he wrote to Kenya’s Treasury in late 1954, “I beg to apply for £2,500 to enable basic grants of £500 to be allocated to each of the districts of Central Province for the fostering of women’s homecrafts as a means of rehabilitating the large numbers of women and girls on the fringes of Mau Mau. These grants will not meet all the requirements of District Commissioners, and must be supplemented from African District Council funds.”11 But such pleas for the barest of allocations most often were left unmet. Without additional loans from the Colonial Office the money simply was not there, at least based upon allocations from Nairobi. Indeed, Kenya’s minister of finance, Ernest Vasey, was one of the most forward-looking thinkers in Baring’s administration, and a personal friend of Askwith’s who had helped establish the multiracial United Kenya Club, the only dining and social club in Kenya free of the color bar. If there was money to be had in the Treasury, chances were good that Vasey would have found it and allocated some to rehabilitation.
But Vasey was not in charge, nor was Askwith. In the forest war Erskine was largely calling the shots. As for the Pipeline, Jake Cusack and Taxi Lewis had full control under Baring. In the reserves the Administration was in charge, in the persons of the provincial and district commissioners, who saw Askwith’s attempts at rehabilitation in the villages as misguided and threatening to their own power. Askwith’s men found themselves on the margins of decision making, serving as mere advisers to the provincial and district commissioners. Askwith’s immediate superior, Beniah Ohanga, the minister for community development and rehabilitation, observed the unfolding power play between the Administration and the rehabilitation officers in the villages, and repeatedly told Baring and others, “With our [Rehabilitation] Officers in the field we cannot be regarded as complete aliens t
here.”12 He proposed the creation of an interdepartmental rehabilitation advisory committee, but the Ministry of African Affairs, which oversaw the work of the provincial and district commissioners, was not interested. Within the Kikuyu reserves and behind the wires of the villages, the British colonial officers in the Administration wanted to maintain full control over Mau Mau adherents and their future. Frank Loyd, a high-ranking colonial officer, summed up the general sentiment of many of his peers and subordinates: “Only we [the Administration] understood what was happening out there. First things first, we had to break Mau Mau and keep the support of those loyal to us. It’s not like I was against rehabilitation in principle, but the Emergency wasn’t the time for such things. It would have its place, but much later.”13 With neither the funding nor the support of the Administration, Askwith and his skeleton staff had no hope of implementing rehabilitation in the newly created villages.
Certainly, the villages helped to sever supply lines to the forests, but that was only one aspect of their broader function. Surrounded by barbed wire and spiked trenches, heavily guarded by armed Home Guards and watchtowers, and routinized by sirens and daily forced labor, these villages were also detention camps in all but name. They came to serve a dual purpose for the colonial government at a time when its men on the spot wondered how they were going to break the hundreds of thousands of so-called lesser Mau Mau adherents, mostly women, children, and the elderly. As one district commissioner observed during the early years of the Emergency, “It is obviously not practical politics to incarcerate a million and a half Kikuyu who are admitting freely to having taken the illegal oath.”14 Villagization became another form of detention, one that solved the practical and financial problems that would have been associated with a further, massive expansion of the Pipeline. The colonial government adopted a policy of sending most men, and hard-core women, to the Pipeline, leaving the remainder of the Kikuyu population in the reserves. In the villages detainment of over a million Mau Mau adherents was left largely to the same agents who had been responsible for carrying out the earlier screening campaign.
Imperial Reckoning Page 32
