When Gathoni Mutahi saw smoke billowing from the homesteads on the ridge next to hers, she knew that villagization had begun in her location of Nyeri District. The sight and smell of burning wattle and roof thatching hung thickly over Kenya’s Central Province throughout the second half of 1954. Neither Gathoni nor any of the other women living in the reserves were given explicit warning of their impending forced removal. “It all happened so quickly,” Gathoni later remembered. “All the homes and cattle bomas in our area were wiped out in a matter of hours. When I saw the smoke in the next ridge I started burying pots and other items under the floor, and I bundled my children and took what I could.”15 British officers from the Administration and patrolling security forces directed the operations, though the Home Guards were largely responsible for the actual removal of the Kikuyu from their homesteads—torching the thatched-roof huts as they moved through the reserves. The huge scope of the forced removals generated a wave of confusion and terror throughout Kikuyuland. Inhabitants fled the infernos, carrying children and household items; others were trapped inside and perished in the flames. Beds, cooking items, bicycles, clothing, and livestock were all confiscated by the Home Guards for their own use. Later many loyalists returned to the smoldering homesteads, poking the ground with their spears to unearth items like those Gathoni Mutahi had cached away.
Amid the chaos and smoke families were often separated, and many young children were never recovered. Prior to villagization, Ruth Ndegwa was living several ridges away from Gathoni. Her husband had already been arrested and detained, and she was left alone to take care of her children and elderly relatives. Ruth later recalled the moment of forced removal.
We had not been given any warning beforehand that our houses were going to be burned. No one in the whole ridge knew that we were to move. The police just came one day, and drove everybody out of their homes, while the Home Guards burned the houses right behind us. Our household goods were burned down, including the foodstuffs like maize, potatoes, and beans, which were in our stores. Everything, even our clothes were burned down. One only saved what one was wearing at the time!…During the move I got separated from my children, and I could not trace them. They had been in front, leading our remaining cattle, but I failed to find them. During the whole night I could hear a lot of shooting and screaming. I cried the whole night, knowing that my children were gone. 16
Areas of Central Kenya Affected by Mau Mau
At sunrise she found herself in Kiamariga, one of the several “protected villages,” as the British colonial government called them, in her district. According to colonial officials, the new villages in Central Province were a proud physical manifestation of colonial progress. As British colonial forces were razing the homesteads, various ministers in Baring’s government had gathered in Nairobi, where they filed a report stating, “It is agreed that amongst the Kikuyu there is a fundamental craving to acquire knowledge on European lines. Whilst they could not be expected to take kindly at first to a departure from their traditional way of life, such as living in villages, they need and desire to be told just what to do.” The same ministers went on to laud the process, emphasizing that the new Kikuyu communities were being built along “the same lines as the villages in the North of England.”17
Kiamariga, like the other Emergency villages, hardly evoked the pastoral images of the English countryside. When the women arrived at their new collective homesteads, they found nothing, save a cordon of armed loyalists and a nearby Home Guard post. There was no shelter, food, water, sanitation facilities, or medical supplies. “It was a site of absolute suffering,” recalled one woman from Kiambu District. “It was very cold, and we slept just there on the ground. If we had known then what awaited us, I’m not certain we would have gone on.”18 Despite the self-satisfied and optimistic rhetoric of Britain’s colonial planners, villagization was intended as a punitive strategy to contain, control, and discipline Mau Mau women. They had refused to cooperate with British colonial authority, and they were going to suffer the consequences. The district commissioner of Nyeri, Oswald “Ozzie” Hughes, made this point clear when he wrote:
At the end of 1953, the Administration were faced with the serious problem of the concealment of terrorists and supply of food to them. This was widespread and, owing to the scattered nature of the homesteads, fear of detection was negligible; so, in the first instance, the inhabitants of those areas were made to build and live in concentrated villages. This first step had to be taken speedily, somewhat to the detriment of usual health measures and was definitely a punitive short-term measure. 19
A routine of forced communal labor dominated the day-to-day lives of the villagers. They spent the first several months living outdoors or in makeshift lean-to structures while they built hundreds of huts. With Home Guards chasing them about with whips and clubs, the work was done at breakneck speed. From dawn until dusk women and the handful of men, mostly the elderly and infirm, cut wood, thatched roofs, and plastered walls with mud and then white clay, giving the structures a whitewashed look. Wandia wa Muriithi, one of Ruth Ndegwa’s fellow villagers from Kiamariga, described her enforced labor.
Sometime in 1954 we were ordered to move from where our home was, and everything was burned. Our cattle were also confiscated. I was then heavily pregnant and gave birth three days after the move. The people were many and could not possibly fit into the few homes that had been made. We were ordered to go into the forest to get logs and cut reeds, to construct more houses. Even me, with my tiny two-day-old baby, had to carry thatching reeds. The construction of the village began, and everybody was involved. There was no discrimination in the work. Whenever a house was complete, ten or more women would occupy it, together with their families. All the houses were constructed in the same circular style, with conical roofs. Every day we would leave early, to start getting construction material. In one day we could construct about ten houses. The whole location was accommodated in a few large villages. 20
Today women throughout Central Province recall the mad rush whenever a hut was ready to be occupied. Several women and their children would occupy a single hut of approximately one hundred square feet. In it they would cook on small hearths that were cleared away at night so as to use every square inch for sleeping space. Even then, the quarters were unbearably tight, leaving the villagers little choice but to sleep virtually on top of one another.
Once the huts were finished, the women began to dig trenches to encircle the villages. About ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide, they were lined with nyambo, or thick sharpened sticks. The trench perimeters were then surrounded with barbed wire. The intent was to keep villagers in and to prevent them from supplying any of the remaining forest fighters. All access to a village was through a single gate and bridge that were kept under round-the-clock Home Guard surveillance. The loyalists and their families lived in nearby Home Guard posts, which were sites of comparative luxury. They enjoyed ample living space and food, largely provided by confiscated livestock and food stores, and the free labor of the thousands of imprisoned villagers living nearby. Initially their labor was used to build trenches surrounding the Home Guard posts, similar to those constructed around the villages. Later the villagers would become personal servants to the loyalists, sent to the Home Guard posts to draw water, fetch firewood, cultivate farms, and tend to loyalist livestock. Loyalist women were not required to work on the forced communal projects or even on the basic domestic upkeep of their own homes. Their special status earned them the derisive label of thata, or barren. In a society where reproduction defined womanhood, such a label was the ultimate insult.
The hard labor began when the villages were finally completed. In Kiamariga and the other villages of Nyeri District the days began before dawn with the sound of a siren or the shrill of a whistle blown from the Home Guard watchtower. Women scurried to prepare the usual meager morning meal for the children. They often made ugali, a polentalike meal, and gave their children one small p
iece each; the remainder was then mixed with warm salted water to be consumed as a kind of porridge. Other times breakfast was simply warm salted water. But the children’s hunger was not so easily deceived, and the early morning air would be filled with their cacophonous wails and later, when exhausted, whimpers for more food. For women like Ruth Ndegwa, the realities of village life quickly sobered the elation she felt after reuniting with some of her children. She later recalled how they, like all of the other children, would be left behind in the village while she worked—the younger ones, including infants, being tended to by the older children, as well as by the elderly and crippled, some of whom were family, others barely acquaintances. Today, the sound of a whistle brings to mind those mornings, when, she said,
I prepared whatever food I had from the previous night, and the porridge I made before going to work was what I gave them to eat for breakfast. Then I left them alone in the village. If we had nothing to eat the previous night, the children would have to remain without eating the whole day…. If you delayed in the hut after the whistle to report outside the village for work had been blown, maybe because you were preparing the porridge to leave for your children, the Home Guards would come kicking doors down, and if you were found inside, they would kick and overturn the porridge and you would be beaten because of being late. 21
With hoes, shovels, and viondo, or baskets, the villagers would then march in the morning darkness for two to three hours, guided by the light of hurricane lamps hung from long poles. Their destination was the forest edge on Mount Kenya, several miles away, where they were constructing yet another trench, this one to separate the forest from the reserves. Their warders in the villages, the Home Guards, were also their escorts. Already exhausted and battered from their march, the women spent the remainder of the day filling their individual work quotas at the trench site. The work brigades were divided between those digging the ten-foot-deep trench and those lifting the baskets of soil from below and hauling them away. This assembly-line process continued without pause throughout the day. The colonial officers overseeing the projects would often survey the vast labor site from their Land Rovers, shouting orders to the Home Guards: “Kazi, kazi” (Work, work). The Home Guards were more than happy to impress their white superiors. “While [you were] digging the trench,” one woman from Kiganjo village later recalled, “the Home Guards would be standing on either side, in front and behind, such that if you raised your head to take a break, you were hit on the head or back. It was a reminder that you should be working.”22
Singing, talking, eating, and drinking were all forbidden during forced labor. This is not to say that women did not compose songs late at night, in the relative safety of their huts. They sung verses that disparaged the Home Guards, pointed to colonial injustices, and begged for humane treatment. In Nyeri’s Gatung’ang’a village one song asked that
Women tell Kariuki [the headman],
So that Kariuki may tell Gatoto [the subchief],
And Gatoto may tell Karangi [the chief],
And Karangi may inform the DO
That this trench digging is going to kill the women.23
In Gaikuyu village the women decided to take their chances, breaking the rules with the hope that their condition would change. “When the DO came to inspect the progress of the trench,” one villager later recalled, “we composed a song for him in desperation, asking him why he had detained our husbands at Manyani and left us to die from digging the trenches.”24 Not surprisingly, many women did die from the deadly combination of exhaustion, brutality, and hunger. Miles from the villages, the Home Guards would order several of their laborers to dig a grave, sometimes inside the trench and other times outside of it near the forest edge. Unceremoniously, the dead would be buried, and the work would continue.
Violence in the Emergency villages was not confined to the hours of forced labor. Women and their dependents lived in constant anxiety, not knowing when they would be singled out for the most minor infraction or, more often than not, for no reason at all. If any logic is to be construed from the violence, the perpetual atmosphere of fear and uncertainty was intended to break the villagers of their Mau Mau support. As in the Pipeline, Mau Mau suspects in the reserves were expected to provide full confessions of their oaths as well as their knowledge of all subversive activities. There was also a kind of frenzy to violence in the Emergency villages, similar to that in the camps. Colonial agents, white and black alike, were not seeking simply to extract confessions and intelligence. They clearly also wanted the villagers to suffer or die.
The Home Guard posts were the epicenters of torture. The contrast between the idleness of the loyalist women living there and the brutality inflicted upon the villagers in courtyards of the posts or in the ndaki, the interior subterranean holding cells, could not have been more stark. If a woman was late to communal labor roll call, if she walked too slowly or failed to fulfill her daily work quota, if she was suspected of harboring Mau Mau sympathies—or worse, if she was caught trying to supply the remaining forest fighters, which was not unusual—she could be sent to the Home Guard post. “I was tending to my sick child when the final morning whistle blew,” recalled one villager from Kiamariga. “Before I knew it, the Home Guards broke the door down and hauled me off to the post. I grabbed on to an old lady, who held me tightly, but it was no use. They hit her in the face with a rifle butt and dragged me away.”25 After a thorough beating outside of her hut, this woman was taken to the ndaki. As in other villages, the ndaki at Kiamariga was about four feet deep, halfway filled with water, and covered with a thick matting of sisal and branches—forcing those inside to crouch and fumble their way around in the darkness. The hole itself was many feet long, and there were generally a dozen or more captives inside at any given time. They often huddled together for warmth and for protection against the snakes and vermin that infested the cell.
After being released from the ndaki, a woman might be sent back to the village and more forced labor, or she might suffer additional torture at the post. Sometimes the Home Guards took the initiative, squeezing and mutilating women’s breasts with pliers, pushing vermin and rifles into their vaginas, and forcing them to run naked around the inside of the post while carrying buckets of excrement on their heads. The women were also raped, oftentimes repeatedly by several men. Resistance could lead to summary execution or further torture before reconsideration of a life or death judgment. Simon Rutho—one of the few men left in Nyeri District’s Gatung’ang’a village—later recalled the screams that would come from the Home Guard post. He had a unique vantage point, having been screened as “white” and serving as the teacher for the local loyalist children. But Simon was, by all accounts, a Mau Mau supporter even if he could do nothing to help those being tortured other than drop food into the ndaki when he found the opportunity. Otherwise, he later said, he tried not to watch the public displays of brutality no matter how difficult they were to avoid.
I remember in our village there was a headman who had come from Kiamariga. He was a very cruel man. Whenever that headman desired a woman, and she refused him, he would take a beer bottle, then order an askari to hold one of the woman’s legs, and another to hold the other, wide apart. Then he would insert the bottle into the woman’s private parts and punch it up to the stomach. Many women died after having been treated that way. First he beat them with sticks and kicks, but if they still resisted his advances he used the beer bottle…. Nobody cared about them. The village men would be told to go and bury them in the village [when they died]…. So many people died. I remember a few years ago a farmer who was digging in his shamba [farm] exhumed a human skull into which a sweet potato had grown. The skull was taken to the local school, for the young children to see how people had been buried. The area around where the skull was found had been the village graveyard, and if you tried digging there you would unearth skeletons of the people who were buried at that time. Nobody cared about the village people. 26
The
Home Guards were following the example of those in charge, but they also had choices, albeit those that were incredibly constrained by their bosses in the colonial government. They could have chosen not to rape, beat, and torture, but if they had, it could have meant running the risk of being labeled Mau Mau, and thus on the receiving end of British colonial justice. Men like Simon Rutho toed a very dangerous line and were, in fact, beaten by local district officers for not reporting Mau Mau activities. When double agents like Simon were caught, they were relieved of their duties and sent to the Pipeline or summarily executed as an example to the rest.27 Other Home Guards were ordered by their white commanding officers to beat and torture the local villagers, and failure to comply would mean a beating identical to that which they could not bring themselves to administer. In the face of this pressure, and considering the rewards that accompanied compliance, it is easy to understand why many loyalists were willing participants in the torture of villagers, demonstrating their active support for the colonial government.
The handful of former Home Guards who offered their recollections of the Emergency invariably used language similar to that of colonial officials and local settlers. In their words, Mau Mau adherents were “scum,” “filthy pigs,” and “savage animals” who had to be wiped out.28 How much this eliminationist mentality was the result of intense exposure to British colonial discourse and how much was independently conceived by the loyalists themselves we will never know for certain. Today, many former Mau Mau share the sentiment of Wachehu Magayu, who lived in the North Tetu Division of Nyeri District during the Emergency. “The Home Guards behaved with such hatred and cruelty because they were being paid by the government to do it,” she explained. “They had agreed to become sellouts of their people, and the government was rewarding them for it. They had put money and personal gain before everything else. That coupled with the fact that they did not believe that Kenya would ever be free, that we would ever be independent. So they thought they chose the winner’s side by supporting the colonialists.”29
Imperial Reckoning Page 33
