Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  The behavior of the Home Guards cannot be analyzed without understanding the origins of their training and their inculcation into the philosophy and procedures of the British security forces. The women detained in the villages called Britain’s security forces haraka, “the fast ones,” because of the speed with which they could inflict damage on the local population. “Whenever those groups came into the villages,” recalled Shelmith Njeri, “they would wreak havoc within no time. They would be everywhere within a short period, turning houses inside out, burning houses, and raping women. It was so fast that a person in one house would have no time to know what was happening in another. As soon as she heard the screams, they had already burst into her house and began tearing it apart.”30 Some women like Shelmith distinguished between the British soldiers who were members of the military and paramilitary units, and the whites who belonged to the Kenya Police Reserve, the King’s African Rifles, and the Kenya Regiment. Others simply referred to all of these men as “Johnnies,” or, in the words of several women, “British savages.”

  Women suspected of continuing to feed the Mau Mau guerrillas were sometimes brought into the village square and shot or hung as an example to the rest. Sometimes they were beaten first with clubs and rifle butts, and sometimes raped. On other occasions members of the security forces would take captured Mau Mau fighters, rope them to the back of Land Rovers, and drive them around the villages, leaving bits of body parts in their wake. Young children were slaughtered and their remains skewered on spears and paraded around the village squares by the Home Guards. Excrement-based torture was also widespread.31 “The Johnnies would make us run around with toilet buckets on our heads,” recalled one woman. “The contents would be running down our faces, and we would have to wipe it off and eat it, or else we were shot. Even then, some people were killed anyway.”32 There were also public executions of captured forest fighters, like this one described by Milka Muriuki, who was a teenager at the time.

  When we were still living in Hombe village…the British soldiers shot dead a man named Stephano and another. Many of these soldiers came, and the villagers were herded out into the square, and soon there were British soldiers everywhere. I do not know where the two Mau Mau fighters had been caught, but they were tied with ropes and hung onto a tree branch and then shot one after the other, in full view of all the villagers. That day, all of the remaining men were rounded up and taken to Nyeri, and only the women were left behind. The soldiers raped many of us. 33

  It did not matter whether they were young or old, all women in the villages lived in fear of sexual assault. Some, like Milka, connived to avoid the fate of so many other women.

  The white officers had no shame. They would rape women in full view of everyone. They would take whomever they wanted at one corner and just do it right there. Whenever those soldiers came into the village, I remember I used to sneak into our house and smear ashes all over my body so they would not fancy me. Then, when they saw me, they would say, “Now look at this one, what is wrong with her?” 34

  Many women were not so fortunate. Mothers and daughters were sometimes raped together in the same hut by white and black members of the security forces. At gunpoint others were given the choice between death and rape. Margaret Nyaruai explained why many chose rape: “We felt that we would rather allow them to rape us than get killed, especially those who had small children depending on them.”35 Some women were assaulted on their way to or from forced communal labor, others while they worked. “We would be digging the trench,” recalled one woman, “being whipped if we worked too slowly or looked lethargic. And then a security force patrol would come by and just start dragging women into the forests and raping them. Then when they were finished with us we had to go back to work, and if we didn’t fill our quotas we would be beaten some more or sent to the Home Guard post, where we would be beaten and raped again.”36 Oftentimes the security forces were demanding intelligence at the same time they were brutalizing the women. If the Mau Mau guerrillas had launched a successful attack, the Johnnies would often exact their revenge on the villagers while simultaneously interrogating them. “They would sometimes squeeze women’s breasts with pliers,” recalled Njeri Wamai, “or swing women by their long hair. Other times, one would be interrogated while lying on the ground, with a soldier stepping on her neck, while others would beat her all over her body. Then one would be allowed to sit upright and tell everything. If she still refused, she would be beaten again. Many died this way.”37

  The capriciousness of these raids was complemented by the certainty of confessional barazas. After returning in the late afternoon from forced labor, the women often would be led into the village squares, where they would be forced to listen to anti–Mau Mau propaganda and endure more screening. The Home Guards and local district officers were present, as were various members of the security forces, depending on who was patrolling the area or who wanted to participate in the action. The barazas were clearly intended to elicit confessions of oaths as well as of all knowledge of Mau Mau activities, past and present. By the time the villagers made it into the square, they had been, to put it mildly, worked over. They were exhausted, beaten, violated, and famished, and, once the baraza was finished, they would have a similar routine to look forward to the following day, as well as every day thereafter. Nothing they said or did would change their status. Confession did not mean an end to forced labor, a relief from hunger, or improved care for their children. It meant only that they were spared from death, for the time being.

  Lined up in the village square, women would be singled out one by one. The haphazard method of selection infused the unfolding drama with anxiety, with each person fearing they would be the center of the public spectacle. Those taken to the front of the crowd were often stripped naked and forced to lead the rest of the village in rounds of anti–Mau Mau songs. When the music stopped and the questioning began, those who refused to confess were beaten, often unconscious. The British officers would order villagers to bring buckets of water—the same water they were forbidden from drinking—to douse the unconscious victim. Once she was revived, the questioning resumed, and if she still refused to cooperate, the British officers and Home Guards used other methods. Many of the village detainees in Nyeri later recalled what would happen next. According to Margaret Nyaruai:

  At that time, some people who had refused to confess were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of their bodies while the other covered the upper part. Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit. The people inside would die writhing in the flames. Many people were dying every day. And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth. 38

  There were many variations on this form of public terror. In the village near Othaya British security forces often brought in the bodies of the dead forest fighters and forced the women to carry them around the village square while chanting, “This is independence.” Other times, the same women repeated the drill carrying the bodies of dead villagers of all ages, including children. British officers burned women with cigarette butts and ordered them to walk barefoot on beds of hot coals. Home Guards pulled the villagers’ hair out in fistfuls, while screaming at them to confess their Mau Mau sins.39 There were also other, less physically brutal tactics that were no less harrowing for those involved. Throughout Central Province various colonial officers had their own versions of counteroathing ceremonies.40 In Kiamariga village women were forced to denounce Mau Mau while sticking their finger in a gourd filled with blood—which was, according to the local district officer, the blood of dead Mau Mau forest fighters who had found their wiyathi, or independence.41 On other occasions torture took on a specific Kikuyu meaning, with one woman from Nyeri District recalling:

  At one point, all the villagers were ordered to remove every artic
le of clothing and remain stark naked. You cannot start to imagine the shame and embarrassment we felt when, without any consideration for the small children, we were told to arrange ourselves in two rows, one for the men and the other for the women, old and young alike. To everyone’s horror we were ordered at gunpoint to embrace each other, man with a woman, regardless of whether the man happened to be your father, father-in-law, or brother. It was all so humiliating that one woman hanged herself later, as she felt that she could not continue to live with the humiliating experience of having been forced to embrace her son-in-law while both of them were naked. In our custom that is a curse. 42

  Torture was also highly personalized. Home Guards were often neighbors or even relatives of the villagers they were brutalizing. There were also local British officers whom the women knew by name, or rather by nickname. By far the most notorious of these men in Nyeri District was YY. As a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, this young British settler and Napoleonic-like figure had acted with particularly cruel abandon during the early days of the war, screening Mau Mau suspects with a perverse enthusiasm. With the formation of the Emergency villages, YY and others like him, along with their minions, perpetrated daily acts of brutality. They took no pity on those suffering around them. Rather than revolting these young British officers, the gruesomeness of their behavior only aroused their eliminationist mentality. Or perhaps over time their repeated tortures and killing anesthetized them, wiping out any inhibitions they may have had, thus making their murderous deeds a form of daily labor. Still, many of these men hardly seemed like automatons. Some joked and laughed while perpetrating tortures; others casually smoked cigarettes or ate snacks. Even through the prism of Mau Mau their behavior was extraordinary, only partly explainable by the moral approbation that belied it.

  By early 1955 General Erskine had seized the initiative over the Mau Mau guerrillas, and there were at most a few thousand of them remaining in the vast tracts of forest around Mount Kenya and the nearby Aberdares. The general’s success in rooting out Mau Mau was partly attributable to villagization, disrupting as it did the supply line between the women and the forest fighters. The spiked trenches, barbed wires, and armed guards were all deterrents, as were the demarcated zones called special areas, or the territory that stretched between the villages and the forest edges (usually known as the “one-mile strip”). They were a kind of no-man’s-land where villagers, unaccompanied by Home Guard escorts, would be shot on sight. It was also where many women tended what remained of their farms. Once a week, those living in the villages were given permission to go into the special areas to gather what little there was growing in their abandoned plots. The Home Guards would lead them out of the villages en masse, and the women would hurry about collecting what they could in the few hours allotted to them. But there was increasingly little to be found, because villagers had been given no time to plant or cultivate their crops. The women would fill their skirts or blankets with roots and wild vegetables, or, when they were lucky, with sweet potatoes or maize that had germinated on their own. Still, there was only enough time to collect food for three or four days, even though they were permitted into the special areas just once a week. If a woman was confined in the ndaki, she missed her opportunity for weekly food collection. If sick or lame from the day’s beating or forced labor, she did what she could to make it to the food collection roll call.

  When reflecting on their weekly food brigades, former villagers remember the desperation they felt scavenging the decimated countryside or, worse, their fear of hunger when the opportunity was missed altogether. “If a woman happened to miss the chance to go to her farm,” Grace Kaharika later recalled, “for whatever reason, her family would have to beg for food the whole week from the neighbors, who barely had enough for themselves in the first place.” She went on to say:

  No amount of pleading would arouse the sympathy of the headman and his Home Guards to agree to allow the poor woman to go to the farm. Even if her failure might have been occasioned by illness, as was often the case, she would have to wait until the set day on the following week. Even if it was a child who had been very sick and could not be left alone, they still would not understand. Sometimes the other women, if they knew of her problem before going to the farm, would contribute some food each to the woman, and she would be able to survive the week. 43

  Some women took their chances and snuck out of the villages and into the special areas. It was then that YY, lying in wait, would shoot them dead. The no-man’s-land was his personal domain. Often he would patrol the area on food collection day, and when the whistle blew for the villagers to return, he would start shooting. Many of the women fled, dropping some or all of the food they had gathered as they ran to the relative safety of the Home Guards. “You never knew when YY would be there,” recalled one Kiamariga villager. “When the shooting started, it was total mayhem. Here we were, exhausted trying to gather the pitiful food that was left, and even then we had no peace. If someone was shot and killed, we just left them there. If you stopped to help them or grieve, you ran the risk of being shot yourself.”44 Or, in the words of Milka Muriuki, “It was like he was hunting wild game, only we were the animals.”45

  YY also ventured inside the villages and Home Guard posts. He tortured countless women without provocation, squeezing their breasts with pliers, beating them with his riding whip, clubs, or the butt of one of the several pistols that hung from his waist. It was not unusual for villagers to die during such episodes, their bodies later strapped to YY’s Land Rover and driven around for all to see. Any reluctance on the part of the women to look at the corpses was met with a rain of blows from the Home Guards.46 In several Nyeri villages YY traveled with another British district officer, known by the locals as the One with the Crooked Nose. Like YY, this man was young, though he was not a settler but a member of the Administration. Together they were a physical study of contrast—YY, a diminutive figure, and the One with the Crooked Nose, an extremely tall, muscular man. Sometimes with his confrere, other times alone, YY would single out women, men, and some of the older children from the village square and take them to Kwa Wood—the name of the execution site not far from YY’s police post at Gaikuyu. There, those selected would dig their own graves and line up in front of them. YY or his accomplice would shoot them dead, and their bodies would be covered up by the Home Guards.

  Despite their death march to Kwa Wood, some villagers were spared. “I remember the day when I was chosen,” one woman later recalled. “I was taken with five others to Kwa Wood, where we were ordered to begin digging our way to our wiyathi [independence]. As we dug, YY and the other white man just stood there talking casually, though I could not understand them. We finished digging, and YY shot the others and kicked the ones into their graves who did not fall in. Then he came to me, and he paused. I was a young woman at the time, and he decided to rape me instead. He took me back to the village, and until my husband returned from detention he raped me whenever he had the chance.”47 As did other members of the security forces, YY raped women in their huts, during forced labor, and in the Home Guard posts. In a gesture of bravado, he also had the habit of removing his shirt while perpetrating acts of sexual violence, earning him another nickname, Gathiiutheri, or the One Who Walked Naked. He also appeared more than willing to help out his fellow officers. On one occasion, “YY stood there holding a gun to a woman’s head,” recalled a former Hombe villager. “I then saw her being made to do something that I had not imagined possible. She was made to put the penis of the other white man who was with YY in her mouth and ordered to suck it. This lady only died recently as an old woman.”48

  To suggest that YY was a rogue operator, or that the villages of Nyeri District were somehow unique, would be a mischaracterization of the war in the Kikuyu countryside. There may have been degrees of difference between some of the villages, just as there were between the camps in the Pipeline. Nonetheless, the point of villagization was to make the suspected pop
ulation of Mau Mau adherents suffer, and many white and black members of the British forces of law and order were masters at their vocation. Today, whether one travels through Nyeri, Murang’a, or Kiambu District, former Mau Mau adherents will share similar stories of destruction. “It became clear to us very quickly,” recalled one woman living in the Kiharu Division of Murang’a, some twenty-five miles south of YY’s territory in Nyeri, “that the British wanted to kill us, and those that were not killed were going to suffer. That was what those times were like. They just thought we were animals.”49

  Farther south another thirty miles or so toward Nairobi is the region of southern Kiambu, which during Mau Mau was the domain of Kiboroboro, or the Killer, and his fellow members of the Kenya Regiment. A young settler who was known by many of the locals prior to the Emergency, Kiboroboro launched his operations from the Kenya Regiment post at Thigio. From there he often traveled along the southern Kiambu road that stretched from the Nairobi suburb of Dagoretti in the east, westward toward Makutano village. The villagers along this stretch of highway even had a nickname for Kiboroboro’s Land Rover. They called it Gitune, or the Big Red. When asked if it was because the truck was painted red, villagers provided a response similar to Njuhi Gachau’s. “Oh no,” she said, “it was not red. It had a greenish blue color. We used to call it Gitune because it was always bloody.”50 On the dashboard of this Land Rover Kiboroboro had affixed an automatic rifle, which he used to hunt down local villagers—men, women, and children—as he made his rounds. “He mostly used to pass along this route, going from Gikambura, Kamangu, Thigio, to and fro,” Stanley Wainaina, a former villager, later recalled. “If he happened to see anyone crossing the road ahead, he would not hesitate to shoot them…. People came to fear him so much.”51