In fact, anyone standing near the roadside, outside of a hut, working on communal labor—they were all targets. On any given day two, five, ten, or several dozen unsuspecting villagers would be mowed down.52 Some were picked up and tossed into the back of Kiboroboro’s Land Rover by the local Home Guards; others were picked up later in a kind of flatbed truck—described by one villager as “a bus whose body had been cut off, leaving only the cab and a back without sides.”53 Like Kiboroboro’s vehicle, this one also had a nickname. It was called Warurungana, or the Gatherer. Bodies were sometimes picked up immediately; other times they were left for several days decomposing and attracting wild animals and dogs, who fed on the rotting flesh. There were also other forms of postmortem humilitation. “This lady and her father were shot by Kiboroboro one morning,” Rahab Wakibunja recalled. “They were both shot right there by the roadside. But what shocked and infuriated the locals here was that after the shooting the killers laid the lady’s body facing upwards while they laid that of the father on top of the lady, in a manner suggestive of copulation. The two bodies were then left lying like that, by the roadside, to be collected later.”54
Kiboroboro also operated with the British military forces. Like other members of the Kenya Regiment, he would have been expected to act as an adviser to any of the British units deployed to Kenya, be they the paramilitary, the King’s African Rifles, or the British regiments. “At night Kiboroboro would come to our homes accompanied by the young soldiers we called Johnnies,” recalled Esther Muchiri. She went on to say:
They would walk around the village, knocking down the doors of our huts, and nobody dared to complain. Sometimes Kiboroboro would just empty his Bren gun inside the room without caring about who or what was hit. Other times they would enter a house, and on finding a young man inside, they would take him away with them. The following morning we would get reports from those detained at [Thigio] post that so and so’s body was lying there. That was the way things were at this place. Most people were taken to detention, while the others were killed. We had no peace. We couldn’t even go out to our farms to get food for fear of getting caught. If you were found with cooked food in your hut, you would be punished because you would be said to have prepared the food for Mau Mau, which they referred to as our husbands. It was real persecution. We cried until our tears ran dry. Sometimes during their patrols some would deliberately be left behind to rape you. If you happened to have a nasty one, he would force a bottle inside your private parts. It was painful, my child. 55
Young women, pregnant women, and old women were raped, often repeatedly, during such raids. The Johnnies would generally rape them first, then leave the women for the Home Guards, who also took their turns. Other times women were divided up, the Johnnies and locals like Kiboroboro getting first pick—preferring the adolescent girls whom they called “un-plucked chickens.”56 There was no way to resist, though many adopted tactics similar to the women in Nyeri District, smearing their hair and bodies with soot and excrement. Sometimes this tactic worked; other times it meant they were violated by the younger Home Guards who occupied the lowest rung on the raping hierarchy. Regardless of who raped them “we could not utter a word because that would mean instant death,” one woman from Mung’etho village in Ndeiya later recalled. “Can you imagine living in the same room with your father-in-law [a taboo for the Kikuyu]? That was how we lived, because there was no room to live separately. When the Johnnies and Home Guards came, they would rape you, in full sight of your father-in-law, and he would not say a word of protest. He would just watch quietly and bear the pain patiently. Even your own daughters could be raped in your sight, and you wouldn’t protest or prevent it.”57
Still, these women considered themselves lucky to be alive. As the Emergency wore on, they were increasingly terrorized by Kiboroboro and other members of the security forces, who dressed in blackface, pretending to be Africans. The metamorphosis of these white men was now complete: no longer were they simply behaving like the so-called savages they were allegedly pacifying; they looked like them as well. Disguised, they would move into the villages undetected, before the locals had an opportunity to run. In Kiboroboro’s case “people would not know that it was him and bolt away,” recalled Njuhi Gachau. “They would only realize the truth when it was too late to run away. He would then spray them with bullets ‘ta, ta, ta, ta, ta,’ killing everyone.”58
Many corpses were eventually taken to the post at Thigio, located along the southern Kiambu road. It was there that the Kenya Regiment had established its area headquarters. At the start of the Emergency, the local Mau Mau population was forced to turn the post into a fortresslike structure, surrounded by the customary deep trench, barbed wire, and a watchtower. Hundreds of villagers were called out for the project. As one woman later recalled:
Our first assignment as communal work was to dig a trench which went all around the post. The trench was the first obstacle that any unauthorized visitor to the post would encounter before reaching the high barbed-wire fence. As we were digging the trench, the old men were engaged in cutting and sharpening sticks into spikes, which would then be planted inside the trench, both on the floor and on the sides, in a crisscrossing way, so that it would be impossible for anyone falling into that trench to come out alive, or without sustaining fatal injuries. The post was also where the white man we called Kiboroboro lived with the other British soldiers and their Home Guards. It was also used as a temporary detention camp for all those arrested during the frequent raids inside the village. 59
Not far beyond Thigio’s spiked trench was a massive burial site. Dozens of villagers confirm today that this was one of the area’s largest mass graves, smaller by only a little than the one at the Ruthigiti Home Guard post, farther down the road in the direction of Nairobi. The men and women arrested and later held at Thigio were responsible for burying the bodies. Villagers would off-load the corpses from the Big Red and the Gatherer and bury them in pits deep enough to hold a dozen bodies or so. Beatrice Gatonye was one of the many women assigned this task, and she later remembered her work: “In Thigio, trenchlike graves were dug in rows, and dead bodies would be laid in them. When one was full, it would be covered, and we would go on to the next.”60 Villagers like Beatrice insisted that many of these corpses were not from the local area. Thigio was apparently one of the dumping spots for bodies as far north as Limuru. The grave site was active for most of 1954 and 1955, though it was used intermittently until the end of the war. “I don’t think anybody can say for sure how many people are buried here,” Rahab Mungai later stated, “owing to the fact that [the corpses] were also brought from surrounding areas and at different times. At a guess I would say more than two thousand. Probably three. But no one can say for sure.”61
The gruesome scene outside of the Thigio post was rivaled only by what was happening inside. There, alongside the barracks of the Kenya Regiment, were interrogation rooms where local villagers were brought in for torture. Men and women were questioned incessantly about their knowledge of Mau Mau and told to confess their oaths if they wanted to live. Hung upside down from rafters, they were beaten with whips, clubs, and rifle butts. Women were often held for days and raped repeatedly by white and black alike. Some were gang-raped, others molested by individuals. They were raped at gunpoint, at knifepoint, or were tied up or held down by the force of a boot or the butt of a gun. Men were also sexually assaulted, sodomized with bottles and rifle barrels, and castrated. For many taken to the Thigio post, the struggle was not to avoid the beating or sexual torture but simply to survive. “Even the men who were being arrested and taken to this post,” Rachel Kiruku later recalled, “would only believe that they were alive when they awoke in the morning. This was because the same people who would bury their dead colleagues today would be corpses tomorrow, to be buried by the others.”62
Several miles down the road at the Ruthigiti Home Guard post the situation was much the same. Kiboroboro made his usual appearances ther
e, but most of the operations were directed by another young member of the Kenya Regiment who took the liberty of nicknaming himself Major wa Wanjiru, or the Major, Son of Wanjiru. Proudly bearing the image of an African buffalo, the regiment’s symbol, on his hat, this sadist joined the ranks of Kiboroboro, YY, and others when it came to the cruelty of his torture and killing. He would select villagers at random, line them up in the post, and then shoot them in the back. Presumably, if ever questioned, he could claim they were shot while trying to escape. Others were killed after they were told to leave the post—a few steps outside the gate, and they were shot dead.
Major wa Wanjiru and his comrades often tortured their victims before executing them. Not long after villagization, they rounded up Esther Muchiri and several dozen women and men early one morning, marching them off to the Ruthigiti Home Guard post. There Major wa Wanjiru began his work. The Home Guards were ordered to strip all of the victims naked, and then, according to Esther:
We were beaten the whole day until evening, when we were separated from the men, who were ordered to sit a distance away with their hands cuffed together. Then the interrogators started to squeeze their private parts with a pair of pliers. There was only a short distance between where they were and ourselves. I even saw one of them being hit on his face, a blow that sent him sprawling down unconscious. A whole bucket of water had to be poured on his body to revive him. The same evening, the men were loaded onto a vehicle and driven away. We were to learn the following morning that all of them had been executed. That night all of the women including myself were divided amongst the Home Guards and raped. Even this lady who was eight months pregnant was not spared. We were raped throughout the night. The following morning we were anxious to know the fate of the men. I remember asking the same pregnant woman what happened to our men after they were castrated. She pointed to a vehicle which was a short distance away. The bodies of our men lay inside. They had already been killed. 63
It was the women who were later forced to bury the bodies of those murdered. Many corpses were taken to the forest edge and dumped, but others were put into pits. “We would lift them one by one, one person holding the wrists while the other held the ankles,” recalled Njuhi Gachau, who underwent a similar ordeal at the Ruthigiti post. “It was one experience I will never forget.”64 Unlike the graves around Thigio, those in the vicinity of Ruthigiti were reportedly much larger, containing scores of bodies that were, according to one woman “lying on each other like heaps of maize cobs. And the graves were not very deep, but they were wide,” she continued. “They were heaped on top of each other like pieces of wood.”65
The sites would often be left open for several days until filled. Some of the dead were local villagers, but many were being brought in by Land Rovers from elsewhere, “reversing near the graves and dumping the bodies in,” according to one man.66 Both at Thigio and Ruthigiti women were selected to fingerprint the bodies, a task that served no other purpose than to punish. The identification process was nearly always done days after a body or batch of bodies had been thrown into a burial pit. By the time the women began their work the flesh of the corpses was rotting. Amid the stench, the flies, and the errant dogs, they would start fingerprinting. But the decomposing skin was sticky, often adhering to the women’s hands. “The job we were told to do was just to torture us,” Beatrice Gatonye later recalled. “The flesh would come off in our hands, and you couldn’t get it off of you. For days you would have this sticky substance attached to your skin, knowing that it was the skin of someone else. We never managed to get many fingerprints. Anyway, those white men in charge would just stand near us with their guns, joking and laughing with each other and at us, smoking their cigarettes.”67
As was true elsewhere in Central Province, the cruelty perpetrated by the colonial forces just went on and on, knowing no bounds other than the sadistic imagination of its perpetrators. The demand for intelligence or confessions was often a mere pretext, if one was even needed, to torture and murder the Mau Mau population. Women in Kiambu with husbands or relatives fighting in the forest were also assured of being singled out. Salome Maina was picked up with another woman and two adolescent boys, all of whom were accused of supplying arms to their husbands and fathers, who were allegedly still alive and fighting in the forests. Major wa Wanjiru ordered they be taken to the Ruthigiti post. There, according to Salome,
he made the two young men strip naked and then commenced to beat them mercilessly. Then he came and started kicking me with his boots all over my body. The other lady was said to be the one who used to accommodate gangs in her home. He would hold us by our necks and bang our heads together. Then we were beaten until we fell unconscious. [When I awoke] I saw the two young men were beaten so badly until blood was coming down their faces and bodies, but we could still hear them pleading with those who were beating us…. When they still couldn’t get information from me they decided to put paprika pepper inside my private parts. We were ordered to lie down on the open area inside the Ruthigiti post. No one held us down, but guards stood over us with guns. We were ordered to separate our legs with our knees raised. Failure to comply invited ruthless beating. Then a bottle full of a mixture of pepper and water was inserted into my birth canal and the contents emptied inside me. As the bottle was being emptied, it was held in place with the heel of a booted foot. After the pepper was inside of me, it is impossible for anyone to imagine the torment. The burning could be felt everywhere, in the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and all over. It happened that the previous day, the day we were arrested, a lady named Watiri had been given the same treatment, only her mixture had been made from pepper and petrol. It was fortunate that the vehicle had left by the time my mixture was being prepared. After this treatment I was later carried to where Watiri was still lying groaning in agony and vomiting.
Several days later, Watiri was dead. Salome recovered, only to be subject to more torture. “It was the first time electric shock was used on us,” she later recalled. “The small conductor was either placed on the tongue, on the arm, or anywhere else they desired. At first, I was made to hold it in my hands, and it swirled me around until I found myself hitting the wall. When it was placed on your tongue, held in place with some kind of wire, it would shake you until you wouldn’t even realize when it was removed…. This was after we had been subjected to such terrible things already. The stories of that time are difficult to recount. But some of us still survived.”68
Farther down the road in the direction of Nairobi was Dagoretti, the domain of Muru wa Itina, or the Son of the Buttocks. Like YY in Nyeri District, he was a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, running his operations from the Dagoretti police station and the nearby Home Guard post. Muru wa Itina, in fact, had a notable pedigree; his father was the infamous local settler known as Itina, or the Ass, and two of his brothers were also eliminating the Mau Mau threat, one in Fort Hall District, the other in Nairobi. Muru wa Itina patrolled the villages of Dagoretti Division, shooting people at random and parading the locals past the corpses before they were taken off for burial. “We were used to such mockery,” recalled one woman. “It was usual for us to be collected and made to view dead bodies before they were buried…. It was a way of scaring us. Once there were many who had been killed inside a hut, which had been set ablaze by the security forces. Some were shot as they tried to escape, while others were burnt. Then there were other times when they just tossed grenades inside, blowing up everyone.”69 It was the murderous cruelty of Muru wa Itina’s campaign that was so striking; no effort was expended to spare the victims unnecessary suffering. “He would just single people out and shoot them,” recalled one man who today lives in the Mutuini Ward of Dagoretti. “There were also the rampages of burning of people’s houses and the confiscation of their livestock which was used to feed the Home Guards. Those were punishments whose deliberate aim was to cause people pain. He also used to order the merciless beatings of the villagers while interrogating them about the oath. Thos
e are just a few of the things he did here.”70
It is not the random selections, the sexual assaults, the forced labor, or the torture that the Kikuyu women of Central Province remember most about the years of the Emergency. It was the lack of food. Today many former Mau Mau adherents are convinced that the colonial government was trying to starve them to death. In the words of one villager from Nyeri District:
Hunger was the worst problem; that’s what was killing most of the people. They were starving us on purpose, hoping we would give in. The little time we were allowed to go to the shamba was too short to allow for any meaningful food gathering. Also, the area we were allowed to use was too small, because the largest areas had been declared Special Areas and were off-limits. So the allowed areas had been overharvested, but that was what we had. 71
The colonial government did virtually nothing to avert the food crisis. Despite reports from the districts beginning in early 1955 that starvation and malnutrition were widespread, Baring refused to confirm any serious scarcity of food. What malnutrition did exist was blamed on the Kikuyu themselves. According to A. C. C. Swann, the acting provincial commissioner for Central Province, “In many cases the parents have adequate food supplies, but do not make them available to their children. The intelligent Kikuyu are adept at leaving Government to feed their children, and are also fully aware of the propaganda value of apparent malnutrition among the young.”72 By November, however, the East African Standard detailed the starvation-related deaths of forty-five villagers in the Kiambaa Location of Kiambu. This district, containing some of the most densely populated areas in the Kikuyu reserves, suffered from the worst food shortages. There the Red Cross intervened with soup kitchens and supplies of dried milk, while Kenya’s Medical Department dispatched several assistants. Missionaries also actively assisted such relief efforts, drawing largely upon private funds from international donors.73 Still, British colonial officials denied any responsibility, the minister for local government, health, and housing, Wilfred Havelock, recognizing there were “undoubtedly bad spots in the Central Province” but insisting “one of the main factors was the ignorance of mothers in the feeding of their children. They did not realise the great importance of proteins.”74
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