By denying the mounting crisis and blaming the victims of the incipient famine, the colonial government managed to deflect most of the criticism of its villagization policy. It did not address, however, the hardship in the reserves. It refused to allocate more funds and, instead, relied upon the efforts mainly of the Red Cross to assist the Emergency villages.75 Baring turned to Malaya for help, approving the transfer of a handful of volunteer workers from the Malaya Federation to Kenya. By mid-1955, eleven Red Cross workers were in Central Province distributing food, along with a handful of missionaries. Everywhere, the collective efforts of these relief workers were under Baring’s direct control, with him and his men on the spot insisting that the Red Cross and missionaries target their operations not to the areas of greatest need but to the locations where loyalists were demanding more government support.76 The colony’s own Medical Department issued scathing reports highlighting the “alarming number of deaths occurring amongst children in the ‘punitive’ villages” and the “political considerations” that were blocking the Red Cross relief efforts.77 Indeed, throughout the Emergency the Medical Department would criticize the colonial government for its failure to address the causes and the effects of the food shortages in Kikuyuland. Moreover, reports issued by the Red Cross underscored the need for more concentrated and well-funded efforts in the villages. The director of the Overseas Branch of the British Red Cross, during her tour through Central Province, commented that “women frequently have to feed a family in addition to themselves and that cases had been brought to her notice of women who, from progressive undernourishment, had been unable to carry on with their work.”78
In the path of this worsening famine lay Askwith’s Community Development and Rehabilitation Department. With whatever meager funds he was granted, Askwith soon redirected his efforts away from rehabilitation, such as existed, and toward famine relief. Milk and soup distribution, together with orphan care, accounted for most of his officers’ work in the Kikuyu reserves. Some home-craft classes and leisure-time activities were introduced, but hardly on the scale proposed by Askwith or advertised by the governor and colonial secretary. By far the most significant measure undertaken by Askwith’s department was the establishment of Maendeleo ya Wanawake, or Progress among Women Clubs, which were essentially self-help organizations for women.79 With additional input from voluntary organizations like the Red Cross and the East African Women’s League, these clubs became centers for expanding home-craft training. But like other community development efforts undertaken in the context of the war, Maendeleo had little financial support and could not be separated from the colonial government’s preeminent objective of punishing Mau Mau and rewarding loyalism. In March 1955 the two British women in charge of Maendeleo—Mary Beecher, the wife of Archbishop Leonard Beecher, and Nancy Shepherd, the assistant commissioner for community development and rehabilitation and chairwoman of Maendeleo—drafted a resolution condemning the effects of villagization.
The Headquarters Committee of the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation deprecate the excessive use of communal labour for women as it leaves too little time for the care of homes and children, causes great suffering, creates anti-Government feeling, and makes the teaching given in the Maendeleo Clubs very largely useless…. Where the communal labour is essential, this Committee feels that at least the women should be paid so that money is available to buy food for the children. 80
The response was predictable. The acting provincial commissioner insisted that Kikuyu women in the districts labored for no more than two days per week, and that Maendeleo sewing and knitting classes were well attended.81 In other words, the villagers weren’t dying from the combined effects of forced labor, torture, and famine; they were sewing and weaving and learning the virtues of British hygiene. If there was any truth in these statements, it applied to the lives of loyalist women, not to the villagers who often attended to the loyalists as maids or houseboys might. The wives and daughters of the Home Guard were regular members of Maendeleo throughout the Emergency. Even Nancy Shepherd, the organization’s chairwoman, insisted that no one could join Maendeleo unless “she has forsworn Mau Mau” and that the clubs were being used as “a way of breaking the bonds of Mau Mau amongst the women.”82 This implied that women who confessed and cooperated benefited from Maendeleo, but for the most part this simply was not the case, at least not until the last years of the war. Moreover, many European women directing local club efforts, particularly those from the settler-dominated East African Women’s League, strictly enforced a loyalist-first policy. That is, regardless of a woman’s level of cooperation, priority would always be given to those Kikuyu who had remained faithful servants to the British Crown throughout the Emergency.83 Even with the effects of famine devastating the Mau Mau population, the well-fed loyalists were generally the first to queue up for Maendeleo’s relief efforts. Not until 1957 did the extent of famine-related deaths compel some within the Administration to rethink villagization and to demand assistance from Nairobi.84 Even then, the colonial government dismissed the reports as alarmist, continuing to rely largely on international donors and voluntary organizations for assistance.85
Thus there may be some plausibility in the villagers’ contention of enforced starvation. What other explanation could there be for actively contriving to starve hundreds of thousands of Mau Mau adherents? The same people who were purportedly being rehabilitated, an educational effort that requires a certain degree of free time, were scavenging at every opportunity for food. They fed their children what little could be found: boiled roots, garbage from the Home Guard rubbish piles, vermin, wild berries, and as a last resort warm salted water, just to survive. In time, death tolls in the villages were enormous, according to various eyewitnesses. “This was because the sickness always found bodies which were weak from hunger, in an environment where cleanliness was impossible due to lack of water and there were no health facilities,” one woman from Kiambu later deduced.86 In Nyeri District, one former missionary reported, “It was terribly pitiful how many of the children and the older Kikuyu were dying. They were so emaciated and so very susceptible to any kind of disease that came along.”87 There was hardly a woman of childbearing age during the Emergency who did not lose a son or daughter, or elderly relative, to the combined effects of famine and disease. The overcrowded huts were incubators for tuberculosis, typhoid, pneumonia, and whooping cough—just a few of the illnesses that swept through the villages. Malnutrition also manifested itself in the form of scurvy, kwashiorkor, and pellagra. Diarrhea too was endemic, particularly among the children. “You would not have wished to see them when they woke up,” Mary wa Kuria later recalled, “with their dirty faces and their clothes unwashed for months…. Even our own bodies, we had no time to bathe or to wash our clothes.”88 The lack of hygiene was compounded by curfew orders that forbade the villagers to leave their huts between nightfall and the morning siren. This meant that everyone had to use the interior toilet bucket, though even this was a luxury. At night, the villagers often had to urinate and defecate on the same floor where they cooked and slept.
The colonial officers in the Administration were fully aware of the health consequences of their policies. In Meru, the district commissioner summed up the general sentiment held by some of his counterparts when he stated, “From the health point of view, I regard villagisation as being exceedingly dangerous and we are already starting to reap the benefits. We are, in fact, trying to effect in a few months a major social revolution which took 500 years or more to achieve in England.”89 In spite of these warnings, Baring refused to do anything to alleviate the crisis. He never altered his policy of continued repatriations from the White Highlands and the urban areas. Many illnesses that incubated in the transit camps, where repatriates would wait for months in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, were later expressed as epidemics in the villages. While the colonial government eventually condemned Gilgil and Langata camps because “they were unfit to hold Kikuyu…
for medical epidemiological reasons,” thousands passed through these locations en route to the Kikuyu reserves before they were finally closed.90 All chronically ill detainees, provided they were not classified as hard-core Mau Mau, were sent back to the Kikuyu districts. In fact, in 1955 the director of medical services reminded all camp commandants, “It is accepted policy that cases of pulmonary tuberculosis…be returned to their reserve to avail themselves of the routine medical control and treatment within their areas.”91 But there was virtually no medical treatment to be found in the reserves. Baring himself was aware of this when he made a tour of the Emergency villages in Central Province in June 1956, during which he had to have witnessed the hardships and human destruction caused by village life; this perception was wholly unavoidable by any but the blind. Rather than endorse a policy to alter these destructive conditions, he instead decided to do nothing. Writing his follow-up report to his visit, the governor noted that “there have been a number of discussions about the expenditure of money on villages. The financial position has now worsened. It is therefore necessary strictly to justify this expenditure on Emergency grounds…. Schemes of medical help, however desirable and however high their medical priority, could not in [these] circumstances be approved.”92
As Baring took deliberate steps not to intervene, the villagers in Central Province continued to bury the dead. “Whenever anybody fell ill or a child fell sick,” recalled Margaret Nyaruai, “the only thing was to look after them until they died, as there was no help forthcoming from anybody.”93 Returning from a day of forced labor, women were often greeted with the news that a child or elderly relative had died. The local Home Guards would hand them shovels and lead them to the special areas or other designated spots for burial. Other times, women tied their dying infants to their backs, carrying them along to communal work. Some did so with the hope of being able to beg for help from a sympathetic Home Guard or British officer, others because they did not want their child to die alone. “When you carried your child with you to work,” Wamahiga Wahugo later recalled, “if the Home Guard in charge of you disliked you, you would not be allowed even some time to sit down and feed the sick child.” She went on to say:
The sick child would be strapped to your back while you worked, being burnt by the hot sun. It was like we were in slavery. You would dig like everybody else the whole day…. You would be so busy at work, trying to finish your task, and go home to look for food with which to feed your other children that by the time you realized that the child hadn’t cried for some time and decided to bring it to your front from your back to check its condition, you would find that the child had been dead awhile. You would start screaming in shock and anguish. Only then would the Home Guards order some others to come and help you bury the child. 94
Throughout Central Province former villagers related countless stories like Wamahiga’s. Children were dying on their mothers’ backs, in the huts, or on the roadside when their mothers were granted permission by a sympathetic Home Guard to go to one of the few local mission hospitals. Even for those fortunate few who reached medical assistance, their efforts were often in vain. The missionaries or their African assistants generally demanded a few shillings for treatment, and the women had no money. In other cases the medical staff simply turned them away, fearing—not without some justification—that they would be arrested for assisting Mau Mau.95
Today, many of these women think of the entire Central Province as a kind of mass unmarked grave. There were bodies that had been left out exposed to the elements and the animals. Some were buried alone and others together, all in unmarked graves. After independence some were exhumed when the locals began tilling their farms again, unearthing skeletons from shallow graves as they planted maize or sweet potatoes. But according to many former Mau Mau, the majority still remain in unmarked locations throughout the countryside. “They are just everywhere,” one man summed up. “When we walk through our land, we know that those who died are near to us. It is a very painful thought and something we live with every day of our lives.”96
Then came the day when detainees began returning from the Pipeline. By the end of 1955 nearly one thousand were being released every month, a figure that would climb to as high as two thousand by the end of 1957.97 The cumulative effect of forced labor and torture had compelled them to confess and cooperate, with the ultimate hope that life would improve once they were released to their wives and families. For the colonial government, this mass movement of detainees down the Pipeline was no small feat. Baring and the colonial secretary, first Lyttelton and then Lennox-Boyd, had spent nearly two years constructing and consolidating the camp system. But before they could release thousands of detainees en masse, the colonial officials had to solve one last vexing problem, which they called reabsorption.
There was no more room in the reserves. Of course, the colonial government had itself to thank for the problem. Overcrowded conditions in Kikuyuland, exacerbated by continuous forced repatriations, completely saturated the reserves by December 1954, at least according to the official standard-of-living index.98 For a time, returns slowed as the Prisons Department diverted many Mau Mau suspects, mostly women, children, and the elderly, to the Langata Camp. But Langata was condemned for its atrocious conditions in April 1955, and the repatriates who had been awaiting their return now flooded back to the Kikuyu districts.99 As a consequence, detainees who were beginning to confess their Mau Mau oaths and cooperate were not immediately released until space could be found for them in the reserves.
To solve the reabsorption problem, the colonial government had to address the dilemma of agricultural reform. In the context of the Emergency, agrarian reform and suppression of the Mau Mau uprising were intimately related. Despite the fact that colonial officials refused to acknowledge Kikuyu land grievances as legitimate, they knew they had to, at the very least, find a way to make the overcrowded reserves more agriculturally productive. They were not going to reward Mau Mau with more land, but they still needed to find a long-term solution to feeding the Kikuyu people. Governor Baring needed a seasoned veteran to take charge and plan exactly how to do this. In September 1955 he created the new position of special commissioner for Central Province and appointed Carruthers “Monkey” Johnston to take the helm. In time, Johnston would also take over from Edward Windley as the head of the Ministry of African Affairs and Beniah Ohanga at the Ministry of Community Development and Rehabilitation. With this unprecedented triple role, he would emerge as the most powerful person in Kenya overseeing the colonial government’s suppression of Mau Mau in the reserves, with the obvious exception of Baring himself. Like so many other colonial officials, Monkey Johnston came from a formidable upper-class background. He was educated at one of Britain’s finest public schools before heading off to Oxford and a career in the colonial service. Among his subordinates in Central Province, he was renowned for his English civility and fine manners, hosting drinks and dinner parties that are remembered to this day for their flawless execution in the middle of the African bush. Despite his unfortunate physical appearance, which some said was almost primatelike, Monkey Johnston was an unmistakable leader who, according to one colonial officer, remained “gracefully unchanged by his Gilbertian status.”100
Johnston’s first order of business was to take over Kenya’s Resettlement Committee and force a rethinking of the Swynnerton Plan. Initially, the colonial government thought this far-reaching agricultural agenda, which had been adopted as official policy in late 1954, would provide the solution to its dilemma of resettlement and overpopulation in the reserves. Swynnerton introduced several measures—including land consolidation, improved farming techniques, and land reclamation and antierosion schemes—that would in theory expand the carrying capacity of the reserves, creating room for the vast influx of Kikuyu returns.101 Under the plan the government would also over time lift restrictions placed on African coffee, tea, and pyrethrum production. Swynnerton projected that the average family income wo
uld rise from eight to twelve pounds to one hundred pounds per annum. An agricultural revolution would sweep through the Kikuyu countryside, transforming it into a progressive and efficient model of production and, significantly, render it capable of accommodating tens of thousands more people.
Like all colonial policies during the Emergency, agricultural reform was highly politicized. The Emergency ushered in a state-directed class revolution in Central Province, one that was intimately linked to land access and loyalism. The Kikuyuland of the post–Mau Mau future would be a model of agricultural production, with former loyalists living on the large efficient parcels of land, and many former Mau Mau adherents serving as the landless laborers either on the loyalist farms or in some as yet to be defined industry. For their part, the loyalists took an active role in ensuring their own aggrandizement. In fact, colonial officials put their loyalist supporters in charge of the demarcation committees for land consolidation throughout the Kikuyu reserves. Practically, this meant that the loyalists were empowered to decide not only who got land in the Kikuyu reserves but also how much. The subsequent fraud was shameless, so much so that consolidation had to be completely redone in Fort Hall in the early 1960s.102
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