Those held in detention routinely lost out in the consolidation process, despite the best efforts of their wives who remained in the villages to protect their land. It was not unusual for former detainees to return to the reserves to find that loyalist kinsmen or neighbors had expropriated their land. In light of ongoing reward policies in the reserves, it would have been surprising to find that such land theft had not taken place.103 In his ground-breaking work on land reform in Kikuyuland, M. P. K. Sorrenson asserts that land consolidation for the colonial government “was regarded as a means of establishing a politically reliable, anti–Mau Mau force in the Kikuyu countryside, perhaps on the analogy that such classes in Britain and Europe were nicely conservative.”104 There is no ambiguity, therefore, in the results of the land consolidation process. The classes of “haves” and “have-nots” split fairly evenly along the line of British colonial versus Mau Mau supporters. The agricultural consolidation legally codified the land tenure inequalities of the pre-Emergency era and exacerbated the crisis of land access in the reserves.
Monkey Johnston had no intention of deviating from Swynnerton’s course. Land consolidation and other concurrent agrarian “reforms” would guarantee the long-term ascendancy of the loyalist supporters. But the problem of reabsorption still loomed, and Johnston made two critical decisions. At the top of his agenda was the acceleration of two detainee labor projects that were turning once desolate areas into settlements for some of the surplus Kikuyu population. The first was the Mwea project in Embu District, where a massive rice production scheme was intended to transform the area and eventually feed some fifty thousand people.105 In addition, there were settlement schemes for the high-forest zones of Kiambu, Fort Hall, and Nyeri districts, projected to reabsorb another estimated five thousand Kikuyu.106 The settlement of these locations by landless Kikuyu was secondary to satisfying loyalists seeking to improve their living conditions. Commenting on the projects under his direction, the minister for forest development emphasized, “The scheme is essentially one of ‘reward’ for loyal Kikuyu, Meru, and Embu and not for the reclamation of doubtful Mau Mau.”107
Johnston’s second decision was staggering in its cynicism and simplicity. Rather than expanding the boundaries of the reserves, or deviating from the government’s position of rewarding loyalists, either of which would have opened up more land for former Mau Mau adherents, Johnston and the Resettlement Committee chose instead to reword the Swynnerton Plan. Clearly, in the long term the proletariat Swynnerton aimed to create would come from the ex-detainee community. But in the near term, Johnston realized he had to alter some of Swynnerton’s assumptions if he was going to make room in the Kikuyu reserves for returning detainees. Prior to Johnston’s appointment the committee had asserted:
Over the greater part of the three Kikuyu Districts…no significant increase in production, relative to the present problem, can be expected in less than 8 to 10 years. However, the extent to which the Kikuyu districts can absorb displaced persons may be considered independently of this gradual improvement. Here the answer is governed largely by another variable factor, namely, what standard of living is aimed at [emphasis in original]?…As regards standard of living, while the relatively high standard of surplus income of 100 pounds p.a. is a proper target for Government long-term policy to aim at, it is impractical to plan short-term action on such a high target. The fact is that the 1954 population…was, and is, living in the three Kikuyu Districts at a standard of living, which may be low, but which the people are used to. There are strong reasons why, for the next few years at least, the Government should let these people go on living at this standard, and make its plans on that basis. 108
By tinkering with the official numbers and readjusting the originally targeted standard of African living downward, the committee was able to magically render the reserves, on paper, fully capable of accommodating the surplus population of 150,000 additional Kikuyu.109 When Johnston took over the committee, he fully believed the district commissioners should be “able to absorb the bulk of those released into the reserves.”110 He then explained that the remainder of the former detainees would be resettled in those locales that either the loyalists had declined or that exceeded their needs. With a stroke of the pen, the problem of reabsorption was suddenly solved. Within the stale corridors of the colonial government the Kikuyu reserves were in a moment transformed, now capable of absorbing well over one hundred thousand more people. In effect, at the same time that the vast majority of Kikuyu were starving, the colonial government reconciled its population balance sheet, simply by reducing a standard of living that was already wholly fictitious.
Immediately after Johnston’s maneuver the Pipeline began to empty. Many detainees already had an intimation of the chaos that awaited, having witnessed and worked on the changing landscape while at district works camps. Few were prepared, however, for what they found when they were finally released. Often they had to be directed to their families, as the new villages were foreign to them, having been created while most were in the Pipeline. “It was completely disorienting,” one former detainee from Kiambu recalled. “I wandered around the wired village knocking on doors looking for my wife, but I never found her. I was told she had been killed during one of the Johnnies’ raids and only my eldest child was left alive, being tended to by my mother, who somehow managed to survive.”111 Detainee after detainee recounted similar homecoming stories. “When I returned,” another man from Nyeri stated, “I learned those who had been killed were being buried in random spots outside the village…. No one can be able to say for certain where his father, mother, wife, or children were buried. They were all large, unmarked graves.”112 Those they did find alive lived in horrendous conditions, leading many detainees to conclude that life in the villages had, in fact, been worse than in the Pipeline.
Most women recalled the bittersweet moment of joy and shame when their husbands returned to them. “I wept when I first saw my husband walk into the village,” remembered one woman from Nyeri. “At first I did not recognize him, but once I did I knew how lucky I was because so many women were widowed, their men never came home.”113 But some women, having given birth to children during their detention in the villages, reluctantly welcomed their husbands. Sometimes called nusu-nusu or chotara, meaning half-caste, these children were physical reminders of the repeated rapes they had endured. Some were clearly fathered by men from other African ethnic groups; others were most definitely mixed race. “A lot of half-white children were born at that time,” Lucy Ngima later recalled. “In fact there is one on the other ridge not far from here. There is another lady [who is] named Nyawira wife of Zakayo, [one man named] John son of Nyambere, [a woman called] Wangari daughter of Milka, and even the mother of Migwi gave birth to such a child at the Consolata Hospital, Nyeri, where the sisters offered to adopt him. The mother refused, but the sisters forcefully took the baby, arguing that they were in a position to look after the child and give him a better life than the mother.”114 Detainees also returned to find their wives rearing children that bore a striking resemblance to their Home Guard neighbors. Often, though, they found that women in the villages were amenorrheic, or incapable of reproducing because of their emaciated and exhausted condition. Some, like Rachel Kiruku, attributed this temporary infertile state to the anxiety of village life. “The constant fear of death and guns had frozen the women’s wombs,” she said.115 There were countless women for whom infertility would be a lifelong problem, the damage caused by sexual violence, contraction of venereal disease, or both, irreparable.116
Silence was a widespread remedy for coping with the difficulties of family reunification. Generally women would not provide their husbands with accounts of their sufferings, though the former detainees could often deduce what they were, particularly after local boastful loyalists and colonial officers filled them in on some of the details. Similarly, many men also chose not to speak about the Pipeline. “One could not talk to the people about his expe
riences in detention,” Karega Njoroge later said. “That was not allowed. We used to warn each other not to take our detention days to the people. How could it have helped them?”117 There were also several thousand women who would eventually return from Kamiti, and they too chose simply to move on as best they could. Of course, what other choice did any of these men and women have? The Emergency was ongoing, and the repressive policies were still in place. The colonial government was certainly not going to help them; if they had any hope of surviving and piecing their lives back together, they simply had to move forward. For some, like Mary wa Kuria, this was the only possible way of coping.
While our men were detained, we had to learn to live like widows. A lot of things had happened during the time they had been detained, but we never even once gave up hope that they would come home one day. Even after we were raped, we still kept on hoping that life would one day be normal again. When the men came back, we picked up life where we had left. Even those men who found their wives with children born while they were away did not blame them, but just accepted the children as their own. Everybody understood that we had been forcefully separated, that whatever happened could not be blamed on anybody, because all of us had been living in our separate hells, where none had any certainty that the other would survive—that a reunion would ever be possible. This was another divine chance we had been given for a normal life, and we couldn’t allow the lost time to interfere with the future. 118
But there were many instances where men and women simply could not go on, or could not accept the circumstances in which they were living. Throughout Central Province former villagers recall men who spent years in the Pipeline, only to commit suicide when they returned, after finding their families dead or their wives raising half-caste children. Marriages, too, did not always survive. Some men rejected wives who had been raped, particularly those who had borne children from such encounters. Their anger and masculine shame was too much to bear. They had failed in their roles as Kikuyu men, as guardians of production and reproduction. “You can imagine it yourself,” one man opined, “a woman who was accustomed to having someone to rely on, someone earning the daily bread for her, who had now been left alone amongst enemies while we men were away. Most of the people who were Home Guards used to mistreat women by forcing them to do what they did not want; even some of them were being raped by those people. By imagining it, you can understand how life was. It was a very harsh life for the women, and we men could do nothing. I was so ashamed of myself when I returned, and am sometimes now when I think about it all.”119
The elation of some women also gave way to anger, anger at their husbands and fathers. They resented the absence of their men and the consequent hardships they had to endure, though in spite of their resentment few left the reserves.120 Restrictions on movement were still in place, but later, when these restrictions were finally relaxed, most women still chose to remain and rebuild their lives, living with pain and bitterness. Others, however, left their husbands and went to work in Nairobi, where they became part of an expanding class of entrepreneurial women whose existence presented a challenge to Kikuyu men struggling to reestablish their manhood after the war.
Few loyalists were enthusiastic about the detainees’ returning. There was the fear of revenge, although with Emergency Regulations still in place, and support from the colonial government continuing, the loyalists were still well empowered. Their greatest weapon was their right to determine whether an individual was ultimately released from the Pipeline or exiled. Loyalists used their power to deny former detainees the right to return to the reserves, often banishing them instead to a lifetime in settlements like Hola. Such abuses made yet another mockery of the rehabilitation system and of the colonial government’s ability to reintegrate the Kikuyu population. In a speech to Kenya’s Legislative Council, Beniah Ohanga, Monkey Johnston’s predecessor as minister of community development and rehabilitation, implored his peers and the loyalists in the reserves. “The time has come,” he said, “when the attitude of the country generally should bend slightly towards released rehabilitated detainees.” He went on, arguing:
I am a firm believer in the gospel of the second chance. All down history individuals and nations have fallen by following wrong ideals and by taking the wrong steps. If their wrong-doing is to be continuously remembered as long as they live and no opportunity given them to reform we can be nowhere in this world. I should, therefore, like to make a general appeal to the loyal Kikuyu, Embu and Meru who have supported the Government during the dark days of terrorism and stood firmly by their convictions that terrorism and Mau Mau did not pay, to open their doors wider to give their fellows who have fallen a second chance to make good. 121
But second chances were few in the Kikuyu reserves. The continuing policies of the colonial government made certain of that. For Baring and the Colonial Office, the whole point of launching a total war against Mau Mau had been to cement control over Kenya for the future. This lust for control did not stop with the mass confessions in the Pipeline or the Emergency villages but was continued with a series of policies designed to lock in permanently the socioeconomic divisions in Kikuyu society. It was here that the impact in the Kikuyu reserves of the newly modified Swynnerton Plan was critically important. When finally released, the former detainees quickly realized that their economic futures were being manipulated by the colonial government, and there was little that they could do about it. Many had already lost what material possessions and livestock they had during their detention, and often part or all of their land. Throughout the Emergency, countless appeals were made to the Administration and to the governor, like that filed by several former detainees from the Othaya Division of Nyeri District.
In general on land, we wish to make the point that there is great and growing land hunger in the Central Province. Many people are landless and many have very small pieces of land which are uneconomic to work. In addition there is the young generation which is growing to adulthood without any land or any means of earning a living…. We do not support the methods which were used and are being used to implement the Land Consolidation programme. There is an element of force in it. At the same time most of the programme was implemented, at least in this District, when thousands of people were still in detention camps or in Gaol. They were not given facilities to take care of their land in the general transactions which took place. Consequently they harbour many grievances because in many cases they were unjustly treated by their more fortunate neighbours who were on the spot. When they were released, they were brusquely treated by the Land Consolidation officers and the demarcation committees if they raised any question on demarcation or the measurement of land. They were told by these committees that the government had left them to do as they pleased. They were even threatened by the local administration with imprisonment or detention if they persisted with their requests. 122
With the introduction of the Loyalty Certificate the colonial government created a legal distinction between loyalist supporters and former Mau Mau adherents. This document was issued only to men whom members of the Administration considered to be steadfast loyalists. No Mau Mau adherent, regardless of how much he confessed and cooperated, was ever to be issued one of these crucial, and coveted, certificates. Carrying this document, loyalists were not subject to movement restriction orders, meaning they could engage in private and government employment outside of the reserves, where there were countless more opportunities to find good-paying jobs. Certificate holders were exempt from paying the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru special taxes, a tax all former detainees had to pay, despite the fact that they had no source of income. Loyalists were also given special consideration for various commercial licenses, and they were the first to be granted permission to plant and sell coveted cash crops like coffee and tea.123 With a Loyalty Certificate a man was also given the right to vote; without it he had no political voice in elections.
Ex-detainees did not emerge from the Pipeline as r
ehabilitated citizens with equal rights. This inequality was the precise intention of the colonial government. With the future net effects of Swynnerton’s agricultural overhaul at least another decade off, and the immediate discriminating effects of that plan all too apparent, even a subsistence income was beyond the reach of many former detainees and their families. Those released from the Pipeline were also expected to labor for part of the week on unpaid communal works projects such as terracing, bracken clearing, and cultivating the shambas of the local loyalists. Many men were forced to violate pass laws and movement restrictions in order to search for employment outside of the reserves. By the end of 1956 nearly three thousand Kikuyu were being arrested monthly under Emergency Regulations, which when compared to the Pipeline release-rate figure of one thousand per month dramatizes the predicament. Of these arrests, over two-thirds were pass book and curfew offenses. Ex-detainees were breaking the law in order to search for work in urban centers. Even Lennox-Boyd reluctantly admitted that the movement and curfew violations reflected the overcrowding and unemployment problems that plagued the Kikuyu reserves. While those arrested were generally not returned to the Pipeline, they were imprisoned and then fined before eventually being repatriated back to the reserves, where the cycle started again.124
Clearly, there were perpetrators of violence both in the Pipeline and in the Emergency villages, men like Kiboroboro, Mapiga, YY, and Kenda Kenda. There were other brutal elements as well: members of the Kenya Regiment, the King’s African Rifles, the Kenya Police, battalions from Britain, and colonial officers in the Administration. And there were the local loyalists who contributed enormously to the violence, though their choices were generally more constrained than those of their white superiors. There were also degrees of participation. Some chose to murder and rape, others to engage only in beatings and humiliation. In the reserves some dutifully carried out orders to favor loyalists over Mau Mau when dispensing rations, and in the Pipeline others carried out only the punishments allowable by Emergency decree. Still others chose to observe but remain silent.
Imperial Reckoning Page 37
