Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  In the course of all this work the Church has from time to time become aware of certain abuses and of other matters needing correction and as leaders of Churches with our loyalty to the Kingdom of God and its standards of righteousness we have not hesitated to make representations to the Government. We have sought to do this in the spirit of our Master who directed as a first step “if thy brother shall trespass against thee go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone.” As a result of representations made at various levels action has been taken on most matters and there has been improvement. In some cases progress has been slow, and the Government has not always agreed to our suggestions to the degree that we would have wished. 108

  By early 1957 it was clear that officials at the highest level of the British government knew about the destruction unleashed in Kenya by colonial forces. In addition to the public revelations and debates, Lennox-Boyd had had lengthy private correspondences and meetings with Colonel Young, church leaders, Meldon, and various Labour MPs. Like Castle, he received letters from detainees in the Pipeline asking him to intervene to stop the ongoing abuses. 109 Throughout the war against Mau Mau, various members of his Colonial Office staff repeatedly commented upon the “bloody-mindedness” of both the British settlers and members of the Administration, as well as their African loyalist supporters. 110 Years later the head of the East Africa Department, Will Mathieson, publicly revealed some of the thoughts and concerns of the colonial secretary and his staff. He stated that both the Colonial Office and Lennox-Boyd realized that there was an “infringement of basic legal rights going on in one of Her Majesty’s colonies” and that they were all very unhappy about it. But he went on to say that the Colonial Office “also regarded it as a really inevitable casualty of the situation.” Moreover, according to Mathieson, “there was evidence that there were incidences [of violence against individuals practiced illegally], probably there were more that didn’t come to light than actually did come to light…. I think we all realize that there must be a lot; if there was one or two things going on, there was probably a whole lot more.” 111

  It was inevitable that these issues would come up in cabinet discussions. Churchill’s ministers had met on numerous occasions to review various aspects of their ongoing war in Kenya and specifically addressed issues related to detention without trial and forced labor. In one meeting in February of 1954, for example, the cabinet minutes recorded that Churchill and his men realized, “This course [i.e., detention without trial and forced labor] had been recommended despite the fact that it was thought to involve a technical breach of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 and of the Convention on Human Rights adopted by the Council of Europe.” 112 They then went on to recommend finding legal-appearing means for circumventing the constraints of these treaties. Nearly a year later Churchill’s cabinet would discuss the public relations problems caused by the blanket amnesty, ultimately agreeing to it despite its implications.

  That insiders in both official and unofficial circles knew about British crimes in Kenya was an open secret, as a 1953 row between Churchill and Lord and Lady Mountbatten would illustrate. During a precoronation reception at Buckingham Palace the flamboyant Edwina Mountbatten was conversing about the Emergency with India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the then colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton. When Lyttelton commented on the “terrible savagery” of Mau Mau, Lady Mountbatten infuriated him by firing back “on both sides.” Word of the exchange quickly made it to Churchill, and the colonial secretary told him, “Nehru afterwards said to me that Africans were being shot down and that we should not solve anything by these means. He was barely civil and turned on his heel and went away. I am thinking of sending Edwina the photographs of some of the atrocities so she cannot repeat her disgraceful remarks.” Presumably, Lyttelton was speaking of Mau Mau atrocities, not those dispensed by the hands of Britain’s forces. Angered by the incident, Churchill retaliated, refusing to allow Lord Mountbatten to take his wife with him on an official visit to Turkey. 113 Though Edwina eventually did travel with her husband on the tour—the official invitation had already been accepted—a clear message had been sent not just to the Mountbattens but to everyone else who traveled in their circle. Indiscretions would not be tolerated by the prime minister.

  As charge after charge was leveled at the colonial government, neither of the colonial secretaries nor Governor Baring nor Churchill nor his successors Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan ever wavered from their course. The situation in Kenya had created a very partisan, bitter, and often personal debate, particularly between Lennox-Boyd and Castle. But there were alternatives. In retrospect, the most obvious was immediate decolonization. At any point Britain’s prime minister and colonial secretary could have put an end to the violence by pulling out of the colony altogether and granting Kenya its independence. There would have been angry repercussions to this decision, to be sure, most especially from the still intractable settlers. There would have also remained the question of what to do with the politicals who were still locked away. Moreover, the precedent that such a decision would set—that is, that the British gave in to or, worse, were defeated by an African uprising—remained unthinkable. Officials in the British colonial government also believed they were fighting a moral war for Western civilization over the forces of dark savagery. There would be no contemplation of an imperial retreat from Kenya before Mau Mau had been crushed. In their minds, the colony had to be rendered governable, if only to protect long-term British interests. Yet, paradoxically, Britain’s very presence in Kenya and the brutality of its forces were the real root of the turmoil. Withdrawing was never considered, though, at least not until the end of the Emergency when Mau Mau had been destroyed and with it much of the Kikuyu population. Even then, there were colonial officials, particularly in Kenya, who believed the colony would remain part of the empire for at least another generation.

  Ultimately, hanging in the balance was the whole rationale, both past and present, for the British Empire. Decades had been spent constructing Britain’s imperial image, and that image contrasted sharply with the brutal behavior of other European empires in Africa. King Leopold’s bloody rule in the Congo, the German-directed genocide of the Herero in South West Africa, and France’s disgrace in Algeria—the British reputedly avoided all of those excesses because, simply, it was British to do so. That is what the civilizing mission led much of the Western world to believe, and it was certainly believed by the British public at home. For many years the White Man’s Burden was accepted on all sides of the political divide because it was understood to be a reformist endeavor that would nurture Africans, and others in the empire, for future responsible citizenship. Both liberals and conservatives in Britain believed in the superiority of British colonial rule. Unlike other European nations, so it was thought, Britain avoided the corrupting effects of absolute power in its colonies because of its higher, Christian moral principles and economic know-how. It also had a uniquely professional, elite cadre of overseas civil servants, who led with their ruling-class sense of obligation and duty, honor and discipline. In places like Kenya the “paramountcy of native interests” had been declared in the early 1920s. At face value, this notion meant that the colonial government and its men on the spot were protecting the feckless Africans from settler greed and international capitalism while developing African resources and minds for future self-rule.

  Mau Mau threatened to blow apart this charade of colonial trusteeship. For years the British had employed their own brand of violence in the colony to extract resources and maintain rule, but the Emergency brought an intensification and spread of white anger and brutality that converted racial exploitation and hatred into something far more lethal. Kenya was not the first time, nor would it be the last, in which the British used violence and repression to maintain rule over its twentieth-century empire. At the start of the century there was the Boer War in South Africa, and later there were the brutal tactics deployed in Palestine and M
alaya. These cases are significant not because they represent other instances where colonial violence was widespread but because each one had an impact, through the sharing of policy or manpower, or both, on the implementation of Emergency powers in Kenya. Further, in the history of the transfer of ideas and people around the British Empire, Kenya would later provide models for interrogation and dentention used in colonies like Northern Ireland.

  It is in this light that the government’s refusal to end the bloodshed in Kenya must be at least partly understood. Pulling out of Kenya because of Britain’s bad behavior would shatter a carefully cultivated colonial image. So too would have the findings of any independent judicial inquiry into the Pipeline and Emergency villages. The rationale for empire had been built around the civilizing mission. If British colonialism’s superficial, and deceptive, nature had been exposed in Kenya, what possible justification would be left for the anachronism of British colonial rule in a post–World War II world community? If the truth about Kenya were to become known, British colonial rule would be comparable to that of the Germans, the French, and even King Leopold of Belgium.

  Hindsight about high politics is easier than analyzing popular opinion. The real dilemma, some fifty years later, is comprehending why the British public was so silent on the issue of colonial atrocities during Mau Mau. By virtue of the debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords, and the popular press, Mau Mau and the colonial atrocities it inspired were very much a part of British public discourse. In fact, press coverage reached a vast readership, which included not just the white-collar middle and upper classes but the lower-middle and working classes as well, thanks in large part to the British tabloids. Both the Daily Mirror, which routinely backed the Labour Party, and the Conservative-leaning Daily Mail found much to report in Kenya, filling their pages with lurid atrocities and breaking scandals. For all their sensationalism, however, these tabloids also brought hard news about Britain’s empire, news like Castle’s tour of Kenya, to its combined daily readership of some 15 million people. Then there were the Observer, the Times, the Daily Worker, the Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman and Nation, and the Daily Telegraph, as well as pamphlets from missionaries and extra-Parliamentary interest groups, which each covered the outbreak of Mau Mau, the reported savagery of the oath takers, and atrocities by the British colonial forces. It was the press that helped to turn Mau Mau into a British household word, and indeed into a term that continues to have common currency. In fact, not since the phrase “the Black Hole of Calcutta” became part of everyday British discourse over a century earlier had empire entered popular language and culture with so much impact. 114

  The stereotype of Mau Mau helps us understand British silence. From the moment Britons first heard of Mau Mau’s beginnings, the movement and its name became synonymous with the worst kind of savage terror. 115 Except for the Daily Worker, every newspaper in Britain, and around the world for that matter, gave its readers lurid accounts of Mau Mau bestiality, accounts that ranged from the relatively straightforward to the utterly sensational. 116 Before the New Statesman and Nation began criticizing the colonial government and demanding independent inquiries into the camps and villages, it labeled the Mau Mau oath as “nasty mumbo-jumbo” and declared that “people are being murdered in their beds and children hacked to pieces [by Mau Mau].” 117 So too did the Manchester Guardian condemn the “filthy poison of Mau Mau” and its “barbarous” oath, while supporting the settlers and the understandable panic that gripped their community. 118 Even Fenner Brockway was quoted in the liberal paper, describing Mau Mau as “an ugly and brutal form of extreme nationalism. It is based on frustration. Frustration brings bitterness and bitterness brings viciousness.” 119 If such accounts of Mau Mau terror were coming from papers representing the views of the left, the same publications that would soon rip into British colonial excesses, it is not difficult to imagine what was being printed in the conservative newspapers, particularly tabloids like the Daily Mail. Grisly photographs of alleged oathing ceremonies and murderous Mau Mau activities were splashed alongside headlines decrying the movement’s “terrorism” and bloody cannibalistic rituals. The coverage had a patina of the occult, a kind of incomprehensible African black magic that had preyed in the recesses of racist minds for years. Everyone’s worst black African nightmare had become a reality.

  To the British public, it seemed that civilization itself was at stake in Kenya. The British government and the press had the nation convinced that Mau Mau was slaughtering Europeans in vast numbers, and that its terror was undermining any sense of law and order in the colony. Also, the African loyalists, the representation of British colonial success, needed British protection and understanding. “How can we treat these people who have thrown in their lot with us and with the future of Kenya,” Lennox-Boyd publicly reasoned, “in precisely the same legalistic manner as we are obliged to treat those who are convinced Mau Mau?” 120 With the perception that countless settlers and British supporters were dying at the hands of the bloodthirsty Mau Mau, with the very roots of civilization threatened by unspeakable terror, it becomes easier to contextualize the lack of public support for the mounting allegations of cruelty and human rights violations against the colonial government.

  The British public was misled. Government rhetoric had British citizens believing that their boys in Kenya were fighting a war for human progress and against godless savages bent on destroying Christian values. It might have been a little bloody at times, but, so went the rationale, think about all of the hearts and minds the benevolent colonial officials were saving. There was Lennox-Boyd, standing in the well of the House of Commons, declaring that no independent inquiry was needed, that the offenses were one-offs, and that British crimes were not really crimes anyway. Lending an air of credibility to this version of events was the public ambivalence of Archbishop Beecher, as well as the local missionaries, all of whom, regardless of any personal allegiances, were much more interested in the prospect of redeeming lost Mau Mau souls than they were in ameliorating the brutal conditions under which their future converts were living.

  Nevertheless, the evidence kept coming in, and still nothing was done. The British became distracted by other pressing issues, most especially postwar reconstruction. Rationing continued until 1953, and economic recovery was slow. There was also great sympathy for “our boys” overseas, many of whom had won enormous respect for their gallantry in Korea. Many of the Labour MPs’ allegations must be considered in the context of the Cold War. Although Mau Mau was not a communist movement, the fact that the conservative press often labeled Castle, Brockway, and other members of the Labour Party as socialists lent a suspiciously Red air to the crisis in Kenya.

  In the post–World War II era few Britons were interested in human rights abuses occurring in the empire. The knowledge of brutalities in Kenya simply did not have much of an impact on the daily concerns of the average British citizen. For Labour Party activists the violence, murders, and detention without trial in Kenya were important; indeed, for many Labour leaders the issues were moral ones that went to the heart of their party’s values. But their belief ran against the popular understanding of empire, particularly in Africa, where in the 1950s any discussions of race and social development still inspired nineteenth-century reactions. People were much less inclined to care about colonial atrocities when African lives were at stake, and particularly when those lives had been corrupted by the Mau Mau oath. Thus it is easier to understand why the leaders of the Labour Party, men like Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, were never front and center in the campaign against the Conservative government’s actions in Kenya. Instead, the Labour MPs leading the charge, with the exception of Aneurin Bevan, were relative lightweights. For her part, Castle would not be at the forefront of Labour politics until 1964, when Harold Wilson appointed her to his cabinet as minister of overseas development. Until then, she was never in a position to strike any political bargains in the government; nor was she taken s
eriously by her fellow Labour MPs, who viewed her causes as self-promotional. In the end, despite shared Labour outrage, no one in the leadership of the party really wanted to rock the boat over Mau Mau, particularly in view of the widespread public apathy about Kenyan affairs. 121

  This silence around Mau Mau in the mid-1950s would send a dangerous signal to the British colonial government. Because of the public’s failure to act, Lennox-Boyd, Baring, and others assumed an endorsement of their policies and a belief in their justifications for harshly suppressing Mau Mau. Emboldened by the public’s apathy, they analyzed the situation in early 1957 and decided to break the remaining detainees in the Pipeline once and for all by using the most extreme form of officially sanctioned violence ever seen in colonial Kenya. This new assault would be called, ironically, Operation Progress.