• Chapter Ten •
Detention Exposed
Hola Exile Camp
There was no other way [than to use force]. The men were obdurate and very dangerous…. You had to knock the evil out of a person.
—JOHN COWAN, senior prisons officer in charge of Mwea camps
Emergency powers, mass detention, violence unleashed and suppressed were not good arguments for political evolution, nor indeed the outward sign of good stewardship.
—TERENCE GAVAGHAN, district officer in charge of rehabilitation, Mwea camps1
STAGGERING TO HIS FEET WITH BLOOD OOZING FROM HIS NOSE AND mouth, Nderi Kagombe saw a double image of Isaiah Mwai Mathenge standing over him, his club ready to strike another blow. In front of Nderi lay the heavy metal bucket that he had been carrying on his head for nearly the entire morning. Much of the sand, urine, and feces mixture was still inside; some was caked on Nderi’s face. Exhaustion and a final blow to his nose had sent him tumbling to the ground, headfirst into the splattering excrement. “Mathenge was shouting at me to get up,” Nderi later remembered, “but I couldn’t. I was on my knees, but everything was moving and I couldn’t see Mathenge properly because my vision had been affected from carrying the bucket for so long and for being beaten with the clubs.” 2
After the warm-up of “bucket fatigue,” as camp authorities called it, Nderi was kicked along toward one of the cement-blocked screening rooms that were scattered throughout the five detention camps that made up Mwea. There he saw two men strung up by their ankles, hanging from the rafters. They were naked and dripping wet from the cold water that was being poured over their bodies. The man hanging nearest the door had blood and puss running from his nose, his face swollen and distorted. “The white man in charge was yelling at him,” Nderi later recalled. “He was shouting to confess, but there was no way this man could have spoken even if he had wanted to. To see the torture like this…I had become so used to it during my time in the Pipeline, but Mwea was different. They never stopped. It was day and night until we gave in. Those people running Mwea were like animals. Either you confessed, or you died.” 3
But Nderi was a survivor. It had been nearly three years since he had been sanitized, numbered, and subjected to the tortures of Wagithundia in Manyani’s Compound 6. In the interim he had been shackled, loaded onto a railcar and then into a ship’s cargo for transfer to the hard-core camp on Mageta Island. There his home was Compound 2—located on a high ridge above the water—where he was among the “blackest of the filthy pigs,” as one of the camp officials, nicknamed Gosma, called them. 4 Gosma was a British officer as notorious as Manyani’s Mapiga or Mackinnon Road’s Kenda Kenda, beating detainees mercilessly and meting out special treatment to those who refused to work. Whips, rubber hoses, truncheons, and sticks were all used, as were more inventive forms of torture. The swamp surrounding Mageta filled the island with mosquitoes. “A few times I saw the white man in charge order the askaris to take the sap from a certain leaf and rub it all over a detainee who had been shackled to a post,” recalled another former detainee from the Lake Victoria island. “Within no time the man would be covered with these mosquitoes, and it was such a terrible scene. If you saw these people afterwards, you would never have recognized them; their bodies had been devoured.” 5 In Nderi’s case the camp commandant “used to order two askaris to pin us down on our backs, facing the sun, and we were not allowed to even blink let alone shade our eyes.” 6 This would go on for several hours, though Nderi and others recalled how they could not control themselves; they had to close their eyes from time to time even if it meant a beating.
In return for his uncooperative behavior Nderi was sent to the dry heat and dust of Lodwar, not far from where Kenyatta and the other so-called masterminds were imprisoned. There Leslie Whitehouse, a British officer, was in charge, and the torture he handed out “convinced me to go and work,” Nderi remembered. “It didn’t mean I confessed,” he went on. “Many of us had agreed that working didn’t mean we were giving in.” For over a year Nderi labored building the local hospital, where, as the cement was drying on the floor inside, he took a stick and scratched in the words Icua Hospital (Hell Hospital) because, he said, “it was so unbearably hot there.” Taxi Lewis made frequent visits to the camp, and on one occasion not long after arriving he ordered the detainees to go to the dry riverbed to dig for water. “When we refused because we were not prisoners,” Nderi recalled, “we were beaten thoroughly after the white man named Lewis, who was then the commissioner of prisons, ordered that we be beaten for refusing to work. The askaris were let into our compounds and beat us indiscriminately with their batons. A lot of detainees were seriously injured after that.” 7
Nderi and several others were loaded into lorries for their journey to the Mwea camps. Bouncing along the unpaved roads, the detainees, many of whom had broken limbs and open wounds, were enveloped in choking dust for nearly two days before they reached Embu District. “We could see hundreds of detainees bent over the rice fields,” Nderi said. “The guards were all around just beating anyone who paused or stood up from their work. We had heard this was a very bad place, but I don’t think even we knew how bad it would be. It was the place where I was worn down.” When Nderi and the others were hustled off the lorries, dozens of armed guards as well as white officers were waiting for them. They were told to take off their clothes. They refused. They were told again, and again they refused. “The next thing we knew they set on us,” Nderi told me. “Several of them would just start beating us, and when some of us screamed they shoved dirt in our months. They beat one man, who was very injured already, unconscious. They ripped off my clothes and shaved off all of my hair. Then they put a uniform on me and then pushed me into one of the cages. That was my reception into Mwea. I was in Hell.” 8
Violence and torture had for years dominated life in Kenya’s camps. A pornography of terror, including public brutality, rape, and starvation, swept through the villages as well, and thousands died there. Yet Nderi, a man who lived through seven of the worst camps in the Pipeline, described Mwea as the nadir. Other survivors have similar memories. “It was Hell on Earth,” one man from Kiambu recalled. “It was where men were being killed,” another man from Nyeri went on. “It was where they finally broke us, where Satan defeated our God.” 9 All of these men arrived in the Mwea camps in the late 1950s and recall receptions similar to Nderi’s, relentless torture and work, and deaths. Little did they know either at the time or even today that the colonial government had singled them out. The governor and the colonial secretary decided in early 1957 that they had to break the remaining thirty thousand or so hard-core Mau Mau, and to do it they had to reverse their policy on permanent exile or drastically modify it. This was a radical step, and to understand it, and its ferocity, we need to look closely at decisions being made at the highest levels of British colonial governance.
At issue was the European Convention on Human Rights. For nearly five years the British had disregarded this treaty, believing that it did not apply to their African subjects in the empire, people whose level of social, cultural, and economic development left them decades if not generations away from the rights of international citizenship. But, as we have seen, rather than articulate these racist ideas publicly, the colonial government decided early on to derogate the Convention’s article prohibiting detention without trial by arguing that an Emergency was in place. This activated a loophole in the European Convention that permitted such human rights violations during periods of national emergency. The language of its Article 15 is startling, given that the accord was drawn up only shortly after the gross human rights violations of the Second World War. “In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation,” the article states, “any High Contracting Party may take measures derogating from its obligations under this Convention.” 10 Nations could detain without trial during wartime or in defense of national security. In Kenya’s case, were Baring to have lifted th
e Emergency, such a derogation would no longer have been possible, and the colonial government would have had no legal justification for indefinitely detaining the so-called hard core. 11
“How long can we hope to keep 12,000 people locked up?” Will Mathieson at the Colonial Office’s East Africa Department wrote in the summer of 1955. Further assessing the situation, he went on, “If we are not to be driven step by step to revocation of our statement that they will never return we must reconcile the bulk of them very quickly.” 12 His colleague Gorell Barnes concurred: “My own feeling is that, after a great deal of further effort and correspondence, we might be able to agree on provisions which it might be possible to keep in force for a very long time, provided that the number of ‘exiles’ were very much fewer than at present contemplated.” 13 Clearly, the question dogging the Colonial Office was not the basic human rights of those men and women still in detention. Lennox-Boyd and his men had already decided to violate the European Convention after the Emergency ended. At issue was to what degree the international treaty could be violated without resulting in a censure.
Baring was no less involved in the collusion going on behind the scene. He and the other colonial policy makers viewed the European Convention as an irritant, something that was not immutable, but rather open to political negotiation. Apparently, this sentiment was shared by other signatories as well. Baring said as much when he wrote, “Her Majesty’s Government could only in the first instance be expected to justify a breach of the Convention to the other signatories if the numbers concerned were not too large.” 14 Both he and Lennox-Boyd were keenly aware that Britain’s future rule over Kenya turned on keeping the political detainees in exile. The grand design for breaking Mau Mau, forcing its supporters to cooperate and submit to British colonial authority, and installing the loyalists as the Kikuyu leaders of the future would surely come undone were the politicals to be released. By early 1957 the Colonial Office decided to throw its support behind the permanent banishment of the most politically threatening hard core, a few thousand in all, provided the rest of the detainees were let go. The agenda was clear: empty the Pipeline of most of the hard core, and new legislation authorizing permanent exile would take care of the rest. 15
This mandate was no small challenge to the colonial government’s men on the spot. For over two years Baring and Lennox-Boyd had anxiously labored under pressure to get the remaining tens of thousands of detainees out of the Pipeline. They had to contend with the steadily mounting criticism in Britain from the left as well as the allegations of brutality and murder, not to mention the staggering costs of the war. There was every reason to accelerate the rate of release, and Monkey Johnston was the point man overseeing this vexing challenge. His primary job as special commissioner was to get the detainees out of the Pipeline, and from the start he approached this task with a calculated bureaucratic ruthlessness. As noted earlier, first he adjusted downward the standard-of-living estimates for the entire Kikuyu population, thereby creating space in the reserves for the future release of tens of thousands of detainees. This was accomplished with the stroke of a pen. The problem of forcing confessions from the remaining group of Mau Mau adherents in the Pipeline, which remained their only ticket out, was another matter. 16
When Johnston took up his post in late 1955, thousands of detainees like Nderi Kagombe were still refusing to confess. Some would eventually be worn down by the sheer cumulative effects of labor and torture; others would submit after falling prey to informants and surrenders. A year later, there remained over thirty thousand men and women who would still not give in. To make matters worse, they began to resist collectively. Several months after Nderi left Mageta Island the men in Compound 2 decided to fight back. In one former detainee’s words, “We rioted to show the commandant that we would not die like cowards, even if some of us had had our manhood taken.” 17 The mayhem began when the askaris attempted to haul off several men accused of causing trouble. Under newly revised Emergency Regulations, even the most minor of infractions were deemed “major offences.” 18 Camp authorities could legally put a detainee in solitary confinement for two weeks with little or no food. “There was no way we were going to let them take our brothers,” Wilson Ndirangu later recalled. “We attacked the guards, and then all hell broke loose.” 19 For four days the detainees and the guards, reinforced by the General Service Unit and the Kenya Police Reserve, fought for control of the compound. Then, as Wilson later related, Major Mwangi—one of the prison officers in charge—organized a final crackdown. “We could see from our compounds that the whole camp was surrounded by the GSU, the regular police, and the KPR,” Wilson said. He then went on to describe what happened next.
We knew that we were to prepare for battle…. Those in the kitchen split as many firewood planks as they could. Then, Major Mwangi climbed onto the guard’s tower, ready to give orders to his troops. He gave an order, and all the white officers came. We were ordered out of our cage and told to squat outside. We obeyed. They came and surrounded us, surveying us. The officer on the tower, Major Mwangi, raised a red flag, meaning that we should be beaten, and if anyone got killed there would be no case, because we had disobeyed. He gave the order, and the white officers and their askaris started beating us…. As per our plan, I stood up and started screaming. I screamed three times, and that was meant to alert the other cages in the compound. By the end of my three screams, none of the cages had any doors because the detainees had ripped them off. Other detainees started distributing the pieces of firewood to the others. The askaris had shields, clubs, and metal helmets on their heads. Major Mwangi put up the white flag to signal a stop of the beating, but the battle went on that way for many days, until they began to starve us. 20
It was the food denial that finally ended the standoff. Government reports suggest that the detainees engaged in a hunger strike voluntarily, but those who were there in the camp, men like Muraya Mutahi, remember otherwise. “[We] were denied food for about six or seven days. By the end of six days the room in which we slept—because we could not summon enough strength to go outside—was stinking so badly…. We did not stay much longer at Mageta because we fought with the askaris there and refused to work. After we recovered from the imposed starvation we were split into two groups. One was taken to Hola, and the other was Lodwar. I was taken to Lodwar.” 21 In some ways Muraya was lucky. Camp authorities singled out nearly nine hundred of the rioters at random, tried them in a makeshift court, and sent them on to Embakasi Prison—or “Satan’s Paradise,” as some former Mau Mau adherents call it.
Riots were now also breaking out in other Pipeline camps, at the same time that Johnston and his colleagues were trying to accelerate the rate of release. The camps had succeeded in further embittering many of the detainees, numbers of whom had become hard core only because of their treatment in the Pipeline. Feeding the detainees’ anger was the perennial issue of land. Numerous camp officials commented on this, including one of Askwith’s men in the Rift Valley, who wrote:
The principle underlying idea of all detainees is still that their fathers’ land was stolen by “Government” and that no compensation has ever been paid. This doctrine is so prevalent that I suggest it would be worth while for a booklet in the vernacular to be produced giving the true history of the Carter Commission and its awards. I have been unable to borrow a copy of the Report for use but something of this sort is much needed. 22
But many detainees had already been bombarded with government propaganda declaring the fairness of colonial land policies and the illegitimacy of Mau Mau’s battle cry for “a return of stolen land.” The absurdity of attempts to convince the Kikuyu of the impartiality and equitability of land expropriation was not lost on Askwith. At the time he wrote, “Whatever you say the Kikuyu will not be satisfied that they have been treated justly.” 23 Later, when reflecting on this issue at the heart of Mau Mau, Askwith said, “If you wanted to solve the bigger problem, you had to give these people land, you had to acc
ord them a degree of humanity, which meant you had to understand their grievances. You had to understand that you weren’t going to win this thing by putting them all back in the reserves, where there was no way they could live with the amount of land that they had.” 24
But forcing the Kikuyu to cooperate and sending them back to the overcrowded, famine-stricken reserves was exactly what Johnston and the governor planned. First, the special commissioner attempted to increase the rate of release by fine-tuning the established colonial policy of divide and rule. He decided to introduce a new classification system, one that replaced the color system of “black,” “grey,” and “white” with a much more complex letter-based system. “Blacks” were separated into “Z1s” and “Z2s,” “greys” into “Ys,” and “whites” became either “Xs” or “Cs.” 25 By separating the most recalcitrant “blacks” from those who were at least agreeing to work, Johnston thought he would have better luck at breaking the hard core. The maneuver was an administrative nightmare and scarcely complied with the governor’s new quotas; he was now demanding, in the spring of 1956, a doubling in the rate of release, from one thousand per month to two thousand. 26 A few months later, Johnston learned that the twelve thousand spots for permanent exile had been reduced to a few thousand, leaving him with the responsibility for breaking an additional eight or nine thousand detainees who were considered to be among the most truculent in the Pipeline, but for whom exile could no longer be justified. Johnston again tried to refine the classification system with the idea that more discrete categories would separate the waverers from the true hard core, theoretically freeing them from contact with the worst Mau Mau dogma and thus removing any hesitation they might have had in confessing the oath. There were now “Zs” and “Y1s,” “YYs” and “XRs.” The whole exercise seemed like a parody of bureaucratic procedure. 27 Johnston, hardly a fool, quickly realized the futility of his changes. Throwing away his pen, he looked instead for someone with a heavy hand to do his dirty work.
Imperial Reckoning Page 43
