Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  In early 1957 Monkey Johnston sat in the tranquillity of the Cottage Hospital in the foothills of Mount Kenya. He came with a gift in hand, a copy of Philip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India, for the man lying in the bed next to him. The patient was in a cast that extended from his foot to his thigh—a victim of an unfortunate squash accident on the court at the nearby European-only Outspan Hotel. He was one of the British colonial government’s young district officers serving in Kenya, and his name was Terence Gavaghan.

  Gavaghan was by all accounts, particularly his own, a formidable human being. When not nursing a torn Achilles tendon, he was an imposing figure. His height—well over six feet—his short cropped hair, solid physique, piercing blue eyes, and bent nose all gave him an air of masculine toughness. Prior to Monkey Johnston’s unannounced bedside visit, Gavaghan had served the Crown for nearly thirteen years, most recently in the camps and villages of Nyeri District. But the thirty-four-year-old was by no means a prototypical British colonial officer. Instead, as Gavaghan recounts in his first autobiography, Corridors of Wire, he was “a loner and a maverick.” He also elaborates on his own outsider status and alludes to the purpose of Johnston’s hospital visit, writing under the pseudonym Corrigan:

  Corrigan [Gavaghan] is, by background and self-esteem, in the service but not of it and he knows it. It riles him, so he takes a perverse pride in being different….[He] himself was not one of “us” although no one quite knew why. There was always surrounding him a sense of instinctive restiveness as at the presence of a different species of animal at the waterhole. Here he saw an advantage. Colville [Johnston] had said that the detention camps were a “no-go” area for the others so he would be effectively among them but not of them. No one was going to envy him the task itself. They needed its success, but did not want the responsibility for its performance…. Corrigan [Gavaghan] was no paragon of gentleness. He knew his temper and the usually suppressed urge to violence when thwarted. It overtook him more strongly when he lacked for sex too long. 28

  It was only Gavaghan who did not know why he was “not one of ‘us.’” Other British colonial officers were irritated by his renegade mentality and insatiable sexual appetite. There was also the matter of Gavaghan’s ethnic background. He was of Irish descent, something that was hardly unimportant to the public-school and Oxbridge crowd around him. Gavaghan did not enjoy the ruling-class pedigree shared by his peers. He was indeed an outsider and therefore someone who, in an embarrassing situation, could be sacrificed, making him the perfect person to spearhead a new campaign in the Pipeline. Johnston had secured his heavy hand.

  There remained at least thirty thousand detainees who required breaking, and Johnston was prepared to give Gavaghan free license to do whatever was necessary to force them to confess. Gavaghan was appointed to the newly created position of district officer in charge of rehabilitation and was answerable only to Johnston and the governor. When later reflecting on this new position, Gavaghan emphasized, “There was no way in which I could assess the magnitude and nature of what was being asked of me since there was no precedent for it and no guide book to the way out of the impasse…. I had only that most dangerous thing, an irrational and unjustified belief in my ability to face the challenge of the impossible.” 29 Johnston did point Gavaghan in the direction of a solution. At Gathigiriri Camp, which was one of the five camps on the Mwea plain, a prisons staff officer by the name of John Cowan was working on a new method for breaking the hard core. It was something called the dilution technique, and its impact in the camps would be unparalleled.

  The dilution technique was straightforward. Under Cowan’s direction, camp officials would take fifty detainees in leg irons from one of the other four Mwea camps and send them to Gathigiriri. According to Cowan’s carefully worded recollection, once the lorryload arrived,

  [the European officers] isolated a small number of uncooperative detainees who were surrounded by prison staff. [The detainees] were ordered, and refused, to carry out some simple task, and were then forced physically to comply by the preponderance of warders, thus submitting, however symbolically, to hitherto resisted discipline. They were then harangued without respite, by rehabilitation staff and selected detainees working together, until finally they confessed their oaths. 30

  Two related strategies upheld Cowan’s dilution technique. First, camp officials had to separate detainees from the other hard core and arrange them into small, manageable groups. Then they had to use unbridled brute force to overpower the Mau Mau adherents, using fists, clubs, truncheons, whips, and any other weapons at their disposal. This brutality would continue until the detainees cooperated by listening to orders, working, and ultimately confessing.

  In the dilution technique colonial officials believed they had discovered the beginnings of a systematic approach to brutalizing detainees and forcing them to confess. Countless other forms of torture were employed in the Pipeline, but they were disorganized and inefficient in comparison, and none held the promise of dilution, a quick and complete repudiation of Mau Mau. Reports were sent to Nairobi detailing the technique’s success in breaking the hard core. New batches were being dispatched regularly to Gathigiriri, where each detainee was individually overpowered by Cowan, other officers, African warders, and former Mau Mau adherents, or the surrenders. It was clear that the majority of the detainees, most of whom had been uncooperative for years, were finally cooperating and even confessing. The minister for defense, Jake Cusack, went to witness dilution personally and was so impressed by the results that he immediately recommended the tactic be exported to other camps. At a moment when everyone in the government was under enormous pressure to empty the Pipeline, Cowan offered a tangible and proven solution to the release dilemma. 31

  But there was one small problem. Detainees were dying, something Johnston knew well when he paid Gavaghan his bedside visit. In one case Baring sent a secret telegraph to the colonial secretary in early 1957, reporting that a Gathigiriri detainee undergoing dilution, one Muchiri Githuma, was “severely beaten and died as a result.” 32 The governor planned to blame the murder on the African rehabilitation assistant and the surrenders working with him, noting that “no Europeans were involved.” 33 Meanwhile Baring put a temporary stop to the dilution technique, although neither he nor Lennox-Boyd had any intention of abandoning it altogether. An internal visiting committee was sent out to tour the Mwea camps and later reported, “It soon became apparent to us that there has been a marked deterioration in the advance of rehabilitation in the Camp, which we were told was attributed to the strict withdrawal of any form of ‘physical persuasion.’” 34 By now there was no doubt that to break the hard core there had to be systematic and relentless brute force. “If we abandon the ‘dilution’ method,” the governor wrote, “a severe check would be given to a process which is not only working well now but also offers hope of bringing down a ‘pipeline’ towards release many Mau Mau detainees who a few months ago we all considered would remain irreconcilable for years.” 35 Baring, Lennox-Boyd, and Johnston all knew that the dilution technique had to be reintroduced, but this time they needed someone on the ground who could oversee the operation, someone who could do what needed to be done.

  It was at this juncture that a now healed Gavaghan stepped in, proclaiming his new mission Operation Progress. He would resurrect the dilution technique into a systematized and well-executed program of brutality. To do this, he enlisted the help of the prisons and rehabilitation officers posted at the Mwea camps. Without question, Gavaghan’s right-hand man was Cowan, and they proved a study in contrasts: Gavaghan, the physically imposing and emotionally passionate man, juxtaposed with the diminutive Cowan, whose coldhearted detachment from his work was stunning, given the level of brutality he was overseeing. Among those working alongside them were Ivan Hook, Emile Hawley, and David Blair, all still technically under Askwith’s authority, and the most notorious African rehabilitation assistants at Mwea, Isaiah Mwai Mathenge and Jeremiah Kiereini.<
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  Under Gavaghan’s command, these British officers and their African assistants began preparing a force of African warders capable of launching Operation Progress. The first step was to break the detainees already being held in Mwea, which meant an all-out blitz inside the compounds. Gavaghan’s own description of this initial “show of force,” as he later called it, gives some sense of the atmosphere he was creating.

  We…decided to apply the first control operation to the subdivision of the Thiba camp compound containing 1,000 men into four of 250, leaving a fenced cruciform access corridor between. This required advance preparation of tall posts, deep holes and rolls of barbed wire, with implements. We also recruited from eager volunteers a “Praetorian Guard” of over 100 educated young Kikuyu of good physique and address. They were quickly drilled in simple unarmed combat and equipped with short wooden truncheons slung from leather belts binding judo style heavy cotton tunics over calf length trousers. Their heads were shaven for effect as well as protection…. Outnumbered by five to one, we had prepared against resistance of some kind, but did not expect any concerted attack. The options open to either side were limited by space and weapons to hand, if not by hours of daylight. The front lines and outer fringes did not so much crumble as concertina, scrambling awkwardly into each other until no inch was left. We could not have imagined the hysterical crescendo of a convulsion which imploded within their ranks. Limb intertwined with limb in a tangle of bodies, squirming upwards into a living mound…. Fists, nails, feet and teeth were engaged. Truncheons were not drawn except in defence. How long it lasted I could not tell, but in about two hours, singly or in clusters, frog-marched or stumbling loose, the whole thousand sat and slumped on the grass outside in several large rings. 36

  The new intake procedure came next, something Gavaghan later described as “a kind of rape.” 37 Small batches of detainees from Manyani, home to some twenty thousand hard-core detainees, were shackled and transferred to Mwea by rail. Upon arrival, they were faced by a mob of European officers, African assistants, askaris, and surrenders. During the intake, Gavaghan’s men used raw physical power to force the detainees to change from their Manyani clothes into a new camp uniform and submit to a shaving. The whole operation, or the “rape,” hinged on the use of brutality, something Gavaghan recounts in his second memoir.

  At first it seemed that…persuasive voices and the familiar faces through the wire had taken effect and the shaving of heads began without fuss or resistance. Suddenly a remembered howl sounded from the rear and a man was thrown to the ground thrashing about wildly, followed instantly by several more, and a general melee took place. The warders had been trained for just such an outbreak. One took their man in an armlock, tripped and forced him to the ground, head pressed sideways against the angle of the body, astride which the other sat while the barber did his work. 38

  Other compounds holding already cooperative detainees awaited them. The new intakes were under strict orders: follow all commands, labor on the irrigation scheme, attend the propaganda lectures, and confess. But many detainees, like Nderi, would refuse to submit and so would quickly learn why Mwea was called “Hell on Earth.”

  At the same time that Lennox-Boyd was publicly discrediting Fletcher and Meldon as his way of denying allegations of brutality in Kenya’s camps and of refusing any independent investigation, he was poised to endorse Gavaghan’s Operation Progress. Just as he had received plenty of information about the true conditions in the Pipeline, so too had Lennox-Boyd been fully briefed on the dilution technique. Baring and his attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, sent numerous secret memoranda to the Colonial Office, outlining the plan for systematic use of brute force and asking for official approval from the colonial secretary. “Gavaghan has been perfectly open with us,” the governor secretly wrote to Lennox-Boyd. “He has said that he can cope with a regular flow in of Manyani ‘Zs’ and turn them out later to the district camps. We believe that he will be able to go on doing this a very long way down the list of the worst detainees. But he can only do it if the hard cases are dealt with on their first arrival in a rough way…there must be with some a phase of violent shock.” 39 In a separate memorandum sent to the colonial secretary, Griffith-Jones provided extensive details of Mwea, details that he and several other high-level colonial officials in Kenya witnessed firsthand when they went to observe Gavaghan’s work. The attorney general, Jake Cusack, Thomas Askwith, Taxi Lewis, and others had seen detainees who refused to change their clothes “hit with fists and/or slapped with the open hand,” according to Griffith-Jones. He went on to write that in some cases “defiance was more obstinate, and on the first indication of such obstinacy three or four of the European officers immediately converged on the man and ‘rough-housed’ him, stripping his clothes off him, hitting him, on occasion kicking him, and, if necessary, putting him on the ground. Blows struck were solid, hard ones, mostly with closed fists and about the head, stomach, sides and back.” 40 Apparently, the colonial officials did not see some of the more brutal methods of persuasion, as the attorney general went on to suggest.

  Gavaghan explained, however, that there had, in past intakes, been more persistent resistors, who had had to be forcibly changed into the camp clothing; that some of them had started the “Mau Mau moan,” a familiar cry which was promptly taken up by the rest of the camp, representing a concerted and symbolic defiance of the camp authorities; that in such cases it was essential to prevent the infection of this “moan” spreading through the camp, and that accordingly a resistor who started it was promptly put on the ground, a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth; and that a man whose resistance could not be broken down was in the last resort knocked unconscious. 41

  At first Lennox-Boyd balked when he learned of Gavaghan’s methods. It was one thing to endorse unofficially the violence and torture that was ongoing in the camps and villages; it was another to make it officially sanctioned policy. The colonial secretary was clearly on the verge of adopting systematized brutality as a way of breaking down the tens of thousands of detainees who remained in the Pipeline, and his rationalization was the protection of the British colony. Sensing the questionable logic of this proposition, Griffith-Jones took charge, drafting a series of codes written in legal doublespeak, differentiating between something he termed legal compelling force from the otherwise illegal punitive force. Compelling force could be used “when immediately necessary to restrain or overpower a refractory detained person, or to compel compliance with a lawful order to prevent disorder.” 42 Punitive force was apparently used to describe any kind of unlawful physical punishment. This rhetorical hairsplitting provided some comfort to the colonial secretary, and he approved Regulation 17 of the Emergency (Detained Persons) Regulations, which gave license to all of his men on the spot to employ systematized violence in order to break down remaining detainees. 43

  The colonial secretary understood what was going on in Kenya, and this knowledge further inspired his efforts to protect his government with legal mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless, he turned his head and hoped it would all soon be over. Gavaghan certainly knew this, later writing, “The gap between the supreme policy makers with their grave political concerns, and the actions of location functionaries in a small remote place was too wide for mutual comprehension or proper control.” 44 This was all too true in late colonial Kenya, though certainly if Lennox-Boyd or the governor had wanted to assert “proper control,” they could have. Instead they vested men like Gavaghan with carte blanche to extract confessions, by whatever means necessary. “Punishment was being meted out which clearly skirted the edges of the quasi-legal concept of ‘compelling force,’” Gavaghan later conceded, describing it in this way:

  A dozen or so men in their twenties and thirties were half running at the level bent-kneed gait of rickshaw pullers, following an elliptical path in a single file around the hump [in the grass]. They carried galvanized iron buckets filled with mud and stones on woven grass circlets pla
ced on their shaven heads, gripped at the rim by each hand in turn, or by both if the bucket started to slip. Under the mud and sweat which streaked their faces, they were expressionless and made no attempt to cast down their buckets or run out of the ring in which they were enclosed…. This [was a] long practiced form of punishment, accurately known as “bucket fatigue.”…It was visually “brutal and degrading,” but was held to be both necessary and effective. 45

  It was not long before detainees at the Mwea camps, like others before them, began sneaking out letters of protest to British colonial officials, Labour MPs, and even the queen. But colonial officials in Nairobi and London did nothing. They instead forwarded the letters to Gavaghan, who had set up his own form of complaints department. First, he subjected several letter-writing detainees to what he called “a ‘square bashing’ exercise.” That is, a kind of bucket fatigue, with some extra brutality added in. Then, in his words, “the same day [as a ‘square bashing’], I brought a number of letters of complaint which had been returned through the Government to such varied addresses as ‘Queen Elizabeth’ or ‘Lake Success’ (United Nations). I read them aloud inside the full compound, explaining that they had been delivered, taken into account and sent back. I then tore them up publicly saying that, if they felt that they had scores to settle with me, I promised that after ‘freedom’ and Independence they would find my name board outside my house in Nairobi, which I would buy with my Kenya earnings.” 46