The colonial government tried to massage the facts by arranging an internal investigation. Senior Resident Magistrate W. H. Goudie took charge, opening an inquest into the Hola deaths on March 18. His investigation focused on one of the top camp officials from the original Operation Progress, Gavaghan’s right-hand man, John Cowan. In early February Cowan had been sent to Hola by Taxi Lewis to deal with the hard core who were still refusing to cooperate. When Cowan arrived, he found that the camp was divided into two sections. There was the open camp for detainees who were cooperating and willing to work, among them Gakaara wa Wanjau, the famed Kikuyu intellectual. After being released from the Pipeline, Gakaara had been rejected by the loyalists in his home area and was sent to Hola, where he was later joined by his recently released wife, Shifra. Together, they set up housekeeping in the insufferable heat and mosquito-infested new settlement scheme, a place they believed they would have to endure for the rest of their lives. 128
It was the hard core in the nearby closed camp that was the motive for Cowan’s new assignment. Whatever tactics he tried, the camp commandant, G. M. Sullivan, could not force these men to cooperate, let alone work. Cowan arrived on the scene, assessed the situation, and subsequently drew up what was to be the famous Cowan Plan. In it he directed Sullivan to take out small batches of twenty or so detainees to the irrigation project and order them to work. “Should they refuse to work,” Cowan went on to direct, “they would be manhandled to the site of work and forced to carry out the task.” 129 The Cowan Plan was a departure from the earlier tactics used at Mwea only in one sense: it was written for internal distribution. The plan was reviewed by Johnston, Cusack, and Taxi Lewis, all of whom were determined to show the hard core who was in command. Still, they all knew the Cowan Plan could be a recipe for disaster, with Lewis later conceding, “It would mean the use of a certain degree of force in which operation someone might get hurt or even killed.” 130 For his part, Sullivan was wary about the scheme, knowing that the solidarity and intractability of the detainees in his camp made it an incredibly risky venture.
Permission to implement the Cowan Plan was given a day after the House of Commons voted to defeat the motion to establish an independent inquiry into the camps. A week later Sullivan moved ahead, and what happened next more than fulfilled Taxi Lewis’s worst fear. Even the sanitized government reports issued by the internal investigation would reveal clearly that the detainees were beaten severely by the guards. At specific issue, however, was whether Sullivan tried to put a stop to the beatings once they got out of hand. British officers said he did. Detainees like Paul Mahehu, though, had a different story to tell. 131 After refusing to buckle at Athi River, Paul had been shipped to Hola, where he would join the ill-fated group of detainees assigned to the working party on March 3, 1959. “We were selected a hundred people from the closed camp, which housed about four hundred detainees,” Paul began. He then went on to relate what happened next.
We were told that we would go to work. The askaris were all armed with heavy sticks. We were taken to the trench, which was being used to bring water for the whole Hola irrigation system…. What we were required to work on was the enlargement of the experimental garden. The most surprising thing was that for each detainee there were about five askaris—that is, for one hundred detainees there were well over five hundred askaris there. It was something that had been planned in advance, and any observer could have seen that it was a prepared attack. The shovels had been put a short distance away, but they were very well guarded. When the officer in charge [Sullivan] informed us that we would be required to work, we hesitated. But a fellow detainee named Munyi Mutahi advised us to agree to work, as it was clear that the officer was only hoping for an excuse to set the armed askaris on us. We agreed and asked to be given our tasks, but they were impossible ones. We were each to dig about one hundred cubic feet of earth in two hours. We complained, and the white officer said that we would have to do it, but we maintained that the task was too much. When he ordered us to do the tasks a third time, he blew his whistle and ordered the askaris on to us. It was as if the askaris had been coached about it. The dust that was there cannot be described. Even today, whenever I remember about Hola, I shed tears. I cannot understand how I escaped death on that day. The askaris were so many, their clubs would hit against each other as several askaris tried to hit the same detainee. I was hit, and I fell down. The detainee who fell over me had his skull broken, and I was covered in his brains and blood. I pretended to be dead. Other detainees continued to be beaten long after they had died. The first time the six detainees died. The white officer blew his whistle to stop the beating and then asked, “How many detainees have been killed?” 132
Rather than stop the beatings, Sullivan ordered the six bodies dragged away and then blew his whistle again. The mayhem started up once more until another shrill of the whistle. Sullivan again asked how many had died; this time the number had reached ten, at which point, according to Paul, he ordered the beatings to stop. The survivors were later taken to the camp clinic, including Paul, who was in his own words “full of blood and brains but still alive.” Along with scores of others he stayed there for several weeks, and together they watched when the eleventh man died from the compelling force that had been imprinted all over him. 133
When it came time for Goudie’s report, there was only so much the senior magistrate could do to obscure the actual causes of death. Given that Castle had exposed the truth about the “water cart” incident, Goudie had little choice but to reveal, albeit with scant detail, how the detainees died. “In each case death was found to have been caused by shock and haemorrhage due to multiple bruising caused by violence” (emphasis in original), Goudie summarized in his report. “There was no serious combined attempt [by the detainees] to attack warders…[and] there was a very considerable amount of beating by warders with batons solely for the purpose of compelling them to work or punishing them for refusing to work.” 134
When the senior magistrate went on to apportion blame for the murders, he ultimately found that no one could be held accountable. Surely Goudie was not about to be the one to bring down the British colonial government in Kenya; nor was he going to offer any findings that would derail Lennox-Boyd’s or Baring’s desperate attempts to protect their men on the spot, not to mention themselves and Prime Minister Macmillan. “At first sight it might be considered extraordinary that such opinions should be recorded in view of my finds of illegal beatings having taken place at the work site,” Goudie prefaced his summary remarks. He then continued:
The following factors, however, in my view clearly justify such opinions. It is impossible to determine beyond reasonable doubt which injuries on the deceased were caused by justifiable and which by unjustifiable blows, and which injury or combination of injuries resulted in the shock and haemorrhage causing death. It is impossible to say on the evidence with any degree of certainty which particular person struck the blows, whether justifiable or unjustifiable…. The Cowan Plan, which apparently had government approval and backing, gave, intentionally or unintentionally carte blanche in “forcing detainees to carry out the task.” If criminal offences were committed which were clearly illegal, the defence of “superior orders” would be of no avail, but I do not consider that the orders were so clearly illegal on the face of the orders as to justify my recommending the preferment of charges. That is, however, ultimately a question of policy, which is a matter for the Attorney General and not for me to decide. 135
But little could be expected of Kenya’s attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, as he had been the chief legal strategist for officially sanctioned violence in the Pipeline. Griffith-Jones was not about to prosecute anyone, in spite of the fact that he had himself been a Japanese prisoner during the Second World War. In fact, he led the charge in pushing Gavaghan’s Operation Progress, offering up his brainchild of compelling versus punitive force to persuade the Colonial Office to move forward with institutionalized violence.
Lennox-Boyd and Baring were left to deal with the political fallout back in London. As soon as Goudie’s findings were made public, the Opposition issued a motion condemning Hola and demanding a full public investigation into the incident. A first debate was set for mid-June in the Commons, and in the interim the prime minister and his men worked overtime to control the damage and to calculate how they might avoid an independent investigation. Baring began by inviting a host of newspaper reporters to a choreographed tour of Hola Camp. Many left with a favorable impression, printing dispatches that helped mitigate the earlier, damaging newspaper accounts of the camp. 136 The government then launched an internal disciplinary proceeding against Hola’s commandant, Sullivan, and a handful of his lieutenants. Macmillan now stepped in to sort out the bigger issue of how in the weeks to come to handle Castle and the rest of the Opposition.
In a cabinet meeting, several of the prime minister’s men, though divided on the issue of an independent inquiry, felt strongly that responsibility for Hola should be assigned to Baring and his colonial government in Kenya. 137 Baring flew to London to insist that he would not allow his men, particularly Cowan and Cusack, to be made into “scape-goats.” 138 Policies endorsing the use of systematized violence had been approved at the highest levels, starting with Gavaghan’s Operation Progress, and he was not about to let his boys, or himself, take the blame. After a private session with his chief whip and Lennox-Boyd, Macmillan agreed. The prime minister then set down a clear course of action, and neither he nor anyone in his government would deviate from it in the weeks and months to come. First, they would refuse any independent inquiry into the past events in the Pipeline; rather, they would establish an internal review, called the Fairn Commission, that would offer guidelines for the future administration of the camps only. 139 Macmillan, Lennox-Boyd, and Lord Perth (minister of state for the colonies) would take the lead in stressing their government’s success in winning the war against terrorism in Kenya, and with it concede that one or two unfortunate incidents may have occurred but that they needed to be understood in light of the extraordinary achievement of rehabilitation in the face of unimaginable Mau Mau savagery. 140
There was strong resistance by some in Macmillan’s cabinet to this course of action. The most strident calls for censure came from his own attorney general, Reginald Manningham-Buller. Behind the scenes, the prime minister was tenuously pulling his dissenters along when a most incredible announcement was made by the Colonial Office. In the middle of the gathering storm centered largely on the Cowan Plan, Lennox-Boyd bestowed upon Cowan the honor of Member of the British Empire (M.B.E.). It was an extraordinary bungle, one that prompted Macmillan to write in his diary, not for the first time, that the colonial secretary’s shop was “a badly run office.” 141 Nonetheless, in an election year of all times, there was dogged resolve that no one was going to be sacrificed.
After squaring off for the first debate in the Commons in June 1959, Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary that “the debate has gone as ‘well as could be expected’ but it has been an anxious day.” 142 In hindsight, the drama was predictable, with the Opposition demanding straight answers and calling for an inquiry and a well-prepared Lennox-Boyd dodging and weaving in remarkable and typical form. It was, though, just a preview of what was to come in the next debate on the massacre. MPs on both sides of the political divide postured, threw “barbed personal criticisms,” and gave indications, both strong and subtle, of their positions, not just on Hola but on the question of Britian’s colonial mission more broadly. Ultimately, Macmillan’s greatest challenge came not from Labour but from onetime Tory MP Enoch Powell. Powell had left the Conservatives six months earlier after a falling-out occasioned by the prime minister’s fiscal policies, and so was preparing to use Hola as a pretext for launching a vigorous attack against the government’s colonial policies. “The Tory Party,” he believed, “must be cured of the British Empire, of the pitiful yearning to cling to the relics of a bygone system…. The courage to act rationally will follow from the courage to see other things as they are.” 143
For Powell, colonial heads would have to roll. “A large slice of responsibility for this administrative disaster lies at a high level in Kenya,” he told Macmillan, “and I trust that it is going to be accepted publicly and in the only way possible.” 144 If by this he meant the colonial secretary had to step down, he was not alone. Labour MPs were calling for his immediate resignation, and Lennox-Boyd himself even pressed Macmillan to let him leave the helm of the Colonial Office. But the prime minister would hear none of it. His mind was made up, reasoning that Lennox-Boyd’s resignation would lead to irreparable damage to his government, suggesting as it would culpability for Hola, not to mention the scores of other alleged atrocities. Moreover, Macmillan said, it “might make the more extreme Africans feel that they had now got the white man on the run.” 145
Closing ranks only stoked the political fires. Certainly, outrage was expected from the Opposition, but it was Lord Lambton’s break from the Tory party line that sent a clear message to Macmillan: his handling of the Hola massacre was proving disastrous. In early July the Conservative MP felt compelled to publish a scathing article in the Evening Standard. The headline “When Loyalty Is Not Enough” made his message clear. His concern was less about the human rights violations in and of themselves, but rather their geopolitical implications, as well as the mockery that Hola was making of Britain’s formidable and otherwise successful civilizing mission. “We are in Kenya in the process of making the tragic mistake of handing to the Communists and anti-British elements in the whole of the African continent a propaganda stick with which they will beat us for years,” he wrote. He went on to tell the public that he was not alone in his sentiments. “Hola has caused deep concern to many Tory MPs…. Responsibility must be accepted whatever the cost.” 146 After the internal disciplinary hearing, Sullivan was merely told to retire, suffering no loss of income and with his subordinate fully exonerated. As for Taxi Lewis, Lennox-Boyd asked that he take a six-month leave of absence until his retirement—which he gladly did.
With the House of Commons showdown looming at the end of July, the government was hardly out of the woods. Macmillan retreated to Chequers, accompanied by Lennox-Boyd and a handful of other colonial policy makers, all of whom went directly to work concocting their final plan of action, with help from the government’s resident expert on public relations. No doubt the situation must have seemed dire, particularly since the Hola debate was scheduled for the same day as the debate over Nyasaland, where another State of Emergency had been in effect for several months. As with Kenya, there were also allegations of Britain’s misuse of power, as well as of brutality and murder in this southern African colony. In fact, Britain’s own commission had found that “illegal force” had been used and that the government had greatly exaggerated the alleged savagery of Nyasaland’s African National Congress. In spite of Lennox-Boyd’s successful insistence that the commission’s report—the Devlin Report—be sanitized before its publication, the Colonial Office’s censors missed what would become the most famous and embarrassing passage of the whole report: “Nyasaland is—no doubt temporarily—a police state, where it is not safe for anyone to express approval of the policies of the Congress party, to which the vast majority of politically-minded Africans belonged, and where it is unwise to express any but the most restrained criticism of government policy.” 147
Kenya was clearly no exception in British colonial Africa. The mass murder and torture of unrecorded numbers of Mau Mau suspects was the extreme, but it was becoming abundantly clear that there was blood on the hands of Britain’s so-called civilizers in other parts of the continent as well. The outcome of the two colonial debates in the Commons would be perceived as a referendum not just on Hola and the Nyasaland Emergency but on Britain’s colonial mission more broadly and, ultimately, on confidence in Macmillan’s government.
Hola was first on the docket, and Barbara
Castle among the first to speak. In her own account, she recalled “trembling so much from anger I could barely get out my facts.” 148 For nearly three-quarters of an hour, Castle cataloged several atrocities that had occurred prior to Hola, the deceptions and stonewalling that followed them all, demanded again that an independent inquiry be held, and ended with an attack on Lennox-Boyd. “When this terrible shame comes upon the Colonial Secretary, whether he willed it or not, and he does not act, he shows he does not deserve to hold his office.” 149 It was then Enoch Powell’s turn. With calculating, surgical skill the onetime Tory MP dissected the British colonial government, leaving it exposed on the table for all to see. He called the whole debacle “a great administrative disaster” and insisted the colonial secretary “ensure that the responsibility is recognized and carried where it belongs, and is seen to belong.” 150
Powell’s concluding remarks were the most damning. In his final bit of grandstanding he declared, “We cannot say, ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home’…. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.” 151 But was it not precisely the double standard condemned by Powell that had guided British colonial policy? Baring had taken his direction from General Templer in Malaya, and certainly there were other instances of such a double standard throughout Africa, Nyasaland being only one example. The colonial government had squandered numerous occasions to apply the so-called British principles of law in Kenya, the posting of Sir Arthur Young to overhaul the police force being one such instance. Rather than supporting Young, Baring refused to endorse British standards of policing and ultimately drove the police commissioner out of the colony. Together with Lennox-Boyd, the governor covered up the whole affair and went on to pack Young’s supporter, Attorney General Whyatt, off to Singapore. In the end, few of the high-ranking officials in the British colonial government actually believed that the standards of British law applied to Africa, or most parts of Asia for that matter, and particularly not while they were fighting a war against savagery.
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