Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  Alongside the high-minded, imperial reasoning used to construct a defense for the failures at Hola came a still darker side of colonial logic. Prime Minister Churchill, and later Eden and Macmillan, as well as the colonial secretary and his men on the spot, were willing to accept the use of brute force and systematized violence to save civilization in Britain’s far-flung corners of the world. A powerful critique of this convoluted and ultimately counterproductive reasoning was the message that Barbara Castle and other outspoken Labour critics had been sending for years, though it had fallen on deaf ears. By the time the Hola investigations surfaced, some Conservatives had begun to listen, though it cannot be known how far they might have been willing to go in opposing their own government’s policies. After Lennox-Boyd’s predictable defense of his department’s good administration in Kenya, and his lauding of the success of rehabilitation, no vote was entered in the Commons. In what must stand as perhaps one of their gravest tactical errors, the Labour Party MPs had arranged for the debate on Hola to be appended to an appropriation bill, which meant that the issue could not be put to a vote. “There might well have been quite a number of Conservatives voting against the Government or abstaining,” Macmillan later conceded, knowing the Opposition’s error most likely saved him and his government from what should have been a disaster. 152

  In the end, an independent investigation into Kenya’s detention camps was never conducted. Nor was there one for Nyasaland. The day after the Hola debate, Lennox-Boyd again defended his government’s actions, sidestepping the Devlin Report and instead holding up what he bragged were the countless success stories of British colonial performance around the globe under his five-year stewardship. British rule had not been “squalid,” as the Opposition charged; rather, it was a triumph. Lennox-Boyd offered the examples of newly independent Ghana and Malaya as illustrations of British success, indeed tangible evidence of Britain’s civilizing mission. Even his harshest critics like Enoch Powell were convinced, at least enough to vote against a further probe into Nyasaland.

  For Lennox-Boyd, the nightmare was coming to an end. The skeletons left over from the repression of Mau Mau, and the other colonial scandals, would remain in the closet, and he would soon quietly retire from the Colonial Office. But the future of British colonial rule in Kenya would not be given such a storied ending. The colonial secretary and Governor Baring escaped the final chapter, only to see the loss of the one prize to which they had so desperately tried to cling. In the aftermath of Hola it was simply impossible for the British to remain any longer in Kenya, and Lennox-Boyd’s successor, Iain Macleod, undertook the measures needed to decolonize. The British had won a long, costly, and bloody battle against Mau Mau, only to lose the war for Kenya. The devastation they left in their wake would be inherited by Jomo Kenyatta and Kenya’s first independent government.

  Epilogue

  Survivors at grave site in Dagoretti, August 2003

  IN THE FALL OF 1965 SIR EVELYN BARING STOOD INSIDE WHAT HAD once been his office. Since leaving Kenya and the governor’s post nearly six years earlier, when the country was still under British rule and the Mau Mau politicals remained safely locked away, the country had changed. Kenya was now an independent nation, Government House had become State House, and what had been the former governor’s command site throughout the Emergency now belonged to Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta.

  It seems remarkable that until that October afternoon in 1965 Baring and Kenyatta had neither met nor spoken. In fact, the last time the two men had been in the same room was at Senior Chief Waruhiu’s funeral thirteen years earlier. Baring was uncharacteristically nervous as he visited his old office, especially because Kenyatta was standing just opposite him. Indeed, what do you possibly say to a man whose trial you rigged and who, because of your signature, spent years of his life banished to a desert wasteland? There was no avoiding the subject, so after some initial pleasantries the former jailor turned to his onetime captive, gestured, and said, “By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago.” “I know,” Kenyatta told him. “If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same.” The nervousness evaporated, and the room erupted in relieved laughter. With everyone still chuckling, the new president chimed in, “And I have myself signed a number of detention orders sitting right there too.” 1 As the two later strolled through the gardens admiring the Naivasha thorns that Baring’s wife, Mary, had planted years before, Kenya’s jails were already beginning to fill up with detainees whom the new independent government deemed threats to the country’s young democracy.

  It was by no means foreordained that Kenyatta would walk out of detention in August 1961. When it happened, neither the local settlers nor the Kikuyu loyalists could believe it. Neither group had been particularly disturbed by what had happened at Hola, and certainly never believed that as a result of that final tragedy the British would take rapid steps toward decolonization. To the surprise and dismay of both groups, Hola proved to be the point of no return.

  The world was changing, but the settlers were impervious, living as they did in their bunker of white privilege. They were certain Harold Macmillan’s and the Conservative Party’s victory in October 1959 was cause for celebration. As they were dancing on the tables of the Muthaiga Club, Macmillan was studying the rest of Africa and catching an ugly glimpse of what the future of Kenya might look like should he decide to cast his lot with white settler rule. There was the French disaster in Algeria, where by the end of 1959 a reported 20,000 Frenchmen and 150,000 Algerians had died—largely as a result of France’s draconian tactics of quelling dissent, eerily similar to those the British had employed in Kenya and elsewhere in their empire. In neighboring Congo the Belgians in 1959 were moving quickly toward decolonization, though it would prove unsuccessful in staving off a brutal African backlash against the local Belgian settlers—nearly fifteen thousand of whom were forced to flee the colony with nothing but the clothes on their backs. In South Africa television cameras would soon capture the brutal racism of the apartheid government, which allowed white policemen to open fire on a crowd of African demonstrators in Sharpeville, killing close to one hundred people and injuring countless others. Farther to the north Britain, along with France, was still suffering from the earlier embarrassment of the Suez debacle, where in 1956 the United States and the Soviet Union forced them both to pull out.

  The Cold War was clearly under way and bearing heavily on Africa. The administration of John F. Kennedy was becoming increasingly intolerant of anticolonial conflicts—not necessarily because colonialism was, in and of itself, a bad thing but because these wars were perceived as hotbeds for communist recruitment. Harold Macmillan knew he could no longer justify bloodshed in Africa and that without Britain’s age-old weapons of force and oppression he could no longer hold on to Kenya or Nyasaland, nor for that matter any of Britain’s other African colonies. Moreover, the romantic and fraternal attachment to the settlers was disappearing, only to be replaced with a cold indifference that bordered on outright hostility. The “prevailing mood” after Hola, the onetime settler leader Michael Blundell later wrote, was best captured by the remarks of a young Conservative MP who proclaimed, “What do I care about the f…cking settlers, let them bloody well look after themselves.” 2 Rather than functioning as a referendum for empire, the general election in 1959 was its death knell.

  But the history of Britain’s empire is not just about the decision making in London. If this story has revealed anything, it is that African colonial subjects and their resistance shaped power just as much as British power shaped their resistance. It was a two-way street, and one the colonial government was going to find increasingly difficult to navigate as it moved toward decolonization in Kenya. While the British had managed to defeat Mau Mau, the drawn-out and bloody struggle against the detainees and villagers together with the irrepressible demands of the more radical African nationalists forced them to
abandon any gradualist approach toward decolonization in Kenya. 3 Driving the African high-political agenda were the Luo leaders Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, both of whom had been resoundingly critical of the British government during the final days of the Emergency. Together they helped forge a Kikuyu-Luo alliance that was poised to undo the careful, measured pace of decolonization laid out at the first constitutional talks held at Lancaster House in January 1960. It was there that Macleod announced his plans for Kenya’s future: it would become a parliamentary democracy based on universal franchise. The Europeans, including Michael Blundell and members of his moderate New Kenya Group, were stunned. Many settlers, particularly the conservative diehards, saw the announcement as the ultimate betrayal—that the new colonial secretary had “sold them down the river.” 4 Nonetheless, they all felt that they had at least ten years before independence, plenty of time to prepare the colony’s sixty thousand whites for African rule. 5

  The settlers were also convinced that Kenyatta would never be released. There was scarcely a single European—even Baring, whose moral righteousness prevented him from ever admitting that Kenyatta might have been innocent of the crimes he had been unjustly convicted of—who doubted that Kenyatta was the mastermind who had brewed the evil poison of Mau Mau. 6 To add an official stamp on this British colonial version of the truth, the government released its report on Mau Mau in early 1960. Its author, F. D. Corfield, relied solely on British and loyalist sources when drafting the so-called definitive history of the movement. He employed the usual terms, speaking of British enlightenment and African darkness, and declared Mau Mau to have been “wholly evil” and Kenyatta its chief protagonist. 7

  This line was echoed by Kenya’s new governor, Sir Patrick Renison, who had replaced Baring during the closing days of 1959. Renison was notably sympathetic to the settler plight and was determined to cut down Kenyatta at every turn. When the new governor returned from London and the Lancaster House talks in May 1960, he delivered what would become one of the most famous denunciations of Mau Mau and its alleged mastermind. Perhaps the rest of Kenya’s Africans could be civilized, but not Kenyatta. Renison minced no words. “Jomo Kenyatta was the recognized leader of the non-co-operation movement which organised Mau Mau,” he said in a widely circulated speech. “Mau Mau, with its foul oathing and violent aims, had been declared an unlawful society. He was convicted of managing that unlawful society and being a member of it. He appealed to the Supreme Court and the Privy Council. In these three courts his guilt was established and confirmed. Here was the African leader to darkness and death.” 8

  Renison conveniently forgot to mention the small technicality that Kenyatta’s trial had been rigged, something that was up for public debate by this time, for the Crown’s star witness, Rawson Macharia, had stepped forward and admitted to both perjury and accepting a bribe. 9 There was undoubtedly a genuine fear on the part of the settlers and some British colonial officials that Kenyatta, if released, would start up the whole bloody mess all over again. At the very least, they thought he was unpredictable and held an almost hypnotic sway over the ordinary African, particularly the easily misled Kikuyu. Even Macleod, who was vehemently opposed to Renison’s “darkness and death” speech, was doing his best to save from the ruins the earlier postcolonial vision espoused by Lennox-Boyd and Baring. Macleod, like his predecessors, wanted no part of nationalists like Mboya and Odinga. Rather, he had every intention of seeing moderate Africans, men like the Kikuyu loyalists who would safeguard Britain’s commercial and strategic interests, firmly installed in power before handing over the colony to majority rule.

  Eventually, the British would get their way, but few would have ever predicted the path they would take to get there. The world was poised to witness a dramatic reinvention of Kenyatta, one that would transform him from a Machiavellian, satanic figure into a conservative, civilized man who embraced the so-called enemies of his past. Of course, this transformation was hardly one at all, except in the minds of the British and those they had hoodwinked into accepting their version of Mau Mau. Kenyatta had never been the oath-taking revolutionary he was purported to be. He was instead a mission-educated politician who had preached moderate reform. Kenyatta wanted a piece of the colonial pie and to be accepted like the rest of the African colonial elite, and he sought the social and economic privileges that went along with that acceptance.

  Kenyatta’s reinvention was never planned. Instead his release, and subsequent transformation, were foisted upon the British colonial establishment by the Africans in Kenya, who were demanding their rightful leader be set free. When the first colony-wide elections were scheduled for February 1961, Kenyatta’s release was practically the only issue that mattered to many ordinary Africans, particularly the Kikuyu. At this point, everyone in Kenya, regardless of whether they held a Loyalty Certificate or not, had been enfranchised. For their part, Mboya, Odinga, and their Luo-Kikuyu coalition party—the Kenya African National Union, or KANU—knew how to win the vote. They campaigned on the pledge that they would not take their seats in office unless Kenyatta was released. The opposition, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which was secretly supported by the British colonial government, championed minority ethnic rights, including the rights of the European settlers, and had no desire to see Kenyatta freed. When the election results were in, KANU had won a resounding victory and, as promised, its members refused to join the government unless Kenyatta was released.

  News of KANU’s victory was broadcast all over the world, reaching even the remotest part of northern Kenya where Kenyatta sat listening to the results on his small transistor radio. He was no longer living in the desert wilderness of Lokitaung, but rather ninety miles south in the arid wasteland of Lodwar, where he had been moved after the completion of his prison sentence. Lodwar was thought to be his final resting place. But Mboya, Odinga, and the rest of the newly elected KANU MPs backed the British colonial government into a corner, and for the first time the African majority had the upper hand, leaving Macleod no choice. Kenyatta had to be released.

  After eight years of desert seclusion the Mau Mau mastermind was reintroduced to the world in April 1961. A press conference was called, and Kenyatta stood in front of the cameras wearing his trademark leather jacket. His seventy-year-old face was gaunt and his eyes were sunken, but his voice and mind were robust. He told the phalanx of reporters, officials, and curiosity seekers, “I have been greatly misrepresented by some of you, but today I hope you will stick to the truth and refrain from writing sensationalist stories about me.” He then went on to reject the Corfield Report as “a pack of lies,” before turning his attention to the issue of vengeance. Much like Nelson Mandela would do some thirty years later, Kenyatta emerged from detention preaching forgiveness. Here, the presumed leader of “darkness and death” borrowed from the words of Jesus, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He went on to say, “I have never been a violent man. My whole life has been anti-violence. If I am free I will continue to do so.” 10 Then Kenyatta imparted one last unforgettable message before stepping down. “Uhuru,” he declared. “Uhuru.” The Kiswahili word uhuru would become the slogan for all Africans in Kenya in the weeks and months to come. It would become the greeting on the streets, the closing word in conversations, and the lyrical base for children’s songs. “Uhuru,” they would sing. “Uhuru na Kenyatta.” That is, “Freedom…Freedom and Kenyatta.”

  For hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu, Kenyatta’s final liberation in August 1961 was as sweet, if not sweeter, than their own. “I wept, I wept with joy,” recalled one former detainee. “Word got around very quickly when he was released, and we danced and celebrated into the morning. Our leader was free, and he was going to save us from the colonial oppressors. Ngai had answered our prayers.” 11 Triumphal appearances soon followed, with Kenyatta touring the country for the first time in nearly a decade. He also made a remarkable, if enigmatic, impression upon the British public when he gripped millions of
viewers in their living rooms during a forty-five-minute interview on the BBC’s television series Face to Face. No one knew quite what to make of this man who spoke eloquently, wore a Western-style suit, and had no horns coming out of his head. It was becoming apparent to everyone, though, that once the countless details had been worked through, this “leader to darkness and death,” or great African statesman, no one at the time was entirely sure which, was going to become Kenya’s first president.

  In fact, less than two years after he was reintroduced to the world, Kenyatta stood on the podium of Nairobi’s Uhuru Stadium. “This is the greatest day in Kenya’s history and the happiest day in my life,” he told a crowd of some forty thousand ecstatic Africans. As always, Kenyatta was a spell-binding speaker, refusing to read his prepared address in English. Dramatically, he tossed his speech aside and spoke extemporaneously to his people in Kiswahili, and the crowd was virtually uncontrollable. Looking down with him on the scene were dignitaries from around the world who had all come to Kenya on that eleventh day of December 1963, to witness Africa’s thirty-fourth country achieve its independence from European rule. Then at midnight, after hours of ceremonies and dancing, a spotlight zeroed in on the Union Jack being lowered, and Kenya’s new flag was raised for the first time. For a moment it refused to unfurl, and the Duke of Edinburgh, the queen’s representative for the affair, leaned over and whispered to Kenyatta, “Do you want to change your mind?” In his moment of glory Kenyatta only grinned and watched as the wind finally picked up his country’s flag, and the crowd again roared.