Hidden beneath this euphoric moment, however, was another much less triumphant picture of cover-up and betrayal, self-interest and greed. Time and again, Kenyatta would declare that “we all fought for freedom,” and that his new nation must “forgive and forget the past.” Less than a year after independence, the country celebrated its first Kenyatta Day—which, not coincidentally, took place on October 20, the same day as the declaration of the State of Emergency. In a broadcast speech to another massive crowd, the country’s president declared, “Let this be the day on which all of us commit ourselves to erase from our minds all the hatreds and the difficulties of those years which now belong to history. Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past. Let us instead unite, in all our utterances and activities, in concern for the reconstruction of our country and the vitality of Kenya’s future.” 12 In other words, there would be no day of reckoning for the crimes committed during Mau Mau, no memorializing of those Mau Mau men and women who had fought in the forests and died in the camps and villages. There would be no prosecutions against former loyalists, and certainly not against any of the British colonial officers or settlers, many of whom continued to live a very privileged life in Kenya.
On one level, it could be argued that Kenyatta was sacrificing the past for the future. He was, in the only way he knew how, trying to prevent his country from descending into a civil backlash. In Kikuyuland, former Mau Mau adherents despised their loyalist neighbors for taking their land, raping their wives, killing their children, and murdering their husbands. Worst of all, they saw the same loyalists profiting from their losses. For the former Mau Mau adherents, the Home Guard and their leaders were being rewarded for their crimes, with nearly all of them living in comparative luxury. Calls for vengeance were universal, and only Kenyatta had the moral authority to contain the anger, even if he could not eliminate it.
Another problem was the issue of the non-Kikuyu people of Kenya. There were millions of Africans who were wholly uninvolved with Mau Mau, and who were deeply suspicious of a Kikuyu oligarchy taking over the country. Had Kenyatta recognized Mau Mau as a legitimate nationalist uprising that drove the British out of Kenya, where would this have left all of Kenya’s other ethnic groups when it came time to parcel out the fruits of independence? One way around this potentially explosive issue was to erase Mau Mau from the public’s memory and replace it with the politically correct and widely embracing message: “We all fought for freedom.” With Kenyatta’s politicized spin on the truth, every Kenyan had a claim to make on the past and therefore the right to share in the benefits of independence.
Kenyatta the great reconciler was also Kenyatta the conservative politician who had never supported Mau Mau’s oathing or guerrilla tactics. Hardly the mastermind of the movement, he instead did everything in his power both before and after independence to marginalize those who had fought and been detained in the war. After their release, many former hard-core detainees banned together to form the Land and Freedom Army, administering once again an oath of unity. They demanded the return of their land, pledging to fight if Kenya’s new government betrayed their cause. But Kenyatta would have none of it. He told the veterans and former detainees again and again that “nothing is free.” If they wanted their land back, Kenyatta insisted, they would have to purchase it like everyone else. He denounced those demanding compensation and recognition, admonishing a crowd in Kiambu, “We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. We must have no hatred towards one another. Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” 13 In fact, some of those “hooligans,” or former Mau Mau supporters, who refused to listen would soon find themselves locked up, with Kenyatta signing their detention orders at the same desk that had once belonged to Sir Evelyn Baring.
In the end, the fruits of freedom were going to be divided up between Kenyatta’s emerging oligarchy, the loyalists, and those settlers who remained in Kenya. It was a scenario that the British colonial government had fantasized about for years, albeit with a slight twist. No longer would Kenyatta be the lifelong captive but instead, over time, would become the darling of the British political establishment. From the moment he stepped out of detention, Kenyatta did his best to allay the fears of the British government and the settler population, assuring them that an independent Kenya would forgive the past and, most important, would not take their land. In one of the most revealing confrontations during the run-up to decolonization, Kenyatta went to the heart of the settler nation in Nakuru, where he won over the white, hostile crowd. “We are going to forget the past and look forward to the future,” he told them. “I have suffered imprisonment and detention, but that is gone and I am not going to remember it…. Let us join hands and work for the benefit of Kenya, not for the benefit of one particular community. We want you to stay and farm well in this country: that is the policy of this government.” 14 By the end of the meeting the settlers—the same ones who had for years condemned Kenyatta—were patting him on the back, laughing at his jokes, and shouting, “Harambee,” or “Let’s All Pull Together,” which had become Kenyatta’s preferred rally cry.
Not all settlers endorsed the reinvention of Kenyatta or his vision for the country’s future. Thousands packed their bags, sold their farms, and left—many fleeing to the warm embrace of apartheid South Africa, others going back to a Britain that in many ways must have been completely foreign to them. But unlike their counterparts in the Belgian Congo, the Kenyan settlers departed with much more than the clothes on their backs. The newly independent Kenyan government bought their land at market rates, using nearly £12.5 million in loans from the British government to finance the buyout. In total, nearly twenty thousand European settlers left Kenya and with them went an enormous outflow of foreign investment capital. Nonetheless, Kenyatta successfully convinced well over thirty thousand of them to stay, along with their investments, and to this day many of these former settlers and their descendants continue to live a life of racial privilege, complete with houseboys and gardeners, cooks and nannies, frequent visits to the Muthaiga Club, and countless reminiscences of the good old days when the “natives” knew their place.
Much of the land that was sold to the Kenya government was resold to European investors and to wealthy Kikuyu, many of whom had been loyalists during the Emergency. These Africans certainly had the means to purchase this property. During British colonial rule they had enjoyed years of economic privilege, amassing wealth from their enormous and oftentimes illegally gotten plots of land, the cash crops that colonial officials had allowed them to grow first, the trading licenses, and their extortion and bribery.
During the run-up to independence and in the years that followed, former loyalists also wielded political clout to consolidate their own interests and power. Under Kenyatta many became influential members of the new government, people like Isaiah Mwai Mathenge and Jeremiah Kiereini, both of whom had worked in the Pipeline for years and who had proved instrumental to Gavaghan’s success in the Mwea camps. This system of loyalist patronage percolated all the way down to the local level of government, with former Home Guards dominating bureaucracies that had once been the preserve of the young British colonial officers in the African districts. Of the numerous vacancies created by decolonization—powerful posts like provincial commissioner and district commissioner—the vast majority were filled by onetime loyalists. As a result, the nature of governance in the Kikuyu countryside did not change much with independence. The loyalists still wielded a great deal of day-to-day power over the former Mau Mau detainees and villagers.
Back in Britain there would be no soul-searching or public accounting for the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women in Kenya. When Iain Macleod took over the Colonial Office in the months after Hola, he wrote to Kenya’s new governor, Patrick Renison, assuring him that he had “decided to draw a veil over the past.” 15 The final lasting image of Britain’
s moral war in the empire was not going to be revealed by thorough investigation into the torture, murder, and starvation of Kikuyu men, women, and children. Instead, there was a great deal of sympathy, if not admiration, for the professional soldiers, British colonial officers, and ordinary settlers who fought the terror of Mau Mau, even if that terror pushed them into casual brutality and violence. In the end, it was these representatives of the British colonial government who would be remembered as the victims of the battle to save civilization, not the savage Mau Mau adherents, not the Kikuyu people.
Nonetheless, the new colonial secretary did some of his own internal probing. Though he had picked up the baton from his predecessor and continued denying publicly any systematic abuse or official culpability for the atrocities in Kenya, his report to the Colonial Policy Committee in November 1959 told a different story.
Separate allegations of ill-treatment in some of the Mwea “pipeline” camps have revealed signs that widespread irregularities took place there up to December 1958. The responsibility for these irregularities, which took place mainly during the intake of recalcitrant detainees into the camps and involved a certain amount of unauthorised corporal punishment and some physical violence, has been investigated personally by the Acting Chief Secretary (who is substantively the Attorney-General). The investigation indicates that the principal responsibility lies with the then Provincial Commissioner and the Minister for African Affairs…who have virtually admitted that, at the very least, they ignored the previous Governor’s personal directives and the Kenya Government’s policy, and condoned illegal methods of “persuading” detainees to confess and co-operate. 16
Macleod’s assessment was accurate, except that he did not go far enough up the ladder in apportioning blame. In the Colonial Office’s own files were several documents suggesting that Monkey Johnston and Gavaghan were not out there beating detainees into submission without approval from above. From Lennox-Boyd at the top to Governor Baring and his attorney general Griffith-Jones, British colonial officials knew what was happening, endorsed the policy, and later even commended Gavaghan for his extraordinary success.
In spite of these investigations, there was never a single internal reprimand issued, nor any sign of a housecleaning. Sir Evelyn Baring left Kenya in the fall of 1959 and returned to the luxury of his family estate at Howick, where he pursued his passion for bird-watching. Shortly thereafter he accepted an offer to head up the government’s Colonial Development Corporation (CDC), another arm of British colonialism that offered loans and management to developing countries provided they followed the rules that Baring and his men set out for them. John Cowan, the former prisons officer and author of the Cowan Plan, retired to the Bank of England. 17 As for Monkey Johnston, he left Kenya to work for MI8 back in Britain, while Gavaghan stayed in Kenya overseeing the country’s Africanization program, or the transitioning of loyalists into the Administration. For all of his hard work and success during the Emergency, Gavaghan was ultimately awarded the prestigious Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.). Askwith, by contrast, received no gong, as the former British colonial officers called these coveted honors, and instead left for Afghanistan after his posting in Kenya. Even after his death, Askwith continues to be ostracized by many of his former colleagues from the colonial service.
Once Britain began moving toward decolonization in Kenya, the demands for an independent investigation began to subside. Enoch Powell, who both at the time and years later insisted that either Governor Baring or Lennox-Boyd, or both, should have assumed responsibility, never again pursued the matter in the political arena. 18 As for Labour MPs like Barbara Castle, their wish was to see colonies like Kenya gain their freedom. With the Conservatives retaining power in the fall of 1959, and Macleod’s subsequent concessions at Lancaster House, there was not much to be gained politically by pursuing the atrocities and cover-ups in Kenya. For the Opposition, there were still battles to be fought, but empire in Africa would no longer be one of them. The Conservatives too were already looking beyond their African colonies. In early 1960 Harold Macmillan had gone on a tour of Africa, where he made his position on the future of British colonialism abundantly clear. “The wind of change is blowing through this continent,” Macmillan told the South African Parliament, “and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.” 19
All that remained were the guilty consciences of those who perpetrated the atrocities, and those who witnessed the tortures and murders and did little or nothing to stop them. During the course of my work, I certainly met or learned about a wide range of people who perpetrated or witnessed terrible crimes, and all displayed or professed varying degrees of guilt and denial. I also interviewed a number of former settlers who some fifty years later still seemed to take delight in their handiwork during Mau Mau. They spoke of heinous tortures as if they were describing yesterday’s weather; for them the brutality they perpetrated during the Emergency is as banal today as it was some fifty years ago. At the other extreme were those like Cowan, who later described his work as simply that, work. “I didn’t feel guilty, I don’t think,” he said when later asked about Hola. “I don’t think that’s quite the word…. I felt extremely sorry that it had gone wrong, but not actually guilty.” 20 For his part, Gavaghan is much more perplexing. I have spoken with him in person and by phone perhaps several dozen times over the years and was often struck by the moral weight he seemed to be carrying. I was therefore surprised when he later told another interviewer that, with regard to guilt, he felt “none whatever.” 21
One is then left to wonder about the others. Why didn’t Askwith say anything outside of official circles? He knew that detainees “had been illegally assaulted and even killed,” and he had protested vehemently over Gavaghan and the dilution technique, yet he never broke ranks. 22 In the end, Askwith upheld the unwritten rules of British colonial conduct, though he later reflected, “I wished I had done more, but I’m not certain even today what I could have done because no one was listening.” 23 As for the others—the “good commandants,” as some detainees called them, and the missionaries—certainly many lobbied behind the scenes, perhaps thinking they were doing the best they could given the constraints under which they were operating. But, still, when allegation after allegation kept coming, right up to Hola, it is at the very least puzzling to understand why nothing more was done. Perhaps these men and others like them ultimately believed that Mau Mau was savage, that they were fighting a moral war, and that the ends justified the means. Perhaps they did not want to appear weak, or perhaps they were too weak to confront authority. Or perhaps they just did not think much at all about what was happening around them. 24
How is it possible to evaluate the impact that this war had on the hundreds of thousands of men and women who were detained in the camps and villages of British colonial Kenya? There is no record of how many people died as a result of torture, hard labor, sexual abuse, malnutrition, and starvation. If the British did keep records of these deaths, they were destroyed long ago. We can make an informed evaluation of the official statistic of eleven thousand Mau Mau killed by reviewing the historical evidence we now know. Former detainees and villagers recall thousands dying; others remember being assigned to burial parties that disposed of hundreds of corpses in any given day; missionaries wrote of widespread famine; Kenya’s medical officers described deaths from contagious diseases and malnutrition. There were countless letters written by detainees during the Emergency, describing tortures and deaths, and there were the independent findings by people like Arthur Young, his assistant, Duncan McPherson, and Barbara Castle—all of which revealed unspeakable brutalities and murders. There are also the recollections of Asian advocates, men like Fitz de Souza, who remember representing thousands of detainees, none of whom they ever saw again. “By the end I would say there were several hundred thousand killed,” de Souza later reflect
ed. “One hundred easily, though more like two to three hundred thousand. All these people just never came back when it was over.” 25
There are the demographic figures. The British colonial government undertook a census of the Africans in Kenya in 1948 and 1962, years on either end of the Emergency. The population figures reveal that the growth rate of the Kikuyu was notably below that of the neighboring Kamba, Luo, and Luhya populations, something that should not have been the case. If the Kikuyu population figure in 1962 is adjusted using growth rates comparable to the other Africans, we find that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for. 26 I believe the lower growth rate was likely due to two factors: actual deaths and a slower birthrate due to lower female fertility. This lower fertility would have been caused by such factors as malnourishment, disease, miscarriage, the absence of regular male partners, and the psychological stress resulting from war trauma. I would argue that at the very least it is safe to assume that the official figure of some eleven thousand Mau Mau killed is implausible given all that has been uncovered. 27
Of course, we will never know exactly how many Kikuyu died during the last years of British colonial rule in Kenya. But does this matter? The impact of the detention camps and villages goes well beyond statistics. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have quietly lived with the damage—physical, psychological, and economic—that was inflicted upon them during the Mau Mau war. In the aftermath of independence they had their advocates in Kenyatta’s new government—MPs like Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, and J. M. Kariuki who demanded the detainees be remembered and who insisted they be given compensation or at least consideration for their contributions and losses during the Mau Mau struggle. But over time these protagonists for the Mau Mau past were either pushed aside or, in the case of J. M. Kariuki, assassinated. For Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel T. arap Moi, Mau Mau was to remain buried—it was a moment in Kenya’s past that would divide more than it would unite.
Imperial Reckoning Page 50
