Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  The official record was not enough to understand fully the origin, structure, and purpose of the Pipeline. I traveled to some twenty archives and libraries on three different continents to amass the research necessary to write this book. Missionary data were extremely important as were private paper collections, including those from settlers, British colonial officials, British MPs, and missionaries, primarily located at the Rhodes House Library, Oxford. I also went through newspaper collections in Kenya, Britain, and the United States, as well as numerous private, public, and commercial photograph collections. The fragmented remains of official documentation from colonial government sources, when read alongside materials from private collections and missionary archives, began to reveal a clearer picture of how and why the Pipeline functioned.

  Nevertheless, understanding what life was like inside the camps was difficult to ascertain solely from official and private archives. Certainly, the missionary reports provided some firsthand insights. So, too, did the papers of the men and women directly involved with the day-to-day administration of the camps, as did the detainee letters sent to British colonial officials, Labour MPs, and others in Kenya and Britain. But to get behind the wire and capture the intimate details of detention life, I needed to use two other sources.

  First, there is the handful of memoirs written by former Mau Mau detainees chronicling their lives in the camps. Like the massive literature produced by the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag, the Mau Mau texts offer an unmediated voice of those detained. These highly personalized historical accounts provide a counterbalance to the biases and silences inherent in any official archival source; however, to be useful as historical sources, memoirs, like other texts, must be read with and against other evidence. 3

  Because few survivors of the detention camps in Kenya wrote and published their memoirs, I needed a much larger source of data to re-create the world behind the wire. 4 With this in mind I began collecting survivor testimonies in 1998. I am certainly aware that oral histories, like written memoirs, represent a person’s subjective remembering of past events. 5 Memories are, as cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter points out, “complex constructions—not literal recordings of reality.” 6 There is a constant interaction between the past and the present in all human memory such that oral testimonies, like memoirs, tell us as much about a person’s current state of mind and the society in which he or she lives as they do about a particular historical moment.

  When one considers testimonies from those who have experienced traumatic events, the use of memory can be challenging. At issue is the degree to which violence affects a person’s ability to remember. Put another way, all memories are fallible to some extent, but memories of traumatic events are often perceived as being more fallible than memories of mundane episodes. There is certainly plenty of evidence to support the notion that people who have experienced violent pasts would often prefer to forget them, and in extreme cases they simply cannot remember them. 7 But, interestingly, some of the same evidence suggests that, when recalled, traumatic events are actually better and more accurately remembered than ordinary experiences. 8

  Nevertheless, issues of accuracy and believability are often present when using survivor testimony. No one senses this more than the survivors themselves. In nearly all of the interviews that I conducted with former detainees there emerged a shared concern that I, their audience, would have a hard time believing the events they were recalling. It became clear to me as well that any problem in believing and using oral testimonies also resided with me, the listener. Occasionally, there was the problem of language as survivors struggled to find words to capture the events and meanings of their pasts. But there was also my limited ability to understand these brutal and traumatic moments within the mental framework of my comparatively normal world, a fact several former detainees were able to sense. One man, when recalling forced sodomy at Manyani Camp, asked me, “How do I explain this to you, how can I make you understand this? The white man in charge ripped our shorts off and then made us do terrible things…. Do you understand me?” 9 In another instance a woman stated simply, “How can I possibly tell you what it’s like to bury lorryloads of dead bodies? How can I make you understand?” 10

  But what struck me the most about these oral testimonies were the consistencies between them. It was not just that survivor memories when taken together evoked a general period of brutality; it was that they provided recollections of events, processes, relationships, and individuals that were very similar. Take, for example, the detainees’ reception at Manyani Camp. Without prompting, nearly every man recalling his time in this camp described to me the two rows of askaris, the beatings, the cattle dip, the stripping, and the body searches. Notorious guards, struggles over food, mending clothes, walking when shackled, trying to communicate with each other and the outside world, and the moral dilemmas they faced were all commonalities in the oral testimonies of life in Manyani Camp. Today, many of these former detainees live many miles apart, have poor access to transportation and communication, and many have not left the general area around their homes for decades. This is one of the countless instances in my research whereby the men and women of rural Kenya recalled very similar traumatic experiences that occurred some fifty years ago. 11

  Yet it was not just the consistency of the oral testimonies over time and space that I found striking; it was also the degree to which the oral data correlated with what remains in the written record. I was able to cross-reference many of the survivor accounts with details contained in detainee letters written at the time of Mau Mau. Additionally, the court proceedings from various screening and detention abuse cases, the internal memoranda from missionaries, newspaper accounts, demographic data, as well as eyewitness testimonies from former colonial officials, settlers, politicians, and lawyers, all provide similar details to those offered by the detainees in their oral testimonies. In effect, the arguments that I make in this book are derived not from any one historical source but from the combined weight of a wide variety of sources. Within this methodological framework, survivor accounts give a face to the otherwise bureaucratic structure and procedure of the camps. Without these testimonies, we would be unable to see fully into the world behind the wire or understand what day-to-day life was like for the detainees in the camps and villages. Nonetheless, we would still have to explain why the myriad of other sources, when read together, present a picture of destruction leveled against the Kikuyu population by the British colonial government.

  The version of history for which I found little corroborating evidence is that which depicts the camps as a benign system, and colonial officials, camp commandants, and guards as paternalistic reformers. In the official written record as well as in later interviews the testimonies of British colonial agents are littered with omissions, half-truths, and lies. Powerful motivations existed for them to evade and conceal the truth; but to believe many of their testimonies, those offered either at the time or in subsequent years, would require dismissing all other historical evidence. Except for a few writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, these self-exonerations were for years largely accepted. 12 My research sought to avoid the path laid out by those directing and executing the policies of detention and villagization and to offer instead a comprehensive account of Britain’s last desperate efforts to maintain colonial rule in Kenya.

  Notes

  One: Pax Britannica

  1. Kenya National Archives (KNA), MAC/KEN 34/9, Colonel Meinertzhagen, “Mau Mau,” 1956.

  2. Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: An Entertainment in Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

  3. Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905).

  4. Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1974), 15, as quoted in Robert B. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 4.

  5. Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary, 1902–1906 (Londo
n: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), 51–52.

  6. Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu, and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), chapter 2; and John Lonsdale, “The Conquest State of Kenya 1895–1905,” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, ed. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Book 1 (London: James Currey, 1992), 13–39. See also Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 70–76, for a discussion of the demographic impact of the drought and famine on the Kikuyu population.

  7. Robert Weisbord, African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa Protectorate, 1903–1905 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968); and M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968), parts 1 and 2.

  8. David Koff and Anthony Howarth, Black Man’s Land: Images of Colonialism and Independence in Kenya (Van Nuys, Calif.: Bellweather Group, 1979).

  9. This term was commonly used to describe Kenya after the establishment of British settlement. It was popularized by the famed author and Kenyan settler Elspeth Huxley in her two-volume work titled White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya (London: Macmillan, 1935).

  10. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15.

  11. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991); and Raymond Betts, ed., The “Scramble” for Africa: Causes and Dimensions of Empire (Boston: Heath, 1966).

  12. Numerous books chronicle Britain’s empire, including William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99); Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Trevor Lloyd, Empire: The History of the British Empire (London: Hambledon and London, 2001); Andrew Porter, ed., Atlas of British Overseas Expansion (London: Routledge, 1991); and Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

  13. “Victorian aspirations,” or the civilizing mission, has been rather uncritically accepted by various authors writing on the British Empire. The most notable and recent is Niall Ferguson in his work Empire, chapter 3.

  14. Kenya was never capable of paying its railway debt, and the British government finally wrote it off in the 1930s.

  15. Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990), esp. 73–75.

  16. Note that while the Colonial Office was responsible for the vast majority of colonies in Africa and elsewhere in the empire, the Foreign Office had jurisdiction over a sizable portion of Britain’s imperial holdings (including Kenya until 1905), and the India Office had responsibility for the colony of India until its independence in 1947.

  17. Bruce Berman’s in-depth analysis of the Kenya Administration in Control and Crisis demonstrates that despite the governing hierarchy from the center, the Administration wielded great local influence, to the point of dictating some policies in the districts, as would particularly be the case during Mau Mau.

  18. As quoted in Berman, Control and Crisis, 103.

  19. There are numerous published and unpublished manuscripts from various members of the Kenya Administration, including Charles Chenevix-Trench’s useful book, which chronicles the history of the men who served in Kenya, titled Men Who Ruled Kenya: The Kenya Administration, 1892–1963 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993). In addition, various files in the Rhodes House Library contain the unpublished work of numerous men who served in Kenya, such as T.C. Colchester, O.E.B. Hughes, T.G. Askwith, T.H.R. Cashmore, and A.D. Galton-Fenzi. The importance of a shared pedigree and aristocratic ideology is not limited to Kenya, but instead knit together the entire empire of colonial servants with London, as well argued in Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); and Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  20. Errol Trzebinski, Kenya Pioneers (London: Heinemann, 1985); V. M. Carnegie, A Kenyan Farm Diary (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1930); Baron Bertram Francis Gordon Cranworth, A Colony in the Making: Sport and Profit in British East Africa (London: Macmillan, 1912) and Kenya Chronicles (London: Macmillan, 1939); Elspeth Huxley and Arnold Curtis, eds., Pioneers’ Scrapbook: Reminiscences of Kenya, 1890–1968 (London: Evans Brothers, 1980); Elspeth Huxley, Nine Faces of Kenya (London: Harvill Press, 1990), part 3; and Edgerton, Mau Mau, chapter 1.

  21. Huxley, White Man’s Country; and Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 44–47.

  22. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa (London: Putnam, 1937).

  23. I interviewed several Kenyan settlers who regaled me with endlessly amusing stories about the “good old days,” though I would not say that the “good old days” are entirely over in Kenya. Spouse swapping was rampant, particularly in the “Happy Valley,” as were hard-core drugs. For a published account see James Fox, White Mischief (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).

  24. Though race had provided a category for exclusion since the Enlightenment, Europeans systematized racial hierarchies and used them to subjugate the African population in an unprecedented manner in the twentieth century. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); George L. Moss, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Albert Memmi, Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

  25. The notion of the “black peril”—or black men sexually violating the purity of white women—has intrigued many authors writing on empire and Africa. For example, Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Norman Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 15, no. 1 (1988): 36–53.

  26. The pastoralist groups in Kenya, particularly the Maasai, had more land alienated than did the Kikuyu, but the Kikuyu, with their expanding population and practice of settled farming, were affected more by the alienation and the consequent overcrowding and depletion of resources.

  27. M.G. Redley, “The Politics of Predicament: The White Community in Kenya, 1918–1932” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1976). The land was expropriated from the Nandi and Kipsigis, though the loss left all Africans feeling less secure about their land.

  28. R. M. A. Van Zwanenberg, “Kenya’s Primitive Colonial Capitalism: The Economic Weakness of Kenya’s Settlers up to 1940,” Canadian Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 2 (1975): 277–92.

  29. Note that the African reserves in Kenya were de facto ones until the establishment of administrative boundaries in 1926. It was at this point that the Administration officially gazetted, after several earlier lobbying efforts by the settlers, twenty-four so-called tribal reserves covering some 50,000 square miles. At the time, an observer noted that the population density in the reserves closest to the White Highlands already exceeded that of many South African reserves, and predicted that there would be a land shortage within twenty-five years. As Bruce Berman points out, because the African population sizes were underestimated, the density pressures were felt much sooner. See Berman, Control and Crisis, 150–151; and Christopher Leo, Land and Class in Kenya (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), chapter 1.

  30. Magayu Kiama, interview, Aguthi, North Tetu, Nyeri District, 25 February 1999.

  31. Robert H. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Berman Control and Crisis, 168–70
, 267–68.

  32. Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987).

  33. Ibid.

  34. Lord Frederick Lugard developed this policy of indirect rule and articulated it in his book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1922).

  35. Robert L. Tignor, The Colonial Transformation of Kenya: The Kamba, Kikuyu and Maasai from 1900 to 1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); and David P. Sandgren, Christianity and the Kikuyu: Religious Divisions and Social Conflict (New York: P. Lang, 1989).

  36. Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 24–26; Jocelyn Murray, “The Church Missionary Society and the ‘Female Circumcision’ Issue in Kenya, 1919–1932,” Journal of Religion in Africa 8, no. 2 (1976): 92–104; and Tignor, Colonial Transformation of Kenya, 235–49.

  37. Berman, Control and Crisis, 256–74.

  38. This period of time when the British colonial government introduced its so-called development policy into the Kikuyu reserves with its accompanied disruption of local economic and social life has been coined the “Second Colonial Occupation,” by D. A. Low and John Lonsdale, in “Introduction: Towards the New Order 1945–1963,” in History of East Africa, ed. D. A. Low and Alison Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 3:12–16.

  39. From 1932 to 1934, the Kenya Land Commission (Carter Commission) heard land disputes, nearly one-third of which were brought by Kikuyu. The commission considered it impossible to investigate each claim, and ultimately decided to grant the Kikuyu 30.5 additional square miles of territory for their losses, and 350 square miles for future needs. After the Kenya Land Commission’s ruling, there would be no further land grants made to the Kikuyu. See Report of the Kenya Land Commission, Cmnd. 4556(1934), 71–77, 129–44.