40. Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999), 25–35, 70–91.
41. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1978 [1939]).
42. Kanogo, Squatters, 105–20.
43. KNA, African Affairs Department, Annual Report, 1950, 2.
44. There is no consensus on the etymology of the term Mau Mau. The first appearance of the word in a British colonial government source occurred in 1948. Mau Mau, however, was not originally used by the Kikuyu to refer to their movement. Louis Leakey, the government’s expert on the Kikuyu, could find no indigenous origin and wrote, “Most of the Kikuyu that I have asked say it is just a ‘name without meaning’” (L. S. B. Leakey, Mau Mau and the Kikuyu [London: Methuen, 1953], 95). Several explanations have been offered as to the possible origin of the term. Some believe that it was derived from a distortion by Europeans of muma, the Kikuyu word for oath. Others hold that it is a type of Kiswahili play on words.
45. This analysis of the growth of African discontent out of socioeconomic conditions during the post–World War II period is derived from the phase of Mau Mau historiography that began in the mid-1980s. Whereas the three earlier phases of historiography—which include the first phase of the early 1960s, punctuated by F. D. Corfield’s Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, Cmnd. 1030 (London: HMSO, 1960); the second phase of the late 1960s as defined by Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham’s The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966); and the third phase of the 1970s and early 1980s as highlighted by the works of Robert Buijtenhuijs and B. Kipkorir—presumed there was a single point of origin for the movement, the work that began in the mid-1980s presents three distinct fronts of Mau Mau. No longer a narrow movement directed by the political elite, Mau Mau is seen as emerging from three focal points: the settler estates in the White Highlands of the Rift Valley and Central provinces; the urban slums of Nairobi; and the African reserves of the Kikuyu. For the most comprehensive accounts, see David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53 (London: James Currey, 1987); John Spencer, The Kenya African Union (London: KPI, 1985); Kanogo, Squatters; and Frank Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective (London: James Currey, 1989).
46. Njama s/o Ireri, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 31 January 1999.
47. Ibid.
48. I heard various kinds of language used in the oath during my interviews, though they would all end with the phrase “may this oath kill me.” For further details written by the British colonial government at the time, see Report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies by the Parliamentary Delegation to Kenya, 1954, Cmnd. 9081 (London: HMSO, 1954), appendix 2; and KNA, MAC/KEN 30/5, “Mau Mau Oaths,” 28 February 1955.
49. Nelson Macharia Gathigi, interview, Murarandia, Kiharu, Murang’a District, 20 February 1999.
50. Lucy Ngima Mugwe, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 10 March 2002.
51. Note that this figure includes the closely related Embu and Meru ethnic groups; oftentimes the British colonial government referred to the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru as simply the Kikuyu.
52. Patrick Gaitho Kihuria, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 24 January 1999.
53. Shadrack Ndibui Kang’ee, interview, Mugoiri, Kahuro, Murang’a District, 17 January 1999; and Samson Karanja, interview, Ngecha, Limuru, Kiambu District, 28 February 1999.
54. Hunja Njuki, Ngorano, Mathira, Nyeri District, 23 January 1999; and Samuel Gathuu Njoroge, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 10 February 1999.
55. Susanna Gathoni Kibaara, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 22 March 1999; and Gladys Wairimu, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 21 March 1999.
56. Esther Wangari, interview, Ngecha, Limuru, Kiambu District, 28 March 1999; and Helen Njari Macharia, interview, Mugoiri, Kahuro, Murang’a District, 16 January 1999.
57. Berman makes a similar point in Control and Crisis, 138.
58. Throup, Economic and Social Origins, 11–12, 54–56.
Two: Britain’s Assault on Mau Mau
1. I am indebted to Sam Waruhiu, son of the late senior chief, who provided me with details of the assassination and subsequent false arrests. Note that his father had been summoned to hear a land case in Gachie by the DC, which was contrary to procedure by that time. Sam Waruhiu, interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 7 September 2004.
2. Charles Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring: The Last Proconsul (London: Collins, 1978), 221–25.
3. David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–53 (London: James Currey, 1988), 54–56; and Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring, 223–24.
4. Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, Cmnd. 1030 (London: HMSO, 1960), chapter 20.
5. Rhodes House (RH), Mss. Afr. s. 1574, Lord Howick (Sir Evelyn Baring) and Dame Margery Perham, interview, 19 October 1969.
6. Ibid.
7. For a full biographical account on Sir Evelyn Baring, see Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring.
8. The most detailed descriptions of Baring’s dietary restrictions were given to me by Terence Gavaghan in various conversations between 1998 and 2000. According to Gavaghan, Baring’s stomach was so sensitive that he would pick out the small slivers of orange peel from his marmalade before spreading it on his morning toast.
9. “Mau Mau Shoot Africa’s Churchill,” Daily Mail, 8 October 1952.
10. I heard this song sung several times in the Mathira Division of Nyeri District, in Kahuro in Murang’a, and throughout the Kikuyu Division of Kiambu District.
11. Baring (Howick of Glendale) Papers, University of Durham, GRE/1/19/150–164. This file contains correspondence between Evelyn Baring and Oliver Lyttelton detailing the decision-making processes they went through prior to declaring the State of Emergency. See also the Public Record Office (PRO), CO 822/450, “Correspondence with Sir Evelyn Baring concerning the situation in Kenya.” This file includes numerous memoranda between the governor and the Colonial Office reviewing the situation both before and after the declaration.
12. Jomo Kenyatta, Suffering without Bitterness, The founding of the Kenya Nation (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 340.
13. Mary Nyambura, interview, Banana Hill, Kiambu District, 16 December 1998; Hunja Njuki, interview, Ngorano, Mathira, Nyeri District, 23 January 1999; and Magayu Kiama, interview, Aguthi, North Tetu, Nyeri District, 25 February 1999.
14. For the generalship in the forests, see John Lonsdale, “Authority, Gender and Violence: the war within Mau Mau’s fight for land and freedom,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, ed. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 46–75; and Caroline Elkins and John Lonsdale, “Memories of Mau Mau in Kenya: Public Crises and Private Shame,” in Memoria e Violenza, ed. Alessandro Triulzi (Napoli: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, forthcoming, 2005). For accounts from former forest fighters on their organization, see Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (New York: Modern Reader, 1966); Waruhiu Itote, “Mau Mau” General (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967); and H. K. Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1975).
15. One woman who participated in the attack on the Meiklejohns described the incident in detail to me, as well as the utter amazement of the attackers that Dr. Meiklejohn, the wife, survived her injuries. Anonymous, interview, Ruguru, Mathira, Nyeri District, 22 March 1999.
16. Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 255–56; Robert B. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 71; and KNA, MAC/KEN 33/6, memorandum, “Shooting of innocent people, confiscation and destruction of property,” no date.
17. As cited in Anthony Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952–60: A Study of Military Operations against Mau
Mau (Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers, 1976), 51.
18. PRO, CO 822/450/10, letter from Baring to Lyttelton, 24 November 1952.
19. All of Kenyatta’s codefendants were members of Kenya African Union’s Executive Committee.
20. Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring, 246.
21. For the most authoritative account of the Kapenguria trial and its meanings, see John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Peter Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 196–239.
22. Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring, 246.
23. Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring, 247–48; and Edgerton, Mau Mau, 145.
24. Montagu Slater, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (London: Mercury Books, 1965), 34.
25. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 262–63.
26. Ibid., 264.
27. RH, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 527/528, End of Empire, Kenya, vol. 1, Sir Michael Blundell, interview, 55.
28. For example, RH, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 527/528, End of Empire, Kenya, vol. 3, Maurice Randall, interview; Fitz de Souza, interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 11 August 2003; and Edgerton, Mau Mau, 148.
29. “A Small-Scale African Hitler,” Daily Telegraph, 1 November 1952.
30. KNA, DC/NVA 1/1, Naivasha District Annual Report, 1953, 1–2.
31. Slater, Trial of Jomo Kenyatta, 240–41.
32. Ibid., 242–43.
33. Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, 278–80.
34. Granville Roberts, foreword, The Mau Mau in Kenya (London: Hutchinson, 1954), 7–9.
35. Ibid. Such adjectives are found throughout official files from the British colonial government in both Kenya and London.
36. Such accounts were most likely to be seen in conservative British papers like the Daily Mail, which ran numerous accounts of Mau Mau atrocities. For the most recent study on the British press and Mau Mau, see Joanna Lewis, “‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Mau Mau’: The British Popular Press and the Demoralization of Empire,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood, ed. Odhiambo and Lonsdale, 227–50.
37. For details on early forms of settler justice, see Correspondence Relating to the Flogging of Natives by Certain Europeans in Nairobi, Cmnd. 3256 (London: HMSO, 1907); Report of the Native Labour Commission, 1912–13 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1914); Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 142–44; and David M. Anderson, “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939,” Journal of African History 41, 3 (2000): 459–85.
38. RH, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 527/528, End of Empire, Kenya, vol. 2, Sir Frank Loyd, interview.
39. Sir Frank Loyd, interview, Aldeburgh, England, 13 July 1999.
40. Terence Gavaghan, interview, London, England, 29 July 1998.
41. John Nottingham, interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 29 January 1999.
42. Anthony Sampson, telephone interview, 12 May 2004; and copies of Anthony Sampson’s diary extracts (seen courtesy of Sampson).
43. See, for example, PRO, CO 822/489/20, secret memorandum from Frederick Crawford to E. B. David, 16 March 1953; and RH, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 527/528, End of Empire, Kenya, vols. 1 and 2.
44. For accounts of genocidal killings and the dehumanization of targeted ethnic groups, see Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For the best case of Jewish and Nazi exceptionalism, see Daniel Jonas Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997), 412, where he argues that “almost all other large-scale mass slaughters occurred in the context of some preexisting realistic conflict (territorial, class, ethnic, or religious)” whereas, he goes on to state, in the case of the Nazis and the Jewish population, such a preexisting conflict did not exist.
45. For example PRO, CO 822/1337/10, draft memorandum by secretary of state for the colonies, “Colonial Policy Committee, Kenya: Proposed Amnesty,” November 1959.
46. For a transcript of the European Elected Members’ discussions with Lyttelton, including the quotes from Blundell, Keyser, and Slade, see PRO, CO 822/460/B, “Verbatim Report Meeting of Secretary of State and European Elected Members,” 30 October 1952. Note that “White Mau Mau” was another phrase used at the time to describe settler extremists. See, for example, RH, Mss. Afr. s. 1580, Major General Sir Robert Hinde, papers, box 1, file 1, letter from Lieutenant Colonel MacKay to Hinde, 27 September 1953. For reference to extremist opinion gaining control over the local population, see Granville Roberts’s comments in PRO, CO 822/459/7, handwritten memo by Granville Roberts, 4 November 1952.
47. Oliver Lyttelton [Lord Chandos], The Memoirs of Lord Chandos: An Unexpected View from the Summit (New York: New American Library, 1963), 380.
48. RH, Mss. Afr. s. 1574, Lord Howick (Sir Evelyn Baring) and Dame Margery Perham, interview, 19 November 1969.
49. PRO, CO 822/460/B, “Verbatim Report Meeting between Secretary of State and European Elected Members,” 30 October 1952.
50. See, for example, PRO, CO 822/489/20, secret memorandum from Frederick Crawford to E. B. David, 16 March 1953.
51. PRO, CO 822/486/1, letter from Robertson, commander in chief, Middle East Land Forces, to Harding, 12 January 1963.
52. W. Robert Foran, The Kenya Police, 1887–1960 (London: Robert Hale, 1962), 183.
53. Naftaly Kanino Mang’ara, interview, Kiruara, Gatanga, Murang’a District, 5 August 2003.
54. On 5 October 2003, I conducted interviews in the Kiruara sublocation of Gatanga, Murang’a District, with the following survivors of the Kiruara massacre: Paul Kimani Gatuha, Naftaly Kanino Mang’ara, Njuguna Njoroge, Mary Wangui Mungai, Kinuthia wa Ndirangu, Julia Wachu, Mburu Gichung’wa, and Francis Chege Kabiru.
55. “Police Fire on Crowd: 15 Die,” East African Standard, 24 November 1952; “Police Stations in Kikuyuland,” East African Standard, 26 November 1952; and Foran, The Kenya Police, 183.
56. Reprinted in Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 38–39.
57. As quoted in Ibid., fn 21.
58. As quoted in Edgerton, Mau Mau, 84.
59. Erskine’s famous Churchill letter and the snapping of his glasses case is another well-known story of the Emergency in Kenya. The most interesting rendition told to me was provided by Petal Erskine Allen, a young settler at the time of Mau Mau and niece of General Erskine. Petal Erskine Allen, interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 12 January 1999.
60. There are several books on Mau Mau’s guerrilla war and Britain’s counterinsurgency campaign in Kenya. Some of the best contributions include Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya; Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1960); Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), part 2; and Randall Heather, “Intelligence and Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952–56” (Ph.D. diss, Cambridge University, 1993).
61. Mwaria Juma, interview, Kiamariga, Mathira, Nyeri District, 10 February 1999; and George Maingi Waweru (General Kamwamba), interview, Muhito, Mukuruweini, Nyeri District, 1 March 1999.
62. “Britain’s Klaus Barbie Still Walks Free,” New Statesman, 29 November 1999. For further details on Henderson and the pseudogangs, see Ian Henderson, Man Hunt in Kenya (New York: Doubleday, 1958); Ian Henderson and Philip Goodhart, The Hunt for Kimathi (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958); and Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs. Note that Henderson was deported from Kenya by the independent government in 1964 after the protest of several of Kenyatta’s cabinet ministers who insisted that the onetime leader of the pseudogangs should not be allowed to remain in the country.
63. I am suggesting that the British colonial government could not assert morally legitimate rule over the entire African population in Kenya, and that any inroads the government may have been able to make in regard to its lack of moral legitim
acy came undone with the draconian Emergency Regulations and the subsequent colonial violence perpetrated during Mau Mau. For further discussion of the colonial government’s legitimacy, see Berman, Control and Crisis; John Lonsdale, “KAU’s Cultures: Imaginations of Community and Constructions of Leadership in Kenya after the Second World War,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, 1 (2000): 107–24; and Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials.”
64. For details on specific Emergency Regulations, see Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Emergency Regulations made under the Emergency Powers Order in Council, 1939 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1954). The Kenya Official Gazette also published the Emergency Regulations and the amendments as they were enacted by Governor Baring.
65. For a convincing argument about the efforts of Ernest Vasey to keep Kenya financially solvent during the Emergency, see Robert L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
66. The initial power to move individual Kikuyu was granted under the original Emergency Regulation 2, 1952. Three subsequent regulations were enacted in 1953 providing the necessary powers to remove and transit any Kikuyu from one area to another, regardless of circumstances. These regulations were: Emergency (Movement of Kikuyu) Regulations, 1953; Emergency (Amendment No. 4) Regulations, 1953; Emergency (Control of Kikuyu Labour) Regulations, 1953.
67. Ndiritu Kibira, interview, Kirimukuyu, Mathira, Nyeri District, 9 February 1999.
68. Ibid.
69. KNA, MAA 7/786/10/1, memorandum from O. E. B. Hughes to Desmond O’Hagan, “Action Against Mau Mau in Nairobi,” 8 April 1953; KNA, DC/MSA 1/6, Mombasa District Annual Report, 1953, 1–2 and 12–13; KNA, OP/EST 1/361, “Repatriation of Kikuyu from Tanganyika” and PRO, CO 822/502/14, memorandum from Governor Twining, “An Appreciation of the Kikuyu Situation in the Northern Province on 27 October 1952,” 30 October 1952.
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