‘Oh, you don’t want to feel sorry for them’: Britain’s Gulag
A sixteen-year-old African boy is taken into custody as a suspected insurgent. The next day his body is returned to his family; he had been shot ‘while trying to escape’. When his father tries to find a lawyer, he and his friends are also taken into detention. A young boy shins up a tree in terror; though not an insurgent, he is shot by the security forces; wounded, he falls to the ground. A third young man is being made to ‘confess’ that he is Mau Mau. Tied up with his head between his knees, dirt forced down his throat, he is left out in the cold night air and refused food as he slowly slumps to death.86 These were a few of the shocking stories Daily Mirror readers encountered in the run-up to Christmas 1955, in a syndicated set of articles focusing on the Emergency in Kenya. They were authored by the Labour MP Barbara Castle, who, commissioned by the tabloid, had undertaken a ‘one-woman probe’ into allegations of widespread abuse by British forces in Kenya during the Emergency. ‘CAN the black men get white justice in Kenya today?’ asked one article.87 While in that country, Castle found herself in an unusual position; followed everywhere by the secret police just like the African trade unionists she met, she believed she now ‘realised what it must be like to be black, and power-less’.88 Were any African to complain, they would find themselves, like the father of the sixteen-year-old she reported on, disappearing into prison camps. Castle’s articles, as the Mirror boasted a few days afterwards, caused a ‘House of Commons storm’.89 ‘Labour to Fight Kenya Thugs’ read the headline on the front page of the Tribune, referring not to Mau Mau, but to the hardliners of counterinsurgency operations, about whose conduct several Labour MPs would pose parliamentary questions.90
The ‘excesses’ on Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd’s watch would generate widespread controversy, fuelled by ‘leaks’ from within Kenya’s administrative service which included photographic evidence of torture and horrifying conditions in detention camps. ‘Stories of colonial brutality and government evasiveness’ were carried in several newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman and Nation.91 Hot on the heels of the Castle Daily Mirror probe came the bombshells dropped by Eileen Fletcher, in the pamphlet Truth about Kenya, published by the Movement for Colonial Freedom, in which the former rehabilitation officer, a Quaker reformer, detailed not only the brutal, overcrowded and lethally unsanitary conditions in the camps, but also the fact that female children as young as twelve were among the detainees.92 Accompanied by several harrowing photographs, Fletcher’s exposé spoke of the growing callousness of the British in Kenya, the wide ‘sweeps’ in which thousands were detained simply on suspicion and treated like cattle: ‘I saw several men who were not moving quickly enough to please the Askaris being given great blows on naked shoulder blades with rifle butts, and when I protested the British Officers and even women officials standing by said, “Oh, you don’t want to feel sorry for them.” ’93 The process of ‘screening’ for Mau Mau entailed both torture – at the very least a ‘light diet and a good thrashing’ – and questionable psychological techniques. Undernourished and severely weakened prisoners were put to hard labour if they did not first die of disease. Fletcher’s challenge to her British readers was emphatic: ‘The defeat of Mau Mau is largely financed with money from this country. It is our money that is being spent on these brutal and repressive measures. What are we going to do about it?’
The unease about what was happening in Kenya was not restricted to the usual suspects. In the first two months of the Emergency, historian Joanna Lewis notes, ‘the popular press across the board gave Kenya front-and back-page coverage, editorial comment and in-depth analysis’.94 To the Daily Mail, Mau Mau was the gift that kept on giving sensational copy: secret primitive ceremonies, blood oaths, ritual cannibalism, diabolical murders of settlers and loyalists, and white settlers in ‘terrorland’ heroically braving ‘terrorists’ of the worst kind, from whom neither women nor children were safe.95 But as the months went on, even the conservative Times noted that ‘anxiety cannot fail to be felt at the high number of executions’.96 The danger for the colonial government, the newspaper reflected, was that ‘they would be building up in the name of Britain a terrible legacy of hatred and bitterness, for while deeds done in hot blood may be forgotten, the cold processes of law are apt not to be, in Africa any more than in Europe’.97 This anxiety was borne out by a parliamentary delegation report noting that, towards the end of the long and brutal campaign, ‘the influence of Mau Mau in the Kikuyu area … has not declined; it has, on the contrary, increased’.98 Indeed, even diehard apologists for empire such as F. D. Corfield, who strenuously denounced Mau Mau’s ‘atavism’, would find themselves conceding that there was method in what they denounced as absolute madness. Commissioned to write a Command Paper for parliament published as Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, Corfield insisted that Mau Mau had to be seen in the wider context of the ‘swift rise of African nationalism’, if ‘a violent and wholly evil manifestation of that nationalism’.99 Noting that Mau Mau could not be reduced to a communist plot even if it had the sympathy of sections of the British left, Corfield’s report also attested to the existence of much unrest before Mau Mau emerged fully onto the scene, in the form of strikes, upheavals and other ‘subversive activities’.100
In Histories of the Hanged, his brilliant account of Mau Mau and the Kenyan Emergency, David Anderson notes that many Europeans objected to the idea of negotiations with the insurgents on the basis that they were ‘sub-humans’ who could not and should not be parlayed with.101 Even the official government analysis of Mau Mau articulated an epidemiology of rebellion whereby the uprising was ‘only an illness, a mental disease’, afflicting the Kikuyu.102 While Anderson is correct to point to the salience of the ‘mental-illness’ analytic, it is necessary also to tease out the tensions in such pathologizing accounts which were rarely – even in the case of the most virulently hostile – solely about inhuman others. In inviting deprecation of its ‘inhumanity’, Mau Mau inevitably threw light upon the correspondingly inhumane aspects of colonial rule, putting uneasily into the frame the claims to humanity being made by the subjects of empire. It raised the question of whether Huxley’s infamous ‘yell from the swamp’ could also be read as an insistence on recognition. The ferocity of the colonial state’s response generated an uneasy sense that only the end of empire could end the savagery all around. Thus the Daily Mirror deprecated empire apologists: ‘The gunboat. The bomb, the prison compound. That is what the monocle-flashing warriors of the Empah mean when they speak of determination. Will the sun never set on these bristling Blimps?’103 In this opinion piece, the novelist and commentator Keith Waterhouse insisted that, while he sought no ‘excuses’ for the ‘beastly’ and ‘revolting’ Mau Mau whose defeat had raised jubilation in other quarters of the media, the British response to the insurgency also raised several questions about ‘the thick catalogue of shameful things that have happened in Kenya in the name of the British Empire’.104 Waterhouse’s disgust at what was being undertaken in the British name in Kenya – random floggings, the mutilation of corpses, and the torture and humiliations heaped on Mau Mau suspects and insurgents – inspired a stark warning, one resonant of Hale’s caution in the House of Commons. Before long, Britain would see ‘the eyes of the Empire staring back at it … And those eyes will be full of hate’.105
Brockway and others raised similar concerns in parliament, the former asking the secretary of state for the colonies ‘what provision is made to feed Africans when caged for screening in Kenya; what shelter is provided against rain; how far hooded interrogators are employed; and at what speed the individual screenings take place’.106 Castle’s findings had caused a political furore, and, along with Fletcher’s charges, were the subject of much official denial and evasion. On 6 June 1956, a high-profile debate on Kenya was introduced by the former colonial secretary, Arthur Creech-Jones, himself no radical. He r
aised questions about the administration of justice in the colony and suggested that the events of the past few years called for ‘long overdue’ political and economic changes of significance.107 Brockway too spoke at length, defending Eileen Fletcher from attack, mentioning the ‘series of trials which have shocked hon. Members and a large part of the British public’, as well as the execution of over a thousand Kenyan Africans in the space of four years. Barbara Castle revisited her findings, connecting the continuation of Emergency measures in Kenya with ‘the attitude of baasskap, white domination’, not unlike the attitudes that prevailed in South Africa, ‘controls for control’s sake’ passing as the war against Mau Mau. What was needed now was a decisive end to white domination and ‘the recognition that Africans are human beings with fundamental human rights as people’.108
Castle’s comments here point to a remarkable feature of the debate around Mau Mau and the Emergency: politicians and writers were starting to make the connection between what was happening in Kenya and imperial rule more broadly. Thus, Leslie Hale:
This matter affects not only Kenya but the world as a whole. Our attitude in Kenya has a considerable effect on American opinion. But that was not the point that I wished to emphasise. Our attitude to the people of Kenya has its repercussion in Tanganyika, Uganda and the adjoining territories. At this moment a real struggle has started for the soul of Africa. The liberal conscience of Britain is becoming heard more than it has been for a long time; people are evolving a new conception of human rights and there is a new demand for human dignity. We cannot afford to allow a small body of settlers by a policy of repression to lose the fundamental moral integrity of Britain which is tied up in this struggle.109
Some of the most stentorian interventions in what is arguably one of the most significant debates on colonial matters came from the Labour icon Aneurin Bevan, best known today for his pivotal role in instituting Britain’s National Health Service. Observing that matters pertaining to repression came to a head only when ‘there is some protest from someone in the Colonies about them’, Bevan deprecated the gradualism – ‘the necessity of extending the franchise very slowly’ – which he heard articulated by some Members of the House who, he averred, could have as easily been speaking a hundred years before: ‘We do not like this weighted franchise. We do not like votes handed out as prizes for the establishment.’ Bevan, like Hale, called on the House to ‘read the situation at which we have arrived, especially in the supervision of colonial administration’, in a world-historical frame:
Very grave difficulties are arising in different parts of the world. We are faced with a very serious crisis in Cyprus. We may have very great difficulty in Singapore. Trouble is starting in Aden and may develop, and trouble has not been altogether removed in Kenya. It has been borne in upon me and upon my hon. Friends that the time has now arrived when the House of Commons should gravely consider an overhauling of our constitutional relationship to colonial administration.110
Charging government ministers with evading serious questions put to them by Brockway, Bevan reiterated the causal connections: ‘We talk here as though the administration of Kenya, as though the seizure of land in Kenya and all those things were not responsible at all for Mau Mau.’111
Britons against the Empire: The Movement for Colonial Freedom
Within a decade of his return from Kenya, Brockway would write, much of what he had campaigned for had come to fruition: ‘an elected African majority in the Legislature, African farms on the exclusive White Highlands, Africans allowed to grow coffee’.112 He would also call for ‘all progressive opinion in Britain’ to ‘support the African claims’ in Kenya at a point in time when ‘all over the Continent the African people are sweeping forward to democratic self-government’.113 In April 1954, under Brockway’s leadership, the COPAI merged with the Kenya Committee, the Central Africa Committee, the Seretse Khama Defence Committee and others to form the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Its archives, now housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, indicate that the impetus came from events in Kenya and British Guiana; there was the sense that if the anticolonial struggle was about to hit a new stage of intensity, then Britain should have an organization that could offer solidarity and assistance, independent of direct political affiliation but calling on various wings of the Labour movement for support. In comparison to Brockway’s more cautiously stated insights during his African journeys, the MCF’s goals were explicitly radical and anticolonial, supporting ‘the right of all peoples to full independence’ and ‘the substitution of internationalism for imperialism in all political and economic relations’.114 Situating itself as a ‘part of a world movement’, the MCF sought to invert the direction of colonial tutelage, ‘enlightening’ Britain by rectifying Britons’ ignorance about colonial affairs. With over a hundred affiliated MPs, the organization also sought to draft parliamentary questions and brief MPs on matters relating to Asia and Africa, and to highlight areas of shared interest – indeed, an identity of struggles between the Labour movement in Britain and liberation movements in colonial territories. It would provide assistance to representatives from various colonial liberation movements, arranging for them to speak at public meetings and meet with British trade union leaders and parliamentarians. Such speakers included Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda; when Kenyatta was jailed, the MCF led a campaign in Britain to have him released. At one point, the organization could claim to have the support of nearly one hundred MPs and about twenty trade unions, in addition to various regional affiliates.
In its literature, much of it written with Brockway’s imprimatur, the MCF explicitly espoused the right of all peoples to full independence, including freedom from external political, economic and military domination, as well as calling for the universal application of the Four Freedoms and the Declaration of Human Rights.115 A pamphlet urging youth organizations to affiliate to it cautioned that the MCF was ‘not a “charity” do-gooding organisation, which provides balm for uneasy consciences’.116 Later, in his assessment of what he called ‘the Colonial Revolution’, Brockway would also describe the organization as carrying on continuous agitation in Britain – though, importantly, always taking its lead from crises of colonial insurgency:
Mau Mau in Kenya, the independence struggles in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanganyika and Uganda, the repression in Nyasaland, the tragic Lumumba agitation for unity in the Congo, the military intervention in British Guiana, the opposition to the Central African Federation and the violent resistance in Cyprus to British power (as well as to national conflicts outside the British Empire in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Madagascar …)117
The MCF produced leaflets, pamphlets and petitions (to demand the release of Kenyatta, for instance), and organized meetings, lobbies, special conferences, debates, marches, ‘poster parades’ and demonstrations across the country, facilitating speakers from Africa in particular. There were film shows and half-day schools, and press conferences for visiting anticolonial activists around whom the MCF tried to generate publicity for its causes. In the mid 1950s, Brockway recalled, ‘there was great interest in the emerging anti-colonialist struggle, but little knowledge’.118 Providing information and a colonial education became one of the campaigning organization’s platforms. With the assistance of others in the MCF, which noted that it was supported by a range of trade unions, including the National Union of Miners, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, Brockway drafted Commons questions and briefs for interested MPs.119 MCF educational pamphlets covered a huge range of relevant issues from self-determination for the colonies to nuclear disarmament, and from world hunger to racism in Britain. These also spanned several contexts from Northern Ireland, Cuba and Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to Vietnam, Timor, Oman, Cyprus and Malaysia. The MCF was credibly seen as ‘an articulate pressure group with much depth of support’, giving ‘a sense of centrality to colonial issues unknown in Brit
ish history since the First World War’, Kenneth Morgan has argued – though he somewhat predictably situates the organization in ‘the grand tradition of British dissent’.120 In an article he drafted for Life magazine in 1973, Brockway was clear that decolonization in colonies with white settler populations had not taken place on metropolitan initiative, but was the consequence of the defeat by African nationalism of the white settler populations’ attempts to dominate.121 ‘Moderates have never achieved anything’, he cited Hastings Banda of Nyasaland as saying. ‘It took extremists like Oliver Cromwell and Mrs Pankhurst to get things done.’122 The minutes of the MCF’s Central Committee would make a similar point: ‘Whilst the attainment of colonial freedom depended mainly on the effort of the colonial movements, it also depended on the attitude of British governments.’123 With this in mind, influencing British opinion was the real contribution which the MCF could make: ‘Imperialism can only be ended by the British and Colonial people struggling jointly against the common enemy’.124 Democratic pressure on parliament was key to the MCF’s strategy, which included writing briefs and policy documents for Labour MPs to draw on. One such document noted the extent of repression that it had taken to keep the Empire in place:
British colonialism, like all colonialisms, has a sad history in its denials of personal liberties and human rights. During the last twenty years of national struggles, it has been an almost continuous record of detentions without trial, imprisonments on political charges, deportations, enforced periods of exile, and of the repression of the freedoms of speech, writing, movement, association and trade unionism.125
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