by Mark Curtis
The major African nationalist political group opposed to British rule was the Kenya African Union (KAU), which noted:
The chief characteristic of all labour – skilled or not … is the low wages obtaining in Kenya … The greatest problem which requires urgent consideration is that of the old man and woman who cannot perform hard manual labour. The settlers simply turn them off their land – rightly according to law … The greater majority of the dying Africans and those suffering from malnutrition accrues as an upshot of the meagre allowances that our people earn. Due to this, ninety per cent of our people live in the most deplorable conditions ever afforded to a human being.
The KAU referred to the squatter system as a ‘new slavery’ and explained that ‘modern serfdom has come into being as cheap labour can be found everywhere in the colony’.9
British officials thought about things rather differently. In a 1945 report the colonial government noted that:
The principal item in the natural resources of Kenya is the land, and in this term we include the colony’s mineral resources. It seems to us that our major objective must clearly be the preservation and the wise use of this most important asset.
The Deputy Governor explained:
It is of greatest importance on all grounds of Imperial policy and for the future well being and prosperity of the native people that there should be a vigorous and well established British settlement in these highlands, for without it there is no hope of successfully overcoming the immense problems which confront us in this part of the world and of erecting here a permanent structure of enlightenment and civilisation.10
The following year, the Governor declared in an after-dinner speech that ‘the greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in our hands … This land we have made is our land by right – by right of achievement’. He explained to the Africans that ‘their Africa has gone for ever’, since they were now living in ‘a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century’. The Governor added:
We appear to Africans as being immensely wealthy and nearly all of them are in fact very poor … But these are social and economic differences and the problems of this country in that respect are social and economic and not political; nor are they to be solved by political devices.
Britain was in Kenya ‘as of right, the product of historical events which reflect the greatest glory of our fathers and grandfathers’.11
In fact, Britain had engaged in mass slaughter to subjugate Kenya. Winston Churchill referred in 1908 to one expedition by stating that ‘surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale’.12 The governor was using a traditional pretext for pursuing terrible policies – ‘humanitarian impulses’ – a strategy now taken up by the missionaries of New Labour.
Curbing the threat of nationalism
Unfortunately for the champions of ‘enlightenment and civilisation’, Africans were indeed engaging in politics.
In standard history, the declaration of the state of emergency in October 1952 is viewed as a response to Mau Mau terrorism which was getting increasingly out of control, with Britain portrayed as a noble defender of human rights. In reality the declaration was more a cause of the war. Moreover, the declassified files show that the declaration was intended to stamp out popular, nationalist political forces demanding land reform and self-government – the threat of independent development.
In the year previous to October 1952, there had actually been fewer murders and serious injuries than in previous years. A few days before the declaration – on 15 October – the Governor cabled London saying that in the previous week ‘there had been some falling off in crimes, both Mau Mau and otherwise’. Yet two days later he confirmed that the declaration would take effect from 20 October. The declaration itself prompted an increase in these crimes.13
The real problem for the colonial government was the increasing popularity of KAU leaders, especially Jomo Kenyatta, who were drawing ever larger numbers of people to their public meetings. Radical trade unionists were taking control of the country’s unions as the KAU gradually extended its influence throughout the country. The Governor explained to London that the plans for declaring the emergency might appear ‘excessive’ but ‘Kenyatta has succeeded in building up right under the nose of authority a powerful organisation affecting all sides of life among the Kikuyu’.14
Two months prior to the declaration, a colonial official noted that recent large KAU meetings had been coupled with a ‘serious increase of Mau Mau activities [sic] … in each area where [Kenyatta] spoke’. One meeting had been ‘attended by twenty to thirty thousand people, who were so excited and truculent that the preservation of law and order hung upon a thread’. ‘We decided’, the official noted, ‘that we would be wrong to allow any further meetings of the KAU’.
Another official noted that at recent KAU meetings at which Kenyatta had been the key speaker, ‘large crowds have attended and treated him and his utterances with enthusiastic respect’. Even worse was that the KAU and other groups were ‘demanding … the “return” of the White Highlands to the Kikuyu and self-government on the Gold Coast model’.15
The answer, the Governor declared a few days before the declaration, was that ‘we must remove Kenyatta and several of his henchmen during the next few weeks’. The Attorney-General explained that Kenyatta and his associates should not be released from prison at the end of the emergency but be ‘kept in custody for a very substantial period of years’. He further noted that ‘one of the principal reasons’ for declaring a state of emergency ‘would be to enable us to make detention orders against the leading African agitators’.
The state of emergency was declared and the authorities jailed dozens of KAU leaders and every branch chairman who was not already in jail.16
In seeking to justify the repression of the popular nationalists, British authorities needed to portray Kenyatta as the instigator of the Mau Mau movement. The only problem was that Kenyatta had consistently denounced it. At one meeting, the Attorney-General observed Kenyatta publicly condemning Mau Mau, while the 30,000 Kikuyu present at the meeting held up their hands to ‘signify that they approved of his denunciation of Mau Mau’.17
At his subsequent trial, Kenyatta was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment as a result of what the defending counsel called ‘the most childishly weak case made against any man in any important trial in the history of the British empire’, one that was patently trumped up to dispose of the country’s leading nationalist.18
Human rights, colonial style
With the political road to reform blocked by Britain, just grievances found their expression in increasing violence. The subsequent war resulted in atrocities being committed by both Mau Mau and government forces but with far greater brutality by the latter. The sheer number of deaths at the hands of the government forces shows that there was an extensive shoot-to-kill policy and that killings were conducted with impunity. Colonial government forces killed around 10,000 Africans. By contrast, the Mau Mau killed 590 members of the security forces, 1,819 Africans, and 32 European and 26 Asian civilians. More white settlers were killed in road accidents in Nairobi during the emergency than by Mau Mau.19
Some British army battalions kept scoreboards recording kills, and gave £5 rewards for the first sub-unit to kill an insurgent. One army captain was quoted as informing a sergeant-major that ‘he could shoot anybody he liked provided they were black’. Frank Kitson, a senior army officer and ‘counter-insurgency’ expert who would later apply his skills to Northern Ireland, once commented: ‘three Africans appeared walking down the track towards us: a perfect target. Unfortunately they were policemen.’20
A Channel 4 documentary made in 1999 – offering a rare glimpse by the media into the reality of the British war – referred to ‘free fire zones’ where:
Any African could be shot on sight … Rewards were offered to the units tha
t produced the largest number of Mau Mau corpses, the hands of which were chopped off to make fingerprinting easier. Settlements suspected of harbouring Mau Mau were burned and Mau Mau suspects were tortured for information.21
The British also resorted to dictatorial police measures: 153,000 arrests, for example, were made in the first fourteen months of the war. But it was the methods used by the police that were particularly vile. There was ‘a constant stream of reports of brutalities by police, military and home guards’, noted Canon Bewes, of the Church Missionary Society, following a visit. These brutalities included slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.
‘Some of the people’, Bewes noted, ‘had been using castrating instruments and … in one instance two men had died under castration.’ A metal castrating instrument ‘had also been reported as being used to clamp on to the fingers of people who were unwilling to give information and … if the information was not given the tips of the fingers were cut off’. Bewes stated that there were also a number of cases of rape perpetrated by the army. A Kenyan police team sent to the neighbouring colony of Tanganyika to ‘screen’ Kikuyu there were found guilty by the Tanganyikan authorities of ‘violence, in the form of whipping on the soles of the feet, burning with lighted cigarettes and tying leather thongs round the neck and dragging the victims along the ground’. Of the 170–200 interrogated, ‘at least 32 were badly injured’.22
A former district officer recently admitted:
There was outright abuse of power and some of the crimes committed were horrific. One day six Mau Mau suspects were brought into a police station in the neighbouring district to mine. The British police inspector in charge lined them up against a wall and shot them. There was no trial.
Asked whether he thought colonial forces had committed human rights violations, he replied: ‘If throwing a phosphorous grenade into a thatched hut with a sleeping family inside isn’t a human rights abuse then I don’t know what is.’23
Between 1952 and 1956, 1,015 people were hanged, 297 for murder and 559 for unlawful possession of arms or administering the Mau Mau oath. As well as widespread beating and torture of suspects, defendants rarely had a chance to prepare their case and judges were racially biased in their evaluation of evidence. There were mass trials of up to fifty men with numbers around their necks; in most of these, groups of between ten and twenty men went to the gallows together. ‘There was appalling abuse of human rights at all stages of the legal process,’ notes David Anderson of the University of London. A mobile gallows was transported around the country dispensing ‘justice’ to Mau Mau suspects, while dead rebels, especially commanders, were often displayed at cross-roads and market places.24
The Governor of Kenya even proposed that the death penalty be applied to people who were merely helping the insurgents, whether directly or indirectly, and to those committing acts of sabotage. This was too much even for the Colonial Secretary, who noted that this definition would be so broad that the death penalty ‘would be applicable to deliberate obstruction by motorist of baker’s van delivering bread to military unit or to intentional puncturing of sanitary inspector’s bicycle [sic]’.25
By the mid 1950s the scale of atrocities was so great that news stories by the foreign press based in Nairobi reached London. A parliamentary delegation visited Kenya in 1954 and found that ‘brutality and malpractices by the police have occurred on a scale which constitutes a threat to public confidence in the forces of law and order’. The following year the Labour MP Barbara Castle visited Kenya to investigate government involvement in torture and killings and concluded that the entire system of justice in Kenya had a ‘Nazi’ attitude towards Africans:
In the heart of the British empire there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where murders and torture of Africans go unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation.26
The key aspects of British repression in Kenya were ‘resettlement’ operations that forced 90,000 Kikuyu into detention camps surrounded by barbed wire and troops, and the compulsory ‘villageisation’ of the Kikuyu reserves. The Kikuyus’ livestock was confiscated and many were subjected to forced labour. ‘Villageisation’ meant the destruction of formerly scattered homesteads and the erection of houses in fortified camps to replace them. This meant a traumatic break from the traditional Kikuyu way of life. Even when not accompanied, as it often was, by 23-hour curfews, it resulted in widespread famine and death. In total, around 150,000 Africans lost their lives due to the war, most dying of disease and starvation in the ‘protected villages’.27
Shortly after the ‘emergency’ was declared, the Governor issued an order allowing the government to detain whomever it liked in a concentration camp for an indefinite period. In these camps, the inmates were classified as ‘blacks’ if they were Mau Mau officials or supporters, ‘greys’ if they were suspected of being such with no evidence, and ‘whites’ if they had no Mau Mau connections (the latter were subsequently released). Diseases spread in the camps. The declassified files report on one camp having over 400 typhoid cases, with around ninety people dying as a result.28
The colonial government reported:
The sudden confinement of thousands of Africans behind barb wire has set very considerable and difficult medical problems. This has been aggravated by the fact that of necessity there has been little distinction between the fit and the unfit when the question of detention is being considered. Consequently, infectious disease has been introduced into the camps from the start.29
Historian V. G. Kiernan comments that the camps ‘were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments’. Brutality by the warders was systematic. One former officer noted that ‘Japanese methods of torture’ were being practised by one camp commandant.30
A former officer in one of the detention camps in 1954–55 witnessed routine ‘short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging – all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights’. In one camp, he said:
The detainees were being systematically ill-treated, underfed, overworked and flogged by the Security Officer … The women and children, in conditions of severe overcrowding, were sleeping on the bare stone or wooden floors as the Commandant had forbidden them to construct beds … The lavatories were merely large pits in the ground … with the excreta lapping over the top.
At another camp, where forced labour was practised, ‘one European officer made the detainees work at pointless hard labour tasks twelve hours a day’. The commandant was seen ‘punching and kicking detainees’ and, on the orders of a European officer, warders were ‘sent into one of the compounds … with orders to “beat up” the detainees. This they proceeded to do with sticks, lumps of wood and whips. Several European officers … joined in the beating’. The order had been given ‘for no apparent reason’. ‘Some African detainees had been knocked unconscious and nearly 100 were treated in hospital.’31
The killings of eleven men by warders at Hola concentration camp in March 1959 proved to be a turning point in British policy. John Cowan, the Senior Superintendent of Prisons in Kenya from 1957 to 1963, told the Channel 4 documentary noted above of British officers forcing a group of prisoners at Hola camp to obey work orders. He said the policy was that if they did not ‘prove amenable to work’ then ‘they should be – in the phrase “manhandled” to the site of work, and forced to carry out the task’. On 3 March 1959, 85 prisoners were marched to a site and ordered to work. One of the prisoners, John Maina Kahihu, said:
We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves. There were two hundred guards. One hundred and seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. They beat us from 8 am to 11
.30. They were beating us like dogs. I was covered by other bodies – just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But the others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them.32
Alongside the eleven dead were sixty seriously injured. When reports of the killings reached Britain there was political uproar; within weeks London closed the Kenyan camps and released the detainees.
Government attitudes to forced labour in 1950s Kenya show British elites’ basic contempt for international law, equally blatant today. In February 1953 the Kenyan colonial authorities cabled London saying they were on the verge of putting people ‘compulsorily to work’ in ‘the areas being prepared for settlement by Kikuyu or other African tribes.’ To do this, the Governor asked London whether there was any possibility ‘of obtaining exemption’ from the provisions of the UN’s Forced Labour Convention of 1930. The Colonial Office debated the issue and recognised that implementing the proposal would be illegal. It was clearly noted that ‘compulsory labour as proposed by Kenya would be a breach of the Forced Labour Convention’ and ‘there was no procedure for claiming exemption from its provisions’. But despite this, the minutes of one meeting note that ‘if the measures could be introduced without publicity, or delayed until after the [UN] session, the UK delegation’s task would be easier’. The Colonial Secretary then wrote to the Governor explaining that ‘if … the proposal for compulsory employment is to be pursued it means facing up to the fact that we shall be breaking the Convention’. The Colonial Secretary declared:
