A substantial part of the Kikuyu population became rootless, eking out a living as squatters on white farms. All had to carry a record of their birthplace, fingerprints, employment history and wages in a small tin strung around their necks. Those who became squatters on white-owned property found themselves subjected to forced labour, in particular the important task of excavating terraces to prevent soil erosion. The squatters’ small herds were constantly subjected to veterinary procedures designed to stop diseases jumping to prize European livestock. They were tolerated so long as the white settlers did not know how to make the land they occupied profitable, but once they mastered such cash crops as coffee or tea, and developed large beef and dairy herds, it was time for the squatters to go. Since they were unwelcome back on the Kikuyu reservations, which had their own demographic pressures, many younger Kikuyu migrated to the slums of Nairobi, where they became a restive underclass, while those in regular employment were radicalized by trade unions protesting against the dire wages they received.
Young Kamau worked his way up to secretary-general of the KCA, editing its newspaper Muigwithania and making an impressive presentation on Kikuyu land problems to the Hilton Young Commission in Nairobi in 1928. The association sent him to London the following year to represent Kikuyu interests directly to the Colonial Office. Apart from a brief return visit in 1930–1 to see his wife Grace Wahu and their young children, Kamau would remain in Britain until 1946, using the name Johnstone Kenyatta and marrying an Englishwoman while his presumably more informal African marriage was still in being. Whatever transformed him into one of the most revered African nationalist leaders largely happened in the dingy London bedsits he inhabited for sixteen years of cold and hardship, alleviated by handouts from his white liberal and Presbyterian friends.
In 1929 he paid a brief visit to Bolshevik Russia, returning there in 1932–3, where as ‘James Joken’ he attended the Lenin School and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (thereby following in the steps of Ho Chi Minh), whose offerings included paramilitary training and indoctrination in Marxist-Leninism. Like many another black African he soon discovered that Russian racism was of an even more virulent kind than he had encountered in Britain. As to the supposed indoctrination, when a South African Communist accused him of being ‘petty bourgeois’, he replied, ‘I don’t like the petty thing. Why don’t you say I’m a big bourgeois?’6 ‘James Joken’ left Russia abruptly when Stalin reversed the orthodox Communist line on imperialism to court the Western powers after the advent of Hitler in Germany.7
Although Britain’s MI5 knew that Communism had little appeal to Kenyatta, the colonial administration in Kenya was to make much of his time in Moscow. In fact it left almost no imprint on him and was merely one of the identities he tried out, encouraged to dabble in Marxism by the clever African Americans and Trinidadians he met in London, and, unlike the majority of Western ‘useful fools’, permanently put off it by his experience of Stalin’s police state.
In fact Kenyatta was very far from being ‘progressive’. Although he remained a Christian, he broke with the Church of Scotland for its condemnation of the Kikuyu practice of female circumcision, which privately he opposed. This was a clever tactical move, in line with the KCA’s pose as the defender of ancestral ways against Western interlopers and their agents, the tribal chiefs, whose authority of course rested on tradition. Independent schools, staffed by teachers who refused to observe the Church’s line, were created to rival the mission schools.8
During his long sojourn in London Kenyatta eked out a modest living, as a spear-waving African extra in Alexander Korda’s 1934 film Sanders of the River, while attending classes by the great anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski at the LSE. Under Malinowski’s guidance, he produced Facing Mount Kenya in 1938, a hymn to the primordial paradise that was East Africa before the disruptive white serpent arrived. Parts of the book are intensely lyrical, as when thunder and lightning are attributed to the creaking joints of Ngai the sky god as he stepped from one mountaintop to another.9 It was a brilliant work of semi-fiction, with academic trappings.
For the cover the nearly-fifty-year-old author posed wearing a cloak and brandishing a fake spear, with a beard modelled on that of the Emperor Haile Selassie. With the aid of a friend Kenyatta went through the alphabet trying combinations of sounds until they alighted on Jomo as the appropriate name to accompany Kenyatta.10
While Kenyatta settled into the role of stage African, affecting a fez and cloak, large garnet rings on his fingers and a silver-topped cane as well as his trademark beaded cummerbund, the fecund Kikuyu were bursting through the demographic limits of their territorial reservations, at the same time as the white settlers were expanding their holdings, a process accelerated by the boom in commodity prices following the outbreak of war in 1939. More demobbed British soldiers flooded into Kenya after 1945 to benefit from a scheme to expand agricultural settlement. By contrast, many of the 75,000 demobilized Kenyan African soldiers who had fought for Britain drifted into heavily segregated Nairobi, by now much more than a dusty or muddy railhead, where some of them joined criminal gangs.11 Moreover, 100,000 squatters without any firm title were displaced from prime agricultural land to more remote and infertile territory between 1946 and 1952.12 To bolster their solidarity the squatters took binding oaths, a practice adopted from men radicalized by the slums of Nairobi.
This was all a world apart from the sleepy West Sussex village of Storrington, where Kenyatta spent the Second World War tending tomatoes and lecturing to army educational classes. In 1942, by now divorced, he married the thirty-two-year-old Edna Clarke, whose parents had been killed in a bombing raid. After sixteen years in England, Kenyatta had astute things to say about the inhabitants. ‘The English are a wonderful people to live with in England,’ he wrote to his daughter Margaret, the child he had had with Grace Wahu.13
The 1941 Atlantic Charter seemed to promise much, bringing in its wake much frothy talk on the BBC about the future of European colonies. To the official response that it was a question of fitness for self-governance, Kenyatta and his fellows, like Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast, responded, ‘who is to be the judge of our fitness, and by what standards will this verdict be pronounced?’ In September 1946 Kenyatta bade farewell to his Edna and their own child and set sail for East Africa. At Mombasa he was reunited with Grace Wahu and their two children, a son aged twenty-five and the eighteen-year-old Margaret. At each stop on the journey to Nairobi women made the Kikuyu trilling sound every time he alighted, which suggests a considerable degree of prior mobilization and organization. Tribal connections ensured that Kenyatta’s future was bright when he was made head of an Independent Teachers’ College, with a view to training teachers who he hoped would become a future political network. In June 1947 Kenyatta became president of the Kenyan African Union (KAU), which since the banning of KCA in 1940 had become the main vehicle of Kikuyu nationalism. Although he would have preferred to embrace the other major tribes, the Kamba, Luo and Masai, they so feared Kikuyu domination that they preferred to stick with the British. While Kenyatta was undoubtedly the movement’s figurehead, within the KAU much more radical figures slipped into leadership positions. Kenyatta himself was under permanent police surveillance and had to be very cautious, but the more obscure actors suffered no such inhibitions. From early 1952 the bodies of police informers began to appear as the KAU radicals cleaned house.
The Setting
The settlers’ behaviour as they fanned out in the White Highlands between Nairobi and Lake Victoria could be brutal. One colonial official reported: ‘there is no atrocity in the [Belgian] Congo – except mutilation – which cannot be matched in our Protectorate’.14 Once colonial policing was introduced such behaviour died down, but the settlers learned to institutionalize their power through domination of the all-white Legislative Council introduced in 1920. By the 1930s they numbered around 30,000, and they undoubtedly put their stam
p on the country. A gulf of incomprehension divides contemporary Britons from those times. Most whites were wiry, hardworking farmers living in glorified shacks, with enough Swahili to say ‘jambo’ (hello) or ‘kwa heri’ (goodbye) to the help. But the richest indulged in every kind of vice, which gave the whole of Kenyan white society an international reputation for tawdry scandal.15 As Evelyn Waugh noted when he visited in 1930 as a special correspondent for The Times, this was like generalizing the antics of a handful of upper-class rakes in Belgravia or Mayfair to the clerks and managers of London.16
Although the settlers spoke constantly of the superiority of white civilization, there was not much of it in evidence among them, as visiting intellectuals like Julian Huxley sneered. They were devoted to sports and to heavy drinking in hotels and clubs, with the abrupt sunsets acting like a starting pistol. The places where they gathered were strictly segregated. When a customs officer played tennis with an Anglo-Indian doctor at the Mombasa Sports Club, he was taken aside and told he was an embarrassment to the European community. As a Jew, Alderman Izzie Somen could not join the exclusive Nairobi Club even after he became the mayor of the city.17 By the mid-1940s the settlers had organized as a proto-party called the Electors’ Union, with Michael Blundell as their sophisticated spokesman.
Of the Barings, the American travel writer John Gunther wrote: ‘Sir Evelyn is one of the most aristocratic aristocrats I have ever met . . . [He and his wife] were fastidious, generous, with beautiful manners and refinement – healthy people too – but they made Government House in Kenya resemble a stately island lost in time, drowned in forces nobody could comprehend.’18
The last point was also true of a British intelligence-gathering operation confined to Nairobi. Among the Kikuyu, oaths had long been used to cement contracts involving land or marriage, with ‘unhealthiness’ the penalty for infringements. Christianity meant that oaths were sworn with a Bible in one hand. The more radical members of the KAU developed the oathing ceremonies of the displaced squatters into a means of political mobilization. At some point members of protection rackets in the Nairobi slums began to take oaths among themselves and (under duress) from those they preyed on. For that was the literal meaning of the term Mau Mau – ‘greedy eaters’ being a plausible translation – that came to be applied to the Kikuyu resistance movement against egregious white domination. Their oaths drew on animist practices and glorified gang rituals.
Such rituals appealed to the Mau Mau’s core supporters: rural have-nots and urban ‘wild boys’ impatient with the slow traditional path to becoming a fully fledged man through acquiring a stake in society as it existed. Coerced oath-taking spread through the Kikuyu community, with the object of deterring people from becoming police informers and to create an informer-free space in which to operate their criminal enterprises. Oaths were administered at night, under arches of banana leaves studded with sheep’s eyes, and involved animal and human menstrual blood, urine and animal parts. Sometimes participants were obliged to commit bestiality. When naked husbands and wives took the oath, they were bound together by the intestines of goats. Unsurprisingly, Europeans concluded that something darkly demonic or at least essentially pathological was afoot, whereas African loyalists tended to view the Mau Mau as ‘lost boys’ or reckless delinquents. By 1950–1 the most advanced oaths had become a call to bloody revolution:
If I am sent to bring in the head of my enemy and I fail to do so, may this oath kill me.
If I fail to steal anything I can from a European may this oath kill me.
If I know of an enemy to our organization and I fail to report him to my leader, may this oath kill me.
If I ever receive any money from a European as a bribe for information may this oath kill me.
If I am ever sent by a leader to do something big for the house of Kikuyu, and I refuse, may this oath kill me.
If I refuse to help in driving the Europeans from this country may this oath kill me.
If I worship any leader but Jomo, may this oath kill me.19
Acknowledging Kenyatta as a symbolic figurehead was no proof that he either initiated or directed Mau Mau violence. In fact, the head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was categorical that ‘Our sources have produced nothing to indicate that Kenyatta, or his associates in the UK, are directly implicated in Mau Mau activities, or that Kenyatta is essential to Mau Mau as a leader, or that he is in a position to direct its activities.’ Its leadership was much more decentralized and self-selecting and hence difficult to track than would have been the case had it been the handiwork of one man.20
Initially, Mau Mau violence was deployed against those Kikuyu loyalists who refused to take such oaths; many of them were Christians who regarded such rituals as satanic. Following prosecutions of those who administered such oaths, in August 1950 the Mau Mau society was proscribed, without the colonial government having much of an idea of what it was. Attacks on loyalist Kikuyu continued, and there were dozens of cases of arson on remote farms, where the dry grass suddenly blazed up. When the police investigated such incidents, they encountered a wall of silence, with the result being a Collective Punishments Ordinance in April 1951, under which recalcitrant villages could be fined the huge sum of £2,500.
The government also encouraged what wits called ‘Her Majesty’s Witch Doctors’ to administer counter-oaths, based on anthropological ‘traditions’ invented by Louis Leakey. In return for their fees, these elderly gentlemen used a goat’s hoof or sacred stone to induce the oath taker to vomit out the Mau Mau oath, although usually this involved a spit and the words ‘I emit it’, all helped along with a few prods of the rifle butt by African policemen.21 In mid-May 1952 the first mutilated corpses appeared, usually of informers, with those who reported finding the bodies also murdered.22 In a particularly shocking incident, a Kikuyu Christian who refused such an oath was strangled to death. A couple of weeks after his burial, Mau Mau insisted his neighbours exhume the corpse, which they were obliged to hack to pieces, touching decomposing parts to their mouths.
With Baring yet to grace his colony with his presence, the acting Governor Henry Potter yielded to settler pressure for drastic measures to deal with these incidents of murder and arson as well as more general unrest. In September 1952 curfews were introduced, printing presses were controlled and the police were allowed to attest a suspect’s confession in court. Judges soon realized that these were being beaten out of people, although none of them allowed this to lead to acquittals.23 Within a week of Baring’s arrival in the colony the paramount chief of the Kiambu district was ambushed and shot dead as his car returned from a session of a Native Tribunal in which he sat as a judge. Baring attended his funeral, catching sight at the graveside of Jomo Kenyatta, who a few weeks before had denounced Mau Mau in front of a crowd of 30,000 people.
The initial British response was to attempt to ‘nip the insurgency in the bud’ through massive coercion. Unlike in Malaya, the authorities in Kenya did not have the option of deporting their enemy to their country of origin. Sir Percy Sillitoe of MI5 and his top team were brought in to make Special Branch intelligence collection more efficient, but although many of the tactics employed in Malaya were adopted in Kenya they were not part of an overall, integrated plan. For this Baring’s arrogance bears the primary responsibility. As the number of killings mounted, he requested authorization from London for a state of emergency. In preparation for Operation Jock Scott, a list of 150 names of people to be arrested was compiled, at the head of which was Jomo Kenyatta.
On 20 October 1952 the 1st Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers was flown in from Egypt, to reinforce the eight battalions of King’s African Rifles present in the theatre. At midnight the Kenyan police picked up two-thirds of the 150 people on the list. Moderates awaited arrest, while the real radicals like Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge escaped into the forest. Kenyatta was arrested at his residence in the school compound at Githunguri and flown to Lokit
aung, a remote desert station near the Ethiopian border. He had his own small house, alongside another where four guards from a different tribe lived. Meanwhile senior policemen toiled through the ton and a half of papers they had scooped up during his arrest, finding nothing incriminating.24 In a legalized farce, Kenyatta and five KAU colleagues were relocated to a remote area called Kapenguria, technically as free men, where they were rearrested so that they could be tried in obscurity rather than in Nairobi in whose vicinity their alleged offences had been committed. They were charged with controlling and directing Mau Mau, and became notorious as ‘the Kapenguria Six’.
Ransley Thacker, formerly of the Supreme Court of Kenya, was picked to preside over the trial. He requested and received a secret payment of £20,000 to ensure his future safety in Kenya. An impressive defence team included a member of India’s upper house and Denis Pritt, a British Marxist MP and Queen’s Counsel. Every obstacle was put in the defence team’s way, starting with locating them in a town thirty miles from the court, where even getting a meal was complicated by the colour bar against Pritt. The prosecution case was flimsy, reliant on one witness who claimed to have seen Kenyatta administer an oath – on a date before Mau Mau had been legally proscribed. Thacker was biased and vindictive against the defendants and their counsel, frequently repairing to Nairobi for consultations. Six years later it transpired that the prosecution’s chief witness had been paid to perjure himself in return for an airfare to England, the fees for a university course, subsistence for his family and a guaranteed job back in Kenya.
After the initial hearings, Thacker went to Nairobi to ponder whether to dismiss or proceed. Whatever doubts he had were dispelled when the Mau Mau slaughtered a young couple called Roger and Esme Ruck on their remote farm. Hitherto, when the Mau Mau had struck at Europeans (and it is worth bearing in mind that the thirty-two Europeans killed in the emergency were fewer than those who died in road accidents) the victims had been elderly loners who were easy prey. Roger and Esme were hacked to death with panga knives on the veranda of their home; their six-year-old son Michael met the same fate in his bed amid his toys. A thousand white settlers descended on Government House in an ugly mood. A middle-aged woman screamed, ‘There, there, they’ve given the house over to the fucking niggers, the bloody bastards!’ when the visiting Sultan of Zanzibar was incautious enough to appear on the balcony, while below him enraged settlers pressed against African policemen guarding the Barings, burning them with cigarettes. At a mass meeting in Nakuru bullish settlers demanded that 50,000 Kikuyu be shot to avenge the Rucks.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 43
