Thacker returned to Kapenguria in a grim mood. The lead prosecutor spent a fortnight smearing Kenyatta as a Soviet stooge, and trying to fabricate a connection with Mau Mau. The background continued to militate against dispassionate justice. In March 1953 several hundred Mau Mau killed seventy-four men, women and children in the loyalist village of Lari, committing unspeakable atrocities. The following day, relatives of the victims in the Home Guard and Kenya Police Reserve struck back at suspected Mau Mau sympathizers in the area, killing a far greater number. Thirty miles away, another Mau Mau gang attacked a police post in Naivashu, making off with a significant cache of weapons and freeing 170 Mau Mau suspects from an adjacent detention camp.
Thacker found Kenyatta and the others guilty and sentenced them to seven years’ hard labour. They were sent back to Lokitaung, which had been converted into a prison, its barbed wire augmented by Kamba guards, who hated the Kikuyu inmates, while the local Turkana tribesmen were told they could hunt down and kill escapees. In Kenyatta’s absence the authorities destroyed his college at Githunguri and pulled down his home at Gatundu. Aged sixty, he was spared manual labour and instead functioned as the group cook while tending vegetables. On completion of his sentence in April 1959 he was restricted to a purpose-built colony at Lodwar, where he could move only 800 yards from his dwelling.
Johnnie Shows that Bwana is Boss
Kenyatta’s personal fate was separate from that of Mau Mau, although imprisonment accelerated his transformation into nationalist leader in waiting. The partial decapitation of the Mau Mau political leadership was accompanied by collective punishments, mass screening and a special tax levied on the Kikuyu to subsidize the costs of fighting the Mau Mau. In active Mau Mau hotspots livestock was confiscated, notionally to encourage informants to come forward. In a very tense atmosphere, even innocent events could turn deadly. When a large group of Kikuyu gathered to witness a dumb boy miraculously cured, a much outnumbered party of African policemen panicked at the sight of so many pangas and shot sixteen of them dead. As a result of this incident the police were ordered to use buckshot rather than bullets.25
From the end of 1952 Mau Mau raids quickened. On Christmas Eve there were five separate attacks on senior African members of the Church of Scotland, in which the victims were speared or hacked to death. On New Year’s Day 1953, two white bachelor farmers were killed when fifteen Mau Mau burst in before the victims could rise from the dinner table to get their guns. For this was a society where it had become advisable to have a loaded revolver near to hand at all times as detailed instructions called ‘Your Turn May Come’ advised: ‘The speed with which you can have a gun in your hand may well mean the difference between life or death.’26 Robert Broadbent, the MI5 security liaison officer in Nairobi, slept with a revolver under the pillow, blissfully unaware that a Mau Mau arms cache was hidden in his own kitchen.27 ‘Women Put Guns in their Handbags’ figured as a headline in Britain’s right-wing Daily Mail, which along with the left-wing Daily Mirror gave regular coverage to events in Kenya.28
In line with what the French military were doing in Algeria, the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya were declared prohibited zones, where anyone was liable to be shot. The definition of a weapon was extended to agricultural tools or a spear that the bearer might have had innocent reasons to possess. On the Kikuyu Reserve those who failed to respond to a challenge could be shot too. During the first three months of 1953 thousands of Kikuyu loyalists were encouraged to join Home Guard militias to defend people and property against Mau Mau attacks. More and more Kikuyu were screened to identify Mau Mau activists and supporters, who were held in an ever larger number of detention camps. The constant harassment served as a recruiting sergeant for the Mau Mau cause – if you were going to be treated as Mau Mau, you might as well join them.29 So did the policy of expelling squatters from the Rift Valley or from the slums of Nairobi. They were not welcome in the Kikuyu reservations and often joined the Mau Mau bands for want of any alternative.30
Britain had signed the Geneva Convention in 1949, though it contrived to avoid ratifying it until 1957 to allow itself as much latitude as possible in dealing with insurgents. Similarly, Britain may have been one of the original signatories to the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, but it ensured that derogations existed to exempt its colonies from it. However, the development of global mass media meant that the metropolis could no longer turn a blind eye to what happened at the behest of local colonial authorities. In both Algeria and Kenya the traditional collusion failed.31
In 1952 the local authorities requested the blueprints for gallows to be built beyond Nairobi.32 By mid-1953 capital crimes included administering or participating in Mau Mau oaths, membership of Mau Mau gangs, being found in possession of arms, ammunition and explosives or being discovered in the company of such persons. With so many suspects being detained the wheels of justice turned too slowly in the eyes of the settler community and the majority Kikuyu loyalists, which presented the authorities with the challenge of pre-empting vigilante justice. In response the British government gave in to Baring’s request for a series of Emergency Assize Courts.33
It was not the finest hour for British jurisprudence. The judges, who sat alone in these courts, gave credence to dubious confessions and to the evidence of witnesses who had survived Mau Mau massacres by keeping their heads down. In one notorious case where the accused had the seemingly watertight alibi that he had been in jail during the massacre at Lari, the police were on hand to testify that on the day in question he had escaped for a few lethal hours. The judge sentenced him to death, although the conviction was quashed on appeal.34 The seventy-one men executed for the Lari massacre were only the first to be hanged in a draconian and largely successful effort to prevent Kenya succumbing to lynch law. In normal times half of the death sentences passed in Kenya were commuted to terms of imprisonment. Of the 1,468 Mau Mau convicted of capital crimes, 1,068 were hanged. By contrast there were 226 hangings in Malaya and only twelve Zionist terrorists executed in Palestine between 1938 and 1947. Although in both cases more British civilians, policemen and soldiers lost their lives than in Kenya, the threat of mass vigilantism was absent.
The Mau Mau murder of the Ruck family intensified white-settler pressure on Baring to involve them more intimately in the anti-Mau Mau campaign. The settlers formed a United Kenya Protection Association, with its own seventy-man ‘Commando’ or death squad. To counter such pressures, the War Office despatched Major-General Robert ‘Looney’ Hinde, who in 1944 had been removed from his brigade command in Normandy, as director of operations. Hinde declared that ‘we must heed the example of Malaya and ensure that repressive measures do NOT result in an unbridgeable gap of bitterness between us and the Kikuyu’. His stated plan was to prevent the spread of Mau Mau, stop terrorist attacks and ‘stamp out Mau Mau and the ideology behind it’. But when the Mau Mau murdered a farmer who had been a wartime soldier and POW, Hinde’s sympathies swung towards settlers who wanted to wage a ‘gloves off’ war in which vengeance would be meted out by their own police force and the Home Guard militias. Once it became apparent that he was prepared to tolerate vigilantism, Hinde was sacked. However, the police continued to kill with impunity, joking that simama (halt) meant ‘goodbye’.35
Hinde was replaced by Lieutenant-General Sir George ‘Bobbie’ Erskine with the title of commander-in-chief. His early military career had started in Ireland and India. He went on to win the DSO at El Alamein in 1942, although later in Normandy Montgomery lamented his lack of aggression on the battlefield. He made up for it as commander of British forces in Egypt in 1949–52, using considerable force to suppress nationalist guerrillas in the Canal Zone. Erskine had a low estimation of some of his own forces and took a violent dislike to the ‘middle class sluts’ as he described the white settlers – and he did not just mean the women. He kept a written authorization to declare martial law in h
is spectacle case, which he opened and snapped shut whenever the settlers tried his patience.
Erskine immediately stopped the practice of keeping scorecards of Mau Mau killed and paying £5 per kill by way of bonus. He dismissed the brigade commander of the King’s African Rifles and court-martialled KAR Captain Griffiths for shooting two Kikuyu prisoners. Unable to make the charge of murder stick, Erskine insisted the court try him for torture instead, because he had cut trophy ears from the victims before murdering them. Griffiths spent five years in a British prison, an almost unique case when most British personnel who committed acts of barbarity were never even indicted. Erskine was exceptional too in that he was firmly of the opinion that Mau Mau was not an atavistic cult, which was how Colonial Secretary Lyttelton, Governor Baring and most of the settlers perceived it. Instead he regarded it as the product of maladministration and brutal policing, not to speak of the economic exploitation practised by the settlers.
In late June 1953 Erskine launched Operation Buttercup. This was a large-scale probing mission that took in the villages of the Kikuyu reserve at Fort Hall as well as the adjacent forested areas where the Mau Mau operated. To increase spatial coverage, Erskine agreed that the police needed beefing up, incorporating the white-officered Home Guard, which added another 25,000 men and women to the settlers’ own all-white Kenya Police Reserve, which was in turn augmented with imported ‘Kenya Cowboys’ from the European war’s flotsam and jetsam. Stationed in encampments surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, the Home Guard performed badly: they tried to buy off the Mau Mau with arms and ammunition, and tended to bolt at the first sign of trouble. They also extorted money and goods from the Kikuyu they were supposed to be protecting. In yet another precursor of events in Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, the pervasive violence served as cover for both sides to settle private scores.
Under close press scrutiny, Erskine made it a priority to seek the moral high ground, in which endeavour he was aided by the barbarity of the Mau Mau. So the conflict was cast as a struggle against savagery rather than against Communism, the usual suspect, to prevent the internationalization of the conflict by meddling Americans or Nehru’s India striking poses at the UN.36 Evidently, the behaviour of some elements of the security forces undermined the claim. To sort out the police, who were the worst offenders, Arthur Young, the London Police Commissioner who had been successful in Malaya, was appointed Kenya’s new commissioner of police, arriving in March 1954. One of his first acts was to restore the autonomy of the Criminal Investigation Department to investigate police abuses and atrocities. Young lasted until December. Two innocent Kikuyu farmers were tortured and killed at a loyalist interrogation centre, with the connivance of British officials who falsified evidence and committed perjury. Although a judge unravelled the truth, Baring suppressed the written judgment. Young resigned and returned to London, and was with difficulty persuaded to tone down a resignation letter that blamed Baring for what the police had been doing.37
In Kenya white judges and juries more usually found excuses for whatever the police did, assuming that wholesale bureaucratic cover-ups did not prevent such incidents reaching court. Brian Hayward, the nineteen-year-old leader of a screening team sent to Tanganyika in October 1953 to vet 8,000 Kikuyu being repatriated to Kenya, was found to have systematically tortured those he suspected were Mau Mau with the aid of ten African members of his team. One victim was so badly beaten that he begged to be killed. The judge showed much sympathy for the defendants: ‘It is easy to work oneself up into a state of pious horror over these offences, but they must be considered against their background. All the accused were engaged in seeking out inhuman monsters and savages of the lowest order.’ Hayward was convicted and given a token sentence that he served by working for twelve weeks as a clerk in a hotel. Baring compounded matters by reinstating him as a district officer, although Erskine later managed to have him dismissed.38
Meanwhile, in January 1954 the army captured Waruhiu Itote, known as General China because of his wartime service with the KAR in Burma. Disorientated after demobilization, Itote had been oathed in 1950, before becoming an administrator of oaths himself, and an experienced Mau Mau killer. In August 1952 he moved to the forests, from which he launched a series of fearsome raids to massacre government loyalists, their wives and children. Finally his band ran into an army patrol and, after being shot twice and injuring his leg, he surrendered. Surprised to be treated well and offered his life, Itote revealed everything he knew, including the fact that he had commanded 4,000 men, the largest single concentration of Mau Mau. On Prime Minister Churchill’s instructions he was prevailed on to relay surrender terms to his comrades in the forests. A KAR unit not informed of this arrangement ambushed a large group of Mau Mau on their way to surrender, driving the rest back into the hills.
In April 1954 Erskine launched Operation Anvil, based on the 1946 Operation Agatha, when the Zionist leadership had been rounded up in Palestine. In the small hours of 24 April some 20,000 British and African troops interdicted all movement in and out of Nairobi. For four weeks the security forces screened the entire male population, paying special attention to the Kikuyu inhabitants of the densely populated sub-districts of Bahati, Pumwani and Kariokor, before turning to the predominantly Asian suburb of Eastlands out near the airport. Basic inspection of an array of documents Kikuyu were required to have about them led to suspects being taken to a transit camp at Langata, one of three camps erected prior to the operation. Notes were made on each individual, which frequently developed into a substantial file. Tribal elders and hooded informers were brought in to identify Mau Mau, a practice that left plenty of room for mere malice.
Alleged Mau Mau were moved to two camps at Mackinnon Road and Manyani where, in line with Allied classification of Nazis in post-war Germany, they were designated ‘black’, ‘grey’ and ‘white’. Most of the ‘blacks’ and ‘greys’ were subject to emergency detention orders under which they could be held without trial for two years. Twenty-four thousand people, roughly half the adult male Kikuyu population of Nairobi, were detained. By the end of 1954 there were 70,000 in captivity. The greatest number formally detained in Malaya had been 1,200, in Palestine 500.39
While Anvil certainly dampened down Mau Mau activity in the capital, it was a desperately indiscriminate operation that swept up even brave Christian opponents of the terrorists. Richer Kikuyu often evaded detention by doling out bribes, but others were taken away, leaving Home Guard units free to loot their shops and homes. The Home Guard became a permanent intimidating presence in some of Nairobi’s slums, but at least the remaining inhabitants could drink beer and smoke cigarettes, which the Mau Mau had banned on pain of death or mutilation. This was one of the many ways in which the Mau Mau had alienated potential supporters. Another was their campaign to burn down Church schools, which outraged the vast majority who recognized that education was the only way to achieve prosperity.
The Nairobi operation was matched by the creation of protected villages in Central Province, another strategy copied from Malaya, and designed to isolate the Mau Mau from their food and supplies. People who had traditionally lived in scattered settlements were scooped up and their villages burned. They were corralled into tight groups of around 500 people, after first having to build the new round huts themselves, together with excavating the spike-filled moats that surrounded them.40 By the end of 1955 there were 804 such villages, containing 1,050,899 people. It is worth noting that, as a proportion of the target population, this eclipsed what the French did in Algeria or the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique.41 The wretched inhabitants of these villages were subjected to all manner of chicanery and coercion by the Home Guard protecting them. A further disgusting detail is that since many of the inmates were women, whose husbands were in detention camps, they were frequently raped.42
The Mau Mau were forced into harsher environments such as swamps and the deep forests, where their morale an
d discipline crumbled. Although this terrain was too altitudinous for the sole available helicopter, the RAF was licensed to drop much bigger bombs (weighing 500 or 1,000 pounds) than the twenty-pounders used on areas where the Mau Mau were mixed up with civilians. In September 1954 a Mau Mau leader called Gitonga Kareme surrendered after twenty of his gang had been obliterated by RAF bombing. Between November 1953 and June 1954 the RAF killed or wounded 900 Mau Mau insurgents.43 British troops also tracked the Mau Mau into the forests. They destroyed a Mau Mau gang lurking in the Dandora Swamp, capturing its leader, Captain Nyagi Nyaga, and although he was extremely co-operative with his CID and Special Branch interrogators, he was sentenced to death and hanged along with sixteen of his comrades. Nyaga was a seasoned fighter, but many of his co-accused were either men whom Mau Mau had sprung from a prison – and had little choice in joining the society – or who claimed they had been kidnapped and press-ganged. That defence did not save them, even when one of the hard-core Mau Mau fighters confirmed it was true.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 44
