Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The last Mau Mau redoubts were in the forest of the Aberdare Range and Mount Kenya, where trees gave way to dense bamboo as one got higher, and the bamboo gave way to hard scrabble and rock. Here Mau Mau bands established well-concealed camps, ringed by sentries and provisioned by volunteers from nearby villages. They learned how to use animal or bird sounds to communicate, and while their British opponents lumbered noisily through the undergrowth laden with heavy gear, the Mau Mau could run for up to seventy miles a day. They made do with berries and plants, and overcame Kikuyu taboos to eat elephant or monkey meat. The ability to extract honey from African beehives was a much prized skill. Gradually they replaced their ragged uniforms with items fashioned from furs and animal hides. But, like the Chinese Communists in Malaya’s jungles, they were increasingly prone to paranoia and depression.44

  Major infantry operations such as Operation Hammer in February 1955 involved a sharply worsening cost-benefit ratio for the attacking force. In Hammer nine battalions killed 161 Mau Mau, which worked out at £10,000 per kill. Out of this impasse emerged the innovation, pioneered by the then Major Frank Kitson, of false-flag operations or ‘pseudo gangs’, initially involving Kikuyu loyalists from the Kenya Regiment, and then rebels who had been successfully turned to operate against their former Mau Mau comrades. Contrary to myth there was little role for white policemen and settlers ‘blacking up’ with actors’ greasepaint or burned cork for these missions.45 In October 1956 Ian Henderson, a white Special Branch officer, used Kitson’s methods to track down the able if psychopathic Dedan Kimathi, the only major Mau Mau leader still at large. He became the last Mau Mau member to be hanged when he was executed in Nairobi prison on 27 December 1956.46

  In June 1957, Sir Evelyn passed on to the Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd a secret memorandum written by Eric Griffiths-Jones, the Attorney-General of Kenya. The memorandum described the abuse of Mau Mau detainees. Sir Evelyn wrote a covering letter stating that inflicting a ‘violent shock’ had been the only way of dealing with Mau Mau insurgents.

  Though the Mau Mau uprising had been militarily defeated by this date, its aftermath was deeply embarrassing for the British government, which found itself arraigned by both domestic and international opinion. The reasons arose from the so-called rehabilitation process or ‘Pipeline’ into which Mau Mau suspects were fed and shunted between camps whose regime notionally reflected whether they were categorized as ‘grey’ or ‘black’. The camp gates were emblazoned with such historically unfortunate exhortations as ‘Labour and Freedom’, as well as ‘He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped’. These camps were barbed-wire compounds dominated by watchtowers, with images of the young Queen Elizabeth II juxtaposed to those of Jomo Kenyatta, who within a few years she would be greeting like a long-lost uncle. Loudspeakers boomed out commands and exhortations day and night.

  The Kenyan concentration camps bear comparison with the worst, excepting Nazi death camps. They were places where people were dehumanized and randomly brutalized (or just murdered) by men over whom the colony’s authorities exercised no control whatsoever. They undermined the British people’s belief that their colonial regimes were superior to those of their European competitors, let alone the idea that the British ‘don’t do that sort of thing’. It in no way diminishes British responsibility that many Kikuyu loyalists enthusiastically supported and participated in the process.47

  There was both a scandal and a government cover-up. Despite being systematically smeared for their efforts, a few local whistleblowers brought the disgraceful conditions in the Kenyan detention camps to the attention of Labour politicians at Westminster such as Fenner Brockway, Barbara Castle and John Stonehouse. Just when the metropolitan and colonial governments thought they had bluffed their way past a succession of scandals in Kenya, they were hit by the worst of them all. It had a history.

  In 1957 senior members of Baring’s administration had decided drastically to reduce in number the 30,000 or so detainees who were still classified as ‘black’. By overestimating the capacity of Kikuyu land to support released detainees it would be possible to free large numbers of them, provided they could be psychologically broken first. That put the spotlight on the most irremediably ‘black’, who were thought to exert an untoward influence on the less committed majority. Special measures would have to be employed to break that core group of recalcitrant Mau Mau, who were reclassified more precisely as Ys and Zs or even Z1s and Z2s, the latter being the most stubborn.

  To effect this new course, dubbed Operation Progress, Carruthers ‘Monkey’ Johnston, the Minister for African Affairs in Nairobi, appointed thirty-four-year-old District Officer Terence Gavaghan as head of rehabilitation. Gavaghan’s only obvious qualifications were that he was very large and extremely brutal. The Kenyan Attorney-General Eric Griffith-Jones helpfully provided a specious lawyerly distinction between ‘compelling’ and ‘punitive’ force, which led to the policy being tacitly approved by both Governor Baring and Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd.48

  In November 1958 the Kenya Commissioner for Prisons imparted the new line to Commandant G. M. Sullivan, newly appointed to Hola detention centre on the Tana River, which housed the worst of the worst detainees. He received support from John Cowan, the Senior Superintendent of Prisons, as he set about breaking those detainees who were still refusing to work. Cowan suggested saturating the place with a riot squad of Africans who would outnumber the detainees by five to one, and Johnston and the Minister for Internal Security and Defence authorized it. In February 1959 massive force was used to induce eighty-five detainees to work after they had sat down on the ground. Eleven of them were beaten to death by guards with pickaxe handles. When news of the atrocity reached Nairobi, Baring and the senior officials involved conspired to pass off the deaths as the result of drinking contaminated water, and quickly shunted the affair over to a supposedly compliant magistrate’s inquest. When a doctor and nurse who were present testified that the men had been beaten to death, Baring instituted merely disciplinary, as opposed to criminal, proceedings against Sullivan and his deputy Walter Coutts. He even recommended Cowan for an MBE. The smooth lawyerly scum who legitimized these acts remained entirely unaffected.49

  News of the latest outrage filtered back to British politicians, partly through the good offices of Kenyatta’s lawyer Denis Pritt. Starting with credulous reports in the East African Standard, by June 1959 the ‘Hola Scandal’ had made Time magazine in the US. The subject of Hola occupied an all-night debate in the House of Commons on 27–28 July. Hitherto Lennox-Boyd had been able to deflect Labour calls for a public inquiry into conditions in Kenya’s camps. When the government sought to defend its clumsy cover-ups with reference to the ‘morale’ of the colonial civil service, one Labour member countered with the dubious claim that ‘we cease to rank as a great power, but moral power we still have’. He also acidly commented that ‘of course the colonial civil servants were jolly good chaps, and it was very unfair to attack them, whatever they did. That is what [Dr] Crippen’s friends said: they all said that he was an extremely nice chap, but, after all, he had murdered his wife.’

  More dangerously for the Colonial Secretary, the Tory MP Enoch Powell – who had resigned from the Treasury eighteen months before – was also incensed.50 Powell was known to his own leader as the ‘Fakir’, and Macmillan had even asked for him to be seated further down the Cabinet table to avoid his staring eyes. It has to be said that the detestation was mutual, since Powell thought the Prime Minister was a Whig ‘actor-manager’ and not a true Tory.51

  Powell had decided by the early 1950s that the Commonwealth was a sham, and that, without India, which he loved, empire was beyond Britain’s means. In the early hours of the morning he rose to speak and in his flat Midlands accent forensically demolished the claim by Lennox-Boyd, Baring and others that one could not use metropolitan methods to counter an African insurgency. Attempts to justify the deaths at Hola by calling the victims
‘sub-humans’ met his withering scorn: ‘I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil on the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgement on a fellow human-being and to say, “Because he was such and such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.”’ Acceptance and assignment of responsibility for one’s actions were part and parcel of the representative government which Britain sought to introduce to Africa. Finally, Powell attacked the moral relativism of applying different standards to different peoples. ‘We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man on man, rests on opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern, depends on the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’52 If anything induced the British to pack up and go, it was the moral disaster that it had inflicted on itself, a disaster British politicians and civil servants systematically covered up until 2012 by destroying or doctoring the written records of the former colony.

  The eventual settlement also engraved injustices into independent Kenya. The Swynnerton Plan of late 1953 proposed the creation of a solid class of Kikuyu yeoman farmers, allowed to grow cash crops such as coffee. With so many Mau Mau suspects in detention, it was a simple matter to resurvey land and to reward loyalists with solid title to the vacant holdings of detainees. This meant jobs for the willing boys on a grand scale. Loyalist Kikuyu of humble means were blessed with much official favour in terms of trading licences or loans to purchase something as modest as a bicycle. The administration operated whitelists as well as blacklists for employers, who were encouraged to discriminate on behalf of loyalists. Loyal Kikuyu were recruited into the lower reaches of the administration, whence they rose higher and were favoured when the colonial regime gerrymandered an anti-Mau Mau electorate in the transition to Kenyan independence. The aim was to ensure that, when Mau Mau detainees were released, they would never attain the critical mass needed to dominate the majority, something over-insured by denying them the Certificates of Loyalty without which one could not vote. As a measure to prevent a possible breakdown of law and order it was a great success. However, the structure became the backbone of the authoritarian, bureaucratic and deeply corrupt state that Kenyatta would impose on independent Kenya, which his successors have done little or nothing to reform. Kenya was one of those colonies where the Americans were content to allow the British free rein. The developing Cold War forced them to think about Africa in a more focused way. But in the beginning policy towards this huge continent was almost a blank slate as its affairs did not concern them.

  14. THE COLD WAR COMES TO AFRICA

  A Blank Slate

  In February 1950, US diplomats from across sub-Saharan Africa convened in Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese Mozambique. US Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee chaired the conference. The purpose of the gathering was to fill the void in US policy towards Africa, which had been neglected. Washington had fewer diplomats in the whole of Africa than in West Germany.

  The conference participants endured a series of briefings on the problems of each European colony, coloured by their belief that they were riding the wave of the future and could safely scorn the past. ‘The East African authorities are still living in the age of Queen Victoria,’ said one. Communists were not a significant problem anywhere, though the colonial powers were exaggerating the threat of Communism in Africa to avoid concessions to nationalist movements. Since it did not want to sink the NATO boat by destabilizing Europe’s colonies, the US favoured lengthy periods of grace so that, having built the foundations of stability, newly independent states would avoid anarchy, from which only the Soviets might benefit. ‘It is necessary to keep in mind that we are not in a position to exercise direct responsibility with respect to Africa,’ said McGhee. ‘We have no desire to assume the responsibilities borne by other peoples and, indeed, our principles, our commitments, and our lack of experience all militate against our assumption of such obligations.’1

  While McGhee acknowledged diffuse humanitarian goals, US policy was very much of its time regarding the regressive potential of black Africa: ‘the American negro is to Africans in Central Africa as the present day white American is to the common man in the days of Charlemagne’. Thus, he continued, ‘without the discipline and control of Western nations, ancient antagonisms would burst their present bounds and numerous races or tribes would attack traditional enemies in primitive savagery. The native people of Africa tend always to mistrust the leadership of their own kind because in themselves they have not yet as a people achieved sufficient evolutionary stature to understand the existence of motivation other than the compulsion of self-interest of a very low order or fear.’2

  As the 1950s unfolded the growing band of newly sovereign states had minds of their own regarding their strategic destinies. Foster Dulles was intensely suspicious of Third World neutralism and non-alignment, as advertised at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, regarding them as ‘a transitional stage to communism’, even though ‘neutralism’ had been the US’s default diplomatic stance, barring a brief participation in the First World War, from the Republic’s inception until December 1941. After the British Gold Coast became independent Ghana in early 1957, Vice President Nixon took the lead in pushing Washington to rethink its overall policy towards the continent. After touring northern Africa, Nixon lobbied for a separate Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department, for increased economic aid and for progress to be made on domestic civil rights, if only to stymie Soviet propaganda on the issue in Africa. The US administration was too witless to advertise the fact that African students at the Friendship University in Moscow were routinely abused and beaten in the streets by Russian racists.3 The first policy statement on sub-Saharan Africa was NSC 5719, issued five months after Nixon’s visit: ‘Premature independence would be as harmful to our interests in Africa as would be a continuation of nineteenth-century colonialism, and we must tailor our policies to the capabilities and needs of each particular area as well as to our overall relations with the metropolitan power concerned.’4

  The domestic rhetorical pace on Africa was set by the Democrat Senator John F. Kennedy, who was boosting his own standing in foreign policy to counter the expertise of Nixon, his most likely opponent in a run for the presidency. Kennedy became the leading light of the Senate Foreign Relations Sub-committee on African Affairs, and African nationalism was a powerful wind filling his sails. In September 1956 he spoke of:

  the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people to control their national destinies . . . In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democrat administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today – and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism.

  In July 1957 he delivered an outspoken attack on French policy in Algeria. When would the French learn that colonies are ‘like fruit that cling to the tree only till they ripen’? When would the Eisenhower administration learn that ‘tepid encouragement and moralizations to both sides, cautious neutrality on all the real issues, and a restatement of our obvious dependence on our European friends, and our obvious dedication to the principles of self-determination, and our obvious desire not to become involved’ was not a coherent policy?5 Thereafter, every ambitious African leader beat a path to Kennedy’s office to enjoy face time with the charismatic young Senator, among them the Angolan Holden Roberto and the Kenyan labour activist Tom Mboya.

  Much of Kennedy’s interest in Africa was designed to compensate for his non-interest in domestic desegregation because of the electoral importance of Southern Dixiecrats. But in one respect he did br
ing new thinking to US relations with Africa. He did not reflexively link the nationalist ferment happening within European colonies with the Cold War threat from the Soviets. After nationalist forces had triumphed, he adopted a much more nuanced approach towards Third World non-alignment. He distinguished between Soviet clientelism and ‘true’ or ‘real’ neutralism, in which Third World nations were critical of both superpowers while maintaining order and stability and practising economic diversity and political pluralism at home. The US could accommodate such diversity of outlook; until Khrushchev arrived on the scene, the Soviet Union could not. African states would not need to become military allies or mini-Americas; instead, the US could achieve ‘victory through denial’ by simply ensuring that they did not become puppets of the Soviet Union. This went together with a belief in the usefulness of strongmen in undeveloped societies unfit for democracy, a stance Kennedy took over from the Eisenhower administration.6

  Sverdlovsk, Cuba and the Congo

  Policy towards Africa was inseparable from a sudden ratcheting up of Cold War tensions. The advent to power of the Castro regime in Cuba in 1959 meant that any Third World radical was liable to be viewed through a similar optic, added to which was the fall-out from the U-2 spy plane incident the following year. In May 1960, a weary Eisenhower prepared for a summit conference in Paris as the prelude to a visit to the Soviet Union later in the year. The previous September Khrushchev had managed to show his more personable side during an historic visit to the US. He came to revel in the technological achievement that on 4 October 1957 had seen Russia put a Sputnik in orbit around the Earth, emitting bleeps for radio hams the world over. Here indeed was proof of the superiority of socialism, he said, even though his fellow countrymen had never seen a banana or an orange, and had to wait decades for a car.7 Much hinged on Eisenhower making a success of the intervening Paris summit with Khrushchev before his reciprocal trip to Moscow later in the year. The auguries for a nuclear test ban treaty seemed fair, and Ike hoped to revive the Open Skies idea of mutual aerial inspections of rocket-launch sites, not realizing that the Soviets would have to reject it to conceal how small their nuclear arsenal was compared to the Americans’. While candidate Kennedy cynically declared the reverse to be the case and denounced a ‘missile gap’ he knew did not exist, the reality was that the US had 150 ICBMs and the Soviets a mere four, as confirmed by U-2 spy planes. Although Ike was very aware that these over-flights were illegal and provocative, he rather too casually allowed the CIA one final pre-summit U-2 flight over the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Grand Slam. The mission was supposed to be completed before 1 May but in fact took place on that all too auspicious date in the Soviet calendar.