[Marxism] British colonialism and the Mau Mau

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(posted in full because it is only available to paid subscribers.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
From the issue dated January 21, 2005
A 'Civilizing' Mission in Late Colonial Kenya

By CAROLINE ELKINS

Looking back to the start of my research, in the summer of 1995, I had no 
idea that nearly 10 years later I would write a book about wide-scale 
destruction in colonial Kenya and Britain's vigorous attempts to cover it 
up. I was a Harvard graduate student during those early days and had become 
fascinated with the history of Mau Mau, a liberation movement launched by 
Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, who had been pushed off their 
land in the process of colonization. From the start of the war, in October 
1952, tales of Mau Mau savagery had spread wildly among the white settlers 
in the colony and at home in Britain. Mau Mau was portrayed as a barbaric, 
anti-European, and anti-Christian sect that had reverted to tactics of 
primitive terror to interrupt the British civilizing mission in Kenya.

Mau Mau seized the world's attention in the early 1950s, not just in 
Britain and the Commonwealth countries but also in the United States, 
Western Europe, and the Soviet bloc. Life and other magazines presented 
photographic spreads with chilling pictorial evidence of Mau Mau cruelty 
that contrasted dramatically with images of the local British settlers. 
While the Mau Mau insurgents claimed they were fighting for ithaka na 
wiyathi, or land and freedom, few people in the Western world took 
seriously the demands of those so-called savages.

The British mounted two parallel responses to the rebellion. The first was 
in the remote mountain forests of Kenya, where security forces engaged in a 
drawn-out offensive against some 20,000 Mau Mau guerrillas. In difficult 
forest terrain it took more than two years and 20,000 members of Britain's 
security forces, supported by the Royal Air Force, to gain military control 
over the Mau Mau insurgents, who were armed largely with homemade weapons 
and had no military or financial support from outside Kenya.

The second, and lengthier, campaign was directed against a much larger 
civilian enemy. The British and their African loyalist supporters targeted 
some 1.5 million Kikuyu who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath 
and had pledged themselves to fight for "land and freedom." The battlefield 
for that war was not the forests but a vast system of detention camps, 
where colonial officials reportedly held some 80,000 Kikuyu insurgents.

I couldn't help finding those camps a compelling subject for my 
dissertation, particularly since no one had written a book about them. So 
in 1995 I embarked with great interest on the research to capture the 
details of the story. I began with a preliminary sift through the official 
archives in London, where files stuffed with dusty, yellowed memos and 
reports told a seductive story about Britain's civilizing mission during 
the last years of colonial rule in Kenya. According to the documents, the 
detention camps were meant not to punish the rebellious Kikuyu but rather 
to civilize them. Behind the barbed wire, colonial officials were 
reportedly giving the detainees civics courses and home-craft classes; they 
were teaching the insurgents how to be good citizens and thus become 
capable of running Kenya sometime in the future. The colonial government 
did report some "one-offs" or "incidents," as it called them, of brutality 
against the detainees but insisted that these were isolated occurrences. At 
that early stage in my research, I had little doubt about the story slowly 
unfolding from Britain's official archive.

It wasn't long, though, before I began questioning that view. I found that 
countless documents pertaining to the detention camps either were missing 
from Britain's Public Record Office and the Kenya National Archives or were 
still classified as confidential some 50 years after the Mau Mau war. The 
British were meticulous record keepers in Kenya and elsewhere in their 
empire, making the absence of documentation on the camps all the more 
curious. I came to learn that the colonial government had intentionally 
destroyed many of those missing files in massive bonfires on the eve of its 
1963 retreat from Kenya.

Even the most assiduous purges, however, often fail to clean up all of the 
incriminating evidence. I spent years going through file upon file of 
official documents. Some days I found nothing of use; other times I 
discovered nuggets of information that I added to a growing pile of 
evidence. It was a tedious and sometimes frustrating process as I struggled 
simply to identify all of the different camps -- there is no single 
remaining document that lists them all -- and to reconstruct the chain of 
colonial authority responsible for their day-to-day operations. Mercifully 
there were also the handful of days when I would come across entire files 
filled with rich evidence, files like the ones bursting with letters 
written by detainees during their time in the camps and addressed to 
high-ranking colonial officials that challenged any notion that the British 
detention camps were civilizing.

Over time I developed a certain sense that told me when something just 
didn't seem right. For instance, given the sheer number of detainees 
referenced in the files, the official number of 80,000 detained began to 
seem more and more suspicious. Upon closer scrutiny it was clear that the 
British had provided misleading detention numbers, giving "daily average" 
figures that did not take into account all those detainees who had already 
entered and exited the camps. The number of Africans detained was at least 
two times and more likely four times the official figure, or somewhere 
between 160,000 and 320,000.

Something else nagged at me about those numbers. Except for a few thousand 
women, the vast majority of the detention-camp population was composed of 
men, despite several files discussing the steadfast commitment of Kikuyu 
women to Mau Mau and their role in sustaining the movement. I soon realized 
that the British did detain the women and children, though not in the 
official camps but rather in some 800 enclosed villages that were scattered 
throughout the Kikuyu countryside. Those villages were surrounded by spiked 
trenches, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and were heavily patrolled by armed 
guards. Once I added all of the Kikuyu detained in those villages to the 
adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually 
detained some 1.5 million people, or nearly the entire Kikuyu population.

Those revelations alone were not enough to reconstruct the full story of 
detention in British colonial Kenya. While I was working in Kenya in 1998, 
I bought an old Subaru station wagon and, together with my research 
assistant, Terry Wairimu, set off into the heart of Kikuyuland, in Central 
Province, in search of survivors willing to speak with us. Many of my 
introductions to them were made by their children or nieces or nephews whom 
I had met in Nairobi. At first the former detainees and villagers were 
uncertain of me and my motivations. Some thought I was a Roman Catholic 
sister and wanted me to bless their livestock. Others thought I was British 
and refused to speak to me until I convinced them that I was an American.

Together with Terry, I would live in the rural countryside among the 
survivors in modest mud-and-wattle homes for days or weeks. We would eat 
meals of ugali and sukuma wiki (local versions of polenta and collard 
greens), help with the shambas (farms), play with grandchildren, and talk 
around the kitchen fire late into the night over milky, sweet tea. I 
quickly found that my hosts were as interested in me as I was in them, and 
on several occasions I had to explain why I was there in the Kikuyu 
countryside living with them rather than at home, with my husband, 
producing children.

We also worked very hard to find Kikuyu loyalists who were willing to share 
their stories with us, although those interviews were significantly more 
difficult to conduct. In many areas former loyalists, or Kikuyu who had 
supported the British occupiers during the Mau Mau war, refused to 
acknowledge their previous status, and many who did were very reluctant to 
speak. Eventually a handful candidly told us about their participation on 
the side of the British during Mau Mau, but often on condition of anonymity.

There were also scores of colonial officials, missionaries, and European 
settlers who were willing to speak with me, although many would offer their 
vivid accounts only if I agreed not to reveal their names. To meet with 
them, I would often take my old Subaru out to one of Nairobi's posh suburbs 
or to the Muthaiga Club, Kenya's most exclusive country club and a vestige 
of its colonial past, where we would discuss the detention camps over 
afternoon tea or a gin and tonic served to us by African houseboys and waiters.

Almost a decade after I started my research, I've come to believe that 
during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a 
savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic: Only by detaining nearly 
the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people, and physically and 
psychologically atomizing its men, women, and children, could colonial 
authority be restored and the civilizing mission reinstated.

Certainly the Mau Mau war was a fierce struggle that left blood on the 
hands of all involved. But in considering the history of this war, we must 
also consider the issue of scope and scale. On the dreadful balance sheet 
of atrocities, the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents were quite 
small in number compared with those committed by the forces of British 
colonial rule. Officially fewer than 100 Europeans, including settlers, 
were killed, and some 1,800 loyalists died at the hands of Mau Mau. In 
contrast, the British reported that over 11,000 Mau Mau were killed in 
action, although the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls 
into serious question the validity of that figure. I now believe there was 
in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a 
campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead. 
The Mau Mau uprising has been portrayed as one of the most savage and 
barbaric of the 20th century. I ask that we reconsider that accepted orthodoxy.

In the fall of 1965, Sir Evelyn Baring stood inside what had once been his 
office. Since leaving Kenya and the governor's post nearly six years 
earlier, when the country was still under British rule and the Mau Mau 
politicals remained safely locked away, the country had changed. Kenya was 
now an independent nation, Government House had become State House, and 
what had been the former governor's command site throughout the Emergency 
now belonged to Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu.

It seems remarkable that until that October afternoon in 1965, Baring and 
Kenyatta had neither met nor spoken. In fact, the last time the two men had 
been in the same room was at Senior Chief Waruhiu's funeral 13 years 
earlier. Baring was uncharacteristically nervous as he visited his old 
office, especially because Kenyatta was standing just opposite him. Indeed, 
what do you possibly say to a man whose trial you rigged and who, because 
of your signature, spent years of his life banished to a desert wasteland? 
There was no avoiding the subject, so after some initial pleasantries the 
former jailer turned to his one-time captive, gestured, and said, "By the 
way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order 
20 years ago." "I know," Kenyatta told him. "If I had been in your shoes at 
the time, I would have done exactly the same." The nervousness evaporated, 
and the room erupted in relieved laughter. With everyone still chuckling, 
the new president chimed in, "And I have myself signed a number of 
detention orders sitting right there, too." As the two later strolled 
through the gardens admiring the Naivasha thorns that Baring's wife, Mary, 
had planted years before, Kenya's jails were already beginning to fill up 
with detainees whom the new independent government deemed as threats to the 
country's young democracy.

For hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu, Kenyatta's liberation, in August 1961, 
had been as sweet, if not sweeter, than their own. "I wept, I wept with 
joy," recalled one former detainee. "Word got around very quickly when he 
was released, and we danced and celebrated into the morning. Our leader was 
free, and he was going to save us from the colonial oppressors. Ngai [God] 
had answered our prayers." Less than two years after he was reintroduced to 
the world, Kenyatta stood on the podium of Nairobi's Uhuru Stadium. "This 
is the greatest day in Kenya's history and the happiest day in my life," he 
told a crowd of some 40,000 ecstatic Africans. As always, Kenyatta was a 
spellbinding speaker, refusing to read his prepared address in English. 
Dramatically he tossed his speech aside and spoke extemporaneously to his 
people in Kiswahili, and the crowd was virtually uncontrollable. Looking 
down with him on the scene were dignitaries from around the world who had 
all come to Kenya on that 11th day of December, 1963, to witness Africa's 
34th country achieve its independence from European rule. At midnight, 
after hours of ceremonies and dancing, a spotlight zeroed in on the Union 
Jack being lowered, and Kenya's new flag was raised for the first time. For 
a moment it refused to unfurl, and the Duke of Edinburgh, the queen's 
representative for the affair, leaned over and whispered to Kenyatta, "Do 
you want to change your mind?" In his moment of glory Kenyatta only grinned 
and watched as the wind finally picked up his country's flag, and the crowd 
again roared.

Hidden beneath that euphoric moment, however, was another, much less 
triumphant picture of cover-up and betrayal, self-interest and greed. Time 
and again, Kenyatta would declare that "we all fought for freedom," and 
that his new nation must "forgive and forget the past." Less than a year 
after independence, the country celebrated its first Kenyatta Day. In a 
broadcast speech to another massive crowd, the country's president 
declared, "Let this be the day on which all of us commit ourselves to erase 
from our minds all the hatreds and the difficulties of those years which 
now belong to history. Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past. 
Let us instead, unite, in all our utterances and activities, in concern for 
the reconstruction of our country and the vitality of Kenya's future."

In other words, there would be no day of reckoning for the crimes committed 
during Mau Mau, no memorializations of those Mau Mau men and women who had 
fought in the forests and died in the camps and villages. There would be no 
prosecutions of former loyalists, and certainly not of any of the British 
colonial officers or settlers, many of whom continued to live very 
privileged lives in Kenya. In the end, the fruits of freedom were going to 
be divided up between Kenyatta's emerging oligarchy, the loyalists, and 
those settlers who remained in Kenya. It was a scenario that the British 
colonial government had fantasized about for years, albeit with a slight twist.

Back in Britain there would be no soul-searching or public accounting for 
the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women 
in Kenya. When Iain Macleod took over the Colonial Office, he wrote to 
Kenya's new governor, Patrick Renison, assuring him that he had "decided to 
draw a veil over the past." The final, lasting image of Britain's moral war 
in the empire was not going to be revealed by thorough investigation into 
the torture, murder, and starvation of Kikuyu men, women, and children. 
Instead there was a great deal of sympathy, if not admiration, for the 
professional soldiers, British colonial officers, and ordinary settlers who 
had fought the terror of Mau Mau, even if that terror pushed them into 
casual brutality and violence. In the end, it was those representatives of 
the British colonial government who would be remembered as the victims of 
the battle to save civilization, not the savage Mau Mau adherents, not the 
Kikuyu people.

To this day there has never been any form of official reconciliation in 
Kenya. There are no monuments for Mau Mau, children are not taught about 
that part of their nation's past in school, few speak about it in the 
privacy of their own homes, and, with the exception of the relatives of the 
Hola Massacre victims (the 11 detainees whom the British government 
acknowledged were beaten to death in Hola Camp in March 1959), there has 
certainly never been any kind of financial consideration given to those who 
lost family members in the camps and villages or property to the local 
loyalists. Some men and women lost the use of their limbs, others their 
minds, as a result of the years they spent behind the wire, though neither 
the former colonial government nor the new independent government did 
anything to help them piece their lives back together. Insofar as there has 
been any successful social rebuilding, the burden has been shouldered by 
local Christian churches. But they, too, have insisted that bygones remain 
bygones.

If you ask former Mau Mau adherents today if they get along with their 
loyalist neighbors, the response is generally the same as that of Mary 
Mbote, a woman I interviewed. "We are Christians, and I do not hate them," 
she told me recently. When I probed a bit further, she expressed a 
sentiment shared by many other former villagers and detainees. "I hate 
them. I hate them for what they did to us," she said. "We all hate them and 
will not speak to them if we see them outside of church. We even refuse to 
go to their funerals, which is against the church, but they didn't go to 
the funerals of our husbands and children and parents when they killed 
them. Aye, I despise them." She then paused before continuing. "You know," 
she finally said to me, "this will only change when everyone knows what 
happened to us. Maybe then there will be some peace, once our people are 
able to mourn in public and our children, and our grandchildren will know 
how hard we fought and how much we lost to make Kenya free for them."

Caroline Elkins is an assistant professor of history at Harvard University. 
This essay is adapted from her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of 
the End of Empire in Kenya, published this month by Henry Holt. Copyright © 
2005 by Caroline Elkins.

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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