How not to run an empireReprinted from
The EconomistTHE common image of the Mau Mau fighter is hard to erase: dirty, sullen and intransigent, with hair matted into dreadlocks from his months on the run in Kenya's equatorial forests. From the start, Mau Mau was cast as a throwback from a dark and primitive past, with its blood oaths and its disembowellings. Not since the Black Hole of Calcutta did a single phrase so instantly conjure up the forces of evil that Britain's civilising mission abroad was supposed to be doing its best to overcome. Elspeth Huxley, the white settlers' literary spokesman, wrote in 1957 that Mau Mau was the “yell from the swamp”.
In reality, as two new books begin by explaining, the roots of the Mau Mau uprising lay in a quest for the restitution of land appropriated by white settlers in Kenya in the early part of the century. During the first years black and white rubbed along without much strife. Blacks suffered badly, of course, but European farmers also struggled against drought, disease and the economic slump of the 1930s. When the Kikuyu could not sustain themselves on native reserves—poorer land that had been set aside for African use—they drifted on to white farmland in search of jobs, cultivating small subsistence plots. No fences impeded movement, and the settlers anyway needed cheap labour.
By the early 1950s, however, things had begun to change. Both in number and determination, the white plantocracy was stronger, enriched by sustained demand for cereals since the fall of Singapore in 1942 put the agricultural wealth of South-East Asia in enemy hands. One thing it did not want was for the anti-colonialism that was spreading elsewhere in the empire to take root in Kenya.
At the same time, a new generation of Kenyan Africans—75,000 of whom had fought alongside the British against fascism—wanted a fairer future, and in particular a more equable division of land and other resources. The British were not prepared to listen, and so the usually peaceable Kikuyu turned to force, first against their colonial masters and then later—and in far greater number—against their loyalist tribal brethren.
Despite years of lip-service to what it called “the paramountcy of native interests”, the British government opposed Kikuyu militancy with force. It committed the full state apparatus—men, arms and the courts—to defending the status quo, political and economic. By the early 1950s, Britain had lost India, Palestine and, to a large extent, Malaya. It now regarded Kenya as its most important colony. The common view was that the rebellion, or “minor civil disturbance” as it was referred to in London, would take just three months to snuff out—provided that it was dealt with swiftly and firmly.
Jomo Kenyatta, Mau Mau's purported leader, was sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour by a British judge who was paid £20,000 to secure a guilty verdict. Although it was just seven years since the end of the second world war, the state of emergency that was announced with Kenyatta's arrest in October 1952 enabled Britain to circumvent all the new international conventions on labour and human rights.
Tens of thousands of Africans were arrested and detained without trial in a series of squalid camps across the country. Thousands more—1.5m indeed, or the entire Kikuyu population, according to one of these books—were barricaded inside barbed-wire villages on the reserves, in an effort to starve the rebellion of food and military supplies. A systematic campaign, including by British missionaries, attempted to win over the hearts and minds of villagers. Meanwhile, the authorities devised an elaborate ritual of oaths intended to disinfect detainees from Mau Mau contamination before their release. The system was slow, and even those who repented early on spent years being channelled through what was officially known as the “Pipeline” before being set free.
Repent, but not at leisureHard labour, overcrowding, bad food, contaminated water and disease were the stuff of everyday life. To ensure their repentance, detainees were commonly beaten, electrocuted, dragged behind moving vehicles, burnt with cigarettes and tortured both sexually and psychologically by British and loyalist African warders. Those who were still intractable after this regime—remarkably, an estimated 40,000 men—were sent to the camps that specialised in “dilution”. There, inmates were separated into small groups before being overpowered by wardens, stripped, shaved bald and forced to break stones.
Kenya's state of emergency was kept for four years after the fighting ended, while a sustained effort in London and Nairobi covered up the reality on the ground. Efforts were made by Fenner Brockway, a socialist campaigner, and Barbara Castle, then a fiery young Labour MP, to force the Conservative government to admit to the maltreatment and murder of detainees. But against a cold-war background, these were routinely painted as pink rumour-mongering. Calls for independent investigations were resisted.
On the eve of Britain's withdrawal from Kenya, much of the documentation was destroyed that related to how the Mau Mau were dealt with. Not a single file on the detainees survives in the police records. Little evidence remains of the work of the Kenya Regiment. Nonetheless, two young historians—one at St Antony's College, Oxford and the other at Harvard—have diligently pieced together what there is. They come to broadly the same conclusions about a dirty war which by the late 1950s had led even Enoch Powell to question whether Britain deserved an empire. The books are very different, and the interested reader would do well to read both.
David Anderson focuses on the 1,090 Kikuyu who were hanged by the authorities between 1953 and 1958, and asks why in Kenya Britain resorted so much more—and so much more swiftly—to imprisonment, flogging and capital punishment than it did in Palestine, Cyprus or Malaya. Nowhere in the history of British imperialism has state execution been used on such a scale. Mr Anderson's re-examination of the court records in order to assess whether British justice was fair or flawed does not make for happy reading.
If Mr Anderson's work is with the dead, Caroline Elkins's focus is on the living. Collecting the oral histories of some 300 detainees and their wardens, many of whom have never spoken of their experiences, enables Ms Elkins to paint a vivid portrait of daily life behind the wire.
At the time, westerners became aware of Mau Mau from reading grisly newspaper articles about the murder of white farmers. In fact, although thousands of Africans died in the conflict, only 32 white settlers were killed by Mau Mau in eight years. By shifting the focus away from the white murders that filled the press at the time, and by choosing to refer to even the most sadistic British camp wardens by the nicknames that the Kikuyu themselves used, Ms Elkins forces the reader to view this conflict from the Africans' side in a way that few western historians writing about Kenya have done before.
Small infelicities exist in both books. Mr Anderson writes of a Mwangi Toto, a minor rebel leader. His name was Mwangi Tutu, and far from being killed in a raid in October 1954, he worked for this reviewer's father until 1965 and was still alive in the 1970s in Uganda. Ms Elkins refers to a particularly vicious white settler named Dr Bunny as the “Dr Mengele of Africa”. Many people will assume she is letting the finger of suspicion fall on Dr Reginald Bunny, once well known in Kenya. Yet Bunny, a mild-mannered Quaker who ran a rural medical practice in Naivasha in the 1960s, makes an improbable torturer. Ms Elkins's willingness to use flimsy evidence to make the case for settler wrongdoing may have led her, in this instance, to suspend her usual rigorous judgment.
These are small matters, and the contribution that these two books make far outweighs them. By calling for reconciliation in the early years of his presidency, Kenyatta understandably sacrificed the past for the future. But today young Kenyans know next to nothing about the Mau Mau uprising and how it led to independence. For them, these books are an incomparable record of what happened in, and to, their country. For others, parallels with American foreign policy today are apparent enough. The lack of real accountability, the rough justice, ignoring international conventions, maltreating prisoners, detention without trial; in Kenya the British used them all.
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. By David Anderson.
Norton; 320 pages; $25.95.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £20
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of the End of Empire in Kenya. By Caroline Elkins.
Henry Holt; 496 pages; $27.50. Published in Britain as “Britain's Gulag”; Jonathan Cape; £20
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