Table Of ContentTO BRENT
Illustration Credits
© Punch Ltd.
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 240
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Kenya National Archives
© Bettman / CORBIS
© Topham / The Image Works
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Transafrica Press
Kenya National Archives
© Topham / The Image Works
Transafrica Press
Transafrica Press
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Kenya National Archives
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 775
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Popperfoto / Retrofile.com
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Transafrica Press
Kenya National Archives
Kenya National Archives
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Guardian News Services
Peace News
Estate of Alastair Matheson
Personal collection of Caroline Elkins
Contents
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PREFACE
ONE: PAX BRITANNICA
TWO: BRITAIN’S ASSAULT ON MAU MAU
THREE: SCREENING
FOUR: REHABILITATION
FIVE: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN’S GULAG
SIX: THE WORLD BEHIND THE WIRE
SEVEN: THE HARD CORE
EIGHT: DOMESTIC TERROR
NINE: OUTRAGE, SUPPRESSION, AND SILENCE
TEN: DETENTION EXPOSED
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX: THE OPERATING PIPELINE CIRCA JANUARY 1956
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON METHODS
NOTES
INDEX
Preface
LOOKING BACK TO THE START OF MY RESEARCH IN THE SUMMER
OF 1995, I had no idea that nearly ten 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 the Mau Mau uprising, a movement
launched by Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, who had been pushed off
part of their land in the process of colonization. From the start of the war in
October 1952, tales of Mau Mau savagery 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’s savagery 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 these
so-called savages. The Mau Mau were said to be criminals or gangsters bent on
terrorizing the local European population, and certainly not freedom fighters.
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 twenty thousand Mau Mau guerrilla
insurgents. In difficult forest terrain it took over two years and twenty thousand
members of Britain’s military forces, supported by the Royal Air Force, to gain
control over the Mau Mau insurgents, who were armed largely with homemade
weapons and who 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 this war
was not the forests but a vast system of detention camps, where colonial officials
reportedly held some eighty thousand Kikuyu insurgents.
I couldn’t help but find these 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 I would need to do to capture the
details of this 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 not meant
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 they were isolated occurrences. At this early
stage in my research, I had little doubt about the story slowly unfolding from
Britain’s official archive. When I presented my dissertation proposal to my
department in the winter of 1997, I was intending to write a history of the
success of Britain’s civilizing mission in the detention camps of Kenya.
I soon returned to Britain and then went on to Kenya for an exhaustive look
into the official colonial records. It wasn’t long before I began questioning my
earlier view of the camps and the British colonial government. 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 fifty 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 these missing
files in massive bonfires on the eve of its 1963 retreat from Kenya.
To give a sense of the destructive scale, three different departments within
the colonial government kept individual files for each of the reported eighty
thousand detainees in the camps. This means there should have been at least
240,000 individual detainee files in the official archives. I spent days and days
searching for them in the catalogs of Britain’s coldly efficient Public Record
Office and in the dusty but orderly file shelves of the Kenya National Archives,
but in the end I unearthed only a few hundred in Nairobi and came up empty-
handed in London.
After years of combing through what remains in the official archives, I
discovered that there was a pattern to Britain’s cleansing of the records. Any
ministry or department that dealt with the unsavory side of detention was pretty
well emptied of its files, whereas those that ostensibly addressed detainee
reform, or Britain’s civilizing mission, were left fairly intact. This was hardly
accidental and explains why my first cursory reading of the official files in
London generated a picture of a relatively benign system of detention in colonial
Kenya.
Even the most assiduous purges, however, often fail to clean up all the
incriminating evidence. I spent years going through file upon file of official
documents looking for anything that pertained to the detention camps. 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. Many times I
would grow weary of finding little of any use, then hit on a document that
provided just another small piece to the puzzle. 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. In them, the
detainees provided vivid accounts of what their lives were like behind the wire,
accounts that challenged any notion that the British detention camps were
civilizing.
Other revelations in the archives came not from any single document or file
but rather from the cumulative effects of sustained research. 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 eighty thousand detained began to seem more and more
suspicious to me. Upon closer scrutiny it was clear that the British had provided
misleading detention numbers, giving “daily average” figures, or net rather than
gross figures. In other words, the official number did not take into account all
those detainees who had already entered and exited the camps. By going back
through the documents and piecing together the intake and release rates, I
determined that 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 these 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 eight hundred enclosed villages that were
scattered throughout the Kikuyu countryside. These villages were surrounded by
spiked trenches, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and were heavily patrolled by
armed guards. They were detention camps in all but name. Once I added all of
the Kikuyu detained in these 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.
These revelations alone were not enough to reconstruct the full story of
detention in British colonial Kenya. I had to build upon the fragmented remains
in the official archives with written and visual materials from private collections,
as well as from missionary and newspaper archives. I also had to track down as
many people as I could find who had directly experienced the detention camp
system. 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 about their experiences in the camps and barbed-wire villages.
Meeting these elderly Kikuyu men and women was initially a challenge.
Many of my introductions to them were made by their children or nieces or
nephews whom I had met in Nairobi and who, at my request, agreed to take me
upcountry to meet their mother or father or aunt or uncle who had lived through
the camps and villages. At first the former detainees and villagers were uncertain
of me and my motivations. Some thought I was a 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. This was my first introduction to
the intense bitterness engendered by British colonial rule in Kikuyuland, a
bitterness that still seethes today.
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, 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 had to explain why I was there in the Kikuyu
countryside living with them rather than at home with my husband producing
children.
In time, many of the elderly Kikuyu felt comfortable sharing their pasts with
us, and I soon found that my initial difficulty in meeting and earning the trust of
the survivors gave way to a new problem. After almost every interview the
former detainees and villagers would ask if I would like to meet other survivors,
for example, their next-door neighbor or a sibling or cousin who lived up the
road or on the next ridge. Once I had been accepted within a local Kikuyu
community, I was overwhelmed by the number of men and women who were
willing to share with me the often painful details of their detention experiences.
In total, we collected in 1998 and 1999, as well as in subsequent years, nearly six
hundred hours of interviews with some three hundred ex-detainees and villagers.
We also worked very hard to find Kikuyu loyalists who were willing to share
their stories with us, though these 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, though 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 camps over afternoon tea or a gin and
tonic served to us by African houseboys or waiters. Other times I met with
former British settlers on their glorious estates near Lake Naivasha in the Rift
Valley. There they told me about their roles in suppressing Mau Mau and
casually admitted appallingly brutal behavior.
Almost a decade after I first started my research, my view on the detention
camps, as well as on broader British colonial policy in Kenya, has changed
dramatically. An integrated reading of all the sources—written, oral, and visual
—yields an astonishing portrait of destruction. 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
committed during Mau Mau, the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents
were quite small in number when compared to those committed by the forces of
British colonial rule. Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including
settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred loyalists died at the hands of
Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau
Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I
unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this 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. Mau Mau has been portrayed as one of the most savage and barbaric
uprisings of the twentieth century. But in this book I ask that we reconsider this
accepted orthodoxy and examine the crimes perpetrated by colonial forces
against Mau Mau, and the considerable measures that the British colonial
government undertook to conceal them.
• Chapter One •
