Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya- My take.

Hi y'all,

Hope you are well.

To begin with my condolences to all the folks in Japan who last Friday lived through the worst crisis of their life in the form of an Earthquake-Tsunami- Nuclear Catastrophe. May the LORD have mercy on your nation, even as it opens up to the Gospel. Amen.


This week, I chose to share a brief synthesis of a Caroline Elkin's Book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.Miss Elkins is a Havard History Proffessor, who conducted over 10 years research on this matter and compiled this book for our benefit.

I have striven to keep it as apolitical as possible.The substance of the blog comes from an academic paper I wrote on the same ( I hope the Uni wont have shidaz with me.) Please note that this book maybe banned in the country...



As Kenyans, there is a lot we don't know about our nation. I encourage you to get the book.

Enjoy:
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Africa’s past is inseparable from its present.

The response of the British to the Mau Mau insurgency has had grave consequences which are still being felt in Kenya almost three generations later.

In the early 1950’s, the Mau Mau seized the world’s attention not just in Britain and the commonwealth countries, bit also in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. The international media portrayed them as criminals and gangsters, bent on terrorizing the local population, and certainly not freedom fighters.

As a counter-measure to the uprising, the British mounted two parallel responses to the rebellion: the first was in the remote mountains of Kenya, where security forces were engaged in a drawn out offensive against some twenty thousand Mau Mau guerilla insurgents; the second was an initiative to 'win the hearts and minds ' of the people...

It took over two years and twenty thousand members of the British military forces, supported by the Royal Air Force, to gain control over the Mau Mau insurgents, who were armed largely with home made weapons, and who had no military or financial support form outside Kenya. The second and lengthier campaign was directed against a much larger civilian enemy.The British and their 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 freedom.The battle field for this war was not the forests but a vast system of detention camps, where colonial officers reportedly held some eighty thousand Kikuyu insurgents.


The British came into Kenya in the mid 1800’s as missionaries and explorers. In 1895, eleven years after the 1884 Berlin Conference, Kenya became a colony under the British East Africa Protectorate, with powers to enact policies and laws under the Crown. It is these colonial policies and laws that formed the genesis of mass disinheritance of various Kenyan communities of their land.Later, the British established a settler community which by beginning of the Mau Mau resistance comprised of 60,000 persons.


In the early 1890’s in Kikuyu territory, at Dagoretti near Nairobi, Captain Fredrick Lugard, made an agreement with Chief Wayaki wa Hinga that the British cold have some land for the construction of a station post, but would not encroach on more, an agreement that the British subsequently dishonored. According to the Nobel Laureate Prof Wangari Maathai, and more importantly in this context, a Kikuyu who had lived through the Mau Mau Uprising, it was partly in this agreement that the Mau Mau found basis of their action. In her memoir, Unbowed, she notes:


The roots of the Mau Mau movement, however, are found in an older betrayal. In 1890, Captain (later Lord) Fredrick Lugard arranged a meeting with Wayaki wa Hinga, a Kikuyu leader, to establish station posts for the Imperial British East African Company on Kikuyu land and enable goods to be brought to and from Uganda. At their meeting, Lugard and Wayaki swore an oath to allow the station posts on condition that the British would not take Kikuyu land or other property. This agreement however did not last long, because Lugard’s porters started looting the nearby settlements and raping women. The Kikuyu fought back in a series of battles that culminated in a standoff in 1982, when Wayaki was captured, taken away and eventually buried alive by the colonial administration.



The Kikuyu were stunned by Waiyaki’s humiliation and death. In Kikuyu culture, everybody had a right to shelter and space: people who had land were expected to share with people who did not, who became like squatters, and were allowed to stay while they purchased their own land. It was profoundly shocking that the British, when temporarily given such land under oath, would renege on their word and seize the land. Even though the oath was oral and not written, to the Kikuyu this was seen as a solemn pledge. But as the Kikuyu would learn, the newcomers had no time for verbal promises between themselves and the native population. Eventually, the strangers simply acquired and distributed the land to themselves and others, who began arriving in Kenya in large numbers. The appropriation and redistribution of land became a feature of the British presence in Kenya. 11(Mathaai: 2007:61-62)



This excerpt clearly captures the psyche of the Kikuyu that led to the rise of the Mau Mau movement and the subsequent guerilla war. Right from the onset, the Mau Mau had a clear objective, to get, ithaka na wiathi, (land and freedom).It was for this reason the Kikuyu took oath to fight the colonial government and launched an insurgency.It was this oath that bound them to their cause: the Mau Mau cause.


In response, the British Colonial Government declared a state of Emergency on 20th October 1952 and with it began the systematic breakdown of the Kikuyu Population of about 1.5 Million persons. The war against the Mau Mau, which had sanctioned the state of emergency, was between 1952-1954.By 1954, the insurgency had been crushed and the British had control of every region of the colony. That being said, they had no justifiable reason to maintain the state of emergency up to 1960.Yet they did.


Before the uprising, during their colonial administration in Kenya, the British had appointed Colonial Chiefs among the Kikuyu. Before then the Kikuyu did not have a centralized form of government, each ridge have its own council of elders who settled disputes among the residents of that particular ridge. By appointing Colonial Chiefs, the British set a wedge among the Kikuyu as they used these chiefs to collect tax and recruit forced labor. The chiefs used their positions to settle scores and did all they could to protect their privileged positions.


On 20th October 1954, the Colonial Administration carried out Operation Jock Scott, where they detained all suspected leaders of the Mau Mau. This included politicians who had been the most vocal against the British. These persons were detained under the detention orders given by the Colonial Governor. This was later on followed by Operation Anvil in 1954, where all Kikuyu persons in Nairobi were arrested and detained. They were subjected to screening and sent to the various camps. In 1956, so as to reduce the number of detainees in the camps, the Administration sanctioned Operation Progress, which empowered the colonial administration to use compelling force to force the detainees to confess their oaths.


The Colonial government had set up a system of detention camps which were infamously known as the Pipeline. This was a system set up to deal with the Mau Mau and their sympathizers. A person was first detained in holding camps then forced to pass before a hooded person known as a gakunia for identification of whether they were Mau Mau or not. If the gakunia indicated that one was not a Mau Mau adherent or sympathizer, the person was sent back to the holding camp and later repatriated to their native home area reserve. If one was identified as Mau Mau, whether adherent or sympathizer, he or she was sent to detention camps, which varied according to the degree the person was perceived as a threat. ‘Black’ was code for a die-hard Mau Mau adherent, ‘Grey’ was code for a Mau Mau sympathizer. Some camps were up-Pipeline or special detention camps only for ‘blacks’, and other were down pipeline for ‘greys’. There were also reception centers, which the Governor later renamed holding camps to reflect the fact that the detained housed there often ended up staying for months even years. There were also camps set up for Non-Kikuyu Mau Mau suspects,-particularly Kamba and Maasai. Many of these oath takers had either married Kikuyu or lived in close proximity to them in Nairobi. Finally, all the way up the Pipeline were exile camps, or open camps, to which ‘grey’ detainees were transferred from the ordinary work camps as a final step before their release.


Confession of the Mau Mau oath was the sine qua non for the detainees’ release. The purpose of detention in Kenya was not necessarily to keep the Mau Mau suspects alive, but to force them to confess through punishing routine of forced labor. As Elkins notes, it was routine for the detainees to be tortured so as to confess the oath and/or give information on the Mau Mau. Men and women were beaten all over their bodies with rhino whips and clubs, beaten on the soles of their feet, had their legs broken, were castrated or had their breasts mutilated with pliers19It was not unusual for people to be summarily executed by the warders. In summary, the pipeline was based on principle of organized terror, violence and degradation, all applied in an environment where space time, and social exchanged were completely organized and routinized.


So as to control stamp out support for the Mau Mau, the British used a military counter insurgency strategy that had been employed in Malaya by General Templar: they had the entire Kikuyu population live in controlled villages. Unlike the Malayans who had the camps built for them complete with amenities before they moved in, the Kikuyu, mostly women (since most of the men were in detention camps) were forced out of their houses and forced to clear the forest and build new fortified villages where they would live for over seven years.In contravention to the International Labor Organizations Convention Against Forced Labor, the villagers were forced to construct trenches, all the work done under the task mastership of the loyalist guards and British officers. Women were raped by both the Colonial Administration officers, British soldiers and home guards. This was also used as a tactic to torture their husbands who were in detention camps.In some cases, villagers were randomly selected, tortured and summarily executed before the rest so as to instill fear. Hunger and starvation also characterized life in the villages. The villagers had left their own plots of land with produce and forced to settle in one area. They were only allowed three hours a week to collect food. Elkins notes:

It is not the random selections, the sexual assaults, the forced labor or the torture that the Kikuyu women of Central Province remember the most about the years of the emergency. It was the lack of food. Today, many former Mau Mau adherents are convinced that the Colonial Government wanted to starve them to death. In the words of one woman from Nyeri District:



Hunger was the worst problem; that was what was killing most people. They were starving us on purpose, hoping that we would give in. The little time we were allowed too go to the shamba was too short to allow for any meaningful food gathering. Also the area we were allowed was too small, because the largest areas had been declared special areas and were off limits. So the allowed areas had been over harvested, but that’s what we had.



Sir Alex Lenox Boyd the Minister in charge of the Colonial office, together with Governor Sir Evelyn Baring did their best to ensure that the state of affairs in Kenya were not reported in England. The Colonial Government also benefited from the relative silence and outright support of the local missionaries. Most missionaries believed that the Mau Mau had cast a specter of evil over Kenya and had to be eradicated. Back in England, the British Government and the press had the nation convinced that Mau Mau was slaughtering Europeans in vast numbers, and that its terror was undermining any sense of law and order in the colony. Nothing could have been further form the truth: by the end of the Emergency in 1960, only 32 British persons had been killed by the Mau Mau, with two thousand loyalists having suffered the same fate. 29On the Mau Mau side, one thousand and ninety persons had been tried and sentenced to death by hanging, eleven thousand other Mau Mau persons shot dead.30





The newly independent Kenyan government bought their land at market rates, using nearly 12.5 million Sterling Pounds in loans from the British Government to finance the buyout. Much of the land that was sold to the Government as part of the settler community left was resold to wealthy European investors and wealthy Kikuyu, many of whom had been loyalists in the Emergency. During the run-up to independence and in the years that followed, former loyalists also wielded political clout to consolidate their own interests and power. Under Kenyatta, many became members of the new government.There was no prosecution for the atrocities done by the settler community the Colonial Administration and the British forces on the Kikuyu population .The final lasting image of British 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. This ‘drawing of the veil over the past’ that began in 1960 and due to the ban of the Mau Mau that was only lifted forty years after independence kept the Mau mau debate out of the public domain and thus cemented the injustice that had been meted out against the majority of the Kikuyu population. The extent of their struggle is cleverly diminished in Kenya’s history books and school curricula.


Partly as a result of the political momentum set by Caroline Elkin’s book, there is an ongoing court case in Britain lodged by Mau Mau survivors seeking justice. This is a step in the right direction in seeking justice for the people who lived through the Emergency and honoring the memory of those who perished. However, this view is not held by everyone. In 2008, the immediate former Prime Minister of the United Britain while on official tour in India being reported to have said that the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over.



We still wait for justice to be done...