This was most evident at the start of Mau Mau. Between January and April 1953, Governor Baring empowered his government with dozens of extreme and wide-ranging laws, called Emergency Regulations. These included provisions for communal punishment, curfews, the control of individual and mass movements of people, the confiscation of property and land, the imposition of special taxes, the issuance of special documentation and passes, the censorship and banning of publications, the disbanding of all African political organizations, the control and disposition of labor, the suspension of due process, and detention without trial. Emergency legislation extended to the control of African markets, shops, hotels, and all transport—including buses, taxis, and bicycles. During these early months, Baring established enabling powers for the creation of concentrated villages in the African reserves, barbed-wire cordons in African towns and in Nairobi, and concentrated labor lines—or mini–detention camps—on settler farms in the White Highlands.64
From the moment Baring declared the State of Emergency, the treatment of Mau Mau suspects, with rare exception, was devoid of any humanity. The convergence of local ideology, or the “Emergency mentality,” with the draconian legislation passed by Baring meant that these laws worked to reestablish colonial domination and satisfy to some degree the vehement demands of local settlers for the tightest possible control of the Kikuyu. A critically important factor in understanding the effect of the Emergency Regulations is to know who actually had the day-to-day job of enforcing these harsh laws. Who were Baring’s foot soldiers? They were in many cases the same men who had been calling for summary justice to purge the colony of the so-called Mau Mau vermin. Baring delegated his Emergency powers not only to his Administration in the field, most of whom were unsympathetic to the oath takers, but also to hundreds of settlers, many of whom would be drafted into the colonial government as temporary district officers, and to Kikuyu loyalists, who were poised to be incorporated into the British colonial government as members of the Home Guard.
Selecting who was best suited to implement Emergency Regulations on a day-to-day basis was partly dictated to the governor by the budgetary and administrative hand that was dealt him. He was hardly unaware of the extremist attitudes gaining ascendancy with the settler population, and with members of his own Administration, particularly after the well-publicized Mau Mau attacks on local whites and at Lari. But throughout the Emergency, Baring constantly struggled with financial and manpower shortages. He and his finance minister, Ernest Vasey, despaired that Mau Mau was not communist. Had it been, the British government would have given them a blank check to suppress the movement, as it had done with General Templer and the communist uprising in British colonial Malaya.65 Baring instead found himself having to finance the entire civilian war on a shoestring budget. His lack of personnel only worsened as the war dragged on, and he was forced to delegate huge responsibilities to many young district officers, local settlers, and loyalists, and with them unprecedented powers to act. To the governor, at least, there appeared to be no alternative.
Forced removals marked the colonial government’s first major assault against the civilian population of Mau Mau suspects, setting an alarming standard for acceptability. In the midst of Kenyatta’s trial in late 1952, Governor Baring decided to deport all suspicious Kikuyu living outside of the reserves, particularly those who were living as squatters on European farms, back to Kikuyu districts in Central Province.66 Ndiritu Kibira still remembers vividly the night the forced removals began on the Kiringiti Estate. The farm was in Molo, in the heart of the Rift Valley Province, and its owner decided it was time to get rid of the “rats,” as he called them, that lived on his land.67 Ndiritu had been a gardener on the farm ever since he was a young boy; in fact, his family had lived on the Kiringiti Estate for several decades before the start of the Emergency. It was, as far as they were concerned, their home. Ndiritu remembers, “The door to our hut was smashed in by some Wazungu and Africans whom I didn’t know. My parents and sisters hurried around picking up our belongings, but there just wasn’t enough time. We had no warning. They were loaded into the back of a lorry and carried off into the night. Later I heard they were sent back to the [Kikuyu] reserves. I was spared, only to be arrested later.”68 Ndiritu’s family was part of the first wave of Kikuyu deportations that began in December 1952 and rolled through other settled areas of Kenya, eventually on to Nairobi and Mombasa, and finally to the neighboring British colonies of Tanganyika and Uganda, where thousands of Kikuyu had migrated in search of land and employment after their displacement during the early years of British rule.69 The removals were massive and indiscriminate, with the deportations often carried out shortly after Mau Mau strikes against Europeans or loyalists, a clear reaction to the outcry from European settlers.
Local colonial administrators in the Rift Valley executed the Emergency Regulations with particular zeal. By the beginning of 1953 they had packed thousands of Kikuyu into railcars and lorries for shipment back to the already overcrowded reserves. The volume of humanity was staggering, and members of Kenya’s Legislative Council commented again and again that the “trickle [of repatriates] became a stream.”70 As of May of that year, over one hundred thousand Kikuyu had been deported from their homes and returned to the Kikuyu reserves, a place many of them hardly knew, having been squatters all their lives. Scarce consideration was given to the conditions awaiting them. One young colonial servant had just arrived in Kenya to take his post as a district officer in Nyeri. He remembers vividly the forced removals, having had to cope with their effects in the Kikuyu reserves.
These Kikuyu were packed into lorries, and they were carrying pots and pans mostly. There were small children being carried and pulled along, even women trying to nurse their infants. They had no money. There was this broad assumption by those in charge of this whole operation that these people would be welcomed with open arms by the Kikuyu in the reserves, that they would feed them and let them live on the land. But these people just exacerbated the land issue; they weren’t wanted. I was totally overwhelmed. I couldn’t deal with this problem at all. They usually arrived late in the day, sometimes hundreds of them. They had no food, and I wasn’t given any rations to give them. They just slept wherever they could outside at this place called the Showground. The whole thing, it affected me in a way I had never been before. Of course, this was just the start of what I call the horrors.71
Kikuyu women and children being held at Thomson’s Falls Transit Camp after their forced removal, December 1952
In a halfhearted attempt to control the flow of deportees, the colonial government established transit camps in the European areas intended to accommodate thousands of Kikuyu awaiting their final deportation to the reserves. The largest camps were located in Nakuru, Gilgil, and Thomson’s Falls, and they quickly became notorious for their squalid and overcrowded conditions. Thousands in the transit camps suffered from malnutrition, starvation, and disease—hardly surprising given that the transit camps had inadequate sanitation or clean water and insufficient rations, if any at all. Most Kikuyu had no means of purchasing food, having been deported without compensation for their livestock or outstanding wages. They depended heavily on assistance from voluntary organizations, particularly the Red Cross, for food and medical assistance. Thousands of the repatriates languished in the transit camps for months or more, in part because there was simply nowhere to put them in the Kikuyu reserves.72 Clearly, despite the denials of the colonial government, the socioeconomic basis for Kikuyu anger that manifested itself in the Mau Mau demand for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom, was, in fact, a reality. There simply was not enough land, and that which was set aside for the Kikuyu in the reserves was collapsing ecologically from overuse. Governor Baring, his ministers, and officers in the field knew the reserves could not accommodate another single Kikuyu, time and again calling the land “oversaturated.”73 At the height of the deportations, Desmond O’Hagan—then the provincial commissioner for Central Provi
nce—demanded a temporary end to the returns. “This is a very serious problem,” he wrote, “for to each of the Kikuyu Districts some 20,000 to 30,000 people have been returned…. It is certain that the Native Lands cannot absorb all those who have returned.”74
Nevertheless, the deportations continued. In Kenya’s Legislative Council, the majority advocated even more severe punishment for the Kikuyu. Major Keyser captured this retributive sentiment when he declared, “The Kikuyu tribe is going to suffer very greatly by the congestion that is going to take place in the reserves, by the lack of food that is going to take place in the reserves, by the amount of strife that is going to take place in the reserves, and all I can say…is that they brought it on themselves and unless they are going to suffer very considerably, they will not see the advantage of putting down this rebellion and of supporting the Government.”75 Shirley Cooke—who represented settlers living in Coast Province, far from the Mau Mau conflict of central Kenya—was the lone voice of European reason. Addressing the deportations, Cooke was blunt: “I have no hesitation in calling Government’s policy a complete negation of good government,” and further warned, “The reputation will live for years about these Transit Camps, and they will probably get the reputation of the concentration camps after the Boer war, memories of which live even to-day.”76 He demanded an investigation into the extraordinary power being exercised by the colonial administrators and settlers who were carrying out the forced removals. Not only was his motion resoundingly quashed, but the Member for African Affairs, Eric Davies, publicly scolded Cooke. “I do not believe what may be described as a witch hunt—an inquiry—should take place now,” Davies insisted, “this indeed is not time for such things.” A similar refrain from various British colonial officials resisting other calls for independent inquiries—first into the transit camps and later into the detention camps and barbed-wire villages—would be heard throughout the course of the Emergency.77
Appeasement and retreat were always available to Baring and Colonial Secretary Lyttelton, but in the early years of Mau Mau these options were unthinkable to them. They were committed to regaining control of Kenya and to reaffirming white minority rule over the colony. Certainly, there was some overarching plan to grant Africans their independence someday, but the timing for Britain’s future decolonization of Kenya was vague, at best, particularly in the face of Mau Mau.78 In late 1952, even the most liberal officials in the Colonial Office anticipated that an imperial retreat would be at least a generation away, and even then would take the form of some kind of multiracial democracy in which the white settlers would maintain a strong foothold in Kenya’s political institutions. Additionally, there was a single-mindedness shared by most colonial officials in Nairobi and London, and local European settlers, that the future African leaders of Kenya had to be hand-cultivated moderates who would help safeguard British interests and protect the settlers after colonial retreat. As regards the Kikuyu, the moderate politicians would come from the ranks of the loyalists. These loyalists—some of whom, like Waruhiu, had been prominent senior chiefs during the years leading up to Mau Mau—were known locally as the “rock on which to rebuild a common future,” or the backbone of enlightened Kikuyu leadership.79 During the remaining years of formal colonial rule, and beyond, they would move in lockstep with the British to ensure their common collective interests.
Women and children being screened at a transit camp
Neither Governor Baring nor Colonial Secretary Lyttelton, nor his successor, Alan Lennox-Boyd, set out to annihilate the Kikuyu population. There is nothing in the historical record to indicate that Kenya suffered from its own version of Adolf Hitler. But maintaining colonial rule while simultaneously preventing a massacre of Kikuyu oath takers was nearly impossible in light of the realities and constraints of late colonial Kenya. Rather, the British colonial government would not lose sight of its ultimate objective of reestablishing colonial domination in Kenya—even if it meant perverting judicial processes, creating one of the most restrictive police states in the history of the empire, and deploying unspeakable terror and violence. In 1953 the end of the Emergency seemed nowhere in sight, despite the now steel-fisted grip of colonial control. In retrospect, the next logical step in restoring and protecting British domination was to round up the entire population of Mau Mau suspects, detain them, and force them, somehow, to submit to colonial authority.
• Chapter Three •
Screening
Hooded loyalist screeners
Undu umwe itakariganirwo ori ni screening. Ngeretha acio matiaiganagira, mendaga ondimahe uhoro ona itari naguo. Makiihura, makiihurira, kuu borithi station kuu detention ona villagi. Screening yahanaga ta kwa ngoma.
(One thing I will never forget is screening. Those British were never satisfied; they just wanted more information from me but I didn’t have any. They just beat me and beat me in the police station, in detention, and in the village. Screening was hell.)
—GACHECHE GATHAMBO, February 22, 1999, Mathira, Nyeri District
SCREENING IS THE ONE WORD IN KIKUYULAND TODAY THAT IS SYNONYMOUS with British colonial rule during Mau Mau. In recounting their days in the detention camps and barbed-wire villages, Kikuyu men and women never translate screening into their own language. Instead, they pause in their Kikuyu or Kiswahili and enunciate the English word screening in a slow, deliberate, colonial British accent. This is because there is no word in Kikuyu or Kiswahili that captures the same meaning.
In British colonial Kenya, screening was the preferred term for interrogation. To screen meant to get information from a Mau Mau suspect and, as the Emergency wore on, to persuade him or her to confess Mau Mau affiliations. When interrogations of Mau Mau suspects by colonial officials turned bloody, screening took on a more sinister connotation. For former Mau Mau adherents and even for those Kikuyu who never took the oath, screening was indiscriminate, and no one escaped it. It was an experience they would prefer to forget, although their memories often prove uncooperative. The practice began not long after the start of the Emergency when British security forces, European settlers, and the Kenya police force together spearheaded a campaign to interrogate anyone suspected of Mau Mau involvement. No Kikuyu—man, woman, or child—was safe from the screening teams. Every Kikuyu was a suspect.
When the mass deportations of Kikuyu to the reserves was started in early 1953, the colonial government began setting up screening centers throughout the Rift Valley and Central provinces. Local settlers and colonial officers funneled thousands of repatriates through these centers, where they were interrogated for hours and sometimes even days. Baring and General Erskine had ordered their men to screen all Mau Mau suspects in search of intelligence, especially information about future Mau Mau operations, guerrilla support in the reserves and on the settler farms, and names of other Mau Mau, particularly passive-wing organizers and oath administrators. Suspects branded as dangerous were shipped off to a detention camp, while others were slated for final deportation to the reserves, often via a transit camp.
In the field the teams of interrogators, known as screening teams, were ruthless in their pursuit of information. Even in government-approved screening centers like Subukia and Bahati, where presumably there was closer scrutiny of interrogation tactics, the third degree (as the local settlers called it) was the method of choice for extracting information and confessions from Mau Mau suspects. D. H. Rawcliffe, himself a settler, wrote in 1954 that the third degree was so widespread that “every European in the security forces knew about these beatings, talked about them, and very often had ordered them or participated in them.”1 Even the Christian missionaries were aware of the brutality, calling the government’s screening center at Thomson’s Falls a “cruelty camp.”2 Such abuses could hardly have been surprising, considering those who were typically in charge. The screening centers were often staffed by local European settlers whom Baring had appointed as temporary district officers in charge of screening.
Christopher Tod
d, the first settler appointed as a screening officer, had a major role in devising the screening system on the settler estates and elsewhere in the colony. Todd was a longtime resident of Naivasha and a leader among the local settlers there. Fresh from his service in the First World War, Todd arrived in Kenya in 1920 to take up a government land grant in the Rift Valley, or Happy Valley, as the local settlers called it. His view of the natives, as he referred to the Africans, was not unlike that of his fellow European colonists. Stereotypical in his British paternalism, Todd displayed a common colonial attitude of the time.
There was no depth of thought [with the native]. As for culture, compared with European and Asian standards, there was none. These men were pagan barbarians but none the less likeable for that…. They were naturally lazy and had continually to be kept up to the mark. Perhaps their greatest curse was, and is, the way in which their whole lives are governed by superstition—that, coupled with their colossal vanity, makes them such an easy prey for the unscrupulous agitator.3
During the Second World War Todd fought again for the Allied forces, this time narrowly escaping death. Returning to Kenya in 1950 after two years of convalescence in Wales, he remained paralyzed for the remainder of his life. His physical condition did not prevent him from joining the Kenya Police Reserve at the outbreak of Mau Mau. Along with his close friends in the Kenya Legislative Council, settlers like Cavendish-Bentinck, Todd was resoundingly critical of what he described as Baring’s too soft Emergency policies. Together with his neighbors, he formed the Vigilance Committee for Naivasha. As he later recalled in his memoirs:
A number of farmers in the district became so exasperated by the lack of action taken by Government to suppress the menace that they formed a Vigilance Committee, to take the law into their own hands for the purpose of protecting the lives of their families should the occasion arise. The Police soon got word of this “subversive society.” After discussion with the members, they persuaded them to join the KPR where they would have legal protection. 4
Imperial Reckoning Page 9