Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  We have to inform you that we detainees of Manyani we are very much disappointed of you because you came here [to] Manyani you did not see us…. Therefore we want to ask you, did you come to see the barbed wire that [is] surrounding us or did you come to see us? You have already come here two times and you never get any chance to tell us anything nor you never let us to tell you our difficulties…. Our hearts were quite angry and much pained when you was here and you did not spoke to us, you saw the barbed wire then you turned back to your home. We saw you, when you entered the camp at about 100 yds. We were ready to tell you our wishes and our difficulties, our minds were ready, but you did not entered in the compounds…. When you prepared yourself journey to Manyani and report to the Government that you are going to Manyani Camp, what did you report to Govt.? Did you tell them that you are going to see the detainees who are over 5,400 or you told the Government that you are going to see the officers in Manyani who are over 10 or over 20? We are sure that you saw Detainees near the camp-gate where they were sitting waiting to go to working parties, and actually you saw how they were weakest because of eating too little food that does not sufficient them…. You saw like this how people are very thinnest and the same [time] you saw good number of detainees were naked without clothes like wild animals, that is what you saw with your eyes. Your eyes are witness of all that. 86

  Technically, inspection committees were required to visit the camps on a regular basis, regardless of detainees’ complaints. Made up of local missionaries, low-level colonial officers, and notably any settlers interested in touring the camps, these committees’ visits were irregular, and their reporting was, based upon what remains in the archives, haphazard at best. Many of these committees provided Askwith, Lewis, and the governor with verbal rather than written reports, ostensibly because they were under pressure and did not have the time to commit their observations to writing.87 This may well have been the case, but Cusack’s office held a much more cynical opinion. In late 1956 the colonial government discovered an “oversight” at Saiyusi, an up-Pipeline destination for the hard core.88 One of the Opposition party members received a letter from the detainees held at this island camp, detailing conditions as well as the fact that there was no inspection committee, something the detainees knew was required by law. Cusack and his Defence Ministry were hardly alarmed by this news. Instead, the ministry’s deputy dispatched a telegram to the Colonial Office, emphasizing that the whole inspection procedure was really a farcical waste of time.

  I fully agree that it should have been appointed sooner, and I only discovered by accident a few months ago that several of the detention camps still had not been provided with Inspection Committees, apparently through oversight, and put this right as soon as I could. You will appreciate however that it is far from easy to find public spirited people willing to visit these camps in out of the way places, partly no doubt because they feel not without some justification that the whole thing is window dressing anyway.89

  The degree to which the detainees were aware of their rights, as defined under Emergency Regulations and international law, is impressive. Their requests went well beyond visiting committees, more often addressing issues that dealt with forced labor and detention without trial. Writing to the colony’s chief secretary in 1955, the men at Athi River pointed out:

  Referring to the Government Notice No 729 which appeared in the Kenya Official Gazette Supplement No 33 of 5th May 1953, in Paragraph 8. The Commandant has only power to make detainees to do only the work which concerns camp cleanliness and tidiness. Contrary to this regulation he has forced detainees to work in gardens, in a dam, and in ways leading to them thus violating Government Regulations and his actions has therefore been unconstitution. Actually we shall not take this lightly, it is a very serious matter. As the result of malnutrition detainees have been so weak that they cannot do hard work. Our demand is for you to abolish it as we honestly ask you. 90

  The detainees were correct about the colonial regulation, at least as it read in the spring of 1953. However, the government had anticipated the need for forced labor at a camp like Athi River. So, as with many other camps in the Pipeline, Governor Baring designated it a special detention camp, sidestepping the earlier regulation to which the Athi River detainees were referring. Still, there remained the issue of due process. Detainees repeatedly demanded that they be given a fair trial, that they be able to defend themselves against charges that they were savages, infected with the Mau Mau spell, and misleading the masses of ordinary Kikuyu. It was not just the hard-core detainees who demanded due process. Men in camps like Aguthi, a works camp for the “grey” detainees, demanded that they too be allowed their day in court. They wrote to Taxi Lewis stating, “Corv’ee [sic] labours are forced hard to all detainees after the arrival of the destination camps. It is curious to say that castigation by beatings and by hunger is imposed on us. If the Govt wishes Corv’ee [sic] labour to be accepted by the detainees, according to the law of the British Govt, it should pass through the courts all detainees for sentences.”91

  Some of the men behind the wire wanted their cases heard by the Advisory Committee on Detainees. Headed by Justice C. P. Connell, this committee traveled to various camps in the Pipeline, where they listened to Mau Mau suspects appeal their detention orders. Typically, two kinds of cases were brought to the Advisory Committee. First there were those detainees held under Delegated Detention Orders, some of whom were devout practicing Christians at the time of arrest. These unfortunate converts had been swept up with the Mau Mau suspects because they refused to fight actively on the side of the colonial government during the war. The second type, and larger number of cases, were those detainees held under Governor’s Detention Orders, or GDOs. The majority were classified as politicals, who, being aware of Emergency Regulations, knew full well that the Advisory Committee existed and that they were guaranteed access to it. This was no small matter. In fact, today most former detainees who were not politicals recall nothing about such an appeals process. The colonial government made little effort to inform the detainees of this appeals avenue, explaining why out of several hundred thousand detainees the Advisory Committee adjudicated only a few thousand cases.92

  When preparing and making their appeals, detainees had no right to legal help or representation. They were entitled to only the slimmest explanation of why they were detained. Governor Baring justified this procedure by stating that he did not want the committee “compromising the individual sources of information regarding [the detainee in question].”93 One would presume from this statement that Baring wished to protect the government’s informants. In certain instances this may well have been the case, but there was another motive as well. Some colonial officers were ordered to fabricate charges to include in the GDOs. One young district officer, for example, was handed a stack of detention orders by the colonial administrator in charge of his district. This would not have been unusual, except that they were largely blank. Only the name of the Mau Mau suspect appeared at the top and Governor Baring’s signature at the bottom. At this point the district officer, a recent Oxford graduate on his first assignment in Britain’s empire, was, in his words, “told to fill in the reasons for these men’s detention. So there I was in the local boma filling these things with everything I could think of, trying not to make them the same. I didn’t know any of these people, I had just recently arrived. And this was one of my first lessons in how we ruled Kenya.”94

  With no attorney a detainee was nevertheless expected to appeal and attempt to refute charges left unspecified, because any revelation of the specific allegations leveled against him by informants would constitute a breach in colonial security regulations. The colonial government’s real fear, of course, was that the detainees would have reasonable explanations for some of these charges, particularly since many were fabricated. This included not just those made up by colonial officers but those created by African informants as well. In all, the Advisory Committee recommended
the release of fewer than 250 men who appealed their detention orders. The list of those denied is a veritable who’s who of Kenyan nationalist politics—men like Gakaara wa Wanjau, John Cege, James Beauttah, Achieng’ Oneko, and Frederick and James Koinange. Most were detained at the Manda Island and nearby Takwa camps and realistically had no chance of their detention orders being overturned. The appeals process was, for most detainees, an exercise in futility. It was, indeed, “window dressing.”95

  The question of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of women who took the Mau Mau oath plagued the colonial government from the Emergency’s inception. Colonial officials would eventually detain the vast majority of them in some eight hundred Emergency villages scattered throughout the Kikuyu countryside. However, several thousand of these women were classified as hard core and, in the words of Askwith, “had to be separated from the rest of those who had been misguided by the Mau Mau doctrine.”96 Some were arrested at the start of the Emergency, already having been identified as people who helped to organize the Mau Mau movement at the grassroots level. Others were later arrested at their homes—accused by their loyalist neighbors, local colonial administrators, or security forces of directing the passive-wing operations that supplied forest fighters with intelligence, food, ammunition, clothing, and other supplies. Included in this hard-core sorority were Shifra Wametumi and Helen Macharia. The two sisters were arrested together in Fort Hall District, along with more than a dozen men, on suspicion that they functioned as the backbone of the Mau Mau organization in their local area. Screened thoroughly in a makeshift camp at Kahuro, the two women managed to escape the fate of the men who were arrested and detained with them. The British officer in charge ordered that they all be herded together, shot, and buried in a large pit.97 Spared their lives, Shifra and Helen would spend the next five years detained without trial.

  By their own later admission, the sisters were helping to direct the movement’s activities in their area. Of the two, the elder, Shifra, likely raised the suspicions of local authorities because of the broad scale of her involvement. She was a leader in one of the local African independent churches and, according to her later account, “knew just about everyone who was Mau Mau in our location, because our independent church was the center of Mau Mau activity. We directed the oathing, collected funds, and prepared ourselves for our war. We wanted our land back; we wanted the Europeans out. They had caused many problems in our country, and we wanted our freedom so we could organize our lives and our communities as we saw fit.”98 Such resolute commitment had its consequences. The two sisters left several young children behind when they were taken away. In Helen’s case, she kept her nursing infant with her until the time of her deportation to Kajiado Camp. At this point she decided to hand the young child to her husband, who was standing beneath the lorry, rather than take the infant with her to the camp. But a few months later her husband would also be detained. Helen and her widowed sister Shifra, like so many other women in the Pipeline, would rely upon the goodwill of their Mau Mau family members and neighbors to feed and protect their children during their detention.

  Throughout their years in detention Shifra and Helen would be known by their numbers, 98 and 99, respectively. At the co-ed Kajiado Camp they joined thirty-two other women, and together, according to Shifra, they “were being referred to as condemned people by the Mzungu in charge, to be killed at any time he saw fit.”99 After a year they were transferred to Athi River Camp, making them the first women to occupy the new all-female compound, Compound 1. Though separated from the men, they too experienced daily the Pipeline’s same idiom of violence, as well as its hard labor and deprivations. Their days consisted of siren wake-up calls, inspections, and marches out to the labor site, where they dug by hand an eight-foot-deep security trench encircling the camp. When now recalling this forced labor, former detainees of Compound 1 cannot separate the work from the heat and the beatings. They would voluntarily strip down to their underclothes to contend with “scorching sun,” as Shifra recollected. There was no clean water, and, according to Helen:

  We had to do with the water coming down the drainages, after dishes had been washed and toilets and bathrooms cleaned…. I remember being asked by women to use my big foot to stop the draining water flowing, so as to make a small pool where others could be able to scoop the water with their hands. This was because the thirst was so much, and the digging was like a punishment. And we couldn’t complain. That was a punishment. Nobody would listen to our complaints. They used to call us the bloody Mau Mau and abuse us more.100

  Women at Athi River did, however, voice their grievances. Literate detainees like Helen and the legendary one-eyed detainee named Nyaguthii, from Nyeri District, drafted and wrote letters detailing the forced labor, the beatings, and the screenings. Without fail Fridays at Athi River meant screening, and the women hardly escaped the usual tactics of the government’s interrogators. They were beaten, whipped, and sexually violated with bottles, hot eggs, and other foreign objects, all in an effort to force them to talk. Alsatian shepherd dogs were also brought into the screening huts, where they would growl at and eventually maul those women who refused to cooperate.101 Compound 1 sent numerous letters to the governor, who, on occasion, responded personally by inspecting the camp. According to Shifra, Baring would “sometimes come and see us being screened. Other times we would be ordered to squat, and he would come around looking at us. He never asked us anything; he would just walk around glancing at us like we were animals.”102

  Governor Baring’s impression was not so far off the mark. The women’s hair was matted, they had not bathed properly since their arrests, toilet bucket waste was encrusted in their scalps and backs, their skin was often covered with scabs and boils, and they walked around—in Helen’s words—“like paranoid creatures, always jerking our heads from side to side for fear of being hit with a club or whip.”103 The camp experience had fully transformed their physical appearance, to the point that they had become the feral-looking Mau Mau savages that Baring and the colonial secretary were peddling in their propaganda to Britain and the international community.

  For most of the Emergency, women were detained primarily at Kamiti Camp. Kamiti had previously been a maximum security prison for criminals, but the circumstances of the war forced its transformation into a multipurpose facility. It was an overflow site for Embakasi prison and held several thousand men convicted of Mau Mau–related crimes. Behind its walls and barbed wire was also one of the largest known burial sites for Mau Mau adherents killed in the forests, on the reserves, and in detention camps, as well as those executed under Emergency Regulations. In the spring of 1954 the colonial government decided to open the gates of Kamiti to accommodate a surge of female Mau Mau convicts and detainees. Once fully operational, Kamiti would be unique in that it functioned as a self-contained Pipeline. In it women of all classifications—from the blackest of “black” to “white,” and various shades of “grey” in between—were detained and moved to different compounds based on their level of cooperation. Female Mau Mau convicts were fully integrated with the detainees, living in the same compounds and laboring together. At the end of their sentences they too became detainees, little altering their lives.

  Kamiti was also unique in that the colonial government envisioned eventually releasing some of its hard core back into the Kikuyu reserves. This exception to an otherwise hard-and-fast exile policy was a reflection of the challenge that these female Mau Mau adherents posed to the British colonial stereotype of African women, who were supposedly intellectually weak and easily manipulated. In the case of Mau Mau they were presumed to have joined the movement because their husbands, fathers, and sons had coerced them into taking the oath.104 But women like Shifra and Helen exploded this myth. Colonial officials were left struggling to reconcile female Mau Mau militancy and solidarity with their simplistic notions of a passive and compliant African womanhood.

  Askwith, however, turned this colonial s
tereotype on its head. In a report to the Colonial Office in early 1954 he wrote, “There is evidence that wives have in many cases persuaded their husbands to take the oath and are often very militant. They are also said to be bringing up their children to follow the Mau Mau creed. It is therefore more important to rehabilitate the women than the men if the next generation is to be saved.”105 Despite evidence from intelligence reports that women were the “eyes and ears of Mau Mau” and that “the part played by women to aid the terrorists is considerable,” old British gender stereotypes would not fade away.106 At Kamiti the gender stereotype curiously seemed to render some of the hard-core women redeemable. Some female detainees may have been among the most militant of the Mau Mau adherents, but most colonial officials simply could not attribute this behavior to any kind of independent thought or agency, as they did the men of the movement. If these women had simply been manipulated by their menfolk, they could also be reoriented, as British logic went, toward the colonial way of thinking. In other words, if women like Helen and Shifra had been manipulated once, under the right conditions they could be manipulated again.