Imperial Reckoning

by Caroline Elkins

  No sooner was this bomb defused than another was lobbed into the arena. A detainee named Kabebe Macharia was beaten to death at Gathigiriri Camp. According to internal secret memoranda exchanged between the Colonial Office and officials in Nairobi, “he had been beaten with rubber strips cut from motor-car tyres.” It was argued that those responsible for his murder were not among the European officers in charge of the camp. The explanation given for the death of this “Fort Hall terrorist,” as Baring termed the murdered detainee, was that he provided inconsistent responses during screening, and eventually his truculence got the better of two African interrogators, who then beat him to death. Allegedly, the senior African rehabilitation officer had given repeated warnings not to use violence during screening, though systematized brutality with its compelling force was already official policy in the Pipeline. The prisons officer in charge, Daniel Derek Luies, was reportedly absent from the camp at the time of the murder, an argument the governor not only accepted but explained away: “I have little doubt that the Prison Officer in question at the end of a long, successful and arduous period of service forgot the danger of beating and that advantage was taken of his absence. It is therefore most unlikely that the circumstances which led to the beating will recur.” Finally, Baring argued that there was no connection between this beating to death and the earlier beating to death of Muchiri Githuma that had occurred at Gathigiriri in 1957. Despite the unmistakable similarities between the two murders, they were maintained to be isolated and unrelated incidents. 106

  When Senior Crown Counsel Jack Webber conducted an internal disciplinary investigation into Prison Officer Luies’s role in Kabebe Macharia’s murder, his findings were similar to those from previous such probes. Webber merely reprimanded Luies for taking a day off, and was inclined to agree with John Cowan, who told the Crown’s senior counsel “that whilst one would hope that a warder seeing or hearing brutality used towards detainees would report it to his superior officer, in practice, it is extremely unlikely that this would happen.” 107 In other words, if beatings and tortures took place, it was the still uncivilized African assistants who were responsible. From the investigation transcripts it is clear that Webber had no problem agreeing. He believed that British officers could have in no way been involved in such acts, and, moreover, if and when they occurred the only way any of the officers could know of such torture was if their African underlings were to report it. This in spite of the fact that systematized brutality had already been made official British policy. No independent investigation into any British officer’s role in Kabebe Macharia’s murder followed Webber’s report. Two African assistants, however, were later tried for murder, convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. That Kabebe Macharia was “savagely beaten,” and that “evidence shewed that the deceased’s screams could be heard in the compound,” was not enough to convince the presiding judge, Justice Rudd, that any particular person, including the officer in charge, Hugh Galton-Fenzi, had actually heard the screams. 108

  By the close of 1958 the colonial government had seemingly argued away a mountain of evidence pointing to brutality, murders, cover-ups, breaches of international conventions, and an overall dereliction of trusteeship in Kenya. The Opposition had brought numerous cases of wrongdoing into public light; the press likewise had published letters from detainees and issued calls for independent inquiries. There were the reports by Fletcher and Meldon, censures by various church leaders in Britain, and numerous unpublished accounts of brutality in the Colonial Office files, including additional letters from detainees detailing abuses and asking for help. It is a testament to Alan Lennox-Boyd’s power of persuasion and political cleverness that he successfully held at bay independent judicial investigations.

  But additional accounts of brutality soon came to light. Victor Shuter, a former prisons officer in Manyani and later Fort Hall and Mariira camps, presented the colonial government in early 1959 with a fifteen-page sworn affidavit, listing charge after charge of brutal abuse and cover-up. He named more than a dozen British officers, serving in the Prisons Department, the Community Development and Rehabilitation Department, and on the police force, who had perpetrated acts of cruelty, and he provided specific details of each offense. According to Shuter, many of these officers “carried home-made weapons of various kinds, with which they frequently and arbitrarily assaulted the detainees…. These weapons were pieces of rubber hose filled with sand and tied at both ends, and short rhino whips known as ‘kibokos.’” He went on to say, “I saw…W. Cumberland force a detainee’s head into a latrine bucket, which contained excreta,” and that European officers routinely took detainees into a “small room” and collectively beat them. He described the Manyani intake procedure with the cattle dip and “detainees [who] could not swim, and had to struggle through the water holding onto the edge of the tank”—though many nearly drowned when the African chief warder put “his foot on the heads of detainees and push[ed] them under water in the aforementioned dipping tank.” Over evening drinks, officers would discuss the next day’s torture techniques, which included unleashing the riot squad in the compounds, singling out detainees for public beatings, collective punishments, kicking the crutches out from beneath amputees, and yanking men along by their shackle chains. 109

  Shuter also provided a list describing the “welcome” system at Kamaguta Camp whereby the officer in charge would personally screen each new intake by beating him. At the same camp, a detainee named Macharia was “deaf and paralyzed” as a result of having been “beaten daily over a period of about three weeks” by D. Hartley, the camp’s commandant. Shuter wrote of the assaults at Fort Hall Camp and the “new batches of detainees [who were] ‘beaten up’ as a matter of course” during their dilution at Mariira. Detainees with broken limbs and visible welts and bruises were the ones who “were concealed from the Inspecting Committee on the orders of [the officer in charge].” Moreover, he said, “before inspections by visiting committees, the [other] detainees were threatened with beatings if they made any complaints.” As for Shuter himself, he had written numerous complaint letters to his superior officers and to the superintendent of prisons but had gotten nowhere. Responses had ranged from “the camp was being run efficiently” to “some of us were being too lenient with the detainees.” In response to his criticisms, Shuter had been “subjected to considerable open ridicule.” 110

  On the heels of Shuter’s allegations came another round of accusations, this time from Captain Ernest Law. In an interview with the Daily Mail Law said, “I knew too much” and went on to claim that he “lost his job as a chief officer at Main Prison, Nairobi after protesting about sadistic treatment of African prisoners by some English prison officers and their African assistants.” 111 Out of work, Law found himself in debt and took the unusual step of turning himself in to the local police as a vagrant in hopes that the government would pay for his return to Britain. Instead he was sent to Kamiti Prison. There, according to his statement, he saw African warders “frog-marching two women convicts” inside an office, and once “they got outside the beating started. The Chief Warder Cha-Cha and his askaris started hitting and kicking the women….[He] hit with the flat hands each side of the head with enough force to burst their eardrums and during the beating I saw the women pass their motions with fright. I was soon to learn this was a daily occurrence. During my first two months at Kamiti there were beatings every day.” He described the riot squads beating entire compounds with truncheons and sticks, and one British officer—after severely beating a convict—telling his askaris, “Give him some more. He is not dead yet.” Outside of Kamiti’s tuberculosis ward, “4 convicts were dragged, kicked and beaten towards our compound,” Law wrote. “One of the convicts had crutches, one had no use of his body from the waist down, one had his right leg in plaster of Paris and the other was too old to do anything. They had been brought out because they refused to have their hair cut. The barbers arrived with Mr
. ‘H’ who was carrying a walking stick. He began to beat all four with his stick until it broke then he began to kick them, the convicts collapsed too weak to speak or ask for mercy. Then Mr. ‘H’ put his face close to the one who had no use of his legs and shouted…‘who is the boss now?’” 112

  After Shuter and Law came two other European eyewitnesses who had unique vantage points on the Pipeline abuses. Unusual among the European population in Kenya, Leonard Bird and Anthony Williams-Meyrick were petty criminals, convicted of theft and sent to Kisumu Prison and later Kamiti. Their backgrounds would provide easy ammunition for the credibility assaults that awaited them. Nonetheless, their statements, when considered together with those of Law and Shuter, clearly merited attention, or at least the Opposition thought so. During his time at Kamiti, Bird was the clerk in the prisons office, where he “witnessed a number of incidents involving brutality towards African prisoners.” He saw transfers from Embakasi being brutalized, men in leg irons tortured, and a general “sadistic attitude of the European prison officer.” 113 Likewise, Williams-Meyrick offered up accounts of daily beatings with truncheons, batons, concealed daggers, and “pick handles,” detainees being forced to eat contraband like tobacco until they were “violently ill,” and a British officer who routinely knocked “African prisoners over the head with a heavy swagger cane which he carried…without provocation.” 114

  A frenzy ensued in the Commons and in the press, as well as along the wires connecting the colonial secretary to Governor Baring. Now it was not just Castle, Brockway, and other predictable left-wingers demanding explanations; rather it was the entire Labour Party, with nearly two hundred MPs signing a motion urging “the Secretary of State for the Colonies to institute an independent inquiry into the conditions and administration of prisons and detention camps in Kenya, including Lokitaung Prison, Northern Province, in view of allegations of ill treatment received from prisoners and detainees in Kenya and allegations about the conditions made by former officers of the Kenya Prison Service.” 115 A showdown debate was set for the Commons on February 24, and the colonial government’s political wheels were spinning.

  An independent investigation had to be avoided. Lennox-Boyd and Baring were now so close to emptying the camps, and to succeeding with their plan to cement British control over the colony, that the governor insisted, “We must not fall for this gambit in the war of nerves being conducted by those trying to undo us in Kenya.” 116 By early 1959 Baring and his men on the spot were putting the finishing touches on the main exile camp at Hola. Remarkably, the number of hard core slated for permanent detention was down to a few thousand, and with systematic brutality still in place the numbers were still dropping. “An enquiry disorganises rehabilitation work,” the governor went on to reason, “and demoralises rehabilitation workers. Therefore I think that in the interests of detainees who should be released as soon as possible an enquiry without a prima facie case should be avoided. At present the ‘pipeline’ is still running very well….” 117 Baring also sent other cables expressly to discredit the new round of accusers. Shuter was “probably a forger” and “certainly in heavy debt,” Law was a “vagrant” and “his medical reports suggest he was an alcoholic,” and as for Bird and Williams-Meyrick, they were child’s play—summarily dismissed as thieves and convicts. 118

  Insults continued to fly in Parliament in the days leading up to the debate over the motion for an independent inquiry. Time and again Lennox-Boyd stonewalled on questions, and the Opposition voiced its anger. Labour MPs wanted to know what was being done about the allegations, why thousands were still in the camps, and when would political detainees—men like Achieng’ Oneko, whose conviction at Kapenguria had been overturned years before—be released. “Why cannot the Minister do some homework for a change,” one Opposition member barked, “and consult his Civil Service and give this House some decent and factual Answers? On about six occasions today there has been no answer to perfectly simple Questions.” To this, the colonial secretary had no answer, and another Labour MP chimed in, “There are still thousands detained. It is monstrous.” 119

  It was a bitter partisan fight, and in the end politics vanquished morality. The vote on the motion to authorize an independent inquiry split along party lines, with 232 in favor and 288 opposed. The morning after the debate, conservative papers like the Daily Telegraph portrayed the defeat of the motion as a vindication for the British colonial government and yet another failed ploy by the “Socialists.” 120 The liberal media took their usual stand, with the New Statesman and Nation declaring, “It is characteristic of the present political set-up in the Colonial Office that the refusal to set up an independent inquiry into the Kenya prisons is carried beyond the point of reason.” 121 But it was the conservative-leaning Economist that offered the most reflective conclusion to this latest drama over an independent inquiry. “All the same,” its article said in closing, “the one overriding consideration in treating any present-day colonial question must be what last memories of the British way of doing things are to be left behind before the connections with Westminster are severed.” 122

  Had the story of detention, violence, murder, deceit, and abuse of power in Kenya ended with the February vote, it still would have been one of the great stains on Britain’s already blemished record of twentieth-century imperial rule. Nonetheless, one must wonder: had Lennox-Boyd and Baring taken the groundswell of Labour outrage, the relatively close call on the independent inquiry motion, and the dogged questioning in the press as signs to moderate the abuses in Kenya, there might have been a very narrow opening still left for them to escape at least some of the critical judgment they have earned. This was not to be. Instead, British colonial officials saw the motion’s defeat not just as an endorsement of their behavior but as a kind of green light to proceed with even more institutionalized violence. But this time the scenario would play out differently, and they would be caught red-handed.

  On March 4, 1959, a news report came over the wires that ten detainees died at Hola Camp and that “the deaths occurred after they had drunk water from a water cart.” 123 The clear implication was that these men had died from contaminated water they had consumed. At first, everyone seemed to accept the explanation, even Barbara Castle. “I might have been forced to accept this innocent version like everyone else,” she later recalled, “if I had not received a telephone call at the Commons from D.N. Pritt, the left-wing QC who was in Kenya representing the African detainees.” 124 Using his own connections, Pritt had learned of the initial autopsy findings, which told a much different story. “He said, ‘Barbara, this is the worst cover up in the whole history of colonial government,’” Castle later told an interviewer. “‘These men were beaten to death—they were clubbed to death—they did not die of drinking water. Please pursue this in the House.’ So of course what I did then was to ask the Secretary of State of the time please put the documents in the House of Commons library—the documents of the inquest, the documents of the enquiry. There we had the evidence and I was able to go through those documents to prove to the House of Commons that these men had in fact been clubbed to death by illegal behaviour in the running of the camp.” 125

  Still, neither Lennox-Boyd nor Baring were prepared to fully admit the facts. “The medical reports indicate,” a second press release on March 12 announced, “that there were injuries on the bodies which may have been due to violence.” 126 These were the same bodies that had broken teeth and extensive facial bruisings, not to mention multiple other blunt-force injuries that had been duly recorded by the coroner.

  “The Hola Massacre,” as it was termed in the press, would finally validate years of allegations. It would expose the evasions and refusals for what they were: politically motivated cover-ups. Baring and Lennox-Boyd above everything protected their men on the spot, at all costs. No one was going to go down for this, not the local British officers, not the governor, not the colonial secretary, and certainly not Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
. Elections were coming in October, and Hola was exactly the kind of scandal that could bring a government down. At the time Macmillan understood that the situation was dire, writing in his diary that his government was “in a real jam.” 127 He and Lennox-Boyd were prepared to pull out all of the stops to make certain this tragedy was whitewashed and, most important, to ensure that no one was forced to accept direct responsibility. They knew that once blame was apportioned, it would be impossible to control how far up the ladder it might go.