The Historical Background
Nearly everybody was a member of the Movement, but nobody could say with any accuracy when it was born: to most people, especially those in the younger generation, it had always been there, a rallying centre for action. It changed names, leaders came and went, but the Movement remained, opening new visions, gathering greater and greater strength, till on the eve of Uhuru, its influence stretched from one horizon touching the sea to the other resting on the great Lake.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
Prior to the uprising, undoubtedly the most notorious anticolonial crisis of the post-war era, when there were many, Kenya had indeed largely been figured as ‘the land of sunshine, gin slings and smiling, obedient servants’ and ‘of benign white paternalism and accepting black subservience’.12 For the bulk of Kenya’s white settlers, apartheid South Africa was the model polity; as they set about demanding more self-governance in the immediate post-war years, they ‘campaigned against enhanced political representation for Africans, pushed themselves into key roles in the management of the colonial economy, and tightened their grip over local and municipal governments’.13 The movement that came to be known as ‘Mau Mau’ was the culmination of many years of resistance by those dispossessed of their lands and put to work on European farms.14 At the heart of the grievances – which also included low wages, racist passbooks known as kipande, and lack of electoral representation – was ‘land hunger’, large swathes of arable land coming under settler occupation while poor Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, lived economically deprived lives in ‘Reserves’, or tiny plots on settler land which they worked. The complex causes and layered constitution of the network of insurgency that underlay the uprising have been the subject of a substantial body of scholarship, and I do not intend to revisit it here in any detail.15 The roots of the uprising lay in the post-war intensification of fear and anxiety among ‘squatters’ – the misleadingly named communities of farm labour who worked settler plantations and faced intensification of repressive measures to contain them – and the resistance they frequently put up to exploitative regimes of labour extraction. As ‘vast estates were expropriated and then largely underutilised’, squatters became increasingly aware of the injustices they faced, ‘especially since open intimidation, physical floggings and general ill-treatment were part and parcel of their day-to-day lives’.16 Particular resentment was caused by increasingly aggressive kifagio, or settler attempts to dispossess squatters and severely limit how much stock they could keep and how much personal cultivation they could do.17 Much as had happened in Morant Bay less than a hundred years before, squatter resistance, including strikes and refusals to sign contracts, was often shaped by rumours of working conditions which could be equated to enslavement or near-enslavement.18 Low-waged labourers’ refusal to be acquiescent was met with forced removals from the land into already overcrowded reserves; petitioning the government and the Colonial Office proved to be of little use. Much of this resistance was channelled through an organization known as the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), which began as an informal network of contacts and ‘acquired a relative degree of coherence in the 1940s’ after it was declared illegal by the colonial government.19
In the late 1940s, to cement loyalty to the KCA and step up the drive to obtain land rights, a campaign of ‘oathing’ – a practice drawing on existing secret societies and their rituals in rural communities – was intensified; this is what became most famously associated with Mau Mau, the subject of much lurid speculation and demonic mythology in Britain. A younger, more militant wing of the banned KCA – now merged with the Kenya African Union (KAU), led by Jomo Kenyatta – sought to ‘extend oathing on a mass scale to escalate resistance’ and emphasize unity.20 As a split between moderates and the more militant hardened, by late 1947, and repression intensified – culminating in the arrest of evicted Kikuyu squatters from the Olenguruone area – the oathing campaign sought to bind Kikuyu people ‘behind an as yet undefined radical action’.21 Kenyatta and others would caution against drastic measures such as burning the kipande, which several did at public meetings, but the idea of militant underground protest was steadily gaining traction. It was at Olenguruone that ‘rural resistance – disobedience of orders, refusal to make agreements – reached a new level and where a new idiom was found’.22 Here emerged a new oath to fight enemies, ‘based on older Kikuyu traditions but modified in its contents and in its social significance’, administered across ages and genders.23 In the spring of 1952, in the face of increased state and settler repression – which included severely limiting the amount of land and stock squatters could own, as well as evictions of troublemakers – armed resistance emerged. Attacks and sabotage began on settler properties and cattle even as Kenyatta toured the Highlands speaking of political change. Assassinations and disappearances of police witnesses and headmen perceived to be collaborating with the government began to take place. While a small number of white settlers and colonial officials perished in the violence, by far the largest number of deaths was those of Africans deemed to be British ‘loyalists’. Treating the resistance initially as just labour unrest with traditional practices attached to it, the colonial government worsened the situation by increased repression and indiscriminate preventive detentions. On 20 October 1952 the notorious State of Emergency was declared: if the possibility for legal and ‘peaceful’ protests had always been severely limited, now the turn to guerrilla warfare became inevitable.24 The outcome would be disastrous for the Kikuyu – insurgents, their supporters and ‘loyalists’, as well as those caught in between. Shortly after the Emergency was declared, Kenyatta and many others were arrested under ‘Operation Jock Scott’, ahead of being charged and tried for instigating Mau Mau – something of an irony given Kenyatta’s own firm commitment to moderate tactics.25 Whatever their differences on strategy, however, Kenyatta was regarded even by the militants as the leader of the nationalist struggle. His trial in the deliberately remote location of Kapenguria in the Rift Valley would become a cause célèbre across and beyond Africa, the left-wing British barrister D. N. Pritt QC leading the defence, alongside distinguished Indian lawyers such as Chaman Lall. Kenyatta levied a counter-accusation with regard to the emergence of Mau Mau: that it was the colonial government which had ‘made it what it is, not Kenyatta’ – a point which would reverberate in metropolitan discussions of the crisis:26
I blame the Government because knowing that Africans have grievances they did not go into these grievances … instead of joining with us to fight Mau Mau they arrested all the leading members of KAU, accusing them of being Mau Mau … They wanted to, I think, not to eliminate Mau Mau, sir, but what they wanted to eliminate is the only political organisation – that is KAU – which fights constitutionally for the rights of the African people.27
Kenyatta’s subsequent conviction on the charge of leading a proscribed organization – based on distinctly unsafe and uncorroborated testimony which was infamously recanted later by the chief witness, Rawson Macharia – would also cause a scandal. The presiding magistrate, brought hastily out of retirement for the trial, did not really bother to conceal his partisan tendencies, himself noting that his judgement ‘means that I disbelieve ten witnesses for the defence and believe one witness for the prosecution’.28 As Pritt later wrote, the trial was covered by half a dozen of the best foreign correspondents in the British press, and ‘aroused great interest in England, causing a resurgence of genuine liberal sentiment, and even some public feeling of responsibility for British colonial activities’.29 To British observers of a critical disposition, the patently unsound charge that Mau Mau was directed by Kenyatta indicated a desire on the part of the colonial government to deprive Kenyan Africans of ‘all lawful political representation’ by enabling the banning of the KAU, one of many ‘reactionary follies that hastened the independence of Kenya’.30
In the post-war period, as David Goldsworthy has argued, ‘the over-all [sic] direction of co
lonial policy became an issue in metropolitan politics’.31 As Britain became more powerless to control events in the colonies, ‘the search for solutions to colonial problems stimulated greater political activity at home than ever before. Interactions among government, opposition, pressure groups, and colonial leaders became continuous and lively’.32 If insurgencies in Malaya (where another brutal Emergency was imposed) and Cyprus were also significant, events in Africa which provided a particular stimulus to metropolitan political activity included the birth pangs of the Central African Federation in early 1953, the British Guiana crisis later that year, and the Seretse Khama controversy in 1956 over the marriage of an African prince to a white Englishwoman.33 But it was Kenya that dominated the headlines in the 1950s. In 1954, two years into the brutal counter-insurgency programme, Colonial Secretary Lyttelton would suddenly announce ‘constitutional changes to accommodate the “legitimate” aspirations of all races’ in Kenya, including land reforms which could have been ceded much earlier.34 Even as the insurgents’ brutal tactics were widely condemned back in Britain, there appeared to be a growing consensus that both the emergence and the suppression of Mau Mau demanded an urgent revisiting of British colonial policy in Kenya. An early day motion in the British parliament called for ‘all practical measures to mitigate the most pressing hardships and frustrations of the African people’ to be put in place.35 As John Lonsdale has noted, the Emergency was, in reality, ‘a pre-emptive attack carried out by the incumbent colonial authorities against a significant section of the African political leadership of Kenya and its supporters’; this fact was not lost on British dissidents.36 Fenner Brockway was one of them.
‘The member for Africa’: Fenner Brockway and Unlearning Paternalism
They told with varying disagrees of exaggeration how [Mugo] organized the hunger-strike in Rira, an action which made Fenna Brokowi raise questions in the British House of Commons.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
The problems in Kenya are … so symbolic of what is happening in Colonial Territories generally. In the minds of many of us there is the question whether the Colonies in Africa, and in East and Central Africa particularly, are to move towards racial equality and racial co-operation, or whether they will develop into the unhappy situation which exists in Kenya of violence, conflict and race war. I believe that our answer to the present problems in Kenya may determine not only the future of Kenya but the future of other territories in Africa as well.
Fenner Brockway in the House of Commons, March 1955
‘I am instinctively a pacifist. It is literally true that I have never held a weapon in my hand (except a rubber bullet sent me from Northern Ireland)’, Fenner Brockway would recall at the age of 98.37 A founder member of the No-Conscription Fellowship – he was jailed for refusing to serve in the First World War – Brockway remained a lifelong anti-war campaigner, and also became devoted, first, to the cause of colonial reforms, and eventually to full freedom from colonial rule. His was a long twentieth-century life: he died in 1988, just short of his 100th birthday. A firm constitutionalist and pacifist, until the 1950s Brockway had only ever suspended his commitment to non-violence with respect to the war against Nazi Germany. Born in India to missionary parents, Brockway had been pro-Boer during the South African war and a Liberal for a short period before joining the ILP, from this point describing himself as a socialist, strongly influenced by Keir Hardie. He joined the Labour Party in 1946, serving first in the House of Commons and then, from 1964 onwards, in the House of Lords. Although he was formally disapproving of them, he regarded his own elevation to a peerage as providing a useful platform from which to raise questions and introduce bills. A prolific writer, Brockway produced several memoirs, biographies, pamphlets, journal articles and historical accounts. In addition to a long parliamentary career, which began in 1929, Brockway also took on leading roles in the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, the League against Imperialism, the British Centre for Colonial Freedom, the Congress of Peoples against Imperialism (COPAI), the No More War movement, and the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF). It is fair to say that no account of British anticolonialism in the twentieth century would be complete without some understanding of Brockway’s role in it.
As a stalwart backer of the Indian National Congress, whose moderation of policy and non-violent methods appealed to his temperament, Brockway threw his weight behind full independence for India, but had always been something of a gradualist in relation to Africa, a region he knew less well in the interwar period than India, his ‘first love’.38 His close relationships with Gandhi, Nehru and others in the Indian National Congress from the 1920s on had made him a known advocate of the cause of Indian independence; in his pieces for the New Leader and elsewhere, Brockway tended to ventriloquize the INC leadership’s line on India, rarely challenging it. The New Leader under Brockway’s editorship, for instance, took an uncompromisingly hostile line towards the Muslim League and the demand for a Muslim homeland. Under Brockway, however, as we have already seen, the New Leader also provided a vital platform for radical black voices to be heard on the British left, challenging its deep-rooted tendencies towards paternalism. Brockway’s own paternalism, however, would not be disrupted thoroughly until after his second ‘African journey’. While well known as an advocate of self-government throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Brockway really only came into his own as one of the strongest voices in British anticolonialism in the 1950s, when he began to engage with Africa, and Kenya in particular. In 1950, he took his seat in the Commons after having left a highly weakened ILP, and re-joined the Labour Party – a parliamentary career he was able to parlay very effectively into becoming a spokesman and campaigner for colonial liberation. It was then, specifically because of his engagement with liberation movements, he recalled, that he found himself ‘beginning to specialise on the colonies’:39
My contact with Third World movements through the Congress of Peoples against Imperialism meant that I had letters from all over Africa and Asia reporting injustices, and I continually raised them in the House. The Hansard index showed that in one week I put questions about Uganda, Nigeria, Trinidad, Sierra Leone and Gambia. I had been dubbed ‘Member for Moscow’. With more justice I was now called ‘Member for Africa’.40
When Seretse Khama of Bechuanaland was infamously deposed from his chieftainship by a Labour government for the crime of marrying a white Englishwoman – for fear of offending South Africa, where ‘miscegenation’ was illegal – Brockway stood against his own party’s ministers in his support for Khama.41 As the Dictionary of Labour Biography notes, Brockway, a vigorous early campaigner against apartheid in South Africa and racial discrimination in Britain, played ‘a key part in attempts to secure – not always successfully – a peaceful and fair transition to independence for numerous countries including Kenya, Tunisia, Madagascar, Ghana, Cyprus, Malta and British Guiana’.42 In the course of this campaigning, and going very much against the grain of his cultural training, Brockway would also attempt strenuously to slough off his paternalist tendencies in order to become what he called a ‘world citizen’: ‘Compassion is not enough: that is concern by the better off for the worse off. There should not be that sense of gulf. There should be identity’.43 In many ways, Brockway is an exemplary case study in how those of a reformist rather than oppositional bent were radicalized by insurgencies, and by learning from European and Asian anticolonialists.
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