A week after the declaration of a state of emergency, the Lancashire Fusiliers flew in from Egypt to supplement three battalions of the King’s African Rifles who were recalled from abroad. The authorities still lacked good-quality intelligence when hostilities began in earnest in late 1952, so the colonial forces struck out blindly to suppress the violence. The brutal period of repression that followed would permanently change the image of Kenya as a paradise for the white colonials. In the words of the historian David Anderson:
Before Mau Mau, Kenya had an entirely different image. In the iconography of the British imperial endeavour, it was the land of sunshine, gin slings and smiling, obedient servants, where the industrious white colonizer could enjoy a temperate life of peace and plenty in a tropical land. This was “white man’s country,” with its rolling, fertile highlands. Sturdy settler farmers had made their homes here, building a little piece of England in a foreign field.… Mau Mau shattered this patronizing pretence in the most poignant, disturbing manner, as trusted servants turned on their masters and slaughtered them.12
News of the intended arrests under the emergency powers leaked out, allowing the real revolutionaries to flee to their forest refuges in the Aberdare Mountains, while the moderates stayed put and awaited their fate. Many Africans considered Jomo Kenyatta to be a moderate leader, but he failed to unambiguously denounce Mau Mau violence to the satisfaction of the colonial government. Kenyatta knew exactly what to expect: he was arrested on November 18, 1952, and flown to a remote district station in Kapenguria, which reportedly had no telephone or rail communications with the rest of Kenya. He was charged, together with five other Kikuyu leaders, with “managing and being a member” of Mau Mau. They became known as the “Kapenguria Six,” and their trial lasted for fifty-nine days—the longest and most sensational trial in British colonial history. The main prosecution witness, a Kikuyu called Rawson Mbugua Macharia, claimed that he had taken a Mau Mau oath in the presence of Kenyatta. (Macharia was the only witness at the trial to give evidence that linked Kenyatta with Mau Mau directly, yet six years later he swore an affidavit that he and six others had perjured themselves, and that some of them had been rewarded with land for their testimony.) For security reasons the trial was held without a jury, and the British judge received £20,000 (nearly $1.1 million adjusted for 2010 prices) to travel to Africa to put Kenyatta behind bars. (Many claim this fee was a bribe to gain Kenyatta’s conviction.) In April 1953 Kenyatta was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment with hard labor, and indefinite restriction thereafter; the British Privy Council refused his appeal the following year.
For the ordinary Kikuyu, the emergency brought terror and privation. Large bands of Mau Mau fighters moved freely around the highland forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya, attacking isolated police posts and terrorizing and killing Africans loyal to the white settlers. A typical group of insurgents numbered about a hundred; they operated mainly at night and took refuge in the forest during the days. Some of them had learned the techniques of guerrilla fighting during the war, when they assisted the British army against the Japanese in the Burmese jungle.
On January 24, 1953, two British settlers, Roger and Esme Ruck, together with their six-year-old son, Michael, were hacked to death by Mau Mau fighters on their isolated farm in Kinangop, together with one of their farmworkers who came to their assistance. The Rucks were a hardworking and respected farming couple in their early thirties, and they played an active role in the community. Esme Ruck ran a clinic on their farm, where she treated squatters in the area free of charge; her husband was a member of the Kenya Police Reserve. They were the embodiment of everything that white settlers held dear in postwar Kenya.
Panic immediately spread among the white community, and the Rucks’ murder became a turning point in the war for the colonials, who demanded that the government toughen its response to the crisis. The day after the murders, white Kenyans massed outside Government House in Nairobi, calling for the cordon of “nigger police” who were holding the crowd at bay to be taken away. Some demonstrators even stubbed their cigarettes out on the arms of the black constables in an attempt to break through the police line. Sir Michael Blundell, the acknowledged leader of the settler community in Kenya at the time, was in a crisis meeting inside Government House with the governor-general. When he came out to try to pacify the crowd, he was shocked by their mood:
This was my first experience of men and women who had momentarily lost all control of themselves and had become merged together as an insensate unthinking mass. I can see now individual pictures of the scene—a man with a beard and a strong foreign accent clutching his pistol as he shouted and raved; another with a quiet scholarly intellectual face, whom I knew to be a musician and a scientist, was crouched down by the terrace, twitching all over and swirling with a cascade of remarkable and blistering words, while an occasional fleck of foam came from his mouth.13
A few days after the Rucks’ murder, it became clear that their killers had been employed by them for several years—loyal workers who had suddenly turned and butchered them without warning. As a consequence, long-standing relationships and friendships between black and white could no longer be trusted. White settlers, including women, armed themselves with any weapon they could lay their hands on, and they fortified their farms as best as they could. Some of the farmers dismissed their Kikuyu staff because nobody could tell Mau Mau sympathizers from loyal servants.
Only a week before the brutal murders in Kinangop, Governor-General Sir Evelyn Baring had sanctioned the death penalty for anyone caught administering the Mau Mau oath. (The oath was often forced upon Kikuyu tribesmen at the point of a knife, and they were threatened with death if they failed to kill a European farmer when ordered.) Now, in the first few months of 1953, the authorities mounted a new offensive against Mau Mau, killing hundreds of suspects and arresting thousands more on suspicion of being members of the insurgency. At the height of the crisis more than 70,000 suspected Mau Mau supporters were held in British detention camps, and throughout the eight years of conflict at least 150,000 Africans spent some time in detention, including Hussein Onyango and his son Barack senior. (In her controversial book on the Mau Mau, historian Caroline Elkins claims the number of Africans detained was much greater than the official British figures, anywhere between 160,000 and 320,000.)14
On March 26, 1953, the Mau Mau demonstrated that they could organize a large-scale attack with impunity. In response to the declaration of emergency and the mass roundup of KAU officials and Mau Mau suspects, the insurgents sought revenge—not on the whites but on fellow Kikuyus. That evening, a patrol in the town of Lari was called to investigate a body. They found nailed to a tree the mutilated remains of a local man known to be loyal to the British. It was a trap; his body had obviously been left there so that its inevitable discovery would lure the Home Guard away from the town. When they returned, they found that nearly a thousand Mau Mau fighters had attacked the settlement.
The Mau Mau assault on Lari was carefully planned, with the insurgents organized into four or five gangs numbering more than a hundred men each. The gangs had systematically moved through the unprotected homesteads of Lari, killing and mutilating as they went. They tied ropes around the huts to prevent the occupants from opening their doors, then set fire to the thatched roofs. As the occupants struggled to escape through the windows, they were butchered from outside. The Home Guard patrol reached Lari at 10:00 p.m., just as the attackers had finished their gruesome work; more than 120 people, mostly women and children, were killed or seriously injured. No other attack by the Mau Mau during the emergency had the same terrifying impact on public opinion.
At first the killings were thought to be random, but as the true horror of the night began to unfold, the real target of the raid became clear. The heads of those households that were attacked were loyal to the British—members of the Home Guard, local chiefs, councilors, and outspoken critics of the Mau Mau
. The following night a police outpost near Naivasha in the Rift Valley was also attacked; three black policemen were killed, and the Mau Mau rebels released 173 suspects being held by the police. They also captured fifty rifles and twenty-five machine guns, together with a large quantity of ammunition. The attacks changed the way Africans viewed the conflict, and the ordinary Kikuyu began to realize that they were now embroiled in a civil war as the Mau Mau inflicted a reign of terror on their own people.
As with the murder of Mutuaro Onsoti, the foreman from Kisii, these murders of other Africans were often particularly brutal, and intended to terrorize the population. One district officer reported: “There was one murder of an old man at Ruathia; he was chopped in two halves because he has given evidence against the Mau Mau in court … and down by the river below Gituge we found the corpse of an African Court Process Server who had likewise been strangled for informing against the Mau Mau.”15 Many Christian Kikuyu refused to take the Mau Mau oath because they believed that taking the blood of a goat was blasphemous; this left them vulnerable to attack. One Mau Mau fighter recalled, “We generally left the Christians alone. But if they informed on us, we would kill them and sometimes cut out their tongue. We had no choice.”16
More than eighteen hundred Kenyan civilians are known to have been murdered by the Mau Mau during the emergency; hundreds more disappeared and their bodies were never found.17
The British authorities were also guilty of carnage, especially during the “screening” process that was designed to isolate the hard-core Mau Mau supporters from innocent Kikuyus rounded up in error. The interrogation process was designed to terrorize the Mau Mau supporters, first by breaking the spirit of the detainees, and then by making them confess. Onyango had endured a similar procedure when he was arrested in 1949, but the techniques now used by some of the colonial authorities were much more brutal. In her book on the insurrection, historian Caroline Elkins assembled damning evidence of extensive human rights abuses:
Teams made up of settlers, British district officers, members of the Kenya police force, African loyalists, and even soldiers from the British military forces demanded confessions and intelligence, and used torture to get them … electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence.18
At least one detainee had his testicles cut off and was then made to eat them. “Things got a little out of hand,” one witness told Elkins when referring to another incident. “By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.” Another British officer described, with remarkable openness, his exasperation with an uncooperative suspect during an interrogation:
They wouldn’t say a thing, of course, and one of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept right on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He went down in a heap but when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped, I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was, “Bury them and see the wall is cleared up.”19
In the early hours of the morning of October 21, 1956, four years to the day after Kenya entered a state of emergency, a tribal policeman shot and captured the insurgent leader Dedan Kimathi as he tried to break out of his forest hideout near the town of Nyeri—a Mau Mau hotspot. Kimathi’s capture and subsequent execution by hanging marked the end of the forest war against the Mau Mau.
The official number of casualties among the European settlers during Mau Mau was 32 dead and 26 wounded, and British records claim that 11,503 Kenyans were killed. David Anderson maintains the real figure was nearer 20,000, and Caroline Elkins has controversially estimated that at least 70,000 Kikuyu died, possibly hundreds of thousands.* The demographer John Blacker has recently estimated the total number of African deaths to be about 50,000, half of whom were children under the age of ten.20 The real figure will never be known with any certainty, but it must surely run into tens of thousands of Kenyans—most of them innocent civilians.
There is little doubt that the very worst of the atrocities committed by the British and white Kenyans were limited to a small number of people, as indeed was the case within the Kikuyu population. For the most part, the white community struggled to maintain law and order during a very difficult, violent, and uncertain period in Kenya’s history. Nevertheless, many people in a position of power were guilty of overlooking the many acts of violence by members of the white community against black Kenyans during the Mau Mau rebellion, making the decade one of the most shameful and inglorious episodes in British colonial history.
*Caroline Elkins’ highest figures have been challenged on the grounds of unsound statistics.
Barack Obama at his family’s home in the Kenyan homestead of Alego, with his grandmother, Sarah; sister, Auma; and stepmother, Kezia.
© INS News Agency Ltd/Rex Features
Dudi, home of William Onyango and his family, lies a few miles from the Kenya-Uganda border. In the background is the densely wooded ridge of Got Ramogi, the sixteenth-century hill fortress of the great Luo leader Ramogi Ajwang’ and a sacred site for Luo people.
© Peter Firstbrook
A Luo man heavily adorned with a necklace of cowrie shells (gaagi) and other ornaments; he is described as Ukeri, a professional buffoon from the Ugenya clan in Nyanza, c. 1902.
© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford PRM 1998.209.43.1
A portrait of a Luo father and son from 1902; they are wearing large metal arm and leg rings (minyonge) as well as elaborate necklaces of cowrie shells.
© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford PRM 1998.206.4.4
Henry Morton Stanley with his trusted African gun bearer and servant, Kalulu, a Swahili word for an antelope. Kalulu was originally a young slave who was given to Stanley by an Arab merchant during his first visit to Africa.
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
An African soldier from the King’s African Rifles. During the first twelve months of World War I, 4,572 Africans were recruited into the KAR from central Nyanza alone.
© from the Winterton Collection of East African photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University
This photo of Barack Obama senior with his ten-year-old son was probably taken at Honolulu airport in December 1971.
© Obama for America/Handout/Reuters/Corbis
Hawa Auma is aunt to President Obama and his closest living relative; on a good day, she can earn $2 selling charcoal at the roadside in Oyugis.
© Peter Firstbrook
Sarah Obama is Hussein Onyango’s fifth wife and step-grandmother to President Obama; she raised the president’s father from a young age.
© David Firstbrook
This portrait of Barack Obama senior hangs in Sarah Obama’s family house in K’ogelo.
© INS News Agency Ltd./Rex USA
Habiba Akumu, paternal grandmother to President Obama, grieving by the coffin of her son, Barack Obama senior, K’ogelo, November 1982.
© Hawa Auma
The graves of Hussein Onyango (above) and Barack Obama senior in Sarah Obama’s compound in K’ogelo.
© Peter Firstbrook
Many residents of Kisum
u, in the heartland of the Luo tribe, celebrated the election of Obama in November 2008.
© epa/Corbis
The forty-fourth President of the United States takes the oath of office from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on January 20, 2009. Michelle Obama holds the Bible used by President Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration in 1861.
© Brooks Kraft/Corbis
8
MR. “DOUBLE-DOUBLE”
KAPOD IN EPI TO KIK IYANY NYANG’
Don’t abuse the crocodile when you’re still in the water
The world changed in 1953.
On January 7, President Harry S. Truman ushered in the New Year by announcing that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office as president later that month, he kept up the pressure on the Soviet Union by making nuclear weapons central to his foreign policy.1 In June, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility, having been found guilty of spying for the USSR. The Cold War was about to get a lot cooler.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin collapsed and died from a hemorrhagic stroke, and he was replaced as first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party by Nikita Khrushchev. On August 8 Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov announced that the USSR had also developed an H-bomb, and four days later they carried out their first test. Code-named RDS-6, it was thirty times more powerful than the crude atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima.
In the United Kingdom on June 2, Elizabeth walked up the aisle of Westminster Cathedral a princess and walked out a queen. Britain was, at last, emerging from the penury of the Second World War: a British-led climbing team had reached the summit of Everest, the country was experiencing full employment, and for the first time its citizens enjoyed the benefits of the newly created National Health Service. But the country would never regain its prewar global status, and over the next two decades the United Kingdom had to come to terms with its lost empire as its colonies moved one by one toward independence. Kenya was particularly turbulent by mid-1953, as the government there tried to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion. The rift between the white colonial community in Kenya and the Home Office in London continued to widen, and the growing nationalist movement would inexorably lead to Kenyan independence within a decade.
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