by Tim Newark
‘The political tangle here is baffling,’ he wrote candidly. ‘Europeans with the low whisky prices and high altitude pressures are both irresponsible and hysterical. This is the worst season of the year and even in normal times tempers are at their most brittle in March.’
The Mau Mau uprising was the most notorious of all African anti-colonial movements of this period. As with the Malayan Emergency, it was the colonial police who were pitched into the brutal conflict, far outnumbering the soldiers involved and taking many of the casualties, but it was also the police who came up with the most ingenious ways of dealing with the terrorist groups.
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15
THE BLACKED-UP INSPECTOR DRUMMOND
AS IN MALAYA AND PALESTINE, anti-colonial movements in Africa were viewed initially as matters of law and order. Colonial police forces were tasked with dealing with these ‘dirty’ campaigns and their adversaries were termed ‘terrorists’ or more simply ‘gangsters’. The same was true in Kenya with the Mau Mau uprising, beginning in 1952. While Kikuyu resentment of colonial rule had been simmering for some time, many of the Kikuyu people were not interested in joining a rebellion. So, in an attempt to terrorise them into joining their cause, the Mau Mau carried out assaults on their own people.
On the outskirts of Nairobi, the huts of Kikuyu who refused to take the Mau Mau oath were set on fire. This set the pattern for a series of horrendous atrocities perpetrated on Africans by the Mau Mau, culminating in the spearing to death of a senior tribal chief who defied their demands.
Like Malaya, a state of emergency was declared and Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police of the City of London, and police troubleshooter in Malaya, was later flown in to lend his organisational skills to the campaign.
In October 1952, the Kenyan police launched a major operation to arrest the ringleaders of the rebellion. This provoked a series of gruesome murders of colonial families. The Mau Mau spared neither women and children nor old people in their attacks on whites and blacks, often hideously torturing them beforehand. The Kenyan police responded with similar brutality – mutilating and executing suspects.
One night in March 1953, at Lari in the Kenyan Highlands, Mau Mau rebels crept up on a village of Kikuyu while they were sleeping, drenched their thatched huts in petrol and set them on fire. Survivors described what happened next to government investigators:
Escape was impossible to most, for the doors had been securely fastened outside by the fanatical Mau Mau attackers. Men, women and children, forcing their way out of the windows, were caught and butchered. Some perished terribly in the flames; others were chopped and mutilated by the knives of their enemies – their own fellow tribesmen. Dawn revealed the macabre scene left behind by the bestial wave of Mau Mau; the mangled corpses, human remains literally chopped in pieces, all mingled with the smoking ashes of the burnt homesteads.
As 120 Kikuyu lay dead or dying, the survivors told the police of the horrible assault – ‘children being cut up with knives in the sight of their mothers; of others cut down as they tried to run and hide in tall maize’. In the face of this butchery, the British reacted with their own ruthlessness, as one police officer recalled after arresting three Mau Mau:
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’.
The Mau Mau killed many more Kikuyu than they did colonial settlers – at least 1,800 to 232 police, soldiers and colonists. As a result, there were many African recruits ready to join the Kenyan police force. One of the most bizarre stories of the uprising involved white police joining with Kikuyu units to form pretend Mau Mau gangs – or pseudoterrorists, as they became known – to infiltrate the rebel groups. They were bizarre because the white police chose to disguise themselves as black Africans. David Drummond was a key figure in this unusual police operation.
Drummond’s Scottish father owned a dairy farm just east of Nairobi, bought with money earned while working for the Kenyan railroad. Over six feet tall and a keen sportsman, David was born in Nairobi and was well versed in the African landscape, speaking Swahili fluently. An expert hunter, he was a fine shot and competed on a national level.
At the age of 20, he joined the Kenyan police force – just one month after the declaration of the state of emergency. Within a few weeks, Drummond had witnessed his first Mau Mau murder: the killing of two white farmers.
It was dark when he entered their house and, not wanting to expose himself to danger, he crawled in on his hands and knees. As he did so, he touched a severed hand. It had been cut from one of the farmers, who had tried to defend himself against a rain of blows from panga knives delivered by a gang of Mau Mau. When the lights went on in the farmhouse, he saw the full horror of their mutilated bodies.
‘I went outside and was violently sick,’ he recalled. ‘It was not so much the fact that two Europeans had been murdered, as the way in which it had been done. I had grown up with Africans. The thought that they could do this to people like me was like a kick in the solar plexus.’
A few weeks later, the news got worse; a young couple were murdered alongside their six-year-old boy, Michael Ruck, who was hacked to pieces. Photographs of his blood-spattered bedroom, with teddy bears and a train set covered in gore, appeared in the national newspapers, enraging white opinion even further.
Drummond went to work in a detention camp at Ol Kalou, screening the local Kikuyu. He got to learn that the main weapon deployed by the Mau Mau was their oath, forced on the local inhabitants, pledging them solemnly to attack Europeans. Fear of the magic surrounding the oaths and the reprisals that would follow if they broke them served as a potent recruiting device. Stories of depraved initiation rites, including the drinking of urine and blood, and sex with animals and children, may well have been the result of interrogations in which suspects told the police what they thought they wanted to hear, but it certainly succeeded in creating a climate of dread and extreme violence.
As part of his intelligence gathering, Drummond recruited informers from among the Kikuyu, who directed him towards Mau Mau terrorists and their suppliers, including gunrunners. One of his best tip-offs concerned General Harun Njeroge, a leader of what were termed ‘forest gangsters’, based around Molo in western Kenya. The 26-yearold Harun ruled his gang harshly, lashing them for insubordination. He kept his gang small – just 12-strong – strangling any members he considered ‘deadwood’ or disloyal. Mau Mau insiders passed on to Drummond tantalising information about Harun, but the rebel chief kept one step ahead – until the policeman’s fiancée, Mary, noticed some smoke rising from a prohibited area in the Mutamayo forest. Drummond sent Mary to stay with friends and prepared for a dawn raid.
Undermanned, with just three other colleagues to help him, Drummond decided to go ahead with the attack. Armed with an Italian 9 mm Beretta sub-machine gun – a trophy from the Abyssinian War – he set off in the dark before dawn with two police reservists and a Mau Mau informer, armed with Sten guns. Crawling towards the Mau Mau camp, they heard the characteristic sound of Harun beating one of his guards for leaving his post. When the sentry reappeared, Drummond opened fire and the whole camp erupted, bullets slashing through the undergrowth around the police.
‘It was then I heard something falling heavily in the bushes above me,’ remembered Drummond. ‘I looked up to see a grenade caught in a tangle of brambles eight or nine feet just above my head. A second later it went off, blowing the thickets to bits and leaving a throbbing numbness in my ears.’
Miraculously unh
armed by the explosion, Drummond ran forward, only to dodge another grenade. Not fully realising the small force pitted against them, the Mau Mau gang bolted into the bush and escaped. One of them had been killed and two were wounded. Drummond later got the two wounded men to disavow the Mau Mau and give him information about Harun. Drummond was determined to hunt him down and, a few days later, a Kikuyu informer told him he was staying on the outskirts of Nakura, a short distance away.
Drummond burst into a hut on the pretext of a routine search and cornered Harun. Relieving him of his gun, the policeman turned him round to search him further. As he did so, the Mau Mau leader slammed his fist into the side of Drummond’s face, knocking him down, and ran out. Drummond fired after him, but Harun dashed into the bush and escaped. Now it was personal – and evidence of just how personal the vendetta had become emerged weeks later.
Drummond married Mary and as he carried her over the threshold into their cottage, he noticed a blue envelope on the floor addressed simply to ‘Drum’. Ripping it open, he read the message, written in Swahili: ‘You have married a nice white girl but you will not enjoy her for very long. I am going to castrate you. It is I, Harun.’
The cottage was isolated in the Kenyan countryside, half a mile from the main road.
Two days later came a second message: ‘I wish to tell that when I castrate you I will hang it on a thorn tree for the vultures to take away.’
To protect themselves, Drummond hired a night watchman from a tribe that hated the Kikuyu. One night, the African knocked on his door and told the policeman that he could see men creeping forward among the cows in a nearby field. Drummond grabbed his Beretta and peered into the moonlit pasture, seeing the shadows of the men. To stop them getting close enough to torch his cottage, he fired a long burst into the darkness. Blinded by the flash from his own gun, Drummond waited for what must have been agonising minutes until he heard the sound of his neighbouring farmer’s car arriving. The Mau Mau had fled – and a month later Drummond and his wife moved out of the cottage.
Several more letters followed, in which Harun revealed how surprisingly well informed he was about Drummond’s movements. The policeman came to the awful realisation that the rebel leader was getting his knowledge from his own informers – one of them was acting as a double agent. When he investigated further, he discovered that the Kikuyu shopkeeper and Mau Mau party secretary was using his position to run a protection racket, extorting money from fellow businessmen in his township.
In order to flush out Harun and banish the rumours that he was untouchable, Drummond decided to take an African approach to his arch-enemy and challenge him to single combat. He posted the messages in cleft-sticks in the forest near Kikuyu camps used by rebels, inviting the Mau Mau chief to a duel. The challenge remained unanswered.
Drummond pursued Harun through the Kenyan landscape, at one point getting within range of him. He fired one shot that blew up dust, just about level with Harun’s head. The Mau Mau leader spun round, threw back an insult and sprinted away.
After months of this, Drummond woke up one morning with a rash covering his entire body. He was diagnosed with stress and sent to hospital for two weeks to recover.
It appeared that Harun had finally disappeared from Drummond’s patch and, in the lull, the policeman wondered how best he could get close to the Mau Mau gangs in his district. After talking with a secondgeneration farmer and police reservist called Neville Cooper, the men had the idea of creating their own fake Mau Mau gang. Drummond thought this could be used in reconnaissance, but Cooper went further, saying that the gang should actually infiltrate the Mau Mau and – most remarkable of all – be led by Drummond himself, with a ‘blacked-out’ face.
Drummond thought the idea was preposterous – simply ‘blacking up’ wouldn’t convince anyone. But Cooper had experience of similar units within the Kenya Regiment, a white settlers’ volunteer corps who had captured some hardcore Mau Mau gangsters. Some of these Kikuyu had been turned, and once they had got over the fear of defying their tribal oaths, they had realised that they were being exploited by the terrorists and had come to loathe them as much as the colonialists. It was these men who would be key to the whole operation; they would fight alongside the disguised white men, who would drop into the background as the vengeful Kikuyu took the lead during the missions. For Drummond’s unit, Cooper put the word out and several former Kikuyu rebels were recommended.
‘The pseudo-gang were an unruly lot,’ said Drummond. ‘You went down a little path to their shamba, where a group of huts nestled behind a path of maize, and it was always quite startling to come upon a group of bloodthirsty-looking outlaws, with long matted hair and beards that had taken months to grow, dressed in an assortment of skin jackets, caps and raincoats, and armed to the teeth.’
The five ex-Mau Mau, led by a veteran field commander called Thiga, were given training in weapons handling and unarmed combat, while they taught the Europeans about jungle craft. Then came the ticklish question of disguising the white men. Drummond knew he could never replicate the physical features of an African, but if he could just darken himself to pass in a crowd then that would do the job. The usual methods of using polish, stage make-up or burnt cork didn’t work because they looked too glossy, came off on clothes and made the whites of the eyes stand out. Having spoken to a chemist, Drummond decided to use a solution of potassium permanganate to tint the skin all over – so even if they had to strip off their clothes, they would be covered. A weaker solution was used as an eye-wash, to colour the whites of the eyes a browny-yellow.
But this was only the beginning. Drummond had spent years noting the everyday habits of the Kikuyu – how they ate their food, blew their noses, smoked a cigarette. He made a wig for himself out of the hair of a dead terrorist, although frequently it was too hot to wear it on patrol and he just used a hat. Clothes worn by rebels were appropriated, as they were impregnated with the smell of months living in the bush. As for his European features, Drummond claimed that some Kikuyu had sharper Caucasian looks. The white men roughened their hands to the texture of a labourer for the moment when the Mau Mau met in a forest and shook hands.
Even so, it seemed a ludicrous notion that Drummond and Jim McNab, a fellow British undercover policeman, could pass close examination by a suspicious rebel commander.
Their most important asset was a Kikuyu ‘cover man’, who stuck close to them and could think quickly when they came under attention. Then there was Thiga, who had the authority to deal with rival gang chiefs. He would be their leader in the field.
On one of their first operations, the pseudo-gang were sitting around a campfire one night with real Mau Mau gang members. During the conversation, Drummond attracted the interest of a teenage girl follower of the Mau Mau, one of many who liked to serve the rebels.
‘After a while she came over and sat close to me, and there was no doubt at all about what she was after,’ recalled Drummond. ‘I was scared out of my wits. That night I wasn’t blacked out further than my face and hands. The next thing I knew she had put a hand on my arm and was cuddling closer. Then she came straight to the point.’
When Drummond refused her sexual advances, the girl got furious and questioned his manhood. At that moment, his ‘cover man’ came to his rescue.
‘He is a man,’ he intervened, ‘but unfortunately he has VD.’
The girl recoiled and Drummond was saved.
The problem of these fake units being mistaken by white security forces was also a primary concern, bearing in mind the ruthless attitude of many colonial police who were happy to shoot first. This potential hazard was covered by rules of engagement issued by the Kenya Police headquarters:
No pseudo-gang operation should be carried out during the hours of daylight in settled areas or the Reserves if the object could equally well be achieved by an operation carried out at night …
In the event of a pseudo-gang being encountered and being unable to retire, the patrol leader
will endeavour to establish his identity by word of mouth or removal of his disguise.
The unconventional nature of this type of police action was summed up in a secret report on the successes and failures of several pseudo-gangs: ‘We now have six private armies, each led by a man with highly developed individualistic tendencies.’ That certainly applied to Drummond. Then came the warning – these special forces had a ‘tendency to succumb to the temptation to “bump off ” enemy terrorists encountered rather than to wait patiently for an opportunity to achieve a major success’.
The first major target for Drummond’s pseudo-gang was General Jimmy, commander of more than a hundred rebels on Mount Londiani, a forest region in the Rift Valley. Slowly, they built up a picture of the general’s movements. As anticipated by the Kenya Police instructions, the biggest danger for them came from British tracker-combat teams who used dogs to hunt down the terrorists and had not been informed of the undercover team.
After long treks into the forest, they met a Mau Mau foraging party, looking for food to take back to the general’s mountain hideout. They tagged along, but as they pressed into the jungle, it rained heavily, threatening to wash away Drummond and McNab’s make-up.
At one point, Thiga suggested joining the enemy gang, but as part of this process they would take an oath that involved roping themselves together, and General Jimmy’s men refused to be tied. They then spoke about their allegiances to senior Mau Mau leaders and it was at this point that one of the pseudo-gang mentioned the wrong name. Immediately, the foragers bolted into the jungle, fearing they had been trapped by a rival faction. It was a frustrating end to weeks of patient work.