Imperial Reckoning Read online

  TO BRENT

  Illustration Credits

  © Punch Ltd.

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 240

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Kenya National Archives

  © Bettman / CORBIS

  © Topham / The Image Works

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Transafrica Press

  Kenya National Archives

  © Topham / The Image Works

  Transafrica Press

  Transafrica Press

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Kenya National Archives

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Imperial War Museum, negative number MAU 775

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Popperfoto / Retrofile.com

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Transafrica Press

  Kenya National Archives

  Kenya National Archives

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Guardian News Services

  Peace News

  Estate of Alastair Matheson

  Personal collection of Caroline Elkins

  Contents

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  PREFACE

  ONE: PAX BRITANNICA

  TWO: BRITAIN’S ASSAULT ON MAU MAU

  THREE: SCREENING

  FOUR: REHABILITATION

  FIVE: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN’S GULAG

  SIX: THE WORLD BEHIND THE WIRE

  SEVEN: THE HARD CORE

  EIGHT: DOMESTIC TERROR

  NINE: OUTRAGE, SUPPRESSION, AND SILENCE

  TEN: DETENTION EXPOSED

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX: THE OPERATING PIPELINE CIRCA JANUARY 1956

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTE ON METHODS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Preface

  LOOKING BACK TO THE START OF MY RESEARCH IN THE SUMMER OF 1995, I had no idea that nearly ten years later I would write a book about wide-scale destruction in colonial Kenya and Britain’s vigorous attempts to cover it up. I was a Harvard graduate student during those early days and had become fascinated with the history of the Mau Mau uprising, a movement launched by Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, who had been pushed off part of their land in the process of colonization. From the start of the war in October 1952, tales of Mau Mau savagery spread wildly among the white settlers in the colony and at home in Britain. Mau Mau was portrayed as a barbaric, anti-European, and anti-Christian sect that had reverted to tactics of primitive terror to interrupt the British civilizing mission in Kenya.

  Mau Mau seized the world’s attention in the early 1950s, not just in Britain and the Commonwealth countries but also in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet bloc. Life and other magazines presented photographic spreads with chilling pictorial evidence of Mau Mau’s savagery that contrasted dramatically with images of the local British settlers. While the Mau Mau insurgents claimed they were fighting for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom, few people in the Western world took seriously the demands of these so-called savages. The Mau Mau were said to be criminals or gangsters bent on terrorizing the local European population, and certainly not freedom fighters.

  The British mounted two parallel responses to the rebellion. The first was in the remote mountain forests of Kenya, where security forces engaged in a drawn-out offensive against some twenty thousand Mau Mau guerrilla insurgents. In difficult forest terrain it took over two years and twenty thousand members of Britain’s military forces, supported by the Royal Air Force, to gain control over the Mau Mau insurgents, who were armed largely with homemade weapons and who had no military or financial support from outside Kenya.

  The second and lengthier campaign was directed against a much larger civilian enemy. The British and their African loyalist supporters targeted some 1.5 million Kikuyu who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath and had pledged themselves to fight for land and freedom. The battlefield for this war was not the forests but a vast system of detention camps, where colonial officials reportedly held some eighty thousand Kikuyu insurgents.

  I couldn’t help but find these camps a compelling subject for my dissertation, particularly since no one had written a book about them. So in 1995 I embarked with great interest on the research I would need to do to capture the details of this story. I began with a preliminary sift through the official archives in London, where files stuffed with dusty, yellowed memos and reports told a seductive story about Britain’s civilizing mission during the last years of colonial rule in Kenya. According to the documents, the detention camps were not meant to punish the rebellious Kikuyu but rather to civilize them. Behind the barbed wire, colonial officials were reportedly giving the detainees civics courses and home-craft classes; they were teaching the insurgents how to be good citizens and thus become capable of running Kenya sometime in the future. The colonial government did report some one-offs, or incidents, as it called them, of brutality against the detainees but insisted they were isolated occurrences. At this early stage in my research, I had little doubt about the story slowly unfolding from Britain’s official archive. When I presented my dissertation proposal to my department in the winter of 1997, I was intending to write a history of the success of Britain’s civilizing mission in the detention camps of Kenya.

  I soon returned to Britain and then went on to Kenya for an exhaustive look into the official colonial records. It wasn’t long before I began questioning my earlier view of the camps and the British colonial government. I found that countless documents pertaining to the detention camps either were missing from Britain’s Public Record Office and the Kenya National Archives or were still classified as confidential some fifty years after the Mau Mau war. The British were meticulous record keepers in Kenya and elsewhere in their empire, making the absence of documentation on the camps all the more curious. I came to learn that the colonial government had intentionally destroyed many of these missing files in massive bonfires on the eve of its 1963 retreat from Kenya.

  To give a sense of the destructive scale, three different departments within the colonial government kept individual files for each of the reported eighty thousand detainees in the camps. This means there should have been at least 240,000 individual detainee files in the official archives. I spent days and days searching for them in the catalogs of Britain’s coldly efficient Public Record Office and in the dusty but orderly file shelves of the Kenya National Archives, but in the end I unearthed only a few hundred in Nairobi and came up empty-handed in London.

  After years of combing through what remains in the official archives, I discovered that there was a pattern to Britain’s cleansing of the records. Any ministry or department that dealt with the unsavory side of detention was pretty well emptied of its files, whereas those that ostensibly addressed detainee reform, or Britain’s civilizing mission, were left fairly intact. This was hardly accidental and explains why my first cursory reading of the official files in London generated a picture of a relatively benign system of detention in colonial Kenya.

  Even the most assiduous purges, however, often fail to clean up all the incriminating evidence. I spent years going through file upon file of official documents looking for anything that pertained to the detention camps. Some days I found nothing of use; other times I discovered nuggets of information that I added to a growing pile of evidence. It was a tedious and sometimes frustrating process as I struggled simply to identify all of the different camps—there is no single remaining document that lists them all—and to reconstruct the chain of colonial authority re
sponsible for their day-to-day operations. Many times I would grow weary of finding little of any use, then hit on a document that provided just another small piece to the puzzle. Mercifully, there were also the handful of days when I would come across entire files filled with rich evidence, files like the ones bursting with letters written by detainees during their time in the camps and addressed to high-ranking colonial officials. In them, the detainees provided vivid accounts of what their lives were like behind the wire, accounts that challenged any notion that the British detention camps were civilizing.

  Other revelations in the archives came not from any single document or file but rather from the cumulative effects of sustained research. Over time, I developed a certain sense that told me when something just didn’t seem right. For instance, given the sheer number of detainees referenced in the files, the official number of eighty thousand detained began to seem more and more suspicious to me. Upon closer scrutiny it was clear that the British had provided misleading detention numbers, giving “daily average” figures, or net rather than gross figures. In other words, the official number did not take into account all those detainees who had already entered and exited the camps. By going back through the documents and piecing together the intake and release rates, I determined that the number of Africans detained was at least two times and more likely four times the official figure, or somewhere between 160,000 and 320,000.

  Something else nagged at me about these numbers. Except for a few thousand women, the vast majority of the detention camp population was composed of men, despite several files discussing the steadfast commitment of Kikuyu women to Mau Mau and their role in sustaining the movement. I soon realized that the British did detain the women and children, though not in the official camps but rather in some eight hundred enclosed villages that were scattered throughout the Kikuyu countryside. These villages were surrounded by spiked trenches, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and were heavily patrolled by armed guards. They were detention camps in all but name. Once I added all of the Kikuyu detained in these villages to the adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually detained some 1.5 million people, or nearly the entire Kikuyu population.

  These revelations alone were not enough to reconstruct the full story of detention in British colonial Kenya. I had to build upon the fragmented remains in the official archives with written and visual materials from private collections, as well as from missionary and newspaper archives. I also had to track down as many people as I could find who had directly experienced the detention camp system. While I was working in Kenya in 1998, I bought an old Subaru station wagon and together with my research assistant, Terry Wairimu, set off into the heart of Kikuyuland in Central Province in search of survivors willing to speak with us about their experiences in the camps and barbed-wire villages.

  Meeting these elderly Kikuyu men and women was initially a challenge. Many of my introductions to them were made by their children or nieces or nephews whom I had met in Nairobi and who, at my request, agreed to take me upcountry to meet their mother or father or aunt or uncle who had lived through the camps and villages. At first the former detainees and villagers were uncertain of me and my motivations. Some thought I was a Catholic sister and wanted me to bless their livestock. Others thought I was British and refused to speak to me until I convinced them that I was an American. This was my first introduction to the intense bitterness engendered by British colonial rule in Kikuyuland, a bitterness that still seethes today.

  Together with Terry, I would live in the rural countryside among the survivors in modest mud-and-wattle homes for days or weeks. We would eat meals of ugali and sukuma wiki, help with the shambas (farms), play with grandchildren, and talk around the kitchen fire late into the night over milky, sweet tea. I quickly found that my hosts were as interested in me as I was in them, and on several occasions had to explain why I was there in the Kikuyu countryside living with them rather than at home with my husband producing children.

  In time, many of the elderly Kikuyu felt comfortable sharing their pasts with us, and I soon found that my initial difficulty in meeting and earning the trust of the survivors gave way to a new problem. After almost every interview the former detainees and villagers would ask if I would like to meet other survivors, for example, their next-door neighbor or a sibling or cousin who lived up the road or on the next ridge. Once I had been accepted within a local Kikuyu community, I was overwhelmed by the number of men and women who were willing to share with me the often painful details of their detention experiences. In total, we collected in 1998 and 1999, as well as in subsequent years, nearly six hundred hours of interviews with some three hundred ex-detainees and villagers. We also worked very hard to find Kikuyu loyalists who were willing to share their stories with us, though these interviews were significantly more difficult to conduct. In many areas former loyalists, or Kikuyu who had supported the British occupiers during the Mau Mau war, refused to acknowledge their previous status, and many who did were very reluctant to speak. Eventually a handful candidly told us about their participation on the side of the British during Mau Mau, but often on condition of anonymity.

  There were also scores of colonial officials, missionaries, and European settlers who were willing to speak with me, though many would offer their vivid accounts only if I agreed not to reveal their names. To meet with them, I would often take my old Subaru out to one of Nairobi’s posh suburbs or to the Muthaiga Club, Kenya’s most exclusive country club and a vestige of its colonial past, where we would discuss the camps over afternoon tea or a gin and tonic served to us by African houseboys or waiters. Other times I met with former British settlers on their glorious estates near Lake Naivasha in the Rift Valley. There they told me about their roles in suppressing Mau Mau and casually admitted appallingly brutal behavior.

  Almost a decade after I first started my research, my view on the detention camps, as well as on broader British colonial policy in Kenya, has changed dramatically. An integrated reading of all the sources—written, oral, and visual—yields an astonishing portrait of destruction. I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic: only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomizing its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilizing mission reinstated.

  Certainly, the Mau Mau war was a fierce struggle that left blood on the hands of all involved. But in considering the history of this war, we must also consider the issue of scope and scale. On the dreadful balance sheet of atrocities committed during Mau Mau, the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents were quite small in number when compared to those committed by the forces of British colonial rule. Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred loyalists died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead. Mau Mau has been portrayed as one of the most savage and barbaric uprisings of the twentieth century. But in this book I ask that we reconsider this accepted orthodoxy and examine the crimes perpetrated by colonial forces against Mau Mau, and the considerable measures that the British colonial government undertook to conceal them.

  • Chapter One •

  Pax Britannica

  Pax Britannica

  The expansion of Europe during the last century has been the story of crime and violence against backward peoples under the cloak of protective civilisation.

  —CAPTAIN RICHARD MEINERTZHAGEN1

  LIKE SO MANY OTHER AREAS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, EAST AFRICA was opened to colonial domination with the building of railroa
ds, the symbol of imperial achievement. By the early twentieth century thousands of miles of tracks crisscrossed Africa and Asia, opening the territories to the forces of Pax Britannica. Beginning in August 1896, the British government financed and directed the laying of 582 miles of track stretching from the coastal port of Mombasa all the way to Lake Victoria and beyond. The line cut through the lush and exotic landscape of the Indian Ocean coast, then through the arid, lion-infested plains of Tsavo, and finally upcountry toward the Eden of the interior highlands. Completed in December 1901, it was called the Uganda Railway for it linked the inland territory of Uganda to the outside world. For its time the Uganda Railway stood as a remarkable feat of modern engineering.

  But building the railway took an enormous toll in capital and manpower. Britain spent over £6.5 million on the project and imported over thirty thousand “coolies” from India, nearly a third of whom were killed or maimed by the punishing work, disease, and frequent lion attacks. Lord Salisbury’s Tory government reasoned that the railway would help to civilize East Africa by facilitating the spread of Christianity and the destruction of the slave trade. It would also make it easier to counter any possible foreign invasion into Uganda, with its precious Nile headwaters. In one of the more foolish and paranoid scenarios ever imagined, the British feared one of their rivals, particularly Germany, would seize Uganda and dam up the headwaters of the Nile, thereby desiccating Egypt. Such an ecological disaster would, in turn, force the British to withdraw their forces from the area around the Suez; without control of the prized canal, so the logic went, Britain would also lose control of India. Such a scenario would have required the invading foreign government to mobilize and import the massive equipment and manpower necessary to dam not just the White Nile but also all of the Nile’s other tributaries. Somehow the railway would provide the British with quick, military access to the interior so as to frustrate any such invasion. The British public could not understand this convoluted logic. As cost overruns and horrific stories of man-eating lions appeared in the British press, the Uganda Railway came to take on a new name: the “Lunatic Express.”2