Module: HST5359 Freedom and Nationhood: The State in Post-Colonial Africa,1956-2006
By: Frances Murray
The self-congratulatory view of the British Empire is epitomised in Conservative MP Liam Fox’s tweet ‘the United Kingdom, is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history’. This clean view of Empire is not entirely transparent. Britain was far from being the bringers of civilisation in virgin lands. The Ghost of Empire, as Kwasi Karteng has dubbed it, has met with moral obligation.[1] The re-writing of the British history of decolonisation is firmly underway with the very public reassessment of the legitimacy of British colonial action in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. The Foreign Office is being held accountable for the systematised force against, and the detainment of up to 40,000 Kikuyu, Embu, Meru and Kamba during the Mau Mau Rebellion. In what was deemed repression reminiscent of fascism, the Mau Mau Rebellion’s legacy has stirred the British Empire from its strategic amnesia almost 60 years later.[2] History is on trial.
It is perhaps unsurprising the dust is being swept off the fabricated colonial metanarrative of the Mau Mau Rebellion. Four years previously, a 2011 High Court case made the war crimes and atrocities committed by Britain during the Mau Mau Rebellion public discourse and established that UK courts had jurisdiction to hear historical claims.[3] This came after the colonial ban on Mau Mau was lifted by the Kenyan government in 2003, marking the 40th year of independence. The subsequent exploration of archival damage on the eve of decolonisation located the discord between colonial records and reality. What was found was clear-cut, a deliberate strategy of concealment by colonial authorities. Damning revelatory documents from Hanslope Park emerged, belatedly detailing the draconian anti-terrorist laws put in place that suspended the human rights of Mau Mau suspects in detention camps. Details describe the essentially restrictive police state during the 1952 and 1960 Rebellion. The suppression of the past penned by the British government was symptomatic of the fact Britain is guilty as charged to its war crimes.
The British Empire has been held on a pedestal of both benevolence and liberalism. Though the paradox exists between the legacy of the Empire and the lived experiences of the colonised. The British occupation of Kenya was contrived as an act of philanthropy, a ‘benevolent’ Christian ‘civilising’ mission in the Dark Continent. In fact, the Empire as a whole was largely reliant on this imperial ethos. In reality, the colonisation of Kenya was inherently coercive and exploitative. Authorities were totalitarian in their conduct and the climate of institutionalised subjugation of Kenyans, most predominately the Kikuyu, was deep rooted.
Every aspect of Kikuyu life was made governable and there was no alternative to complicity.
Nowhere was British self-interest and colonial hubris more apparent than the labelling of Kenya as the ‘White man’s country’ of East Africa.
However, the tide began to turn with the formation of the Mau Mau and radical desperation led to radical politics. The question remains, who were the Mau Mau and how were the seeds of the ‘Dirty War’ sown?
From the 1920’s onwards, white British settlers had undergone a regime of prejudiced practices. Settlers had appropriated 60,000 acres of rich and fertile agricultural land from the Kikuyu. The disenfranchisement of land had catastrophic effects. Economic dislocation and the exploitation of Kikuyu labourers for the sake of competitive production and capital in the ‘White Highlands’ was rife. The colonists alienated lands in which the Kikuyu had established mbari land rights, which was a massive exogenous shock. The Kikuyu were reduced to entering a pseudo-feudal relationship with white settlers as squatters. Kikuyu were consequently subject to crop restrictions as well as threats of clearance. The Kikuyu were helpless against the settler economy. Their grievances were substantiated.
Land and economic malaise did not stand as a lone factor in rising tensions. The hugely discriminatory settler community afforded no rights to Kenyans. Kenya had developed an increasingly charged racial hierarchy. Kikuyu were forced to carry kipande identity papers and banned from political participation. The social engineering campaign of the colonial authorities extended onto Christian missionaries. Christian missionaries sought to subjugate Kikuyu language and customs. Missionaries had conflicting ideas of social morality, most importantly cliterodectomy and polygamy, to their Kenyan counterparts. This was seen by some as a direct threat to Kikuyu reproduction. [4] A somewhat religious vacuum was formed which split the Kikuyu. The social fabric of the Kikuyu was destroyed.
Deep social polarisation followed. Part of the population were turned towards militancy in the bid for self-determination. Tensions came to a head in 1952 when a state of Emergency was called; what followed was brutal guerrilla and civil war.[5]
What was not so quick to be forgotten were the Mau Mau themselves. The disquieting tale of the intangible terrorist like Mau Mau prevalent across Kenya, flared contemporary anxieties as an ‘anti-white nationalist movement’. The Mau Mau were imputed as an uncivilised cult to the western imagination. With stories of blood oaths and tribal thuggery, the image of the Mau Mau became synonymous with ‘savagery’. They were painted as rebels in the face of modernity and served to rationalise the lucrative colonial system. The propagandising campaign against the Mau Mau relished in the fear the name stirred.
The question of the treatment of Mau Mau detainees has been studiously avoided. Perhaps because the Mau Mau trials unearth not individual settler excess or misguided individuals, but instead unveiled violence that was essentially a state project, condoned and choreographed by British colonial authorities. The ferocity of the state response was unparalleled. Correspondence between Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Attorney General Eric Griffiths-Jones and the Governor Eveyln Baring, indicate abuse was sanctioned at the highest levels of cabinet. One recovered file reveals Evelyn Baring stating, ‘if, therefore, we are going to sin, we must sin quietly’.[6] The abuse that occurred could not be mischaracterised, denied or ignored.
The ‘retribution’ meted out by the British colonial authorities with no legal sanction was horrific. Between 150,000 and 300,000 Africans were detained in over 50 detention camps disguised as a ‘rehabilitation pipeline’ by the British officialdom.[7] This reconstruction programme intended to transform supposed Mau Mau into progressive citizens and was cast as the rubric of reform.[8] Caroline Elkins, though extreme, states Mau Mau detainees were ‘purified through the Baptism of Western reform’.[9] Kenyans were exposed to a catalogue of tortures and abuses or coercive force according to administers designed to extract confessions. This screening process was essentially a euphemism for psychological torture, forced confessions and inculcation in the virtues of Christianity, and stopped at nothing short of death. [10] Detainees were denied prisoner of war status, stripped, beaten and defiled. Rumours of castration and perverse violations were rife whilst the prospect of release was vague. The British cultivated an environment in which torture was commonplace. However, the supposed Mau Mau detainees had not committed verified crimes and were detained in indiscriminate sweeps. Most were innocent and had no affiliation with Mau Mau. There was a suspension of the rule of law and informal sanction of force. Cruelty reigned. The detention camps were ‘our Guantánamo’.[11]
The conqueror versus conquered mentality took control and imploded in Hola in 1959. Eleven Kenyan detainees were beaten to death. The whitewashed cover story that followed epitomised the campaign in Kenya was a dirty business.[12] The virulence and enormity of the colonial campaign was unparalleled. The barbarity carried out in the detention camps and eliminationist mentality adopted, changed the landscape of Kenya as a British colony. Independence was on the cards.
Documents and records of the counter-insurgency were destroyed and ‘the time of forgetting soon set in’.[13] The archival record was sanitised and ‘retained’, documents were sent back to England denying Kenyans of access. All was carried out in the upmost secrecy. The fear of retribution and confrontation from the incoming African government was widespread. The uncovering of these documents was sacrosanct.
The 2016 High Court case establishes a profound principal- the British Empire is culpable for its war crimes. The treatment of Mau Mau should not be marginalised as an isolated or singular event but a reminder of the brutality echoed throughout the British Empire. The opaque smokescreen protecting Empire does not stand strong and the embattled past should not be kept silent. Contrition alone is not adequate for the survivors of Mau Mau and recompense is a small price to pay.
Notes: [1] Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), pp.1-11. [2] Caroline Elkins, ‘Looking beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization’, The American Historical Review, 20/3 (2015), p.855. [3] David M. Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/5 (2011), pp. 699-702. [4] David M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, (London: Phoenix, 2006), p.19. [5] Charles Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence, (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), p.45. [6] Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, p.710. [7] Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence, p.47. [8] Caroline Elkins, ‘The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 33/1 (2000), p.25. [9] Ibid., p.25. [10] Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence, p.47. [11] The Guardian, ‘Our Guantánamo’, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jan/16/historybooks.features [accessed 23 October 2016] [12] Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, pp.326-7. [13] E.S Atieno Odhiambo, John Lonsdale, Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2003), pp.3-4. Bibliography Secondary Sources Anderson. D. M, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, (London: Phoenix, 2006) Anderson. D. M, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/5 (2011) Atieno Odhiambo. E. E, Lonsdale. J, Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2003) Elkins. C, ‘Looking beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization’, The American Historical Review, 20/3 (2015) Elkins. C, ‘The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 33/1 (2000) Hornsby. C, Kenya: A History Since Independence, (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013) Kwarteng. K, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011) Websites The Guardian, ‘Our Guantánamo’, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jan/16/historybooks.features [accessed 23 October 2016]
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