Empire of Violence (5) Kenya

During the Second World War many Kenyans had helped support the British war effort. When they returned home at the end of the war, there was no land available for them, because the best land had been taken by British settlers, who grew coffee to earn US dollars for the empire.

Across Britain's imperial expanse, another kind of systematic destruction was unfolding in Kenya’s one hundred detention camps. A state of emergency had been declared in October 1952, the crisis had been five years in the making (p.543).

Kenya with its European settler population and policies of land appropriation as well as harsh labour and colour bar laws, was awash in inequities. The 1.5 million Kikuyu who comprised around 20 percent of the colony's population were the hardest hit. Europeans lived on much of their appropriated land. These settlers grew coffee and tea—lucrative cash crops that only white farmers could legally produce—while the Kikuyu toiled under harsh master and servants laws, a hangover from Britain's Victorian era domestic labour laws, which criminalised labour offences.

I can remember the local newspapers being horrified by the group that were referred to as the Mau Maus, but it was really just a freedom movement seeking independence and land reform.

It was the rational response of rural people seeking to understand the enormous socioeconomic and political changes taking place around them while attempting to respond collectively to new and unjust realities. Mau Mau’s overarching objective was land and freedom...

Mau Mau antipathy targeted not only the colony’s European population but also the colonial-appointed African chiefs and their followers who became known broadly as “loyalists”. In the context of the incipient war, the government defined a “loyalist” as someone who actively fought on its side against Mau Mau and who, in turn, received a “loyalist certificate” ensuring franchise rights in local elections as well as economic privileges like trading licenses and preferred access to land. Many loyalists accumulated wealth and power at the expense of the broader Kikuyi community.

The emergency descended into another of the empire’s reprisal and counter reprisal cycles (p.548).

White supremacy had long manifested itself in Kenya through various kinds of rough settler justice, which included public floggings, beating deaths and summary executions. Most whites in Kenya placed Africans at the very bottom of humanity’s hierarchy, but the emergence inflamed the empire’s racism. Settlers and colonial administrators described Mau Mau as “vermin”, “animals” and “barbarians” (p.548).

The political power of Kenya’s twenty-nine thousand European settlers had been institutionalised for decades. The colony’s constitution was orientated around their interests, which were further ensured through their disproportionate number of seats on Kenya’s legislative council (p.549).

The all-out civilian assault began with sweeping arrests and detentions without trial combined with forced removal of Kikuyus who remained in the White Highlands. Colonial officials packed thousands into railcars and lorries and shipped them back to the reserves. In the spring of 1953, the volume of internally displaced people was staggering. In a few months, the government moved over one hundred thousand Kikuyus via transit camps. Many languished with inadequate sanitation, clean water, and rations as officials figured out how to squeeze them back into the over-crowded reserves (p.552).

White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defence of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shocks and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicle “till the scrotum burst” according to Anglican Church officials. Some used a kiboko or rhino whip, for beating; others used clubs, fists, and truncheons.

“Bucket fatigue” was a routine practice, as were various forms of human excrement torture. Mau Mau suspects and detainees were forced to clean nightsoil buckets barehanded and run for hours around a compound holding a full night soil bucket aloft, which then spilled over, encrusting the person holding it with faeces and urine (p.556).

In May 1954, Kenya was well on its way to creating the largest archipelago of detention and prison camps in the history of Britain’s empire.

Some never made it to prison. Emergency courts sent 1090 Africans to the gallows, surpassing the number of state executions for any other single conflict in the empires history.

All male detainees officially entered the Pipeline through enormous holding camps. The camp populations quickly exceeded their combined capacity of twenty thousand. White officers shouted “Beat them” to camp guards, who liberally helped themselves to the detainees’ possessions. They forced each detainee to strip down and march through a cattle dip of disinfectant, where several drowned. To those who survived, colonial officials issued diaphanous schoolboy uniforms (p.559).

In June 1954, with the Pipeline pushed beyond capacity, the War council decided to introduce a resettlement policy. The Kikuyu population was subject to collective punishments and fines as well as forced labour and other ongoing detention camp policies and practices. The Kenya government called it villagisation. Its officials forced the Kikuyu, who traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, into 804 villages that consisted of 230,000 huts.

Villagisation took less than eighteen months. During that time, Kenyan officials forcibly relocated 1,040,899 Kikuyus within the reserves and corralled an unrecorded number of squatters into private detention centres, located on Europeans estates, where Kenya’s settlers and security forces surveilled, punished and exacted labour from Kikuyu squatters using methods similar to those being deployed in the new Kikuyu reservation villages. Whereas the labour lines war less tightly controlled, barbed wire, spiked trenches , and twenty-four-hour guards surrounded the “emergency villages” that saw little formal rehabilitation on offer (p.562).

The villages became detention camps in all but name. When their numbers were combined with the estimated 140,000 to 230,000 detainees who passed through Pipeline, the British government had managed by the end of 1955 to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population—a feat that was unprecedented in the empire save for the Chinese population in Malaya.

Life in the Kikuyu reserves became unbearable. One person remembered, “we had not been given any warning beforehand that our houses were going to be burned. No one in the whole ridge knew that we were to move. The police just came one day and drove everyone out of their homes, while the home guards burned the houses right behind us... Everything, even our clothes were burned down... During the move I got separated from my children, and I could not trace them. During the whole night I could hear a lot of shooting and screaming. I cried the whole night, knowing that my children were gone (p.564).