HISTORIES OF THE HANGED: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire By David Anderson
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20; 352pp
ISBN 0 297 84719 8
Buy the book
BRITAIN’S GULAG: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
By Caroline Elkins
Cape, £20; 352pp
ISBN 0 224 07363 X
Buy the book
Which Crown servant, within the past 50 years, covered up his torture and murder of two suspects in his custody by forging his logbook with the connivance of his superior officer and the local police, was nonetheless convicted and sentenced to be hanged, lost his appeal but was finally pardoned under royal prerogative in conjunction with a general amnesty for similar official crimes?
The answer tells us much about the difficulty of unburdening oneself from empire, since this fortunate official, compared by the judge to “a Gestapo man”, was a headman in the Nyeri district of Kikuyuland, Kenya, one Muriu Wamai. Convicted by Judge Cram in December 1954, he was pardoned by Sir Evelyn Baring, the colony’s governor, not many months later.
Wamai’s “crime of punishment” was one among the many horrors and tragedies of late-colonial warfare investigated in two new histories of Kenya’s Mau Mau emergency. The British defined Mau Mau as “civil disturbance”. Had the insurgency been recognised as war or rebellion, international conventions on the treatment of its captives would have inhibited the retribution thought appropriate to black subjects who, under the spell of their horrid oaths, had seemingly lost their minds and shed the veneer of a too-hastily acquired Western civilisation. The emergency, approved by Churchill’s Cabinet in October 1952, was lifted only in January 1960, as white and Asian settler leaders met African nationalists at the first of the Lancaster House conferences on Kenya to hear Iain Macleod propose majority self-rule.
David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged is the first full account of the guerrilla war that determined who should inherit Britain’s most troublesome African colony. His evidence comes principally from the transcripts of the hundreds of Mau Mau trials that, in four brief years, resulted in more than one thousand executions, far more than in any other colonial conflict, even Algeria’s.
Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag draws on today’s memory as much as from yesterday’s documents. It complements Anderson’s account in focusing not on the military campaign in the forests but on the more lethal war — for so the census figures suggest — waged behind the wire of detention camps and fortified villages. This was a campaign of food denial, forced labour, sexual assault, routine beatings and capricious torture, all to extract the oath confessions that alone secured release. It was the conduct of this second front against Mau Mau that in 1959 caused the donnish Enoch Powell to join with the fiery Barbara Castle, across the Commons floor, to denounce the criminally callous official culture that led — in an atrocity not even Baring could brazen out — to the death of 11 detainees at Hola camp.
But back to headman Wamai and his Kikuyu Guard post at Ruthagathi in the southern Nyeri hills. Under frequent Mau Mau attack during his two years of KG service he was, he boasted, one of the insurgents’ prime targets. In court, he pleaded that he had killed the two men while repelling the latest assault. Under cross-examination, however, he confessed that the murders arose out of his routine interrogation, beating, and fining of fellow farmers, the local Mau Mau “passive wing ” — very likely members of clans in dispute with his own over property. Wamai’s volte-face exposed his district officer and local policeman, both of them British, to charges of perjury; each had corroborated, under oath, his initial lies.
In 1954 Kenya had a new commissioner of police, Sir Arthur Young, who was determined to root out collusion between his men and the political administration, whose officials felt bound to defend the African loyalists on whom they depended as the most effective opponents of Mau Mau. The governor’s first loyalty, too, was to his administration. Young resigned, thwarted in his desire to bring the forces of order under the law. Hawkish white settlers, whom one might have thought grateful to the plucky Kikuyu Guard, circulated Cram’s damning judgment under the title “Kenya’s Belsen?” However much black loyalists had helped to defeat Mau Mau, few settlers could admit their fitness for self-government. The Kenya emergency, then, caused by a black revolt against white-settler rule, developed into three civil wars: within African society, within the “thin white line” of colonial rule, and between white settlers and their indispensable African allies.
This complexity is what attracts historians to rebellions or revolutions. Kenya’s historians have hitherto focused on the causes of Mau Mau. Discounting British propaganda on the collective madness that supposedly seized the ungrateful native mind, scholars have analysed the growing agrarian distress and landlessness that corroded African male honour, especially among the Kikuyu people. It was because these, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, had gained most in wealth and learning from colonial rule that their juniors and tenants were, of all Kenya’s Africans, the most threatened by social exclusion. White landlords and black patrons alike had turned against them as the Second World War’s agricultural boom made the market more profitable than rent or tributary service. In Kikuyu political thinking wealth entitled one to leadership, and so Kikuyu gentry, Jomo Kenyatta among them, had taken care to lead a nationalism devoted to a social order that respected age and property. They had principled, as well as self-interested, reasons therefore for rejecting the impatience of their often landless, often youthful, followers who thereupon became Mau Mau. This bitter moral division made insurgency and loyalism between Kikuyu more lethal than African hatred of the white settlerdom that prospered on their “stolen lands”.
That was only the first of Mau Mau’s civil wars. It lies at the core of Anderson’s and Elkins’s accounts. Anderson sees rebels and loyalists as equal victims of independent Kenya’s ghastly birth pangs; Elkins disagrees. Both go further than their predecessors in investigating the other wars of freedom that were intertwined with it.
The British were every bit as divided as the Kikuyu. Whitehall put much of the blame for Mau Mau on the settlers but could not say so publicly. Baring, similarly, excused his oppressive rule, so embarrassing to the Tory Government at home, by his need to disarm settler vigilantism and silence their terrified cries for lynch law. But he put his judiciary in an impossible position, torn between their instincts for due process and their regard for clubbability within white colonial society. Judge Cram was an unusually outspoken man. Arthur Young, equally principled, kept silent.
Those most grievously hurt by judicial short-cuts were not only those insurgents charged with capital offences — of whom most were either acquitted or had sentences commuted — but also those fellow Kikuyu, often young women survivors of an insurgent outrage, who found themselves trapped by circumstance into giving evidence against them.
Many Crown witnesses met a sticky end. “Loyalism” was often rooted in desire for revenge. This intimately lethal politics was unleashed only when the British gained the upper hand in 1954, with the detention of about a third of Kikuyu adult men and the villagisation of women and children. Loyalism could now, with the state’s backing, be more systematically brutal than Mau Mau in enforcing obedience, coercing communal labour, and expropriating insurgent land. Macleod had every reason to think Britain’s good name in Africa could be restored only by letting go.
That was because Kenya’s third civil war remained unresolved. Oliver Lyttelton had made the settlers accept African and Asian ministers in the same pivotal year, 1954, in order to show Africans that constitutional moderation paid. His successor, Alan Lennox-Boyd, raised African elected representation to parity with the immigrant races. But neither whites nor Africans accepted such “multi-racialism” as a final settlement. There was no way for the British to make Kenya governable — and thus decently disposable — other than by coming to terms with the man they most hated, feared, and misunderstood: Kenyatta.
The settlers had trusted neither African nationalism nor Kikuyu loyalism to protect them. Most had departed by the time of independence in 1963. But independence allowed Kenyatta and the gentry to win their Kikuyu civil war and, with that, to rule Kenya with more legitimate authority and less arbitrary violence than almost any other African country in the first decades of independence. Anderson and Elkins see this final irony differently. Their research has cleared the way not only for other historians to explore Kenya’s wars of freedom but also, perhaps, for Kenyans to make peace with their past.
John Lonsdale is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at Cambridge University
