Titlen er helt forkert. Bogen handler ikke om de hængtes historier. Hverken om deres fortællinger eller om de enkelte personers historie. Undertitlen giver derimod et præcist billede af indholdet. Og den beskrivelse Anderson giver af kolonimagtens sidste krampetrækninger er uskøn og virker realistisk.
Alternativ bogtitel:
Den bedrøvelige historie om det engelske retsvæsen i Kenya i de tidlige 1950ere.
Han har studeret arkiverne i Nairobi (specielt retsarkiverne). Så der er ingen grund til ikke at stole på bogens beskrivelse og statistik.
Der er kort over: Hele Kenya, Kikuyuland, c.1952; Kiambu District, showing Lari and Tigoni, c,1952; Tigoni Township Reserve, c.1929, showing Kikuyu githakas; Nairobi's Eastlands in the 1920s; Nairobi and its environs, c.1954; The forest camps of the Aberdares (from Barnett & Njama).
Der er tabeller med: Kenya's population by race, selected years 1905-63; Nyeri Christinas Eve attacks, December 1952: the convictions; Murders of European settlers: the accused and their sentences; The Lari hanged; African population in Nairobi, by origin; Closure of shops in Pumwani, 1954; Convictions for Mau Mau offences, October 1952 to March 1958; Capital punishment convictions in Kenya, October 1952 to October 1959; Monthly returns of Special Emergency Assize Courts, March 1954 to December 1956; Selected collective punishments in Kirinyaga, 1952-6; Comparative prison populations, East and Central Africa, 1938; Daily average number of Mau Mau detainees and convicts, December 1954 to August 1959.
Andersons beskrivelse er klar. Hovedstridspunktet er settlernes tyveri af kikuyuernes jord. Derfor er striden også værst i Det hvide Højland (hvor den gode jord og det gode klima er). (p. 10). Først får kikuyuerne lov til at blive i farmenes marginalområder - mod at dyrke settlerens jord.
I 1932 besøgte The Kenya Land Commission kolonien for at samle information, efter at Chief Koinange i 1931 havde ledet en protestdelegation til London. Som man kunne vente blev kikuyuerne, der havde troet på "lov og ret", "den private ejendomsret" (linkene går til senere hændelser) og lignende fine principper, skuffede. (p. 21 - 3). (At lov og ret spiller en rolle også for Mau Mau, ses af en udtalelse af General China. General China har sit eget kapitel 6). Indtil 2. Verdenskrig var dyrkningen afhængig af den lokale arbejdskraft. (Og det er svært at se forskellene mellem vilkårene her - med mere end 180-dages pligtarbejde for den hvide settler - og danske fæstebønders vilkår i 1700-tallet). Men krigens gode priser, gjorde det muligt for settlerne at udvikle deres jord og at mekanisere, så de kunne undvære meget af den afrikanske arbejdskraft. De sædvanlige kneb, bedst kendt fra USAs indianerkrige brugtes også her. (Olenguruone). Helt galt går det, da man begynder at fordrive kikuyuerne ud til reservaterne i de tidlige 1950ere (p. 71). Bl.a. fordi kikuyusamfundet er så civiliseret, at "ældsten" har en pligt til at sørge for dem uden jord. Det system trues jo i sin grund, når for mange fordrives fra deres jord på en gang.
Det mærkelige er, at hvis man kan tro på denne del af Andersons beskrivelse, var Kenya-kolonien aldrig rentabel.
En anden vigtig anstødssten for kikuyuerne var skoler uafhængige af kirkerne. Kolonimagten opfattede disse - formentlig med rette - som kimen til uafhængighedsbevægelsen. I begyndelsen af 1953 lukkede man derfor 34 uafhængige skoler (p. 71).(Kirkerne, inkl. deres kikuyu-ledere, havde hele tiden modarbejdet dem, p. 72).
Englænderne har altid været gode til at "dele og herske". Derfor er der nogen Kikuyu-høvdinge, som samarbejder med englænderne. Og Davidson viser klart, at netop samarbejdsfolkene er Mau Maus hovedmålgruppe. Der dræbes meget få hvide civile (32 i alt) ! Når man går efter samarbejdsfolk er der altid et vist mål af det, der i moderne krigsførelse kaldes "collateral damage", uskyldige, eller næsten uskyldige, der bare ryger med. I Mau Maus tilfælde kunne det være svært at se graden af samarbejde, og især graden af frivillighed heri, hos de regeringsansatte. (Som det i Danmarks frihedskamp gjaldt for Tyskerpiger o.l. - et begreb, der altid får mig til at tænke på afklippet hår i Smedegade i Horsens og på en kær kollega og hendes rare tyske mand.)
Bekæmpelsen af Mau Mau koncentreres tilsvarende omkring anvendelsen af loyale kikuyuer, som politi- og militærforstærkning (under hvide officerer). 1090 hænges, over 12000 Mau Mau folk dræbes i kamp. Og over 150.000 passerer koncentrationslejrene. (Ud af under 8 millioner afrikanere (1.25 millioner Kikuyu) i Kenya (Tabel 1.i)). Bemærk i øvrigt Andersons betegnelse for KZ-lejrene. Som sædvanlig under kapitalismen, kan man bruges mange ressourcer på at bekæmpe oprør, men ikke på at holde ro og orden i fattigkvartererne, og samarbejdsfolkene drages sjældent til ansvar. Lov og ret (en væsentlig del af "vore værdier") er stort set fraværende, som i de tilsvarende amerikansk besatte kolonier i dag. Og som i Iraq idag trivedes korruption, bestikkelse, overfakturering (p. 227), (eksempler på europæiske firmaers deltagelse p. 228). Nogen Mau Mau havde fået engelsk militær uddannelse (Waruhiu Itote = General China) p. 230.
Det er vel denne strid mellem samarbejdsfolk (HIPO, Scavenius, Alsing Andersen, de store ingeniørfirmaer er danske eksempler på den slags) og modstandsbevægelsen, som stadig giver strid i Kenya (netop strid mellem kikuyu'er internt) her i 2008. Forskellen til Danmarks frihedskamp ligger i, at i Kenya fik samarbejdsfolkene ofte lov til at tage Mau Mau'ernes jord. Og at jorden udover sin direkte økonomiske betydning vistnok også har en mere symbolsk betydning (men når det kommer til stykket er en dansk bonde, hvis familie har ejet jorden gennem generationer, jo også knyttet til sin jord i mere end økonomisk forstand). Wakahangares forræderi i Lari kan formentlig stadig ligge bag stridigheder i området. Jeg ville ihvertfald end ikke idag handle med en Schalburg ! Og jeg har ikke noget personligt mellemværende med familien, intet jordtyveri at mindes. Stikkerdrab spillede også en væsentlig rolle. Med hver fjerde Kikuyu-mand i KZlejr var og er der jo noget at hævne.
Det er klart, at de hvide settleres måde at optræde på bidrog til at skærpe striden. Der er 2 ting, der ser ud til at være karakteristiske for de angelsaksiske, hvide kolonialisters optræden overalt i verden, hvor de kom, inklusive i Iraq og Afghanistan i dag. (Om det så er frakendelsen af modstanderens rettigheder i henhold til internationale konventioner, sås den i Kenya, som den ses i USAs "krig mod terror" i dag). Selv Guantanamo, ser ud til at have sin forløber i Kenya. Et væsentligt nyt aspekt i Guantanamo er isoleringen, som umuliggør den uddannelsesaktivitet, som var væsentlig i de gammeldags fængsler og lejre. Og som idag benægtes alt.
Racismen hos settlerne er så udtalt, at en italiensk familie er “laverestående”.
93
Noget kunne tyde på, at Mau Mau næst efter samarbejdsfolkene gik efter særligt
hårde arbejdsgivere (Ruck, 94)
og arbejdsgivere man ellers havde et forståeligt mellemværende med. (Meiklejohns,
99).
Det,
at tilstedeværelsen ved et mord skulle være nok til en dødsdom, røber jo også en
noget særpræget form for jura, og tyder på, at de anklagede i retssagen ikke
havde nogen forsvarer !(p. 100)
I amerikansk "sort" litteratur taler man om fredelige “house slaves” og mere rabiate “field slaves” åbenbart finder man de samme forskel i Kenya. (p.101).
brutalitet også 95 og 101
Det kan noteres som positivt, at retsvæsenet ikke havde alt for travlt med
dødsdommene (97) og at man længe modstod settlernes pres for udvidelse af
dødsstraffen. Men det er pinligt, at når det
virkelig gælder så falder alle den hvide verdens fine principper om
retssikkerhed ! Udvidelsen af dødsstraffen og indførelse af
hemmelige beviser ligner ganske de amerikanske
militærkommissioner nu. Men politiet blev dog reformeret i marts 1954, da
en ny Commissioner of Police blev udsendt på en åremålsansættelse. Og der kom en
retssag mod Muriu Wamai for hans drab i KZen Ruthagathi. Under retssagen
afslørede han, at der var tale om en godkendt politik og at 5 britiske officerer
var med i forsøget med at dække over drabene. Dommeren dømte, men Baring
forsøgte at forhindre dommens offentliggørelse. Den blev dog lækket til pressen.
(p. 297 - 307). Også i nutiden har England hæderlige jurister og andre
embedsmænd, der lækker, når regeringen forsøger, at dække over sine smudsige
handlinger, som f.eks. i forbindelse med starten på Iraq-krigen. Men der også i
England flere, politikere og embedsmænd, der er parate til at dække over
forbrydelserne, som Secretary of State, Lennox-Boyd, der citeres således: "- it
seemed never to shake his conviction, often expressed in public, 'that the
British ruling class, both at home and abroad, could do no wrong'." p. 306. Den
holdning er jo helt amerikansk.
Den politiske modstand var som nu meget beskeden, men så præcis, at den vigtigste del af kravene stadig udestår, både i Kenya og andetsteds. Og som nu bagatelliserede man de velkendte uhyrligheder og gav enkelte "rådne æg" skylden.
kollektive afstraffelser også link 99
behovet for at fastholde “vort værdigrundlag” også p. 101
Der er tilsyneladende i angelsaksisk kultur en særlig veludviklet evne til at undgå at se egne fejl, egen skyld, inkl. en manglende evne til at se modpartens reaktion, som netop en reaktion, et hykleri, en løgnagtighed og en dobbeltmoral af sjælden styrke, også når det kræver, at man ser bort fra internationale konventioner. Det havde været og er stadig en god ide, at "stick to our values" - holde fast i vort værdigrundlag: retssamfund, demokrati, medmenneskelighed. En sjælden gang blev det fremhævet. (Det skal understreges, at i Kenya gjorde retsvæsenet "oprør" mod politiets og settlernes metoder, som Andersson beskriver det i et konkret eksempel." p. 114 - 6. Det savner vi endnu i Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo etc.
Lari-affæren viser, at hverken land-tyveriet, luskede manøvrer, eller løgnagtigheden er US-Israelske monopoler. Selv Vietnams "sikre landsbyer" har fortilfælde i Kenya.
Man talte allerede den gang, som hr. Bush gør det idag, om modstanderne som dem, der hænger fast i fortiden. Nu er det muslimerne, den gang var det kikuyuerne. En måde at skabe billedet af os, de moderne, dem, de gammeldags, er at vælge bestemte traditioner, der er egnede til at skabe modvilje i Europa - og så dyrke en skarp kampagne mod dem. I nogen tilfælde er kampagnen set isoleret rimelig nok (kvindelig omskæring, f.eks.som også er en kikuyu-tradition og som sådan blev "kampagnet" af de kristne kenyanske kirker allerede i 1920erne) i andre tilfælde er der større forskelle dem imellem og os imellem end mellem dem og os (kvindeundertrykkelsen). Samtidig med at man udbreder kristendom, demokrati og retssamfund så er forholdet til juraen som til religionen (og demokratiet): man prædiker den, men lever den ikke ! I Kenya udpegede man de afrikanske repræsentanter.
Som i dagens kolonikrige (Chad, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan) havde man en del misforståelser, der gjorde det hele endnu sværere. Hvide mennesker er ikke de ret gode til at opfatte nuancer i andre kulturer og soldater er hverken de mest følsomme eller de klogeste af slagsen. [Og det bliver ikke bedre af, at det nu er svenske soldater, der fører Frankrigs kolonikrig (Chad) !!]. Hertil kommer så tendensen til at gå i panik overfor en folkemængde man ikke forstår.
Ligesom man havde delt Afrika mellem de europæiske lande på Berlin-konferencen i 1884, så havde kirkerne delt de enkelte lande/dele af dem. (Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland Mission dominerer i Kikuyuland.
Jeg har hidtil opfattet det sådan, at den mest beskidte kolonialisme var den franske i Algeriet. Sådan er det ikke længere, ikke efter denne bog. Der var over 1000 dødsdomme under Mau Mau opstanden - flere end i Algeriet ! Hertil kommer de, der bare er myrdet.
Om det så er Sydafrikas forhadte pas for sorte arbejdere, havde Kenya det (indført efter 1. Verdenskrig). Det hed Kipande og beskrives p. 10. Det brugtes også til at inddrive en skat. Allerede i 1920erne var der protester herimod (Thuku, p. 16).
Kenya African Union (KAU) var en eliteorganisation af ret konservative "ældste". Det opdagede englænderne vel aldrig ! Mon ikke den blindhed, der forhindrede det, har paralleller i dag. Ligesom de meget brede tilbageholdelser.
Englændernes brug af høvdinge til at styre fordelingen af jord gjorde disse til lette ofre for modstandsbevægelsen. Der kom således en aviskampagne, der specielt havde 3 af dem som mål. "All had opposed the Kikuyu independent education in the 1930s, and none were sympathetic to the returning squatters in the 1940s. From around 1944, each of them was subjected to a string of well-publicised accusations about their corruption in land dealings, their preferment of family members and church associates, and their illegal arrest and harassment of rivals." p. 34
Stiller man høvdingenes udnyttelse af kolonimagten til egen personlig vinst over for behandlingen af strejkende arbejdere i Nairobi ("Of the Kikuyu workers in Nairobi who went on strike, some 2000 were dismissed from their employment after returning to work." p. 39) kan man ikke undre sig over, at der er dybe modsætninger blandt kikuyuerne efter selvstændigheden. Mon ikke høvdingenes navne huskes lige så godt som Schalburg, Fritz Clausen, Scavenius og Alsing Andersen. Ikke mindst de høvdinges, som glemmer god gammel kikuyu sædvane.
Man kunne have forventet, at englænderne i 1952 kunne huske Nürnberg-dommene (1947). Den amerikanske anklager Jackson understregede under retssagen, at de samme regler ville man anvende overfor sig selv. En af de ting man straffede tyske generaler for var kollektiv afstraffelse, en anden var tortur.
Om det så er metoden med at forgælde kolonierne, var den allerede i brug i efter-krigs-Kenya. Længe inden Perkins blev sendt ud som økonomisk lejemorder. Men endnu er det vel ikke bevidst politik (?) men bare en ordinær kapitalistisk økonomisk boble.
Den måde man afviklede kolonien på, frigivelsen af frihedskæmperne til samarbejdsfolkenes land, ligger vel bag dagens (2008) uro.
"The battle to suppress the revolt in Kenya was presented as a war between savagery and civilization, a rebellion made by men who could not cope with modernity, who reached back into a depraved tribal past in an effort to stop the wheel of progress from turning." p. 1
"The official figures set the total number of Mau Mau rebels killed in combat at 12,000, but the real figure is likely to have been more than 20,000." p. 4
"The disruption wrought upon Kikuyu society by the emergency was almost unimaginable. Aside from the deaths of combatants, at the peak of the emergency the British held more than 70,000 Kikuyu supporters of Mau Mail in detention camps. The vast majority of these detainees were held without trial, simply on the order of the administration, on the basis of accusation or mere suspicion. In all, at least 150,000 Kikuyu, perhaps even more, spent some time behind the wire of a British detention camp during the course of the rebellion." p. 5
"Even for those who were acquitted of these serious charges there was to be no freedom. As they walked from the court, virtually every one of the acquitted men was again arrested and detained on lesser charges. These usually required no further legal proceedings. They would spend the next several years in the notorious detention camps of the Kenyan gulag. British justice in 1950s Kenya was a blunt, brutal and unsophisticated instrument of oppression. Yet, those same courts documented their proceedings in meticulous, voluminous detail. Much of the narrative of this book is structured around the courtroom testimonies of these trials, amounting to more than 800 capital cases that survive in the archives." p. 7
"Those interests coalesced around the question of growing landlessness and the traditional obligations of Kikuyu elders to provide for those without easy access to land." p 12
"Worried by Thuku's 'seditious' activities, the Governor had him arrested and deported from Nairobi to the coastal town of Kismayu, under the authority of the Natives Removal Ordinance of 1909 - a catch-all piece of colonial legislation that gave powers to get rid of any troublesome individual without recourse to a proper trial." p. 16
"Before the mid-1920s, each of the main Protestant missions had made efforts to prevent girls in their Christian families from being subjected to clitoridectomy." p. 18
"Since the arrival of the first European settlers in 1902, land in Kenya had been divided by race, just as it was in South Africa. In 1915 the Crown Land Ordinance had recognized 'native rights' in lands reserved for their use, and in 1926 the British consolidated this division by creating African Reserves for each of Kenya's 'tribes', leaving the 'White Highlands' solely for Europeans. The White Highlands had absorbed large chunks of land in Kiambu and Murang'a." p. 21
"By and large, in areas legally opened for settlement, Europeans could claim the land they wanted. The law stated that the land should be unoccupied, but allowance was made to compensate any Africans who were dispossessed. European settlers paid little heed to these provisions, and hid behind the useful fiction that Africans had no notion of land ownership." p. 23
"There was a gradual movement of Africans away from the farms into the Kikuyu reserves by the First World War, but each European landlord still retained a number of squatters, who were now placed on formal labour contracts. A supply of those willing to take up squatter contracts was sustained by the tax demands of the colonial state....the Africans [] sweated labour did the building and the land clearing. Squatter families were permitted to reside on the farms and use grazing, and also cultivate small areas for themselves. In return, they gave a limited amount of labour to the European farmers, up to 180 days each year, for which they were paid at the prescribed rate....The lack of good grazing in central Kenya enhanced the appeal of the Rift Valley farms in particular....But among those to leave for the Rift Valley were also many Kikuyu who had lost their land to white settlers in central Kenya....By the end of the 1930s the Kikuyu squatter community numbered more than 150,000." p. 24
"From the very beginning there had been a grave misunderstanding on the
farms of the Rift Valley. White settlers saw the recruited squatter labourers
simply as hired hands, whose residence on the farm had no bearing upon their
status. ....The squatters ..believed they had customary rights of ownership for
their families and descendants, rights they termed githaka. In Kikuyu custom,
githaka holders had full control over their land and could not normally be
removed. ...Though few squatters could have been aware of it at the time, a
judgment handed down by Kenya's High Court in 1925s had, in effect,
already sealed their fate. The ruling of justice Barth established that resident
labourers on European-owned farms were 'tenants at will' under the law, and
could therefore by evicted on order of the landlord
without the right of appeal....The European farming lobby succeeded by 1940 in
pushing through legislation giving settler-controlled district councils in the
White Highlands the authority to limit by law the number of cattle that could be
held by each squatter." p. 25
"As the annual squatter contracts came up for renewal,
the white highlanders now imposed the new limits on cultivation, restricting
each squatter family to only one or two acres, and removing all their cattle.
European prosperity triggered African misery. The effect on squatters' incomes
was devastating, plunging them into economic despair. The annual family income
fell from 1400 shillings in 1942, to 300 shillings in 1946. At the same time,
wages increased from 8 shillings to only 12 shillings per month, this in no way
compensating for the losses under the new contracts....Between 1946 and 1952 the
trickle would turn into a torrent, as more than 100,000 kikuyu squatters were
forcibly 'repatriated'. They carried their possessions
with them in bundles and on carts; but they were not allowed to keep the
livestock that was their store of wealth....The Kikuyu squatters who left were
understandably bitter and angry. As their numbers grew, there was violent
resistance. ...Olenguruone was the name given to a government resettlement
scheme in the Nakuru district, established in 1941 to accommodate some of the
squatter families evicted from the Rift Valley." p. 26
"The government determined to establish firm agricultural rules on the scheme, dictating the crops to be grown, the type of cultivation, and the conservation and maintenance work required on the land. All of this was defended as 'best practice', but it provoked resistance among the Kikuyu resettled at Olenguruone. On accepting resettlement in 1941, the squatters moving to Olenguruone believed they had been offered githaka rights. A high proportion of the 11,000 who came to Olenguruone were originally from southern Kiambu, where they had been forced out by European settlement in the early 1900s. They saw Olenguruone as the rightful restoration of their githaka lands. No one should tell them, as githaka holders, how to farm or what to do on the land....Eviction orders against the Olenguruone squatters were first issued 1948." p. 27
"Since 1947 Kenyatta and the Kiambaa Parliament had been engaged in the slow process of seeking to build up support for the KAU among Kikuyu. This they did through the 'oathing' of selected individuals, whose seniority, influence and authority would consolidate the position ot the party." p. 30
"Quite simply, the land reserved for the Kikuyu was no longer sufficient for the needs of a population of more than 1.25 million. A colonial agricultural survey of south Nyeri, conducted in 1944, was a portent of doom for the Kikuyu reserves. Population density in south Nyeri had increased from a figure of 463 per square mile in 1931 to 542 in 1944, and the average size of landholdings had fallen over the same period from 8.09 to 6.71 acres." p. 31
"In the months leading up to the declaration of Emergency in October 1952, the emerging pattern of violence in the militants' campaign was therefore not the carefully orchestrated master plan of Corfield's imagination, but a grittier mix of organized political action, random opportunism, acts of vengeance and outright criminality." p. 43
"The next month, there was an outbreak of fifty-eight unexplained grass fires on the European farms in the nearby Nanyuki district, destroying several thousand acres of valuable grazing" p. 45 (marts 1952)
"It was at this point that the District Commissioner in Nyeri first suggested employing the Collective Punishments Ordinance in relation to Mau Mau cases. This provided for collective fines to be charged against communities who refused to cooperate with police investigations, or whose members were thought to be withholding information for the protection of guilty parties." p.46
"Louis Leakey presented himself as a Kikuyu, as 'an insider', a white man who knew African culture because he had bccome part ot it himself. In this guise he was the kind of selfmade man that other white highlanders admired - the perfect antidote to the 'experts' who would be sent out from Britain to solve the problems of Kenya. As the Mau Mau struggle seized Kikuyuland, the politically conservative white African Louis Leakey would play a prominent role in the campaign to counter the rebellion." p. 46-7
"The first bodies were found floating in the Kirichwa river, in Nyeri,
on 15 May 1952 at a remote spot away from any settlements. The two men, had been
shot and their bodies then mutilated. One was a headman. The other was
identified as a police informer. The passer-by who
had first seen the bodies tangled in the reeds, and reported to the police, was
himself killed a few weeks later. By then, two more police informers had been
murdered in Kiambu, and a chief s messenger in Murang'a had 'disappeared'."
p. 47
"At the trial the two men retracted these statements, claiming they were made as a result of prolonged beatings and systematic torture at the hands of their police interrogators. Justice Cram was shocked by these detailed accusations...Claims of the kind made in this case were to become a commonplace of the Mau Mau trials, and Justice Cram's incredulity was to wear thinner as the Emergency went on and it became apparent that not all such accusations were without foundation." p. 49
"Attorney-General, John Whyatt, whom the settlers considered to be unsympathetic to their interests and too fond of legal rules for their more rough and ready methods... It was now permitted for a senior police officer to attest a prisoner's confession, and for this to be accepted as evidence before a court." p. 52-3
"The mass oathing of labourers was followed by a wave of arson attacks on farm buildings and the maiming and disembowelling of hundreds of settler-owned livestock. This event seemed to make a far deeper impact upon the minds of white settlers than had the murders of more than twenty Africans in government service over the preceding months." p. 53
"Baring had already learned that land lay at the heart of the issues that motivated Mau Mau. The movement championed the cause of those Kikuyu who had been dispossessed by colonial changes to land tenure, and the cause of those evicted from European-owned farmlands, as modernization and mechanization took their toll upon older styles of labour tenancy. Some Kikuyu tenants had even been evicted by their African landlords, including Waruhiu himself....Waruhiu was bitterly opposed to the claims of Mau Mau that large landowners should be obliged to provide for the landless." p. 55
"By 1952 the British government in Kenya had come to the conclusion that Mau Mau and the KAU were one and the same thing. The evidence for this was not entirely well grounded." p. 59
"The compromises and ambiguities of Kikuyu politics were obscured from British view by their own static model of a notional 'traditional tribal authority', which was in fact a creation of colonial rule itself." p. 61
"A list of some 150 KAU activists and suspected Mau Mau organizers was compiled by Special Branch, and plans were laid for a mass round-up, code-named Operation Jock Scott, to take place from midnight on 20 October 1952." p. 62
"This advice allowed the government to hamper the KAU in organizing Kenyatta's defence by refusing permits to o certain lawye and delaying the issuing of documents to witnesses for the defence." p. 64
"The British had arrested the leader of the KAU, but he was not the leader of Mau Mau. He had supported the oathing of Kikuyu members within the KAU, but not the subversive and dangerous oathing of the Muhimu. Kenyatta had tried very hard to tell them this at his trial, but Thacker had not wanted to listen." p. 67
"[T]he random screening of thousands of Kikuyu - nearly 60,000 would be held for interrogation between November and the end of February." p. 69
"A crowd had gathered around a young boy, vho claimed to have been healed of dumbness by a miracle. The youth ranted and raged at his curious audience, prophesying that God would come to the market later that day and bring an end to the war. When the police moved in to arrest the youth, he called desperately upon the crowd to rescue him. People remonstrated with the police, some of the crowd surging forward. The commander panicked and ordered his men to fire. They killed sixteen, among them women and children, and wounded another seventeen. The edginess of the security forces and the incomprehension of the Kikuyu crowd set the tone for much that would follow over the coming months." p. 70
"In the bustle and confusion at the Station entrance the manager was accidentally knocked over by a mule cart driven by an African......He got up out of the dust in great pain and the hell of a rage, still clutching his stock-whip. This he uncoiled and with it lashed out in fury at the culprit....As Seaton was soon to discover, the violent reaction of the European agent was not in the least unusual. Among white settlers there was always a tendency to take the law into their own hands." p. 77
"By the early 1920s, the deaths of several African servants from beatings at the hands of their European masters earned Kenya's white settlers an unenviable reputation for brutality....Flogging was a far commoner punishment for Africans in Kenya than in neighbouring Uganda or Tanganyika, where settler influence was absent." p. 78
"They were not wealthy: race alone was enough to elevate and preserve their social status." p. 79
"British snobbery did not encourage the lntegration of the Afrikaners....Whereas colonists in other territories, most obviously Australia, had to live or die by the labour of their own hands, those in Kenya could call upon the sweat of African peasants to push forward agricultural development....For people who did not welcome these social and economic transformations [i England], Kenya held an obvious appeal....The 'pioneers' made more money from land speculation than they ever would from productive farming." p. 81
"Maize and wheat made money for white farmers in the 1920s, and they protected this income by keeping African producers, who were far more efficient, out of the export market...Kenya was marginal to the Allied war effort until February 1942, when the fall of Singapore put the agricultural wealth of South-East Asia into enemy hands. To foster greater production for the war effort, Kenya's farmers were asked to increase production, with the incentive the government would guarantee the prices of their crops. The 1939-45 war therefore gave a huge boost to the settler economy." p. 82
"Even self-styled settler liberals, such as Blundell, who argued for a multi-racial future, saw this as a road toward 'power sharing', and not racial integration....Even at the height of their powers, in the 1940s, this was a curiously anachronistic community." p. 83
"Mau Mau aimed to restore the White Highlands to African ownership..... [O]nly thirty-two European civilians were killed in Kenya as a result of Mau Mau attacks, with another twenty-six being wounded. More European civilians would die in road traffic accidents between 1952 and 1960 than were killed by Mau Mau. These figures should be contrasted with the 1819 African civilians assassinated by Mau Mau and another 916 African civilians wounded over the same period." p. 84
"This white gendarmerie frequently took independent actions against Mau Mau 'suspects'." p. 85
"It established their legal access to land in the White Highlands, and denied rights of ownership to other races. It permitted them to elect their representatives to the Legislative Council by ballot, while Africans and Asians were denied any semblance of democratic choice. It allowed :hem to impose a colour bar in hotels and clubs, and at sporting events such as the Nairobi races. It secured for them better wages in supervisor and administrative jobs, which Africans might be well qualified for but could not obtain. It granted them licences to grow and export valuable crops, such as coffee, that were barred from African cultivation. And it gave them the right to be tried in court by a jury of their peers, a privilege denied to Kenya's other peoples." p. 86
"In the majority of the attacks on white settlers, domestic servants and trusted farm workers vere deeply implicated in the violence." p. 87
"White highlanders could only 'understand' this gross breach of trust if their African staff were in some way deemed to be possessed, or in the control of other forces....The firm denial that Africans had any legitimate grievances against the way they had been treated by settlers closed the door to any materialist or social explanation." p. 88
"Lyttelton would never admit that the rebellion might be rooted in the failure of British policy, and the ponderous Baring would never be hurried into rash responses by the clamour of the settlers. Having stood firm in public against settler pressure, with typical calculation Baring then saw to it that the Lancashire Fusiliers were moved into the Rift Valley within the next fortnight, where they began regular, arduous and prolonged patrols of the farms. ...Reports of oathing campaigns, and of the disappearance of Africans to join the armies then forming in the Aberdares forest, often spurred by the contmuing evictions of Kikuyu squatters from the farms, increased markedly in the Rift Valley over this period." p. 89
"In the week following the attack Baring imposed sterner collective punishment measures against African communities who assisted Mau Mau or withheld information from the police....The troops seized 5000 head of cattle from these squatters, under the collective punishment laws, for their 'lack of cooperation' with the government.....Cameron [Daily Mirror] appealed for reason and restraint. In settler excess he saw the death of colonial liberalism, and the loss of the moral order that gave empire its only possible justification. Cameron hit out against collective punishments, punitive sanctions against African workers, and the general repression of decent African people." p. 90
“The strongest emotional reaction among settlers was reserved for Mau Mau’s
killing of women and children; but the response to the murders of the Payet
children on the Bastard farm, and the deaths of the Meloncelli family on Mount
Kenya, was surprisingly muted. This was a matter of race. In Kenya’s stratified
social order, neither of these families, one Seychellois , and the other Italian,
could claim full membership of white highlander society.” p 93
“There had been a very high turnover among Ruck’s labourers over the preceding
year or more. Although there were strangers on the farm in January 1953, it
seems that Ruck did not notice them. It was to prove a costly oversight.” p. 94
“On Monday morning the Kenya Police Reserve were out in force on the roads
leading into Nairobi’s commercial district, but their purpose was not to deter
Mau Mau: instead, they halted traffic to instruct European motorists to attend
the protest meeting later that day. By midmorning, several hundred whites had
pushed their way past the startled African policemen guarding the entrance to
Government House, to assemble on the lawn in front of the great main doors. When
a line of African police formed on the terrace, linking arms to prevent the mob
entering the building, the mood of the swelling crowd darkened. They shouted for
‘the nigger police’ to be taken away and called for the governor to come out to
see them. As they pushed up against the police line, some pressed their lighted
cigarettes onto the flesh of the African constables in an effort to break
through.” p. 95
“Historically, the Kenya judiciary had always been slow in processing capital
cases, and the conditions of the emergency only served to make things worse. At
the end of 1952, thirty-two Mau Mau murder cases had been committed to the
Supreme Court and were waiting to be heard.” p. 97
“Another corner was cut for ‘lesser offences’ (i.e. being suspected of having
taken a Mau Mau oath), by greatly extending detention without trial through the
issuing of’Governor’s Detention Orders’. This was an effective, though
extra-judicial means of getting rid of any troublesome individual simply ‘on
suspicion’.....the trials were to reveal as much about the violence and
brutality of the white response to Mau Mau as they were about the character of
Mau Mau violence itself.” p. 98
“December 1952, ... the Kenya Police Reserve had been widely criticized for its
methods in administering collective punishments and questioning Kikuyu
‘suspects’ in the Rift Valley....The essential facts of the case were not
contentious. All the farms around the Thomson’s Falls area had been badly
affected by squatter disputes and Mau Mau had strong support there. The
Meiklejohns’ squatter labour were known to be disaffected since Ian
Meiklejohn
had made them remove sheep from the farm and reduce their numbers of cattle a
year earlier.” p. 99
“Gachoka admitted entering the house with the attackers and witnessing the
murder, but stridently denied having struck any blows against the victims. This
was of no relevance in law, as the confirmation of his presence with the
murderers made him an accomphce. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang.“ p.
100
“Watuso Githuri....House servant... His status gave him a decent wage and
reasonable working conditions. House servants were not subjected to the
disruptions faced by the squatters, and by and large they enjoyed a
comparatively favoured position among Africans living on the farms. ....When the
police and neighbouring settlers got to the Meiklejohn farm after the murder,
they were clearly shocked and enraged by what they found. The farm labourers and
domestic staff were immediately suspected of complicity. At the trial the
accused claimed that beatings had been administered to all those who were
questioned, and that this was done repeatedly, and openly, in front of many
witnesses. They further claimed that they had been instructed what to say in
their statements, and that the statements had finally only been made under the
most severe duress. Even those who appeared as prosecution witnesses made
accusations of beatings in their statements. There was little serious effort
made in court to deny the truth of this, and under medical examination two of
the accused showed minor signs of physical abuse even four months after their
interrogations. Justice Bourke did treat this matter with some degree of candour....One
final aspect of this case demands comment. The three Kikuyu assessors who heard
the case with Justice Bourke declared their opinion that all of the accused were
innocent.” p. 101-2
“The evidence as to how Pape behaved is highly contradictory. It is clear that
his first act was to round up the farm labour and to begin questioning them.
Pape claimed this was conducted in orderly and calm manner. All of the Africans
involved in this process had a different story to tell. They claimed that they
were violently and repeatedly beaten with sticks, on Pape’s orders. Such
mistreatment apparently continued when they were held in police custody each
night the next week. There were further beatings each day on the farm as they
waited in turn to be interrogated. Even key police witnesses such as Chira
Kiniaru, one of the Rucks’ domestic staff, vividly described |the beatings
dished out to all the labourers, more than thirty of them, during the police
investigation. These police witnesses had no reason lie about the beatings.
Indeed, logic would suggest that they might have seen good reason not to mention
such things. That they did so freely, and moreover that virtually every witness
repeated a broadly similar account. seems compelling evidence that beatings did
in fact take place.” p. 102-3
“Some claimed they were told what to say in making these statements. Others
claimed that they had been made to put their thumbprints to several blank sheets
of paper before they made any statement to the magistrate. Others declared in
court that the extrajudicial statements attributed to them were complete
fabrications. And two of the accused, whose fingerprints had been found on items
in the Ruck home, alleged that they had been blindfolded during part of their
interrogation so that these items could be placed in their hands.” p. 103
"Anyone reading these trial papers now could not help but be struck by the absurdity of the judge's reasoning; but that reasoning was required firstly in order to allow the 'highly incriminating' extra-judicial statements made by the accused to stand as evidence, and secondly to exonerate the European officers involved. There was a great deal of other evidence in this case linking the accused to the crime, and the extrajudicial statements were not here as critical as they would be in other Mau Mau trials. The judge's determination to quash any accusation against the white officers involved in the investigation had as much to do with European image and reputation as with the need to obtain convictions." p. 104
"On the day after the coronation, as the prime ministers of the Commonwealth gathered for a summit meeting, Churchill was made uncomfortably aware of the difficulties of maintaining British mastery over this multi-racial and increasingly acrimonious club. Kenya, like apartheid South Africa, now divided Commonwealth opinion. India's Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the sternest critic. Two months earlier, on the anniversary of the Amritsar massacre, he had pledged his country's moral support for the Mau Mau freedom fighters....The targets of Bourke's criticism were two lawyers of Asian origin. Bhandari and de Souza, who had defended eight of the accused in the Ruck case. It was their probing of the police witnesses that brought out the full extent of the allegations of beatings and torture, and it was their clients who accused Russell of perjury and who described how they had been tricked into handling property from the Ruck house. Asian lawyers regularly appeared for Mau Mau accused. The better known among them were even sometimes requested by name by the accused." p. 105
There were also financial considerations to be weighed. In most Mau Mau trials, the defendants had no resources with which to pay for counsel and so lawyers had to be assigned to them on what were termed 'pauper briefs'. This was, in effect, a form of legal aid, designed to ensure that all accused would have the opportunity to be properly represented. Pauper briefs did not pay well, and for lengthy trials such as the Ruck case the fixed fees were utterly derisory when compared with other kinds of legal work. Asian lavaers, most of whose practices were less lucrative than their European counterparts, were more willing to accept this - though even they regularly complained about the paltry fees....This system required the cooperation of Kenya's lawyers, white and Asian alike. Statements of the kind made by Bourke, essentially accusing de Souza and Bhandari of unprofessional practice, exposed tensions that many senior members of the Bench generally did their best to conceal. When Bhandari and de Souza brought the consolidated appeals from the Ruck case before the East African Court of Appeal in June, the three appellate judges, Nihill, Jenkins and Keatinge, took the opportunity to show their disapproval of Bourke's outspoken criticism of their Asian colleagues. They praised the two Asian lawyers for the 'great assistance' they had rendered to the appeal court, stating that 'so far as these appellants are concerned nothing which could be said on their behalf las been overlooked'. This was only a thinly veiled swipe at Bourke's view that the defence counsel should not fully explore the allegations of the accused. Noting that de Souza and Bhandari had brought the appeal without a fee, the appellate judges also instructed that they be paid by the court. This was a highly unusual intervention, sending out the clear message that not all the judiciary shared Bourke's views. Such disputes would become increasingly acrimonious." p. 106
"One further piece of evidence in this case never came into the public glare at the time. but it has some bearing on Justice Bourke's robust defence of European reputation. When the seven men who were sentenced to hang arrived at Nairobi Prison, thev were examined by the prison doctor, Anant Ram. On the medical record for each of these prisoners. Dr Ram recorded his observations: each man had serious leg scars from recently inflicted wounds. Ram thought it most likely that beatings were the cause of these unusual injuries. The revelation does not, of course, imply that the men were innocent of murder, but it does strongly suggest that the judge was wrong to have so readily dismissed their allegations of mistreatment simply on the basis of European denials." p. 107
"Two others had been squatters in the Ol Kalou area until August 1952, when they had been evicted. They had spent time hanging around Ol Kalou township until the murders, when they, too, had disappeared.....As the trial unfolded it soon became clear that Justice Mayers, lijke ustice Bourke before him, would have to confront allegations of gross police brutality against the accused. The five men in the dock each repudiated or retracted all the key elements of extra-judicial statements they had made before the investigating European pohce officer, Espie, and the magistrate, Mr Russell...During the interrogations it was claimed that Inspector Espie had told them what to say, and had urged them to implicate Dedan Kimathi by name as the gang leader." p. 10(7-)8
"Justice Mayers came to the view that he was justified in law in ruling that 'the beating was in no way connected to the giving of the statement to Mr Russell'. Any other conclusion would have implied that Mr Russell had committed perjury.....All the accused in these three trials were squatters or ex-squatters recently evicted from the farms, or domestic servants working in the employment of Europeans." p. 109
"The extent to which farm labourers acted under compulsion in many of these cases was dramatically illustrated in the final trial we will consider from the first wave of Mau Mau assaults upon the settlers. The murder of the Kenya pioneer James McDougall had seemed the most callous of all these attacks. An elderly cripple, McDougall lived alone and was the easiest of targets. Settlers raged against the cowardice of such an act; but the circumstances of his death revealed far more about the character of the Mau Mau struggle than this. Though McDougall was killed on 21 July 1953, the events leading up to his death began four months earlier, when a Mau Mau gang had attacked the farm of his neighbour, Payne Williams. The African labourers on the Williams and McDougall farms had for the most part resisted the overtures of the Mau Mau movement and were not trusted to collaborate in this attack. The Mau Mau gang therefore came under cover of darkness, at around 11 p.m., and tied ropes around the huts of the workers, sealing them in, before mounting the assault upon the Williams' farmhouse. A gun battle ensued as the gang laid siege to the house, but one of the farm labourers, Kiahara Ndirangu, managed to break out of his hut and ran at considerable speed to the nearest police post and then to the home of a local KPR officer to summon assistance. As help arrived, the attackers were forced to retreat under heavy fire. It was this same gang, numbering around sixteen men, who returned to the area in July. They sought out Ndirangu, and then selected other workers from the labour lines on the Williams and McDougall farms. These men were now to be punished for their actions during the earlier attack. Under threat of death. Ndirangu and his colleagues were roped and led to yhe McDougall house. There, they were given pangas and instructed to enter the house and carry out the murder, whilst the Mau Mau gang remained outsidc. Ndirangu was compelled to lead the way into McDougall's sitting room, to disarm the old man of his pistol and strike the first blow. This the terrified Ndirangu did, whilst his accomphces ransacked the house and retrieved other weapons and supplies for the gang. After the attack the gang disappeared into the night, leaving the hapless farm workers to their fate.
Justice Henry Mayers found five of the accused in this trial guilty of murder, but in doing so he recognized the predicament that had confronted them all, and most especially Ndirangu. The hero who had saved Williams was now the murderer of McDougall. Mayers wrote to the Governor at considerable length, explaining the background to the case: 'In my view', concluded Mayers, 'there is a strong case for considering whether the prerogative of mercy ought not to be exercised.' Baring did not agree. After sitting on death row for nearly three months, Kiahara Ndirangu went to the gallows, along with four other convicts from this trial, on the morning of 13 February 1954. Five more names had been added to the growing list of executed 'Mau Mau terrorists'." p. 110 - 11
"This 'solution', according to Blundell's analysis,
involved giving the settlers a greater role in the administration of the
counter-insurgency campaign, as well as amending the law in ways that would make
detention and conviction of suspects even easier than they already were. At no
time, it seems, did Blundell consider that the worsening situation might be the
consequence of settler intransigence and indiscriminate reaction." p. 112
"For the majority of settlers the constraints imposed by the legal system seemed an impediment to the security forces: 'They had firmly fastened one of their hands behind their back with a cord of legal difficulties,' as Major Frank Kitson would later put it. The British would not admit that this was a war; they would not even formally concede that it was a rebellion, fearing that to do so might imply that the Mau Mau fighters had rights under international conventions governing the treatment of prisoners." p. 113
"It is a matter of grave concern if criminals go unpunished: It is a matter of equally great concern that the Court should administer justice according to law. The implications of this case are indeed grave, suggesting as they do the danger that the police force in Kenya is :ending to become a law unto itself. The Courts will fail in their duty if they ignore or pretend not to see the danger when it is apparent on the evidence before them. [appeal court judges ]....The settlers dismissed such commentary merely as 'legal technicality'. If the realpolitik of combating the Mau Mau threat demanded measures that the judges of the Supreme Court could not stomach, then it was he law that must change." p. 116
"Lari was a place of wealth, and of poverty. Amongst the leading commercial farmers were a few prosperous elders with large acreages under their control. They were in the vanguard of what the colonial state considered to be 'progressive' African farming. They had moved beyond the traditional constraints of family labour and the obligations of kin, developing their lands with commercial tenancies, waged casual labourers and more intensive farming methods. This wealthy minority were beneficiaries of the active market in land that had been stimulated in Kiambu by commercial success and growing land hunger. At the other end of the economic scale stood the majority of Lari's residents. Most made their livings as tenants on the land of others, producing a small surplus for themselves and supplementing their household incomes with casual work. Others were poorer still, having no access to land through ownership or rent. These were compelled to sell their labour to earn a living. Waged labour was already a faet of life in Lari. Many families included members among Nairobi's pool of migrant labour, and many others had connections with Kikuyu squatters in the Rift Valley, far to the west." p. 120
"Lari also had its industrial labourers, mostly working at the Uplands Bacon Factory, in nearby Limuru. The factory horn bringing the day shift to an end also signalled the ending of the day for many of the farmers in the surrounding fields. Here, in 1930, Kenya had its first taste of trade-union protest, with the shooting of strikers by police and the imprisonment of the workers' leaders. Strikes and violence had again erupted at the factory in the late 1940s, stimulated by emergent trade unionism, and as recently as 1947 the local chief, Makimei, had assisted colonial officials in breaking a strike at the factory. Such radicalism had been driven by workplace concerns - poor conditions and low wages - rather than by political motives; but by the early 1950s the labour lines at Uplands were viewed with suspicion by colonial officials who thought lat the factory was a seed-bed of radical, anti-government opinion." p. 121
"Lari was a male-dominated community, traditional in its support of Kikuyu patriarchy. The most senior elders and the largest landowners were all polygamous, and the wealthiest men had three or more wives. The payments of brideprice from one family to another on the arrangement of a marriage built ties of reciprocity and obligation between families, and these ties gave Lari a dense and complex network of linkages with the wider Kikuyu community within and beyond Kiambu. In making a good marriage, parents would endeavour to make a match for their children that would secure the wider interests of their family and clan. In this process of building alliances, the land-holding unit known as the mbari was of critical importance. Upon marriage, a woman gained entitlement to the use of land for herself and her children within the mbari of her lusband. A landless or dispossessed man, indeed any man who did not have secure access to mbari lands, was therefore a very unwelcome suitor, for any family that hoped to use marriage as a means of brokering future security and prosperity. Obligations, and their reciprocities, were built through marriages, and their proliferation was traditionally a sign of wealth and status. In the desperate times of the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, more and more men found themselves unable to secure mbari land. The evicted squatters who returned to Central Province found that their entitlement to mbari land had long ago been forfeited, while at the same time mbari elders increasingly saw little reason to allow dependents to use their lands when far greater gains could be made through commercial farming. In the midst of these socio-economic transitions, the character of Kikuyu domestic life was beginning to change along with the role and status of women within marriages.
Landlessness was the key factor. Its emergence since the 1940s had fostered severe social divisions among this Kikuyu community. The fear of landlessness was the moving force of Kikuyu politics; and it lay, like a cold shadow, over the whole community of Lari. Lari was in fact a relatively new area of agricultural settlement. The farmers here were recent immigrants. The first of their number had arrived in 1939 the last some ten years later. They had come from Tigoni, in southern Kiambu, where they had been evicted at the instruction of the colonial government. Their removal and resettlement had been a fraught affair, resulting in the loss of land by many poorer families. These people were resentful about their fate. In the early 1950s, despite its appearance of tranquil prosperity, Lari was not a happy place." p. 122-3.
"The high proportion of ex-squatters in Lari by 1952, along with numbers of other landless peasants, marked it as an area where Mau Mau support was known to be strong. The local chief, Makimei, had a reputation for toughness. His methods were often rough and ready, but colonial officials considered him a reliable and secure ally .in these difficult times." p. 124
Just after 8p.m. on the evening of 26 March 1953 the Lari patrol was summoned to investigate the discovery of a body in the location of Headman Wainaini, three miles to the east on the Lari boundary.....They had been purposely | lured to Wainaini's location, leaving Lari undefended. The Mau Mau attack they so dreaded had come at last." p. 125
"They carried with them ropes, which they tied around the huts to prevent the occupants from opening the doors before they set the thatch alight. As the occupants struggled to clamber through the windows to escape, they were savagely cut down. Most of those caught in the attack were women and children, but they were shown no mercy by the attackers, who seemed intent on killing every person in the homesteads." p. 125-6
"The first reports stressed the murder of innocent Kikuyu civilians and stated that this was a 'loyalist community', but it was not explained that the homesteads attacked had in fact been very carefully chosen. The Lari attack may have seemed an indiscriminate slaughter of collaborators but was far from random in its violence. All of the victims were the families of local chiefs, ex-chiefs, headmen, councillors and prominent Home Guard. The male heads of these households were the leading members of Lari s loyalist community, and all were known as outspoken opponents of Mau Mau. Lesser members of the Home Guard, and those who were perceived as clients of wealthier men, were left alone." p. 126-7
"If it was not recognized as such before, then at Lari the Mau Mau struggle had become a civil war....An elder in the Catholic church, his extended family pursued a wide variety of business interests and dominated landholding on some of the most productive farms in Lari. As chief, and as the elder principally responsible for arranging the resettlement of the Tigoni people at Lari, Luka had profited from his association with the government. His murder was Mau Mau's punishment." p. 127
"All were substantial landowners, and each had business connections with Luka Wakahangare.....There was nothing random about these attacks. The victims had been selected with care, their homesteads identified and singled out. The raid had been well planned, and its perpetrators were well equipped. Neighbours were left unmolested as the gangs went about their business...All were Christian, and all were from Catholic families who had come to Lari from Tigoni in 1939. In one way or another, they had all been clients of either Luka or Makimei, or both. One reason for the attack might have been Makimei's own vigorous pursuit of Mau Mau, or his cold rejection of the claims of the evicted squatters who presented themselves in Lari hoping to revive kinship and find shelter and support." p. 128-9
"Loyalists at Lari at first sought vengeance, not comfort. They turned their anger and grief into violent reprisal. The Home Guard patrol returning from Wainaini's location saw members of the gangs making their escape and gave chase. Through the night there was sporadic shooting and skirmishing as the loyalists engaged what they thought to be groups of the attackers. Anyone abroad in Lari that night was taken as fair game." p. 129
"What followed between 10p.m. and dawn the next morning is not easy to describe precisely, for we have no detailed independent record of events, and there was never any official enquiry into the aftermath of the Lari attacks. We cannot therefore say with any certainty who did what to whom over the next few hours. All the same, there is no doubt :hat a second massacre took place at Lari that night. It was perpetrated by the Home Guard, later joined by other elements of the security services.....the Home Guard, police and KPR had exacted their bitter revenge. Some 200 bodies then awaited identification at the local mortuary....A man of strongly anti-colonial views, Evans had been among the lawyers who had volunteered to assist Kenyatta's defence team. In the months following the Kapenguria show trial, he busied himself in Nairobi assisting supporters of the KAU. They provided Evans with a list of persons who were said to have 'witnessed' atrocities carried out by the security forces." p. 130
"The closest to an official reckoning of the extent of the killing came in a brief government statement, reported in the East African Standard on 5 April 1953, that 'the security forces had killed 150 people alleged to have been involved in the massacre'.....The scale of the attack at Lari surprised even the most professional officers among the security forces, and its timing, after the withdrawal of soldiers from the area, showed that Mau Mau was still far better at gathering and making use of military intelligence than were the British.....at Naivasha, .... they mounted a brave and well-planned assault upon the local pohce post. ....On breaching the armoury, the raiders seized eighteen automatic weapons and twenty-nine rifles, and as much ammunitition as they could carry. Another contingent broke open the gates of the detention t camp adjacent to the barracks, liberating some 170 prisoners, among their number several people being held for questioning in connection with the murders of European settlers in the Kinangop area." p. 132
"By the early hours of the morning, the British soldiers pursuing the Naivasha attackers were running into the Home Guard and police patrols from Lari, and there were several incidents of 'friendly fire'....The shooting of a gang of twenty-one terrorists by a Home Guard patrol in an area north of Lari - all killed and no prisoners taken.....These killings appeared to amount to little more than political assassinations. not dissimilar from those carried out by Mau Mau." p. 133
"Next to the police compound, and within view of these shocked and still terrified survivors, a large enclosure had been hurriedly constructed from fence poles and barbed wire to hold the suspects rounded up in the hours following the massacre. By the evening of 27 March this enclosure already held 1500 men, and over the next few days the number rose to above 2000. Virtually every male resident of Lari sub-location who could be found, and who was not a member of the Home Guard or otherwise known to be an active loyalist, was taken into custody." p. 135
"One group of prisoners who were suspected of deeper involvement in Mau Mau were sent to Kampi ya Simba, a notorious British interrogation centre on a farm in the Laikipia district. There, according to district officer Terence Gavaghan, they were 'severely mistreated by security forces'.....Again and again Cram acknowledged in his reports that suspects had been beaten or mistreated whilst in custody With his usual scrupulous honesty Cram did his level best to establish that the statements that he then attested were freely made. But it was a dirty business." p. 137
"Or had they sought vengeance by singling out their known enemies, and the known enemies of Luka and Makimei, for prosecution?" p. 138
"Before we follow this disturbing story into the courtroom, it is necessary to ask the question why this should have happened at Lari? The answer lies in the history of Lari's settlement, and of land disputes involving the various families brought to the area from Tigoni. Other writers have suggested that this prior history marks Lari as an exceptional event, prompted not so much by the Mau Mau war as by other, more deeply rooted historical currents. Those historical currents undoubtedly flowed strongly at Lari, but to suggest they were unconnected to Mau Mau is entirely misleading. The Lari massacre had everything to do with the Mau Mau struggle, and it was the history of Lari's land dispute that made the place, and its factional politics, the focus of such an intense and bitter struggle. Like Olenguruone in the history of squatter militancy, Lari had long been symbolic of resistance for those in the Kikuyu Reserves who campaigned against the expropriation of lands by the wealthy and the evictions of the poor The deeper history of Lari's tragedy therefore has a great deal to tell us about the character and motive of the Mau Mau war
A Deeper History
No doubt on platforms and in reports we declare we have no intention of depriving natives of their lands, but this has never prevented us from taking whatever land we want... Sir Charles Eliot, April 1904 (High Commissioner, British East Africa)" p. 139
"Amid this prolonged turmoil, the land taken by the Catholic mission became a safe haven of relative stability and prosperity for its Kikuyu residents. The missionaries wanted Christian converts, not cheap labourers; and they seemed not to care how many Africans crowded onto the land belonging to their church.....Signs of trouble ahead first became apparent in 1915, when the white settlers living around Tigoni asked the government to remove the Italian mission and evict the Africans living there....The land was considered too valuable to be left 'in the hands of natives'...Faced with dissent, the government sought to placate its critics. In 1924, when the Chief Native Commissioner toured southern Kiambu, he reassured the 'loyal' Kikuyu at Tigoni that there would be no further alienations. But these were weasel words: only two years later, surveyors arrived at Tigoni armed with theodolytes, pegs and tape measures, to prepare for the sale of commercial plots in the new Tigoni township. When the alarmed mbari heads demanded an explanation, they were curtly informed that Tigoni was not a new alienation at all, having been first surveyed as a farm in 1906: the statement of 1924 gave them no protection. The Tigoni Kikuyu were learning not to trust the government's words." p. 141
"It was clear by the early 1930s that Kenya's Africans needed more good land than they had been left by the alienation of the White Highlands. The land commissioners accepted this in principle, but saw the solution to lie in improved African land husbandry, not in the restoration of the lost lands....The commission decided that all the 'islands' of Kikuyu settlement within the Highlands, including Tigoni, should be evicted....Previously compliant chiefs, including Koinange, now became uncooperative." p. 145
"Kikuyu wanted title deeds, so that they could own land in the same way as Europeans....Fazan's vision of 'economic progress', endorsed by the Land Commission, was going to create a huge landless class." p. 146
"In defiance of those Tigoni mbaris who still opposed the move, he [Luka Wakahangare] had visited Lari in November 1935, with Koinange and two British officials, to mark out the boundaries of the land to be resettled. It was an act of capitulation md betrayal for which some Kikuyu would never forgive him. The Tigoni people were now split right down the middle. The seeds of the Lari massacre had been sown." p. 147
"Karanja was telling the District Commissioner that wealthy and influential Kikuyu githaka holders were already involved in a land-grab, carving up the resettlement areas among themselves in an effort to block the claims of others.....Coutts discovered that only one in six of those settled at Ndeiya had a legitimate claim to land in the resettlement area. Around half the land was cultivated by people who did not live at Ndeiya at all, and a further 20 per cent was owned by only four githaka-holders, who included Chief Kioi himself." p. 149
"The means of acquiring a plot at Ndeiya 'was the offering of a fat bribe to the apportioners'....we cannot be sure; but the catalogue of complaints strongly suggests that Luka exploited the situation to enhance the interests of his own mbari." p. 150
"In the Mau Mau war, those who had been involved in the corrupt distribution of lands in Kiambu would be called to account. The murder of Luka Wakahangare and his followers illustrated only too clearly how those who supported Mau Mau 'read' the deeper history of the Kikuyu people. Lari's tragedy was emblematic of the historic pattern of land alienation and dispossession that had driven the Kikuyu people into the Mau Mau revolt. The slaughter of women and children had its reason: it signified the denial of inheritance, a determination that those who had rejected their obligations toward dependents and subverted custom to claim land as property for themselves should not be allowed to benefit. It was a powerful message. And there could have been few in Kikuyuland who did not know precisely why ex-Chief Luka had been singled out." p. 151
"Kenya's judiciary had stubbornly resisted settler pressures to extend the death penalty, but in the wake of Lari even Whyatt gave way. Enactments issued between April and June 1953 made it a capital offence to administer or freely participate in the taking of a Mau Mau oath; to be known to be a member of a Mau Mau gang likely to carry out acts prejudicial to public order; to be in possession of any item of explosives, arms or ammunition; to consort with those likely to carry out acts prejudicial to public order; or to consort with persons whom it was reasonable to know were carrying arms or ammunition. The provisions to convict those 'consorting' had far-reaching imphcations. Anyone identified as having been with any Mau Mau group might now be hanged." p. 152
"He [Michael Blundell] demanded that the legal process be dramatically ' accelerated to get the culprits to the gallows as swiftly as possible. This could be achieved, he asserted, only if magistrates were given powers over emergency capital cases, if the appeal process was removed completely, and if the Governor reviewed the death penalty without reference to advice.....Roberts-Wray the senior legal adviser to the Colonial Office, was outraged. Blundell argued that these measures would 'result in expeditious justice'; Roberts-Wray thought it more likely to lead to 'expeditious injustice'." p. 153
"The strain upon the existing legal system as the crucial issue, he [Lyttelton] contended, telling the Cabinet that more than 200 people might be hanged as a result of the Lari incident alone. The point struck home, but the implications greatly alarmed the Prime Minister. Churchill reacted strongly to the suggestion that there might be anything resembling 'mass executions' in Kenya. To execute such large numbers was not in the PM's view either 'necessary or desirable'....Regulations for the new Emergency Assize Courts were approved in Kenya on 12 June 1953, though London had not scrutinized the details. It was an oversight the Colonial Office would come to regret....It was not until July, in response to questions from MPs, that Roberts-Wray came to appreciate that the removal of committal proceedings had, in effect, denied the accused the opportunity to know the nature of the evidence that would be brought before the court." p. 154-5
"the first Lari trial .... was staged in converted buildings at the Githunguri Teachers' Training College, a few miles to the east of Lari. The college had been founded by Mbiyu Koinange, in January 1939, after his return from the United States. The Koinange family were the main benefactors of the college, but its running costs were raised from voluntary public contributions.....The government had closed the college, but it still stood as a symbol of Kikuyu resistance.....Here, in the Kikuyu heartland of central Kiambu, two courthouses were set out for the Lari trials, with holding pens for the prisoners; and beside them, behind a high fence, a pair of gallows was constructed. The intentions of the colonial government were clear for all to see." p. 155
"The administrative staff in Kiambu went out of their way to make life as difficult as possible for the barristers who came to Githunguri for the trials. Kenya's only African lawyer, Chiedo Argwings-Kodhek, was singled out for special attention. Argwings-Kodhek had been called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1951, returning to Kenya with his Irish-born wife a year later......At Githunguri he fought a running battle with officialdom. As an African, he required a special pass to visit any area affected by the Emergency, and this provided opportunities for repeated harassment by police officers and KPR demanding to 'see his papers'. In the worst example of interference, Argwings-Kodhek was arrested at Uplands on the grounds that he did not possess the relevant pass permitting him to visit Kiambu. When he presented instead his letter of authorization from :he Registrar to the Supreme Court, it was brushed aside. The local magistrate, Mr Baxter, declined to acknowledge the letter from the Registrar, and promptly found Argwings-Kodhek guilty, fining him 50 shillings. This was wilful obstruction, designed to humiliate and dispirit it Argwings-Kodhek. Many of his Asian colleagues, including Ajeet Singh, A. R. Kapila and Fitz de Souza, also accepted paupers' briefs in Mau Mau cases. They were all roundly criticized for doing so, and all were subjected to the spiteful petty interference of police and Europeam district officers; but it was Argwings-Kodhek who was most frequently the victim of the indignities imposed by a callous and disregarding administration." p.156
"Cram attested to this statement having been freely made, but he added his own commentary to the text before making his signature. Cram's 'explanatory note' was not read to the court. What it revealed was undoubtedly more than the prosecution wanted the court to hear:
The deponent [Nganga] was covered with dust and stated he had been beaten by the Home Guard and a European after being hunted and brought into camp. He was sick, vomited twice and had difficulty in moving his limbs. His lips were bleeding. I questioned him most carefully if he had been threatened to make a statement but he denied this firmly and said what he wanted to say was of his own free will." p. 159
"When these nineteen trials are viewed as a group of related proceedings, however. the individual mistakes, errors and uncertainties take on a more sinister meaning. How thorough was the prosecution in collecting and collating evidence? Did they verify and corroborate the evidence of witnesses? Were the identifications reliable? And were witnesses to be trusted? At best, the Crown was sloppy and hasty in preparing its evidence - there was immense political pressure to bring these cases swiftly to court." p. 160-1.
"The appeal judges were deeply alarmed when they reviewed the trial papers. Harley had openly and categorically contradicted himself, in highlighting the discrepancies in Machune's evidence in his detailed summing-up but then declaring his complete faith in the same evidence in his judgment. No fewer than twenty-nine of the forty-eight convicted men had been accused and identified by Machune and Machune alone." p. 167
"It was little wonder that Kikuyu thought British justice to be a haphazard and random affair." p. 169
"Whyatt defended the principles of British justice with his usual firm dignity. Though his speech received prolonged applause, it was the aggressive determination of the white highlander lobby that impressed Baring." p. 174
"Those who organized the slaughter had come in to Lari from the Aberdares forest, but they were not among the convicts because no one had recognized them." p. 175
"These were precisely the kind of people we might expect to have been supporters of the Mau Mau cause, those marginalized and dispossessed by the resettlement at Lari and the natural enemies of the acquisitive and selfserving ex-Chief Luka; but one in seven of those executed were much wealthier men, mostly of an older generation.....Were the convicted men guilty? This is a dangerous question to ask, but surely an essential one.......there are many indications that even the assessors thought that Makimei, Machune, Samson Kariuki and their kind had manufactured evidence against their known enemies. The trial transcripts by no means reveal everything there was to know. Lari still holds its sececrets......Those released by the court - the 120 men who were acquitted, the fifty-six who were discharged, and the fifty-eight who had convictions quashed on appeal lid not go free. On their release from custody all were immediately rearrested and issued with detention orders. These orders allowed the State to detain them without trial under suspicion of Mau Mau activities....While in detention, the property of these men was often seized by their loyalist neighbours." 176-7
"Before Lari the majority of Kikuyu had done their level best to avoid taking sides. After Lari that became increasingly difficult." p. 177
"new military Commander-in-Chief and a new Commissioner of Police. Each would be required to direct operations effectively and possess the moral strength of character to tackle Nairobi's more extreme elements among the Europeans. By now London had realized that those elements were by no means confined to the settler community. Among the senior colonial administrators in Kenya were several hawks..... A police commander in an older colonial style. O'Rorke was too ready to defend his men against all criticism and too slow to investigate allegations of excess." p. 179
"In deed, if not in law, Kenya's colour bar was vigorously policed in the colony's capital. Black and white rarely mixed in colonial Nairobi, any more than they did in Johannesburg, Durban or Harare, except in the roles of master and servant. And that was how the white highlanders liked it.....Three years later, economic progress had dampened. Commodity prices fell on international markets, and Kenya's trade suffered. The postwar era of European optimism and African aspiration crumbled away as the municipal authority saw its debt burden mounting faster than its income. Enhanced earnings from rates and municipal services had failed to materialize. The housing schemes that had been the proud symbol of a new colonial commitment to urban welfare could not in fact be made to pay at sub-economic rents. Construction had failed to keep pace with African demand, and even in Kenya's low-wage economy, building standards had been pared back to keep costs down. The grand design for a better future had been built upon fragile economic foundations. The Master Plan was expensive, and money was now tight." p. 183
"Pangani was finally demolished in 1938, and the bulk of its remaining residents forcibly relocated to a new estate, Shauri Moyo....Eastland's residents built what they could afford, greatly preferring this to costly serviced sites or the grim dormitories that it the government favoured as 'cheap and suitable'. Respectable people wanted privacy, and a home to call their own, at a price they could afford." p.186-7
"Criminal gangs operated verywhere, the Forty Group among them, fleecing traders and retailers with their protection rackets and scams." p. 189
"Those who worked in government employment, as clerks, cashiers or office assistants, were singled out as collaborators. In European-style jackets and trousers, with polished shoes and neckties neatly fastened, these men were highly visible as they walked along Doonholm Road each morning towards the commercial district and the offices on Government Hill. Mau Mau had a name for them, ridiculing their dress and mocking their subservience to European masters: they called them the tai-tai." p. 190
"After this, Mbotela resigned from the KAU and spoke out against the militants with increased vigour, telling his African audiences that oaths of all kinds were divisive to the nationalist cause and that Mau Mau was an evil and illegitimate movement that they should oppose. He eventually paid for his principles with his life. One month into the Emergency, on the evening of 26 November, Mbotela was stabbed and hacked down in a Nairobi street as he walked home from a mayoral reception. His body lay in the gutter, close to a busy thoroughfare in Shauri Moyo." p. 191
"But sheer weight of numbers could not compensate for lack of intelligence, nor overcome the fear that silenced the tai-tai. Indiscriminate and heavyhanded policing hardly helped either. The burning-down of Burma Market, in Shauri Moyo, on the morning after Mbotela's body was discovered nearby, was typical of the retaliatory approach of the police. Mau Mau supporters lost property in the fire, but so too did many others.
Such actions drove people to the rebel cause. Cordon and search operations, begun on the estates in November 1952, became a regular feature of daily life by the middle of I953. Highly disruptive and indiscriminate, these searches were deeply unpopular. 'Operation Rat Catcher', in July 1953, for example, involved the questioning of 17,000 Africans, resulting in the arrest of twenty or so Mau Mau organizers, including the then chairman of Nairobi's Muhimu committee, Hirwan Kamau." p. 192-3
"The creation of exclusively Kikuyu estates was intended to make surveillance easier, but it was a clumsy and ill-considered measure that effectively punished the Kikuyu tai-tai and threw them into the arms of Mau Mau. The colonial state might need the support of a Kikuyu middle class, but the security forces treated all Kikuyu the same way: from March 1953 all Kikuyu in the city had to obtain a special permit, without which they were liable to arrest and detention." p. 193
"Kikuyu business premises, and especially shops, were therefore regularly raided by the police. When residents were moved from one estate to another, after October 1953, the government reviewed all licences, denying renewal to Kikuyu traders whose loyalty might be suspect. They were replaced with 'loyal Kikuyu', or, more usually, with Luo or Kamba." p. 194
"Mau Mau also instructed Africans not to buy goods from any Asian-owned shops in Eastlands, to eat in establishments that were not African-owned, or to drink European bottled beer. The government responded to this on 26 October 1953 by temporarily closing all Kikuyu-owned retail premisess j in Eastlands as a punishment 'for the failure of the traders to cooperate' in the battle against Mau Mau. Kikuyu shop-owners were trapped." p. 195
"When dawn broke on the morning of 24 April 1954, Nairobi's citizens woke to find their city under siege." p. 200
"Nairobi would remain a 'closed district' for the next month.....Each Kikuyu male resident was required to carry five separate documents: an employment registration card; a card setting out his history of employment; an identity card; a poll-tax receipt; and a Kikuyu Special Tax receipt." p. 201
"To identify the more important suspects, the screening teams were assisted by gikunia - the dreaded hooded informants - who sat quietly watching the multitudes being shepherded past them, from time to time leaning to whisper into the ear of a European officer, giving the name and alleged offence of any Mau Mau activist they noticed. The gikunia were loyahsts and informants, mostly residents of the estates. Their silent and anonymous testimonies would condemn many men to the detention camps." p. 202
"Later in the Emergency, all those persons who had been issued with Governor's Detention Orders would lose their rights to land, and their families would forfeit whatever property they had. In the chaos and confusion of Anvil, there were many, many cases of mistaken identity. Once labelled. it was exceeding difficult for a man to challenge any detention order....These women may have expressed the wish to get out of Nairobi, but they did not accept their displacement passively. None of the women did. The Europeans and Asians who volunteered, through the East African Women's League, to help serve tea and bread to the African women as they were loaded onto buses and trains, found that their charity was not wanted. The Kikuyu women loudly sang protest songs, snarled abuse, or sat in silent, sullen resentment." p. 204
"Over the following months of 1954 the Kikuyu population in Kenya's detention camps would swell to more than 70,000.....; nearly half the total number of Kikuyu in the city had been imprisoned without trial.
Of those detained. Special Branch reckoned that 700 were 'hard-core' Mau Mau, who had been involved in criminal activities on behalf of the movement. They considered this a great achievement; but the fact that this represented less than 3 per cent of the total number of people detained told a rather different story." p. 205
"The loudest complaints were first heard from some of the larger employers in the city, who found their workforce decimated overnight. With the Kikuyu population of the city reduced by 50 per cent, the pool of unemployed job-seekers had been taken away. By reducing Nairobi's 'surplus labour'. Anvil did more to raise African wages in the city than had two years of negotiation with employers.....All of this was costly, and deeply unpopular with European and Asian employers....While the government had surely expected a backlash of complaint from employers, they were less well prepared for the criticism that poured down upon them from the leaders of Kenya's main churches.....more than sixty Kikuyu Christians ... had been rounded up in Operation Anvil. These were all persons for whom the churches vouched in unconditional terms: many were senior church elders, including several who had very publicly opposed Mau Mau and some who had been victims of attempted assassination. The loyalty of these men was above question; yet it appeared they had been swept away into the detention camps as Mau Mau suspects" p. 206-7
"The screening team at Manyani agreed. Dedan Kihato was classified as 'white', but when he applied to be allowed to return to his shop in Bahati he was refused. Self-employed Kikuyu like Kihato were thought too vulnerable to Mau Mau influence, and were no longer welcome in Nairobi. Kihato's licence was revoked, and his shop given to another, non-Kikuyu trader. There is no record that Kihato was compensated for his loss of stock." p. 208
"False accusations had removed many people to the detention camps, and this had sometimes been deliberate and calculated.....What the clergy knew only too well, but were usually too cautious to say outright, was that the system of informants run by the security forces was far from infallible, and that the Home Guard units who policed the Nairobi estates were hopelessly corrupt.....With Mau Mau's organization in disarray, Home Guard confidence grew. Many of them sought to exploit the opportunity to full advantage." p. 209
"the maze of bureaucracy and official indifference that shielded the Home Guard from accountability." p. 212
"At Lukenya they launched the attack under cover of darkness. Some 296 Mau Mau detainees were freed from the prison, a guard being killed and others wounded; but the attackers failed to find the armoury:....By October 1954 many of the forest gangs were already splintered, isolated and in desperate need of supphes and new recruits." p. 213-4
"He described how three of his fellow accused, Ngugi Njaguna, Marete Kilela and Gatuthu Gecha, were all in fact captives, and explained that he had personally been assigned 'to guard them'. His evidence was detailed and fitted well with the statements made by his is co-accused; but it did not help any of them escape conviction. Justice Rudd declared that he 'did not beheve Kirongochi's statement', as there 'was nothing else to support the contention'. Nothing, that is, except the statements of his fellow co-accused in the dock. Kirongocha, and the three reluctant recruits he had guarded, all hanged together in Nairobi gaol on 3 January 1955." p. 218-9
"The inability - or unwillingness - of the colonial government to distinguish between active Mau Mau fighters and those swept into the net by dint of fear and vulnerability fundamentally weakened the counter-insurgency campaign, and undermined the rule of law." p. 219
"Other than in the Kikuyu estates of Bahati and Kariokor, the majority of shops were transferred to non-Kikuyu." p. 220
"the energies of the Mau Mau urban fighters turned inwards, as they sought to 'weed out' the informers in their midst." p. 221
"'Only a real two-faced traitor, and there is nothing worse in the wodd, would be sentenced to death. Our courts were much fairer than those of the government with their summary justice, their framed evidence, their perjuring, bought witnesses." citeres General China for, p. 231.
"While the fighters in the forests prepared for war, the British were not sure what to prepare for. They certainly did not want to call it war: to do so had implications. In a war, combatants had rights under international conventions and were protected from criminal prosecution." p. 238
"The Kikuyu Home Guard was, without question, the most important factor in determining recruitment to the forest gangs. In short, Home Guard aggression sent recruits flowing to the forest." p. 239
"The bands in each forest area had little contact with one another. The links they developed were back to the reserves, and to Nairobi, where their supporting committees organized supplies of food, weapons and ammunition, and raised recruits." P. 243-4
"With Mathenge's opposition entrenched and Kimathi intransigent, the moment of high command, so nearly grasped on the Aberdares in the middle of 1953, was gone before the end of the year and would never be recovered. Ironically, China was the one senior commander who might have drawn together the loose strands into a meaningful confederacy. Without it Mau Mau's military potential would not be realized. The falling out between these two Aberdares leaders stood alongside the capture of China as events that would hasten Mau Mau's military defeat.....In the battles to come, the tried and trusted tactics of divide and rule defined Kenya's liberation struggle just as it had defined the country's conquest half a century earlier." p. 250
"When the renegades of the komerera groups behaved recklessly, or when Mau Mau units made mistakes, they were admonished. Those in the forest knew that they depended upon the support of those in the Kikuyu reserves. For the most part, attacks within the reserve were organized in conjunction with local people. The rebel force commanded by General Gatunga in Embu comprised a band of forest fighters, who operated in conjunction with a larger number of supporters who remained living in the villages. The group would rendezvous before an attack, to identify and locate their target, those resident to the area acting as guides. Even when local advice of this kind was not easily available, rebel commanders would select fighters who knew the area to be attacked - often men who came from that very location. The intimacy of the struggle derived from this local focus of violence: rebels often had some personal knowledge of their victims, and hence the witnesses to an attack often recognized many people among the attackers.
This very intimate, personal brand of violence was to carry right through to the war's end, when Mau Mau turncoats hunted down their former comrades in the forests." p. 252
"During 1953 the government confiscated 6000 cattle and 22,000 sheep and goats from Mau Mau suspects, along with over a hundred bicycles. By the time the collective punishments stopped, in May 1956, those totals had more than doubled. p. 254 (Objektivt set er det en krigsforbrydelse, jvf. Nürnberg).
"In one of the first instances of this kind, a young Kikuyu man was shot in the back when riding his bicycle away from an army roadblock. The KAR officer who fired the shot claimed that he had called the man to halt, but that he had continued. No weapon, or anything else of suspicion, was found on the dead man's body. The soldier who fired the shot was, ironically, one Idi Dada Amin, serving in Kenya with the Ugandan regiment of the KAR. Nineteen years later this same soldier would seize power in his native Uganda in a British-backed military coup." p. 254
"A fortnight before the Lari attack the government learned that several Nairobi advocates were engaged in private prosecutions in cases of alleged assault by Home Guards in Kiambu and Nyeri. This exposed the fact that the Home Guard lacked authority for their actions - there was in fact no legislation permitting their formation. nor any legal document outlining their powers. To protect them, Whyatt now moved swiftly to place them under the Tribal Police Ordinance.....By June 1953 the Kikuyu rebellion was already slowly but surely defeating itself in a flurry of local, intimate, internecine violence. " p. 256
"The government was determined to be as ruthless as Mau Mau; but nothing could have contributed more to reinforcing the ranks of the rebel army than did the harassment of the general population by the Home Guards." p. 257
"I therefore order that every officer in the Police and the Army should stamp at once on any conduct which he would be ashamed to see used against his own people." p. 259 (ordre fra general Erskine.) SÅDAN !!!
"The judge contacted Singh and asked him to take the case, but he refused. His patience at an end, Justice de Lestang determined to hear the case without defence counsel. The prosecution witnesses were brought, all Home Guard, police and soldiers, who gave evidence as to the circumstances of the capture of each of the accused. The judge found every one of them guilty of consorting with terrorists, sentencing the seven juveniles to be detained at the Governor's pleasure, and the thirteen others to be executed....The similarities strongly suggest that conduct in court was discussed amongst the fighters in the forest, and the names of lawyers put forward. It is also apparent that these men were resigned to their fate. None mounted any serious defence, nor did they say anything that might assist the security forces or hinder their fellows. Even in court their resolve and determination were disciphned aiand purposeful." P. 266
"The isolation of the forest was made more complete by the construction of deep ditches along the reserve boundaries in Nyeri and Embu. Dug by forced communal labour, these huge excavations were overlooked by Home Guard posts and watchtowers. Spiked poles filled the ditch, making this a difficult barrier for the rebels to cross coming to and from the forest. In February a policy of closer settlement was imposed in areas of the reserve adjacent to the forest. Where Mau Mau sympathies were strongest, villagization was rigorously enforced, with curfews limiting the number of hours that people could leave the village to tend their crops and animals." p. 268
"From mid-December Erskine took the fight into the high forests. Operation Hammer would sweep the Aberdares moorlands, flushing the gangs back down into the bamboo and the lower areas, where they vould be engaged by stop lines set along the forest fringe. Patrolling increased over the next few weeks, and by early February 1955 the army vas in the high forest in force, keeping the rebel gangs constantly on the move. Though the basic method appeared to work, the results were meagre and expensive - fewer than 200 rebels killed or captured, at a cost of GBP 10,000 each. However, Erskine now had a much better idea of how many men were left in the Aberdares (he reckoned around 1700)." p. 269
"Mau Mau was directing its violence entirely against Kikuyu loyaliists. Though they preferred not to think too deeply about it, Kenya's Brititish administrators knew that the Home Guard, despised by a large sectrtion of the population, had come to exert a draconian power over the Kikuyyu reserves." p. 270
"In Kenya the British did nothing to prevent their allies reaping the rewards of this dirty war; indeed, they encouraged it. and in the process they legitimated expropriation and exploitation.....A Forfeiture of Lands Bill was brought before the Kenya Legislature in December 1953, and passed by a large majority: the African members all voted against it, but everybody else seemed to think it was a jolly good idea." p. 271
"Then, in June 1955, with the fighting war all but over and Baring's government looking towards the future, the bill was amended to allow the confiscation of lands jointly held as part of an mbari....Within a week, the loyalist land grab had started. Orders were issued against 406 persons from Kiambu, 868 from Murang'a, 1700 from Nyeri, and 447 from Embu." p. 272
"This was more than a nuisance: it posed real dangers. In order to maintain communications with Tanganyika and other forest leaders, Hendersrson needed to clear security forces out of designated areas. Despite explicit orders, they repeatedly found Home Guard and tribal police swarming all over these areas at times when they should have been clear. There was clear evidence that Special Branch instructions were being regularly. and quite deliberately ignored. This 'sabotage by non-compliance' threatened to destroy the entire operation." p. 274 (i en fase, hvor der forhandledes).
"Though they were in the vicinity of Konyu, and it was obvious by their behaviour that they were waiting for the rendezvous and did not feel themselves to be in danger of attack, they were in fact outside the forest area designated in the ceasefire agreement. The next day, 7 April, the KAR swept along the forest boundary and attacked them. Caught unawares, twenty-five rebels were killed and seven captured, including the furious Gatamuki." p. 275-6
"Though some thought Orr's action deliberate sabotage. others countered this by suggesting that Gatamuki's intentions were to disrupt the surrender. Erskine, intensely frustrated, but never one to criticize his own soldiers, put it down to 'bad luck'. Among the forest fighters there was only one interpretation: the surrender had been nothing but an elaborate government trap designed to kill them all.....Among his many victims was the young Miano Ngemwe. Captured just two weeks after China was taken into custody, Ngemwe was told of China's revelations and encouraged to 'save himself from the hangman's noose by following suit. The trick worked. Ngemwe agreed to return to the forest on 'operational duties' with the British. Over a threeweek period he led his captors to several forest camps and provided an intelligence bonanza that contributed to the killing and capture of more than a dozen other Mau Mau fighters. When he was eventually brought to court, two months later, Ngemwe expected to be treated with leniency. In the dock he was confident, even cheerful, answering questions with direct honesty, and giving full answers about his life with the forest fighters. As the trial came to a close, Ngemwe reeled back in shock when Justice Law sentenced him to hang." p. 276
"The new constitution was not a matter for negotiation, and although Lyttelton took the time to discuss the proposals in Nairobi, he was not prepared to change anything. On 10 March, Lyttelton announced that Kenya would have a new constitution establishing a multi-racial Council of Ministers, to include two Asian members and one African member. It was a sharp reminder to the settler community that London would determine their political future, regardless of how the Emergency turned out." p. 279
"The Kikuyu were sick. Kenya's government built its whole anti-Mau-Mau strategy around this interpretation. It was a neat argument: if Mau Mau was a mental illness, innate to the African in transition, then British colonialism could not be blamed.....That the 'twisted aims' of the movement included the return of their stolen lands, improvement in their wages and standards of living, and political equality with whites and Asians was not explained." p. 280
"Kenya had been home to an unusually vociferous eugenicist lobby in the inter-war years; and even the more reforming enlightened thinking of colonial policy makers emanating from London after 1945 had not easily penetrated Kenya." p. 281
"Sidney Fazan was not so sure about that. His interests lay in defending the government's land policy, which he had played such a prominent role in implementing over the previous thirty years. Fazan did not believe that Kikuyu claims to land could be accepted as legitimate, and said so whenever the chance arose." p. 282
"It is a good story, but it is not quite true. The pseudo-gang idea of sending security forces into the forest disguised as rebels was not unique to Kenya. The technique was used by the British in Palestine and Malaya. The method had been applied in Kenya during 1953. The handful of European officers involved in these first operations were all men from the Kenya Regiment, and the pseudo-gangs they formed were in fact made up of loyal Kikuyu who 'impersonated' Mau Mau, sometimes but not always accompanied by a disguised white highlander. Special Branch took up the idea in the early months of 1954, using captured rebels instead of loyalists. This was far more effective, as the turncoats could locate forest gangs or infiltrate passive wing committees without being suspected, so long as news of their capture had not got out. The important feature of the pseudo-gangs was not the blacking up of white faces, but the use of Mau Mau rebels who had come around to the other side." p. 285
"He realized that there were more immediate and prosaic issues looming, issues that his Kikuyu team spoke about as they cajoled and persuaded. If the captive did not cooperate, then he would go to court to be charged on a capital offence and would certainly hang. Faced with this choice, and contrary to the wisdom of Alan Lennox-Boyd, captives did not generally see death 'as their salvation', but instead chose to cooperate, and to live at least a little longer.
Those in the security forces who ran the pseudo-gangs, and who deployed turned rebels in tracking operations, knew that the 'disease' heories of the psycho docs were bunk." p. 286
"It was education that determined Kikuyu church affiliations...... Kimathi's defence. as with so many other rebels who were captured at the forest edge, was that he had been coming to surrender, in accordance with the instructions given in the leaflets dropped by the government's aircraft." p. 289
"By 1957 the pseudo-gangs in the forests were eliminating the rebels, not taking prisoners." p. 290
"Between October 1952 and March 1958, when the very last Mau Mau offender was executed, Kenya's courts sentenced 1499 Kikuyu to death. Of these convicts, 160 lodged successful appeals....In the final tally, the British hanged 1090 Kikuyu men for Mau Mau offences....Some European nations - Belgium, Holland and Portugal among them - had abolished the death penalty in :he nineteenth century. Others had then followed: Norway in 1905, Sweden in 1921, Denmark in 1930, Italy in 1948 and West Germany in 1949...In February 1956 Sydney Silverman's all-party bill for the abolition of hanging was debated by the British parliament. The elected members in the House of Commons eventually passed the bill, but it was overturned in the House of Lords and the law remained unchanged. In the Lords debate, even the Archbishop of York declared that 'retribution was a necessity in our penal code', while his fellow clergyman the Archbishop of Canterbury reassured parliament that the death penalty was not 'always un-Christian or wrong'.....Hanging was available in the suppression of the communist insurgency in Malaya, in the terrorist war in Palestine, and in the fight against EOKA in Cyprus, but was used far more sparingly in each case....It is in the area of extra-judicial punishment that the parallel between Algeria and Kenya becomes most intriguing. The Algerian war was just as notoriously dirty as the British campaign in Kenya, with several allegations of state torture and atrocity being published at the time." p. 292
"In addition, illegal seizures of property were common. Loyalists often simply took what they wanted and defied the victims to challenge them.....Castro and Ettenger's study of these events in Embu gives just a smattering of examples from one small area of Central Province'" (see table 7.iv, p. 355, for details of collective punishments in Kirinyaga). The same process of predation backed by official acquiescence was repeated throughout Kikuyuland." p. 293
"the War Council took the decision to enforce villagization throughout Kikuyuland - the compulsory resettlement of people from their scattered, ridge-top farms, into centralized, regulated villages....most were little more than concentration camps to punish Mau Mau sympathizers. rhe speed of implementation was astonishing. Between June 1954 and October 1955, a period of only fifteen months, 1,077,500 Kikuyu were resettled in 854 villages.....Villagization hugely assisted, by removing people from their land so that government could more easily go ahead with the adjudication of claims and the surveying and setting-out of new plots. Consolidation was initially seer as just one more reward for the loyalists'." 294
"Though it was never the intention of the psycho docs who recommended confessional methods that they should be violent, interviews were often deliberately intimidating and sometimes far worse. Some 'screening teams', based at Home Guard posts, were renowned for physical violence to extract confessions, and in some places this certainly amounted to institutionalized torture." p. 295
"There matters might have remained, had it not been for a series of unsigned letters sent to another white pohce officer over the next month. These letters claimed that the dead men were not strangers at all, but well-known local Kikuyu farmers. The headmaster of the school near Ruthagathi then called at the police post and specifically requested to see the same officer. He made a lengthy statement, in which he explained that the deceased men had been arrested and detained at Ruthagathi, by Muriu Wamai, several days before their deaths. No one had seen them since that time. In a remarkably strong piece of corroboratory evidence the headmaster also revealed that he, too, had been 'screened' by Warmai at this time. He claimed that he had been beaten and tortured in t the Ruthagathi Home Guard post, and that he had heard the two deceased men being treated in the same fashion in the neighbouring cell." p. 298
"To start the ball rolling, the CID was separated from the other arms of the security forces, so as to maintain its impartiality, and placed under the authority of Whyatt....This was not just about individual cases: it was a struggle over the methods to be employed in combating Mau Mau. Young wanted discipline and the rule of law; his opponents, including senior officers in Baring's administration such as Johnson saw a degree of 'counter-terror' as a necessary weapon." p. 300
"The court ( the local African court) took enormous sums from people in fines, and it was noted that wealthier members of the community found themselves hauled in for this treatment with greater regularity. Judge Cram saw this as litde more than an elaborate 'extortion racket', and asked how it was that a lower court be allowed to proceed in such a manner without supervision or oversight." p. 301
"Fenner Brockway, the veteran socialist campaigner, led the charge. At a packed meeting in London's Holborn Town Hall on 29 November 1952, he called for the withdrawal of troops from Kenya, the ending of the Emergency, and the restoration of propper civilian government. He said that the Africans should be given back their lands and white settlement brought to an end." p. 308
"Kenya's many critics made sure that the excesses of the security forces were well publicized whenever they came to light. Indeed, what is astonishing about Kenya's dirty war is not that it remained secret at the time but that it was so well known and so thoroughly documented. These things were not hidden. They were openly talked about in Kenya. hey were reported to London on many, many occasions; and numerous individuals and pressure groups lobbied and campaigned, from as early as January 1953, to highlight the extent of the atrocities and abuses that were taking place. Officials at all levels, from the Prime Minister down to the lowly district officer, had these abuses brought to their attention. No one in authority could claim they didn't know. Their reaction, like that of Majdalany was to deflect and deny disparaging the accusers or making light of the accusation. Most abuses were blamed on the actions of 'misguided' individuals; at no time did Baring's government ever accept responsibility." p. 309
"Peter Evans, the Irish lawyer who stayed on in Kenya after initially coming out to assist in the Kenyatta trial.....including a case of the cold-blooded assassination of suspects by a European officer. Evans's relentless pursuit of this case led to the Kenya government deporting him. In the process, they seized his papers and thus confiscated his evidence." p. 310
"...pay a visit to the closest Mau Mau prison camp to the city.....1959....on a dull Nairobi Saturday....Between these inner and outer fences of mesh and coiled barbed | wire was a ditch, fifty feet deep, lined at the bottom with neat, symmetrical rows of white, sharply pointed wooden stakes. Looking to left and to right, the fences, the ditch and the camp beyond were dominated by looming watchtowers. Smith thought it looked just like all the stalags and oflags of war-time Germany." p. 311
"Nowhere in the British empire was confinement ever used as extensively as in colonial Kenya. In December 1954 the daily average number of Mau Mau detainees and convicts held in the colony reached a peak figure of 71,346, among them some 8000 women....More than 98 per cent of these detainees came from the Kikuyu-speaking peoples of Kenya's central highlands, with a population of 1.4 million.... a conservative estimate is that at least one in four Kikuyu adult males were imprisoned or detained by the British colonial administration at some time between 1952 and 1958....Even though he was aware that this would place Britain in breach of international conventions on forced labour, Lyttelton gave his consent, telling Baring to be sure to emphasize the place of work in the 'rehabilitation' of Mau Mau detainees." p. 313
"For these men, to be detained was 'to enter a world of constantly threatening violence'. It is this image of the brutality of warders, harsh living conditions and dehumanizing treatment (including sexual assault, most harrowingly recounted in Wambui Waiyaki Otieno's Mau Mau Daughter)....Marshall Clough's study of the Mau Mau memoirs as a genre highlights the sparse yet often chillingly matter-of-fact discussion of violence, deprivation and depersonalization that characterizes these autobiographical accounts. Drawing parallels with political prisoners in Soviet Russia, and echoing Fanon's observation on the totalitarian aspects of colonial conditions, Clough describes the complex of more than fifty British camps scattered throughout the country as resembling 'a Kenyan gulag'." p. 315
"Mau Mau organized their own structures of discipline and control within the camps, in opposition to the institutionalized control of the British....the better educated among the prisoners organized classes for their comrades in everything from basic literacy to politics - this often in competition with the 'official' classes run by the authorities....The withdrawal of food was frequently used as a punishment for non-cooperation." p. 316
"Manyani's kitchens, in which the detainees cooked their food, were fly-infested and disgracefully filthy. Overflowing latrine buckets were left in piles all over the camp. Waters thought it likely that the water supply was contaminated and gave specific insttuctions that 'Europeans should filter and boil all drinking water'. The African detainees did not have the opportunity to take such rudimentary precautions.....At this point the Kenya government did what they did best during the Emergency - they dissembled: the rumours were flatly denied, and the concerned public were reassured that health provision at the camps was more than adequate for the needs of the inmates." p. 317
"Copies of the weekly medical returns from Manyani came to Stott's oflice, and he noticed that the sharply rising death rate at the camp was being attributed to increased cases of malaria. Stott thought this most unlikely.....Confronted by Stott's report, the Kenya government again pre-varicated. The artful Granville Roberts, in Kenya's Office of Information, blithely suggested to the press that the Manyani outbreak was merely a reflection of a general increase in typhoid cases in Kenya, pointing out that detainees might have been admitted to the camp already suffering from typhoid." p. 318
"By the end of the year a total of 1151 typhoid cases had been reported at Manyani, of which 115 proved fatal." p. 319
"Having incubated disease in the works camps, where the British admitted that standards of hygiene were even lower than in other types of camp, the sufferers were now sent home to spread it to their relatives." p. 320
"at Embakasi he was able graphically to show this by differentiating between those inmates on 'light camp duties', working in the kitchens and sweeping, as opposed to those on the heavy construction work for which the camp became notorious. Quite simply, those inmates exposed to heavy physical labour were far more susceptible to pellagra. This was yet another testimony to the harshness of the Kenya prison regime.
Wadsworth's academic research received no support from the Kenya government. His report was not widely circulated at the time, and there is is no evidence that the Kenya administration took any action over his findings other than to advise prison authorities to ensure that maize was properly cooked before serving to inmates. Wadsworth could be ignored....It took the International Committee of the Red Cross nearly two years to obtain British permission for a visit to the detention camps in Kenya......Their report highlighted all of the sanitary and dietary problems that were by then well known to the Kenyan authorities, again documenting the high incidence of illness related to deficiency diseases, but did so in muted, passive tones that implied no especially harsh criticism of the policies of the Kenya government. What failings there may have been were instead assumed to be problems of 'implementation'. The ICRC did not then publish their reports as a matter of policy, and so their findings were not made public at the time.
A second visit by the ICRC was permitted following the scandal of the murder of inmates at Hola Camp, having been proposed by London in 1959 as a way to help quell the political uproar that had ensued. The ICRC's second report was more thorough, more probing, and far more critical. On this occasion the ICRC delegation asked to know why the detainees were not classified as prisoners of war, pointing out that the lack of this status denied them an important set of statutory rights under the Geneva conventions." p. 321
"As the ICRC pointed out. these were men who had never stood trial for any offence. The delegation revealed to the Kenya authorities that they were aware that following the first ICRC visit there had been 'a sharp increase in persecution and bad treatment in reprisal for the complaints they had made to the delegates'." p. 321-2
The most embarrassing revelations came in 1956 with the publication of a pamphlet entitled 'The Truth About Kenya', sponsored by the Movement for Colonial Freedom.'' The information supplied in this report was of a detail and intimacy not previously seen in criticisms of government actions in Kenya. Its author was Eileen Fletcher, a Quaker social worker who had been employed from December 1954 as a Rehabilitation Officer in Kenya, working for the Department of Community Development in Athi River and Kisumu camps, amongst others....and the fact that among the detainees were children, including girls as young as twelve years of age.....The substance of Eileen Fletcher's claims was demonstrably correct. However, the response of the Colonial Office was to seek to refute Fletcher's claims and to besmirch her character so as to lessen the credibility of her evidence." p. 322-3
"The complaints raised by Captain Ernest Law, an ex-soldier who joined the prison service as a warder during the Emergency and was based at Kamiti, received less widespread publicity at the time. Law witnessed brutality in the prison on several occasions, and came into conflict with his colleagues when he objected to prisoners 'being beaten senseless'. He was eventually dismissed from his job, on a spurious allegation of poor health. He returned to Kamiti as an inmate a few months later, when he found himself penniless and waiting to be deported back to England. As a prisoner. Law witnessed further abuses, including prolonged and brutal beatings of prisoners who refused to obey instructions. His account, graphically described from first-hand experience, has the sharp ring of authenticity about it." p. 323-4
"The truth was altogether more sinister, as Willoughby Thompson had easily discovered; but it would take no fewer than three separate government enquiries to penetrate. When taken out and asked to work. the detainees had refused. The guards had then set upon them with whips and batons. At the finish, eleven detainees lay dead, clubbed to death by their African guards whilst European warders looked on.
After Hola there was no way back. The culpability of the most senior officials in the Kenya administration was apparent both in the regime that had resulted in the violence at Hola and in the facile attempt to cover up the incident....But the key speech was from a Tory back-bencher, who got to his feet to declaim the immorality of an empire that could permit a prison regime of this kind to exist. He went on to declare that Britain had no right to an empire if it could not show moral leadership of a higher order. That young back-bencher was none other than Enoch Powell - then a rising star of the right." p. 327
"The reports on Hola made diflficult reading, but the Kenya administration managed its usual trick of blaming the junior staff. The Fairn Report, commissioned from London to look at the whole camps system, offered a more honest assessment: mistakes of judgement had been made at the highest level with the introduction of a policy of 'shock treatment' and physical abuse.'" p.328
"The speech was a dreadful mistake, from which the new Governor would never recover. Even MacLeod thought it pompous and silly. The Secretary of State had a hot-line to Kenya through his brother Roddie, a liberal-minded settler, that served him better than anything the Governor could drum up." p. 330
"Kenya's decolonization between 1959 and 1961. There would be majority African rule, but there would be no place at the table for rebels, or for anyone else whose views were too radical.....Those white farmers who opted to leave could sell up their land under a government-sponsored programme, the Million Acre Scheme." p. 331
"The last to return, and coming in the largest numbers, were those whom the British had considered most dangerous and who took longest to get through the 'pipeline'. In 1956 19,000 were released, and in 1957 nearly 21,000 returned to Central Province; in 1958 the figure was 15,000......Coming home would be a difficult experience for many. Karari Njama found that his wife had been raped by Home Guards in 1955 and had given birth to a child. Josiah Kariuki was moved along the pipeline to the works camp, at the Showground in Nyeri Town, just a few miles from his home in Othaya, in October 1958, where he discovered his mother had died. On 9 December he was taken to Othaya. A police constable lectured him: Kariuki must first report to his chief, then his headman. A further report nust be made to the chiefs office every Wednesday. Kariuki would be expected to do communal labour when requested and to obey any curfew. With these instructions, he walked out of the gates of the police station as a free man. Well, nearly free: he still lived under an order restricting his movements. Joram Wamweya and Karigo Muchai both returned to unemployment, poverty and misery. Detainees were constantly eminded that they now lived in the shadow of their loyalist enemies. In one of the bitterest observations of the returned detainees, Kariuki observed: 'The whole country seemed to be in detention with the village as the compound and the works camps as the small cells. We are not released from anything.'" p.332
"The aim of these colonial reforms, Ogot has astutely observed, 'was to create a base upon which a collaborative African leadership could emerge and to undermine the support of Mau Mau freedom fighters'." p. 333
"The party Kenyatta agreed to lead was to be moderate, and essentially conservative in its politics. The old contitutional nationahst had not changed very much." p. 334
"KANU's runaway victory in the national elections of 1963 swept Kenyatta into power as Kenya's first president. MacLeod's aim, of handing over to reliable, conservative allies had been achieved. The constitutional nationalists ruled independent Kenya. As the British packed their bags. they prided themselves that so difficult an imperial disengagement had been so smoothly achieved.....He (Kenyatta) acknowledged the part the freedom fighters had played in the struggle, but he never once made any public statement that conceded to them any rights or any genuine compensation. Mau Mau was a thing best forgotten....These men thought of themselves as victors, and did not feel defeated. They had refused to come out of the forests until the colonialists had gone; and they now expected to be rewarded for their victory - with land, and property, and the freedom they had fought for. Kenyatta's views were less transparent." p. 335
"They had no political legitimacy, no right to speak for anyone but themselves. Kenyatta would never reward them, for he did not believe they should be rewarded. But he feared their dissenting voices....But the fact that Kenyatta had to keep reminding Kenyans again and again not to talk about Mau Aau was in itself pregnant with meaning. A thin veneer hid the truth: that just below the surface of public life, Mau Mau was being talked about all the time....By 2001 there were reckoned to be as many as thirty different Mau Mau groups." p. 336
"As you drive into town, you come to the traffic island in the highway where the road turns towards the old market, and there it is. It resembles the war memorials of Europe. The tall, thick, tapering concrete obelisk is set on a dais, with steps up from the road. Its original inscription was in honour of the loyalists and soldiers of Nyeri who died in the struggle to defeat Mau Mau; but in more recent times the rebels have repossessed the past here, seizing this little symbolic space for themselves. The obelisk is now Nyeri's monument to the freedom fighters.....The rebels lost the war, and the loyalists won the peace. The struggle continues.....Back in the courtyard a set of rickety wooden steps leads up to another door and another room. This is not part of the bar. Above the door a painted sign tells the visitor that this is Nyeri's Peace Museum." p. 337
"The message is peace and reconciliation. To achieve that, the forest fighters must be acknowledged, not ignored. In its quiet little way, this is a deeply subversive place....staff from Kenya's National Archives in Nairobi.... are very used to Kenyans coming to look for information about the war. The reading room of the National Archive, its tall windows opening onto the square in front of the Hilton Hotel, is packed every day with Kenyans searching for their past, looking to fill the silence with noise." p. 338
Clitoridectomi, kvindelig omskæring, er en modbydelig praksis. Men derfor er det alligevel et udtryk for kulturhovmod, når andres traditioner lægges for had. Det gælder ganske specielt, når hadet skal bruges til at retfærdiggøre, at man fordriver, den gruppe, der har den tradition. Eller når man fører krig mod dem, som nu mod muslimer. Både den gang og nu anvender dem, der sætter sig på den høje hest endda tortur ! Lad os kræve, at man er ren, inden man kaster med sten. Det samme gælder helt generelt for alle menneskerettigheder, se linken for et godt eksempel.
Orla Jordal, 2007
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