In the annals of utterly shameless wartime propaganda, Britain’s casting of the Kenyan Mau Mau as bloodthirsty savages, and its own colonial administrators as heroic benefactors, is pretty much the gold standard.
Over the years, the Mau Mau have been famously called the ”yell from the swamp” (by the white settler Elspeth Huxley), and held up as the embodiment of ”a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilised people have encountered in two centuries” (according to the still widely read United States writer Robert Ruark).
These racist images have proved amazingly durable in some quarters, says David Anderson, an Oxford scholar who unearthed new evidence of Britain’s ruthless response to the Mau Mau rebellion, launched in the early 1950s among Kikuyu people who had been steadily pushed off their land by whites since the turn of century.
Few seem to realise that only 32 European settlers died during the entire seven-year conflict. On the other side of the ledger, 150 000 suspected Mau Mau sympathisers were forced into abysmal labour camps, most without trial; up to 20 000 rebels were killed in combat; and more than 1 000 were executed.
”What is striking is that the repression in Kenya was so much more severe and widespread than in Malaya, Palestine or Cyprus,” Anderson says. ”Kenya was exceptional, and that is why it deserves special attention.”
His new book, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (WW Norton, 2005), seeks to ”fundamentally rewrite our notions of a country, a people, and a revolution”.
Origins of the Mau Mau
The exact origins of the Mau Mau remain cloudy. Some say the movement took its name from the mountains bordering the western Rift Valley, while others say it was the Kikuyu war cry.
What is certain is that a quietly growing revolt became open war in October 1952, when the colonial governor decreed a state of emergency and called for reinforcement troops from England.
One of the first arrested was Jomo Kenyatta, who a decade later would become independent Kenya’s first president. Wrongly accused of being a Mau Mau ringleader, Kenyatta was condemned to seven years of prison and hard labour.
Some of the tactics employed by the British are disturbingly familiar. For example, between 1952 and 1960, new anti-terrorist laws suspended civil liberties of suspects, permitted their property to be seized by the colonial administration, and extended the death penalty to a wide range of offences.
”The manipulation of law, and the ducking and weaving on human rights issues, has a very close parallel” to aspects of today’s ”war on terror”, Anderson said.
”The Brits in Kenya refused to call the rebellion a war, and maintained the line that it was a civil disturbance entirely because this altered the status of the combatants in international law.”
The book’s most groundbreaking material stems from previously undisclosed records of the so-called ”Mau Mau trials”, which sent 1 090 Kenyans to the gallows between 1952 and 1959.
Even by the often brutal standards of British colonialism in Africa and the Middle East, this number was unprecedented — and ironically came at a time when the British Parliament was considering abolishing hanging as a punishment at home.
Capital case records
”I have been researching and writing on Kenya’s politics and history since the late 1970s, so I have quite an intimate understanding of how government works there and how documents come to find their way into the public archive,” says Anderson, who is a lecturer in African studies at Oxford University.
”I knew that capital case records were likely to have survived — the whole question of appeal means that a careful record has to be kept in such cases,” he said.
Anderson recalled that in the late 1980s, the archivist in Nairobi began a more systematic effort to obtain records from the government’s legal department, ”so I just kept checking the incoming file lists, and eventually hit the jackpot”.
”But when I found the files and realised how much detail was in them, I did become rather nervous — anxious to get the material collected as quickly as possible, and very aware of the political implications of what was in these papers.”
In fact, the records of more than 800 capital cases contained ”meticulous, voluminous detail”, including courtroom transcripts, witness statements, confessions and personal histories of both the accused and the African and European police officers who interrogated and prosecuted them.
The archives in Nairobi are now open to the public; for five shillings, readers can examine the documents first-hand.
No Britons investigated
Still, no British official, military or civilian, has ever been investigated or prosecuted for the atrocities committed during the suppression of the Mau Mau. Anderson doubts any ever will.
”I have argued that the British government should at least acknowledge what happened, and offer an apology,” he said.
”The defence that the Mau Mau rebels committed atrocities of their own is of course no defence at all. The British government prefers to take the line that they handed over sovereign responsibility for such matters to the incoming Kenyan government in 1963, and therefore it is no longer a British concern. This may make neat legal sense, but in terms of ethics and morality, it is nonsense.”
Anderson noted that the Kenya Human Rights Commission is currently backing a campaign to bring some of the atrocity cases to court, and while this has the support of the majority of Kenyans in principle, it raises some difficult issues.
”The idea of reparations and compensation for Mau Mau victims of British atrocity can only be made compelling through the use of international standards of justice,” he said.
”But this should then also apply to the victims of Mau Mau attacks, and there were many thousands of Kenyans who suffered at the hands of the rebels — just as there are many Iraqis today who are being targeted by insurgents in that country.
”So, the legal case may be a necessary step in bringing the British to the table, but it in no way solves the issues that still swirl around this dirty colonial war.” — Sapa-IPS