The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (66 page)

support of white settlement in Kenya amounted to a formal pledge

338 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

to the “European race,” the governor insisted that any attempt to

end the racial exclusivity of the highlands would be “regarded by

all European inhabitants of the Colony as a serious breach of faith.”

Additionally, Mitchell maintained that laws requiring Africans to live

in designated urban locations were not discriminatory because that

was where they wished to live. He also claimed that vagrancy laws

designed to prevent illegal migration to the cities primarily targeted

“prostitutes and undesirables” and generally spared respectable people. Finally, and most hypocritically, he justifi ed urban segregation as

necessary to protect the health of the “non-native community” on

the grounds that most Africans did not yet know how to follow the

“elementary rules of hygiene.”53

R. Mugo Gatheru, an inspector in the Public Health Department,

agreed that conditions in the urban native locations were unsanitary, but

he correctly laid the blame for this on the municipal authorities, which

refused to provide African neighborhoods with water and other basic

services. Citing a single public lavatory in Nairobi that was used by more

than a thousand people and was little more than an irrigated trench, he

offered this stomach-churning description of the consequences:

The water system was always defective and the faeces, therefore,

could not be fl ushed away. Having no alternative, people would then

continue “easing” themselves until the trench was full up. They

would then be forced to use every inch of the fl oor until it became

impossible to get inside—this became increasingly diffi cult to gauge

since there were not enough lights within. The tins and fl oors were a

sickening sight, and there were fl ies everywhere. One could see long

threads or rings of tapeworms on the faeces dropped by people who

were suffering from them, an inevitable disease amongst those forced

to live in such circumstances.54

Mitchell justifi ed segregation on the grounds that the more

advanced European race made better productive use of Kenya’s

resources, but this public health disgrace and, by extension, the overall conditions in the slums and reserves were a more accurate record

of the imperial regime’s civilizing accomplishments.

These realities contributed directly to the increasing African

unwillingness to tolerate imperial subjecthood in the postwar era.

While their resistance tended to be local and relatively uncoordinated before the war, land shortages, rising prices, unemployment,

British

Kenya 339

intrusive government regulations, and settler harassment were powerful incentives to think and act collectively. This became most evident in the strike that shut down the port of Mombasa in 1947 and a

more serious general strike in Nairobi three years later. New African

labor unions and the Kenya African Union (KAU), which began as an

advisory body for African members of the Legislative Council, organized much of this opposition under Jomo Kenyatta’s leadership.

The imperial authorities kept the KAU and the unions under

close surveillance, but the independent Kikuyu churches, schools,

and other less formal bodies were a more serious threat. In appearing to be apolitical and respectable, they provided cover for common

people to discuss how to oppose oppressive imperial policies. Police

informers reported that many had become radicalized, but the new

postwar environment required the Kenyan government to prove that

the independent congregations and schools had actually broken a law.

With its capacity to rule authoritatively on the wane, the imperial

regime used a network of spies and intelligence agents to monitor

this opposition and relied on paramilitary police units and the King’s

African Rifl es to cow potential rebels.

These were stopgap measures, and the Kenyan government’s internal security systems failed entirely in the early 1950s when landless

and unemployed young Kikuyu men fought back violently against

the exploitation and injustices of British imperial rule. The bluff and

intimidation that were the coercive linchpins of the new imperialism simply could no longer deter the enormous Kikuyu underclass,

who had grown so desperate that they lost their fear of the imperial regime and its monopoly on lethal force. It is not clear when

the Kikuyu squatters and slum dwellers fi rst turned to violence, but

the fi rst indications that something was amiss appeared in the late

1940s, when the settlers started to notice hamstrung and mutilated

cattle. The Kenyan authorities were slow to see the import of these

developments, and they did not grasp the scope of the danger until

the early 1950s, when the rebels assassinated the Kikuyu senior chief

Waruhiu and massacred a handful of European families on remote

farms. These murders threw the settlers into a panic, but as was the

case with the Tupac Amaru revolt in the eighteenth-century Andean

highlands, the guerrillas’ primary targets were the elite members of

their own community who appeared to prosper from cooperating

with the imperial regime.

340 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Operating from the cover of Nairobi slums and forested regions in

the highlands, the rebels fi elded a decentralized force of fi ve thousand

to six thousand men. Fighting in small bands, their primary weapons

were homemade guns or fi rearms bought or stolen from the settlers

and the army. A much larger group of civilian sympathizers supplied

this armed faction with food and refuge. These people bound themselves to each other with a series of powerful oaths that had great

weight in Kikuyu culture. The Kenyan authorities propagandistically

depicted their vows as tribal, barbaric, and satanic, but in reality they

were an effective means of countering the imperial regime’s strategy of dividing the Kikuyu community. By the end of the confl ict,

it appears that almost every Kikuyu had taken at least one of these

oaths, if for no other reason than to avoid retribution by the guerrillas. Only the most committed mission converts, senior chiefs, and

government allies took the risky step of breaking openly with the

rebellion.

The British referred to the guerrillas and their sympathizers as

“Mau Mau,” but the Kikuyu fi ghters called themselves the Kenya

Land Freedom Army. The term
mau mau
had no actual meaning in

any Kenyan language, but it allowed the imperial regime to further

portray its opponents as barbaric tribesmen who turned to violence

because they could not cope with the pressures of “modernity.” In

hindsight, the Mau Mau upheaval was actually a civil war waged

between the imperial regime’s enemies and allies in local Kikuyu

communities throughout central Kenya. In this sense it resembled

the 1809 mass outbreak of popular peasant violence that targeted

Napoleon’s local proxies in the mountain of northern Italy.

Tellingly, the Kenyan authorities were not much better at controlling the countryside than their Napoleonic predecessors had been.

Lacking the ability to rule directly, they tried to tip the scales in favor

of their Kikuyu allies by recruiting a Home Guard under the command of the chiefs to fi ght the rebels. They claimed that these units

consisted of “loyalists” who rejected the barbarism of Mau Mau, but

most guardsmen enlisted under duress and many were at least tacit

supporters of the rebellion. Caught between these opposing forces,

many common Kikuyu tried to remain neutral and joined the Home

Guard or took an oath only when they had to. Most understandably

wanted to avoid fi ghting their neighbors and kinsmen and hoped to

escape the imperial regime’s violent response to the uprising.

British

Kenya 341

This was a sensible strategy. Caught off guard by the scope of the

revolt, the Kenyan authorities declared a state of emergency, banned

the Kenya African Union, and falsely convicted Jomo Kenyatta for

being the sinister force behind the insurgency. They also had no option

but to turn to the metropolitan government for aid because they did

not trust their own African soldiers and policemen even though most

were not Kikuyu. The British military had few resources to spare at

a time when its forces were tied down in Korea, Malaya, and West

Germany, but the entrenched communist insurgency in Malaya

demonstrated that it was risky to take an anti-imperial revolt lightly.

Winston Churchill, whose Conservative Party returned to power in

1951, had this in mind when he sent an entire British army brigade

to Kenya one year later.

Taking over military operations in the colony, the regular army

pursued an effective counterinsurgency strategy that isolated the

forest fi ghters from the general population by encircling the regions

where they operated. These tactics, particularly using starvation as a

weapon, harked back to the pacifi cation campaigns of the late nineteenth century. All told, the army’s search-and-destroy operations

killed approximately twenty thousand Kikuyu, many of whom were

not necessarily armed combatants, and brought the military dimension of the Emergency to an end by 1956.

The Kenya Land Freedom Army lost for a number of reasons.

Although modern Kenyan nationalism depicted the revolt as an inclusive popular uprising, most of Kenya’s other communities refrained

from taking an active role because they viewed it as a Kikuyu movement. In this sense, the imperial regime’s tribal policies paid a dividend. Equally signifi cant, the Kenyan government took the draconian

step of incarcerating almost the entire Kikuyu population in a network of prison camps and strategic villages on the assumption that

all Kikuyu were guilty until proven innocent. This hearkened back

to Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo’s plan to force the entire subject

population of the Andeans into regimented
reducciones
. In keeping

with their own collectivist rhetoric, the Kenyan imperial authorities

essentially indicted and convicted the entire Kikuyu “tribe.” Only

documented loyalists escaped the sweep that emptied the white highlands and urban areas of Kikuyu, and by 1955 there were roughly

seventy thousand people in detention camps scattered around Kenya,

with about one million more in new fortifi ed villages.

342 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The new imperialism’s civilizing veneer required the Kenyan

authorities to promise to “rehabilitate” these captive Kikuyu through

a program of social welfare, manual labor, and invented tribal counteroaths to break Mau Mau’s hold on their superstitious minds. This

seemingly humane enterprise masked the naked brutality of the government’s anti–Mau Mau operations. Although the guerrillas killed

only thirty-two Europeans during the Emergency (more died in road

accidents during the same period), the imperial regime responded to

the revolt with a retributive fury that rivaled its predecessor’s violent

response to the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Facing the prospect of the mass

tribal uprising that had long haunted their deepest fears, the settlers

fought ferociously to defend their imperial and racial privileges. They

exercised considerable control over the counterinsurgency and rehabilitation programs through the elected member system that gave

them a dominant voice in the Executive and Legislative Councils.

Additionally, their young men fi lled the ranks of the Kenya Police

Reserve, the all-white Kenya Regiment, the detention camp staffs,

and much of the KAR’s offi cer corps. This gave them the means to

terrorize the Kikuyu population through murder, beatings, rape,

physical mutilation, and torture.55

The Kenyan authorities covered up the vast majority of these

incidents and excused those that came to light as a natural consequence of the public outrage over the slaughter of settler families.

This was a fraud for the government itself was also deeply involved

in the abuses. The Kenyan police frequently tortured confessions out

of Kikuyu suspects, and state witnesses openly perjured themselves

at trials that sent more than one thousand convicted Mau Mau members and supporters to the gallows.56 Taken with Jomo Kenyatta’s

sham trial, these cases made a mockery of the British legal tradition

that was supposedly one of the imperial regime’s civilizing gifts to

the subject peoples of the empire.

In time, reports of these abuses appeared in the metropolitan

press, thereby shaming the British government and undermining

public support for the imperial regime. Galvanized by the events

in Kenya, an anti-imperial humanitarian lobby of liberally minded

members of Parliament, socialists, and evangelicals came together

to call for an end to settler colonialism throughout the empire. To a

large degree their criticisms echoed the popular revulsion over the

behavior of the nabobs in Bengal nearly three centuries earlier, but

British

Kenya 343

the realities of the post–World War II era made the Kenyan imperial

abuses far more embarrassing and unsustainable. It was impossible

to reconcile the reports of torture coming out of East Africa with