Mau Mau and all that

Robert Oakeshott

HISTORIES OF THE HANGED: BRITAIN’S DIRTY WAR IN KENYA AND THE END OF EMPIRE by David Anderson Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 406, ISBN 0297847198 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 BRITAIN’S GULAG: THE BRUTAL END OF EMPIRE IN KENYA by Caroline Elkins Cape, £20, pp. 475, ISBN 022407363X ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 SCRAM FROM KENYA!: FROM COLONY TO REPUBLIC, 1946-63 by James Franks Pomegranate Press, Lewes, Sussex, £19.95, pp. 434, ISBN 0954258746 Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya:

Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

And yet writing 30-odd years later in his monumental volume Inside Africa in 1954, John Gunther summarised the division of Kenya’s arable land between Europeans and Africans in two pithy sentences: Roughly Kenya has 68,700 square miles of arable land. A minute handful of Europeans has 16,000 or 24 per cent of this; five and a half million Africans have to get by as best they can on the rest.

So what about the ‘paramountcy of African interest’? The answer has two parts. First, the White Paper was a near-perfect example of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. The key ‘crown land ordinances’ were all enacted before it. As Gunther told his readers, one of these defined the borders of the White Highlands and forbade any ownership in this whole area by anybody not a white European.

The second part of the answer is that the Devonshire principle was never invoked, in all Kenya’s 40 years from 1923 to independence, as a ground for changing the defined borders of the colony’s so-called White Highlands.

Mau Mau is, of course, the name — of uncertain provenance — that has been given to the violent African uprising against Kenya’s colonial government in the 1950s. Two of these books are works of professional historians and deal almost exclusively with the uprising itself and the response of the authorities to it. Neither mentions the Devonshire principle. The scope of James Franks’ Scram from Kenya! is extended in both directions, before and after Mau Mau. He is not an academic historian but has worked most of his life as a building surveyor in this country. His interest in Kenya was kindled by spending two years there as a sapper subaltern after the war. During a visit in 1989 he took up the suggestion of an African driver that he should write ‘an objective and balanced account of the country’s postwar years leading to independence’. I think he has succeeded rather well. I also think that there is more to that history than just the Mau Mau uprising and the British response to it. What’s even more, unlike the academic historians, Franks refers to the Devonshire doctrine of African interest paramountcy.

Which brings us back to the issue of land in colonial Kenya. The monstrously unbalanced land allocation between Africans and Europeans was clearly the main cause of the uprising, and this becomes even more obvious if we focus on the area of the White Highlands and on what, in the days of the colony, were the ‘reserves’ of the Kikuyu tribe which abutted on them. It is not only the extent of the arable land in these Highlands which is relevant, but also the quality of the soil and of other factors which make for successful farming. According to Gunther, the land was ‘so fertile that two harvests are possible every year’. Equally relevant, the overwhelming majority of Africans who threw in their lot with the Mau Mau were Kikuyu. It is Kenya’s largest tribe, and probably numbered over a million — or about 20 per cent of the colony’s total — in the 1950s. Before, during and after the uprising, Kikuyu leaders claimed that the White Highlands should have been part of their reserves and had been ‘stolen’ from them. Against that, the British argued they were largely empty when first alienated by the whites. What is certain is that between the two races the allocation of land did not reflect the Devonshire principle.

I cannot resist quoting part of an eloquent and moving speech made by Eliud Mathu in the colony’s legislative council in 1951 about the importance of land to Africans. It appears in the Kenya government’s Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, written by a former colonial civil servant, F. D. Corefield, published in 1960:

It is on the land that the African lives and it means everything to him. The African cannot depend for his livelihood on profits made through trading. We cannot depend on wages. We must go back every time to the only social security we have — the piece of land. The land stolen must be restored, because without land the future of the African people is doomed. God will hear us because that is the thing He gave us.

From this and other passages in the Corefield report, it is clear that the Kenya government recognised that the land issue was significant, even if not overwhelmingly central as a cause of the Mau Mau uprising. On the other hand, both at the time and almost down to independence in 1963, the colonial authorities put the emphasis elsewhere: on a kind of irrational psychosis attributed to the Kikuyu. It seems that in traditional Kikuyu society commitments were more often sealed with an oath than a signature. The practice was widely adopted when Kikuyu tribesmen were enlisted into Mau Mau bands. Corefield devotes a chapter to ‘The Evolution of the Oath’. This same bias may also help us understand how it was that as late as 1960 the colony’s penultimate governor, Sir Patrick Renison, could refer to Jomo Kenyatta, himself a Kikuyu and independent Kenya’s first president, as ‘the leader to darkness and death’. Thirdly, I suppose that it helps explain how the otherwise highly intelligent and sensitive Elspeth Huxley, herself a child of the White Highlands, could have publicly characterised Mau Mau as ‘the yell from the swamp’. I don’t deny for a moment that the ‘oathing ceremonies’ were gruesome. Gunther begins to give an account of what was involved but then stops short with, ‘other ceremonies are too obscene for mention’. All that may be taken as common ground. But it must not blind us to the realities of what were the most genuine and acute Kikuyu grievances, mainly but not only, about land.

In my view neither David Anderson nor Caroline Elkins adequately discusses the land issue. Both scholars have been working on Kenya for some time. But perhaps in that neither has attempted to write an overall history of the British in Kenya, to criticise them for what I see as errors of omission is unfair.

Certainly both books needed writing and were well worth the time invested in the research — a task made more formidable by the large-scale burning or shredding of official documents by the British before they left. Most of those who have kept an eye on British colonial history over the last 50 years have known that a real mess was made in Kenya for much of the postwar period. What we have not known is either the scale or the degree of the mess.

Histories of the Hanged focuses mainly on the uprising and the measures taken to crush it. For many there is doubtless something extraordinarily chilling and macabre about state executions, whether in colonial Kenya or today’s Texas. As his title implies, Anderson makes much of the fact that ‘in all ... 1,090 Kikuyu [went] to the gallows for Mau Mau crimes’ and goes on to tell us that that was ‘more than double the number of executions carried out against convicted terrorists in Algeria’. But for me Anderson’s key insight is different: namely that whatever its causes, Kenya’s 1950s emergency rapidly developed into an inter-Kikuyu civil war between Mau Mau supporters and those loyal to the British.

Where Anderson highlights the hangings, Elkins concentrates on the network of detention camps and what she calls ‘enclosed villages’, both used by the British to drain away material support from Mau Mau combatants. Information about the horrors of the Hola camp in northern Kenya, the worst of the places of detention, is not new. Most newspaper-readers knew after their exposure in 1959 of the dreadful wrongs committed in the Hola camp, where 12 detainees were apparently clubbed to death by their guards. When the affair was officially whitewashed in a government document the Evening Standard printed an incomparable and unforgettable cartoon by Vicky.

I have no quarrel with Elkins for forcing us to think about these horrible places, but I do question her numbers. On this matter Anderson tells his readers:

In all, at least 150,000 Kikuyu, perhaps even more, spent time behind the wire of a British detention camp during the course of the rebellion.

Elkins first explains her additional category of ‘enclosed villages’, in which women and children were detained, and which she then refers to as ‘detention camps in all but name’. She then goes on:

Once I added all the Kikuyu detained in these villages to the adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually detained some 1.5 million people or nearly the entire Kikuyu population.

Or, I might add, substantially above the Kikuyu total, if we follow Gunther’s mid1950s estimate of between 1.1 and 1.2 million.

Elkins’ numbers are fundamentally implausible. For one thing the ‘loyal Kikuyu’ seem to have been airbrushed out of the calculation. For another, if they are correct, it is almost impossible to explain the widespread acceptance of the Kikuyu-dominated Kenyatta government after independence, given that in her own words, ‘For Kenyatta and his successor ... Mau Mau was to remain buried.’ I would like to close with a prediction: that the story of the British in Kenya, and especially that story from after the second world war to independence in 1963, will run and run.