Kenya: The History You Were Never Taught

                  The British sent their simpletons to civilize Kenyans

                                                                    -  Argwings Kodhek

Hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu men and women were killed by the British during the state of emergency between 1952 and 1960. Only 32 whites were reportedly killed by the Mau Mau in the same period.

Barbara Castle, Labour MP (1945- 1979) and a socialist at heart, who was reputed for admonishing the British society to first remove  the log in their own eye before demanding of others to remove a speck out of theirs, was a voice of civility when her compatriots across the Empire were working too hard to demonstrate otherwise. She vigorously condemned the use of Nazi-like concentration camps by the colonial administration in Kenya.

Kenya’s founding father Mzee Jomo Kenyatta let down his fellow Kikuyus in terms of restitution when he became the first head of state. His vision, however, mid-wifed the birth of a nation in which communities that had hitherto never heard of each other celebrated independence and leapt for joy together on that memorable night in 1963.

Are you ready?

Long before civilization swept across our country, we used to live as distinct tribal nations. Save for the occasional conflicts for resources, and intermarriages that would sometimes be involuntary for the parties concerned (but would be a mark of truce so as to give dialogue a chance), each tribe maintained distinct  structures of governance and social order through a system of age-sets characterised by its members having undergone common rites of passage.

Fast forward to 1963, and literally so, we had managed to move from mud-walled, grass-thatched houses to semi-permanent houses, footpaths to highways, a simple diet to a nutrient-enriched balanced diet; informal education to formal education, barter trade to a financial system and from chiefdoms to a government by the people.

This new way of life brought about by colonization no doubt attested to the African's desire to develop their knowledge capacity, albeit out of necessity, in order to participate in nation building as well as be in sync with the happenings around the globe. Some of those who had excelled in the classroom and found  their way to Europe, Asia and the Americas for higher learning, would later on return to hold key positions in government once self-rule was attained.

In a span of a generation, therefore, we had managed to attain what took our colonisers centuries to achieve, though at a cost and pace that brought about catastrophic, longstanding side effects on the majority of the locals which can still be felt today.

Kikuyus bore the brunt of the freedom struggle

  The Britishers’ arrival in Kenya en masse in the late 19^th Century  was as a result of enticement from their government on the availability of a no-man’s land in a British protectorate somewhere in East Africa for them to settle on and develop.

At this point,Britain owned 25% of the landmass in the Earth and when Kenya officially became a British colony in 1920,the British government had to justify the millions of taxpayers’ pounds spent on construction of the railway line to open up the hinterland from Mombasa to Kampala.Several advertisements regarding the colony were made in Britain as can be seen in the following undated advert.¹  

Settle in Kenya,Britain’s youngest and most attractive colony.Low prices at present for fertile areas.No richer soil in the British Empire.Kenya colony makes a practical appeal to the intending settler with some capital.Its valuable crops give high yields,due to the high fertility of the soil,adequate rainfall and abundant sunshine.Secure the advantage of native labour to supplement your own effort.

To woo more settlers to Kenya, they had to emphasise on a key selling point. Historian Mark Curtis postulates that, the primary British interest in Kenya was land, which, observed the British East Africa Commission of 1925, constituted "some of the richest agricultural soils in the world, mostly in districts where the elevation and climate make it possible for Europeans to reside permanently."

However,as the colonial administration continued to traverse the interior to open up for British settlement, they would meet resistance from the locals which in most cases led to the use of  brutal force, for instance, in the case of the Gusii massacre of 1908 which left 160 Kisiis dead.

This particular event actually coincided with Winston Churchill’s visit to Kenya,then the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for The Colonies, to which he lamented, "It looks like a butchery..and surely, it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenseless people on such an enormous scale.’’(Of course this was before his government would come to oversee one of the darkest eras of the British Empire when he became the prime Minister for the second time between 1951-1955). 

Other resistance came from the Nandi as from 1895-1905 led by the legendary Koitalel arap Samoei, The Ababukusu (Kitoshi) resistance of 1895 led by Mukite wa Nameme and also the Giriama uprising from 1913-14.

Decades later after several aristocratic families had also taken the chance to relocate in Kenya, British World War II veterans would also find their way in to the country as part of a settlement scheme - These would later on become vile perpetrators of terror amongst the locals during the State of Emergency.

The British had also recruited Africans from amongst her colonies mostly to provide support services to combatants fighting in East Asia during WWII. Men particularly from the Luo, Luhya and Kalenjin tribes were preferred due to their servility and natural physical advantages that made them suitable for war conditions. 

It is noteworthy that these Soldiers did not understand why they were fighting other people’s war even as they left for Jinja, Uganda for pre-war training under Idi Amin Dada - later Uganda's dictatorial president.

A King's African Rifles company

The King's African Rifles,as they were then called, had been tricked and conscripted into fighting alongside British troops against the Japanese Army for the latter’s invasion of Burma(now Myanmar), which they did with other Africans from countries such as Ghana, Congo and Nigeria. 

The white soldiers had a condescending view on the Africans who were mostly used as potters carrying heavy loads behind British troops.

But as the days went by, the myth of whites' racial superiority was busted as they could see African-Americans in the US Army being treated with more respect, some serving as pilots and others as platoon leaders and operators of heavy artillery (This was a paradox owing to the fact the Black American was undergoing immense racial discrimination and segregation at the time back in the US soil).

Kikuyu soldiers who had fought side by side with the British and had witnessed first hand that they were mere mortals just like themselves soon realised, much to their chagrin, that their ancestral land had been confiscated and their people rounded up in reserves and detention camps while they had been away.

This was the genesis of the Mau Mau- a term preferred by the colonial government to The Kenya Land and Freedom Army, in order to deny them of any legitimacy, locally or internationally.

The agitation for land and freedom by the Kikuyu community (Gikuyu, Embu, Meru) who had for centuries lived in the area surrounding Mount Kenya and traversed the entire Central Province as well as the Kambas in parts of Machakos and Maasais in Rift Valley provinces (lands later on to be referred to as the white highlands)soon followed.

It is noteworthy that the Kikuyu had earlier lost a court case which they had instituted against the colonial administration for expropriation of their land (approximately 284km²) in 1920, giving the settlers a cart blanche to grab as much land as they could.

The War veterans had little choice but to utilise their tactical and organisational skills acquired during the World War to marshal fellow Kikuyus to the forests in order to reign terror on the settlers in the hope that they would repossess what they considered their birthright.

What the press reported across the globe, however, was that the Mau Mau were killing innocent whites including their own women and children; the objective being to portray them as barbaric or just a step above animals.

To some extent this was true, as Mau Mau would literally slaughter those it considered informers or traitors and cause terror in the households of loyalists and home guards who collaborated with the colonial government.

Such activities helped the colonialists garner the very much needed sympathy and support from the international community as well as sway public opinion at home for the incumbent Churchill government to continue funding the colonial administration here in Kenya.

For the sake of clarity, the Kikuyus’ fight against the settlers was not mere politicking. 

When the white settlers arrived from Britain and South Africa ,they chose to settle in the fertile land that is the former Central Province.

Official statistics show that a total of 1,050,899 Kikuyus in the reserves were crowded inside 804 villages consisting of some 230,000 huts that were confined behind barbed wire fences, watch towers and deep trenches with spikes dug around them.

This Land Consolidation exercise was as a result of a forced resettlement program of Kiambu, Nyeri, Meru, Fort Hall(Muranga) and Embu districts ostensibly to cut off Mau Mau supply lines as well as free more land for the white settlers.

Africans were also registered forcibly in order to provide cheap labour and, therefore, the confiscation of land helped create a pool of wage labourers to among other things, have the settler economy pay for the running of the colonial government.

A kikuyu man without land could not marry or build a home,and without enterprise he was just as good  as dead. What then was the point of staying alive while watching an intruder enjoy the land on which your forefathers were laid to rest?

The State of Emergency was signed in 1952 by Sir Evelyn Baring to curtail the Mau Mau insurgency, and on the following day, Operation jock stock was launched. The famous Kapenguria 6 and 800 others were then arrested to justify this declaration.

Using the experiences and personnel in the concurrent efforts to stifle communist rebellion in Malaya(Malaysia) in the early 1950s, the British went all out to quash any resistance in the Mount Kenya region and in one notable instance in 1953, the King's African Rifles who were the indigenous arm of the British Army, massacred 20 unarmed people in Chuka. Several airstrikes in the forests also killed more than 900 Mau Maus.

Historical records also indicate the existence of Operation Anvil that was meant to eliminate Mau Mau presence in Nairobi. The  entire town was cordoned by over 25,000 British troops and all those not of Gikuyu, Embu or Meru ancestry were let free. The remaining captives were transported to detention camps for screening – a euphemism for gathering intelligence through torture.

All men and women in the reserves who were deemed to be Mau Mau sympathisers were rounded up and sent to detention camps as well where they were subjected to hard labour and torture. These detention camps were constructed by the detainees themselves. 

One notable structure that that still stands today as a monument to the suffering at the work camps, is the gateway to Kenya - The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, then known as the Embakasi Airport.

Thousands died and hundreds more were maimed under the colonial government's watch during the construction of this airport. 

Disease and malnutrition also took a toll on the men who worked in the unbearable heat and were often left to perish since no one was allowed to leave work to take care of them. Scores would be buried on a daily basis - Something to ponder upon the next time you use the facility as a port of exit or entry.

It is important to point out that the local guards manning the reserves as well as the camps consisted of a few Kikuyu loyalists. The majority of the guards, however, came from the other communities since they were not deemed to be as volatile and vengeful as the Kyuks (the derogatory word used for the Kikuyu by the settlers). This Divide and Rule policy was characteristic of the British rule across the Empire.

In the camps, men like JM Kariuki began demonstrating their leadership skills from an early age where they would agitate for better living conditions for the detainees including better food, medical care and sanitation. 

This they would do by drawing the attention of the authorities concerned to their plight by writing letters, some of which found their way to the British Colonial Secretary in London and even in Her Majesty’s Palace at Buckingham.

JM’s popularity as a compound leader in one of the camps increased when authorities began investigating the alleged deplorable conditions the detainees were living in thus causing the warders a great deal of embarrassment. 

He would later receive several strokes of the cane in front of all detainees while stark naked so as to discourage him and his ilk from further activism. What probably saved him from being hanged outside the camp for all to see (which was how the wardens met out capital punishment), was his higher literacy level as compared to the other detainees.

His activism would later on continue even after independence when he penned his memoirs titled Detention; and in his fight for the poor people’s rights as Nyandarua MP which would later cost him his life through an assassin's bullet in 1975.

Some say it was because he had embarrassed the then President Jomo Kenyatta by donating a whooping Ksh.80,000.00 for a public cause, while the maximum the former had ever donated was Ksh.3,000.00 - but we'll never know.

Conversations with former freedom fighters (some of whom are are our relatives) that have also been corroborated by the 2002 award-winning BBC documentary White Terror, indicates that detainees who refused to confess taking the Mau Mau oath or showed signs of rebellion were classified as hardcore.

These would be transported to some of the farthest of the  twenty detention camps, spread across the country like Hola, Manyani, Lamu and Mwea (Where the detainees dug the present day rice irrigation scheme) for further interrogation.

There they would meet sadistic white officers who would shoot at them at the slightest provocation. These detainees were welcomed with a dive in a cattle dip where some would die as a result of ingesting the chemicals in the treated water, as others basically drowned during the stampede. 

Often,the detainees were whipped, clobbered, sodomised and sometimes denied food and medical attention.

Those who had been softened as a result (referring to having confessed), would sometimes be given senseless jobs just to tire them before real work was available. This included going to the river early in the morning with buckets to empty it, which was obviously futile.

Back at the reserves, the white officers together with the home guards would round up women and children and rape women in everyone’s glare, inserting objects like boiled eggs in the women’s vaginas and men’s rectums in an attempt to force them to disclose  Mau Mau's hideouts in the forests.

Those who kept mum were shot and dumped in mass graves. Others were sent to Kamiti Maximum prison, then a women's facility and also the location where bodies collected from detention camps  in nearby camps would be buried in mass graves in its vast compound - the Field Marshall, Dedan Kimathi being one of them.

Actually, the entire Central Province is a grave yard of sorts, according various accounts by survivors of the torturous colonial era. It is worth mentioning that these and other similar experiences had a direct psychological disturbance on the women of Central Kenya concerned who were left to take care of the children and the home when their men were in the forests (if their typical temper and aggressiveness is anything to go by).

Barbara Castle

Barbara Castle in her element in this 1968 photo

A statue should be prominently erected and a street named after this former British Labour MP to commemorate her gallant efforts in seeking justice for the defenseless natives across the colonies and specifically here in Kenya.

A firebrand politician of her day, she would vehemently speak out against the Conservative government and particularly the Colonial Secretary’s office for covering up the atrocities perpetrated by the settlers and the colonial government here in Kenya.

On several occasions, she stood on the floor of the British parliament to defend the voiceless Kikuyus undergoing inhumane acts in the name of British civilization in detention camps across the land. 

Despite numerous frustrations by the ruling conservatives who were the majority in the House at the time and would shoot down any motion she raised on the floor of the house on forming an inquiry to investigate the affairs of the Colonial Secretary’s Office across the British Empire, she relentlessly came back as soon as more evidence was brought to light.

In spite of stringent measures by the colonial government to ensure that British civil servants on secondment to Kenya (for instance, to establish maternity wards, build roads or implement juvenile facilities in prisons) would not divulge details of atrocities happening in Kenya, information still reached the British press after some would terminate their contracts and return home. 

Hon. Barbara Castle would take it up from there.

What was happening to the Kikuyus in the detention camps was no different from the genocide witnessed during Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews and Russian soldiers in Auschwitz and other concentration camps during the World War II. 

But all this was hidden from the ordinary British citizenry which was still fed with the propaganda that their government’s mission to civilize Kenyans was on course and only a few bad elements in the name of Mau Mau were standing in the way of the African’s renaissance.

What, however, bothered conscientious objectors, fair-minded professionals and the likes of Castle, was the British government’s stand against the German Nazi for crimes against humanity and their subsequent ratification of the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Universal Declaration of human Rights (passed by United Nations General Assembly to pre-empt a repeat of such inhuman acts barely a decade earlier), yet they were perpetrating the same acts on defenseless Kenyans who only wanted self-rule and their land back.

The clergy, on the other hand, were torn between allegiance to the Colonial Secretary’s office that had facilitated them over the years as they undertook their missionary activities, and the truth, which if made public would have substantiated Castle’s allegations of the widespread and systematic torture of the Kikuyu. 

It is noteworthy that the church worked in tandem with the detention officers to try and soften the hardcore Mau Mau by preaching to them on the message of repentance, while the latter were starving, sickly, castrated and psychologically worn out by routine dehumanizing activities at the work camps.

There was little success in this campaign, however, since the detainees were getting hardened by the day and held on to their roots and daily rituals of worshiping the God of Kirinyaga whom as records show, they believed had allowed them to suffer in the wilderness just like the children of Israel, but would one day hear their cry.

Barbara Castle, therefore, exemplifies the truth that people are inherently good, and can go against what is popular and expedient to stand for what is just and right. 

Her agitation for the rights and freedoms of Kenyans while on British soil was a vital ingredient to the success of the freedom struggle. According to a source, continuing colonial rule would entail the use of force than that which the British public would tolerate.

Soon, the British government would be put under immense pressure to withdraw from all occupation across her colonies and the Colonial Secretary’s office that coordinated their activities disbanded.

It is widely believed that she paved the way for the upcoming Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.

The third front

The Kapenguria six who were jailed at Kapenguria during the state of emergency declared on the night of October 20, 1952. From Left: Bildad Kaggia, Kung'u Karumba, Achieng' Oneko, Jomo Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Fred Kubai and Daniel Moi who had visited them.

Each community participated in the freedom struggle in its own respect, especially during the early years when the settlers arrived in Kenya. However, once the colonial government set its tentacles across the country and the State of Emergency was pronounced,
the Kikuyus really had it.

What is worth mentioning is that, however little the other tribes’ contribution was in the trenches, their impact in other fronts was nonetheless significant.

Men like Tom Mboya and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, who were the only Africans to be elected in the Legco at the time, refused to sign for the independence of Kenya until Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and the Kapenguria six were released. If they had anyway, they would have been perceived as condoning the atrocities met on all the detainees across the country.

Kenya Police Commissioner Arthur Young’s protest letter to the Colonial Governor Evelyn Baring on the inhumane treatment of detainees in 1954 also shows the shift in support of the colonial government’s atrocious activities among the settlers at the time.

Asians, who initially were the only non-whites allowed in Nairobi  would also face some degree of discrimination and therefore were able to empathise with the African. Their contribution especially as lawyers defending the natives in court was instrumental to the freedom struggle.

Great men like FRS De Souza and Achhroo Ram Kapila who defended Mzee Kenyatta and the Kapenguria six during their trial, A.M Jeevanjee who had long fought the settlers' expropriation of land in Kenya, as well as independence-era nationalists like Pio Gama Pinto are a few examples of this community's vital contribution to attaining self-rule.

A mark of departure from the other participants in the struggle is their holding of two passports - one Kenyan, and the other one British - the latter having been acquired when they were brought in from India as coolies during the construction of the Kenya-Uganda Railway.

On independence, however, they had the option of remaining as Kenyan citizens or going to the UK. Those you see around made the choice to build their future here.

Building a Nation

By the time of Mzee Kenyatta’s release in 1961, The British government was already packing its bags in some of its colonies across the globe after the Colonial Secretary’s office came under heavy spotlight and was later to be disbanded to became part of the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs in 1966. 

The end of the British empire rule in more than 40 countries was thus culminated by an atrocious reign of terror bravely stood up by the Mau Mau.

In their last attempts to cling on to Kenya, The British government had tried all manner of tricks in the book including importing its most brutally efficient officers from other colonies who had succeeded in repressing any uprising.

Cyprus and Malaya(present day Malaysia) were success stories in this regard and the Colonial Secretary’s office would transfer their officers to Kenya to streamline administration e.g  in detention camps, prisons, and work camps.

But all this came to naught as a result of agitation from the British people through their representatives such as Barbara Castle and the civil society which was getting concerned about the British government’s blatant disregard for the UN Declaration on Human Rights in her people’s name. Coupled with the wave of struggle for self-rule across the continent, the die had already been cast.

Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the  founding father of the nation, had a clear opportunity to avenge for his community, the Kikuyu, for the suffering occasioned to them during the resistance after Kenya attained independence. But for the sake of nationhood and common destiny as a people, he opted to form an inclusive government, consisting even of some whites in order to preach forgiveness and tolerance going forward.

However, his demonizing of the Mau Mau did not go down very well with the larger Kikuyu community who felt slighted by his call for the people to work and that there was nothing for free since their common enemy was poverty, ignorance and disease; yet they could see former loyalists, including his own son, Peter Muigai - a well-known collaborator - being rewarded with titles to land previously owned by the British!

This led to the return of some freedom fighters like Marshal Baimungi Marete to the forests, albeit briefly, as they couldn’t imagine facing neo-colonialism under the black man’s rule.

Historical records show that the Mau Mau movement was suppressed as a subject for public discussion in Kenya during the periods under Kenyatta and Moi regimes because of the key positions and influential presence of some loyalists in government, business and other elite sectors of the Kenyan society post-1963.(Elkins 2005)

Fifty years later,the Mau Mau veterans are yet to receive any substantial restitution for their sacrifice for the nation.

Had a more radical kikuyu like the legendary Dedan Kimathi taken the reigns of power, you can bet that he would have avenged, and probably rightly so, for the thousands of Kikuyus murdered.

One cannot rule out the possibility of there being a Kikuyu state by now, and Kenya being partitioned.

It is said that your destiny preserves you, and therefore arguable that Mzee Kenyatta’s personal struggles from birth when his mother died while he was still a toddler, to his stay in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century as well as in Russia(where he had to escape an assassination attempt) as well as his six year jail term at Kapenguria with thousands of other detainees from other communities, had helped him form a vision for the Kenya he wanted to leave for his posterity.

 1. More details of this can be found in Harvard Professor, Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End Of Empire in   

     Kenya,one of the most well-researched books you will ever come across.

  2.My people. My country.