The British were guilty of terrible atrocities during the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya

Dear Editor,

In the last century, there were many just wars for freedom , and one cannot help but recognize Vietnam, Algeria and Afghanis-tan, to mention a few.  Many people may not know about the events which surrounded the years leading up to independence in Kenya in 1963 but the facts are that the British colonial authorities were engaged in a criminal war against the largest tribe in Kenya, the Kikuyu people. The Kikuyus were a proud agricultural people who defined their land as the most important thing in their lives; their aspirations hinged on the land which they occupied for centuries before the white man came. When the British built the first railroad in 1901, the seizure of Kikuyu land started and slowly they were pushed to the interior of the country. With the end of both world wars in 1918 and 1945, thousands of ex-military whites moved to Kenya and started to encroach on the  best Kikuyu land and slowly pushed these proud people into areas which rapidly made them hourly workers, locked in a dysfunctional environment, trying to scrabble to stay fed while sweating for the white settlers day in and day out.

Eventually, the Kikuyu reached the point in 1952 where an oath was to be taken which transferred regular tribal persons into Mau Mau fighters, dedicated to their fight for land and freedom (ithaka na wiyathi).

With the start of Mau Mau activities against the white settlers in 1952, brutality became the norm on both sides with the colonial white regime utilizing torture, beatings, the killing of innocents and eventually open apartheid which made the system in South Africa look like a holiday resort. It is estimated that over one-and-a-half million Kikuyus (almost the total population) were evicted from their ancestral lands and placed into virtual concentration camps and enclosed “villages” (detention camps in all but name) which according to Ms Barbara Castle, a Labour MP of that period, reminded her of the  concentration camps in Nazi Germany and which were, as she pointed out, clear violations of the Geneva Convention and its covenants of the proper treatment of prisoners of war.

This was the way that the British colonial authorities ran Kenya. Leaders  like Jomo Kenyatta, accused of being Mau Mau, spent many years in the camps which the British set up in what was known as the ‘pipeline’ – a set of concentration camps where mainly Kikuyu suspected of being Mau Mau were shuttled back and forth, depending on if they “confessed.” Torture by the British authorities of Mau Mau suspects included castration of young men;  electric shock torture; denial of food and water which were especially harsh in hot, dry regions; burying victims in a vertical position so their exposed heads were bitten by scorpions placed by guards; beatings using rhino leather, which left victims near to death with the only relief a confession and a repudiation of the oath the Mau Mau all took and which bound them together. No newspapers, letters, visitors, radio and other forms of communication with the outside were permitted, and if there were any violations, the penalties were severe. Many Kikuyus who would not give in simply disappeared, never to be heard of again and there were many eyewitness accounts of prisoners shot dead and dumped into mass graves. There was widespread torture and rape of thousands of women who were suspected of helping Mau Mau .

Editor, an amazing chronicle of these transgressions against the Kikuyu people is documented in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning-The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, a damning documentation of the terrible atrocities the British authorities were involved in during the years 1950 to 1961.

Editor, the emphasis by the British colonial authority by 1955, was to slowly starve the Kikuyu people to death, and this was deliberately implemented in the pipeline and on the reserves, with villages becoming totally dependent on food from  outside; the Kikuyu were not allowed to even grow their own food as they had done for centuries. While imprisoning most of the Kikuyu males in the pipeline of prisons, the British authorities moved most of the elderly, children and females to 800 fortified and heavily defended ‘villages’ elsewhere, forcing them to abandon their ancestral homes. In these protected villages rape, beatings and death followed any female suspected of Mau Mau sympathy.  In the meantime, in the forests around Mount Kenya, 20,000 Mau Mau fighters were in two years defeated by 24,000 seasoned British troops (and the Royal Air Force) who enjoyed great material support both from outside and inside the colony. The Mau Mau had no support from outside the country and were armed with homemade weapons, no mobile communications and their base support was destroyed by the gulag prison system which virtually locked down the entire Kikuyu population.

Eventually, independence came with the freedom of Kenyatta after the  party organized by Tom Mboyo and Odinga Odinga and their Kikuyu-Luo coalition (KANU) in  1961 decisively won the first free elections in Kenya and refused to take seats in Parliament unless Kenyatta was released.

This the British did, realizing at last that he was not a Mau Mau but a conservative and a future friend who would eventually ignore Kikuyu claims to lands illegally taken from them and take the side of the white settlers and the local traitors who had betrayed their own people. All the atrocities committed against the KIkuyu were covered up by the British colonial office despite Labour opposition accusations and exposure of the wrongdoings in Kenya. Within Kenya files and records which the British kept so properly were mostly destroyed – files on at least 280,000 male Kikuyus in the pipeline not to mention the disappearance of probably 100,000 to 150,000 others. After Kenyatta, himself a Kikuyu, became President there was never an inquiry into the tragedy of the Kikuyus even though they had led the resistance and given the most to end British colonial rule. There was never compensation to the Kikuyus whose land was stolen and property destroyed; no justice for those tortured, maimed and raped; only silence and cover ups, even inside Kenya.

Editor, the last governor of Kenya before independence, Sir Patrick Rennison, a man who was one of the prime engineers of the cover-up in Kenya, was the same man who became Governor of British Guiana  after the suspension of the constitution in October, 1953 and the subsequent imprisonment of President Cheddi and his close associates.

Yours faithfully,
Cheddi (Joey) Jagan (Jr)