King Charles III commenced a four-day state visit to Kenya on 31 October 2023- his fourth visit to that country and his first to a Commonwealth nation since acceding to the throne in September 2022. At a state banquet in the State House in Nairobi, on the first day of his largely symbolic visit, the King said: “The wrongdoing of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regrets”. His remorse stopped short of a formal apology, as demanded by the Kenya Human Rights Commission, which probably falls within the remit of the British government if deemed appropriate.
The East African Protectorate, which includes present-day Kenya, was proclaimed in Mombasa in June 1895 and took charge of a territory that had been administered by the Imperial British East African Company since 1888. Within a few years, White colonists were flocking to central Kenya, lured by grants of Crown Land for agricultural purposes in the temperate and fertile Kenyan Highlands. Aristocratic settlers came to acquire enormous estates and enjoyed lavish lifestyles, popularised in accounts of the hedonism of the Happy Valley set. After the First World War, they were joined by British army officers and soldiers. Inevitably, the native Kikuyu were deprived of their ancestral land holdings and either became labourers or squatters on settler farms, were consigned to special reserves, or had to settle for urban poverty. The Kikuyu were soon surrounded by settler farms to the east, south, and north, and by the government-controlled forest reserves of the Aberdares to the west.
The British colony of Kenya was carved out of the East African Protectorate in June 1920. In this new colony, the Young Kikuyu Association (1921) and the Kikuyu Central Association (1922) were the first organised manifestations of Kikuyu dissent, providing a voice for their demands for land rights, abolition of forced labour, fairer taxes, protection of cultural practices, and the ability to run their own schools. Kenyan nationalism was by no means confined to the Kikuyu, but they were undeniably the dominant force in the drive to independence.
Jomo Kenyatta, active in Nairobi politics while an inspector of water supplies, became general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in 1928 and visited England during 1929-1930 as KCA’s overseas representative, conveying a petition on land grievances to the Colonial Office. Returning to voluntary exile in England between 1931 and 1946, he spent his early years studying anthropology in London. Kenyatta published ‘Facing Mount Kenya’, in which he noted the disrupting effect of White settlement on Kikuyu tribal life. Upon his return to Kenya in 1946, he rapidly emerged as a major threat, both to the Colonial administration and to the White settlers, as a leading figure in the rapidly accelerating independence movement.
By 1950, discontent among the Kikuyu was declaring itself by attacks on White settler farms and their livestock. These actions were soon attributed to a banned secret society, the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and Freedom Army). The Mau Mau uprising was an armed nationalist and anti-colonial rebellion, in which rebels targeted White settlers, colonial authorities, and fellow Kikuyu loyal to the government. Mau Mau administered oaths at secret ceremonies to enforce allegiance among members; it took seven oaths to become a fully-fledged member. Originally labelled as terrorists and guerrillas, the Mau have since been rehabilitated in post-independence Kenya as freedom fighters.
Kenya’s Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, declared a State of Emergency on 20 October 1952, following the murder of Waruhiu wa Kungu, the loyal Paramount Chief of Kikuyuland.
During Operation Jack Scott later that month, 181 Kikuyu suspects, including Jomo Kenyatta, were arrested and detained for their involvement with Mau Mau. The colonial government meanwhile began recruiting loyal Kikuyu into a Home Guard, who engaged in violent actions to suppress the rebels, which were in turn reciprocated by the Mau Mau. A massacre of 97 Home Guard members and their families and relatives in the loyalist village of Lari, ten miles from Nairobi, on 26 March 1953 was a particularly gruesome event in the history of internecine Kikuyu conflict.
In June 1953, Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine took over as Commander-in-Chief, reporting directly to the War Council in London. He doubled up British efforts on the ground to eradicate Mau Mau. The British campaign was boosted by the capture in January 1954 of rebel leader Waruhiu Itote, better known by his nom de guerre as General China. Initially sentenced to death, he was induced to agree a plea bargain by prominent colonial police Special Branch officer Ian Henderson and to share critical information about Mau Mau strategy and deployment. This information enabled the launch of Operation Anvil, a successful British counterinsurgency operation between 24 April and 26 May 1954.It was followed by two more large-scale actions: Operation Hammer (December 1954-February 1955) and Operation First Flute (February-April 1955). British military operations effectively ended by November 1955 and the military handed back all control to the civil authorities by November 1956. The Mau Mau were led by “Field Marshal” Dedan Kimathi, who was eventually captured in October 1956 and hanged after trial on 18 February 1957.
The British military campaign against the Mau Mau included search-and-destroy missions against rebels, who were subject to a shoot-on-sight policy in designated ‘Prohibited Areas’. Sweeping powers of arrest and detention without trial meant that Mau Mau members and sympathisers ended up in a network of screening centres, detention camps, and work camps throughout Kenya, commonly referred to as ‘the Pipeline’, where they were beaten, tortured, and even summarily executed. Simultaneously, over a million Kikuyu were forcibly uprooted and resettled in 804 make-shift and heavily patrolled villages, surrounded with barbed wire and spiked dry moats, as part of an official ‘villagisation’ programme.
The State of Emergency ended on 13 January 1960. Between 1952 and 1960, more than 11,000 people died, including 1,090 who were hanged by the colonial administration. The vast majority of those who were killed were Africans- only 32 White settlers lost their lives. The episode soon faded away from the British collective memory.
The work of investigative historians prevented the Mau Mau uprising from being consigned to the hidden recesses of British colonial history. The book ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya’ by Caroline Elkins, a Harvard professor, was published in 2005 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction the following year. Also in 2005, ‘Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire’ by David Anderson hit the press. Huw Bennet’s ‘Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency’, published in 2013, extracted important information from secret colonial archives that had been sequestered away at HM Government Communications Centre in Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire.
On 6 June 2013, British Foreign Secretary William Hague informed the House of Commons that the government had agreed to compensate 5, 228 Kenyan Mau Mau veterans to the tune of £19.9 million, in the negotiated settlement of a class action by victims of confirmed during the suppression of Mau Mau uprising. The UK Government also agreed to fund a memorial to the victims, at Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi. Further litigation was to follow, but with less success.
In the post-colonial era, the story of the Kenya Uprising of 1952 to 1960 provides yet another reminder of the depredations and iniquities of colonial rule. Answers to the vexed questions of apologies, restitution, and reparations await another day and a different political mindset.
Ashis Banerjee