Freedom by any means necessary

[XXPANTHAXX]

By Stephen Millies
Published Mar 16, 2005 1:20 PM

Book review: “Imperial Reckoning� by Caroline Elkins
and “Histories of the Hanged� by David Anderson

In 1947 in Murang’a, women led a revolt against being forced
to build thousands of miles of terraces that often washed
away in the rain.

Kenyan African Union leaders went to the countryside. Jomo
Kenyatta spoke to 30,000 people in Nyeri, 60 miles north of
Nairobi, on July 26, 1952.

Oath-taking campaigns united people in demanding land and
freedom. Most historians have smeared the so-called “Mau Mau
oaths� as “savage� and “barbaric.� What was barbaric was
colonial occupation.

Throughout history oppressed people have taken oaths to
fortify themselves. The “Tolpuddle Martyrs�—English farm
workers who dared to form a union—were banished to Australia
in 1834 for taking an oath.

Kenyans boycotted buses in Nairobi. Preparations were made
for armed struggle. People’s justice got rid of the biggest
collaborator of the white settlers, British-appointed “Senior
Chief� Waruhiu, on Oct. 9, 1952.

Eleven days later Kenya’s colonial governor, Evelyn Baring,
declared a state of emergency. His family controlled Barings
Bank, founded in 1762 by the slave dealer Francis Baring. His
father was Lord Cromer, the British dictator of Egypt and
India.

A battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers was flown in from the
British-occupied Suez Canal. Authorities rounded up more than
80 Kenyan political leaders, trade unionists and school
administrators. Most of the independent schools were shut
down.

Jomo Kenyatta, Bildad Kaggia, Fred Kubai and three other
defendants were put on trial for allegedly leading the Mau
Mau. There was no jury. Their conviction was guaranteed.

Judge Ransley Thacker received a bribe of 20,000 British
pounds, worth several hundred thousand dollars today.
The London Daily Telegraph called Kenyatta “a small-scale
African Hitler.�

Baring hoped Kenyatta’s frame-up would demoralize Africans.
Instead, it ignited years of guerilla warfare.

Mau Mau fighters stole weapons and ammunition from settlers’
farms and military depots. Kenyan blacksmiths made hundreds
of guns in the liberated areas.

Ten more British battalions had to be rushed to Kenya. The
Royal Air Force bombed guerilla strongholds in Aberdares
Forest and on Mount Kirinyaga (Mount Kenya).

A total of 55,000 soldiers and cops, including thousands of
British draftees, were mobilized to fight the Mau Mau.

Mass beatings, hangings

The British hanged 1,090 “Mau Mau suspects.� As with
Kenyatta, none of these martyrs had a jury trial. Like
those tortured in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, captured Mau
Mau soldiers were not protected by the Geneva Convention.
Being found in possession of a single bullet brought a death
sentence.

Some 54 people were executed just for administering oaths.
Supplying food to guerilla fighters—labeled “consorting� by
British justice—sent 207 to the gallows.

By this time, the Conservatives were in office in Britain.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was Adolf Hitler to the
people of Kenya.

Elkins estimates as many as 300,000 Kenyans were put through
concentration camps to be “screened.� Prisoners had to
confess to taking the Mau Mau oath in order to be released.

Author Elkins and her assistant, Terry Wairimu, a researcher
at the Kenyan National Archives, interviewed 300 survivors.

Every one of these heroes had been beaten and starved. Their
harrowing testimony is reminiscent of “The Theory and
Practice of Hell,� Eugen Kogon’s account of surviving
Buchenwald concentration camp.

Torture, including sexual mutilation, was routine. Detainees
at the Manyani camp were clubbed on arrival. Alsatian dogs
mauled women inmates at the Athi River camp. Inmates could be
killed just for trying to smuggle a letter to the outside.
In Kamiti camp alone, 600 children were confined. Almost none
survived.

“Hard-core Mau Mau supporters� would be selected to bury
them. “They would be tied in bundles of six babies,� recalled
former camp inmate Helen Macharia.

The Githunguri Teachers’ Training College was turned into a
concentration camp equipped with a pair of gallows. Some of
the slaves who built a 37-mile irrigation canal at the South
Yatta camp were buried alive.

The biggest of the 55 main camps was located outside Nairobi,
where thousands of inmates built a seven-square-mile airport
at Embakasi with their bare hands. U.S. “foreign aid� helped
pay for this atrocity.

British authorities burned almost all their records about
these camps when finally forced to leave Kenya.

U.S. and British media alleged that Kenya’s Land and Freedom
Army was just a “tribal struggle� conducted by the Kikuyu—
just as, 50 years later, President George W. Bush and Prime
Minister Tony Blair claim the Iraqi resistance is confined to
the “Sunni Triangle.�

Concentration camps were set up for Kamba and Maasai people,
too. Ole Kisio died in combat leading Maasai fighters. Luo
political leaders Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga demanded Jomo
Ken yatta’s release. Fitz de Souza and other lawyers of Asian
origin defended prisoners.

Stymied by their failed attempts to defeat the Mau Mau, the
British military decided to starve them out, cutting off
their supplies. This was real “ethnic cleansing.�

Over a million Kikuyu were forced out of their homes. They
were driven into 800 “emergency villages� built by their own
slave labor—a tactic also used by the British in Malaya and
the Pentagon in Vietnam. White settlers and Kenyan
mercenaries called the “Home Guard� brutalized Kikuyu in
these fenced-in areas.

“Operation Anvil� swept nearly half of Nairobi’s Kikuyu
population into the camps on April 24, 1954. Anyone found
with a union card was picked up as well.

The world was shocked when 11 prisoners were beaten to death
in the Hola camp on March 4, 1959. Colonial authorities
claimed at first that they had died from drinking
“contaminated water.� The United Nations did nothing.

“You had to knock the evil out of a person,� explained senior
prison officer John Cowan, in charge of Hola and other camps.
Cowan later got a plush job with the Bank of England.

Cut off from its support network, Kenya’s Land and Freedom
Army was finally overcome by British planes and tanks.

But 20,000 Mau Mau guerrillas didn’t die in vain. Neither did
hundreds of thousands of other Kenyans, whether murdered in
concentration camps or killed by hunger and disease in the
emergency villages. An independent Kenya was born on Dec. 12,
1963.

The last of the Mau Mau leaders—Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi—
had been captured on Oct. 21, 1956. He was hanged on Feb. 18,
1957, in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison outside Nairobi.

Tony Blair and George W. Bush shed crocodile tears for
Africa, but Tony Blair’s government refuses to even reveal
where Kamathi’s body is buried. None of the bodies of the
hanged Mau Mau martyrs was returned to their families.

Oppressed people aren’t even supposed to mourn their heroes.
But Africa remembers. The date of Kimathi’s execution is
commemorated annu ally. Streets are named for him. Mau Mau
veterans have filed a lawsuit for reparations.

They are being avenged wherever people fight for land and
freedom.

“Imperial Reckoning� and “Histories of the Hanged� can be
purchased from Leftbooks.com.