Britain’s systematic use of force against the Mau Mau

At 74, Jane Muthoni Mara has seen it all. She walks with a slight stoop, is slow of speech, but her eyes pierce the soul. At that advanced age, nothing betrays her past, not even those piercing eyes and the mound of greying hair on her head, which she covers with a scarf.

But Muthoni carries within her a pain that words can never explain. She was aged only 15 when colonial guards raided her home in Embu on accusations that she was a Mau Mau sympathiser. Indeed she was, for she had been supplying food to local fighters in the bush when she was spotted, she believes, by a home guard who reported her to the authorities.

When she heard the knock on her door, she knew the end had finally come. She, alongside other such sympathisers, was taken to a holding camp for interrogation. She did her best to co-operate with the interrogators, but they had other ideas about her.

Muthoni, young and terrified to her teenage bones, was still trying to reconcile herself to the fact that she was now officially a criminal when the doors to the interrogation hut burst open and four guards strolled in.

They sized her up and one, ever so slowly, reached for her. She made to stand, but it was too late. There was no way she was going to escape this.

The leader lifted her up and, in one brutal move, slammed her on the ground. She tried to break free from him as the others watched, but he was too strong for her. The more she struggled, the tighter his grip on her became. To properly subdue her, he held her by the shoulders and pinned her to the ground, her legs flailing in the air.

The man then beckoned two of the other men standing guard to join him. Each grabbed one of Muthoni’s arms while another prised open her thighs. She could see her interrogator, named Edward, sitting on a stool a few yards from her feet. Edward then asked one of the guards to “bring the bottle”.

Muthoni says she has never felt so violated in her life. Pinned to the ground and her screams attracting neither attention from outside nor remorse from her attackers, she almost lost her senses when the men thrust the glass bottle filled with hot water into her.

Pain and anguish

Her story, one of the many that formed the basis of a court case against Britain for compensation over atrocities committed in the colony during occupation, brought to the fore the pain and anguish that thousands endured in the struggle for independence. It all started in the years between 1884 and 1885, when, after decades of contact through exploration missions, European nations organised a conference aimed at coming to an amicable agreement over who would control what part of Africa.

That is the politically correct way of talking about the meeting of colonists that officially marked the beginning of the scramble for, and partition of, Africa.

At the conference, which took place in Germany, Britain claimed Kenya — alongside other African nations like Uganda, Sudan and the present Zimbabwe — as its possessions.

What followed was British occupation and rule that has been described by historians as one of the most brutal in all colonies. The herding went on for decades before natives organised themselves into self-defence armies and headed for the bush.

A lot has been written about their struggle, but there is a certain part of that history that remains largely unknown; the response of the colonial administration to their attempts. Only those who took part in the struggle, most of whom, like Muthoni, are nearing their sunset years, can ever tell the true story of destruction and maiming that followed their armed struggle.

However, recently declassified documents show a colonial approach to matters that bordered on genocide. Under the directive of the colonial administration, British soldiers and African home guards descended on the forest fighters and their entire families in a wave of well-calculated and executed violent raids that spared no one.

In 1952, an official state of emergency was declared, leading to forced ‘villagisation’ where close to a million natives were rounded up and forced to live in barbed wire enclosures under the watch of security agents. The numbers of deaths that arose from the entire uprising from 1952 to 1963 remains a mystery, ranging between 25,000 and 300,000, depending on who you talk to. The Kenya Human Rights Commission says about 90,000 were either executed or maimed and over 160,000 detained in appalling conditions.

“From the inception of the detention camps, the colonial administration engaged in widespread acts of brutality,” says the human rights body. “Detainees were subjected to arbitrary killings, severe physical assaults and extreme acts of inhuman and degrading treatment. The acts of torture included castration and sexual assaults which, in many cases, entailed the insertion of broken bottles into the (reproductive tracts) of female detainees. Camp guards engaged in regular severe beatings and assaults, often resulting in death.”

Martyn Day, Senior Partner at law firm Leigh Day that represented 5,200 Kenyan victims of that torture, agrees: “These crimes were committed by British officials and have gone unrecognised and unpunished for decades,” Mr Day argues. “They included castration, rape and repeated violence of the worst kind. Although they occurred many years ago, the physical and mental scars remain.

“Many of those who were detained and tortured were never tried and had little or nothing to do with the Mau Mau insurgency.

Dilution technique

KHRC reports that, in 1957, the colonial administration decided to subject the detainees who still refused to cooperate and comply with orders to a torture method known as “the dilution technique”, which involved the systematic use of brute force to overpower Mau Mau adherents, using fists, clubs, truncheons and whips. This brutality would continue until the detainees cooperated with orders and ultimately confessed and repented of their alleged Mau Mau allegiance.

Historian David Anderson, writing in Histories of the Hanged, Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the end of Empire, reports that the dilution technique was officially endorsed by the Colonial Office in Britain and implemented in five camps on the Mwea plain in March 1957.

“The technique was administered under the command of a British Colonial Officer Terence Gavaghan and was named ‘Operation Progress,” he writes. “The colonial administration thereafter authorised the extension of the dilution technique to other camps, including those at Athi River, Aguthi and Mweru, all of which became known as “filter camps”.

“In short,” says KHRC, “the dilution technique was used as part of an orchestrated regime of systemised violence which had been approved at the highest levels of the British Government and which resulted in grave injuries and, in many cases, death.”

In March 1959, 11 detainees were killed by camp guards in Hola. An inquest found that each death was caused by shock and haemorrhage due to multiple bruising caused by violence. A public outrage ensued.

Over the years since Kenya gained independence, there has been a call for the British government to take responsibility for its actions during the struggle. Those calls have been met with disdain — until now.

Foreign Secretary William Hague last week told the House of Commons that the government regrets the abuses, but fell short of a full apology.

“I would like to make clear now and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the Emergency in Kenya,” said Mr Hague. “The British Government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place, and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence. Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn.”

London agreed to pay a total of Sh2.6 billion to 5,228 claimants in the case, as well as “support the construction of a memorial in Nairobi to the victims of torture and ill-treatment during the colonial era”.