The flogging of natives was the pillar of British colonialism

One Thursday morning, just over 14 years ago, outside a Nakuru court room, President Moi whipped Dr Richard Leakey. Of course, he did not personally flog the famous white Kenyan; he just made it possible for some Kanu youths to do so.

Dr Leakey had on June 20, 1995, formed Safina, a political party, to oppose the ruling Kanu. The president, never known to miss a trick, must have decided that Dr Leakey was getting a little uppish and needed to be slapped down.

He had announced that Dr Leakey, a descendant of a colonial, was a foreigner who wanted to reinstall colonialism. Presumably, therefore, he was fair game.

The palaeontologist had on August 10, 1995, gone to Nakuru where fellow Safina member Koigi wa Wamwere was being tried on the trumped-up charges of robbery with violence. The Kanu youths’ lashes left marks on his back.

They used hippo and rhino-hide whips, or nyanuthu in Kikuyu. The hippo-skin whip was a colonial symbol of subjugation.

Symbolically, and literally, the youths turned the tables. Mr Moi had a unique sense of poetic justice and grasp of colonial history. Flogging was used as a terror tactic to keep the natives in their place. From Nigeria to British Bechuanaland (now Botswana), the colonials used brute force to spread fear and defeat.

The natives were flogged on their bare buttocks or backs to induce maximum pain for infractions, including insubordination and laziness.

It was an accepted method of stamping authority. In Australia, the chief justice was reported on October 18, 1889, by an Adelaide newspaper, Christian Colonist, as telling natives it was in order for them to be flogged by their white masters.

Colonial ideologues held that Africans, because of their “childlike nature”, understood body pain better than incarceration as punishment. They viewed flogging as a powerful deterrent on “savages”.

Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao, authors of Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, state that “the peculiar demands of establishing colonial rule over primitives” required flogging. They describe flogging as “an adjunct to the civilising mission”.

Tens of thousands of natives were flogged each year. But the most famous single incident in British Africa took place in front of a Nairobi courthouse on March 14, 1907, some 88 years before the Moi flogging of Dr Leakey.

Referred to nonchalantly by British officials as “the flogging of natives by certain Europeans in Nairobi”, the incident was reported by the London Daily Mail under the heading, Native Peril in East Africa. But it was more of white peril.

The story said “three Negroes” were “publicly flogged in front of a Nairobi courthouse, in the presence of a large crowd, by Capt Grogan, president of the Colonists’ Association.” The report said they were flogged “in consequence of their having insulted white women and gone unpunished by the authorities”.

At about 10 o’clock on that Thursday morning, a crowd of more than 100 settlers cheered as Capt Grogan, who later became a colonel, brought into town three Kikuyu rickshaw drivers with their hands tied behind their backs to flog them in public “for insulting my sister and a lady friend”.

He also brought a Maasai, a Mkamba and a Mkavirondo to witness the flogging. “I selected different tribes so as to let the news circulate among different tribes,” he later explained.

“I told them to tell their own fellow natives that white men would not stand by any impertinence to their women-folk.

“I then gave one of the boys 25 lashes,” he said. “When I finished the kiboko I used... the crowd closed in around me, and I did not see what followed.”

What actually followed was that two of his fellow Europeans whipped the other two “boys”.

One of the Europeans was Russel Bowker, who said it had always been his first principle to flog a nigger on sight who insults a white woman.

“I have always found that where natives are treated with laxity, they become insolent, and when insolent to white women they go further and attempt to commit grave crimes,” he said rather matter-of-factly.

“I felt it my bounden duty to take the step I did, and that in a public place as a warning to the natives,” he added.

gigirimwaura@yahoo.com