Mau Mau’s blood, sweat, tears: Kenya’s dark phase during 1952 State of Emergency

On the night of October 20, 1952, Britain sent a battalion of troops and a cruiser to Kenya to control the rising political heat occasioned by violent demands for the end of imperialism and white supremacy.

The Lancashire Fusiliers were flown in from the Middle East, Uganda, and then Tanganyika in 12 planes in what was supposed to be a show of might as Britain feared that it might face guerilla warfare like the one it encountered in Malaya.

Seventy-one years later, debate on the British response to that challenge and its impact on Kenya has never ceased – despite attempts by a section of historians to portray the local demands as an internecine warfare.

The colonial government declared a State of Emergency and started a crackdown on moderates and radicals, throwing Kenya’s history into a dark phase.

Though the State of Emergency led to indiscriminate torture, death, and detention without trial – the British government has consistently refused to apologise to the victims of its attempts to hold onto one of its pricey settler colonies in Africa.

Many others were hanged – at times in public – to scare campaigners calling for the end of colonial rule and the removal of the 30,000 white settlers who had monopolised almost all the fertile land in the ‘white highlands’.

But the memory of this struggle – and the others that confronted the imperial regime – are today celebrated within the framework of Mashujaa Day, which is set aside to remember all the heroes who contributed to the making of the Kenyan nation.

As the State of Emergency started, 2,000 European volunteers joined the reinforced police patrolling Nairobi – the seat of colonial power – to defend what they called the ‘white man’s country’.

The previous night, and in a show of might, the Mau Mau fighters had burnt down the Nyeri Polo Club, which had hosted the Queen and Duke of Edinburg before she learned of her father, King George VI’s death, while on a Kenyan trip. To them, the destruction of British symbols of colonial power had started.

The State of Emergency and the ensuing crackdown were plotted in London after a meeting between the governor and the colonial office. Archival records show that the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd, had approved the imposition of the emergency after the October 6, 1952 murder of Chief Waruhiu Kung’u.

It was claimed that Waruhiu’s assassination was planned at the ‘Kiambaa Parliament’ by Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu. Evidence in the Migwe/Kamundia case pointed fingers at Chief Koinange and his sons, John Wesley and Noah Koinange. 

But Koinange hired a Queen’s Counsel and won the case. Chief Waruhiu had previously told the intelligence that he had unearthed a plot to kill all the colonial chiefs and white settlers in central Kenya.

Waruhiu’s murder stunned the 30,000 British settlers in Kenya for it signified that the colonial appointed African leaders were in trouble, and that people wanted to have a say on leadership.

Back in his office, Baring telegraphed the Secretary of State for Colonies and asked for troops, and in two weeks, they arrived just by the October 21 date when he had wanted to declare a State of Emergency.

For three months, starting August 1952, the Mau Mau freedom fighters frightened the Colony forcing Governor Evelyn Baring to seek help from London. On October 9, 1952, he wrote to Lyttleton that “Mau Mau was widespread” throughout Mt Kenya region and Nairobi.

Baring claimed that 75 per cent of the members were recruited through coercion and intimidation. Finally, he said that there was “unanimity of opinion” that Kenyatta and other KAU leaders were the instigators and planners of Mau Mau.

Lyttleton approved the request for Operation Jock Stock on October 14, giving ample time for the movement of troops to arrive in Kenya.

The aftermath of the emergency has led to one of the biggest shames of British colonial enterprise despite its attempts to silence demands of an apology and compensation. Some British historians prefer to label the post-emergency events as the “Kikuyu civil war” between the loyalists and radicals to cover up the British atrocities.

When it all started, and in a radio broadcast on October 20, the governor said, “the grave step of proclaiming an emergency has been taken most unwillingly. (That) there was no alternative in the face of mounting lawlessness in a part of the colony, and there was no other method of keeping the peace and protecting the lives and property of innocent men of all races”.

This was not to be -and some families continue to suffer 70 years after the emergency.

He further said that “the (emergency) measures taken by the government are aimed at those, and at those only, who in the opinion of the Government are responsible directly or indirectly for violence and state of disorder in a part of the Colony”.

It was a lie. Thousands of innocent people suffered as the crackdown started. The emergency rules were brutal: Police officers could stop and question anyone, ask for identity, and detain the person if they failed to explain why they were there at that moment.

The mere suspicion that a person acted in a manner prejudicial to public safety could lead to detention – which meant loss of land and freedom.

The governor could also order the detention of a person without trial to maintain law and order. Further, the District Officers were also given powers to impose collective punishments in Kikuyu Reserves by, among others, seizing vehicles and cattle and ordering the closure of businesses if the residents failed to produce suspected members of Mau Mau.

All the seizures were reported to the governor, who was the final authority for their release, forfeiture, disposal, or sale. The order was never challenged, and the proceeds were used to compensate ‘victims’ of Mau Mau.

At best, the loyalists used the opportunity to enrich themselves. Baring borrowed this form of punishment from the British 1951 war in Malaya and the Germans in their WWII escapades in Czechoslovakia. Overall, there were three operations: Operation Jock Scott, which was to arrest all the KAU leaders and the Mau Mau adherents; Forest Operations to clear the forests of the fighters and Operation Anvil, which targeted Mau Mau sympathisers and networks in Nairobi.

In early 1954, the Minister for Internal Security and Defence, Richard Turnbull (who would later become governor of Tanganyika) issued a statement accusing the “great majority of the Nairobi Kikuyu (as) either active or passive supporters of Mau Mau or are in tacit sympathy with the movement’s aims”.

By then, the Nairobi Eastland had witnessed an acceleration of hit-and-run crimes, with 100 cases of murder and manslaughter recorded in 15 months. For these, there were only a few successful prosecutions for lack of witnesses.

On April 25, 1954, the government started a mop-up of all Kikuyus in the largest sweep ever conducted on an African community. Over 30,000 people were removed from their homes and sent to camps as the militants set up inside the Aberdare and Mt Kenya forests, where they continued challenging the British authorities.

‘Operation Anvil’ in Nairobi started in April, running to May 1954, and cordoned off the entire city to arrest most central Kenya communities. About 50,000 residents in Nairobi were interrogated during the screening – the most brutal hunt ever seen in Kenya.

Kenyan historians Bethwell Ogot and William Ochieng admit that, ironically the Mau Mau war turned the political tide in Kenya.

“The settlers lost the colonial state and lost the White Man’s country. The future of everybody stood starkly at stake because of the Mau Mau. In this sense, the rhetoric of Mau Mau – land and freedom- became the turning point around which future Kenya was to be built… The second irony is also a paradox; Mau Mau played a constructive role, albeit unwittingly, in that the military defeat of the Mau Mau cleared the political arena and enabled the loyalists to re-emerge as nationalist politicians in the postcolonial society and made moderate competition a legitimate and effective vehicle for utetezi – the agitation for African independence. Some seven decades later, the Mau Mau discourse continues to be appropriated by politicians while challenging the status quo. It is a chapter that has yet to be closed.