Abstract
‘Poor Mitchell, though a first-class Governor in many ways, had been entirely caught out by the Mau Mau movement and had told the Colonial Office there was no serious danger,’ Sir Evelyn Baring, who replaced Sir Philip as Governor in 1952, told Margery Perham after independence.1 Although cheerfully paternalistic in manner, Sir Philip Mitchell did not socialize with Africans and had sounded preoccupied by the thought that they had not invented the wheel.2 Because Baring had nearly chopped off his arm with an axe, there was a three-month gap while he recuperated between Mitchell’s departure and his own arrival. In the course of it only one high-profile arrest was made, that of Jesse Kariuki, who had made a speech inciting the police to disobey orders.3 But the police, increasingly frustrated at the lack of response to their warnings of really serious subversion, claimed that events were taking a set pattern. First, there would be a political meeting in some area at which Kenyatta was the main speaker and for which crowds were shuttled in from Nairobi; next Mau Mau meetings would occur in that same area, at which oaths were taken and dead dogs hung up in front of the houses of non-supporters; then would follow the murders. During the three months before Baring arrived thirty-six witnesses who had been subpoenaed had been assassinated as well as twenty-four headmen.
‘I speak the truth and swear before Ngai [God] and before everyone present here that if I am called upon to fight or to kill the enemy, I shall go, even if that enemy be my father or mother, my brother or sister. And if I fail to do this, may this oath kill me, may this thenge [he-goat] kill me, may this seven kill me, may this meat kill me.’ (One of the seven parts of the batuni (platoon, or warrior) oath)
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Notes and References
Rhodes House, Howiek Papers Mss Afr s.1574 Interview of Evelyn Baring (Lord Howiek) by Dame Margery Perham, 19 November 1969. Baring added that he had inherited a constitution that was ‘absolutely fatal’, with an unofficial majority and only one African member.
Information: Colin Legum.
About 400 Kikuyu, however, had been convicted before October 1952 for offences relating to Mau Mau, which had been proscribed as an illegal organization in August 1950.
B[ritish] D[ocuments on the] E[nd of] E[mpire], Series A Vol. 3, David Goldsworthy (ed.), The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951–1957 Part II Politics and Administration (London: HMSO, 1994), doc. 286, pp. 234–8 Baring to Lyttelton, 10 October 1952. Lyttelton, ‘Situation in Kenya, 13 October’. CAB 129/55, C(52)332, 13 October 1952.
J. C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau (Government Printing Office, Nairobi, 1954), p. 16.
PRO CO 822/1909 Thirteenth Council of Ministers, 27 April 1960.
Rhodes House, Howiek Papers.
Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom 1921–1963 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975), pp. 66–8.
Mau Mau has no meaning in any of the languages used in Kenya, nor was it used as a password by the conspirators. Kaggia says the word muhimu, which is the Swahili for ‘important’, was employed as a code for oathing ceremonies.
Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 1921–1963 (East African Publishing House, 1975), p. 115.
As with some other Africans, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians seems to have been Kaggia’s favourite text.
Interview with Bildad Kaggia, Nairobi 1961.
Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, p. 66.
John Spencer, Kenya African Union, pp. 204–6, 239n.3
Interview with Kaggia, Nairobi 1961.
Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau (Praeger/ Pall Mall, 1966) pp. 270–1.
Interview with Kaggia, Nairobi 1963.
Interview with Kaggia, Nairobi, 1963.
Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, p. 82.
Kaggia interview, 1963.
Mbiyu Koinange and Achieng Oneko, Land Hunger in Kenya (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1952) sets out in moderate language the full African case against the British treatment of the land question. They demanded ‘the real implementation of Britain’s declared policy’. Politically they required as an interim measure 22 elected MLCs, equal to the combined non-African representation.
The summary which follows of the ‘Mau Mau’ organization draws heavily on two published sources: Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom and Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru.
Kaggia in Drum, no. 237, January 1971. Roots of Freedom, pp. 109–10.
Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, pp. 113–14.
Information: Colin Legum.
Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, pp. 114–15.
Rhodes House, Howiek Papers.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Series A Vol. 3 Part II, doc. 286, pp. 234–5. CO 822/338 no. 14A, undated manuscript minute by Lyttelton. Dr Lonsdale makes the point that ‘hooliganism’ was also the word Kenyatta was using in his speeches about Mau Mau.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, doc. 287, n. 3. CAB 128/25, CC 85(52)1 14 October 1952.
Figures of casualties during the Mau Mau Emergency are analysed by Bennett and Smith in D. A. Low and Alison Smith, History of East Africa Vol. III, pp. 132–3.
He was a member of the famous Leakey family. Blundell, So Rough a Wind, p. 111.
Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) House of Commons Vol. 505, 21 October 1952, cols 866–9. Vol. 507, 7 November 1952 cols 456–553 (Lyttelton 456–67).
Parliamentary Debates Vol. 507, 7 November 1952, cols 503–14.
A. Fenner Brockway, Outside the Right (George Allen & Unwin, 1963), pp. 55–62 and 100–13.
Brockway, Outside the Right, p. 103.
East Africa and Rhodesia, 23 October 1952.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, docs. 192 [‘Commonwealth Membership’: Cabinet memorandum by Lord Swinton with Appendix, 11 October 1954, pp. 29–42] and 193 [‘Commonwealth Membership’: brief by Sir N. Brook for Sir W. Churchill, 1 December 1954, p. 43]. CAB 129/71, C(54)307. PREM 11/1726F.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, doc. 195, pp. 45–6. CAB 128/27/2, CC 83(54) 7 December 1954.
A. J. Hughes, East Africa: The Search for Unity (Penguin, 1963), pp. 222–3.
Interview with Kaggia, Nairobi 1963.
Oliver Lyttelton, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (The Bodley Head, 1962), p. 418.
There was also a court ruling against the actions of the British administration in Uganda. In his oral history interview at the Bodleian Lennox-Boyd gives a misleading impression that the Kabaka’s return was agreed upon as soon as he took over. I am grateful to Dr Philip Murphy, author of the forthcoming biography of Lennox-Boyd, for clarifying for me the sequence of events.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, doc. 299, p. 274. Minute by W. A. C. Mathieson, 29 November 1956. PRO CO 822/912.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, doc. 298, Twining to Gorell Barnes, 12 November 1956.
The literature on Mau Mau includes O. W. Furley, ‘The Historiography of Mau Mau’, in Bethwell A. Ogot, Politics and Nationalism in Colonial Kenya (HADATH/East African Publishing House, 1978), pp. 105–33;
Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya (Pall Mall Press, 1966);
David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau (James Currey, 1987);
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee (OUP, 1963);
Donald Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (Macgibbon & Kee, 1966);
Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (Heinemann, 1967);
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Book II: Violence and Ethnicity (James Currey, 1992);
Malcolm Page, KAR. A History of the King’s African Rifles and East African Forces (Leo Cooper, 1998).
A. J. Hughes, East Africa: The Search for Unity (Penguin, 1963), pp. 118–19.
Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, pp. 115–17.
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee, foreword by Margery Perham (OUP, 1963), pp. 25–7. John Spencer, Kenya African Union, pp. 239–40.
See also Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, pp. 56–9, and F. D. Corfield, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau (HMSO, 1960).
Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, p. 57.
Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee, pp. 29–30. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, pp. 118–19.
Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru, pp. 113–22.
John Lonsdale, ‘Constructing Mau Mau’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series Vol. 40 (London, 1990), especially pp. 242–3. ‘If it was enough to say with Blundell, that they included “masturbation in public, the drinking of menstrual blood, unnatural acts with animals and even the penis of dead men”, then even a dirty mind must shrink from exploring further.’
Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within.
John Lonsdale, ‘Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought’, in Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley II, pp. 453–4, which challenges an earlier view that this tragedy arose from an entirely separate feud. ‘By the end of 1956 the Kikuyu Guard were reckoned to have killed 4,500 Mau Mau, not far off half the total insurgent dead, and to have lost 730 men of their own.’
Rosberg and Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau, p. 333. But the stereotypes so attributed were not only those made by Europeans but also by other African tribes.
Bennett and Smith, ‘Kenya from “White Man’s Country” to Kenyatta’s State 1945–1963’, in History of East Africa Vol. III, pp. 132–3. The exact total of executions was 1,015. More than a half were for ‘possession of firearms’ or ‘consorting with terrorists’. House of Commons Vol. 551, cols 145–6, 25 April 1956. Asian deaths through Mau Mau were three in the security services and 26 civilians.
Rhodes House, Young Papers, Mss Brit.Emp. s.486, 5/3 ff 100–7. Macpherson to Young, 23 December 1954; Young to Baring, 28 December 1954.
Lennox-Boyd interviewed by Alison Smith, Bodleian Modern Mss Library, Mss Eng C.1433 East Africa, ff 264–5.
For example, the report by R. M. A. Hankey, British Charge d’Affaires in Cairo in FO 371/102721 JE1023/2 of 27 August 1953, that the Egyptian President Neguib had received Joseph Murumbi as Vice-President of KAU and that ‘two disgraceful articles’ had appeared in the newspaper Al Tahrir about Mau Mau’s ‘gallant resistance’, one of them by the editor, Anwar Sadat. Hankey had told Foreign Minister Fawzi that he must see to it that this sort of error did not recur, because otherwise he would find it made his job ten times more difficult.
After James Mwangi Kariuki had taken the first ‘Mau Mau’ oath, he asked if it was all right for him to continue recruiting for KAU. He was told that he could but must not disclose his new allegiance to KAU members (Kariuki, ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee, pp. 27–8).
Macharia was placed on trial in 1959, when his statement that he had lied at the Kapenguria trial was believed but his allegation that he had been bribed to lie was not.
Montagu Slater, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (Seeker & Warburg, 1959); Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, pp. 260–76.
Murray-Brown, Kenyatta, pp. 291 and 294–5.
Sir Michael Blundell, So Rough a Wind (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), pp. 123–8.
Rhodes House, Evelyn Baring, in interview with Margery Perham.
Gen. Sir George Erskine, ‘Kenya, Mau Mau’, 23 November 1955. Text of talk in Imperial War Museum.
The Ministers under Baring were: R. G. Turnbull (Chief Secretary), J. Whyatt (Legal Affairs), E. H. Windley (African Affairs), J. W. Cusack (Internal Security and Defence), C. H. Hartwell (Education, Labour and Lands), A. Hope-Jones (Commerce and Industry), E. A. Vasey (Finance and Development), Major F. W. Cavendish-Bentinck (Agriculture), L. R. Maconochie-Welwood (Forest Development, Game and Fisheries), W. B. Havelock (Local Government, Health and Housing), I. E. Nathoo (Works), B. A. Ohanga (Communal Development), M. Blundell and A. B. Patel (without Portfolio). Ohanga was defeated as soon as African MLCs became elected, as was James Jeremiah, who was made the only African Parliamentary Secretary.
Blundell, So Rough a Wind, p. 178.
EAS, 15 January 1956. The Muthaiga club was the white settlers’ classiest hideout in Nairobi.
Goldsworthy (ed.), BDEE Part II, doc. 296: W. L. Gorell Barnes for Lennox-Boyd, ‘The franchise in East and Central Africa’, 15 October 1955, pp. 257–60. PRO CO 822/929 no. 26. The draft was approved by Lennox-Boyd on 22 October and the policy was accepted by the Cabinet Colonial Policy Committee on 10 November. PRO CAB 134/ 1201, CA5(55)2.
It was calculated that 60 per cent of adults were thereby enfranchised instead of, under Coutts, 40 per cent.
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© 1999 Keith Kyle
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Kyle, K. (1999). The Politics of Mau Mau. In: The Politics of the Independence of Kenya. Contemporary History in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377707_3
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