This paper is a book review concerning the violence n Kenya in the late 1940s and 1950s. Kenya is relatively unique in the anti-colonial literature because of the Mau Mau movement, a bloody and violent sect that sought to eject the equally bloody British from Kenya. This work is critiqued and praised in turn, ultimately failing because of its lack of comparative treatment. No convincing analysis on the uniqueness of the Mau Mau is offered. There are no innocent victims: colonization brutalizes colonizer and colony alike. That is the thesis of this book reduced to one sentence.
It is rare that anti-colonialism in Africa is done without violence. But some of the worst types of violence were found in the Mau Mau rebellion after World War II in Kenya. This paper will be a review of one of many recent works on this rebellion, its causes and its effects on Kenya and Africa. This review will be divided into three parts. The first is a general description of the anti-colonial rebellion and its causes. The second will be a description of the major issues, both theoretical and practical, the book raises, and lastly, by way of conclusion, a general critique of the methods and basic approach of the author. I.
The Mau Mau Rebellion: Some Basics Colonialism in Kenya took on the same coloring that colonialism takes throughout the world, the French in Algeria, Jews in Palestine, the English in Ireland. Colonialism is the domination of an empire over the native culture of the colonized. In turn, it gives rise to elitism in multiform ways. First, in the creation of the domination itself, where the metropole gradually imposes itself (especially economically) on the colonized, distortion is created. Second, it creates a settler culture where a small group of privileged immigrants from the metropole take up residence in the colonized country.
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These settlers take a large share of the economic produce of a country and create great resentment. Making matters more complicated, these settlers remain citizens of the mother country, and hence, this latter is dedicated to protecting them from the consequences of their rapacious behavior. At the same time, these settlers take on the most militant and troublesome point of view relative to the colonized population, demanding greater and greater military force to be applied to the colonized.
Third, the metropole usually promotes loyalists (or at least moderates) of the colonized population into positions of power in order to ease the rule of the metropole over the colonized peoples. Kenya, of course, had all three of these elements. The British colony in Kenya was economically exploitative, created a white settler movement (the Kenyan highlanders) and created a corps of “chiefs” who were salaries and were granted large tracts of land in return for their loyalty.
All three of these elements must be taken seriously in all forms of anti-colonial agitation, for they work together: usually, the concentration of economic wealth is connected to both the metropole’s dominance, the foreign elite and the local elite. Hence, there is a multi-variate war occurring at each and every step of the anti-colonial struggle. In Kenya, the main asset was land, and, especially after World War II, land to grow coffee and cocoa, the two major Kenyan exports. This land was dominated by both the local elite and the foreign elite (9-12).
After World War II, the economic struggle grew fierce (17ff).
This economic struggle was fueled by the coffee-boom that took off after the war, and white settlers raced to claim more and more land, even outside f the colonial administration’s control. The settlers, like the French in Algeria, developed a life of their own, still demanding the protection of the metropole. More and more of the Kikuyu land was brought under white cultivation, and the “chiefs” were brought in with greater powers to hopefully keep this tribe under control.
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The Kikuyu was an elite tribe, maybe a little less than a third of the entire population, who made up the dominant local class of farmers and merchants. They had prospered in the early years of British occupation, but began to slowly get squeezed out of their farms and businesses as white settlement expanded after the war (21ff).
The Kikuyu, in other words, were soon to begin waging a war of independence for economic motives, as a means of getting back what they had lost to the settler movement and to take advantage of the west’s seemingly endless demand for coffee and chocolate (31ff).
Basically then, the situation by the late 1940s looks like this: the formerly elite Kikuyu tribe has lost much of its early elite status. Its land has been taken by settlers, and settlers have created an infrastructure of both dehumanization and local control that needs to be broken for the tribe to bounce back. Both population pressures and settler control are forcing wages down, and more and more formerly independent farmers are now tenants of the settler population and their local elites. As a result, several movements developed, as described by the author on pages 12-15.
First, the conservatives, these were made from what was left of the Kikuyu elite, large farmers and businessmen, and a fraction of the missionary movement. The moderate nationalists will eventually be the winners in this struggle, as their spokesman becomes the famed Jomo Kenyatta (”the light of Kenya”), these are the middle class and the bulk of the missionaries. Lastly, the militant nationalists, represented eventually by the Mau Mau revolt, who, in mast cases, were the black nationalists and the more or less anti-Christian forces in the country.
The underlying causes of the revolt were several, but the author concentrates on two major ones: the land reform struggle and the struggle over the practice of female circumcision. The first is at the heart of the economic struggle. The moderates formed under the Kikuyu Association (similar to the Irish Land League) that demanded a rational land reform that would return profitable land to African control. The demands were relatively moderate, but were refused by the British authorities partially due to the violence of the settlers, who would hear of no such thing (27ff).
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This was bad enough, but the debate over female circumcision brought a cultural edge to the struggle. The practice of female circumcision had been practiced in east African society for a long time. It was supported by the bulk of the population, but most missionaries and elites had loathed the practice, and it was used often to assert the superiority of European values over African ones (20-21).
The nationalist movement of both wings supported the practice, giving more of a push to the revolutionary movement.
While the moderates had failed at land reform (which is the really efficient cause to the Mau Mau violence) they gained quite a bit in the defense of the practice of circumcision of females. While Kenyatta is in exile, his presence is still felt in Kenya. Ultimately, this man will come out of the anti-colonial struggle as the first native political leader of the country since colonization. He rejects the use of force and the tribal divisions in the country. He rejects the later Mau Mau revolt, but has no problem in benefitting from it.
He believes in a multiracial society and racial tolerance (333-336ff).
He, while under British attack for must of his revolutionary years, becomes the “moderate” the British were hoping for. Nevertheless, his persecution by the colonial authorities at the insistence of the settlers was extremely counterproductive. The revolt lasts throughout the 1950s, and sets the standard for other later African revolts. Hence, several issues develop within the actual violence. Given the divide and rule tactics of the British, the country is both tribally and economically split.
Religion also plays a role here. Formerly elite Kikuyu are removed from the land and even squatters are removed by force. There is a small elite and mostly Christian element of the Kikuyu tribe that is under attack from the more militant element of the revolt, and this will be the prime target for the Mau Mau in such atrocities as the Lani Massacre (126ff).
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The Lani attack led to the deaths of roughly 300 loyalists, pro-British (or at least moderate) Africans who sought to use the all-black home guard to defend their settlement against the Mau Mau, however poorly armed they were.
In some ways, the massacre was a warning to the timid (similar to Irish IRB violence against suspected loyalists), in others, to gain access to British weapons. Both were successful, and the moderates, while ultimately successful, were very much afraid (130-155).
Ultimately, the Mau Mau will kill far more Africans than whites, as only a few dozen settlers are ultimately killed. Nevertheless, while the Mau Mau was inferior in weapons and tactics, they had determination, toughness and, most of all, public support (Anderson’s analysis of “General China” is instructive in this regard, cf.
233-240).
Hence, the divisions in Kenyan society make the rebellion far more difficult, and the British, while slow to respond at first, eventually engage in as much brutality as the Mau Mau, which is the real subject of this book. In other words, the British used the Mau Mau as an excuse for violence and dehumanization (95-99).
The book is very well written, and one of the main reasons for this is that Anderson is capable of using both local issues and broader contexts both separately and together, as the occasion permits.
Local questions such as the methods of the Jack Scott offensive, the eccentric practices of “Bwana,” or the trials of the Mau Mau themselves are woven into a grander narrative of economic dislocation, oppression, cultural cleavage and status changes. Hence, the book can be used by ethnographers as well as historians. Furthermore, the author, unlike many in this field, seeks to be as dispassionate as possible, a method which, truth be told, assists the basic thesis here, that the British merely used Mau Mau violence to cover up their own.
The “Jack Scott” offensive will set the tone for the British response to the Mau Mau (cf. 62-68).
Torture, mass imprisonment and a refusal to deal with the root causes of the rebellion show great similarities to Ireland, something this reviewer saw throughout the book. Jack Scott, so called, acts as the “black-and-tan” movement in the British colonial troops in Ireland. In other words, the jack Scott approach is to assault, kill, and maim one’s way to dominance. As in Ireland, this approach backfired, specifically in making a mockery of the moderate pleas for peace.
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But the (literally) colorful Bwana (David Drummond) shows the lengths that the security services went to attack the revolutionaries (cf. 87-90ff).
Painting himself brown, going to every conceivable length to hunt down Mau Mau leaders is included in this narrative not only to give it some color and tell a very interesting story, but to show the violence of the British as contested and compared with the Mau Mau. II. Major Issues The basic chronology of the rebellion is really not the purpose of the book, or this review.
The broader point is to bring up the issues that make sense out of the rebellion, its extreme forms of violence and the British response. While the list here might be considered arbitrary, this list is meant to provide the basic theoretical and tactical points the book brings up in order to explain and authentically understand this rebellion. 1. The Mau Mau, while no doubt violent to the extreme, was as much reacting to British provocation as anything else. For a long time, the British press was loaded with atrocity stories that both justified the empire as well as dehumanized the opposition to it.
The British view, very important to Anderson, was that both the circumcision issue as well as the Mau Mau was proof that the British mission was just: to bring civilization to the savages (95-100, also 125ff).
2. The white settler culture was the great catalyst for the British violence. Settlers, such as in the Gaza Strip, Algeria or Ulster, are often the most militant of the colonial mentality. They would not give up anything, and were the real cause of the violence, since it was their rapaciousness that led to the British refusal of land reform and the economic monopoly of the two great Kenyan exports.
At the same time, this foreign oligarchy distorted Kenyan development to such an extent that it was easy to link economic depravation with national aspirations. This is an immensely potent theoretical element of the book: colonialism is almost non-cognizable without the existence of such an oligarchy. 3. The British, at the outset of the rebellion, set up a concentration camp system for the prisoners of war, making the situation far worse than it had to be. By the mid 1950s, there were roughly 70,000 members of the Kikuyu tribe detained without trial (297).
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Sometimes these were ominously called “re-education” camps reminiscent of communist “corrective labor camps” as well as the British attempted extermination of the Afrikaners in 1900-1901. The attack on this latter people argues against the cliche “racial” interpretation popular in the literature in this field, and in fact, one can argue that the concentration camps for the white Afrikaners were the first use of a systematic and scientific form of “re-education.
” In many ways, the moral high ground that the British empire had won in defeating the Nazis and (at this time) fighting the communists was washed away with the revelations of these camps and their nefarious purpose. 4. Nothing is as absurd as the trial of Kenyatta himself, a moderate. The trial, as Anderson notes, cost the British a solid 20,000 pound bribe, making a mockery out of the already rigged trial system. Anderson notes that of the initial set of 3000 Mau Mau put on trial, about 1000 were hung in one of a series of mass hangings (cf.
173) that permitted the rebellion to take nastier and nastier turns (152).
Beatings and torture were regular at these trials, and “informants” were often lying, settling scores, or simply being bribed or threatened. 5. It remains however, that the Mau Mau cannot be romanticized. It is possible that they may have maintained the high ground, but since the bulk of their efforts were against more moderate members of their Kikuyu tribe, they lost this high ground. Ultimately, it was Kenyatta and his followers who successfully claimed the moral mantle of national liberation.
The great strength of this book is that, unlike some others, it does not seek to romanticize the rebel movement, but realistically see the strengths and weakness of both sides. Colonialism does not merely hurt the colonized, but it brutalizes the colonizers as well. Anderson suggests throughout the book that the Mau Mau were not merely an agent of national liberation, but in fact, opposed to the traditional form of African leadership as well: the chieftain system combining religious with political authority.
They seem to be a highly modern nationalist group seeking a modern Kenya based on industry and socialism, not the traditional agricultural movements of the moderate wing. The work here is critical in the best sense of the term. Anderson does not reduce this story to a morality play between conquered and conquest. There is no “innocent victim. ” All are victims. If the thesis of the book can be reduced to a sentence, that would be it. III. Conclusion: A Critical Appraisal The work’s greatest strength is its evenhandedness. But the basic thesis of the book, that no one is innocent in such wars, makes perfect sense.
If no one is innocent, if crimes are committed all around, then it would require an author to be evenhanded. The descendants of settlers are not morally culpable for their settlement, and hence cannot be judged on such terms. The racial angle is pleasantly played down. Given that the British empire equally brutalized the Irish and Afrikaners (the former for a far longer period of time) the racial argument dissolves. It may have been successful in mobilizing American and British blacks in the 1960s, but it does not fit the pattern of British colonialism, where race means nothing, profits and power, everything.
It seems from this book, and others on British colonialism, that a “white” person was someone who supported the aims of the Empire, regardless of skin color. The racial angle here is both irrelevant and exceptionally cliche. And it is a major strength of the work that it is largely avoided. Secondly, the stress on the trials is another major strength here. The basic chronology of the rebellion can be gleaned from Wikipedia, so to repeat it is redundant. What is more important is motivation, of perceptions, and this is the main strength of the work overall.
Two things seem to linger: first, that political ideology did not matter, but religion did. In fact, when one completes this book, one comes away with the idea that one of the most important variables for predicting which Kenyan would be on what side of the divide is religion. Christians were either conservatives or moderate nationalists, as the Mau Mau sought to recapture some version of a pre-colonial religion. Thirdly, the economic element of the events is stressed. This is of central importance and the book (and really any treatment of such rebellions) would be pointless and incomprehensible.
The rebellion finds its efficient cause, a cause that adequately explains the rebellion, in the gradual disenfranchisement of the elite Kikuyu people. The global economy is skillfully brought into the picture in that the spike in the coffee prices was sparked by the war, and later turned into a continental addiction. This is the cause of the taking of more and more formerly native land under settler cultivation, leading to a land hunger and a tenant farmer status for the bulk of the Kenyan population regardless of tribe.
Hence, the model is: global economic adjustment (the war), leading to local adjustments and a new motive for profits, and lastly, these in turn adequately explaining and accounting for the open violence of the rebellion. Fourthly, there is a gap in this work, a gap that is highly understandable, and this is the nature fo the Mau Mau. While other rebellions in Africa did not produce such a group, Kenya did. Is it possible to make a parallel between the Maroons of Jamaica and the Mau Mau? Were the basic economic conditions present? Can all of this be reduced to coffee? And what of the huge American market?
While American coffee addicts went to Latin America for their brew, could this intense competition have anything to do wit the intensity and inflexibility of the settler movement in Kenya? Furthermore, the disappointing lack of parallel with Ireland irritated this reviewer. Nearly all the conditions were the same in both countries: population pressure, land hunger, an elite settler population, outrageous treatment of rebels, dehumanization, the “civilizing mission” myth, religious superiority, single crop dependence, and many other variables make the parallel almost irresistible.
It should have been included. But even further, there is no parallel with the Mau Mau in Ireland, and even the Defenders do not fit the bill, for as the latter was a secret society, they had no secret rituals and macabre tendencies like the Mau Mau. Even still, a clear parallel between the Mau Mau and Defenderism could have been made for the sake of a scientific control variable, but was left out. Leaving the reader with an engaging but non-comparative and hence non-scientific treatment of the subject.
