Truth is, we look for acquaintance, we crave a connection; it's human nature. So let me tell you... Cry, my beloved country...
Truth is, we look for acquaintance, we crave a connection; it's human nature. So let me tell you that the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction went to Caroline Elkins for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, $29), published in Australia as Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Jonathan Cape, $69.95). That subtitle of the US edition caused my heart to lurch and freeze when I read it because I have a connection that has haunted me all my life.
Gulag is Elkins's description of policies the British government sanctioned in Kenya colony in the 1950s and early '60s to punish and destroy Mau Mau, the Kikuyu tribe's resistance to decades of colonisation during which the British government had systematically taken their land in favour of white settlers, my maternal grandmother among them.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, British explorers raised the Union Jack over one-quarter of the world's landmass, usually without a murmur from bemused indigenes. These included the many peoples native to what would become known as Kenya. There was little protest and they looked on as civilisation arrived from Whitehall in the form of cockaded hats, schemes for development of resources, agriculture and infrastructure, and an end to the slave trade.
People who were considered subhuman black savages suddenly found themselves the fortunate beneficiaries of roads, railways, schools, hospitals, clothes, jobs, churches and eventually, for the brightest, the opportunity to travel to Britain for further education. It was more than they deserved because generally they were lazy, ungrateful, stupid, smelly, criminally minded and often possessed by barbaric impulses that made them inherently untrustworthy. With patience and constant supervision, however, they could be quite serviceable as labourers, servants, cooks, nannies, etc.
Consorting in any other way with blacks was unthinkable. Friendship and other relations were taboo because the spectre in the corner at any dinner party was black sexuality. It was widely believed black men had an appetite for white women as huge as their legendary genitalia. (White men also feared this made them irresistible to white women.) Similarly, black women were said to be insatiable and longing to ruin the moral fibre of the hapless white man (ignoring the widely practised custom of female circumcision). Such beliefs were common among Kenya's Europeans (the generic name for whites). To express any other view was to be branded "nigger-lover" and risk social ostracism. The underlying fear and consequent hatred also meant that appalling events revealed by Elkins (a professor of history at Harvard University) in Imperial Reckoning were inevitable.
To really understand these people and their actions, however, first study Robert Ruark's notorious Mau Mau novels, Something of Value and Uhuru. It was these books that Kenya's Europeans passed around like sacred stones because they told their story. Significantly, they were also read abroad, in Britain and the US in particular, as history.
Recently I found a first edition of Uhuru, inside which was a gift-giver's inscription: "To the Dunns -- with my hope that these doleful pages will give you a better understanding of what I have tried to explain on this complex problem of UHURU." It's signed "AP", dated "19.3.63".
Mau Mau was an initially haphazard but violent guerilla response by the Kikuyu to years of petitions, letters and delegations to London pleading that British justice might eventually be shared with them. Unfortunately for the Kikuyu, in the aftermath of two world wars Whitehall was desperate for land. Thousands of restless servicemen had been demobbed to unemployment, dim prospects and disgruntlement. The British government divined they might be appeased by a land grant. Kikuyuland's forests, rich soils, sunshine and rainfall made it a prime destination for heroes. That it was already inhabited did not deter the British Colonial Office.
By the 1950s, European settlement and sense of ownership was firmly in place. Kenya's "White Highlands" were deemed white man's country and not for a bunch of bloody nugus (monkeys) who wouldn't know a pyrethrum daisy from a coffee bean and wouldn't work the land if you paid them, anyway.
For most displaced Kikuyu, bare subsistence became the norm. The rest drifted to Nairobi's burgeoning slums where despair, seething resentment and exposure to radical ideas were the trigger for the birth of radical politics. A lucky few, including independent Kenya's founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, escaped abroad to such hotbeds of evil as the London School of Economics, Moscow and Cuba. The eyes of Kenya's self-exiled intellectual elite were opened to other possibilities. Black activism was born and with it a new gripe for Kenya's Europeans: the only thing worse than an uneducated black was a half-educated black. "Half-educated" meant a black man who believed the country should be returned to its indigenous owners when anyone knew it would be decades, if ever, before the black man was ready for such responsibility. The onset of Mau Mau was ineludible. Its consequences, for the Kikuyu, unknowably terrible and unjust.
Imperial Reckoning sets out in unflinching detail how Britain and Kenya's colonial administration responded. Make no mistake, Mau Mau was brutal, shocking and merciless. Women and children were murdered, livestock maimed and slaughtered and arson and sabotage were rife. It was a terror campaign of awesome effect not unlike that of 9/11 when a relatively small action provoked, through previously unimaginable fear, a colossal reaction. This may be because horror increases exponentially with the perceived nastiness of the weapons involved: shooting a person from a distance does not provoke the abhorrence felt if that person were to be hacked to death with a machete, or leapt to death, on camera, from the twin towers.
Yet white rage at Mau Mau provoked an official response so extreme, so calculated and so ghastly that successive British governments have suppressed all evidence. Elkins discovered very quickly that research in London was almost impossible because, despite the usual 30-year limit on release of official documents, those pertaining to Kenya's state of emergency have never been released; she could not access them. Rather, much of her evidence is eyewitness testimony from ageing survivors of the concentration camps (the Pipeline) and "villagisation" (work camps for women and children) in which more than one million Kikuyu were incarcerated; and in which tens of thousands -- men, women and children -- died. With unintentional irony, the gates of one camp, Ngenya, were adorned with the exhortation: "Labour and Freedom". As Elkins notes, similar slogans encouraged prisoners of Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes you free) and the Soviet Union's Solovetsky: "Through Labour -- Freedom!"
Meanwhile, the British government was permitting far worse in Kenya. Despite sustained campaigning by Labour MP Barbara Castle, a sophisticated government spin campaign not only covered up but also inverted the truth of "the emergency". Its effects continue to this day in fooling all of the (white) people all of the time. Perhaps they want to be fooled. University of Sydney anthropologist Ghassan Hage has said it's a mistake to see all racists as bad people.
As an irritating small child who sat quietly and digested the hushed conversations of adults, I was vaguely aware of things being awry. The emergency was long over but agitation for independence was in the air. Everywhere, young men and kids would hold two fingers high in the V-sign and yell "Uhuru!" (freedom!) at passers-by. Agitation for the release of Kenyatta from many years of detention (shades of Nelson Mandela) was gaining momentum. White Kenya was as jittery as it had been at the height of Mau Mau. On highland farms, servants were again banished from the house by sundown; my grandmother carried a .38 Webley in the front pocket of her pinnie (but had more faith in her kiboko, rhino hide whip, which was as well because the revolver was massively unwieldy and she was a lousy shot).
My mother, on the other hand, was as bolshie as ever and appalled the tennis club ladies by announcing that Kenyatta would make a terrific president and ought to be released. Whether this was a greater shock than her brazen friendship with a Kikuyu woman, a former prostitute who wore scarlet nail polish and glamorously straightened hair, I'll never know. What I now understand is that although my mother was a woman of her times and as exacting with our servants as any memsahib, she was, as a woman proudly born in Kikuyuland and steeped in its lore and magic, not a typical European.
She loathed Kenya's snobbish white society as only a barefoot farm girl who had taught herself English from a dictionary could. She had told her mother she was a fool to sell her farm for a pittance and leave for South Africa (great move, ouma!); and she told other wazungu (whites) that Kenya would not descend into the predicted post-independence bloodbath because the people were too decent and forgiving; so they'd better get used to it or get out.
I had a pretty white dress and veil made for my confirmation and I can still feel the heavy hands on my head of Leonard Beecher, archbishop of Mombasa and a collaborator with government atrocity as knowing as Pius XII. And so it goes.
Before reading Imperial Reckoning, I thought I'd had a fortunate and colourful upbringing in a beautiful country whose people I respected for putting behind them the well-meaning if paternalistic policies of colonial Britain. Mau Mau had been a nasty blip and a dirty little war waged by Britain against the Kikuyu; much worse for black people than Ruark had white Kenya believing but not really that bad. I now know otherwise. I was the beneficiary of policies and actions as heinous as anything devised by Hitler or Stalin. I didn't know then, but it doesn't make me feel any better now, and I am deeply troubled. What comforts me, perversely perhaps, is that my mother lies in an unmarked grave in Kenya, in good company with tens of thousands of her countrywomen.
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