Staggering to his feet with blood oozing from his nose and mouth, Nderi Kagombe saw a double image of the guard standing over him, his club ready to strike again. In front of him lay the heavy metal bucket full of sand, urine and faeces that he had been carrying on his head for almost the entire morning. Exhaustion and a blow to his nose had sent him tumbling to the ground, head first into the splattering exrement, which caked his face. "He was shouting at me to get up, but I couldn't," he later remembered. " I was on my knees, but everything was moving and I couldn't see him properly because my vision had been affected from carrying the bucket for so long and from being beaten with the clubs."
After the warm-up of "bucket fatigue", as the camp authorities called it, Kagombe was kicked towards one of the brieze-block screening rooms that were scattered throughout the five detention camps that made up Mwea. There he saw two men strung up by their ankles, hanging from the rafters. They were naked and dripping wet from the cold water th at was being poured over their bodies. The man hanging nearest the door had blood and pus running from his nose, his face swollen and distorted. "The white man in charge was yelling at him", Kagombe recalled. "He was shouting to confess, but there was no way this man could have spoken even if he had wanted to... They never stopped. It was day and night until we gave in. Either you confessed, or you died."
Kagombe was a survivor. It had been nearly five years since he had first been sanitised, numbered and incarcerated as a suspected Mau Mau rebel against British colonial rule in Kenya, and he was still alive. But it would be another three years before the state of emergency, declared by the British governor in 1952, would finally be lifted. And it would be many decades more before the state of emergency, declared by the British governor in 1952, would finally be lifted. And it would be many decades more before the full horrific story of Britain's reponse to the Mau Mau rising would be told to the world. It is a story that deserves to be herad in full because it involved the incarceration of nearly one and a half million people; many tens of thousands of deaths - perhaps more than 100,000 - from brutality, starvation and systematic torture; and an official cover-up so thorough that, even today, few people have any idea that "Britain's gulag" ever existed.
Resistance to white rule in Kenya - which became a British colony in 1920 - had been growing since the end of the Second World War, and had erupted catastrophically in 1952, when a series of gruesome outrages by Mau Mau rebels coincided with the arrival of a new governor, Evelyn Baring. The insurgents claimed they were fighting for land and freedom, but widely disseminated pictorial evidence of their savage mutilations convinced most people in the West that they were criminals bent on terrorising the local European population.
The British mounted two responses to the rebellion. The first was in Kenya's remote mountain forests, where security forces engaged in a drawn-out offensive against about 20,000 Mau Mau guerrilla insurgents. After much brutality on both sides, the British finally seized the initiative. The military campaign was all but over when Dedan Kimathi, the elusive guerrilla leader, was captured and executed in 1956.
But the Mau Mau resistance still had enormous grass-roots support: hence the second and longer campaign, which was directed against a much larger civilian "enemy". The British and their African supporters targeted members of the Kikuyu population who were believed to have taken the secret Mau May oath and had pledged themselves to fight for land and freedom. The battlefield for this war was not the forests but a vast system of detention camps, where colonial officials reportedly held some 80,000 Kikuyu insurgents.
Officially, the object of this exercise was to educate and rehabilitate a population that was sinking into "savagery". That is the story that the official archives seem to tell about the project known as the Pipeline; and that is the story that I was intending to tell when I began my research into the detention camps of British Kenya.
It wasn't long before I found that countless documents pertaining tot he camps were either still classified as confidential - more than 50 years after the Mau Mau war - or were missing from Britain's Public Record Office and the Kenya National Archives. Where there should have been at least 240,000 official files on individual detainees, I could unearth only a few hundred. I came to learn that the colonial government had burned many of the missing files on the eve of its 1963 retreat from Kenya. And what was in them?
Evictions of Kikuyu, from the prime highlands claimed by white settlers to government-controlled "reserves" in western and central districts, had been going on long before the Mau Mau. But the deportations that began in 1953 were unlike anything before. Not only were they more thorough, but deportees were 'screened' by teams of interrogators, who were ruthless in their pursuit of information about the Mau Mau activities. The "third degree" (as local settlers called it) was widely used. Suspects branded as dangerous were shipped off to detention camps, while others were slated for final deportation to the reserves.
But this was only the beginning. Early on the morning of 24 April, 1954, Britain's military forces launched an ambitious operation to reclaim full full colonial control over Nairobi, the capital, by purging the city of nearly all Kikuyu living within its limits. Nearly 25,000 security force members began to cordon off the city for a sector-by-sector purging of every African area. The entire population - African, Asian, and European - was caught off-guard.
Loudspeakers affixed to military vehicles blared directives: pack one bag, leave the rest of your belongings in your home and exit into the streets peacefully. In some cases, there was no time. People were picked up on the street or at work, or the security forces knocked down their front doors. All Africans were then taken to temporary barbed-wire enclosures, where employment identity cards were used to determine tribal affiliations. The Kikuyu, as well as the closely related Embu and Meru, were seperated from the rest of the city's African population in prepation for on-the-spot, ad hoc screening, while members of other ethnic groups were most likely released and returned to their homes.
Dozens of people who were picked up during the operation told me of the confusion, fear and verbal or physical abuse they experienced. If they moved too slowly, or too quickly, they were beaten with clubs and rifle butts. If they spoke in the screening parades, they were often shipped directly to a detention camp. If a Mau Mau suspect protested about his rough handling, he would be hauled off and put in a "special police vehicle"; several of these suspects were never again seen. There was widespread seperation of families. Victims also recall seeing members of the security forces looting the houses of those they had picked up, or - in one case - having their clothes and belongings taken, put into an enormous pile and burned in front of them.
There does not seem to have been a conscious policy decision to conduct the campaign in such an oppressive way. On the contrary, the creators of the "Pipeline" programma included some of the most humane and liberal adminstrators in the colonies. But the men who ended up administering it were, for the most part, white settlers and colonial officers whose overwhelming priority was to extirpate the Mau Mau menace.
Nderi Kagombe's experiences give a flavour of the system. The owner of two shops that sold restaurant supplies in Nairobi's Bahati district, he was successful by the standards of the time, supplementing his income with a lucrative subletting business and managing to save money while also supporting his wife and children in Nyeri. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he had also taken the Mau Mau oath, although his involvement was limited to helping organise supplies. Then he was picked up, and everthing changed.
Over the next five years, he was moved through seven camps. Inmates were classified according to theri degree of demonstrated co-operation, from "black" - the most recalcitrant - to "white" the most co-operative. Those deemed to be "blackest", such as Kagombe, could find themselves graduating to ever more severe regimes. At Mackinnon Road, one guard was nicknamed Kenda Kenda ("nine nine") because of his policy of administering savage beatings to every ninth detainee.
At Manyani, the speciality was not just pain but intense physical degradation. One torture involved holding detainees upside down with their heads in buckets of water while alernating doses of sand and water were stuffed into their anuses. On Mageta, a mosquito-ridden island on Lake Victoria, whips, rubber hoses, truncheons and sticks were used, as were more inventive forms of torture. "A few times I saw the white man in charge order the guards to take the sap from a certain leaf and rub it all over a detainee who had been shackled to a post," said another former detainee. "Within no time the man would be covered with these mosquitoes, and it was such a terrible scene. If you saw these people, you would never have recognised them; their bodies had been devoured."
At the next camp - the dry, dusty, unbearably hot Lodwar - Kagombe and others were seriously beaten for refusing to work. They were taken off to Mwea, where, on arrival, they were told to take off their clothes. They refused. "The next thing we knew they set on us," Kagombe told me, "Several of them would just start beating us, and when some of us screamed they shoved dirt in our mouths. They beat one man, who was very injured already, unconscious. They ripped off my clothes and shaved off all my hair. Then they put a uniform on me and then pushed me into one of the cages. That was my reception into Mwea. I was in Hell." Mwea was, said another inmate, "where they finally broke us - where Satan defeated our God."
We will never know exactly how many Mau Mau camps and prisons there were. There is no single extant document that lists them all. Moreover, camps and prisons were constantly opened and closed. (This was, in part, a system of forced labour comparable to the slave camps of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.) By carefully studying the remaining colonial files, and cross referencing them with interview data and documents from private and missionary archives, I have been able to compile what I believe to be a near-complete listing of the camps and prisons in the Pipeline. There were more than 100, not including scores run by loyalist chiefs, and others run by private settlers.
Nor is it an easy matter to establish how many people were forced through the system. The official number is 80,000. Over time, the sheer number of detainees I found referred to in the files made me more and more suspicious of this figure. Upon closer scrutiny it became clear that the British had provided misleading detention numbers, giving "daily average" figures, or net rather than gross figures. In other words, the official number did not take into account all those detainees who had already entered and exited the camps. By going back through the documents and piecing together the intake and release rates, I determined the number of Africans detained was at least two times and more likely four times the official figure, or somewhere between 160,000 and 320,000.
Something else nagged at me. Except for a few thousand women, the majority of the camp population was composed of men, despite several files discussing the steadfast commitment of Kikuyu women to Mau Mau. I soon realised that the British did detain the women and children, but not in the camps. Rather, they kept them in some 800 enclosed villages that were scattered throughout the Kikuyu countryside. They were detention camps in all but name. Once I added all the Kikuyu detained in these villages to the adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually detained about 1.5 million people, or nearly the entire Kikuyu population.
Nor is it easy to evaluate the impact of this detention programme. There is no record, for example, of how many people died as a result of torture, hard labour, sexual abuse, malnutrition and starvation. If the British did keep records of these deaths, they were destroyed long ago. We can, however, make an informed evaluation of the official statistic of 11,000 Mau Mau killed by reviewing the historical evidence we do possess. Former detainees and villagers recall thousands dying; others remember being assigned to burial parties that disposed of hundreds of corpses in any given day; missionaries wrote of widespread famine; Kenya's medical officers described deaths from contagious diseases and malnutrition. There are also recollections from Asian lawyers, men such as Fitz de Souza, who remember representing thousands of detainees, none of whom they saw again. "By the end I would say there were several hundred thousand killed," De Souza later reflected. "100,000 easily, though more like 200,000 to 300,000. All these people just never came back when it was over".
The British colonial government undertook a census of the Africans in Kenya in 1948 and 1962. The Kikuyu population figure in 1962 is between 130,000 and 300,000, lower than one would expect from the growth rates of the neighbouring Kamba, Luo, and Luhya populations. Some of this may be due to a lower birth rate (presumably casued by such factors as malnourishment, disease, miscarriage, the absence of regular male partners and the psychological stress resulting from war trauma), the rest is likely to represent actual deaths. At the very least, it is safe to assume that the official figure of some 11,000 Mau Mau killed is implausible.
No less implausible is the argument that the British Government was unaware of what was going on. In early 1959, Victor Shuter, a former prison officer in Manyani and later Fort Hall and Mariira camps, presented the colonial government with a 15-page sworn affidavit, listing charge after charge of brutal abuse and cover-up. He named more than a dozen British officers, serving in the Prisons Department, the Community Development and Rehabilitation Department, and in the police force, who had perpetrated acts of cruelty, and he provided specific details of each offence (including one detainee having his head forced into a bucket containing excreta, and another being left "deaf and paralysed" after three weeks of daily beatings). According to Shuter, many of these offiers "carried home-made weapons of various kinds, with which they frequently and arbirtarily assaulted the detainees... These weapons were pieces of rubber hose filled with sand and tied at both ends, and short rhino whips known as kibokos."
He added that he had written numerous complaint letters to his superiors and to the superintendent of prisons but to no avail. Responses had ranged from "the camp was being run efficiently" to "some of us were being too lenient with the detainees". In response to his criticisms, Shuter had been "subjected to considerable open ridicule".
Countless other such letters were written between 1953 and 1963, many by inmates, revealing unspeakable brutalities and murders. The question of attrocities was also raised by a series of more senior figures. In 1953, for example, Canon Rodney Bewes reported to the governor various claims that had been made to him "by European policemen themselves". One had reported "that a fellow European policeman had picked up a man, had him laid on the ground with his legs apart, and had him beaten on the private parts in an attempt to extract a confession... Further information along this line was that some of the police had been using castrating instruments and that in one instance two men had died under castration". A report by Anglican church officials the following year repeated the "castration" claim and added the charge that "the hands of men shot have been cut off and used not merely to identify the victim but to extract information from their relatives".
Other distinguished protesters included Colonel Arthur Young, who resigned as Kenya's commissioner of police in 1955; Eileen Fletcher, a prominent Quaker, who published a pamphlet describing The Truth About Kenya in 1956; and the liberal idealist THomas Askwith, in charge of the rehabilitation aspects of the Pipeline programme, whose repeated objections earned him the sack in 1957. The concerns of all three were known to, at the very least, the governor - Evelyn Baring - and the colonial secretary - Alan Lennox-Boyd.
In due course, the question of teh treatment of detainees in Kenya began to be raised in Parliament: initially by Barbara Castle and, later, by Enoch Powell. Somehow Lennox-Boyd managed to argue away the evidence, insisting either that it was wrong or that the incidents were isolated.
Back in Kenya, Baring, likewise, had pat answers for all the charges, either declaring them unfounded or assuring that every effort was being made to look into them. Somehow a judicial inquiry was averted - and in 1963 the whole oppressive system came to an abrupt end, as Britain, realising that the war against the Mau Mau was unwinnable, returned Kenya to the Kenyans. Independence brought relief, but also an understandable desire by the country's new rulers not to dwell on the bitter divisions of Mau Mau.
In Britain, meanwhile, a general ignorance of the astonishing scale of the atrocities made it easy for any questions of guilt to be swept under the carpet. There was a widespread view that the presumably isolated instances that had come to light had to be understood in the context of Mau Mau. It had been a brutal war, it was argued, and the local British forces had done their best considering the bloodthirsty savagery of the enemy.
Ultimately, hanging in the balance was the whole rationale, past and present, for the British Empire. Decades had been spent constructing Britain's imperial image, and that image contrasted sharply with the brutal behaviour of other European empires in Africa. King Leopold's bloody rule in the Congo, the German-directed genocide of the Herero in south-west Africa, and France's disgrace in Algeria - the British reputedly avoided all of those excesses because, simply, it was British to do so. That is certainly what the British public believed - and probably what they believe now.
If only it were true.