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On the evening of March 26, 1953, the local Home Guard unit of the town of Lari in the British colony of Kenya was summoned to investigate reports of a body found an hour’s journey from the town. Arriving at the location, they found the disfigured corpse of a man left nailed to a tree next to a footpath so that he would be easily discovered. No sooner had they found him, however, then they saw fires breaking out in the direction of Lari, which they had left undefended. Hastening back to the town, they were horrified to discover dozens of people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, murdered by the armed gangs who had used the corpse to lure them out of town so they could attack the vulnerable community.
In the end, nearly a hundred people were killed in the Lari massacre, making it the bloodiest single incident in Kenya’s “dirty war” between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, and the British authorities. To David Anderson, the event was a product of far more than a struggle for independence from colonial rule, reflecting as well the deeper changes that had taken place in native African society as a consequence of British imperialism. Not the least of his achievements in this absorbing book is in showing how these larger and more relevant factors made the Mau Mau revolt not just a war of insurgency against an imperial power but a civil war among the native peoples, one that, while overlooked in popular conceptions of the conflict in contemporary Western coverage, still haunts Kenya to this day.
To demonstrate this, Anderson spends considerable space detailing the socioeconomic development of Kenya in the years leading up to the rebellion. Much of this was shaped by the land hunger of the British, who found in the highlands both fertile farmland a climate very much to their liking. Britons unable to afford the gentry lifestyle back home could replicate it in Kenya at a fraction of the cost, thanks to the support of a colonial regime that crafted policies that favored their interests. The influx of white settlers marginalized the indigenous Africans, who were forced into “reserves” and reorganized tribally to suit British expectations.
Resentment of British rule, coupled with population pressure and declining agricultural income, proved a fertile mix for resentment among the Kikuyu people, one of the ethnic groups native to the region. Anderson identifies three distinct political blocs within the Kikuyu community. Foremost among them were the chiefs, headmen, and Christian elders whose authority was based on their collaboration with the British colonial state. They faced opposition from two groups: Westernized moderate nationalists, and a more militant nationalist group that would serve as the foundation of the Mau Mau. Empowered by an influx of ex-servicemen from the Second World War, the latter group seized control of the moderates’ Kenyan African Union political movement in the late 1940s, turning their oath from a pledge of loyalty to a pan-ethnic movement into a commitment of support to more radical action.
The first acts of violence took place among the Kikuyu, as workers on white farms who refused to take the oath were beaten. Police investigations alerted the colonial state to the existence of the Mau Mau, who in the summer of 1950 moved to ban it. The government’s efforts to downplay the extent of the Mau Mau, however, placed the burden of the response on the conservative Kikuyu leadership in what became a contest for control over their community. Local leaders and police informers were assassinated and witnesses to these crimes were themselves murdered or intimidated into silence, frustrating legal prosecution. It was not until the murder of the first European and the assassination of a senior chief in October 1952 that the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, requested permission from London to declare a state of emergency in the colony.
What followed fully justified the label “dirty war.” The growing violence against terrified white settlers fed a dehumanizing vision among them of Mau Mau members as possessed of some form of mental illness, and added to their demands that the authorities be given a blank check to fight the insurgency. Despite priding themselves on “knowing” the Kikuyu, they erased in their minds any distinctions between the Mau Mau and the moderate nationalists, which warped what had started as an internecine conflict into a simplistic Manichean struggle over white rule that only confirmed the settlers’ unwillingness to compromise. Confessions obtained by the police from Mau Mau suspects were subsequently recanted in court as the product of torture, yet the judges generally discounted such claims (even when confronted with visible proof) and accepted the initial statements as genuine. The Home Guard militia, formed by the authorities out of a nascent vigilante movement among loyalist Kikuyu, often abused their power and sometimes behaved as little more than sanctioned criminal gangs. By the time General George Erskine, a career army officer with counter-insurgency experience, took command of operations in June 1953, the security forces were out of control, with vengeance rather than justice the goal of many of their members.
After restoring a measure of discipline to his ranks, Erskine launched Operation Anvil, which detained thousands of Mau Mau, disrupted their presence in the capital, Nairobi, and broke up the supply lines for the Mau Mau fighters in the forests. Though two more years of campaigning lay ahead, the reassertion of British authority weakened the Mau Mau’s ability to terrorize the Kikuyu populace and allowed the loyalists to reassert themselves. By the end of 1956, relentless operations aided by intelligence from Mau Mau detainees had broken up the forest armies, with the survivors scattered throughout the Kenyan countryside. For the British the price of this success was high, as the “Emergency” in Kenya lingered on until 1960, while news of the detention of thousands of Mau Mau in harsh and unsanitary conditions sparked outrage at home, fueling the drive towards independence.
By 1963 the British were gone, replaced by an elected government dominated by the former loyalists and moderate nationalists. For the Mau Mau who fought to achieve it, independence mainly brought disappointment, as instead of rewarding them for their sacrifice the country’s new president, the moderate nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, preferred to bury a divisive past. Anderson’s framing of the conflict as a Kikuyu civil war makes this understandable, as he demonstrates the lingering political sensitivity over the conflict even decades later. Drawing upon police reports, court records, and other largely untapped archival holdings in both Kenya and Britain, he constructs a comprehensive description of a conflict from which few emerged with their honor intact. His reliance on them lends a legalistic focus to his account, which exposes the hollowness of British claims for the benefits and superiority of their rule, and adds to the power of his account of the collapse of their empire in the 20th century and its legacy for the newly independent nations that emerged. It should be read by everyone interested in the history of the “dirty war” and its legacy for Kenya today.
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