Nasty, Brutish and in shorts? British colonial rule, violence and the historians of Mau Mau

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following for reading earlier drafts of this essay: John Lonsdale, Giacomo Macola, Allison Pearson and Ato Quayson. I would also like to thank my Master's students at LSE for displaying remarkable enthusiasm for this subject and thus reviving my own. I am also hugely indebted to Terry Barringer. Notes 1. This argument can be found in Vigdis Broch-Due (Ed.), Violence and Belonging: The Quest for Identity in Post-colonial Africa, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. See in particular Chapter 2 by Amrik Heyer, ‘“Nowadays, they can even kill you for that which they feel is theirs”: gender and the production of ethnic identity in Kikuyu speaking Central Kenya’, pp. 41 – 49. 2. As examples of the current trend, see Patrick Chabal, Ulf Engel and Anna-Maria Gentili, Is Violence Inevitable in Africa: Theories of Conflict and Approaches to Conflict Prevention, Leiden: Brill, 2005; and Christopher Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006. 3. For a recent study of the state-sponsored violence, see Monica Thakur, ‘A critical analysis of the Ugandan regime's foreign policy in the DRC conflict and the Great Lakes Region of Africa’, DPhil thesis, London School of Economics, 2005. 4. For two examples, see Zeric Kay Smith, ‘The impact of political liberalization and democratization in ethnic conflict in Africa: an empirical test of a common assumption’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 38 (1), 2000, pp. 21 – 40; and Bruce Berman, Eyoh Dicksin and Will Kymlicka (Eds), Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, Oxford: James Currey, 2004. 5. See, for example, the discussion on the poetics of violence in N. L. Whitehead (Ed.), Violence, Oxford: James Currey, 2005, esp. his introduction ‘Cultures, conflict and the poetics of violent practice’, pp. 3 – 24. Poetics here refers to the way in which violent death and suffering generates of itself an idiom of meaning. 6. Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005; and Suzette Heald, Controlling Anger: The Sociology of Guisi Violence, Oxford: James Currey, 1998. 7. For a pioneering study of this, see M. F. Chingono, The State, Violence and Development, Aldershot: Avebury, 1996. See also Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 8. South Africa following the collapse of apartheid has been the subject of much scrutiny; more recently Sierra Leone, the new favourite in view of the huge UN involvement in reconciliation; and more generally the rehabilitation of child soldiers. See, for example, L. S. Graybill, ‘Pardon, punishment and amnesia: three African post-conflict methods’, Third World Quarterly, 25, 2004, pp. 1117 – 1130; Tim Kelsall, ‘Truth, lies and ritual: preliminary reflections on the truth and reconciliation commission in Sierra Leone’, Human Rights Quarterly, 27, 2005, pp. 361 – 391; and Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck, Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa, Oxford: James Currey, 2005. 9. Patrick J. McGowan, ‘African military coups d'état, 1956 – 2001: frequency, trends and distribution’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41(3), 2003, pp. 339 – 370. 10. For an extremely useful overview, see Mark Leopold, ‘Violence in contemporary Africa reassessed’, African Affairs, 104, 2005, pp. 685 – 700, especially his discussions of definitions of violence. 11. This radiated from Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the End of the Twentieth Century, New York: Vintage, 1997. 12. Leading the field was Paul Collier, Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implication for Policy, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000. See also Mats Berdal and David Malone (Eds), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. 13. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 1996; T. Mkandawire, ‘Post-colonial “rebel movements” in Africa: towards an explanation of the violence against the peasantry’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 40, 2002, pp. 181 – 216; and Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, London: Zed Books, 2001. 14. See, for example, discussions in Jon Abbink & Ineke van Kessel, Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, Politics and Conflict in Africa, Leiden: Brill, 2005. More generally, see John Kekes, Facing Evil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999; R. F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1996; and Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Toronto: Random House, 2003. 15. A sample of the enormous literature on the various theories of the origins and nature of the violence would include Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959 – 1994: History of a Genocide, London: Hurst & Co., 1995; L. Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, London: Zed Books, 2000; G. H. Stanton, ‘Could the Rwandan genocide have been prevented?’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 2004, pp. 211 – 228; Peter Langford, ‘The Rwandan path to genocide: the genesis of the capacity of the Rwandan post-colonial state’, Civil Wars, 7, 2005, pp. 1 – 23; Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998; and Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 16. P. Richards (Ed.), No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, Oxford: James Currey, 2005; Whitehead, Violence, in which the majority but not all the chapters are on Africa; and Harri Englund, ‘Conflicts in context: political violence and anthropological puzzle’, in Broch-Due, Violence and Belonging, pp. 60 – 74. 17. The practice of land inheritance, which had moved much more towards a pattern of transfer from father to son during the colonial period, has been challenged by the economic strength of women, thus matrifocality has threatened the dominant masculine system and produced terrible tensions. Heyer ‘“Nowadays they can even kill you”’. 18. Paul Richards, ‘To fight or to farm? Agrarian dimensions of the Mano River conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone)’, African Affairs, 104, 2005, pp. 571 – 590. 19. Mark Leopold, Inside West Nile: Violence, History and Representation on an African Frontier, Oxford: James Currey, 2005, esp. ‘Imperial encounters: the Lado Enclave and the birth of the Nubi, 1913 – c.1850’, pp. 180 – 130. 20. For the latest example of putting the history back into violence, see Preben Kaarsholm (Ed.), Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa, Oxford: James Currey, 2006. 21. Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Terence O Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, Oxford: James Currey and Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000; M. Mamdani, When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001; and Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, revised edn, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006. 22. Mkandawire made this accusation in ‘Post-colonial “rebel movements” in Africa’ and Ellis then defended himself by arguing that he was explaining why the violence took the forms that it did. See Stephen Ellis, ‘Violence and history’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41, 2003, pp. 457 – 476. His critic remained unconvinced: T. Mkandawire, 'A rejoinder to Stephen Ellis, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41, 2003, pp. 477 – 484. 23. See Inge Brinkman, A War for People: Civilians, Mobility and Legitimacy in South-East Angola during the MPLA's War for Independence, Cologne: Rudiger Koppe Verlag, 2005; and review by John Lonsdale, Journal of Southern African Studies, 32, December 2006. 24. See, for example, a bitter exchange on this point raising the matter of the compromising effect of Belgian government funding. Didier Goyvaerts, ‘Review of L'Afrique des Grands Lacs’, African Affairs, 97, 1998, pp. 577 – 578; and Filip Reyntjens, ‘A dubious discourse’, African Affairs, 98, 1999, pp. 119 – 122. 25. See, for example, Richard Dowden, ‘State of shame’, The Guardian, 5 February 2005, Review, p.14; Bernard Porter, ‘How did they get away with it?’, London Review of Books, 3 March 2005, pp. 3 – 5; and Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2004. 26. Max Hastings, ‘Dark side of empire’, The Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2005. 27. Scathing attacks in journals include Susan Carruthers, ‘Being beastly to Mau Mau’, Twentieth Century British History, 16, 2005, pp. 489 – 496; Bethwell Ogot, ‘Britain's Gulag’, Journal of African History, 46, 2005, pp. 493 – 505; and Pascal James Imperato, ‘Differing perspectives on Mau Mau’, African Studies Review, 48, 2005, pp. 147 – 154. See also David Elstein, ‘The end of Mau Mau’, New York Review of Books, 52, 2005, p. 56; and exchange with Bernard Porter and Porter's reply, London Review of Books, 2 June 2005, p. 4. Nevertheless, despite such a range of verdicts, the book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, a tremendous achievement. 28. Past historiographical surveys include Oliver Furley, ‘The historiography of Mau Mau’, in Bethwell A. Ogot (Ed.), Hadith 4: Politics and Nationalism in Colonial Kenya, Nairobi: 1972, pp. 105 – 133; E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, ‘The production of history in Kenya: the Mau Mau debate’, Canadian Journal of International Studies, 25, 1991, pp. 300 – 307; Robert Buijtenhuijs, Essays on Mau Mau: Contributions to Mau Mau Historiography, Leiden: African Studies Centre, 1982; and Frederick Cooper, ‘Mau Mau and the discourses of decolonization’, Journal of African History, 29, 1988, pp. 313 – 320. For the most authoritative treatment to date, see John Lonsdale's discussion of ‘The problem’ in ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, in John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley. Book Two: Violence and Ethnicity, London: James Currey, 1992, pp. 282 – 302. 29. F. D. Corfield, The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey, Cmd 1030, London: HMSO, 1960. 30. P. Murphy and J. Lewis, ‘“The Old Pals Protection Society”: the Colonial Office and the press on the eve of decolonisation’, in Chandrika Kaul (Ed.), Media and the British Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. 55 – 69. 31. For example, Mau Mau: A Pictorial Record, London: 1953, available from Royal Commonwealth Society Collection, Cambridge University Library. On the fetishization of Mau Mau violence in European minds, see John M. Lonsdale, ‘Mau Mau's of the mind: making Mau Mau and remaking Kenya’, Journal of African History, 31, 1990, pp. 293 – 321. 32. Joanna Lewis, ‘“Daddy wouldn't buy me a Mau Mau: the British popular press and the demoralisation of empire’, in E. S. Atieno Odhimabo and John Lonsdale (Eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, Oxford: James Currey, 2003, pp. 227 – 250; and Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1981 – 1964, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 33. Philip Murphy, Alan Lennox Boyd: A Biography, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999; Ronald Hyam and Wm Roger Louis (Eds), The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1957 – 1964. British Documents on the End of Empire Series A, Vol. 4, London: HMSO, 2000, esp. Part 1: High Policy, Political and Constitutional Change. 34. L. S. B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, London: Methuen, 1954, pp. 85 – 86. 35. J. C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau, Nairobi: Government Printer, 1955. 36. For a survey of some of the wide-ranging pamphlets published at the time, see ‘Mau Mau's war of words: the battle of the pamphlets’, in James Raven (Ed.), Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 222 – 246. 37. One outstanding exception has been Frederick Cooper's scholarship, including Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in British and French Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. And for an extremely useful periodization of colonial studies, see Cooper, ‘The rise, fall and rise of colonial studies’, in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 33 – 58. 38. Stephen Ellis, ‘Africa's wars of liberation: some historiographical reflections’, in Piet Konings, Wim van Bingsbergen and Gerti Hesseling, Trajectoires de liberation en Afrique contemporaine, Paris: Karthala, 2000, pp. 69 – 92. 39. Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee, London: Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 129 – 130. 40. Margery Perham, ‘Foreword’, in ibid., pp. xi, xiv. 41. Donald M. Barnett & Karai Njama, Mau Mau from Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya's Peasant Revolt, London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1966. 42. Carl G. Rosberg Jr and John Nottingham, The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya, New York and London: Pall Mall Press, 1966. John Nottingham, unusually for his time, married a Kikuyu and is currently active in a reparations campaign working closely with Caroline Elkins. 43. Mania wa Kinyatti, ‘Mau Mau: the peak of an African political organisation in Kenya’, Kenya Historical Review, 5, 1977, pp. 287 – 311. 44. Bethwell Ogot, ‘Politics, culture and music in central Kenya: a study of Mau Mau hymns, 1951 – 56’, Kenya Historical Review, 5, 1977, pp. 275 – 286. 45. For example, see Jomo Kenyatta, Suffering without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation, Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1968, p. ix. 46. See Marshall S. Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory and Politics, Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1998 for an extremely useful compendium and detailed analysis of this long established genre. 47. For example, Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964 – 71, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. 48. Tabitha M. J. Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905 – 1963, London: James Currey, 1987. 49. Frank Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective, London: James Currey, 1989 and T. O. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study, California: University of California Press, 1985. 50. Furedi, The Mau Mau War in Perspective, p. 7. 51. S. B. Stitcher and J. L. Parpart (Eds), Patriarchy and Class, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988; and N. J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, Stanford, CA: California University Press, 1976. 52. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 53. For example, K. Santili, ‘Kikuyu women in the Mau Mau rebellion’, Ufahamau, 8, 1977 – 78, pp. 143 – 59; Cora Ann Kaplan, Kikuyu Women, The Mau Mau Rebellion and Social Change in Kenya, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. 54. Luise White, ‘Separating the men from the boys: constructions of gender, sexuality, and terrorism in central Kenya, 1939 – 1959’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23, 1990, pp. 1 – 25. 55. Lynn M. Thomas, ‘Mau Mau and the girls who “circumcised themselves”’, in Thomas, The Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 79 – 102. 56. Wambuyi Wayaki Otieno, Mau Mau's Daughter: A Life History, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 57. On the renaissance of colonial studies and widening out of imperial history more generally, see Cooper, Colonialism in Question, esp. pp. 33 – 58. Two key articles that exposed the contradictions and the impact of African social differentiation were John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, ‘Coping with the contradictions: the development of the colonial state in Kenya’, Journal of African History, 20, 1979, pp. 487 – 506; and John Lonsdale, ‘The Depression and the Second World War in the transformation of Kenya’, in D. Killingray & R. Rathbone (Eds), Africa and the Second World War, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 97 – 142. 58. Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination, London: James Currey, 1990. 59. David Throup, Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945 – 1953, London: James Currey, 1987. 60. My own research was inspired by these two works and was an attempt to write a social, cultural and gendered history of colonial governance, emphasizing the horizontal local divisions and vertical alliances with London, through studying a department whose activities and non-activities had a role to play in the emergence of rehabilitation as a strategy in 1954. Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Colonial Kenya 1925 – 1952, Oxford: James Currey, 2000. 61. See, for example, Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944 – 1960, London: Leicester University Press, 1995. 62. David W. Throup, ‘Crime, politics and the police in colonial Kenya, 1939 – 63’, in David M. Anderson and David Killingray (Eds), Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917 – 65, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 127 – 157. 63. Mainly Antony Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952 – 60, Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers, 1976; Ranald Heather, ‘Intelligence and counter-insurgency in Kenya 1952 – 56’, Intelligence and National Security, 5, 1990, pp. 57 – 83; and David A. Percox, ‘British counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952 – 56: extension of internal security policy or prelude to decolonisation?’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 9, 1998, pp. 46 – 101. 64. For example, see Peter Hewitt, Kenya Cowboy: A Police Officer's Account of the Mau Mau Emergency, London: Avon Books, 1999. For an inflated account of the individual's role, see T. Gavaghan, Of Lions and Dung Beetles: A ‘Man in the of the Colonial in Kenya, Arthur H. 1999. For the examples, see Terry Empire: An of and Studies, London: of Commonwealth Studies, The was L. (Ed.), of in Southern Africa, London: James Currey, See also T. Ranger, ‘The of the of Africa’, in T. and O. (Eds), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa: Essays in of London: Press, in with pp. – and B. J. Berman, and the African state’, African Affairs, 97, 1998, pp. – For a example, see B. and their in Kenya, – Oxford: James Currey, 1999. David W. & Politics in Kenya: The and and the of the in the Oxford: James Currey, and John New 2002, pp. 16 – 18. J. Lonsdale, ethnic and political the of the in (Ed.), in pp. – This is on my reading of John Lonsdale, ‘The of Mau Mau: and in Kikuyu political in and Lonsdale, Unhappy pp. – 69. p. See discussion of in pp. – at end of the a for violence and of women and was a the end were as the the and and who of the in the and Mau Mau from Oxford: James Currey, 1997. p. See also pp. – 320. 74. pp. – One was the of a the of a had been by an extension were on the of against who had to their would their to by their p. For example, see generally D. R. and the of the in Colonial Kenya, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, and gender and the politics of the East African in Journal of African History, pp. – ‘The and the war against Mau Mau in Kenya’, Journal of African History, the late studies of were See M. ‘The in during the Mau Mau and – and African Studies, pp. – For example, see P. Kenya or the ethnic violence and the politics of the in Kenya, – African Affairs, 40, 2005, pp. – 50. ‘The Mau Mau political in of pp. – The impact on the history of the was a key in John Lonsdale and E. S. (Eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration, Oxford: 2002. This the of current scholarship, and Kikuyu identity and British and of the p. pp. 222 – ‘The pp. – 18. ‘The the pp. – Review of Journal of British Studies, 2005, pp. – 86. ‘The p. 4. Imperato, ‘Differing perspectives on Mau Mau’, p. of New 2005, pp. – 52. John ‘The of Mau Mau: and in Kenya in the a African Affairs, The were the and the the they had been as and in the they were on pp. – For a on the violence as through see ‘The of in Marshall Clough, Mau Mau pp. – 92. Robert Mau Mau: An African New York: Free Press, For example, of as is on p. 42. ‘The p. 17. This is from Whitehead with to studies of violence more See Whitehead, Violence, p. 60. Corfield, The Origins and Growth of Mau For a on British of African and see ‘The of colonial to in British East Africa’, Journal of African History, 2006, pp. – For an argument the nature of violence and the on the from political see ‘The of in Whitehead, Violence, pp. – Contemporary for such is See, for example, to as a strategy for local in Africa, 2006, pp. –

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