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Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and the Origins of the ‘Mau Mau’ Emergency in Kenya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Bruce J. Berman
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Extract

In the twenty-odd years since the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952, the analysis of the phenomenon known as ‘Mau Mau’ has undergone a fundamental revision. The initial interpretation, advanced by the colonial authorities and their apologists and by a few (mostly British) scholars, explained ‘Mau Mau’ as a fanatic, atavistic, savage religious cult consciously created and manipulated by a group of unscrupulous, power-hungry leaders. It was said to be rooted in a mass psychosis affecting an unstable tribe freed from the anchoring constraints of tradition. It was also said to have had no direct links to socio-economic conditions in the colony or to the policies of the Kenya government. This interpretation, popularized by a large and sensational journalistic literature, went virtually unchallenged for more than a decade. During this period ‘Mau Mau’ and its antecedents were largely ignored by social scientists. As late as 1965, Gilbert Kushner could report that a search of major anthropological journals revealed, at best, only peripheral mention of Mau Mau. Where ‘Mau Mau’ was explicitly considered, the basic premise of the official explanation was generally accepted, and the phenomenon was treated as a nativistic cult or revitalization movement.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1976 , pp. 143 - 175
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

1 The most.complete statement of the official explanation is found in Corfield, F. D.. The Origins and Growth of Man Mau (London: HMSO.Cmd. 1030, 1960).Google Scholar Other sources emphasizing one or another of the facets of the official explanation include Carothers, J. C., The Psychology of Mau Man (Nairobi: Government Printer. 1954)Google Scholar; Roberts, Granville. The Mau Mau in Kenya (London: Hutchinson, 1954)Google Scholar; and Leakey, L. S. B., Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Methuen, 1952)Google Scholar and Defeating Mau Mau (London: Methuen, 1954).Google Scholar An account of the first presentation of the official version at the Kapenguria trials and the evidence used to support it can be found in Slater, Montagu, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (London: Seeker and Warburg. 1955).Google Scholar

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9 For a careful analysis of the level of violence during the consolidation of British control in the early years of colonial rule see Lonsdale, John, ‘Western Kenya: The Politics of British Conquest, 1894–1908’ (unpublished paper, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 10 1973).Google Scholar Disparities in force levels are reflected in the official casualty figures of the Emergency which report 11, 503 ‘terrorists’ killed as opposed to the loss of ninety-five Europeans (thirty-five civilians), twenty-nine Asians (twenty-six civilians) and 1,920 ‘Loyal Africans’ (1,819 civilians), (Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, p. 316Google Scholar). Unofficial estimates of the number of Africans killed by the security forces are much higher.

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11 See, for example, Wasserman, Gary B., ‘The Adaptation of a Colonial Elite to Decolonization’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1973)Google Scholar; and Emmanuel, Arghiri, ‘White Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism’, New Left Review, LXXIII (1972), 35–57.Google Scholar

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13 The character and political role of the Kenya Administration is explored more fully in my ‘Administration and Politics in Colonial Kenya’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1974).Google Scholar

14 The fullest analysis of the early decades of the Kenya Administration when many of the patterns discussed here began to take shape is Cashmore, T. H. R., ‘Studies in District Administration in the East African Protectorate, 1895–1918’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1965).Google Scholar

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17 While the metropolitan authorities possessed formal powers to control a colony's internal administration, these were essentially extreme controls clearly intended for use only in exceptional circumstances. They were usually invoked only when the affairs of a colony became a source of political controversy in Britain and a potential embarrassment to the Colonial Office or the Government. The London authorities were thus in a position that ‘made powers of persuasion more important than powers of command’ (Lee, M. J., Colonial Development and Good Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 54Google Scholar). The result was a delicate, complex and often protracted process of bargaining in which the individual colonial governments exercised considerable influence on the vague general policy principles enunciated in London.

18 Interview 2O1FS.

19 Interview 201FS.

20 Cashmore, , Studies in District Administration, passim.Google Scholar

21 Personal communication, July 1973.

22 Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957), p. 17.Google Scholar

23 Heussler, Robert, ‘British Rule in Africa’ in Gifford, P. and Louis, W. R., eds., France and Britain in Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 576.Google Scholar

24 Some of the maxims of the Provincial Administration have been recorded by Cashmore: ‘When in doubt create a crisis.’ ‘In each new district one has to have a showdown. Choose your battlefield and win. After that bluff will last to the end of the tour.’ ‘No officer is any use till he has served at least six months in a district.’ ‘Remember, one only finds the true reason for any African action months afterward.’ (Studies in District Administration, p. 55, fn. 3.Google Scholar) In addition, ‘All subscribed to that second of the Punjab principles that a shot in time saves nine’ (p. 58).

25 Interview 219F.

26 Perham, Margery, ‘Introduction’ to Heussler, Robert, Yesterday's Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. xx.Google Scholar

27 Wilkinson, Rupert, The Prefects: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). p. 4.Google Scholar

28 Sir Ralph Furse who directed the selection of colonial administrators in the Colonial Office for more than thirty years recounted his methods of work in Aucuparius: Memoirs of a Recruiting Officer (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

29 Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 491–6.Google Scholar See also Behrmann, Cynthia F., ‘The Mythology of British Imperialism’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1965).Google Scholar

30 Interview 04PB.

31 The ideology of traditional authority relationships is analysed in Bendix, Reinhard, NationBuilding and Citizenship (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 48–58.Google Scholar

32 KNA/Office of the Chief Secretary 1/1195, Chief Native Commissioner, ‘Speech to the United Kenya Club’, 06 1952.Google Scholar

33 Interview 218F, and Tatton-Brown, R., ‘How was Colonialism Justified: A Personal View’ (unpublished seminar paper, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, 1968), p. 8.Google Scholar

34 KNA/MAA7/126, P.C., Central Province to Deputy Chief Secretary, 6 December 1948.

35 The principal theorist of incrementalism, Charles Lindblom, incorporated the phrase used by the British to describe their approach into the title of one of his major papers: ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’, Public Administration Review, XIX (1959), 79–88.Google Scholar

36 It is important to point out that the issues involved critical decisions within the imperial relationship about the internal structure of the colonial political economy, i.e. whether Kenya was to be developed on the basis of European settler commercial agriculture or African peasant cash crop farming. The outcome in either case was a dependent primary-product export economy. For an analysis of the de facto growth of settler predominance and its effects in Kenya see Brett, E. A., Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa (New York: NOK Publishers, 1973), especially pp. 165–212.Google Scholar

37 In August 1933, the Tory Secretary of State, Sir Philip Cunliff-Lister, told the settlers' political leader. Lord Francis Scott that ‘no government in this country would ever agree to the claim on the part of the white settlers to govern on their own’. (PRO/CO533/436/3198/33, ‘Note by Sir Samuel Wilson on Discussion between the Secretary of State and Lord Francis Scott, at which Lord Plymouth and Sir S. Wilson were present’, 2 August 1933.)

38 KGL, ‘Kenya: Report by Lord Hailey Following His Inquiries in April, 1940’, P. 40.Google Scholar

39 In 1922 Governor Sir Robert Coryndon exclaimed in a despatch to the Secretary of State, ‘Upon my word, it seems as though none of my predecessors had ever thought of the future’ (PRO/CO533/280, Despatch of 17 09 1922).Google Scholar The lack of general policy was already in evidence before the First World War and drew several complaints from administrators. (See Cashmore, , ‘Studies in District Administration’, pp. 77, 92, 112, 117–20.Google Scholar) In 1929, during discussions of native policy in Kenya, W. C. Bottomley, an Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, noted that ‘It is I think in the possible absence of what I call a definite direction of Administration in Kenya, that the Colonial Government is most open to criticism’. (PRO/CO533/396/16040/1930, Minute of 12 March 1930.) From the unofficial side complaints about the lack of direction came from the missionaries (Oliver, Roland, The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1954), p. 254Google Scholar) and from settler politicians, one of whom stated, ‘Basically, I think the settlers’ criticism of the British administration was it never really made up its mind where Kenya was going’ (Interview 01PS).

40 Interview 201FS.

41 Interview 103F.

42 Heussler, , ‘British Rule in Africa’, p. 578.Google Scholar

43 Thus Governor Sir Philip Mitchell could write in a foreword to a book by one of his District Commissioners: ‘And what agreeable people these simple folk are, how like a breath of fresh clean air, in contrast to the fetid wickedness of Western civilization gone putrid in the hands of wicked men’: ‘Foreword’ to Hennings, R. O., African Morning (London: Chatio and Windus, 1951), p. 9.Google Scholar While three years later he commented in his memoirs: ‘it was, and is, to this day, a picture of simple, ignorant witch- and magic-ridden people at the mercy of many enemies …beginning to grope at long last towards escape from behind the Iron Curtain of the black ages of ignorance and terror. A people helpless by themselves…’: African Afterthoughts (London: Hutchinson, 1954), p. 26.Google Scholar

44 Interview 210S.

45 Interview 103F.

46 Interview 201FS.

47 Grigg, echoing the opinions of his field officers, wrote during the crisis over female circumcision:

There is no evidence of any acts or even any propaganda on the part of the association or of individual agitators that could be called definitely seditious… what I have to report to your Lordship therefore, is not a series of overt acts of opposition to government or of omission to comply with government's requirements, but the creation, and, I fear, the spread of an atmosphere of criticism and mistrust which may have unfortunate effects upon those of the native population who become involved in it.

(PRO/CO533/392/15921, Confidential Despatch no. 130, Grigg, to Passfield, Lord, 12 10 1929.)Google Scholar

48 PRO/CO533/392/15921, Grigg, to Passfield, , 12 10 1929.Google Scholar

49 PRO/CO533/384/15540, Sub File A, Major E. A. T. Dutton, to Bottomley, W. C., 25 11 1929.Google Scholar

50 According to one PC: ‘The politicians were the minority using their superior education or superior wit to persuade the people they lived among to believe whatever they chose to tell them in order to give themselves more political power and authority. Because at that time… the great bulk of people, even in Kikuyuland, were extremely ignorant and they could easily be persuaded that almost anything was true’ (Interview 214F).

51 The belief is mentioned repeatedly in the papers in KNA/DC/FH1/4.

52 This interpretation was stressed by H. E. Lambert, one of the Provincial Administration's most distinguished amateur anthropologists in a letter to the PC, Central Province, 15 June 1942 (KNA/DC/FH1/4).

53 For example, during the Taita Hills land dispute the DC insisted policy changes must be made before the leaders of the Taita Hills Association were released from detention ‘so that if adjustments are made they cannot in any way be attributed to their return’ (KNA/PC/Coast 1/108/63, DC Voi to PC Coast, 23 May 1942).

54 KNA/PC/CP8/5/2, Kangethe, Joseph et al. , Letter to Senior Commissioner Nyeri, 10 07 1926.Google Scholar

55 KNA/KBU/1/22, Handing Over Report, Vidal, M. R. R. to Fazan, S. H., 21 09 1929Google Scholar and PRO/CO/533/392/15921, Grigg, to Passfield, , 12 10 1929.Google Scholar

56 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, The Economic Development of Kenya (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 20–1, 340.Google Scholar

57 Kenyatta, Jomo, Kenya: Land of Conflict (Manchester: International African Service Bureau no. 3, 1945), p. 22.Google Scholar

58 This distinction is not, of course, absolute. As Brett (Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa) and others have shown, individual administrators between the wars did stimulate physical development and sporadically encouraged Africans to enter the monetary economy either as laborers or cash crop farmers. Nevertheless, administrators between the wars basically conceived of themselves as exercising the less activist guardian role. The post-1945 period involved a change in the intensity, scope and degree of organization and resources applied by the colonial government to ‘development’, and a concomitant shift in what was demanded and expected of field administrators.

59 KNA/MAA/9/929, PC, Central, E. H. Windley to Chief Secretary J. D. Rankine, 23 November 1948, and Chief Secretary, Memorandum to Deputy Chief Secretary, Chief Native Commissioner and Financial Secretary, 30 November 1948.

60 See the comments about KAU petitions in KNA/MAA/2/5/146, Assistant Secretary, M. N. Evans to Personal Assistant, Chief Native Commissioner, Minute of 17 March 1950.

61 Interview 218F.

62 Interview 219F.

63 KNA/PC/NZA3/1576, Low, H. H., DC Central Kavirondo, ‘Memorandum on Native Policy’, 8 12 1943.Google Scholar

64 KNA/DC/MKS15/3, ‘Minutes of the Provincial Commissioners' Meeting of 10–15 April, 1945’. The Annual Report of Native Affairs (Nairobi: Government Printer) for 1946–1947Google Scholar complacently noted that few of the aspiring African entrepreneurs ‘had resources in experience and capital commensurate with their ambitions, and gradually the disappointed, who were many, settled down to their former way of life’ (p. 3). Oginga Odinga asserts that the Administration actively harassed African efforts, including his own, to establish businesses; that it was impossible for Africans to get loans from banks; and that official trade regulations seemed to exclude Africans. He notes that ‘our economic effort was frowned upon not only because it was competition against established trading preserves, but also because it was a demonstration of African initiative and independence’. (Not Yet Uhuru, p. 89.Google Scholar)

65 The Report of the Beecher Committee on African education, African Education in Kenya (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1949)Google Scholar, led to plans for only sixteen African secondary schools by 1957. For a detailed analysis of the role of the Administration in educational policy, see Anderson, John, The Struggle for the School (London and Nairobi: Longman, 1970), especially pp. 32–50.Google Scholar

66 KNA/DC/MKS15/3, ‘Recommendations made at an informal meeting of Provincial Commissioners, April 28, 1948’ and Office of the Chief Secretary 1/1195, Chief Native Commissioner, ‘A Talk to the Christian Forum on Some Present Day African Problems’, 3 07 1950.Google Scholar

67 Sorrenson, , Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country, pp. 81–2Google Scholar and Rosberg, and Nottingham, , The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 248–52.Google Scholar

68 The Municipal African Affairs Officers in Nairobi and Mombasa served in an advisory role to the European dominated City Council and had no executive powers. They also had little influence within the Provincial Administration and felt their colleagues had little understanding or sympathy for the problems they faced in the cities. (Interviews 201FS and 206FS.)

69 KGL, ‘Despatch from the Secretary of State to the Governors of the African Territories’, 25 February 1947 (bound into the minutes of the African Affairs Committee for 1948). This was the principal Colonial Office statement of political development policy in the immediate post-war period.

70 In his despatch on local government, Creech-Jones warned of the danger of creating a ‘class of professional African politicians absorbed in the activities of the centre and out of direct touch with the people themselves’, while in his reply Governor Mitchell emphatically asserted the right of the Administration to protect ignorant rural Africans from the wiles of the sophisticated demagogue ‘usually inspired by self-interest and…a marked lack of concern for truth, honesty, justice or good government’ (KGL ‘Despatch from the Secretary of State…’, 25 February 1947; and Sir Philip Mitchell to Arthur Creech-Jones, Confidential Despatch No. 16 of 30 May 1947).

71 Howman, Roger, African Local Government in British East and Central Africa (Pretoria: Reprint Series of the University of South Africa, No. 4, 1963), Part 11, p. 32Google Scholar (originally published 1952–53).

72 KNA/DC/MKS/15/3, ‘Minutes of the Provincial Commissioners’ Meeting of 24–26 October 1946’ and also ‘Minutes of the Provincial Commissioners' Meeting of 26–28 May 1947’.

73 KNA/MAA8/141, P. Wyn-Harris, Chief Native Commissioner to E. W. Mathu, Member of the Legislative Council, 4 June 1948. This statement was repeated verbatim in 1950.

74 In a most revealing and important document of the period, African workers in Mombasa, most of them Kikuyu, expressed their grievances to the Industrial Relations Officer of the Labour Department in October, 1947, a few months after a major strike had paralyzed the port. They told him that:

The European wants the African to be poor and come down like dogs… African gets too little money for work… Because of the low wages they do not get enough and cannot send to the reserve and are compelled to steal… The European comes and takes everything belonging to them and then asks for brotherhood… When they want to go up government pushes them down… They like government but government doesn't like them. Why cannot government assist us so that everyone can be equal… The lion and the goat cannot lie down together. Why is government, they asked, not good to the Africans. Everybody in the world is out to put the Africans down.

(KNA/Ministry of Labour/9/372, Report by James Patrick, Industrial Relations Officer, no date [1947].)

75 Interview 227FS.

76 Interview 103F.

77 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 81, 98, 117, 169–70, 221.Google Scholar

78 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 52–3, 72, 102–3.Google Scholar

79 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 74–5.Google Scholar

80 KNA/MAA8/25, Secret ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Official Members of the African Affairs Committee’, 3 11 1948.Google Scholar

81 KNA/MAA8/65, PC, Central to Chief Native Commissioner, 13 September 1952. A notable example of the image of African politicians can be found in the letters of 1 September and 14 September 1951 from the PC Central Province to the CNC and Chief Secretary respectively commenting on the activities of the Central Province Branch of the KAU (KNA/MAA2/5/146).

82 Rosberg, and Nottingham, , The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 264–5, 269–70.Google Scholar

83 Rosberg, and Nottingham, , The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 331–4Google Scholar; Barnett, and Njama, , Mau Mau from Within, pp. 53–4.Google Scholar

84 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 100–1.Google Scholar

85 KNA/Office of the Chief Secretary 1/1195, Chief Native Commissioner, Davies, E. R., ‘Notes on a Speech to Legislative Council’, 02 1952.Google Scholar Also, CNC ‘Notes for a Speech to LegCo’, 11 1950Google Scholar, and ‘Notes for Speech to LegCo Budget Session’, 11 1950.Google Scholar The Chief Native Commissioner was not the executive head of the Provincial Administration and possessed only advisory powers, serving as the ‘friend at court’ who articulated the views of the field administration to the central government.

86 KNA/MAA2/5/146, ‘A Prayer for the Restoration of Our Land’, Kenya African Union to Right Hon. James Griffiths, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 May 1951. On 6 June the DC Nyeri prepared a secret report on a KAU mass meeting in Nyeri on 27 May and noted that ‘There seems every likelihood of trouble in the near future, if as seems certain, the KAU memorandum on the Kikuyu lands is rejected. The district is hot with rumours of “deeds not words”.’ (Quoted in Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 107.)Google Scholar

87 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, p. 136Google Scholar; Rosberg, and Nottingham, , The Myth of Mau Mau.Google Scholar

88 Interviews 227FS and 07PS.

89 Reports of unrest from the Provincial Administration were generally considered by the Secretariat to be ‘exaggerated’ (see Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, pp. 144–52).Google Scholar

90 Corfield, , The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, p. 151.Google Scholar

91 Rosberg, and Nottingham, , The Myth of Mau Mau, p. 277.Google Scholar

92 Barnett, and Njama, , Mau Mau from Within, p. 71.Google Scholar

93 The subsequent careers of the Chief Secretary, Attorney General and Chief Native Commissioner were all adversely affected to some degree, especially the last named, by their resistance to the state of emergency and a consequent reputation for being ‘soft’ in dealing with the situation. The CNC was replaced by E. H. Windley, the PC in Central Province in 1952 and the Secretariat's strongest critic in the Provincial Administration.

94 Interview 227FS.

95 Interview 103F.

96 Interview 214F.

97 Sorrenson, , Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country, especially pp. 220–36.Google Scholar

98 See Mark Kesselman's critique of Huntingdon, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, and Binder, Leonard et al. , Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, in ‘Order or Movement? The Literature of Political Development as Ideology’, World Politics, XXVI (1973–1974), pp. 138–54.Google Scholar

99 Thus, Gurr's interpretation of Mau Mau sees it as a revolt following ‘the imposition of restrictions after a period of expansion of political rights’ during the 1920s and 1930s when the Kenya government had been ‘increasingly responsive’ to African political demands! He concludes that ‘the frustrations which brought it about were those affecting Westernized Kenyans with intense, modernizing political demands, and it occurred only after a generation of gradual improvement in the political status of the Kenyans most committed to modern politics and its forms’ (Why Men Rebel, p. 116).Google Scholar

100 The continuity of theory and policy in dealing with peasant rebellions, guerrilla insurgency or ‘wars of national liberation’ is not accidental. From Malaya to Kenya to Vietnam, etc., the use of ‘villagization’ or ‘strategic hamlet’ programs, as well as ‘rehabilitation’ and various forms of psychological warfare is linked to the emergence of an Anglo-American counter-insurgency community of administrators and scholars. The adoption of the perspective of incumbent authorities in ostensibly neutral academic research thus often has a direct linkage with policy and is implicated in the initiation and escalation of incumbent violence. (Numerous instances of the involvement of social scientists in counter-insurgency programs are discussed in Fitzgerald, Frances, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston, Mass.: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1972), passim.Google Scholar The linkage between theories of revolution and counter-insurgency techniques is ‘discussed at length in Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Revolutionary Warfare and Counter insurgency’ in Miller, N. and Aya, R.. eds., National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World (New York: The Free Press, 1971), pp. 137–213.)Google Scholar

101 Zolberg, A. R., ‘The Structure of Political Conflict in the New States of Africa’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1968), 70–87, p. 77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

102 Tilly, , ‘Does Modernization Breed Revolution?’, pp. 437–47.Google Scholar The model of power contenders and power resources is developed more fully by Anderson, Charles in Politics and Economic Change in Latin America (New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1967), pp. 87–114.Google Scholar

103 Hagopian, Mark N., The Phenomenon of Revolution (New York: Dodd Mead, 1974), p. 162.Google Scholar

104 Wolf, , Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, p. 287.Google Scholar Wolf's fine study manages to focus on the sources of peasant rebellion without slipping into the perspective of the incumbent authorities.

105 Wasserman, , ‘The Adaptation of a Colonial Elite to Decolonization’Google Scholar, and ‘The Independence Bargain: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue 1960–62’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, XI (1973), 99–120.Google Scholar

106 SirBlundell, Michael, So Rough a Wind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), pp. 271. 273.Google Scholar