CAPÍTULO II: MARCO TEÓRICO
2.1 ANTECEDENTES INVESTIGATIVOS
2.2.9 Imagen Institucional
As British efforts to stage-manage the retreat from Empire and uphold Cold War
military commitments unfolded across south-east Asia in the early 1950s, it is easy to
overlook the conflict that Frank Kitson labelled „a sideshow amongst sideshows.‟1
Declared four years into operations in Malaya, the Kenyan Emergency utilised counter-
insurgency tactics that built upon the lessons learned in the Far East and were applied in
the effort to defeat the mysterious movement known as Mau Mau.
The focus of critical analysis in this chapter will be the extent to which strategic and
tactical direction in Kenya was based on the developing counter-insurgency campaign in
Malaya and the enactment of slowly-imbibed lesson-learning from south-east Asia. The
early phases of the Kenyan Emergency lacked coherence and direction. Yet as the
belated dividends of General Briggs‟ actions and the renewed sense of purpose lent by General Templer in Malaya began to turn the tide for Britain against the Malayan Races
Liberation Army (MRLA) after 1952, such strategic and tactical imperatives as forcible
resettlement to new villages, detention camps, supply network cut-off, and the use of
surrendered enemy personnel as double agents, were implemented by the British
authorities in Kenya with clear operational dividends. Kenya, in short, was a slow-burn
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strategy. Once the British gained strategic clarity in Kenya, largely thanks to lessons
from Malaya, the Mau Mau found themselves prosecuting an increasingly isolated
insurgency. As in Malaya, eventual British „success‟ has to be contextualised against the
background of a small insurgent movement lacking in overt popular support and any
external aid. Intelligence agencies were also slow to react at first, but organisational
restructuring witnessed in Malaya also became a model for Kenya, reaping quick
rewards by improving the system of intelligence collection and dissemination. The
political community, however, were not willing to acknowledge that experiences in
Malaya could help counter-insurgency operations in Kenya. Any comparison between
the two was discouraged given the political propensity to view Mau Mau as a
disorganised, savage rabble that could be easily defeated. Yet propaganda in both
insurgencies retained the same themes, namely the delegitimation of the insurgent group
by highlighting their atrocities and perceived savagery. As a case study in counter-
insurgency lesson-learning, Kenya demonstrates the maladroit abilities of the British to
learn quickly, and typifies just how an eventual counter-insurgency „victory‟ and belated
operational and strategic clarity were able to be realised in large part due to the
deficiencies of the insurgent opponent. This case study exhibits how a nascent tendency
for slow learning and slow burning that emerged in Malaya became fully established in
Kenya and began a linear trend in British counter-insurgency conduct.
Perhaps more than any other insurgent group in British post-war colonial history, the
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its origins, meaning and legacy.2 Traditionalist interpretations, primarily encapsulated by the works of Kenyan scholar Louis Leakey during the Emergency itself, depicted Mau
Mau as an atavistic cult shrouded in mysticism.3 Yet the 1960s gave rise to a revisionist historiographical trend that shifted interpretation of the group away from tribal
primitivism and towards an understanding of a rational and modern uprising fought for
national liberation unshackled by previous European ethnocentric analysis.4 Since the crest of the revisionist wave broke in the 1960s, Mau Mau has been comparatively
under-researched as a source of counter-insurgency analysis, especially in terms of
historical and military literature, until the early twenty-first century when a series of
books revisiting the Kenyan Emergency offered new critical interpretations of British
conduct between 1952 and 1960.5 The on-going debate about Mau Mau has given rise to what Bruce Berman has labelled the historiographic „paradox of Mau Mau‟, where contending schools of thought have common foundation in divergent explanations of the
three overarching themes of nationalism, ethnicity and modernity.6 Indeed, the dispute over both the continuing implications of the meaning of Mau Mau in Kenyan history and
2 For an overview of this debate see E. S Atieno-Odhiambo, „The Production of History in Kenya: The
Mau Mau Debate‟, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol.25 No.2 (1991), pp.300-307; and Joanna Lewis, „Nasty, Brutish and in Shorts? British Colonial Rule, Violence and the Historians of Mau Mau‟,
The Round Table, Vol.96 No.389 (2007), pp.201-33.
3 L.S.B Leakey, Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London: Meuthen, 1952); Defeating Mau Mau (London:
Meuthen, 1954). For another conservative traditionalist account see Fred Majdalany, State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau (London: Longmans, 1962).
4
Perhaps the most prominent of the revisionist texts is Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham, The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1966). Also see Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau From Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966).
5
The two books at the forefront of this critical approach are David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Orion, 2006) (which focuses upon the summary justice and wonton use of capital punishment for insurgents), and Caroline Elkins, Britain’s
Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2005) (which focuses upon the conditions and treatment in detention camps).
6 Bruce Berman, „Nationalism, Ethnicity and Modernity: The Paradox of Mau Mau‟, Canadian Journal of
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British execution of its counter-insurgency campaign were crystallised in October 2006
when a group of surviving Mau Mau veterans launched a lawsuit against the British
government demanding an apology for brutal atrocities committed during the
Emergency and an out-of-court financial compensation settlement.7 Contemporary interest in Mau Mau was further sparked by revelations in late 2008 that the then US
President-elect Barack Obama‟s Kenyan grandfather had been arrested and allegedly
tortured by the British for being a suspected Mau Mau member.8 Yet in terms of the extrapolated meaning pertaining to counter-insurgency, the Kenyan example has not
consistently been placed in the context of lesson learning. If Malaya drew up the
counter-insurgency blueprint, Kenya represented the first opportunity to put those plans
into action elsewhere. Archive material and elements of existing secondary sources
reveal an untapped angle from which to view the British defeat of Mau Mau: namely its
strategic, operational and tactical roots in the Malayan Emergency and the delay in
producing an effective transferral process.
Origins and Background to the Mau Mau Insurgency
The roots of Mau Mau lie in the Kikuyu tribe – one of forty-two tribes or ethnic
groupings in Kenya. The politicisation of the Kikuyu stemmed from severe pressure
7 „Mau Mau to Sue British Government‟, BBC News Online,
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/5411030.stm, accessed 23 October 2006.
8The Times, „Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama‟s grandfather loathe the British‟, 3 December
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placed on their tribal lands in the 1920s by a parallel occurrence of a marked population
increase and the claim to large swathes of Kikuyu land in the central highlands of Kenya
by European settlers who employed Kikuyu labour to tend the land as de facto tenant
farmers. This was to provide a catalyst for militancy within elements of the Kikuyu, who
had seen during the early twentieth century their tribal practices and political
organisations, namely the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), suppressed and
manipulated by the colonial authorities and the missionary churches. For implications
further down the line, it also provoked a mass migration of landless and angry Kikuyu
from the White Highlands to the urban centre of Nairobi, channelling an influx of
radicalised rural sentiment into a new urban environment. As a consequence of these
developments, significant segments of the Kikuyu tribe were faced with poverty and
unemployment accentuated by a lack of land and over-population.
In 1940 the colonial authorities proscribed the KCA, interpreting it as a challenge to
colonial power, forcing those members who had not been arrested underground.
Between 1944 and 1946 a successor movement, the Kenya African Union (KAU),
emerged, quickly building a membership of over 100,000 under the leadership of Jomo
Kenyatta. By instinct a moderate reform movement, schisms soon appeared within the
KAU as the radical remnants of the KCA began pressing for more subversive action.
The underground KCA leadership subsequently altered its recruitment strategy in order
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that the mysterious group known as Mau Mau first emerged.9 This militant and mercurial movement was thought to have been responsible for a number of agitations
against colonial rule in the late 1940s and were understood to administer oaths of
allegiance to its members (the particulars of which subsequent British propaganda would
disseminate in salacious detail.)10 Their intentions, much like the movement as a whole, remained porous, ensuring that Mau Mau was concomitantly labelled reformist,
nationalist, anti-colonial and Kikuyu supremacist. No coherent manifesto was ever
expounded, adding to the movement‟s image as dark and irrational.11
Fearing what they
did not quite understand, the proscription of membership to Mau Mau was decreed by
the colonial authorities in August 1950.
Yet despite the move to quash the movement by legal manoeuvrings, violence and
disruption perpetrated by Mau Mau continued, fuelled by the intransigence of both
London and Nairobi to instigate political reform of the almost exclusively European
settler representation on Kenya‟s Legislative Council. Attacks on the homes of European settlers and Kikuyu loyalists were undertaken alongside the symbolic mutilation of their
cattle. The Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, only months away from retirement
by early 1952, proved unwilling to curtail this spike in rural violence and demonstrated
particular obstinacy in refusing to tackle this growing problem. Even the Colonial
9 Stephen L. Weigart, Traditional Religion and Guerrilla Warfare in Modern Africa (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), pp.22-24.
10
For an analysis of the role of oaths in creating the myth of Mau Mau see John Lonsdale, „Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya‟, Journal of African History, Vol.31 No.3 (1990), pp.393-421.
11
For a comprehensive political, social and economic contextualisation of Mau Mau and the creation of its „myth‟ see D.W Throup, „The Origins of Mau Mau‟, African Affairs, Vol.84 No.336 (July 1985), pp.399- 433; and Dane Kennedy, „Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mau Mau‟, International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol.25 No.2 (1992), pp.241-260.
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Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, in a telegram to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, a
month before the Emergency was declared, announced that he „did not take a very
alarmist view of the situation in Kenya.‟12
Mitchell left his post in June 1952, as the
emergence of a nascent insurgency fomented. Astonishingly, Mitchell‟s departure triggered a four month interregnum before London posted a new Governor to Kenya, Sir
Evelyn Baring, in October.13 Upon arrival Baring quickly acknowledged the danger of the situation, citing the existence of a „planned revolutionary movement‟14
, and in an
attempt to curb the mounting levels of rural violence and urban disquiet he declared a
State of Emergency on 20 October 1952. It was to mark the beginning of a counter-
insurgency campaign that received relatively little public attention in Britain, yet was to
demonstrate a military attempt at transferring asymmetric lessons from other theatres of
operations, often with a decidedly un-nuanced level of force.
The Political Response to Mau Mau
Within twenty-five days of Governor Baring declaring a State of Emergency up to 8,000
arrests had been made in a massive military and police operation codenamed Jock
12 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Kew, London, PREM 11/472, „Telegram from Secretary of
State for the Colonies, O.Lyttelton to PM, 9 September 1952.‟
13
This gap was, in part, caused by Baring having nearly amputated his hand in a tree-chopping accident at his home on the eve of his planned departure for Kenya, resulting in a delay of several months.
14 TNA, CO 822/444, „Top Secret: Letter from Sir Evelyn Baring to Secretary of State for the Colonies,
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Scott.15 This represented an attempt to decapitate the KAU and the KCA in a direct effort to stifle the momentum of Mau Mau. A further crackdown on the wider trade
union and nationalist movement was also instigated in a political endeavour to cripple
any solidarity from groups perceived to have sympathies with Mau Mau‟s seemingly anti-colonial strategy. Yet as an antithesis to the interpretation of the Emergency as a
consequence of Mau Mau violence, revisionist arguments, notably from Donald Barnett,
posit that it was in fact a cause of escalated militancy. Barnett contends that the move to
outlaw the affiliations of large swathes of both the Kikuyu and wider nationalist
population alienated a far greater degree of Kenyans than before the Emergency.16 The fact that the colonial authorities estimated that up to ninety percent of the Kikuyu
population of 1.5 million had taken at least one of the seven stages of Mau Mau oaths
can aid an understanding of the draconian, catch-all detention policy. Yet this estimate
was exaggerated and led to an unsubtle political approach in distinguishing the
insurgents from the ethnic community from which they emanated.17 The political element of the counter-insurgency strategy was therefore flawed from the outset.
Yet the political response to Mau Mau cannot be reduced to reference to imperial
reassertion. There were numerous, often competing, interests and influences that
intertwined during the Emergency, namely that of the European settlers, the Kikuyu
„loyalists‟, the colonial authorities, and the British government itself. It is from the interaction of these interests that emerged the political reaction to the Mau Mau
15
John Newsinger, „Minimum Force, British Counter-Insurgency and the Mau Mau Rebellion‟, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol.3 No.1 (Spring 1992), p.48.
16 Barnett, Mau Mau From Within, p.72. 17 Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, p.27.
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insurgency.18 There does appear to have been a distinct disparity between the attitudes and inclinations of the colonial authorities in Kenya and the political officials at
Westminster. The colonial response at the declaration of the State of Emergency had
been to significantly increase the sentences for apparent misdemeanours or perceived
Mau Mau-inspired crimes and instigate collective punishment. However, as David
Anderson points out, „Churchill was not impressed by the “special pleading” from Nairobi for this or that power… Lyttelton (Colonial Secretary), too, thought that the latest proposals smacked of heavy handedness, even of vengeance and retribution.‟19
Yet
as the Emergency unfolded the Kenyan campaign weighed little on the mind of Prime
Minister Churchill, with most political direction in London emanating from Colonial
Secretary Oliver Lyttelton.20 Despite the activism in the face of stories of British brutality (see the next section on the military response) by the trio of Labour MPs
Barbara Castle, Fenner Brockway and Leslie Hale, even on the opposition benches „no one in the leadership of the party really wanted to rock the boat over Mau Mau…‟21
Counter-insurgency in Kenya was simply unwarranted of political attention in London,
dismissed as an uprising by local savages, easy to put down, and thus crystallising
Kitson‟s interpretation of Mau Mau as a „sideshow‟ in the grander scheme of 1950s
British foreign and defence policy. Yet as an example of counter-insurgency lesson-
learning, and as an illustration of how often the most interesting illuminations on a topic
18 Bruce Berman, „Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and the Origins of the
„Mau Mau‟ Emergency‟, British Journal of Political Science, Vol.6 No.2 (April 1976), p146-47.
19
Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, p.71.
20 Analysis of the main files at the National Archives dealing with Whitehall‟s response to Mau Mau
reveals management lay with the Colonial Office. Especially see series CO 822.
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appear when light is shone in the darkest corners, Kenya needs to placed under the
scrutiny of the historical microscope.
The colonial authorities‟ depiction in both Nairobi and London of Mau Mau as primeval savages enabled them, in Bruce Berman‟s words, „to fight a nasty guerrilla war with good conscience.‟22
This illustration of the insurgent enemy was cemented by a carefully
constructed political propaganda campaign. The campaign within Kenya itself resorted
firstly to outright censorship, banning a long list of publications including the
communist Daily Worker, and then secondly to more „positive‟ forms of propaganda designed to further the political and military ends of the counter-insurgency campaign.
This type of propaganda, as in Malaya, derived from a multiplicity of requirements,
including the mutual need to delegitimise the insurgent cause whilst stemming the flow
of sympathisers to the forests and placating the fears of the settler community.23 As in Malaya, this final task of ensuring settler compliance was often undermined by mistrust
and a feeling on their behalf that „outsiders‟ from London did not understand the mentality or behaviour of the „natives‟. The settler-government relationship was not eased by the prospect of Kenyan independence (discussed in full detail below.) These
difficulties were further exacerbated by a Kenyan Information Service in a „state of neglect and disorder.‟24
Propaganda was the vague responsibility of a disparate number
of agencies with no centralised control or message. It took until February 1953 for the
22
Berman, „The Paradox of Mau Mau‟, p.192.
23 Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial
Counter-Insurgency, 1944-1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), p.146.
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Kenyan and British authorities to appoint a unifying Director of Information, Brigadier
William Gibson.
Whitehall‟s propagandists were eager to ensure that the Kenyan Emergency was not depicted as a carbon copy of the Malayan Emergency. They were concerned by late
1952, four years into operations in Malaya, that any comparisons with what were
perceived at that time to be a stalled and protracted campaign against a porous enemy
were counter-productive. A.C.E Malcolm, the Head of the Information Policy
Department (IPD), was keen that propaganda material should „substantiate the thesis that Kenya is not, repeat not, going to develop into “another Malaya”… On the face of it there is altogether too much similarity for the propagandists‟ convenience.‟25 Such a view, however, must be placed in the context of a pre-Templer strategic vision in
Malaya, when Whitehall disgruntlement at progress in the colony was volumous. The