Hotep

Though the rebellion was officially over in 1959, the detainment of Kikuyu, suspected taking the "Mau Mau oath," in concentration camps continued. They were to stay until they could be "cleansed."

John Nottingham, a district officer in the colonial service from 1952 to 1961, explains, "The way that it found was that if you beat them up enough then they would confess an oath. So what you do is beat them up and then you give them a bit of paper and a piece of blunt pencil and say, 'Confess! I took it! I took it! I took it!' You are now a human being again."

John Cowan, Senior Superintendent of Prisons in Kenya from 1957 to 1963, explained the rationale behind one of the most brutal episodes in the war against the LFA - the Hola Massacre. "I think that Christianity had been tried and hadn't succeeded with them. And they needed a sort of moral compulsion ... to confess their oaths. In one of my camps there was a small faction of 'Mau Mau' detainees who were difficult. There was a procedure implemented there, which was successful. We had to coerce them into confessing. We used a little bit of force on them.... I never saw a man, in all the time I was there, having had force used on him in any worse condition than an amateur boxer getting out of a ring."

Cowan's method proved effective and he was asked to write a report on how to deal with a group of hardcore detainees, held at the Hola Camp, who had declared themselves political prisoners. With violence now enshrined as official policy, Cowan outlined a scheme to make the Hola detainees submit to authority. The first thing was to get them to obey work orders. He explained that should the detainees not immediately "prove amenable to work", then "they should be - in the phrase - 'manhandled' to the site of work, and forced to carry out the task."

On March 3,1959, 85 prisoners were marched out to a site and ordered to work. One of the detainees, John Maina Kahihu, described what happened: "We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves. There were two hundred guards. One hundred seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. They beat us from 8 am to 11.30. They were beating us like dogs. I was covered by other bodies - just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But the others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them."

Afterwards 11 men lay dead and 60 were seriously injured. The prison officials attempted a cover-up by claiming that the men had died from drinking contaminated water. But the story found its way back to London and the truth could not be suppressed.

Cowan's remarks, looking back on those terrible events : "I didn't feel guilty, I don't think. I don't think that's quite the word.... I felt extremely sorry that it had gone wrong, but not actually guilty."

When reports of the massacre reached Britain there was political uproar. Suddenly it was the British authorities that were exposed as brutal thugs. Within weeks, London closed the Kenyan camps and released the detainees. The Mau Mau oaths, which had dominated the crisis, suddenly became irrelevant.

PEace
Solarus


"Activism is the practice of using an internal, self-determining source of power to live one's life and/or enact some sort of change. Power is the ability to define reality, while self-determination is to decide or define one's self. Therefore activism, is not simply something done to right some wrong or to fight some cause but rather it is a way of life. Activism is the way of life where one can define self and change anything that may impede or control the reality that one chooses to live."-Solarus