SerialSaga: Unveiling the Atrocities

This weeks serial saga is going to be about a topic that is close to home and about my home country. It will highlight some of the recorded massacres that happened during the British colonial rule in Kenya, especially to the tribe that was at the forefront of the rebellion.

In a brutal attempt to suppress the Kenyan insurgency, British colonial authorities suspended civil liberties and imposed severe measures on the Kenyan population. This led to the relocation of many Kikuyu people. British authorities reported that 80,000 Kikuyu were interned, but Caroline Elkins [ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya] estimated that between 160,000 and 320,000 were confined in concentration camps, with other estimates reaching as high as 450,000.

Over a million more were held in "enclosed villages." While some detainees were Mau Mau guerillas, many were innocent victims of the collective punishment imposed by the colonial regime.

During "screenings" meant to extract information about the Mau Mau threat, thousands of detainees suffered beatings and sexual assaults. Worse mistreatment followed for those who refused to renounce the insurgency, including horrific acts of torture. Official accounts describe prisoners being roasted alive, and subjected to brutal interrogations involving the slicing off of ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging to death, and burning with lit cigarettes.

The British colonial police used a "metal castrating instrument" to mutilate prisoners. One settler boasted, "By the time I cut his balls off, he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him." The British executed over 1,090 suspected rebels, far surpassing the number of executions during the Algerian War. Another 400 were sentenced to death but reprieved because they were under 18 or women. Certain areas were declared prohibited zones where anyone could be shot on sight, and many Kikuyu were shot for "failing to halt when challenged."

The Chuka Massacre

In June 1953, members of the King's African Rifles B Company perpetrated the Chuka Massacre, killing 20 unarmed people in Chuka, Kenya. They entered the area to flush out suspected Mau Mau rebels but ended up executing Kikuyu Home Guard members, a loyalist militia recruited by the British. Major Gerald Griffiths, the commanding officer, was court-martialed and sentenced to seven years in prison. However, in the climate of atrocity and reprisal, the incident was largely ignored, and no one else stood trial for the massacre.

The Hola Massacre

The Hola Massacre occurred in March 1959 at a colonial detention camp in Hola, Kenya. By January 1959, 506 detainees were held there, with 127 in a "closed camp" for the most uncooperative. These detainees often resisted participation in the colonial "rehabilitation process" or manual labor. On 3 March 1959, the camp commandant executed a plan to force 88 detainees to work, resulting in guards clubbing 11 detainees to death and seriously injuring 77 others.

The Lari Massacre

On the night of 25-26 March 1953, the Lari Massacre saw Mau Mau militants herding Kikuyu men, women, and children into huts and setting them on fire, killing anyone who attempted to escape. The official death toll from the Lari massacre stands at 74.

Sources:

Anderson, D. A. (2005). Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (1st ed., p. 434). W. W. Norton. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.110.4.1295

Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. CNIB, 2008.

Wikipedia contributors. (2024, June 24). Mau Mau rebellion. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:09, June 26, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mau_Mau_rebellion&oldid=1230754663

Jackson, K. (2006). [Review of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, by C. Elkins]. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 39(1), 158–160. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40034012