Whitethorn (84 page)

‘Certainly that was a great part of the reason. Malaria, as I told you, was another and a major quarrel with Chris Peterson when we were both in the Special Branch; he is now the commanding officer of the Kenya Regiment.'

‘What happened there?' I asked him. ‘You promised you'd tell me.'

‘It was a bitter disagreement about the method of interrogation when we captured the Mau Mau. In order for you to understand you need to know more about the Kikuyu culture and you'll need to go to Kenya and see the situation for yourself. Perhaps we can leave this for later, Tom.'

As usual, Mike's briefing was thorough. He was someone who thought deeply and in detail, and his observations were seldom superficial. If anything, he was too serious and on occasion somewhat melancholy. With the prospect of his return to Kenya he'd taken to drinking whisky with beer chasers, and on several occasions when we'd been to Bulawayo I'd had to put him in the back seat of the military Ford sedan he'd drawn from the motor depot and drive him back to the camp to let him get out just before we got to the officers' quarters so that he wouldn't be seen with a training recruit bringing him home. He was what in those days would be described as a serious-minded young man with a tendency to worry too much. While he expressed an earnest desire to return to Kenya ‘to finish the job', I sensed that it wasn't going to be easy for him. Anyway, in the matter of briefing me, he began with the topography of the country. I would, of course, learn it for myself so will put down a brief description here.

The Kenyan landscape has a taste of everything that is Africa. Savannah grassland, pancake flat, soft hills that fold into rolling green plains, harsh unrelenting rocky desert, fertile highland valleys and, most imposing of all, its mountains – the mighty Aberdares and the forbidding slopes of that second great African giant, Mount Kenya, a mountain that doesn't stand the least in awe of Kilimanjaro with its snow-capped peak squatting smugly on the invisible line of the Equator.

Mike's whole demeanour changed as he spoke of the mountains and the forests as if they were sacred places. ‘Tom, Mount Kenya is the throbbing heart of Kenya and the Aberdares may be said to be its lungs, its breath, its very life.'

He described the impenetrable bamboo growing over razorbacked ridges where a mile away, as the crow flies from another ridge, may well be a day's march away. Within the deep green valleys, the sides of which fell almost vertically from the ridges, grew giant forest trees, each desperately competing to break through the dense canopy to reach the light – African mahogany, Cape chestnut,
Podocarpus
, meru oak and the enormous wild fig trees, also a feature of the slopes of Mount Kenya. Beneath the canopy was a world of vines and dense bamboo, where old man's beard hung ghost-like from the branches of the taller trees. Here it was always half-light, cold and misty with almost constant rain, a place to cause endless discomfort. Rising 13 120 feet above the forested ridges and dark valleys is the peak of
Ol Doinyo
Lesatima
, where two waterfalls plunge for 900 feet to be swallowed into a deep gorge below. I recall Mike observing that ‘The Aberdares is the most primal landscape on earth, beautiful in its terror and always unwelcoming.'

It was within the wooded valleys and razorback ridges of the Aberdares and the densely forested lower slopes of the extinct volcano, Mount Kenya, where the Mau Mau hid: two distinct groups of terrorists, one at each location who, although they fought for the same cause, seldom came in contact. From these two almost impenetrable hiding places they launched their uncoordinated attacks on white farms and on those Kikuyu tribesmen they considered traitors to the cause of freedom and the restoration of the land they believed they rightfully owned. In the main, these tribesmen enemies of the Mau Mau were known as the Home Guard. This armed and semi-armed, mainly African militia consisted of Kikuyu who had accepted Christianity or been promised land grants by the colonial authorities in return for their allegiance to the British and their willingness to fight against their own people.

I was curious to know why this Home Guard militia could be persuaded to fight their fellow tribesmen in return for agriculturally inferior lowlands granted to them by the British, who had robbed them of their rich and fertile ancestral highlands in the first instance.

Mike Finger explained it to me like this. ‘The Kikuyu have a spiritual and emotional association with ownership of land that is the major factor in the Mau Mau uprising, which, by the way, the Mau Mau call the Land Freedom Army, or LFA.'

‘Hardly a new idea,' I protested, ‘the Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa and the Matabele in Rhodesia, as well as almost all other African tribes, have the same belief that land tribally owned is common wealth. A man's personal wealth is counted in the number of cattle and goats he possesses.'

‘Of course, but it goes much further than this with the Kikuyu. Without actually possessing, that is
owning
and working land, he doesn't, in the beliefs of the tribe, qualify as human. There is an old Kikuyu proverb that states “One cannot eat what he has not sweated for”.' Mike went on to explain. ‘To fully understand this expression, it means much more than hard work in return for food, it means that without the means to create food from the soil a man may not be allowed to receive it.'

I looked at him curiously. ‘You mean, don't you, they're considered to be lesser people? That's not so strange, landowners in any feudal society call the shots, you know, dominate the society. Peasants and landowners, the age-old struggle that eventually led to communism.'

He shook his head. ‘No, I can see you don't understand, Tom. With the Kikuyu, land is everything, without it a man is completely emasculated, he is not allowed to take a tribal wife or to officially procreate. Landless Kikuyu are regarded as incomplete humans and therefore their offspring have no status within the tribe. Without land their lives and tribal association become meaningless.'

‘So, by the colonial authorities granting the Home Guard land they grant them, in a real sense, the meaning of life?'

‘You've got it in one. If they have to betray their own kind as a consequence, they argue that they are not fighting disaffected freedom fighters, they are fighting incomplete men, men of no substance, men of no spiritual value to the tribe.'

It was the lawyer coming out in me, for there seemed to be a contradiction to this rather neat analogy. ‘But you've always maintained that a majority of the Kikuyu have taken the Mau Mau oath and are therefore seemingly in sympathy with them. If these freedom fighters are men of no consequence to the tribe, why would they take an oath of allegiance?'

Mike laughed. ‘It's a mixture of things very African, but also practical, the oath is a critical and compelling component of the Mau Mau participation,' he explained.

‘What exactly does taking the oath involve?' I naturally asked.

Mike thought for a moment. ‘I was raised with the Kikuyu people, and at puberty was initiated into a Kikuyu age-set, the traditional manhood ceremony. I've mentioned in the past how they thought of me as an “inside-out man”, a member of their tribe, white on the outside and black on the inside, and I'm pretty sure the oath of loyalty to the Mau Mau differed little from the normal oath of compliancy used in Kikuyu tribal ceremonies. You're going to hear all sorts of stories when you get to Kenya, most of them complete bullshit involving ritual cannibalism, necrophilia with goats, sexual orgies and the like. If I know anything about their rituals the oath will take place with some ceremony involving the eyes and intestines of a goat and the ingestion of animal blood, because almost any tribal ceremony involving an oath will have these components. What I do know is that they call on the old,
true
god, Ngai, to witness the oath. The people taking it swear to be united in their fight against the colonial enemy and agree to become involved in the struggle to take back the land stolen from them by the white man. As most of the tribe know, this is an honourable and just reason to fight, they can usually be persuaded to undertake the ceremony. Having taken the loyalty oath they discover it is totally binding, a deadly serious matter and one that can never be broken. The recipients, thought to be nearly 60 per cent of the Kikuyu tribe, are truly caught between a rock and a hard place. Fearing the power of the oath, the British administration has made taking it a capital offence and, conversely, the Land Freedom Army or Mau Mau work on the adage that you're either for me or against me. Neutrality doesn't exist, if you're against me you're my enemy and must die.' He looked up. ‘Make no mistake, Tom. Loyalty is everything and ambivalence or resistance to the oath is potential death, so you see the ordinary Kikuyu people are in a no-win situation.'

Mike paused, then added, ‘The second reason for taking the oath is a genuine recognition that under the traditional rules of land ownership these young men would not be robbed of their humanity. It is the fact that we white men and our colonial administration have expropriated the best of Kikuyu land without compensating or even granting them sufficient land elsewhere to meet their tribal requirements. This has left thousands of would-be traditional landowners with no means to acquire land so these emotionally castrated, young jobless men invade the towns looking for work and create the slums in Nairobi. In the fourteen years prior to the rebellion the city's population doubled. It was within these festering slums that, of course, the Mau Mau originated among the disaffected Kikuyu youth. The Kikuyu tribesmen – that is, other than some of their rich, self-serving, landowning British-appointed chiefs supported by the colonial administration – recognise this and support the Mau Mau cause. In a real sense the tribe is deeply affected; young men without the status and traditional means to marry and procreate means the Kikuyu people suffer in an ethnic sense, with nearly half of their young eligible bachelors unable to take their place in the tribal structure. Kikuyu women with no prospects of marriage to a man who owns land, or to avoid being sold off as wives to the hated Home Guards, have joined the freedom fighters in the forests. The Mau Mau have among them women who are said to have powers of prediction and they work directly with Mau Mau platoon commanders.

‘Jomo Kenyatta, the political leader of the tribe, has tried to argue the Kikuyu's cause with the colonial authorities, pointing out the injustices and how, with some land redistribution, these might be remedied. In effect, he has tried to demonstrate how to bring the terrorism to a halt. But this would mean us white Kenyans giving back some of the land we've stolen. Of course, we're not willing to do this and, if you listen to my dad or any other Kenyan farmer, we will resist doing so, down to the last clod of earth. Instead we've put Kenyatta in prison, and consequently turned him into a martyr and a symbol of freedom, not only for the Kikuyu, but for all the tribes of Kenya.'

By the time Mike arrived back in Kenya, and I arrived for officer training in the Kenya Regiment, the emergency was thought to be almost over. In an operation named Anvil, the slums of Nairobi were being cleared and tens of thousands of Kikuyu suspected of being city Mau Mau supporters were summarily arrested; men, women and children were removed from their homes and incarcerated in detention camps or transferred to the already over-populated Kikuyu reserves.

Rural villages near Mount Kenya and the Aberdares suspected of supplying the Mau Mau with food and support had been razed to the ground. Huts were burned, crops destroyed, animals stolen to be eaten by the Home Guards and the villagers herded into barbed-wire-fenced, moated and fortified African gulags known as Home Guard posts that they shared with other rural suspects awaiting interrogation. The Kikuyu Home Guards who ran the camps were, for the most part, illiterate and badly trained militiamen who were increasingly guilty of indiscriminate murder, rape and pillage. They practised these atrocities with the covert permission of their local white officers and the colonial authorities who, with a stroke of the governor's pen, would eventually officially absolve them of all crimes against humanity. The refugees herded into these gulags were helpless and without recourse to justice, the victims of a systematic purging that saw a great many innocent people die. The official colonial administration's reaction to the Mau Mau was to prove to be one of the most shameful human rights abuses in the history of British colonialism.

With their rural and city support system in tatters, hundreds of Mau Mau, starving and forced from the forest to look for food, were being captured in increasing numbers. A captured Mau Mau represented the black terrorist in every settler's nightmare and epitomised the official and settler view that they were subhuman creatures. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words and the photographs and newsreel pictures sent around the world of captured and dead Mau Mau were a major source of British propaganda.

Like all Kikuyu, the forest fighters didn't wash but would rub their bodies with animal fat. While a few still wore the tattered semblance of European clothes, most were clad in animal skins often shaped and stuck to the skin while freshly slaughtered, so that when they dried, they became an extension of the human skin underneath. This kept out the bitter cold of the forests and gave them the appearance of demonic wild men. Their eyes were deeply bloodshot, and their faces scarred and bearded. Their hair hung in dreadlocks to their shoulders, a hirsute fashion that would later become popular among Rastafarians but at the time was regarded as repulsive. They often had ulcers and ugly festering wounds and the stench they emitted would cause a capturing British soldier to turn away and throw up. Paradoxically, the corresponding smell of soap and toothpaste on a European often resulted in the captured Mau Mau following suit.