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As Kenyan veterans prepare for legal action,
secret memos
reveal colonial policy of violence to break resistance of suspected guerrillas John McGhie Saturday November 9, 2002 The Guardian Dramatic evidence has been unearthed of such systematic British brutality in the former colony of Kenya that it may require the rewriting of imperial history. Hitherto secret files show that the then colonial secretary, Alan Lennox Boyd, sanctioned a policy of violence towards interned guerrilla suspects. A former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, now living in London, was, according to a memo written by the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, authorised to use force. Some detainees allegedly had their mouths stuffed with mud and were beaten unconscious by his men. The evidence is to be detailed on BBC's Correspondent this month to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the declaration of the state of emergency in Kenya. The revelations appear to bear out the suspicions at the time of campaigners, like the late Labour MP Barbara Castle, that massive abuses were taking place. She and others unearthed individual scandals involving security forces during the 1950s, but the Tory government, headed by Harold Macmillan, denied there was a policy of assaulting prisoners. Mau Mau veterans are preparing to visit London next year to discuss a potentially huge legal action for compensation. A dossier of evidence was handed in to the British high commission in Nairobi a fortnight ago. Campaigners' demands include the investigation for alleged war crimes and human rights abuses of surviving former British officials. In 1957 Mr Gavaghan was ordered to assume the position of officer in charge of rehabilitation at the Mwea camps. Virtually all members of the Kikuyu tribe had taken a secret Mau Mau "oath" and it was considered impossible to release these men until they had "confessed" taking it. A long "secret and personal" memo from Baring to Lennox Boyd describes how their resistance was broken. It was discovered at the public record office in Kew, west London, by Harvard history professor Caroline Elkins. The colonial attorney general, Eric Griffiths-Jones, visited the camp. In an attached memorandum he described the treatment he witnessed of a group of 80 prisoners transferred from a holding camp. As each lorry arrived a group were "hustled off" and made to squat in two rows. They were met by five or six Europeans including Mr. Gavaghan. Each group of detainees was ordered to strip and have their heads shorn. "Any who showed any reluctance or hesitation to do so were hit with fists and/or slapped with the open hand," he wrote. "This was usually enough to dispel any disposition to disobey the order to change. In some cases, however, defiance was more obstinate and on the first indication of such obstinacy, three or four of the European officers immediately converged on the man and 'rough housed' him, stripping his clothes off him, hitting him, on occasion kicking him and, if necessary, putting him on the ground. Blows struck were solid, hard ones, mostly with closed fists and about the head, stomach, sides and back. There was no attempt to strike at the testicles or any other manifestations of sadistic brutality." Griffiths-Jones, who had been a PoW of the Japanese during the second world war, continued: "In each of these cases which the visiting party witnessed on this occasion ... the man eventually gave in and put on his camp clothes. Mr Gavaghan explained, however, that there had, in past intakes, been more persistent resistors who had been forcibly changed into camp clothing. Some of them had started the 'Mau Mau howl', a familiar cry which was taken up by the rest of the camp, representing a concerted and symbolic defiance of the camp authorities. In such cases it was essential to prevent the infection of this 'oath' spreading throughout the camp, and the 'resistor' who started it was put on the ground, a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth. In the last resort, a man whose resistance could not be broken down was knocked unconscious." Another section of the 11-page memo, headed Use of Force in Enforcing Discipline, said: The detainees... are particularly ugly customers and there is no doubt that the use of orthodox methods of non violent persuasion and normal camp punishments for disobedience would be, and indeed have proved to be, useless and ineffective. With possibly a few exceptions they are of the type which understands and reacts to violence." Sir Evelyn tells Lennox Boyd in his covering note that their colonial task "depends on our ability to deal with a small number of very difficult men; and if we are to do this successfully, risks are unavoidable". This regime carried on for 12 months after which time only a few thousand recalcitrant Mau Mau detainees were still behind the wire. In his autobiography Of Lions and Dung Beetles, Mr Gavaghan, now 80, said he had only lost control once. This was when his loyalist guards were dealing with a man who had "adopted the Plasticine doll technique of falling about if pushed and adopting postures resembling the lava encrusted Roman soldier at Pompeii. Partly to associate myself with the frustration of the others, I hit him back-handed across the face, ripping my knuckles on his teeth." Mr Gavaghan also wrote that among other visitors to the camp, which he admits "attracted a good deal of notoriety", there was Philippe Junod, from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Mr Gavaghan said Mr Junod told him: "Do not distress yourself, compared with the French in Algeria you are angels of mercy." Mr Gavaghan told the BBC this month that Griffiths-Jones was only at the camp for a short period on one day. He disputes his account and categorically denies that he knocked anyone unconscious or saw anyone else being knocked out. He describes the force used as manipulative. "It was in no way punitive force [it was] manipulative force. To take somebody's trousers off it takes a bit of doing. you know it's a kind of rape. So that is done and then if someone howls, then it has to be maybe 10 minutes of enforcement." After he left Mwea, Mr Gavaghan was awarded the OBE. Baring wrote to him, calling his work "one of the outstanding successes of the emergency". Mr Gavaghan is not implicated in the other widespread allegations of torture, rape and murder detailed in the programme. Witnesses came forward to recount tortures and murders committed throughout the eight-year emergency involving other white officials and local soldiers under British command. One man says he was castrated and blinded for defying his captors. A woman recalls how her two-year-old child was whipped to death by a white police officer. Women claim that thousands of civilians - mainly women and children - died of beatings, starvation and disease. Professor Elkins says the scale of suffering and death was far higher than previously thought and the Kikuyu death toll could have been as high as 50,000. John Nottingham, a district colonial officer at the time who stayed on in Kenya, said compensation could not wait because the victims were now mostly in their 80s."What went on in the Kenya camps, the Kenya villages was brutal, savage torture by people who have to be condemned as war criminals. I feel ashamed to have come from a Britain that did what it did." � Kenya: White Terror screens at 7.15pm on Sunday November 17 on BBC2 The Mulindwas
communication group
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