Evil Rising: demonising the Mau Mau

Thursday, July 10, 2008
Evil Rising: demonising the Mau Mau
http://leninology. blogspot. com/2008/ 07/evil-rising- demonising- mau-
mau.html

The history of anti-imperialist insurgency is predictably littered
with demonic imagery. The foes of empire are invariably barbarised,
and of course this is as true of the Iraqi resistance as it once was
of the Mau Mau. But the Mau Mau were considered uniquely evil,
unlike other enemies of the British Empire such as the Communists in
Malaysia, even though the suppression of the latter was almost as
brutal. The Mau Mau was a movement that the British could only
consider a recrudescence of African savagery and tribalism. Louis
Leakey's 1954 book, Defeating Mau Mau, described the movement as an
essentially religious one, a debased version of Christianity, that
had attempted to usurp legitimate grievances for its own unspecified
(but nefarious) ends. Those grievances, for Leakey, did not call
into question the supposition that "European civilization" or "the
white man was superior", but rather confirmed it. The grievances had
only arisen as a result of the civilizing impact of whitey, so the
argument went. The settler leaders, who relied on the labour of the
Kikuyu on the 'White Highlands', were certainly convinced of their
innate superiority, and were enraged by the resistance to their
dominance.

The Mau Mau had emerged initially in 1948, just when the old
European colonial powers were looking vulnerable, and just after the
Kikuyu Central Association - the main political organisation that
had existed beforehand - was banned. The immediate cause of their
emergence was the occupation of lands in the central highlands by
30,000 white settlers, who appropriated the labour of 250,000
indigenous workers in the process and had to defeat often highly
localised resistance to achieve dominance. The Kikuyu were those
most affected by this process, with 1 and a quarter million of them
driven into a 2000 square miles of land. By 1948, the reserve
system - strikingly similar to the forms of segregation that had
existed in South Africa until that time - was entering into a severe
crisis. A chiefly minority remained wealthy, but the majority were
being driven into utter destitution as they were worked to the bone
and subject to austere political surveillance and repression. The
colonial authorities believed that the declining returns experienced
by the Kikuyu on their diminished land was really the result of
the 'primitive' farming methods of the natives, and so restricted
them to subsistence production, denying them access to the expanding
colonial market, which of course made the problem worse. So,
although they had provided not only the stock troops of the labour
market but also fought on Britain's behalf during the Second World
War (in fact many of the early Mau Mau had been soldiers for the
British), they were treated contemptuously, exploited intensely, and
their political demands were ignored. Such were the "legitimate
grievances" that colonial writers paid patronising lip service to.

The longer term cause of the emergence of the Mau Mau was the rise
of nationalism, particularly among Kikuyu women, since the 1920s.
And this is such an important element of the story that early
accounts tended to give it as little attention as possible. Women
were central to the Mau Mau's non-combatant wing, the 'passive wing'
as the British called it, and were thus a target of British policies
and propaganda designed to wean them away from the movement. In
fact, the colonial records tended to treat the women in the movement
as either victims or prostitutes who had become intimate with Mau
Mau members. They were either 'forced' into the movement through
degrading rituals, or taken up as 'concubines' . And, in the course
of Mau Mau resistance, the British made a great effort to portray
women as the main victims of its (actual and alleged) atrocities,
even though women constituted a small minority of those actually
killed.

Aside from denying that crucial role of women in the insurgency, the
British had to separate the Mau Mau from any claim on Kenyan
nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. Instead, it had
to be seen as an exclusively tribal movement, not only predominantly
Kikuyu but in strict opposition to other tribal/ethnic groups in the
country. (This happens an enduring issue in the historiography, with
anti-Mau Mau intellectuals both inside and outside Kenya benefiting
in part from a refulgence of imperialist sentiment in the 1980s and
1990s.) Leakey's account of the movement during the 1950s was the
dominant one in colonial accounts of the period: the Mau Mau were
tribalist and religious, not nationalist. Their "insane frenzy"
and "fanatical discipline" could only be the manifestation of a
cultish outfit, organised around leaders lusting for power (whereas
the white settler elite and the colonial powers were apparently
averse to their own enormous power). The Colonial Office held that
the Mau Mau leaders not only wanted power, not only could not be
animated by the real injustices of the colonial system, but were
rejecting its benefits. Thus, the Mau Mau "seeks to lead the
Africans of Kenya back to the bush and savagery, not forward into
progress", according to a report to the Secretary of State for the
Colonies. In fact, as the historian Bruce Berman explains, this
account of the Mau Mau as a fanatical cult was immediately taken up
by the Western academia, particularly American anthropologists who
inserted it into an account of "tribal revival movements"
and "crisis cults" which had been developed to explain native
American resistance to the white colonials.

Secrecy was a crucial component of the counterinsurgency, in part
because it was decided that the less that left-wing anti-
colonialists in Britain knew about what was going on, the better.
What was known was therefore bound to lead to erroneous conclusions,
even among the principled minority who were vocally hostile to
colonialism. Of course, to the extent that this was successful, it
enabled the British to subject people to processes
of 'villagization' (concentration camps) and mass executions.
Together with the hangings, the horrible conditions in
the 'villages' for the duration of the war killed up to 100,000
Kenyans according to Caroline Elkins. British officials used a range
of measures for controlling the imprisoned population, including
sexual violence and physical punishment. Of course, it need hardly
be added that the main victims of this widespread sexual violence
were women, precisely the supposed objects of British paternal
protection.

Well, today's counterinsurgency propaganda has as its goals the
desire to separate the resistance from any claim on Iraqi
nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. It has to
bestialise the resistance by making it seems as if the minority of
atrocities characterise the whole. It has to demonise it as
inherently, and essentially, misogynistic, as well as a
religious/tribal affair. And it has to deprive us of access to
honest reporting on the situation, through various strategies of
media management, including the odd ad hoc death penalty for those
not embedded with the troops. To the extent that it is successful,
it acculturates people to the grave atrocities that the occupiers
see as necessary to maintain their rule and secure a pliant regime.