Living with the fear of the Mau Mau

By Lynn Michell

The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya is in the news again, more than four decades after civil war and bloodshed led to the government declaring a State of Emergency in Kenya. Civil rights lawyer, Martyn Day, defending Kikuyu veterans, has succeeded in bringing a case against the British government for cruelty and torture during the 1950s. There are few Kikuyu left to tell their side of the story and only recently has a different version of history leaked out between the carefully edited, official lines. 

I was there when all this took place. I can't give you a blow-by-blow account because I was very young, but I retain strong images that are the colour of fear.

I was three years old when my father was posted to Nairobi in the 1950s. We arrived just before the Mau Mau carried out their first telltale attacks on the white farmers who lived in remote farms up in the mountains. Their trademark brutality left dogs and cows hamstrung and disembowelled, and humans mutilated and dying.

As the attacks escalated, my gentle mother was taken by my father to the firing range and taught how to use a pistol. Hating the gun, but knowing she would use it to protect her daughters, she hid it in her bedside table, beneath her embroidered handkerchiefs. It wasn't hard to find. When my father was on patrol, the three of us stayed in her bedroom with a chest of drawers jammed under the door handle. I remember the fear that hung in the air as my mother pretended to listen to the radio or to play card games with us before bed. I remember the stories that reached us along the army grape vine, like the killing of a little boy called Michael who was hacked to death in his nursery, leaving the walls blood-splattered and one of his hands lying in a far corner of the room. One of the family's own black servants had let the guerrillas into the house; the same servant who had carried the little boy home a few days previously after he had fallen from his pony.

I learned later that this kind of betrayal was common and often arose from fear. The Kikuyu and other tribesmen were under enormous pressure to leave the white families they had served for many years. They were threatened with torture and death, and, fearful for their own survival, they left in droves and fled to the mountains where they drank the blood of goats and swore allegiance to the Mau Mau.

Night brought heart-stopping fear for my sister and I. As soon as our mother had said 'Goodnight' and closed our bedroom door, my sister would climb into my bed and there we would stay, curled up together, playing whispered games until one of us fell asleep. I remember us watching the shadows of trees outside the window as they swayed in the wind, each of us imagining the shape of a black man hidden in the branches. We whispered about how we were going to die; painted warriors with pangas would climb in our bedroom window and chop off our hands and cut out our tongues.

A few years ago, my father, now 96, started to dictate his memoirs of his active service in the army. He talked and I typed. With his short-term memory almost gone, it gave him pleasure to recount experiences he could remember with total clarity. Active service was when he felt most fulfilled. He portrayed himself as Action Man. Steady under fire. He talked about being a Desert Rat in Libya in WWII when they had reliable information about the whereabouts of the enemy, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps. Then he spoke of fighting guerrilla warfare in Kenya in which the enemy was invisible, cunning and unpredictable. My father trained his men in the Abedare mountains. To some extent it was a farce because the Mau Mau could move rapidly and stealthily across their own humid, stifling, dripping forests while the young infantry soldiers tripped on the tangled roots of the dense scrub and became lost.

All that I have written here is true. The Mau Mau attacks were vicious and cruel. They showed no mercy. This is the version of events that my father handed down to me, a story which he will never change. His conscience is clear because when he went out to track down and kill the Kikuyu, he was doing what he had been trained to do, and he did it well. In the dead of night, he went on armed patrol to defend his own people; to risk his own life to save ours. Who am I to judge him? He, not I, cleared up the body parts after the Mau Mau massacre of a white farmer and his wife.

But he left out the other side of the story.

Much later, I read David Anderson's History Of The Hanged and the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and learnt why the tribes in Kenya had turned on the white settlers who lived there. I understood that their traditional way of life on the land had been destroyed decades earlier when European settlers had seized for themselves thousands of acres of rich, arable pastures and then employed the natives to farm it for a pittance. The natives became servants on their own soil, without legal rights. They were land-hungry and desperate while the white settlers lived a life of obnoxious luxury and notoriety in Happy Valley, playing out one of the last old tunes of imperialism.  Servants were punished with beatings and floggings that sometimes left them dead. For their families there was no regress. The balance was too uneven; in the end, the Kikuyu had nothing else to lose.

History is usually written from the vantage point of the victors. Like invisible writing that reappears after decades, a new account of that period has come to light. Atrocities were carried out without restraint on both sides. Thirty-two British civilians were murdered by the Mau Mau who also turned on their own people and on anyone suspected of being a loyalist. During the now notorious Lari massacre, on the night of March 25, 1953, Mau Mau militants herded one hundred and twenty Kikuyu - men, women and children - into huts and set fire to them, killing anyone who tried to escape. But roll the film on and you will see thousands of Kikuyus standing, glassy eyed, at the barbed wire fences of labour camps where there was no sanitation and not enough to eat. You will understand that it was not just the Mau Mau who were without compassion.

For my sister and I, the days, still smoothed by routine, felt almost normal and in the harsh African sun the demons of fear ran away. It was only when the sun dropped behind the horizon that we breathed more quickly and looked into every dark corner. Just in case. In our thirties, whenever we lived alone, we still searched our bedrooms before we climbed into bed. In two different English cities, thousands of miles from Africa and thirty years away from the initial bloodshed, two grown women performed the same futile rituals of opening the wardrobe doors and feeling behind the clothes, pulling aside the curtains and looking under the bed. The light on the landing had to be left on. Sometimes I propped furniture under the door handle. We laughed at the absurdity of our behaviour but the legacy of our time in Kenya compelled us to fear the night. Grown up and with children of our own, we still slept on our left sides in case we were stabbed. Lying thus, the knife would not enter our hearts and we might survive.

I did in the end find a way of banishing the demons that belonged to a faraway time and place. My hidden revolver comes in the shape of a large, spotted, black and white rescued dog who barks fiercely at strangers. Homer is my warm, loving security blanket but I keep that secret to myself. I can walk the night streets and even cross dark stretches of land so long as my dog is at my side. His instinct to protect me is wired-in. He hasn't heard of the Mau Mau and doesn't need to.

* Lynn Michell is the author of White Lies which is set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. The book offers two accounts: the colonial version and that of the natives. Michell says: "I know of no other British novelist who has covered this period in Kenyan history, but I was there and witnessed the brutality, the fear, the terror, and the criminal deprivation of the tribesmen and the destruction of their way of life."

Recently, Britain's Foreign Secretary - William Hague announced that Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising will receive payouts totalling £20m. He said the UK government recognised Kenyans were tortured and it "sincerely regrets" the abuses that took place.