Organised crime; Looting, abuse, genocide and indignities otherwise known as colonialism.
After the second world war, the Kenyan Africans who had fought
and given life and limb to protect their British masters from the Axis power
were shipped back with the promise of land. Land where they could lie in the
embraces of their wives as they plotted on taking new ones. Land from where
they could tell envious villagers about their heroic antics in Burma where God
knows what had taken them to fight the white man’s war. Where they could build
homes and plant yams and coffee which they would now be be allowed to seeing they
were war heroes and all. You see, Africans were previousily disallowed from planting tea, coffee,
pyrethrum or any other cash-crop unless
of course they were white or had their tongue firmly stuck in between
the toes of the colonial district officer.
Remember this is not land that the British had magically downloaded
from outer space. No this was the same the land they had forcefully taken from
their fathers a few years back(Fathers of the Africans).
However, like the native American people, they came to the rude
awakening that the imperialists had zero intention of keeping their word. Outraged, the young men formed a group named Anake a fourty (Young men of the 40’s)
and took matters and machetes into their own hands. These were the seeds from
which the Mau Mau revolution sprouted and between the end of the Second World
War and 1956 when Dedan Kimathi was apprehended, hanged and planted in a yet to be found grave there struggle went full blast.
British Tactics
Seeing the land in Laikipia, Nyeri, Murang’a and other parts
of central province and rift valley was so fertile, they herded the cattle that
latter became people after independence into reservations. These were tiny
villages where the people were whipped(quite literaly ) into a farming and building frenzy
otherwise known as forced labor in conditions not very different from the
concentration camps in Nazi Germany barely a decade ago. Of course when the Germans
were doing it, it was the noble and moral duty of the Christian British to stop
them and with hindsight it appears, take notes.
Many of the reserves were surrounded not with fences but deep trenches
with sharp spikes planted at the bottom where anyone suspected of being a Mau Mau or sympathiser would inevitably find themselves spending the rest of their life... sticking out-Mshikaki style.
Forced labor was the order of the day and torture involving
pliers and other heavy carpentry and masonry tools on on testicles may have been the first male directed form of contraception
introduced by the British (Yah feminism!). Lining people along these trenches and
mowing them with machine guns? Yes, they did that a few times. Ithamio, is the kikuyu word for forced
migration. Some Africans would be moved from their homelands to the Nyanza region and detained without the inconvenience of a trail on islands in the lake Victoria. Here, they would treated to more of the
pliers therapy and some serious manicures. (This might explain the origin of
the term after all). In which their fingernails would be brutally torn off, presumably for
easier cleaning and perhaps painting. Hopefully "curing" them of rebelliousness.
God bless the king. When these men
were separated from their families, the settlers went on to strengthen their
hold on their land. They were
virtuosos of divide and rule and back home they empowered a sadistic horde of
Africans, to become home guards and colonial chiefs whose primary role was to
terrorize the "terrorists", villagers and anyone imagined to be a sympathizer
of the Mau Mau. Who by the way only wanted their land back. And no they did not
get it. Ever!
Next time I will tell you why we may have gotten independence earlier had it not been for the MAU MAU.
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