Shiraz Durrani, Mau Mau: The Revolutionary, Anti-Imperialist force from Kenya, 1948-1963 (Nairobi: 2018), Vita Books.
Review by Rohan Ammar.
As part of 2020’s global reckoning against decades of colonial glorification, Kenyans toppled the statue of their first post-independence president Jomo Kenyatta. In his place, they erected a homage to Dedan Kimathi, executed by the British colonial regime in 1957, a leader of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or Mau Mau, who took up arms against the British Empire between 1948 and 1963. This could be indicative of a Kenya that is pivoting back to the revolutionary politics of the pro-independence Mau Mau, while simultaneously dismantling the failed capitalist legacy of the collaborationist president Kenyatta.
Kenya was colonised by the British from 1920 to 1963. It’s near impossible not to read Duranni’s sweeping 2018 study of the 1948-1963 independence struggle without seeing parallels to what was happening a decade earlier in Nazi Germany. Durrani himself is not shy of this comparison, entitling one section of his book ‘Fascism Has Come To Kenya’. Pro-independence Kenyans were systematically rounded up and killed on a vast scale. Dowden (The Guardian, 2005) suggests, ‘more than one million people were crammed into heavily guarded camps where starvation and disease killed thousands’. Meanwhile, Mau Mau sympathisers in the neighbouring countries of modern-day Tanzania and Uganda were rounded up and deported back to suffer in the British concentration camps of Kenya.
In the excellent section labelled ‘A Brief Recap’, Durrani quotes international human rights lawyers, Leigh Day, whose 2016 investigation demonstrated that in 1954 alone, ‘approximately 1 million Kenyans were forced to burn their homes and rounded up for six years in 854 villages fenced with barbed wire where acts of brutality by colonial guards were widespread’. And if there was any doubt about the ghastly conditions in these camps, Durrani silences them: ‘The acts of torture included castration and sexual assaults which, in many cases, entailed the insertion of broken bottles into the vaginas of female detainees [and guards] would hang detainees upside down and insert sand and water into their anuses’. Death figures only further support these accusations of blatant war crimes. John Newsinger (The Blood Never Dried, 2006) estimates as many as 50,000 anti-imperialist Kenyans were killed in action during the 1950s war of independence. In contrast, he notes, ‘only 12 European soldiers and 52 European police were killed, three Asians and 524 African soldiers and police … as for settler casualties, only 32 were killed in the course of the emergency, less than died in traffic incidents in the same period.’ The disparity in deaths is not just a matter of the British Empire’s technological prowess, but a result of the systematic execution of ethnic Kenyan combatants and the abysmal conditions of the camps.
It is impossible not to be horrified by these accounts. However, Durrani’s text is not solely an indictment of British colonialism, but an inspiring history of the fierce, organised resistance against it. The imprisoned Mau Mau used the concentration camps to recruit and train fighters: ‘the detention centres came to be known as “Mau Mau Universities”[…] as there was a well-developed programme run by experienced cadres to educate new inmates on the ideology and world outlook of Mau Mau’. The ingenuity and bravery of these prison programmes is just one example of the fascinating way the Kenyan resistance organised. Durrani lists five key tenets of their communication strategy:
- Oral communications
- Revolutionary publishing
- Use of pamphlets and handbills
- Establishment of a people’s press
- Information gathering and dissemination
Revolutionary Kenyans used their employment positions – as cleaners, waiters, servants, desk clerks – to gather sensitive information on the colonial regime. Through coded language (which is collated in a table by Durrani) this was then disseminated around the country. This is a tactic that has been used around the world by anti-imperialists, including, as the author points out, in revolutionary Cuba and Vietnam. Durrani advises us there is much to be explored in these connections, but falls short of doing it himself. While this is a text intended more to be a reference guide for the student or teacher of this historical period, one can’t help but wish that Durrani would have further drawn out these threads rather than teasing us with suggestions.
However, one international link that is clearly highlighted by the author is that between the revolutionary Kenyans and the local South Asian diaspora. As the British had implemented an embargo on international material coming in from the likes of China, India, or the USSR, there was a vacuum of revolutionary literature that isolated Kenyans from the world struggle against imperialism. They needed to fill this vacuum themselves, as indicated by their five tenets of communication, yet without access to any printing press this was a severe challenge. Durrani illustrates how Indians (who had won independence in their own country in 1947) controlled small presses, and sympathetic to the cause of the colonised Africans, printed pamphlets and notices for them. Some, like Jaswant Singh, would store weapons and ammunitions for the armed groups.
Throughout the Kenyan War of Independence, the British used the same methods they had practised not long before in India: sternly oppress the most revolutionary independence forces and allow the collaborationist middle-classes and bourgeoisie to take hold. The post-independence period in Kenya is very much a victim of what Frantz Fanon called ‘the pitfalls of national consciousness’, whereby the newly independent national bourgeoisie begins to mirror the colonial regime. The Mau Mau weren’t the only fighting force in the country, but heavily depended on radical trade unions and the movements for gender equality. All these revolutionary elements, few of whom formed parties but all of whom made demands rooted in socialism, were swept aside by the post-colonial president Jomo Kenyatta. Groomed by the British establishment, Kenyatta had used these movements as props to gain political power then locked these groups up once he sat as the head of parliament. Since 1963, neo-colonialism has gripped the country, with capitalist exploitation, ethnic tensions, and class warfare rife through society.
Today, as Kenyans take to the streets to protest their neoliberal government’s mishandling of Covid-19, we urge them to continue to rehabilitate the image of the Kimathi. We urge them to read Durrani’s text and re-learn about the Mau Mau’s radical claims for land redistribution, for more than ever the politics of the Mau Mau is needed again in Kenya.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 281 April /May 2021
