Kenya's Iron Curtain

Kenya's Iron CurtainAuthor(s): Eileen FletcherSource: Africa Today, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1956), pp. 2-5Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4183838 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 07:33

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Africa Today.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.193 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 07:33:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4183838?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Kenya's Iron Curtain by Eileen Fletcher

At least six times in the past 18 months, responsible people in Britain have asked for a judicial inquiry into the administration of justice in Kenya. Yet it has always been refused by the British Colonial Secretary, who says he is quite satisfied that it is unnecessary. Nevertheless people in Britain are extremely dis- quieted about happenings in Kenya, and I shall be surprised if they let Mr. Lennox Boyd continue long in his satisfaction. I am not surprised, however, that Kenya does not want an inquiry. Things have happened in Kenya that are a disgrace to the name of Britain-things that are breeding bitterness and resentment among Africans that will take years to overcome. Even tribes not affected by Mau Mau are horrified at the ruthless way in which the movement is being suppressed by the Government. Many who do not agree with the violence and atrocities of Mau Mau are in agreement with the aims for which it is fighting.

80,000 Detained Without Trial I went out to Kenya in December 1954 as a Rehabilitation

Officer, employed by the Kenya Government. Very soon after I arrived I was appointed Staff Officer in charge of Rehabilitation of Women and Girls. In this capacity I travelled about the col- ony visiting camps and prisons where women and girls convicted or suspected of Mau Mau sympathies were detained. At one time there were 80,000 people detained without trial, some remaining in this state for several years-some, even, after a court of justice had tried and acquitted them! Many, after they had com- pleted the sentence awarded them by the Court, were still imprisoned under the Emergency Regulations merely by being transferred from the prison to a detention camp.

The staff coping with this enormous problem was recruited hastily, often with little inquiry as to suitability. Most of them were untrained; few had had similar experience; many were quite unsuitable. They were drafted into the three departments dealing with the problem-Administration, Prisons, and Com- munity Development. None of these were properly organized, either for the rehabilitation of Mau Mau, or for the training and

and supervising of their own staffs. Nor was this all. The financial side was similarly ne- glected. Money was poured out -but improperly used. For example, the Auditor General in his annual report, published early in 1956, mentioned

Eileen Fletcher, an English quaker whose revelations about conditions in Kenya shocked the British parlia- ment and nation, now tells Ameri- cans for the first time - in the columns of Africa Today - of what the Emergency in colonial Kenya has meant in human terms.

2



large amounts of gasoline used for personal purposes, quantities of stores missing, and thousands of articles unaccounted for. The report added that the Ministry for Community Development and Rehabilitation appears unable to control its financial operations, and also that its account is overdrawn. This is hardly surprising when one considers that some officers were paid on a considerably higher scale than they were entitled to because they were called rehabilitation officers, although actually they were employed on a different class of work.

How, in fact, does the rehabilitation system work? From time to time sweeps are carried out by the police and the army, Afri- can men, women, and children being swept up and placed in cages on the tops of lorries, and carried off to the huge detention camps where some remain indefinitely without trial. In some cases the authorities give no thought to the children who are left aband- oned in the places where the parents were living. In other cases, small children, some under eight years of age, are swept up and put in camps behind barbed wire without relatives (or indeed anyone else) to look after them. I found some such children in a compound of male juveniles-some of whom were real toughs.

On another occasion I found all the males, including small boys, each wearing nothing but a blanket. The authorities feared that an attempt was to be made to rescue some of the detainees, and therefore all clothing and possessions, other than blankets and cooking utensils, were impounded. The men and boys (several thousand of them) were ordered to march past a small enclosure, open to the weather, into which they had to throw their things pell mell in a great heap, which I saw several days later. "The first comers will grab what they want, and the rest will be unlucky," was the comment of a European Prisons Officer when I inquired how the possessions would be redistributed.

Cruel and Degrading Some of the treatment in camps and prisons was cruel, and

some was degrading. The Government of Kenya and the Colonial Secretary have stated frequently that the confession of suspects is entirely voluntary, and that it would be of no value unless it was. I saw a letter from a prison official asking for 50 single cells to be transferred to his prison as they "would be invaluable for screening women." I was with a male rehabilitation officer when we saw some criminal lunatics being removed from prison to a mental hospital. He said he was sorry to see them go as he had intended putting men who would not confess in with them for a few days. He repeated this, in my presence, to a Prison Com- mandant who said that he had previously done that to a political prisoner, adding "What they did to him during those ten days was nobody's business, but at the end of the ten days he was not interested in politics or anything else." I also saw men stripped

3



naked, and forced to mark time on the double, chanting "Mau Mau's bad! Mau Mau's bad!" because one of their number had escaped from a working party. European officers looked on, and European women clerks watched out of the window. On another occasion, some young girl convicts-under 18 years old-were sentenced to 16 days solitary confinement for singing Mau Mau hymns. I saw their faces on the day they came out of cells, and I shall never forget their look of stark horror.

13000 Africans Hanged

A number of offences carry the death penalty under the Emergency regulations. From the beginning of the Emergency until the end of March 1956, 1,015 African men were hanged- less than a third of them for murder. From January to the end of March this year, when the end of the Emergency was said to be in sight, 44 men were hanged-only eight of them for murder.

On the other hand, cases against Europeans were treated extremely lightly. A District Commandant in the Kenya Police Reserve was sentenced to four years prison for perjury in a case where an African was on a capital charge. He said that a superior had told him that if he pleaded guilty he would only get a nominal fine! On appeal his four year sentence was reduced to 18 months, and after he had served nine of them the Governor exercised his prerogative of mercy and had him released! Another time a European District Officer (and magistrate), and a Chief Inspec- tor of Police, and two other European police inspectors, were charged when a prisoner in their care died. He had been tortured for six days. The prisoner was never charged and never brought before a magistrate. He was tortured by the four accused officials to try and make him confess to having stolen some money. After six days of appalling treatment he died. His injuries, enumerated at the trial, are such that even to read them is enough to make one sick. The charge of murder against the Europeans was, however, reduced to causing the prisoner grievous bodily harm. The two police inspectors were each sentenced to 18 months imprisonment with hard labor, and the Chief Inspector and the D.O. were fined ?25 and ?10 respectively. Later the East African Supreme Court raised the penalties to three and -a half years imprisoned for six months instead of paying the fine. The East imprisoned for six months instead of paying the fine. The East African Standard reported in a leading article that it was right that these men bad been prosecuted with "the utmost rigor of the law"! Rigor seemed hardly the word at a time when Africans were being hanged merely for having in their possession one single round of ammunition. (This latter rule was in force until November 1955 when life imprisonment was substituted!)

Colonial powers must remember that the so-called "Backward Races" have Human Rights! People cannot be suppressed inde-

4



Sons of Africa

* THE PREMIER MEETS "THE AMBASSADOR": Kwame Kkrumah, Prime Minister of

the Gold Coast, is here seen with Mr. and Mrs. Louis Armstrong, who visited him earlier this year. "Ambassador" Louis, the U.S. jazz trumpeter, who is acknowledged to be one of the world's most gifted musicians, won unparalleled popularity with

his West African audiences during his visit.

The American Committee on Africa has a project under way for sending gifts of new and second hand jazz records from individual Americans to African jazz enthusiasts. If you or your friends have records of Louis, or other jazz artists,

please send them to: Beatrice Holloway, c/o the American Committee on Africa,

4 West 40th Street, New York 18, New York. Packing and shipping of the records is being contributed by an American publishing concern,

finitely by armed force. England's anxieties about the methods of suppression of Mau Mau can only be allayed by a full judicial inquiry. If the Colonial Secretary and the Kenya Government are wise, they will agree to this. Otherwise people will continue to ask-as they are asking-WHAT IS BEING KEPT HIDDEN IN KENYA?

5



Kenya's Iron Curtain

Documents

Transcript of Kenya's Iron Curtain