History repeats itself. I see parallels.
The Kikuyu were being wiped out, to the point that even Churchill, not exactly a bleeding heart, complained that it seemed a bit much to keep killing Kikuyu “on such an enormous scale.” But they had to do it; they wanted the land, and it was infested with these surplus black people. You only need so many maids, herders, sex slaves and so on; everybody else is surplus natives. To push more Kikuyu off the land, the Brits used a whole rule-book of laws designed to kill off local populations, laws they’d been perfecting in other colonies for hundreds of years. Suddenly every Kikuyu mud hut was subject to a “hut tax” that cost as much as most Kikuyu could make in a year. Can’t pay it? Get off my land, darkie. The Kikuyu, who were talented farmers, tried to raise the money by growing cash crops, until it was suddenly illegal for Kikuyu to grow those crops. “Sorry, blackie, against the law.” That “law” thing is a big part of why the Brits were able to get away with so much for so long, in so many parts of the world: they were great at making it look like some big impersonal thing, some rule that was made up in Heaven, was responsible, and the colonial officer who turned you out of your hut in mid-winter was just following orders.
Same thing when they forced the Kikuyu onto “reserves.” Any Kikuyu stepping out of the reserve was a “squatter.” That’s another thing the Brits did better than anybody: mess with the language. How do the people who’ve lived there for hundreds of years turn into “squatters” against the thieves who took it from them last week? Same with “rebel”—how come everybody who fights the Brits is a “rebel,” even if it’s been their land since the Flood and the Brits just marched onshore a month ago? Because it makes a better story, that’s why.
Another innovation in storytelling that the Brits understood way, way better than the Germans, who were amateurs at PR, was this one: never talk about how many of them you killed; only talk about your people that they killed. That policy was why I never heard as a kid how many Kikuyu died when they finally rose up against the Brits. The Brits never tell you how many natives they killed. Instead they pick some martyr from their forces and plaster his face all over every newspaper and tv station for years, literally years, until everybody knows him like their long-lost martyr cousin.
The Germans never got that, with their junior-high deaths’ heads and black uniforms. That crap doesn’t work. What works is making YOURSELF the martyr, the victim, so nobody thinks about what you’ve been doing to the natives.
In yesterday’s blog I talked about the way a healthy empire reacts when the really nasty stuff comes out, like it’s coming out now about what the Brits did in Kenya in the 1950s. I said a healthy empire has no conscience, never apologizes, and never gets Nuremburg’d. Well, last night I went looking for British reaction to these archives that prove Caroline Elkins was right, and the colonial rulers in Kenya really did run one of the deadliest Gulags of the century.
What I found, or didn’t find, was just what I expected. Most of the Brit sources don’t mention it at all. The best way to “refute” something like this is never to mention it, and that’s what they’re doing. A few pundits over there are writing about the news, but mainly to say, “Nonsense. Couldn’t have happened.” I found this hilarious column from the UK Telegraph, which seems to be a paper for crusty old patriotic types, where someone named Cristina Odone says the whole fuss about torture in Kenya is just a plot by “self-hating” Britain. And to prove she’s not biased or anything she says, “I know a little about the Mau Mau because my parents lived in Kenya just as their reign of terror drew to an end.”
Lost your plantation, didja Chrissie? It’s like Scarlett O’Hara testifying on the horrors of Yankee rule and Reconstruction. To get a good idea how real imperial loyalists deal with bad news, just check out her reader comments. No matter where you are, there’s only a few ways to deal with days like this, when your own archives prove you’re guilty. One is the good ol’ “It must be a conspiracy to make us look bad” approach. Here’s a neat little example of that from Chrissie’s comments:
“There is more to this than meets the eye, who is pulling the strings behind this?”
Yeah, that’s it! Those international Kikuyu bankers who control the world are putting those dead Africans up to it.
Then there’s the “You got off lucky” line, and there’s plenty of that in the comments:
“The [Kikuyu] people in the photo should count themselves lucky to be alive! Other nations that we can think of would have been far, far harsher with the Mau Mau than Britain was!: They would ALL be dead.”
Well, at least you tried. You killed something like 15% of the total Kikuyu population; that’s not bad. This notion that there’s some Dr. Evil out there who can wipe out every last one of the ethnic group, that’s just not realistic. You can do that to hunter-gatherers, maybe, especially if you’ve got the edge in disease resistance, but Africa has more genetic diversity and disease resistance than the rest of the human world put together, so there’s no way you were going to kill every last Kikuyu. Besides, you weren’t trying to. Who’d have done all the work then? Not Chrissie’s plantation mumsy and dadsums, that’s for sure. Actually the British administration decided, in writing, not to kill off the entire Kikuyu population in 1895 “because we depend on them for food supplies.”
Then there’s the argument that they had it coming:
“I grew up in Kenya from 1953 to 1956. The atrocities committed by those barbarians defies any form of human decency and as such I believe they forfeited any claim they may have had to human rights.”
This might fly if you didn’t know the actual figure for British colonists killed by Mau Mau: 32. Thirty-fucking-two. And on the other side of the scoreboard? Well, they ran out of room: something like 300,000 Kikuyu, and over a million shoved in concentration camps. There’s usually a ratio of 10:1 or so in irregular warfare, natives killed : settlers killed, but a rate of 30,000:1…I mean damn, the Nazis never came close to that.
All this bluster is good enough to keep Chrissie’s audience huffing along in their parsonages or wherever they hang out, cursing this here modern world.
Parlance Province 