Thread by @HistoryKE

#HistoryKeThread Events That Accelerated Kenya’s Independence

Towards the late 1950s, and in spite of scores of Mau Mau and a few of their prominent leaders being killed or captured, there were still pockets of armed resistance against colonial rule in Kenya.

In demands by both international civil rights groups and moderate politicians in the United Kingdom for independence to be granted immediately, the Mau Mau found inspiration.

But bastions of apartheid rule in Kenya such as institutions of learning and private clubs still clung onto hardline positions, wrecking any hopes of independence looming.

As late as 1961, for instance, the leadership committee of the exclusive Muthaiga Club passed a resolution declaring that membership to the club would remain a white affair.

Two years earlier, and as author Christine Nicholls recorded in her book, The White Tribe of Kenya, Egerton College had resolved not to admit non-white students.

It was in April of 1959 that the Secretary of The Colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd (pictured), keen to appease settlers, announced in the House of Commons that Britain would do everything not to abdicate its responsibility to “all inhabitants” of Kenya.

Although he was careful not to say “settlers”, Lennox-Boyd was known to be an anti-independence hardliner.

1959 was also the same year that the colony arguably suffered her worst independence labour pains. Anyone that year seeking signs of the last vestiges of British colonialism in Kenya only needed to look no further than two brutal events.

Let’s have a look at the first one - what came to be known as the Hola massacre.

On the 3rd of March 1959, 85 detainees at the Hola #MauMau detention camp in present-day Tana River district were marched out to site and ordered to work under the hot sun.

The camp at the time had more than 500 prisoners. At least 100 of them were held in a separate “hardcore” detention area.

The relationship between warders and prisoners here was extremely cold. And there were reports that defiant prisoners in the secluded hardcore wing occasionally threw contents of their latrine buckets at warders.

It is not clear if the prisoners that were deployed to work were from the crop of hardcores or not, or if they were mixed. What is known is that on that day, warders armed with clubs descended on prisoners who were lying down defiantly in trenches, killing a number of them.

Majority of the prisoners had staged a sit-in, refusing to work.

One Hola survivor, John Maina Kahihu, described what happened:

“We refused to do this work. We were fighting for our freedom. We were not slaves. There were two hundred guards. One hundred and seventy stood around us with machine guns. Thirty guards were inside the trench with us. The white man in charge...

....blew his whistle and the guards started beating us. We were beaten....(my body)....was covered by other bodies – just my arms and legs were exposed. I was very lucky to survive. But others were still being beaten. There was no escape for them....”

[end of quote]

When the overzealous warders realized their mistake, eleven detainees lay dead.

Panic set in.

Desperate to revive the (dead or dying) detainees, the warders threw water over the corpses. Some warders even tried to force water down the throats of the corpses.

When the resident prison doctor, a young Englishman, arrived at the scene, he inexplicably agreed with warders that the prisoners had drowned.

But another government official, H. W. Thompson, the DC at Kipini, had his doubts.

On orders from the Governor, he had rushed to Hola to investigate the incident. Upon assessing the bruises on, and grotesqueness of, the detainees’ bodies, he openly disputed the argument that they had drowned.

He afterwards left for Nairobi to brief the Governor.

Meanwhile, the East African Standard picked up the story, telling its readers that according to the official statement, the detainees had drowned after drinking water “from a water cart which was used by all members of the working party and the guards”.

More media houses around the world, including in the UK, published similar stories. Cornered, the colonial government was stuck with drowning as cause of the deaths.

The incident led to a storm in the House of Commons. Opposition MPs demanded to know what transpired. The Governor phoned London and gave the Secretary of The Colonies the true account.

No, this admission will put the government in an awkward position, the Secretary must have told the Governor.

Within days of the incident, a Parliamentary Committee in the House of Commons had been formed to probe the incident.

It wasn’t long before the truth emerged, amid adverse publicity around the world about how brutally Britain treated its African subjects.

Meanwhile, later in the same year (1959) London had a new Secretary of The Colonies, Iain Macleod (pictured in Kenya, with crossed arms).

In her book, Christine Nicholls states that when he settled down in office, Macleod immediately contemplated granting independence to Kenya “in three years’ time”. His predecessor, Lennox-Boyd, reportedly had a longer target of fifteen years.

The Hola affair led to London ordering the closure of other detention camps in Kenya. It also ordered for the release of detainees. In any case, Britain was cutting down on funding for the colony.

And if to Europeans the closure of the detention camps was not a sign that it was the beginning of the end of the British empire in Kenya, how the colonial government handled another incident involving one of their own surely was.

On 12th October 1959, a European, Peter Poole, was charged with the murder of an African, Kamawe Musunge.

Musunge was cycling near Ngong Road, Nairobi, when Poole’s two dogs accosted him. He stopped cycling and lobbed stones at the dogs. On hearing his dogs barking, Poole stormed out of his nearby house while armed with a pistol. He angrily confronted Musunge and shot him dead.

The unlucky cyclist was not the only person that Poole had shot at. At another incident, the same dogs had attacked an african policeman and instead of reining in on his canines, Poole strangely shot the constable in the leg, wounding him.

During the trial of the murder of Musunge, reports came out that Poole had also threatened an Indian shopkeeper in Nairobi with a gun. The shopkeeper had only declined to extend discount on the price of a torch.

Also, during the trial of Musunge, multitudes of Europeans - Belgians and French mostly, fled to Kenya from Congo, where a civil war had erupted.

Determined to somehow make the point that the white settler spirit in Kenya lived on, Europeans in Nairobi and major towns went out of their way to welcome the visitors. Classrooms in white-only schools, for example, were created to accommodate the newcomers.

But the developments in Congo also brought out the realization that the dark continent was not to be relied upon as a permanent home for Europeans.

Strangely, that was the same feeling that Poole, whose wife and mother are pictured here, must have had while in remand. For Musunge’s killing, the white jury at the trial, to the shock of the European community in Kenya, condemned him to death.

Amid protests by an angry crowd of both Europeans and Africans outside the prison in which he was held, the sentence was carried out on 18th August 1960.

After Poole’s execution, Europeans in Kenya were increasingly resigned to the grim possibility of African rule in Kenya.

Indeed, in the months that followed, Mzee Kenyatta was released from detention and Secretary Macleod invited Kenya’s political leaders to London for constitutional talks that led to independence.

Just before the Lancaster talks, Macleod, speaking to a reporter, said “...although it was extremely dangerous to move quickly (to grant independence), it would have been far more dangerous to try to hold back the tide of African nationalism....”

In the run up to independence in December 1963, official records and correspondence regarding the killings in Hola were reportedly destroyed or went missing. There seemed to have been a deliberate attempt to have the incident extinguished from memory.

Indeed, the colonial authorities did away with the name Hola and renamed it Galole.

It wasn’t until 1971 that President Jomo Kenyatta, while playing host to a goodwill delegation of residents of Tana River district, ordered that the previous name, Hola, be restored.

If you enjoyed this thread, then you will definitely enjoy this one on the Chuka massacre -

https://twitter.com/HistoryKE/status/915126571534491648?s=09