Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:15:18 +0100
London case: Africa's liberators fought for independence, and won - except in Kenya
Kenya has a schizophrenic relationship with its "liberation heroes", sharply diverging with the rest of Africa
A FEW days ago, it was reported that lawyers in a landmark case in the British courts seeking reparations for atrocities committed in Kenya during the 1950s Mau Mau Uprising are working to have their case settled out of court.
The lawyers argue that their clients – some 20,000 Mau Mau veterans – are of advanced age and need not go through a lengthy court process.
In the meantime, back in Kenya, the local agents of the UK law firm representing the Mau Mau fighters have had to warn veterans against “conmen on the prowl” who are tricking them into giving them money to enjoin them in the ongoing case.
Nairobi city lawyer Cecil Miller clarified that his firm was offering their services free of charge, and any person collecting money in a scheme to enlist them in the case was just out to “swindle the old men.”
The conmen on the prowl may seem like an unfortunate, but rather trivial incident, but it does throw Kenya’s schizophrenic relationship with the Mau Mau in sharp relief.
It also underscores just how sharply Kenya’s diverges with the rest of Africa in the fate that befell liberation fighters.
Far from the commonly held idea that Africa “fought” for its independence, more often than not, independence was thrust upon most of Africa’s countries without a single shot fired.
Independence on silver platter
Out of the 54 African nations, just 11 had an actual armed struggle for independence, and that even includes Madagascar, where the Malagasy Uprising of 1947-48 was ruthlessly put down 12 years before independence was attained in 1960 – making the causal link between the uprising and Madagascar’s independence rather tenuous.
Africa was largely granted independence on a silver platter because Europe was so devastated after World War II that it simply could not pay the bills of its colonial enterprise any longer.
France, in particular, had suffered occupation (and humiliation) by Nazi Germany, and was only liberated by the Allied Forces, a coalition of mainly American, British and Soviet troops.
So in the vast majority of the French colonies in Africa, independence was a quick, bureaucratic affair. It is no coincidence that the independence dates of eight of its colonies were within two or three days of each other in 1960, obviously to fit in the travel schedule of the French government team “giving” independence to the colonies: Benin (Aug 1), Niger (Aug 3), Burkina Faso (Aug 5), Cote d’Ivoire (Aug 7), Chad (Aug 11), Central African Republic (Aug 13), Congo-Brazzaville (Aug 15) and Gabon (Aug 17).
Do it over a fortnight, then back to Paris.
The exception
The only French territory with a brutal armed struggle was Algeria. There were more than a million French settlers in Algeria in 1959. Algeria was unique to France because, unlike all other overseas possessions seized by France during the 19th century, only Algeria was considered not simply a colony, but legally classified an integral part of France – much the way the island of Sicily is an integral part of Italy.
The National Liberation Front (FLN) fought a bitter guerilla war from 1954-1962, and conservative estimates put the total death toll in the war at 700,000. But the FLN emerged victorious and first independence president, Ahmed Ben Bella, was one of the nine core members of the FLN’s leadership.
In the post-independence era, the FLN has remained the pillar of Algerian politics except for a few years between 1990 and 1996.
Even in the British colonies, armed resistance only featured in countries with a large settler population.
Apart from Kenya, Zimbabwe too, had to fight for its independence. But the African resistance was fractured, with the armed wings of two political parties - the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) fighting each other as well as the white minority government led by Ian Smith.
The two groups would later come together under the ZANU Patriotic Front (PF) banner, and former guerilla leader Robert Mugabe elected prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. He remains at the helm today.
A young Robert Mugabe arrives at pre-election rally in Highfields in 1979. Next to him are Army General Solomon Mujuru (l) and current vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa (r). (Photo: Flickr/ Zimbabwe Guardian).
Although South Africa declared itself independent in 1910, the African population had to fight long and hard for political representation, civil liberties and an end to the racist apartheid policy. The African National Congress (ANC) had its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which Nelson Mandela co-founded in 1961, before being sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to overthrow the state in 1963.
We know how the story ends, with Mandela free and the ANC leading the first democratic government in 1994.
Portugal’s folly
The only European power that clutched dearly to its African colonies was Portugal, where guerilla wars were fought in all its colonies – Angola, Mozambique, and a joint campaign for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, which was so draining to Portugal’s economy that by the 1970s, the country was spending 40% of its annual budget on the war effort.
Portugal was much poorer than the other European powers, and so saw its African territories as crucial to its economic and geostrategic interests in Europe. There were also at least a million Portuguese settlers in the various African colonies.
But again, the guerilla warriors won their battles, and led the successive independence governments – in Angola, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in Mozambique, the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and in Portuguese Guinea, the Marxist African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).
The civil wars that troubled these countries came later, in the post-independent era.
So it’s quite unique that the Mau Mau in Kenya did not “officially” win the war, neither were they ever part of the clique that took over power with the departure of the British in 1963.
In fact, Kenya is the only country to actually ban its liberation movement after attaining self-government. The Mau Mau remained a proscribed group until 2003, a full forty years after independence.
In a 1963 speech, first president Jomo Kenyatta said, “We are determined to have independence in peace, and we shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya… Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.”
Truth be told, it’s disputed whether the Mau Mau was even historically necessary, or whether the British wouldn’t have left anyway, considering their ravaged economy post World War II.
Did the legendary ruthlessness of the Mau Mau scared the British into loosening their grip on the Kenya colony, or did it “merely sow discord” within an emerging nationalist movement that was bound to win power in the end?
The main ranks of the Mau Mau were drawn from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru ethnic groups, but was the movement really fighting for a broader “Kenyan” purpose, or narrow ethnic interests?
The uprising has even been described not as a liberation movement, but as a Kikuyu civil war. Just 32 Europeans are documented to have been killed by the Mau Mau, but the militia killed over 4,000 local, mainly Kikuyu villagers, to scare them - according to critics - into being loyal to the Mau Mau and deter collaboration with the British.
The Mau Mau on their part argue some were agents of the colonial state.
Kenya’s official languages - English, Kiswahili and Silence
The fact that the uprising was largely put down with the help of Kikuyu collaborators, known as “home guards” – who then filled the ranks of the country’s post-independence government - made it easy to say that the heroic fighters had been betrayed, short changed and unfairly treated.
But some have even argued that the home guards were actually moderate, constitutional politicians who rescued a pluralist, multiethnic Kenya from the clutches of a narrow, ethnic militia.
The problematic legacy of the Mau Mau explains some of peculiarities of the Kenyan state and society – its extreme opportunism (the most benign of which is the conmen out to swindle the old veterans) and especially, the ease with which things are not just swept under the carpet but are literally, genuinely, forgotten.
Yvonne Owuor in the stunning 2013 novel Dust, captures it succinctly – after independence, “Kenya’s official languages became English, Kiswahili and Silence.”