Nicolas Rankin and the Mau Mau
The latest edition of the Aspects of History magazine has arrived. It includes an interview with Nicholas Rankin, author of Trapped in History: Kenya, the Mau Mau and Me’, together with a review of the book by me.
If you don’t yet subscribe, please consider doing so, but if you can’t read it otherwise, my review follows
Rankin’s book is deeply and widely researched, beautifully written and endlessly fascinating. I enjoyed it. Fascinatingly, I read it during an extended period in India, where I was able to compare and contrast some of the (many) Indian experiences of imperialism with those of Kenya. The two were chalk and cheese, evidence of the remarkable variety of experience of a multifarious empire.
This powerful book is in part an attempt by Rankin to expiate from his own personal or familial history some of the guilt he feels for being a part of the white elite who for so long trampled rough-shod over ancient African liberties (ignored because they weren’t written down) and lorded over by ignorant white settlers content to steal what was never theirs in the first place. I hope the exercise was cathartic and I am sure that his own parents would forgive him for his new perspective of his time as a child colonist. It wasn’t his fault. While some of the book seems uncritically to accept the work of political activists I can forgive Rankin this as, on the whole, this is a lively and personal memoir that gets the injustice of white settler rule in Kenya about right. In an increasingly democratic Britain as it emerged into the Twentieth Century (women did not get the vote until 1928), the injustice of establishing a race-based polity in Kenya to benefit whites first, Asians second and blacks third, was a searing outrage that Rankin works to expiate in the writing of this account of the period of the Mau Mau insurrection of the 1950s. The essential thrust of the book is to present a picture of colonial Kenya as a bad apple of the imperial barrel – though the book doesn’t set out to be comparative – and the ultimate cause of the violence which marked the bloody transition to independence. In this he is surely right. The book is a clear-eyed analysis, through the lens of his boyhood, of how the story of colonial Kenya demonstrates that the Empire was a hodge podge of good and bad polity, and equally good and bad morality. He quotes his family friend Philip Mason’s observation that ‘There is all the difference in the world between an imperial possession ruled by civil servants and a colony which is ruled by settlers.’ Quite. Kenya suffered from the curse of the latter, India after 1858 by the former. He compares the post 1919 administration of the ex-German colonies in Tanganyika under the enlightened administration of Sir Donald Cameron with the settler-dominated political construct found in Kenya. Although he appears early on to fall into the trap of hyperbole by seeming to agree with the Elkin thesis that all imperialism is a narrative of oppressive violence (conveniently ignoring, as she does, the reality of the violence that existed before, or which might exist afterwards were a different set of political structures – locally asserted or externally imposed – to exist) he paints a helpful picture of a colonial regime established in Kenya for the interests, primarily, of an imported white elite. It was this class-based condescension (of knowing what was best for one’s social inferiors, black, brown and white) that benighted the colony and set it apart from other types of colonial endeavour. An obnoxious breed to white settler arrived, adopting the faux aristocracy of a re-created existence, what V.S. Naipaul described as the ‘bogus aristocracy of colour.’ Imperialism has always emerged from different sources and is sustained by a variety of imperatives. In Kenya the missionary and the agricultural settler came to proselytise and occupy, unlike that in India in which hardy entrepreneurs had originally come to trade. The two make very different sorts of colonies and produce very different sorts of legacies.
Rankin works through the issues of colonial polity clearly and carefully. He works hard to describe and explain the basis of the Kikuyu culture and mythology, as a basis for appreciating the origins of the Mau Mau rebellion as it exploded into violence. But the cultural encounter between Britain and African, between Christian and Kikuyu – such as was seen in the universal Kikuyu practise of clitoridectomy and of land rights – was catastrophic, and forced a deepening of the divide between the Government and the increasingly sullen Africans.
Counter-insurgency is a complex business, and isn’t done well by most who attempt it. The British did it well in Malaya, by closely aligning military activity with a clear political imperative: independence, and the physical separation of the insurgent from their sources of support and sustenance. Counter insurgency in Kenya was on the whole badly done, for the most part – as I have often argued – because it was unnecessary. If the political structures that framed the new polity of the colony in the 1920s and 1930s had been racially inclusive and based on a concept of a racially integrated future, the alienation of the indigenous Africans would never have happened and the rationale for insurgency therefore would never have arisen. Given the nature of the white settler movement this possibility, sadly, is pie-in-the-sky. White Kenya thus created the problem it then tried to manage by ‘control’ and, frankly, by an outrageous degree of violence, some indiscriminate, that was hushed up when the colony was granted its independence and only revealed in the second decade of this century.
Perhaps inadvertently he explodes the myth that modern Briton’s don’t understand the country’s imperial legacy. From its earliest days the colonial project had, in the U.K., its detractors and its hopeless romantics. He describes the rapidly changing attitudes in the UK after the war, and not just on the left, which saw Kenya to be a bastion of egregious racial feudalism orchestrated by ‘Tory toffs and tax dodgers.’ Sadly, such was the nature of empire that London did not intervene as it might have done to assert the quality of a rule of law expected on the streets of the home country. The subject of the rights and wrongs of empire seemed to be on the pages of every newspaper in Britain for much of the 1950s and 1960s. Its was a pity that the same level of introspection was not found in colonial Kenya during the same period. Much blood and anguish could have thereby been averted and Nicholas Rankin could have enjoyed the childish tranquillity he now feels he was denied.