The British eight-year campaign against the Kikuyu uprising involved two prongs. One was a military offensive against the rebels(Mau-Mau), who had taken to the mountain forests and fought a guerrilla war from there. It took over two years and 20,000 British troops, supported by the British air force, to subdue the insurrectionists, who fought largely with only homemade weapons against Britain’s vastly superior firepower. And even then, the insurgents may have held out even longer if not for Kikuyu who assisted the British. (These were the Ngati or Home guards. We are talking of the Njonjos,Njiris,Chief Luka in Lari,Nyachae's,Michukis just to name a few). For such “meritorious services,” these Kikuyu, who became known as loyalists, were handsomely rewarded materially with land.
What the Kikuyu suffered and endured at the hands of the British colonialists and loyalists in the detainee and labor camps and enclosed villages constitutes a significant portion of Elkins’s book. From the beginning there were the “screenings,” the colonialists’ preferred term for ruthless torture, designed to get information from a Mau Mau suspect and persuade him or her to confess Mau Mau affiliation. Methods of “persuasion” involved beatings, electric shock, cigarette burns and fire, and “bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs...thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas,” Elkins writes.
But despite this contradiction, the British continued to employ brutality and terror. This was particularly true of people the British considered “hard core” Mau Mau men, against whom there was a great deal of “emasculating” violence involving castration. Men in some of these camps wrote letters, which Elkins found during her research, describing pliers that were used to crush testicles before they were literally ripped off.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are still fighting with the loyalist in 2008, only now they just wear a different kind of uniform called the coalition governement.
