In September 1954, at the height of a bloody war between British colonial forces and the Kenyan anticolonial movement, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the secretary of state for the colonies, received an offer of help from an unexpected source. Brigadier Tony Boyce, the chairman of the Save the Children Fund, suggested that humanitarian organizations should carry out what he termed an “Operation Anvil for children” in Nairobi.Footnote 1
Replicating the Operation Anvil launched by the British army and colonial police, which involved the capture and imprisonment of suspected Mau Mau rebels, Boyce suggested that humanitarian organizations should “round up” children aged between ten and seventeen and place them in residential schools where they would be “re-educated to support the colonial cause.”Footnote 2 Boyce also envisaged a network of kindergartens where the children of Mau Mau suspects would be provided with milk and medical care to “soften” their mothers’ attitudes to British rule.Footnote 3 The Kenyan Emergency presented the Save the Children Fund with an “opportunity to establish an active partnership between the government and voluntary workers … in the colonial territories.”Footnote 4
The Save the Children Fund was not the only aid organization enticed by the “opportunity” presented by the Kenyan Emergency. As postwar reconstruction projects wound down in Europe, many aid organizations sought new roles. In 1948, the British Red Cross transferred a number of its workers from Europe to Malaya during another colonial emergency. Red Cross nurses had participated in a campaign against anticolonial resistance, attempting to win the “hearts and minds” of Malayans through education and sanitation projects. It seemed to the director of the Red Cross Overseas Branch, Joan Whittington, that such methods could be redeployed in Kenya.Footnote 5 For the British Red Cross, as for Save the Children, the Kenyan Emergency was a part of a wider reorientation from postwar Europe to the decolonizing British Empire, where they used their credibility as “international” agents to divert criticism from colonial barbarity.
This article examines humanitarian collusion with the colonial state during the Kenyan Emergency, analyzing how organizations that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period colluded with colonial violence. Aid organizations were deeply implicated in projects for women and children that sought to weaken anticolonial resistance, importing new humanitarian expertise developed in wartime Europe and adapting it to racist, colonial norms. Thus, humanitarian organizations lent credence to the myth that rehabilitation in Kenya was a progressive program enacted by a liberal empire to modernize its subjects, rather than a ruthless attempt to stymie anticolonial resistance. In this case, postwar humanitarian internationalism did not challenge, but enabled, colonial brutality.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, British imperialism was seeking to repurpose itself as a developmental and democratizing force, in line with new international norms.Footnote 6 It was at this moment that colonial violence reached its zenith in a series of wars of decolonization (so-called “emergencies”) that raged from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s.Footnote 7 In Kenya, a state of emergency was declared in 1952, as Mau Mau guerrillas engaged in an insurgency campaign that aimed to end British rule in Kenya. The colonial government embarked upon a program of incarceration and “rehabilitation” to “cleanse” suspected Mau Mau of their anticolonial beliefs, in which insurgents were detained, propagandized, and often tortured.Footnote 8
In recent years, two distinct literatures have examined the two faces of the postwar British Empire. New histories of international order have demonstrated the ideological convergence between twentieth-century imperialism and the ideology of internationalism.Footnote 9 Meanwhile, a burgeoning literature on imperial violence has revealed the illiberal repression at the heart of the “liberal” British Empire.Footnote 10 Through an examination of humanitarianism at the end of empire, this article places these two emerging literatures (one on the intersection of internationalism and imperialism, and the other on colonial violence) in conversation.
The emerging literature on international aid in the twentieth century has shown how internationalist humanitarian tradition emerged from colonial empires (most often the British Empire) and continued to embody and propagate imperial norms after decolonization. In this literature, humanitarian organizations are characterized as “imperial” in the sense that they shared attitudes, ideas, and even personnel with the official machinery of empire.Footnote 11 Aside from recent examinations of the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross during colonial emergencies in Africa, we still know little about how international aid organizations interacted with imperialism as both an ideology and a set of violent practices.Footnote 12 Through an examination of the Save the Children Fund and the British Red Cross in the Kenyan Emergency, this article reveals how, by aiding in the so-called “rehabilitation” of the Kikuyu, humanitarianism became a vehicle for rehabilitating the image of British imperialism.
When Save the Children's chairman, Tony Boyce, arrived at Nairobi airport in September 1954, he walked into the midst of a moral panic about the state of Kikuyu youth. Rapid urbanization and stringent vagrancy laws had led to rising prosecution rates of young men who had been coming to Nairobi in search of work since the end of the Second World War.Footnote 13 Though the majority of prosecutions related to traveling without a pass or to petty criminality, colonial officials used rising crime rates as evidence of the influence of the Mau Mau movement in urban youth.Footnote 14 Many Mau Mau fighters were under twenty-five, and the colonial government claimed that male youths were a “soft target” for anticolonial propaganda.Footnote 15 Children as young as four were alleged to be acting as runners for messages and supplies passed between Mau Mau insurgents in Nairobi and the surrounding countryside.Footnote 16
Prosecution rates for apolitical crimes such as theft and vagrancy rose sharply after a state of emergency was declared in Kenya in 1952.Footnote 17 In the dislocation and upheaval caused by the mass incarceration of 900,000 suspected Mau Mau, and the chaos of the “villagization” schemes that forcibly relocated Kikuyu communities, many people left for Nairobi, accelerating the urban flight that had been a feature of the young Kikuyu experience for decades.Footnote 18 The vast farms owned by white settlers had led to severe land shortages for Africans. Many young Kikuyu men, unable to attain the resources needed to begin new family units and become economically independent from their elders, left the reserves designated as Kikuyu farmland by the colonial state and moved to the city.Footnote 19
Rather than reforming land allocation, the colonial government sought to remake colonial subjects, incarcerating suspected Mau Mau for “rehabilitation.” Boyce argued that no attempt to remake the Kikuyu would be complete without a concerted effort to rehabilitate children. His first suggestion of “Operation Anvil for children” was rejected by the colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, on the grounds that rounding up Kenyan women and children by force for screening and imprisonment would lead to an international outcry.Footnote 20 However, Boyce's contention that remaking youth held the key to remaking society found a powerful advocate in Thomas Askwith, the colonial commissioner for community development and a key architect of the adult rehabilitation scheme.
Askwith, the former principal of a development training academy founded and funded by the colonial state, favored a liberal, “gentle” approach to rehabilitation. The Kikuyu, he believed, were caught between tradition and modernity. As historian Paul Ocobock has argued, Askwith had come to view the Emergency as a generational conflict produced by the psychological effects of missionary education and urbanization.Footnote 21 Drawing upon the work of psychiatrists and ethnographers such as Louis Leakey and J. C. Carothers, Askwith argued that “tribal discipline has disappeared” because young men were more educated than their elders.Footnote 22 Mau Mau, Askwith believed, was a symptom of the “disintegration” of a “whole generation,” psychologically damaged by the absence of elder authority.Footnote 23 Boyce's diagnosis of juvenile delinquency fit neatly with Askwith's conception of the Mau Mau movement as one of psychological distress rather than political grievance. Although their conception of Mau Mau hinged upon a racist view of “backwards” Kikuyu struggling with modernity, both Askwith and Boyce believed that remedies that the Save the Children's Fund had pioneered for juvenile delinquents in a European context could be reconfigured for youth caught up in the Kenyan Emergency.Footnote 24
There were few institutions to deal with the youngest suspected Mau Mau. The Child Protection (Emergency Regulation) Act of 1954 decreed that unaccompanied minors in Nairobi should be sent to reserves or missionary orphanages.Footnote 25 However, the chaos of mass incarcerations and the overburdening of Nairobi municipal courts meant that many children and teenagers spent months in transit camps designed for “screening” adults.Footnote 26 Children as young as seven were beaten by prison guards, often going days without food, shelter, clothes, and blankets.Footnote 27 It seemed to Boyce inevitable that, living in such conditions and close to suspected adult Mau Mau, these boys would be “contaminated by Mau Mau” ideas.Footnote 28
Within the colonial administration, there was confusion about the age at which youths ceased to be protected by the 1952 legislation and became legally adult.Footnote 29 Consequently, the problem of juvenile delinquency was passed around a number of departments, all reluctant to accept responsibility.Footnote 30 The Save the Children Fund had recently had its own debates about the distinction between childhood and youth, raising its age limit for intervention from fourteen to eighteen as part of its wider shift from focusing on the bodies of children to treating their minds. In the interwar period, drawing upon Victorian religious and romantic discourses to categorize children as innocent and apolitical, the fund focused on material succor. After 1945, having witnessed the weaponization of adolescence by totalitarian states, the fund became interested in the political potency of “youth” (broadly, ages twelve to eighteen). It sought to provide moral and material interventions that would steer an emotionally damaged generation toward an adulthood of democratic citizenship, in an era of anxiety about the rising tide of communism.Footnote 31
For Boyce, the fund's new interest in youth, coupled with the colonial state's limited provision for adolescents, provided an opportunity. The Save the Children Fund could enhance its public status by acting as an “agent of the government” and thereby gain logistical support in a new context.Footnote 32 Partnership with Save the Children benefited the colonial government too, providing welfare services while preserving empire on the cheap.Footnote 33 Humanitarian assistance also allowed the government to recast the meaning of colonial government and the Mau Mau struggle against it. Boyce linked the generational rupture in Kikuyu society, central to Askwith's view of the Emergency, to a wider discourse of child psychology. Citing the work of Save the Children in Europe, Boyce sought to convince Askwith that that the crisis of adolescence was a global postwar phenomenon, of which youth criminality in Kenya were part, but with specific racial and national inflections. Whereas in Europe juvenile delinquency arose from the breakdown of familial ties, in Kenya it was due to the disintegration of the tribe.Footnote 34
Concern about the conditions of Kenyan youth, brought up with limited economic prospects and without the guidance of tribal elders, closely echoed similar panic about juvenile delinquency in postwar Europe. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a cadre of child psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Anna Freud and John Bowlby posited that children's “attachment” to their parents (particularly their mothers) was the foremost predictor of healthy, mentally stable adult life. In this context, the mass evacuations of children during the Second World War, and the orphaning or abandonment of children during the conflict, seemed to prefigure continent-wide social dislocation. The war generation, it was feared, would lead to adult lives of criminality and further destabilize European politics.Footnote 35 A sharp spike in so-called juvenile delinquency seemed to confirm these fears.Footnote 36 As new borstals and reformatories were opened across Europe to contain young criminals, humanitarian organizations increasingly focused not on the trauma of war on children's bodies but on their minds.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, social policy and humanitarian work within and beyond Europe was reconfigured to orient provision for children within the family and to recreate the structure of the family when parents were not available. Nascent European welfare states and postwar workforce policies conspired to push women back into the home to raise a generation of well-adjusted, emotionally attached children. Where states themselves were not leading the drive for the creation of nuclear families, humanitarian organizations took up the slack. As Tara Zahra and Sarah Fieldston have shown, American aid organizations sought to reconstruct Europe and “modernize” societies in northeast Asia and Latin America via the promotion and preservation of nuclear family units. Working in the early stages of the Cold War, these organizations sought not only to prevent the creation of a new generation of juvenile delinquents but to ward off totalitarianism.Footnote 37
Save the Children seized upon the zeitgeist and proclaimed its own special interest and expertise in juvenile delinquency. Hosting a series of international conferences, it discussed proven methodologies for the rehabilitation of delinquent youth and argued that institutions replicating the structure of nuclear families were the most likely to reestablish emotional stability.Footnote 38 To replicate the bond between youth and parents, reformatories sponsored by Save the Children organized juveniles into mixed age “houses,” each with their own leader, a trusted adult figure to act as a role model for discipline and support.Footnote 39 This system of prefects, a house system, and multilayered structures of authority, though based on new psychoanalytic observations, closely replicated a far older British tradition: boarding school. Yet boarding school was based on the premise that growing up in proximity to parents undermined the psychological robustness of young men, while reformatories were a response to the problem created by the lack of parents’ emotional guidance and authority.Footnote 40 Although Save the Children originated as an organization funded by aristocratic women in 1919, it had become increasingly professionalized and masculine during its work with the British government during the Second World War.Footnote 41 By the mid-1950s, its leadership comprised upper-class former military men, all educated at boarding schools. The rhetoric of reformatories and attachment allowed them to replicate the (to them) familiar traditional, aristocratic models of boarding-school education, while simultaneously describing them as “innovative.” As in reformatories across Europe, the norms of elite British education were adapted in Kenya for the education and punishment of criminal youth and young anticolonial activists.
Although Save the Children and the colonial government used the European rhetoric of juvenile delinquency to describe the problems of Kenyan youth, they believed Kenyan youth had been damaged by lack of authority, but they did not marry this with a discourse of parental attachment. Their foremost concern was not the severing of emotional ties between children and families but how “modernity” had undermined parental authority. In the tradition of colonial stereotypes of African men, they believed Kikuyu boys lacked discipline, not positive forms of emotional support.Footnote 42 Thus, whereas solving the problem of juvenile delinquency in Europe hinged on “re-establishing” or mimicking the structures of the nuclear family (itself an invented tradition), in Kenya the challenge was to provide a proxy for tribal authority. Young men eager to participate in a wage economy and educated beyond their tribal elders could not return to the traditional tribal life. It fell to the state and its allies to provide a new form of authority for juvenile delinquents.Footnote 43 Within this framework, the youth “rehabilitation” schemes of the colonial government in Kenya became a progressive agenda, helping Kikuyu youths adjust to postwar modernity with the help of humanitarian experts and European scientific knowledge.Footnote 44
The colonial government began its relationship with Save the Children by asking Boyce to provide funding and staff for Askwith's flagship project: Wamumu, a prison school for youths convicted of Mau Mau insurgency. The stated aim of Wamumu was “liberal rehabilitation rather than punishment.”Footnote 45 It drew on a mixture of “innovations” learned from experimental juvenile reformatories across Europe, the traditions of the elite British public school system, and colonial forms of youth education and discipline, including scouting and mission schools.Footnote 46 Wamumu's leaders claimed to enable young men to experience what was left of their adolescence uncorrupted by Mau Mau ideology. Football and gymnastics allowed the boys to “blow off steam” while learning “co-operation and team-work,” which both Boyce and Askwith regarded as the hallmarks of colonial masculinity.Footnote 47 Wamumu also sought to equip young men for economic self-sufficiency. Learning trades such as shoemaking, carpentry, and mechanics led to economic independence and thus, as Paul Ocobok shows, “pathways to manhood” that did not depend on land. Wamumu sought not only to reform individual “offenders” but to remake the relationship between Kenyan youth, the colonial economy, and tribal society.Footnote 48
Based on the success of Wamumu, the Save the Children Fund opened a second rehabilitation project in December 1954. Rather than young men from adult camps, this new project, Ujana Park, would house slightly younger boys, aged eight and up, removed from the streets of Nairobi and municipal jails, By design, none of the children at Ujana Park had formal convictions: the Save the Children council was concerned that if news got back to the fund's supporters in the United Kingdom that their donations were supporting delinquents, the surge in contributions experienced at the start of the Kenyan Emergency would dry up.Footnote 49 Instead, the fund focused on children who were suspected of being “contaminated” by Mau Mau but had not been formally charged or sentenced.
Built on the site of the Latanga Prison in a suburb of Nairobi, Ujana Park was a surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and guarded by police. The headmaster of Ujana Park, Edward Turner, was typical of the postwar generation of colonial aid workers. He had fought in both world wars and after 1945 had optimistically turned his hand to tobacco farming in Kenya. But profit margins had been poor, and when the Emergency started, he summoned his wife, a former social worker, from England and offered his services to Save the Children. He was, in the words of the Nairobi Sunday Post, “no namby-pamby type with a touching faith in humanity.”Footnote 50 Instead, he brought military discipline to bear on the children he described as “the plague of Nairobi, accomplished little thieves and posse of thugs, many of whom were tainted with the Mau Mau doctrine.”Footnote 51
When the first boys arrived at the camp in December 1954, Turner described their disenchantment as they saw their new living quarters: ten windowless A-frame huts made from corrugated steel. There was, Turner explained, “no charity and something for nothing”: the boys built roads in the Nairobi suburb of Karen. They were earning their keep and being imbued with the work ethic that Save the Children hoped would make them “future working class leaders of the Kikuyu.”Footnote 52 Like Wamumu, Ujana Park was seeking to build the colonial citizens of the future, who would be integrated into the colonial economy with practical skills but without the education viewed as a root cause of anticolonial unrest.Footnote 53
Ujana Park's vocational model drew upon a long traditional of colonial education in Kenya, which privileged practical training over literacy.Footnote 54 This model had been used by Save the Children in a series of “work schools” in Eastern Europe after the First World War.Footnote 55 In 1948, Save the Children opened its first major education project outside Europe, a “work school” named Serendah just outside Kuala Lumpur in Malaya. Serendah was founded to teach crafts to working-class young men and keep them away from communist youth leagues during Malaya's Emergency. The school was in a flower-lined, well-organized campus with purpose-built workshops and airy dormitories.Footnote 56 Undoubtedly, the haphazardly constructed Ujana Park was Serendah's poorer, uglier sibling. Indeed, while Serendah was frequently cited as the model for Ujana, the camp far more closely resembled another Save the Children project in Somaliland, the Hargeisa Boys Home. Founded in 1952 to train vagrant boys suspected (but not convicted) of criminality, the Hargeisa Home was a constant headache for Save the Children. Also housed in corrugated iron A-frame huts, Hargeisa boys “earned their keep” by making sandals and tending to a golf course used by ex-patriates. The boys frequently escaped, went on strike demanding payment for the sandals they made, and stole and sold items from the home.Footnote 57 However, life at Unjana Park appeared, to its headmaster Edward Turner at least, more harmonious than at Hargeisa. When Turner's car broke down near the gates in May 1955, “tens of boys swarmed through a large hole in the camp's fence to offer their assistance.” To him this suggested that the boys could have escaped at any point but chose not to do so.Footnote 58
As at Ujana Park, escapes from Wamumu were rare. On one occasion, three boys returned to the camp after being missing for a number of hours.Footnote 59 Life within the camp walls with its beatings and solitary confinement may have seemed preferable to vagrancy on the streets of Nairobi or to adult prisons.Footnote 60 Indeed, in the latter years of the Emergency, Wamumu was “demilitarized,” and the number of guards reduced from two hundred to forty. Of the almost one thousand graduates of Wamumu, not a single one reoffended.Footnote 61 Wamumu was regarded as the flagship success of the rehabilitation project.Footnote 62
Through their role in founding and funding two prison schools, the Save the Children Fund contributed to a wider reframing of Mau Mau resistance as an expression of the psychosis generated by a “tribal” society attempting to come to terms with modernity, rather than legitimate political grievance.Footnote 63 Kenyan youth, caught between childhood and adulthood, served as a metaphor for an “immature” Kenyan society. Working with an internationally renowned humanitarian organization, the colonial government framed its reforms as progressive and compassionate. Humanitarian intervention lent legitimacy not only to the incarceration of teenage boys but also to the wider campaign against Mau Mau.
In the early days of the Kenyan Emergency, the colonial government assumed that African men were the drivers of conflict and that African women were its victims.Footnote 64 Prison provision reflected this, with just two of the one hundred prisons founded under the Emergency Act set aside for female inmates and no “prison schools,” youth camps, or formal education programs for women.Footnote 65 However, women's participation in Mau Mau upended the long-held stereotype of African female passivity.Footnote 66 According to a report filed by the Ministry of Defence in 1954, women were not simply “feeding and harboring menfolk” but had become the “mainstays” of Mau Mau, acting as spies, runners, and combatants.Footnote 67
For the most part, the colonial government attempted to take a “softer” approach to rebellious women, believing that women were more malleable than men and therefore more likely to respond to rehabilitation efforts without the need for imprisonment. Although more than eight thousand women were incarcerated in the prison camps at Gitamayu and Kamiti, most experienced the Emergency in rural areas.Footnote 68 Between 1954 and 1956, the colonial government constructed 854 villages, home to 1,077,500 Kikuyu and Embu people. These new villages were to remake Kenyan agriculture by consolidating small plots of land and enforcing new farming methods, as well as enabling surveillance of the Kikuyu population.Footnote 69 New villages that were deemed supportive of Mau Mau insurgency were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and spiked trenches. Adults participated in daily forced labor, attempting to cultivate the barren landscape. In villages where the population was deemed to have become less supportive of Mau Mau, curfews were lifted and conditions improved. In villages deemed to be in “active support” of Mau Mau, food was scarce, disease rampant, and punishment severe.Footnote 70
The district commissioners overseeing the villages quickly realized their inadequacy, fearing that poor living conditions would create resentment and “give rise to problems far worse than Mau Mau.”Footnote 71 Throughout 1955, Askwith wrote to Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya, petitioning for increased funding from the colonial government for welfare officers to work with “Mau Mau infected women” in rural areas.Footnote 72 He believed that women and girls on the fringes of Mau Mau would be “seduced” by the movement if they lacked social status and occupation. Askwith intended, as with the boys in Ujana and Wamumu, to teach women skills that he believed would make them economically independent and less susceptible to “manipulation” by Mau Mau men. Teaching women homemaking and parenting skills (skills he assumed would be valued because they would “help the women get husbands”) would show Kikuyu women that the government was “willing to help them.”Footnote 73 Educating Kikuyu women would also create fit counterparts for men rehabilitated by the “pipeline” process of deprivation, interrogation, and even physical abuse, so that they would not arrive back from prison to find that “their wives were as primitive as their mothers had been.”Footnote 74
Rather than increasing financial support for rural women, Baring relied instead on Maendeleo ya Wanawake (“women's progress” in Swahili). Founded in 1952, Maendeleo received a small annual grant from Askwith's Community Development Fund but was largely led by female white settler volunteers. In the long tradition of imperial feminism, Maendeleo was presented as an expression of sisterhood and solidarity between African and settler women, but in reality it was a paternalistic attempt to educate women in western norms of motherhood and domesticity.Footnote 75 In 1954, as the Emergency intensified, Askwith sought reinforcement for Maendeleo's activities from the British Red Cross.Footnote 76 Patronized entirely by white settlers, the British Red Cross had been in Kenya since the First World War, when a branch was founded to raise funds and send supplies to British troops. In the early days of the Emergency, it had provided support and supplies to colonial policemen and prison guards.Footnote 77 Askwith's plea for support offered the Red Cross an opportunity to extend its work and recast its vision of imperial duty. Instead of working only for the brotherhood of whites, it would now turn its attentions to the empire's “less civilized subjects,” demonstrating that even at a time of tension between white settlers and Mau Mau, British imperialism was a force for good.Footnote 78
Affiliated with the International Red Cross movement, the Kenyan branch of the British Red Cross was able to draw upon an international network of donors and expertise during the Emergency. In April 1955, it recruited twenty-five “homecraft officers” from Britain to work in the villages of the Central Province, bolstering the efforts of Maendeleo. Officers split their time between thirteen villages each, traveling between them in large white Landrovers provided by United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF).Footnote 79 In addition to leading sewing, knitting, and baking classes, Red Cross workers examined children for signs of malnutrition and disease and promoted hygiene through baby-washing competitions. Dirty children were forbidden to participate in games and denied food from Red Cross soup kitchens.Footnote 80 The most severely malnourished babies were fed milk powder provided to the British Red Cross by UNICEF and the US government under the Share Our Surplus scheme.Footnote 81 Working under the well-known Red Cross symbol, the British Red Cross brought international humanitarian resources and international expertise to the colonial crisis.Footnote 82
Most of the twenty-five relief workers who arrived in Nairobi in the middle of 1955 had prior experience working with displaced populations in Central Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. They had then worked alongside the British government in its villagization program during the Malayan Emergency, where they had founded soup kitchens and led a public information campaign about the benefits of toothbrushing.Footnote 83 By the end of 1953, the British Red Cross stated that their relief workers had met the medical and nutritional needs of almost 400,000 people. Through craft classes intended to build trust and companionship between aid workers and villagers, the Red Cross cast itself as an auxiliary of a wider program to win over Malayan people, the colonial state, and the British imperial cause.Footnote 84
The British responded to the Malayan Emergency on two fronts. Running parallel to military counterinsurgency was a propaganda war designed to win Malayan “hearts and minds,” a phrase famously coined by General Gerald Templar during the conflict. The colonial state also used the term “rehabilitation” to describe the mixture of propagandizing and torture to which anticolonial fighters and their civilian supporters were subjected, framing these practices as medical interventions.Footnote 85 It cast anticolonial insurgency as a form of psychological deviance, and imprisonment, propaganda and torture as the cure.Footnote 86
Askwith, the Kenyan colonial commissioner for community development, had visited Malayan villages and prisons in 1953 to observe Templar's “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency.Footnote 87 In Kenya, Askwith built upon the medicalization of pro-British propaganda that Templar had pioneered. From the outset of the Kenyan Emergency, a government-led Rehabilitation Committee drew on pseudo-psychological and ethnological work to frame Mau Mau sympathies as a form of psychosis. Prisoners were subjected to deprivation, interrogation, and, often, physical abuse. Having passed through this “pipeline,” they were then supposed to confess their crimes, and renounce Mau Mau. Prisoners were then propagandized about the benefits of British rule and perhaps educated for participation in a colonial, capitalist economy.Footnote 88 Because Mau Mau was regarded as a symptom of a problem with deep social and cultural roots, rehabilitation via propaganda and education was prescribed for not only prisoners but the entire society.
In both Kenya and Malaya, the colonial state's discourse of curative rehabilitation chimed with long-standing traditions of the British Red Cross. In early twentieth-century humanitarian vocabulary, “rehabilitation” signaled the dual medical and moral purpose of humanitarian interventions. After wars and disasters, aid organizations prided themselves on far-reaching interventions that would shape character and communities for years to come.Footnote 89 From 1914, the British Red Cross had pioneered the use of haptic, craft activities as a means to divert and occupy recuperating soldiers in military hospitals. The Red Cross described this craft as “rehabilitation” because it aided physical and emotional recovery, restoring soldiers’ dignity through labor.Footnote 90 Such schemes in Europe drew on idealized imaginings of a peasant past, as working-class soldiers were taught to rediscover “traditional” practices like weaving, lace making, and carpentry.Footnote 91
In 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) made craft projects a central feature its postwar rehabilitation programs, appointing an army of welfare officers to Displaced Persons camps across Europe. These officers were responsible for the material conditions of displaced persons as well as preparing them for life beyond the camps. Through training in “manual activities and handicrafts,” UNRRA sought to provide rehabilitation in the broadest sense, preparing displaced persons to be productive, skilled community members.Footnote 92 In the camps, craft activities were used to occupy restless, imprisoned populations, to channel “nationalist sentiment” that camp administrators worried might create tension between ethnic groups or be directed at camp administrators.Footnote 93 Craft was seen as an acceptable vehicle for tokenized and idealized “national cultures,” expressed through “traditional” artistic and artisanal practices. It was this belief in the disciplinary function of craft that the British Red Cross carried into Malaya. During the Malayan Emergency, based on the UNRRA model for administering Displaced Persons camps, the Red Cross tasked their Welfare Officers with the provision of recreation in Malayan New Villages, primarily through craft initiatives directed specifically at women.Footnote 94
Based on their perceived successes in Malaya, Red Cross homecraft officers anticipated a warm welcome in Kenya. They were thus surprised by the “Mau Mau contaminated women,” who, in spite of promises of items such as “brightly coloured threads” and “used Christmas cards,” were “sullen and uncooperative.”Footnote 95 Communal labor was compulsory in each village, and Red Cross workers reported that Kikuyu women would wait until the time of the next visit of a Red Cross Homecraft Officer was announced and then organize group labor to disrupt the visit.Footnote 96 In one incident, bricks were thrown at two homecraft officers in their Red Cross jeep.Footnote 97 In another, women poured condensed milk they had been given by the Red Cross for their children onto the ground.Footnote 98 The death rate of children from malnutrition in the new villages was 16.4 percent: refusing milk was a powerful gesture of defiance.Footnote 99
Despite their close partnership with the colonial state, the staff of the British Red Cross viewed their work as impartial and independent.Footnote 100 The director of the Red Cross Overseas Branch, Joan Whittington, assumed that in Kenya, as in Malaya and Europe, the Red Cross banner would signal the independence of her organization from the colonial state, and Kenyan women would therefore be more open to Red Cross intervention. However, as Red Cross staff were accompanied at all times by British troops, independence from the state was not obvious to Kikuyu women.Footnote 101 The hostile reception that homecraft workers received was part of a wider resistance to myriad forms of hard and soft colonial power. Red Cross workers, however, did not blame anticolonial politics for women's refusal to participate in “rehabilitation” programs.Footnote 102 Rather, they claimed that Kikuyu women lacked “three Ps”: pride in themselves, pride in their homes, and pride in their children. This deficiency meant that they could not see the value in the education that the Red Cross was offering.Footnote 103 Homecraft officers also believed that Kikuyu women's resistance demonstrated their failure to understand the voluntary ethos that animated Red Cross work because there was no analogous tradition in their own culture. One homecraft worker commented that Kikuyu women were “puzzled” when asked to care for children other than their own and (understandably) disbelieving when they heard that there “were no poor in England, because everybody cares for one another.”Footnote 104 Successful “rehabilitation” of Kikuyu women would entail a wholesale cultural shift, the Red Cross believed, endowing them with pride in homemaking and concern for the community.
Concluding that the “rehabilitation of women could not be achieved through friendly cups of tea, sympathy and feeling that all past sins are forgotten,” Red Cross workers sought reinforcement from district commissioners, who made craft classes compulsory.Footnote 105 At best, homecraft officers hoped that classes would endow women with individual pride and community spirit. At the very least, they reasoned, the supervised space of the craft class would provide “innocent recreation” and prevent “idle gossip.”Footnote 106 However, with each Red Cross worker responsible for thirteen villages, the classes had little impact. As Kikuyu men began returning from prison in mid-1955, Red Cross workers warned that unreformed women might “re-contaminate rehabilitated men” and urged the colonial government to delay the men's return. Frustrated by their failure, homecraft officers now proposed a form of emotional coercion, arguing that “joining together as a family unit should be held out as a reward when a certain amount of rehabilitation has been achieved.”Footnote 107 In this way, the Red Cross inverted the older missionary tradition of separating women from men in order to “protect” the women from forced marriage or clitorectomy.Footnote 108 Now it was the men who were to be held back to “protect” them from the “corrupting” influence of the women.
Despite its efforts to influence the government, the British Red Cross could not control the rate at which men were released from the camps. Homecraft officers thus identified an alternative means of “getting at the women”: their children.Footnote 109 In many of the new villages, women performed compulsory labor on nearby farms, leaving their children unattended. Many became severely ill or malnourished due to food shortages and unsanitary conditions.Footnote 110 Echoing the critiques made by philanthropic elites of poor mothers across time and space, the Red Cross homecraft workers claimed that high child mortality in the villages was the result of African mothers not caring for their offspring. One homecraft worker claimed that it was “common” to see a “well fed mother standing next to an emaciated child”— unaware that this could be a direct result of the irregularity of food provision, or the uneven effects of malnutrition on adults’ and children's bodies.Footnote 111 To deal with malnutrition, the Red Cross opened Dagoretti Children's Home, a school, orphanage, and medical center for the “neediest” children of Central Province, imagining the gratitude of Kikuyu women for “all we are doing for their children.”Footnote 112 However, mothers were given no choice as to whether their children went into the home, and some children were forcibly separated from their mothers.Footnote 113
Dagoretti quickly became a flagship project for a host of nongovernmental organizations, attracting funding from missionary organizations, UNICEF, and Save the Children.Footnote 114 Yet, housing only ninety children, Dagoretti did little to address the rapidly rising rate of child mortality in the new villages.Footnote 115 Despite this, and the failure of officers to gain the trust and approval of Kenyan women, their work was perceived as an “outstanding success” by the colonial government. At the end of 1956, Baring proclaimed that “sewing and knitting have done more for the rehabilitation of Kenyan women and the reputation of the colony than the government might ever have achieved on its own terms.”Footnote 116 Baring offered to pay the salaries of Red Cross homecraft officers from government funds, an offer that Whittington gladly accepted. For the British Red Cross, as for the Save the Children Fund, the lines between an “independent” aid organization and the colonial state were increasingly blurred.
Collaboration between allegedly impartial humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and the British state was by no means new. An international mixed economy of aid had existed as long as aid organizations themselves. Founded in 1870 to provide impartial care to military casualties in the Franco-Prussian war, the British Red Cross had acted as an auxiliary of the British army by providing medical relief to soldiers and civilians in twentieth-century conflicts. Save the Children, which was created in 1919 to deliver “impartial aid” to child victims of the First World War in Europe, had gone on to distribute state-funded aid during the 1921 Russian famine and a host of humanitarian disasters thereafter.Footnote 117 Cooperation during and after the Second World War further cemented preexisting ties between society and state in the provision of humanitarian relief.Footnote 118 Nonetheless, the work of the British Red Cross in colonial emergencies represented a significant departure from earlier activities. They were involved not just in state-sanctioned care for civilian populations but in the containment and punishment of large-scale revolt against British rule. In separating mothers from children, and seeking to make family reunification contingent on how far women enacted European forms of domesticity, the Red Cross endorsed a form of cultural and emotional coercion that has not yet been written into historical accounts of violence at the end of empire.
The British Red Cross and the Save the Children Fund both claimed to be internationalist, impartial organizations. Though based in Britain, they were affiliated with international parent bodies based in Geneva: the former with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the latter with the International Union of Child Welfare (IUCW). Neither body had a large operational budget, and both focused on discussing and coordinating the interventions of their nationally based affiliates during crises. The ICRC, the IUCW, and their worldwide affiliates were avowedly “non-political” and claimed to work for the “good of humanity.” “Impartiality” had never precluded support for British imperialism, and internationalism and imperialism were not viewed as contradictory creeds. Indeed, leaders of the ICUW celebrated the British Empire as a model of international cooperation and brotherhood to which the rest of the world could aspire.Footnote 119 When the British-based branches of these international humanitarian organizations stepped in to address the shortcomings of the colonial state, they were attempting to improve the empire, choosing to perceive it as founded on brotherhood, benevolent rule, and the duty of white metropolitan elites to “civilize” colonial subjects overseas.
When damning critiques of colonial brutality were laid before them by western anticolonial campaigning organizations and individual whistle-blowers, the British Red Cross and Save the Children insisted upon both the benevolence of colonial rule and the “impartial” and “non-political” nature of their own work. They saw their role as caring for and ultimately “curing” young and female Mau Mau sympathizers, rather than questioning the conduct of the colonial government. In March 1954, the ICUW received a series of petitions from the Kenya Committee for the Democratic Rights of Africans, a British anticolonial lobby group. The committee claimed that British policies in Kenya amounted to genocide and that the only solution to the Kenyan Emergency would be to grant “fundamental democratic rights” to Africans.Footnote 120 The president of the International Union declined to respond, reasoning that even if he regarded the Mau Mau as a political movement (which he did not), he could not support its aims due to the “strictly impartial nature” of Save the Children. Tacit support for the colonial government, on the other hand, was cast as “non-political”: it simply entailed “child welfare work,” which was understood as inherently neutral.Footnote 121 Even if the International Union had opposed the actions of either the colonial government or the British Save the Children Fund in Kenya, it would not have intervened. Its policy was to respect the sovereignties of national and colonial states.Footnote 122 This policy had kept it from intervening on behalf of Jewish children who were victims of the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany, and from criticizing the emerging apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1950s.Footnote 123
The ICRC, on the other hand, had been given a mandate by the 1949 Geneva Convention to transcend sovereignties in wartime in order to ensure that prisoners of war were treated according to internationally agreed standards. The ICRC response to the Kenyan Emergency was certainly more robust than that of the International Council for Child Welfare and has been the focus of two important studies by Fabian Klose and Yolana Pringle. As they show, the ICRC regarded Kenyan Emergency as a civil war and demanded access to the prison camps that held suspected Mau Mau.Footnote 124 The British Red Cross was affronted by this request and argued that the Kenyan Emergency was a rebellion, not a war, and that the 1949 Geneva Convention was therefore not applicable.Footnote 125 Reading the work of the ICRC through the archives of the British Red Cross reveals how, for the latter organization, patriotism trumped humanitarian internationalism.
The British Red Cross thus sided with the British government rather than its own international parent body, both covering up colonial brutality and acting against criticisms of its own work. In private correspondence, ICRC officials claimed that the British Red Cross's president, Lady Limerick, was either ignorant of the extent of Kenyan suffering and colonial violence—“unpardonable”—or that she was aware of the extent of suffering but was “hushing things up” (equally unpardonable).Footnote 126 The ICRC was dismissive of the work that the British Red Cross had been doing in the new villages, noting that the appalling rate of child mortality was actually rising.Footnote 127 The ICRC was even more disparaging of the claims that the British Red Cross had visited detainees in governmental prison camps, suspecting instead that British Red Cross representatives were more interested in the camp guards. “How much time, do you think,” wrote one ICRC delegate, “would be left to a ‘motherly type of Red Cross worker’ or a reasonably young and attractive ‘Red Cross nurse’ for Kikuyu detainees in view of the presence of the poor [colonial police] boys who have had SUCH a hard life.”Footnote 128 Noting the divergence between British Red Cross accounts of successful interventions, and journalistic reports of poverty in the villages and torture in the prisons, the ICRC concluded that British Red Cross “did NOT do its duty” in Kenya.Footnote 129
The British Red Cross did, in fact, chastise the colonial government about the sanitary conditions of prisoners, stating that some camps were “unfit even to house animals.” In 1954, it demanded that the British government do “something on the health side of things” to improve conditions and believed that this advice had been acted upon.Footnote 130 British Red Cross representatives who visited the camps did not, however, object to the interrogation and punishment methods used, which oral testimonies and recovered documents would later reveal involved torture, forced exercise, forced labor, and routine deprivation of food, water, and medical attention. While it is possible that British Red Cross delegates were not fully aware of these practices, a number of its representatives in Kenya felt that “British justice in its traditional form is hopelessly unsuitable in the present situation.”Footnote 131 Drawing on racialized perceptions of Mau Mau inmates as unstable and irrational, one British Red Cross visitor claimed that a “much more rapid form of judgement and punishment is needed if it is to be effective with the Kikuyu,” concluding that “summary justice” within the camps was reasonable and necessary.Footnote 132 Lady Limerick agreed that the “attacks” on prisons and the pipeline by the ICRC were “scurrilous and unjustifiable.”Footnote 133
Kenya's governor, Evelyn Baring (whose wife was the president of the Kenyan affiliate of the British Red Cross), drew upon the endorsement of the British Red Cross to argue that further inspection of prisons by the ICRC was both unnecessary and unjustified under the Geneva Conventions.Footnote 134 Nevertheless, criticisms of Kenyan prisons at Westminster and in the British and international press intensified. In response, the colonial government acquiesced in 1957 to ICRC demands, allowing a visit to the prisons as a “gesture of goodwill” while continuing to insist that they did not fall under international law.Footnote 135 Once the visit of the ICRC was announced, and the reputation of the empire was at risk, the British Red Cross sprang into action. In the weeks prior to the ICRC visit, it provided additional blankets, medical equipment, and clothes to several prisons. British Red Cross leaders helped to plan an itinerary for ICRC colleagues, attempting to stage-manage their visit by suggesting tours of “successful” village homecraft schemes, orphanages, and youth camps, while avoiding the quarters of injured prison inmates.Footnote 136 The ICRC report from the 1957 visit concluded that the prison camps were “in keeping with humanitarian principles.”Footnote 137
Ultimately, the failure of ICRC probably had much less to do with the British Red Cross attempt to cover up prison violence than it did with what the “moral boundaries” of the ICRC's own humanitarianism.Footnote 138 Unlike the British Red Cross, it felt no allegiance to the British imperial project per se; however, despite the antipathy between the two organizations, they shared notions of racial and civilizational hierarchy and a similar understanding of European superiority in Kenya. In the end, they performed the same function in the Emergency, deflecting and distracting from criticisms of colonial policy.
As public critique intensified in Britain, questions raised in the press or in Parliament about conduct in Kenya often centered on the plight of women and children and could be addressed by citing the “excellent work” of the Save the Children Fund, the British Red Cross, and various missionary societies.Footnote 139 Save the Children and the British Red Cross issued regular ringing endorsements of the colonial government that had (they claimed) ensured that the Emergency had “not been allowed to interfere with the long-term welfare of these people” and had instead used it as an opportunity to make “far seeing plans” for education and social reform.Footnote 140 The ICRC's own favorable 1957 report, once released, was repeatedly invoked by the British government and the colonial government in Kenya to counter allegations of torture. When, in February 1959, eleven men were brutally murdered at the Hola prison camp in Kenya, prompting international outcry, Lennox-Boyd, the colonial secretary, suggested that the ICRC should be invited to visit prisons once again. Having been initially resistant to international humanitarian scrutiny, he now recognized its function in legitimating—or at least obscuring—the violent practices of imprisonment.
Humanitarian attention to Kenya also provided a compelling narrative of the Mau Mau emergency for the British and international public. When Save the Children launched its Kenya appeal in 1955, it raised more money than in any year since 1921, during its major Russian Famine appeal.Footnote 141 Donations to the Red Cross similarly spiked. By donating to the Kenya appeals of these organizations, the British public was given a means to engage with the Emergency while ignoring its broader political context. In their appeals, both the British Red Cross and Save the Children used images of children almost exclusively, presenting them as “victims of Mau Mau,” a force that victimized both black Kenyans and white settlers.Footnote 142 Public giving to the Kenya Emergency appeals did not simply express support for the colonial government but also reflected compassion for the Kenyan people. Through the interventions of British-based international humanitarian organizations, the good of the empire and the good of humanity were aligned in the eyes of the British public, and the brutality of the colonial violence was obscured. Kenya became a site of benevolent intervention rather than political struggle.
CONCLUSION
When Kenyan women who had been imprisoned returned to their children, many found that their breast milk had dried up. Red Cross homecraft officers provided these women with milk powder purchased by UNICEF.Footnote 143 UNICEF milk was keeping child subjects of empire alive, as international aid organizations were in turn preserving the image of a benevolent empire in an era when colonial violence contradicted new international norms. Yet the mothers who were given this milk for their children did not draw distinctions between the colonial state, the British-led aid organization that distributed the milk, and the UN-affiliated aid organization that funded it. To them, the milk was not a symbol of international compassion but of colonial control. Pouring the milk on the ground was a gesture of defiance against the state that had moved them to barren land and imprisoned their communities. To colonized communities, the lines between the colonial state and nonstate aid organizations, and between imperial violence and international aid, were far from self-evident.
Yet despite these blurred boundaries, the existing literature on humanitarianism has often taken claims of impartiality as a starting point, with both historians and contemporary commentators broadly assuming that aid organizations overcame ethical misgivings in order to collaborate with states, and that collaboration with states was a reluctant compromise made when they could not otherwise access suffering populations. Rather, as we have seen, across the British Empire during its violent decolonization struggles, collusion with the state was an opportunity to expand humanitarian work and uphold a vision of British imperialism these organizations believed to be compatible with international humanitarian ideals. They sought to diminish the impact of colonial violence on both civilian populations and the public image of empire. Humanitarian intervention lent credence to the notion that “rehabilitation” was a modernizing project, drawing on international expertise to aid colonial peoples caught between tradition and modernity. In Kenya, this intervention delegitimized Mau Mau as a political movement, portraying anticolonial resistance as psychosis rather than political grievance. The basis for collusion between humanitarian organizations and the state was this shared vision of the Emergency as a crisis of transition between tradition and modernity and a shared understanding of “rehabilitation.” This notion rested on invented tradition: an idealized, colonial African past to which Kenyans could be restored while also benefiting from a modern capitalist economy.
During the wars of decolonization, humanitarian nongovernmental organizations were not only rewriting the colonial past but also preserving the empire's future. In the 1960s, territorial colonialism was replaced with “expert” western aid organizations as they flocked to recently decolonized states to oversee agricultural, welfare, and development projects.Footnote 144 Although such projects symbolized new eras of partnership and development, the staff had often gained their experience and ideals through colonial service.Footnote 145 Humanitarian interventions would continue to ensure that the ideals of British colonialism remained embedded in postcolonial states. In Kenya, humanitarian interventions that began during the Emergency endured long after independence. For example, Dagoretti Children's Home's “rehabilitation” work continues today, and since 1954 has drawn the support of missionary bodies, national Red Cross committees, and development programs of a number of European states, as well as the patronage of local Kenyan elites. In 1964, Dagoretti was lauded as a “shining beacon of Harambee” and its “self-help” agenda was promoted by the postcolonial government as a check on western intervention.Footnote 146 Drawing on the model of Wamumu (and employing staff from it as well), the Save the Children Fund opened the much-celebrated Starehe Boys’ School in 1959.Footnote 147 Beloved by former colonial officials and postcolonial Kenyan governments alike, the school continues to attract donations from major businesses and nongovernmental organizations. In 1960, Save the Children appointed the former secretary of state for the colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd, as their president. The unanimous appointment of Lennox-Boyd, who conspired to cover up torture and prison massacres in Kenya, was regarded as honoring and confirming the close ties that the Save the Children Fund had forged with the Colonial Office during the Kenyan and Malayan Emergencies.Footnote 148 At the height of colonial violence, and under the auspices of international aid organizations, individuals and ideals from the late colonial period became embedded in the social and educational projects of postcolonial states and the wider structures of humanitarian internationalism.
Rehabilitation was not just a project designed to discredit the decolonization struggles of imperial subjects. In the 1950s, international humanitarian organizations sought to rehabilitate the image of British imperialism in Kenya and across the globe. The collusion of humanitarian organizations enabled the British Colonial Office to meet critiques of colonial violence with assertions of benevolence, but violence and humanitarianism were not separate aspects of British imperialism. In Kenya, self-proclaimed internationalist humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state in the incarceration, resettlement, and emotional coercion of civilian subjects. Humanitarians did not experience this collusion with the colonial state as a contradiction but as an opportunity to showcase both their internationally gathered expertise and the benevolence of the British Empire. By becoming embedded in the apparatus of colonial welfare, aid organizations ensured that humanitarian interventions would be recognized as a lasting legacy of empire even as the colonial violence that had provided the impetus for these interventions was forgotten.
