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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
In May 1955, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, visited Fort Hall in Kenya’s Kikuyu native reserve. The colonial government had declared a state of emergency nearly three years before in response to a secret and violent Kikuyu anti-colonial movement which it knew as Mau Mau. In the ensuing guerrilla war several thousand were killed, almost all of them Africans, and some eighty thousand Kikuyu were held in detention camps.
1 Cambridge University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society’s Collection [hereafter RCS], Pamphlet -46p2: Government of Kenya Department of Information, The Archbishop’s Tour of Kenya, p. 12.
2 Cf.Cooper, Frederick, ‘Mau Mau and the discourses of decolonization’, Journal of African History, 29 (1988), pp. 313–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Lonsdale, John, foreword to Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below (Oxford, 1997), p. xxi.Google Scholar
4 Oliver, Roland, The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London, 1952), p. 291.Google Scholar
5 Lonsdale, John, ‘Mau Maus of the mind’, Journal of African History, 31 (1990), p. 407Google Scholar, citing Greene, Graham, Ways of Escape (London, 1980).Google Scholar
6 Margery Perham, letter to The Times, 22 April 1953, cited by Peter Bostock in his unpublished ‘Reminiscences’ (1993).
7 This phrase from the souvenir account of the Archbishop’s tour of Kenya echoes the language of many missionary descriptions, e.g. Bewes, T. F. C., Kikuyu Conflict: Mau Mau and Christian Witness (London, 1953)Google Scholar; and Syliva Bewes’s foreword to Rickman, Mary, Seven Whole Days (London, 1950).Google Scholar
8 Cf.Casson, John, ‘“To plant a garden city in the slums of paganism”: Handley Hooper, the Kikuyu and the future of Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 28 (1998), pp. 387–410.Google Scholar
9 RCS, Pamphlet -46p2, Church Missionary Society Bulletin Special Issue, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 3.
10 A recent shift in the historiography of Mau Mau moves away from ‘lumping’ analyses to explain Mau Mau as a fractured movement whose competing wings came together in competition, not under central control. Cf. Kershaw, Mau Mau from Below, and Lonsdale, John, ‘The moral economy of Mau Mau’, in Berman, Bruce and Lonsdale, John, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London, 1992).Google Scholar
11 CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 4.
12 Lipscomb, J. F., White Africans (London, 1954), p. 143.Google Scholar
13 CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 6.
14 Alport, C. J. M., ‘Kenya’s answer to the Mau Mau challenge’, African Affairs, 53 (1954), pp. 241–8, at p. 241.Google Scholar
15 See Kerby, Michael, ‘The unhappiness of the Kikuyu’, East Africa Medical Journal, 34 (1957)Google ScholarPubMed, and Carothers, J. C., The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi, 1955).Google Scholar
16 Carey, Bishop Walter, Crisis in Kenya: Christian Common Sense on Mau Mau and the Colour-Bar (London, 1953), p. 37Google Scholar: ‘the power of Jomo Kenyatta to sway crowds by his words, and, above all by his eyes, is overwhelming.…He has the witch-doctor’s eyes: shrouded, menacing, compelling - and all for evil.’
17 Ibid., p 27.
18 Beecher, L. J., ‘Christian counter-revolution to Mau Mau’, in Joelson, F. S., ed., Rhodesia and East Africa (London, 1958), pp. 82–92, at p. 82.Google Scholar
19 Idem, ‘After Mau Mau - what?’, International Review of Missions, 44 (April 1955), pp. 205-11, at p. 206.
20 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 43.
21 Bewes, T. F. C., ‘Behind the Mau Mau headlines’, East and West Review, 19 (Jan. 1953), pp. 3–8.Google Scholar
22 Beecher, ‘Christian counter-revolution’, p. 82.
23 Beecher, ‘After Mau Mau’, p. 206. The view of Mau Mau as religious conflict was shared by Philip Mitchell, Governor of Kenya until 1952: ‘The black and blood stained forces of sorcery and magic, stirring in the vicious hearts and minds of wicked men, and as the churches, and the schools speak over the land, whispering to them “Kill, kill, kill, for your last chance in Africa is at hand”…. The light is spreading and these dark and dreadful distortions of the human spirit cannot bear it’ (Afterthoughts [London, 1954], cited in Buijtenhuijs, R., Mau Mau Twenty Years After [The Hague, 1973], p. 45)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Louis Leakey likewise argued that Mau Mau must be understood as religion: Defeating Mau Mau (London, 1954).
24 Beecher, ‘After Mau Mau’, p. 210.
25 See CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, prayer on p. 13, and the Council of Churches of Kenya statement on p. 16.
26 Henry Martyn Library, Cambridge [HML], Kenya Church Year Book 1954, p. 7.
27 Carey, Crisis, pp. 13-37.
28 Ibid., p. 17.
29 Ibid., pp. 38-9.
30 Ibid., pp. 17 and 35.
31 Ibid., p. 29.
32 Cf. Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the mind’, which delineates liberal and conservative positions in the white community. The liberal view is articulated by Leakey, L. S. B. in Defeating Mau Mau and Mau Mau and the Kikuyu (London, 1952)Google Scholar, and in its psychologized form by Carothers, Psychology.
33 Beecher, L. J., ‘Education in Kenya today’, East and West Review, 20 (October 1954), pp. 110–17, at p. III.Google Scholar
34 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 36.
35 Bewes, T. F. C., ‘The work of the Christian Church among the Kikuyu’, International Affairs, 29 (1953), pp. 316–25, at p. 320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 Cf. White, Luise, ‘Separating the men from the boys’, International Journal of African Affairs, 23 (1990), pp. 1–25Google Scholar, and Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the mind’. The blurring of categories is what makes the independent schools and churches troublesome for Beecher: they are neither one thing nor the other.
37 Cf. Casson, ‘“Garden city”’.
38 CMS General Secretary Max Warren called Mau Mau ‘profoundly unAfrican’ in his CMS Newsletter (February 1954).
39 For example, Dougall, J. W. C., Building Kenya’s Future (Edinburgh, 1955), p. 17Google Scholar, and Francis, Carey described in Greaves, L. B., Carey Francis of Kenya (London, 1969).Google Scholar
40 Cf. Carothers, Psychology, pp. 12-15: ‘[Mau Mau] arose from the development of an anxious conflictual situation in people who, from contact with an alien culture had lost the supportive and constraining influences of their own culture, yet had not lost their “magic” modes of thinking. It arose from the exploitation of this situation by relatively sophisticated egoists.’
41 ‘I don’t say that all Kikuyus are actual murderers, but they all… screen, protect and justify these murderers.’ But Carey denied that he was ‘a negrophobe’: ‘I myself mix with Africans most freely, having meals with them (generally tea, but sometimes chicken and so on at lunch), but then I’m a professional and it’s part of my work, they know it, and I know it’ (Crisis, pp. 31-3).
42 Smith, N. Langford, ‘Revival in East Africa’, International Review of Missions, 43 (1954), pp. 77–81, at p. 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, pp. 48-9.
44 Bewes, ‘Mau Mau headlines’, p. 8.
45 Phillips, From Mau Mau to Christ, pp. 19-20; Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 51; Wiseman, E. M., Kikuyu Martyrs (London, 1958), pp. 12, 20Google Scholar; and more recently Smoker, Dorothy, Ambushed By Love (Fort Washington, PA, 1994)Google Scholar, demonstrate the perception of an all-or- nothing moment of decisioa
46 RCS, pamphlet -46p2, E. M. Wiseman, ‘The story of the CMS in Kenya’, (nd), p. 12.
47 For a missionary construction of Kikuyu church history, see CMS, Mau Mau: What b It?
48 Bewes, ‘Work of the Christian Church’, p. 324.
49 Bostock, ‘Reminiscences’, pp. 171-2.
50 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 26.
51 Bewes, ‘Mau Mau headlines’, p. 8.
52 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 47.
53 CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 10.
54 Ibid.
55 Dougall, Building Kenya’s Future, p. 29: ‘out of travail and tragedy a new inter-racial Christian community is being born.’
56 Warren, M. A. C. cited in Groves, C. P., The Planting of Christianity in Africa, 4 vols (London, 1958), 4, p. 312.Google Scholar
57 Beecher, ‘Christian counter-revolution’, p. 83.
58 CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 12.
59 Government officials explicitly welcomed missionary involvement: ‘Rehabilitation is an undoubted opportunity for the churches to re-establish Christian values’ (J. Nottingham and C. Rosberg, The Myth of Mau Mau, pp. 337-40). Missionary Keith Cole made explicit the parallel between rehabilitation and confession, Christian (Hanging in the Middle Way [London, 1959], p. 45).Google Scholar
60 Cf. Bostock, ‘Reminiscences’, and Beecher, ‘Christian counter-revolution’, p. 84.
61 Bostock, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 163.
62 Beecher, ‘Christian counter-revolution’. Cf. J. C. Dougall’s emphasis on Christianity’s role in creating personal responsibility, Kenya’s Future, p. 13.
63 Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the mind’, p. 416.
64 Cf. White, ‘Separating the men’. Note too Cecil Bewes’s comment that in Nairobi, ‘no home life is possible’ (Kikuyu Conflict, p. 37), and Mary Rickman’s belief that ‘hope for the church of the future lies… with the promise of Christian homes, where the wife is the husband’s helpmate, and they bring up the children together’ (Seven Whole Days, p. 52).
65 Wiseman, Story of the CMS in Kenya, p. 11.
66 Beecher, ‘After Mau Mau’, p. 210.
67 John Lonsdale with Stanley Booth-Clibborn and Andrew Hake, ‘The emerging pattern of church and state co-operation in Kenya’, in Richard Gray et al., eds, Christianity in Independent Africa, pp. 267-9.
68 Ibid., p. 268.
69 Lonsdale, The emerging pattern’, p. 270.
70 Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict, p. 67; Dougall, Kenya’s Future, p. 18; CMS, Mau Mau: What Is It?, p. 10.
71 See for example, Beecher, ‘After Mau Mau’, p. 208.
72 Cited in Greaves, Carey Francis, p. 122.
73 As Bewes was happy to admit (‘Mau Mau headlines’, p. 5): ‘Our European kindly paternalism is now out of date. Europeans do consistently insult Kikuyu by treating them as inferior.’
