If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them: Government Cleansings of Witches and Mau Mau in 1950s Kenya

I

During the mid-1950s British administrators in the Machakos District of Kenya enlisted categories of Kamba occult "experts"—"witchdoctors" and "cleansers"—to cleanse local "witches" and migrants from Nairobi who were believed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. A compendium of colonial documents concerning the "cleansing" campaigns illustrates how and why the socio-historical context of Mau Mau-era Machakos drove the colonial administration to break with its longstanding de facto policy of not officially combating supernatural challenges to state authority with supernatural means. The overwhelming disorder wrought by Mau Mau motivated state officials to break with precedent and to identify and employ Kamba "experts" to cleanse Mau Mau adherents and witches.¹

The widespread and politicized nature of the violence occurring during Mau Mau, and its perceived linkages to the supernatural, precipitated the state's shift to the employment of Kamba experts to combat "witchcraft" and Mau Mau oathing. An anthro-historical approach to understanding Mau Mau in Machakos shows that, while the cleansings constituted a group of "critical moments" at which British colonial officials could argue that they had dealt with supernatural challenges to state authority by rendering them "knowable," the cleansings also demonstrated the degree to which state authority became situated in Kamba colonial officials and the extent to which the implementation and interpretation of British colonial cleansing policies depended on these local authorities.²

II

From October 1952 to December 1959 Kenya was officially under a State of Emergency resulting from a violent, anti-colonial insurgency conducted by (largely) Kikuyu guerrilla fighters. The term Mau Mau came to refer to the insurgent movement itself, to the guerrilla fighters and the rebellion's more passive adherents, and also to the oaths of allegiance that fighters and adherents took, or were forced to take. The Mau Mau rebellion arose from decades of consistently increasing levels of socio-economic insecurity and political marginalization experienced by the substantive numbers of Kikuyu squatters in the White Highlands and Kikuyu slum-dwellers in Nairobi, and came to involve members of other tribes.³ Mau Mau violence first flared on settler farms in the White Highlands in 1952, and the colonial government moved to squash the spotty insurgency, which quickly "transformed into a formidable guerrilla force."⁴ Despite the massive expenditures of force and intensified administration on the ground, the colonial state's efforts to put down Mau Mau were unsuccessful and talks surrounding the end of the rebellion resulted in Kenya's independence in 1963.

Yet, in addition to expressing grievances over the depredations and deprivations of colonial rule, the Mau Mau rebellion can also be understood as constituting a key juncture at which violence related to supernatural beliefs and practices challenged the ability of the colonial state to maintain law and order. Rather than treating the rebellion as a situation rooted in more tangible, socio-economic and political concerns, the remedying of which would necessitate the relinquishment of a significant degree of colonial privilege and power, many colonial authorities preferred to read Mau Mau abstractly as primarily a supernatural situation, in which atavistic "black magic" or "witchcraft" beliefs and practices were an engine and means of anti-colonial resistance.⁵ This reading of Mau Mau as a supernatural phenomenon is reflected in the character of colonial administrative policies and practices instituted to "rehabilitate" and "cleanse" known or suspected Mau Mau adherents.

Figure 1.

Burning Witchcraft in Mau Mau-era Machakos. Photo courtesy of J.C. Nottingham.

As part of the administration's efforts to combat Mau Mau, the British colonial government instituted "de-oathing" campaigns in areas surrounding Nairobi in order to "cleanse" black Kenyans known or supposed to have taken the Mau Mau oath. These de-oathing campaigns were part of the colonial government's broader strategy of eradication and rehabilitation, which entailed tactics such as interning black Kenyans in labor camps and removing them to "safe" villages established by the state. Although Kikuyu people bore the brunt of these tactics, other...