Humanitarianism, Race and Denial: the International Committee of the Red Cross and Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion, 1952–60

INTRODUCTION

In our time, following the Cold War and 9/11, classic humanitarian principles such as universality, neutrality, and impartiality have come under sustained attack. International humanitarian organizations have been accused of facilitating conflicts and conferring military or political advantage, while states have increasingly used humanitarian norms to justify military intervention.¹ While the character of humanitarianism has changed significantly since the mid 1990s, histories of humanitarianism have shown that the challenges of providing neutral or impartial assistance are not new.² They have raised questions about the ways in which humanitarian organizations may become complicit with powers using torture, or embroiled in cover-ups of evidence, as can be seen with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Italian Government during the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6).³ Not only have these accounts added a historical context for contemporary critiques of humanitarianism, but they have contributed insights into the ways that humanitarian organizations have evolved in response to geopolitical challenges.

This article is concerned with the moral boundaries of humanitarian action in the past, and the omissions, oversights, and justifications through which human suffering is overlooked. It draws on Stanley Cohen’s work on denial, which alerts us to the problematic relationship between knowledge about abuse and suffering, and action. Cohen invites us to consider how psychic and political spaces can be both ‘known’ and ‘not-known’,⁴ and proposes that we focus on three forms of denial: literal, interpretive, and implicatory. Literal denial is the most straightforward, concerning assertions that something did not happen or is not true. With interpretive denial, the facts are not denied but are given a different meaning (‘what happened is not what you think it is, not what it looks like, not what you call it’).⁵ With implicatory denial, meanwhile, the information itself is not questioned but the responsibility to act is denied through techniques of avoidance, evasion, and rationalization. Inaction and passivity are most frequently associated with implicatory denial, where knowledge of suffering does not carry sufficient moral imperative to act.⁶ Psychologists, sociologists and political scientists have drawn on Cohen’s vocabulary in analyses of audience reactions to human-rights violations and appeals, as well as in the context of humanitarian programmes such as Operation Lifeline Sudan.⁷ By focusing on the justifications and excuses that help bridge the gap between knowledge and action, Cohen’s account of denial also has much to offer to historians who are seeking to tease out the nuances of humanitarian action (or the lack of it) in the past. Importantly, it allows for the recognition that many humanitarian organizations and their staff have good intentions, yet work in contexts (institutional or political) in which they often have little control over events, receive at times incomplete information, and are uncertain about the best course of action.

This article applies these ideas by exploring the response of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion (1952–60). This case study is particularly appropriate for exploring humanitarianism and denial for two reasons. Firstly, Kenya marked the start of discussions among ICRC delegates on the practicalities and implications of a more visible presence in Africa. This was part of a broader concern to show that the ICRC mission was still relevant in the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War, despite being seen by many communist governments as a bourgeois organization of the West.⁸ Yet Kenya posed something of a quandary for the ICRC. Not only were there concerns over the legality of a mandate to intervene in what the British argued was an internal tribal uprising, but their discussions also exposed concerns about race (notably the supposedly psychological instability of black Africans) and the appropriateness of engaging with this problem as an essentially white European humanitarian enterprise. These concerns often hamstrung senior delegates of the ICRC and were used to rationalize their lack of action over Kenya.

Secondly, as historians of Mau Mau have demonstrated, the British Government and Kenya’s Colonial...