‘A prisoner in my own country’

Kariuki Mungai had already been arrested and interrogated three times by 1954, when he became one of thousands of young men swept up in Operation Anvil, a brutal attempt to break the Mau Mau insurrection.

He was first identified as a Mau Mau fighter before being sent to Manyani camp, a name that became synonymous with suffering. There, he said, he underwent humiliating and sickening abuse.

First he was pushed through a cattle dip. Then he was beaten around the back of his head until he fell unconscious. “But the worst punishment was carrying overflowing buckets from the cells,” he said, in the Kikuyu language of his tribe. “We were made to carry them on our heads. The guards would make us run so the excrement would run down our faces. It stank and made our eyes sting. We were all ill, all the time.” In a sworn statement collected by human rights activists, he details other abuses at Manyani, which he described as “hell on earth”. The screams of other inmates turned the camp into a lunatic asylum, he said. Their days would be spent digging rocks from the ground. One of the white guards would force young inmates to carry him on their backs, as if they were horses.

The lack of sanitation in an overcrowded camp of 16,000 — 10,000 more than it was designed for — caused an outbreak of typhoid. More than 100 died.

From there, Mr Mungai was transferred to the notorious Mwea camps, where brutal techniques were pioneered to forc Mau Mau fighters to confess.

Beatings were a daily occurrence as the white guards and their Kenyan counterparts began the final phase of putting down the rebellion, by extracting confessions. “It was years and years of hell,” said Mr Mungai. “I was a prisoner in my own country and no one ever apologised.”

It was 1958 by the time he was released. His body never recovered from the four years of beatings. Today, the 64-year-old walks with a limp, a permanent reminder of a boot in his right hip and his years in a British camp.

‘So horrified I refused to go’

It was not what the young British colonial administrator had been expecting. A tour of the detention camps where he was due to be posted had exposed the sheer horror of conditions endured by the Kenyan men suspected of having taken the Mau Mau oath.

“The superintendent of prisons described what they did, and it was clearly against British anything — rule, or justice, or whatever,” he said half a century later, his voice still ringing with anger.

“He said, ‘I don’t know why you’re looking so queasy about this, it’s just like a good rugger scrum’.”

His “good rugger scrum” was a system of violence pitting prisoner against prisoner. At each stage, suspects were placed in cells where they were outnumbered by inmates who had already confessed their allegiance.

Their role was to slap, beat or kick a confession from the new arrivals in a process known as “dilution”.

It ended with prisoners being suspended upside down from the ceiling of their cells and flogged with rubber strips torn from tyres. Some died.

“I was so horrified that I refused to go,” said the former colonial officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.

On another occasion he was placed in charge of prisoners rounded up from the forest lairs of the Mau Mau. “I’m no expert on age but at most they were 14 or 15,” he said. “Under the laws of the emergency, they were due to be hanged.”

Horrified, he managed to find them places in a school where their education was supported by cash raised by a handful of sympathetic officers.

Overall, the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau caused more problems than it solved, he continued.

“The war in the forests lasted for maybe two and a half years. The more serious situation was created by the operation to sweep Nairobi clean of anyone who was black — or that’s how it seemed.”

The result was a shameful episode for Britain as it began its withdrawal from Africa.

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