Abstract
This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts, seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the times of “emergency.” The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku Mutua and other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many journalists today have commented on the recovery of “lost” colonial archives and the denials of former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers, Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the commentaries on the “Mau Mau” mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past injustices.
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Endnotes
1 For an excellent summary of the individual tort claims regarding assault, battery, and negligence in these cases on the part of Mutua and the other Mua Mau claimants, see Anderson (2011).
For examples of attacks on the case from British commentators, see the comments following Daily Mail Reporter (2011). Some commentators typically argued that lawyers were just taking advantage of the Kenyan claimants, that journalists and others were forgetting about the beneficence of the British empire, that the Mau Mau ought to be counter-sued for their horrific acts of violence, and that if reparations were allowed in types of situations than readers needed to remember about the horrors of the Irish Famine, foreign invasions, etc. Contrast this with one Kenyan claim that “coverage of the case in the British media—across the ideological spectrum—has been both extensive and supportive” (Wanyeki 2011, paragraph 10). Ben Macintyre explains some of the political and cultural context of some of these debates in Africa when he notes that the “reparations claim is regarded in Kenya as nationally divisive since the Mau Mau was in large part an ethnic rebellion by Kikuyu rather than a national uprising. Most of the alleged torture and abuse was carried out by Africans of other tribes, albeit under British supervision, adding a potentially toxic tribal element to the mixture” (Macintyre 2011, paragraph 34).
2 Beginning in the 1960s, scholars have produced a steady stream of essays and books trying to explain or deconstruct various facets of the Mau Mau “myth.” For just some of the representative samples of this work, see (Rosberg and Notthingham 1966), (Barnett and Njama 1966), (Buijtenhuijs 1973), (Buijtenhuijs 1982), (Throup 1987), (Kanogo 1987), (Furedi 1989), (Berman and Lonsdale 1991), (Presley 1992), (Berman and Lonsdale 1992), (Clough 1998).
3 I realize that the labeling or a critique of a field known as “ethnopsychiatry” is fraught with controversy. So is its alleged demise as a field—see (McCulloch 1995). Cristiana Giordano, who has conducted fieldwork in an ethnopsychiatric clinic in Northern Italy, traces some of “ethnopsychiatry’s legacy” back to the works of several colonial doctors, including John Colin Carothers (Giordano 2011, 229).
4 For a detailed discussion of how these racial typologies were used in the eugenical discourses that circulated in Kenya during this period, see (Campbell 2007).
5 Obviously, the various ideological, cultural, and political entanglements of anthropology—and anthropologists’ criticism of various imperial or colonial usages of particular disciplinary practices—has a long and complex history dating back at least to the time of the Enlightenment (Vincent, 2002).
6 Prince further argues that when Jack McCulloch and others write about this commandeering, this is a stance that would be “accepted by most” (Prince 1996, 230). At the end of his article he reminds us that our recollections of this difficult past for transcultural psychiatry are influenced by such notions as consciousness, mind, free will, and responsibility, and that radical shifts in opinions on these intangibles mean that in this field, “opinions that are politically correct today may tomorrow be anathema” (238).
7 For an excellent analysis of some of the rhetorical constructions that circulated in Kenya and other parts of the British Empire during this period, see (McCulloch 1995).
8 For some of the best critiques of Leakey’s claims, see (Clark 1989), (Berman and John Lonsdale 1990), (Kershaw 1997). For samples of Leakey’s classic work on the Mau Mau, see (Leakey 1952, 1954).
9 As Elisha Stephen Atieno-Odhiambo explain, Kenyatta “spoke first,” then “lived long,” and one “of the consequences of his longevity is that he put a lid on indigenous Gikuyu production of history, folklore and anthropology” (Atieno-Odhiambo 1991, 305).
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J.D., Campbell University, 1984; Ph.D. in Speech Communication, University of Georgia, 1993
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Hasian, M. The Deployment of Ethnographic Sciences and Psychological Warfare During the Suppression of the Mau Mau Rebellion. J Med Humanit 34, 329–345 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9236-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9236-6