“All of us deplore Mau Mau”: Fenner Brockway and the revolt in Kenya

The British government’s repression of the rebel insurgency in Kenya during the 1950s was one of the most brutal episodes in the history of the Empire. Indeed, one has to go back to the suppression of the Great Indian Revolt of 1857 to find an instance of a rebellion being put down with such unrestrained and indiscriminate violence. Yet in many ways, the counterinsurgency in Kenya was even worse. Whereas the Indian rebels in the 1850s were comparatively well-armed, the Kenyan rebels, the so-called Mau Mau (the Kikuyu ethnic community) possessed hardly any firearms and were incapable of inflicting serious casualties on their British enemy. The rebels killed only 63 European soldiers and police while themselves suffering over 11,000 fatalities—although unofficial estimates put the real number of rebel fatalities at anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000.

At the time, the British media portrayed the rebellion as a deadly assault on the 40,000 strong white settler population, but in fact only 32 settlers were killed by the rebels, less than died in traffic accidents in the same period. In the course of the “Emergency”, more than 160,000 men and women were interned without trial, many more were imprisoned for offences related to the revolt, and over a million men, women and children had their homes destroyed and were forced into some 800 new villages where they were held under guard in abject poverty. Thousands of children died of hunger and disease.

On 24 April 1954, Britain carried out a massive operation in Nairobi, Operation Anvil, rounding up and screening the entire African population of the city: 27,000 men and women were detained and another 20,000 were deported from the city. Being in possession of a union membership card was considered grounds for detention. This was the largest mass detention operation in the history of the British Empire. Moreover, over a thousand Mau Mau prisoners were to be hanged, including 472 for being in possession of arms or ammunition, 210 for consorting with rebels and an incredible 62 for administering illegal oaths. All this was accompanied by the routine use of torture, rape, mutilation and summary execution. The savagery of the repression unleashed in Kenya was only possible because the rebels were black, and in no other post-1945 British counterinsurgency campaign was the repression as brutal and unrestrained.1

None of this has in any way sullied the reputations of the Conservative prime ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, who presided over the Emergency. One reason for this is, of course, that the Labour Front Bench at the time was well aware that if they were to take power then they would have to continue the repression and its cover-up for as long as it took for the rebellion to be put down. How did the Labour left respond to the horrors taking place in Kenya? In what follows, I will take a closer look at Archibald Fenner Brockway, a veteran socialist and anti-imperialist, and certainly one of the most determined critics of Empire in the House of Commons in the 1950s. Such was his concern with colonial affairs that he was known at the time as “the Member for Africa”.2

Brockway and the Independent Labour Party

Brockway had joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a Labour Party affiliate, towards the end of 1907. He was a strong opponent of both militarism and imperialism, and when the First World War began, he established the No Conscription Fellowship. His opposition to the war saw him spend nearly three years in prison, some eight months in solitary confinement. He was not released until April 1919. He soon threw himself into political activity once again, wholly committed to the class struggle at home and to national liberation struggles throughout the Empire. In February 1927, he was involved in the founding of the Comintern-initiated League Against Imperialism in Brussels and was its first international chairperson. The League certainly alarmed the colonial powers. Its activities were closely monitored by MI5. Even members of parliament who supported the League were subject to surveillance and harassment.

When James Maxton and the Communist MP and former ILP member Shapurji Saklatvala travelled to Cologne to attend a meeting of the League Executive in February 1929, police detained them on their return to Britain. As John McNair wrote in his biography of Maxton, “instead of their luggage being examined in the usual way by the ordinary customs officials, they were all searched by police officers on the instructions of the [Criminal Investigation Department] of Scotland Yard”. The ILP strenuously objected to their treatment in the Commons.3 This harassment was, of course, only to be expected. Brockway himself wrote in the New Leader on 16 September 1927 that the establishment of the League was likely “the biggest human event of the next 20 years”. Inevitably, he argued:

Scotland Yard has its eye on it. A movement which sets out to unite and strengthen the subject peoples of the world in their struggle against Imperialism is not likely to be overlooked by the Secret Service of the most powerful empire in the world! But we are in a bad way indeed if such attention deters us from sympathy and activity.4

It is worth remembering that Brockway, Maxton and Saklatvala had all served time in prison for their political activities and regarded this as a likely consequence of involvement in the fight for socialism. ILP involvement in the League was, however, only short-lived, a victim, at least in part, of the Comintern’s adoption of Third Period sectarianism. Maxton himself was expelled from the League only months after the Cologne meeting. In the New Leader, he subsequently made the point that his expulsion was “final proof of the impossibility of working with Communists in their present state of mind”.5

In May 1929, Brockway was elected to the Commons and was soon in serious conflict with Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government. He was outraged by the government’s policy of mass repression in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign in India—repression that provoked general strikes in city after city across the country in May 1930. There were over 60,000 arrests and protesters and strikers were routinely beaten, with troops and police opening fire on numerous occasions. Brockway made clear that he looked forward to the triumph of the “Indian Proletarian Movement”, to an “Indian social revolution” and to the establishment of a “revolutionary government”. This Indian revolution “will probably not take the same form as the Russian revolution owing to the hold which the principle of non-violence has upon the people”.6 Needless to say, none of this was or ever has been Labour Party policy.

After the Labour government fell with Macdonald and others effectively defecting to the Conservatives, the ILP disaffiliated in July 1932. At the time, Brockway was strongly in favour of this and regretted that the break had not occurred earlier. The ILP now proclaimed itself a “revolutionary party” and, in the course of the 1930s, Brockway was to work closely with anti-imperialists of the calibre of George Padmore and CLR James. James in particular was a regular contributor to the ILP newspaper the New Leader and a popular speaker at ILP meetings. Indeed, in 1935, “the ILP organised a national lecture tour which took James across England…up to Scotland…and for the first time to Wales”.7 The ILP was to facilitate the publication of James’s two classic volumes World Revolution in 1937 and The Black Jacobins in 1938.8 Another contributor to the New Leader is worth noting here: the Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta, the future president of an independent Kenya. The 21 May 1937 issue carried his article “Hitler Could Not Improve on Kenya”. The following year, Kenyatta contributed another article on Kenya to a powerful special supplement on “Empire” that went out with the May Day edition. The supplement’s editorial warned:

There is a great danger at the present time that our hatred of the tyranny of Fascism may cause us to forget the tyranny of imperialism. Our pages show that the barbarities which [Benito] Mussolini and Hitler practice in Italy and Germany are being practiced constantly within the British Empire… The truth is that four-fifths of the British Empire is as much a dictatorship as the Fascist countries.9

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the ILP opposed the conflict as an “Imperialist war”, a position that Brockway strongly supported. In 1942, the ILP published his pamphlet Stop the War by Socialism, in which he rejected the view “that in order to fight Nazism we must identify ourselves with British Imperialism”. He went on:

it is impossible to point to a single suppression of liberty in Nazi Germany which has not occurred in the British Empire during the last ten years… As much as the ILP hates Nazism, it cannot associate itself with the system of Imperialism which shares so many of the characteristics of Nazism.10

He condemned the Labour Party for going into coalition with the Conservatives and called for a “Socialist Government” that would dispossess the capitalist class and put an end to the British Empire.11 Twice during the war, he stood for parliament in by-elections as an ILP candidate in opposition to the Coalition government candidate. As he later recalled: “I urged that the war should be ended by a people’s revolution across the frontiers and not by military victory”.12 In October 1941, standing in Lancaster, he secured 5,418 votes against the Conservative candidate’s 15,783 votes, and in Cardiff East in April 1942, standing against the newly appointed minister for war, Sir Edward Grigg, he secured 3,311 votes against Grigg’s 10,030 votes.

Back to Labour

Brockway was to break with the ILP and rejoin the Labour Party after the end of the Second World War. No mass socialist movement had materialised and so he abandoned the ILP’s centrist brand of socialist politics and instead embraced Labourism. However, he remained on the left of the Labour Party. He was offered a peerage, but his embrace of Labourism had not gone that far yet. Instead, he was elected to the Commons in February 1950. He regarded Prime Minister Clement Attlee “as doing a magnificent job” and the Labour government’s social reforms as “an inspiration… I was thrilled by the inauguration of the free health service. This was Socialism”.13 He was a member of the Keep Left group of Labour MPs and then of the Peace Aims group, established by MP Leslie Hale, which attempted to persuade the Labour Government “to distinguish its goals in the Korean War from those of the Americans”.14 This was hardly an adequate response to the horrors being inflicted on the Korean people and the younger Brockway would have been appalled and dismayed by the political compromises his embrace of Labourism involved.

Instead of seeing struggle as the way forward as he had in the past, Brockway now embraced what can be best described as a form of evolutionary pressure group politics, working not to fight against the reactionary policies of the Labour leadership—whether in terms of domestic, defence, colonial or foreign policy—but rather to influence that leadership, to push them as far as possible in a progressive direction. What still marked him out was that his pressure group politics very much involved organising and campaigning outside Labour when necessary, in order to mobilise opinion and exert pressure. He was one of the founders of the Movement for Colonial Freedom in 1954 and of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957, and he remained a fierce opponent of racism.15 However, he believed that the revolutionary left—which represented the kind of politics he himself had supported in the 1930s and early 1940s—had now become an obstacle to progress.

Difficult moments

Nevertheless, his decision to accommodate himself to Labourism at the end of the 1940s inevitably involved some difficult moments. The Attlee government of 1945-51, for example, did not just carry through a programme of nationalisation, of welfare reforms and establish the National Health Service, but in January 1949, it reintroduced conscription and increased the time to be served the following year. The Labour government gave its wholehearted support to the Korea War, a war waged by the United States with no concern whatsoever regarding civilian casualties—the US military boasted that their bombing killed perhaps as many as a million civilians. This commitment led to a dramatic increase in military expenditure, an increase that necessitated the first cuts in welfare. Moreover, it was under the Attlee government that the British state began its own nuclear weapons programme. Whereas Brockway would have once considered that such actions had to be opposed and would indeed have justified a break with the Labour Party—he had spent three years in prison opposing such policies in the past—now they were policies and actions he had to swallow, even if reluctantly, remaining in the party to exert influence.

Sometimes, this determination to remain in the Labour Party involved a tactful silence regarding the actions of the Labour leadership. In his 650-page magnum opus The Colonial Revolution, published in 1973, Brockway does acknowledge that in 1945 “the British rearmed the French” in Indo-China. This is hardly an adequate account of the more than 20,000 British troops who acted on the orders of the Attlee government and fought the Viet Minh on the streets of Saigon, destroying whole districts of the city, in order to restore French colonial rule. When it comes to the British intervention in Indonesia to restore Dutch rule, he mentions the fact that for four years, the Dutch government “attempted by the most ruthless military means to subdue the Indonesians”. Yet, the British role is not mentioned at all. In Indonesia, once again acting on the orders of the Attlee government, some 45,000 British and Indian troops waged an all-out war against the nationalists using indiscriminate force that left some 20,000 Indonesians dead. This was a major campaign, one of the largest operations the British military had been involved in since the Second World War. At the time, there was considerable opposition to the intervention in Britain and there were even occasions when British troops refused to fight, while in Australia, dockers and seamen blacked ships carrying troops and munitions to the Dutch colony. Once British troops had been withdrawn, the Labour government still provided the Dutch with arms and equipment, without which they would not have been able to conduct their own campaign of repression.16

There can be no doubt whatsoever that Brockway knew all about the British intervention in Indonesia 1945-6, but he does not even mention it in the book. This intervention has been largely written out of the record of the Attlee government, and Brockway shamefully went along with this. Holding the government to account was clearly not the way to exert influence. He does, however, regret the Korean War in this volume, describing it as “tragic”, once again hardly an adequate response considering the bloodbath that the US had unleashed with the full support and participation of the Labour government.17 As an MP, he did not vote against the Labour government’s rearmament proposals: “I had rejoined the Labour Party with my eyes open…[but] I had decided to conform because I realised that the best work for Socialism and peace could be done within the Party”. This was not an easy decision, and “my conscience was so troubled that I was on the edge of a breakdown”.18

Brockway’s reluctance to hold the Attlee government fully to account extended to its policy in Kenya. It was the Labour government’s failure to alleviate African grievances and challenge white settler supremacy that prepared the way for the Mau Mau rebellion. Indeed, the government had actively repressed attempts to organise resistance to white rule and in the process drove the movement underground. The crucial episode was the arrest of the leaders of the militant East African Trades Union Congress (EATUC), Makhan Singh and Fred Kubai, after they issued an uncompromising demand for independence on 1 May 1950. The EATUC responded to the arrests by calling a general strike in Nairobi, which soon spread across the country, with some 100,000 workers involved. They demonstrated chanting “Down with Racism and Colonialism!”, “Equal Pay for Equal Work!” and “We Demand Independence Now!”.19 The general strike was called off after hundreds were arrested and thousands victimised over the following nine days.

The EATUC general secretary, Makhan Singh, a Marxist and Communist sympathiser, was to remain first in detention and then under restriction for eleven years. He had been active in building the trade union movement in Kenya in the 1930s and then left for India in December 1939. Here, he joined the Communist Party, was arrested in May 1940 and held in detention without trial until July 1942, when he was released but placed under restriction. This did not end until January 1945. He returned to Kenya in August 1947 and once again threw himself into trade union work. As far as Britain was concerned, he was a serious threat to the Empire, both in India and Kenya. A 1947 Special Branch report described him as an “able, shrewd, inveterate and life-long fanatical Communist agitator”.20 He was considered so dangerous that he was not released from restriction until 18 October 1961, nearly two years after the Emergency was ended.

Brockway was already looking to the moderate responsible nationalists as showing the way forward. Whereas working-class struggle would once have been central to his stance on Kenya and the Labour government’s conduct would have outraged him, now his perspective had changed. In the past, he would have championed the Kenyan workers’ cause in the Commons as he had the Indian cause in 1930. Now, it went unremarked, and Makhan Singh’s case was never taken up by Brockway.21 Instead, he looked to the moderate nationalists who had opposed the general strike.22 In the circumstances, the militants, led by Fred Kubai and Bildad Kaggia, went underground, setting up the revolutionary movement that the British were to label Mau Mau and condemn as a reversion to primitive savagery that had to be crushed.23 Although this revolutionary movement had a strong presence in Nairobi, at least up until Operation Anvil in April 1954, the building up of a guerilla army, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, in the forests was now seen as the way forward. Brockway, as we shall see, publicly supported the crushing of this liberation movement.

Brockway and the Mau Mau

Accompanied by his fellow Labour MP Leslie Hale, Brockway visited Kenya towards the end of 1952 and wrote a series of articles for the Labour Party newspaper Daily Herald, reporting back on “the mystery of Mau Mau”. On 17 November 1952, he described the Mau Mau as “an ugly fact. Its members have committed crimes against man and beast of the vilest kind. The African cause and the cause of racial co-operation have been set back tragically.” In his later articles, he considered the grievances that were fuelling the Mau Mau, the efficacy of the British response and looked forward to moderates from both the African and the white settler communities coming together—something that he had done his best to promote during his visit.

Although he had been worried about how the settlers would respond to him and had been warned that his life might be in danger, he now told Daily Herald readers on 20 November that he had “suffered less discourtesy from Europeans in Kenya than one normally experiences from opponents in the height of an election campaign”. When he met Michael Blundell, the settler leader, he incredibly “found that he is a man of many liberal ideas”. More generally, he “was delighted to find that among leading figures—European, Asian, African and Arab—there was a remarkable consensus of opinion on what should be done”. There were, he admitted, reactionary settlers opposed to any change, but he made clear that he, together with Leslie Hale, had helped prepare the way for a “harmonising of the interests of the 40,000 white settlers, 90,000 Indians, 12,000 Arabs and 6 million Africans, getting the leaders of the four races round a table to discuss a common programme to heal Kenya’s wounds”. According to him, he had strengthened “the hands of the large body of Africans who are opposed to violence…firm in their opposition to Mau Mau”.24

Indeed, while in the colony, he had offered to make an appeal over the radio, urging Africans not to support the Mau Mau, but the offer was rejected. Nevertheless, he and Leslie Hale wrote an anti-Mau Mau leaflet that was distributed by moderates from the Kenya African Union (KAU), warning that those advocating the use of violence, “even in circumstances of extreme provocation, are at the moment the real enemies of the African people”.25

Early the following year, in 1953, Brockway expanded his arguments into a twenty-page pamphlet, Why Mau Mau?, published under the auspices of the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism.26 The Congress had been founded in Paris in June 1948, and Brockway was its international chairperson. On the inside cover of the Why Mau Mau? pamphlet, the Congress proclaimed itself to be “an international organisation linking the major democratic organisations in Africa together with anti-imperialist movements in Asia, Europe and elsewhere”. Given this, the first paragraph of the pamphlet comes as something of a surprise:

All of us deplore Mau Mau and abhor its methods. The mutilations and murders committed by its members have shocked everyone who possesses a shred of human feeling. The victims have been Africans even more than Europeans. No one who has been in Kenya can withhold sympathy from those of both races who are in danger nor support for the measures necessary for their protection.

He goes on to insist that it is supporters of “the African cause”, like himself, “who particularly deplore Mau Mau”. They had “high hopes in the advance of the African people” and so it had been “a shock to us to find some Africans reverting to methods of witchcraft and terrorism”. This was, of course, a wholly compromised response to the revolutionary movement in Kenya, a movement provoked into existence by the Labour government’s crackdown on trade union militancy and protest. It was a response that effectively embraced the characterisation of the movement by its enemies. It was also inadequate as a response to the ferocity of the repression that was already in the process of being unleashed by the Conservative government of Winston Churchill, who came to power two years earlier.

To be fair, the pamphlet does go on to chronicle African grievances in telling detail, for example, the expropriation of African land and the reduction of the rural population to conditions that are “closer to slavery” than in any other area of “the British sphere of Africa”. At the same time, he goes out of his way to make clear that many white farmers “are considerate of their labourers”. He writes of the poverty and the exploitation of African workers in Nairobi, and of how “racial discrimination permeates every sphere of life”. According to him, the lack of any effective means of addressing African grievances contributed to the rise of the Mau Mau. The uprising was the product of “a deep and continuing frustration—a frustration which is social, economic and psychological”. Although he supported the “measures necessary” to protect both Africans and Europeans from the rebels, he nevertheless made clear that the government’s indiscriminate response “will only increase the bitterness which it reflects”.

Brockway condemned the use of collective punishmens. After “a European farmer had been murdered”, he explained, “all black people within a 25 mile radius had been evicted from their homes, 4,471 people deported back to the Kikuyu reserve, with all their property confiscated, including 994 cattle, 10,577 sheep and goats, 70 donkeys, 59 cycles”. Brockway saw this collective punishment as comparable to what the Nazis did, but at the same time, he was certainly aware that this was no aberration. Collective punishment was and had been for many years a standard response to protest and resistance in the colonies. Previously, the Attlee Labour government had used these same measures against the Communist insurgency in Malaya. However, although he condemned collective punishments in principle, Brckway’s main concern was that British repression was actually making the situation worse so that many people “have turned to Mau Mau in despair…[and] the British Government may destroy Mau Mau only to increase Mau Mauism”.27 There was no recognition of the right of the Kenyan people to resist their oppressors and the duty of socialists to support them.

There was, he insisted in the pamphlet, an alternative to indiscriminate repression. The British government had to actively enlist the support of moderate African opinion, particularly the support of the KAU, which was opposed to the Mau Mau and was prepared to make significant concessions in order to placate the fears of settlers. Incredibly, he celebrated that the KAU would accept a literacy test for African voters, “despite the fact that it would exclude hundreds of thousands of Africans from the franchise”. Moreover, the KAU was prepared to guarantee the representation of minority races. For him, this was the way forward, and in the meantime, isolated European farms “should have permanent armed guards until the crisis has passed.” He suggested that other measures would be necessary to isolate the Mau Mau, but interestingly, ruled out expropriating the settlers who stole the land of African people. Among the alternatives, he suggested encouraging landless Africans to resettle in Tanganyika and Uganda. Both sides had to make concessions, and if this were done, it would be possible to isolate and defeat “the terrorist gangs”.

During his visit to the colony in the previous year, he tried to bring African and settler representatives to negotiate an agreement. The choice was “race conflict or race cooperation”. If the British government continued its policy of mass repression, the result would be clear:

Greater race conflict…only terrible disaster, a disaster in which—let us face the fact—the worst sufferers will be members of our race. Nor will its effects be limited to Kenya. A large part of the continent of Africa is now in ferment—South Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, North Africa. Wrong policy in Kenya will add to the flames.

It is worth repeating his fear that government policy will strengthen the rebels and that “the worst sufferers will be members of our race”. This was written at a time when the most ferocious repression, enabled by white supremacist racism, was being inflicted on Africans in Kenya, when prisoners were raped, mutilated and summarily executed. He never used the word settlers, but always referred to them as “Europeans”.28

In later accounts of the Mau Mau insurgency, he amplified the claim that he and Hale had actually come close to resolving the conflict. They had succeeded in bringing the settler leader Michael Blundell together with KAU moderates, with a declaration of intent imminent. In 1955, he wrote that the Mau Mau were responsible for the failure:

When Mr Blundell got to his farm home, he found a threat had been delivered by Mau Mau. The proposed declaration would appear to be appeasement in the face of the threat. The whole thing was off, at any rate for the time being. We understood the depth of European feeling which arose from the Mau Mau atrocities and regretfully accepted the situation.29

By the time he published The Colonial Revolution in 1973, Blundell’s farm had not just received a threat but had now actually been “attacked by the Mau Mau and the European representatives withdrew their signatures”. According to him, “[t]his was a turning point. The agreement had been endorsed by the officers of the Kenya African Union and would almost certainly have prevented the growth of Mau Mau and the worst events of the next seven years”.30

This was not just so much wishful thinking, but rather a complete and utter travesty, as there is no evidence that the white settlers would have surrendered without a fight. More importantly, what it makes clear is that for Brockway, revolutionary struggle for national liberation had become an obstacle to reform and to the achievement of independence, and it was the revolutionaries who were to blame for the horrors that followed, not the white settlers and the British government. Blundell had condemned Brockway as an apologist for African barbarism and a Communist. Later, in his memoirs, he dismissed Brockway as a “rather muddled thinker” who seemed to believe that the rebellion could be ended by “some great and humanitarian gesture” and did not realise that at the time he came across as “a sympathiser and supporter to a bestial anti-Christian inhuman and evil movement”.31

The tip of the iceberg

The Conservative government was never held accountable for the scale and the ferocity of the repression it had unleashed, and for much of the time, Brockway can be seen as mainly concerned with criticising it as a mistake for fuelling the uprising, rather than as a crime fuelled by racism. A good example of this is his characterisation of the man who presided over the most brutal regime of repression in post-war British history, Sir Evelyn Baring. According to Brockway, Baring “looked a Governor, distinguished in appearance, charming of manner”. Apparently, he “was anxious to end the tragedy which had fallen on Kenya and was open-minded and liberal in his approach”—despite presiding over and covering up a regime of rape, torture and summary execution.32 Brockway’s priority, however, was the defeat of Mau Mau. It is worth quoting Mbiyu Koinange here. His father, Senior Chief Koinange, who was in his late eighties, toothless and nearly blind at the time, had been tried and acquitted of Mau Mau offences in 1953, only to be immediately detained without trial. He was not released until July 1960, aged 95, terminally ill, dying nineteen days later. Brockway was a good friend of the older Koinange, who he describes as “a sincere Christian”, and who had earlier inducted him into the Kikuyu as a chief and as his “blood brother”. He was appalled by his internment, which he considered unjustified.33 While his father was interned, the younger Koinange campaigned against the regime of repression unleashed in Kenya outside the colony, mainly in Britain. If he had returned, he would have certainly been detained without trial.

In the 1955 pamphlet The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves, Koinange made the point that “[t]alk of Mau Mau atrocities is designed to obscure the issue of the liquidation of Africans and win sympathy for the settlers as representatives of civilisation.” However, he correctly insisted: “for every ‘atrocity’ that it has been proved the African insurrectionists committed, I can match a score committed by the settlers, the army, the police and the Home Guard.” As for African people reverting to “outmoded tribal customs”, one reason for this was Britain had “given them a picture of the civilisation of Europe composed of greed, selfishness and inhuman brutality”.34 The younger Koinange was certainly not impressed by Brockway as his concern was, according to historian Erik Linstrum, to “maintain the dominance of the White People”. Labour MPs distanced themselves from Brockway “because of rumours that he was active in the Mau Mau movement”.35

Ras Makonnen, a champion of Pan-Africanism in Britain in the 1930s, was another critic of Brockway. He worked with CLR James and George Padmore among others and was later one of the organisers of the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. In the 1930s, he had argued that Padmore had been too close to the ILP, “was really seeing too much of the ILP office, and writing consistently for their paper, the New Leader.” They could not rely “on Brockway for succour”, he warned. Brockway’s response to the Mau Mau rebellion, condemning it as “a treasonable and abominable affair”, vindicated his stance. Instead of recognising that it was “the savagery of white colonialism” that provoked the rebellion, “he preferred to suggest that it was an unfortunate reversion of the African to his latent barbarity”. Brockway was not alone in this and, for Makonnen, this “showed up the inherent dualism of the liberal element; one moment they would be praising you for suffering peacefully, putting up with so much oppression and nobly bearing it, and the next they’d be shocked if the worm turned”. Instead, he found the stance taken by the likes of Ethel Mannin preferable: “‘To hell with these settlers. Let the blood flow. Give them more!’ One needed this kind of hard core, the uncompromising element”.36

Brockway’s position became clear in his book African Journeys, published in 1955. Here, he once again stated that “many of the practices of Mau Mau represent a reversion to a primitive barbaric mentality” and that “this has shocked, perhaps most deeply, those of us who have cooperated in the political advance of Kenyan Africans”. However, is this hypocrisy, he asked, when we contemplate the horrors perpetrated by the “civilised and cultured”? He was “very conscious of the infamies which we, civilised and cultured commit” and refers to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as one such horror, which “killed 1,000 infants for each one killed at Lari”.37 He added:

More immediately relevant, the government has been executing 50 Africans a month, and less than a third of them have been guilty of killing anyone. Yet there is a difference. It may seem pompous and perhaps hypocritical to say it, but the education and ethic inherited from Greece, Rome and the Christian religion do contain the hope for us of an ultimate civilised society.38

Brockway knew that people were hanged for administering what he described as “oath-taking ceremonies with their filthy obscenities”. What was more primitive, one wonders: administering the rebel oath or hanging someone for administering it? One can only marvel at the almost obscene hypocrisy of this statement. Some eight years later, in 1963, Brockway published another book, African Socialism. Here he made clear that it was wrong to “regard the effects of British and other colonialisms [in Africa] as entirely regressive” and one always had to appreciate “the material contribution which the European colonisers have made”. He went on to insist that “when we balance the rights and wrongs of colonialism, the contribution of its progressive influences—material, human, intellectual and spiritual—must be placed on the credit side.” Moreover, the British imperialists had always “set themselves the goal of colonial self-government, beginning by indirect rule through the chiefs, progressing from nominated to elected African members of the legislatures, and finally to independence”. Indeed, compared to other European countries, the British approach “was undoubtedly the most enlightened”.39 Brockway embraced the liberal establishment defence of British imperialism, either minimising or ignoring the long history of exploitation and repression in the colonies.

Throughout the 1950s, the Labour opposition completely failed to hold the Conservative governments of Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan to account for the horrors of the repression in Kenya in order to defend the settlers. Even those on the Labour Left, such as Brockway, who did protest, never really got to grips with the enormity of what was being inflicted on the rebels and on the Kenyan people, and, as we have seen, even hoped to somehow maintain the position of the white settlers, while they were condemning the freedom fighters. Of course, the revolutionary movement did reach out to Brockway, sending him a copy of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army Charter that had been drawn up by Dedan Kimathi towards the end of 1953. It ended with an appeal to the British people:

Do you not remember what your grandfathers did during the reign of King Richard II, when sixty thousand slaves…demanded their freedom? These people tore down prison walls and the houses of the rich men they hated, and killed many who were their enemies…cut off their heads, put them on poles and set them up on London Bridge.

This was an appeal to the great peasants’ revolt of 1381.40 Brockway never engaged with them. One last point is worth making here: without the courage and sacrifice of the rebels enrolled in the Land and Freedom Army, the white settlers would have remained in control in Kenya, and the country would not have secured its formal independence in 1963. Although they might have been defeated militarily, they had shown the British government that settler rule in Kenya was not viable, that a revival of armed resistance was inevitable with the next insurgency almost certain to receive support from outside the country—support that would include modern weapons.

Brockway in the Lords

Brockway lost his parliamentary seat in the 1964 general election and was promptly installed in the House of Lords as Baron Brockway. Once again, this was something that he would have been opposed to in the years before his return to the Labour Party. This change of mind was in the best traditions of British Labourism, where membership of the House of Lords has long served as a happy substitute for the achievement of working-class emancipation. He continued campaigning against racism and for colonial independence, and a good case can be made that his stance was radicalised by the 1970s.

In her account of anticolonial resistance and British dissent, Insurgent Empire, Priyamvada Gopal argues that Brockway’s “engagement…with crisis of the Emergency imposed on Kenya in 1952 and the related colonial atrocities visited upon Africans…formed the seedbed for a more radical anticolonial politics”. She cites the founding of the Movement for Colonial Freedom in 1954 as demonstrating this.41 Both his activities in Kenya and the evidence of his published books and pamphlets starkly contradict this assertion. Certainly, there was a later radicalisation, a belated recognition that the white settlers in Africa could not be conciliated, persuaded to compromise with moderate nationalists and to dismantle white supremacy voluntarily. These insights, however, derived from the South Rhodesian Settler Unilateral Declaration of Independence in November 1965 rather than from his Kenyan involvement. It was this that began his re-radicalisation. He also recognised that Apartheid South Africa had to be challenged by revolutionary force. The white settlers would not compromise with moderate nationalists unless they were compelled to. On his own testimony, he eventually felt obliged to resign from the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, telling “its annual meeting that I would support an insurgence by the Africans to win their right to self-government in Rhodesia… I would support a revolution in South Africa”.42 This, of course, should have been his stance in the 1950s.

John Newsinger is the author of several books, including The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (Bookmarks, 2013) and Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism (Bookmarks, 2020).

Notes