Asians and the Mau Mau

By Cyprian Fernandes

I think the Sunaks/Mau Mau story is a load of crap: Consider this: Comment from John Lonsdale. Emeritus Professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Trinity College, perhaps the greatest student of Kenyan political history: “Thanks Cyprian, and good to hear from you.  I had not thought to ask about subversive Sunaks: seems rather unlikely to judge from the present generation!  Which of course is no way to do history.  I think an older, pre-East African Sunak generation was not far removed from the Amritsar massacre.  All good wishes, John.

I found the following piece but I have no idea who wrote it or how it was sourced. I can confirm that in my earlier research that there were two groups of Asians who were part of the Kenya Police Reserves but their role was short-lived.

Pio Gama Pinto was the only Asian I know who worked very closely with the Mau Mau, especially the Nairobi chapter. He raised money and collected ammunition for the Mau Mau. He was also a tactical strategist. There is no record of him ever taking any of the oaths but that does not mean he did not do it. In fact, I know he revelled in his role with the Mau Mau. Just before he was assassinated he had planned to help the freedom movement in Southern Africa as well as the Portuguese states in Western Africa. He had planned to move his operations to Mtwapa in Tanzania.

On 24th April 1954, a campaign by the British colonial government to purge Nairobi of Mau Mau fighters in Nairobi began. The campaign was known as Operation Anvil.

 One of the first places to be raided was the Indian High Commission in Nairobi. Accusing the embassy of assisting Mau Mau and for providing “terrorists” with material support, British military officers roughed up staff members and bundled African staff working at the High Commission Commission into trucks outside.

 Of course, the Indian Government sent out a strongly worded protest letter to London, complaining about “diplomatic impunity” on the part of the British administration in Nairobi.

 In his defence, sent to the War Office in London, Kenya’s Governor, Evelyn Baring (pictured, inspecting a guard of honour), explained that the action was justified as it was “backed by intelligence”.

 And although the British government thereafter sent a meek apology, stating that “unfortunate words” were used during the operation, three further raids to the High Commission were authorized between June and November of 1954.

 

In the run up to the raid, it had become clear to the British that the support that Asians in Kenya were rendering the independence struggle was significant. Asians may not have entered the forests to actively fight alongside Mau Mau, but stories abound of cases in which members of their community provided material and moral support to the freedom struggle.

 

I start off with a tale of two Jaswant Singhs: One was a Punjabi Sikh born in Lakhpur, Punjab, in 1935. He was the son of an engineer who had come to Kenya in 1914 to work on the railway. In 1947, Jaswant returned to India for his education but did not stay for long. He returned to Kenya in 1947 to serve in the Kenya Police Reserves as part of the mandatory Asian call-up. (I read somewhere there were two teams of Asians in the Kenya Police Reserve but they were not written in despatches).

 

During the emergency, he became sympathetic to the Mau Mau cause. For a period of at least five months, he not only manufactured arms and ammunition but also secretly taught freedom fighters in his area on how to use and service guns.

In May of 1954, Jaswant was arrested for his involvement in Mau Mau and detained, alongside other “most wanted” Indian prisoners, for a total of four and a half years at Takwa, in faraway Lamu.

 

Then there was another Jaswant Singh who suffered a worse fate. Based in Molo, and typical of Kalasingas’ engineering mien, he was a carpenter, mason, plumber, electrician, tractor driver, builder, radio and motor mechanic, lorry driver, welder and gun maker all rolled into one.

 

 Singh was arrested in September of 1954 for being in possession of two rounds of .32 ammunition that he intended to supply Mau Mau. Prior to his arrest, a Gîkûyû woman had offered to take him to a forest near Molo to meet with Mau Mau fighters. The Mau Mau fighters turned out to be the Kikuyu Home Guard, who arrested and handed him over to the colonial authorities. The Kalasinga was later sentenced to death.

 

Thakorbai Mangaldas Patel, a professional photographer, was another Asian who was incarcerated for his contribution to the freedom struggle. For weeks, he helped members of the Agîkûyû community forge their history-of-employment cards during the emergency.

 

When he was caught, aged only 25, he was put on a charge of “consorting with terrorist(s)”. He was however acquitted of that charge and instead jailed for five years with hard labour on the charge of document forgery.

22/ In 1948, Dedan Kimathi was employed briefly at Keith Sawmills in Kiganjo, Nyeri. Its owner was Kundanlal Watson, who purchased two additional sawmills in Meru. At the height of the emergency, freedom fighters would send him appeals for food through his cook, who had taken “muuma” (oath). So, Kundanlal would occasionally leave some food for the fighters at a cave near one of his sawmills. He also discreetly supplied piping for use in making guns.

 

Acting on a tip off, and having no concrete evidence with which to convict Kundanlal, the colonial police shut down one of his Meru sawmills. When interviewed in the 1980s, Kundanlal said he became sympathetic to the freedom struggle when he saw truckloads of Mau Mau, some of whom were dead and others alive, emerging from the forests. The Mau Mau freedom struggle also reminded him of the agitation that had led...

26/ ...to India gaining independence, he added.

27/ Yet another Asian who owned a sawmill near Karatina was Qassam Dar. He had left Lahore (Pakistan) in 1947 to join his cousin in Kenya, and later immersed himself in the timber business. In October of 1952, which is the very month the colonial government declared a state of  emergency in Kenya, a freedom fighter called Mukunga reportedly called on his premises to administer muuma to sawmill employees. Dar agreed to take the oath, pledging his loyalty to Mau Mau. The oathing ritual required him to take a bite of meat and also drink blood. And as he revealed later in 2006, whilst he took a bite of the meat, he politely declined to drink blood, explaining to Mukunga that his religion (Islam) barred him from doing so.

 

From then on, freedom fighters would secretly collect food, clothing, medicine and newspapers, from a spot near his house at night. But one day, a faction of Mau Mau fighters confronted him and threatened to kill him “as his skin is different”.

 

It took the intervention of his oathed workers and Warûhiu Itote (General China) to save him. The Mau Mau fighters were told that Dar was “one of us”. They spared him but took his gun. As he was a licensed gun owner, Dar was forced to report the “theft”. The police authorities did not quite believe him and put him under surveillance. They weren’t quite convinced that the Mau Mau fighters spared him without inflicting any physical harm.

 

Weeks later, an Italian mechanic who lived near Dar’s house reported him to the police. The Italian had stumbled on the hideout within the sawmiller’s residence from which Mau Mau fighters collected supplies at night. Dar was out in his sawmill when the police came over to investigate the hideout.

 

So when he returned home that night, his gîkûyû maid sent him out to town in the pretext that food supplies had ran out. Some Mau Mau fighters had told her that they’d return in the night to kill the mechanic. She feared the attack would happen while her boss was at home.

 

It wasn’t long before Dar was arrested, however. He gave himself away when he climbed a tree at his house and whistled to fighters in the forest to come over and collect supplies. Armed European police officers lurking nearby immediately placed him under arrest.

 

Besides banning him from ever setting foot in GEMA country, police threatened to deport him either to Manyani, where his sawmill workers were sent, or to Pakistan, his native country.

 

He pleaded with them to send him to Kakamega, where he ran another sawmill. To this request, the police agreed but made it mandatory for him to be reporting to the nearest police station on a weekly basis (sounds familiar?). This Dar did until the end of the emergency.

 

In those days (of emergency), members of the Agîkûyû community were not allowed to shuttle between the farm regions and towns. That is partly why they had the kipande; to not only help identify them but also restrict their movements.

 

Karatina trader, Hassanali Manji, who was also fluent in the gîkûyû language, would deliver salaries of town workers to their families in the rural areas. He also secretly supplied food to forest fighters.

 

 Then there is another interesting story among others cited in the book, “Indians In Kenya: The Politics Of Diaspora, by Sana Aiyar. It is the story of an Asian lady, Malvi Keharchand Kent, who would refuse police on patrol and search duties to enter her house on the plea that it was prayer time. As her farm workers hid under the bed, she would sit on it, holding her prayer beads in mock prayer.

 

As the freedom struggle in Kenya raged, authorities in London commissioned a special probe on the Mau Mau. The probe was led by F.D. Corfield, a former Governor of Khartoum. (Courtesy of  HistoryKE)