Mau Mau Manhunt

The hunt for Dedan Kimathi during the Mau Mau Emergency of the 1950s in Kenya is a prime example of the Continuity & Persistence of one of the key elements of Frontier Partisan operations: the strategic manhunt.

Over and over again throughout Frontier Partisan history, small teams composed of elite scout-soldiers — have gone after individuals whose capture or death might mark a turning point in an insurgency. Think the cross-border dragnet for Geronimo; the Punitive Expedition to catch Pancho Villa after his Columbus, New Mexico, raid; the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo during the U.S.-Philippines War; Frederick Russell Burnham’s assassination of the M’limo (or a M’Limo) during the 1896 Matabele Uprising in Rhodesia . In the modern context, there’s the dark campaign to eliminate Pablo Escobar; the hunt for Mohammed Farah Aideed in Mogadishu, Somalia — which led to the disastrous “Black Hawk Down” episode — and the hunts for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Dedan Kimathi was a teacher who became the most significant leader of the mostly Kikuyu rebels of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, who rose during the post-World War II anti-colonial tide that swept Africa. The guerrillas, regarded as terrorists by the British, took to the forested Aberdare Mountains as a base of operations, with Kimathi claiming the rank of Field Marshal. They were pursued by Kenya police official named Ian Henderson.

The Mau Mau insurgency was savage and terrifying. The rebels initially had few guns, so their attacks were often characterized by home invasions or farm ambushes that left families hacked to pieces with pangas. Grotesque “oathing” ceremonies bound insurgents to their cause an each other — and Kikuyu who rejected Mau Mau were slaughtered in numbers far exceeding the casualties among white settlers. Many joined Home guard units.

The British colonial officials freaked out and engaged in mass internments, which was a tactical error as well as an injustice. It is now well-established that the British also engaged in torture of detainees. That all served to keep Mau Mau viable despite the movement’s own excesses and military limitations. By the mid-’50s, the threat had been contained — though ultimately at the price of Britain’s legitimacy — and the Emergency had become an effort to run down a dangerous gang and a charismatic leader.

The ace historian of African insurgencies Peter Baxter wrote:

“The operation to capture or kill Kimathi was undertaken on the understanding that only by his removal from the active theater could the matter of the Rebellion be finally laid to rest. Mau Mau no longer presented any particular threat to outside society, and in any case been superseded by the mainstream political process which was heading slowly but surely in the direction of majority rule, as it was throughout most of Africa, but so long as Kimathi remained at large the rebellion was active… Dedan Kimathi was the high priest of Mau Mau. He was not the only gang leader operating in the forests of the central highlands, and nor was he consistently the most powerful, but he was the only one sufficiently imbued with the cultural and esoteric mystique necessary to project his image – like that of Che Guevara in the context of Cuba – as the defining iconography of the revolution.”

That right there defines the purpose of the strategic manhunt: Elimination of a symbol, a spark of rebellion.

 

Henderson succeeded in capturing Kimathi.

Baxter:

“In October 1956 the drama ended with an isolated and surrounded Kimathi forced by hunger to leave the embrace of the forest and venture into the open country of the Kikuyu Reserve. There his luck finally deserted him and he was wounded by a Home Guard patrol and later arrested by elements of Henderson’s force. His subsequent trial in Nyeri and his execution were both events of intense international media interest, which in no small way helped to project a rather unpleasant and dangerous cult leader to the status of revolutionary and martyr to the cause of black liberation.”

Kimathi’s death did, in fact, mark the effective end of Mau Mau, but Kenya went on to achieve independence in 1963. The regime of Jomo Kenyatta disdained Kimathi, but in recent decades he has come to be regarded by many as a freedom fighter, and his image has become an icon of anti-colonial sentiment, fulfilling the projection Baxter describes. The success of his strategic manhunt also elevated Ian Henderson, one of the Empire’s truly hard men. Henderson would go on to head the Bahraini secret police, earning the dread name of “Butcher of Bahrain” for his expertise in the torture of suspected rebels, terrorists and the like. He denied all allegations of torture.

“It also served to enhance the reputation of another rather unpleasant character in the person of Henderson, who perhaps thanks to the shift of imperial fortune received more of his just deserts than did Kimathi. Neither man had much to recommend him, however, other than furnishing a fascinating tale that has been well written by Henderson  in his book Hunt For Dedan Kimathi, or Manhunt in Africa  as it was later published. This is a book well worth reading for its own merits as an adventure narrative, but also as a window into the real facts of the Mau Mau now that so much myth and fantasy has been applied to the event by practical history.”

Ran across a remarkable doco on the Hunt for Kimathi:

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Here’s a nerdy deep dive into the classic cartridge of the Empire, British .303.

“We caught them, and we shot them under Rule .303.”

— Breaker Morant