John Nottingham: Briton who sought justice for Mau Mau fighters

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 24 2018

John Nottingham, a former Colonial District Officer in Kenya, poses for photographers outside the High Court in central London on April 7, 2011, where he went to seek justice for Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising by the British army. PHOTO | CARL COURT | AFP 

In Summary

• Nottingham had arrived in Kenya in 1953, aged 24, and was immediately posted to the theatre of chaos: Nyeri District. 
• In independent Kenya, Mr Nottingham always felt sorry for the atrocities that happened and there was little he could do

By JOHN KAMAU
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When the story of the search for justice for Mau Mau freedom fighters is finally written, former colonial district officer John Cato Nottingham — who was buried on Friday — will always feature.

No other Briton has dedicated his life, albeit silently, to searching for justice for Mau Mau than Mr Nottingham — the man whose evidence in British courts led to partial compensation of 5,228 victims. 

In 2013, the Mau Mau victims received payments totalling £19.9m (Sh2.8bn) following a controversial out-of-court settlement.

Mr Nottingham was a star witness in the case. Thousands of other victims said they were left out.

Mr Nottingham had witnessed the castration of men, death in camps and inhuman treatment while working as a DO in the notorious Mwea Camp where prisoners went through what historians now call the “Mwea Technique”.

Also known as “dilution technique” in some official papers, the Mwea Technique, as one victim told Caroline Elkins (author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya) “meant that you were beaten until you agreed to confess everything about the oath and what you had done after taking the oath. Even after confessing, you would not be released!”

BRUTALITY
The Mwea Technique had been devised by a young officer named Terence Gavaghan, who had been appointed to oversee “rehabilitation” of “hardcore” detainees in the six Mwea Camps. 

He came up with what he also called “Operation Progress” — a well-executed programme of brutality.

Mr Nottingham never liked what he saw after he transferred from Nandi to Mwea.

He would later admit such orders came from above and the systematic torture was sanctioned.

The first time I met Mr Nottingham was in mid-2000s — and the discussion then centred on a story on the Scott-born Colonel Ian Henderson, the man who had been deported from Kenya in mid-1964 by Jaramogi Oginga Odinga when he (Jaramogi) was a powerful minister for Home Affairs.

That was before the ministry was stripped of its various roles and left with prisons and other mundane matters — done to spite Jaramogi.

IAN HENDERSON
I had stumbled on some archival papers on Mr Henderson — christened Butcher of Bahrain by British papers in 2000 for torturing hundreds of people — and that is why Mr Nottingham wanted to see me. 

Mr Nottingham welcomed me to his Kimathi Street office from where he run Transafrica Publishers, credited with publishing Philip Ochieng and Joseph Karimi’s The Kenyatta Succession.

Everyone knew Mr Henderson, who was by then a senior police officer and one of the assurances to the British expatriate community that they would be safe under Jomo Kenyatta.

So when Richard Catling, the Police Commissioner, heard that there were plans to deport Col Henderson, who is credited for leading the capture of Mau Mau leaders Dedan Kimathi and Waruhiu Itote (aka General China), he issued some threats: “If Henderson goes, I go too”.

Mr Odinga, who later became the doyen of opposition politics, had been asked by Jomo Kenyatta to deport Henderson, who was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Special Branch.

There was a reason for this, and Mr Odinga says as much in his autobiography, Not Yet Uhuru.

“The government was being made uncomfortable by the pressure put on it by Africans who could not understand at all how we could tolerate Henderson’s continued presence in Kenya.”

“What Odinga didn’t know was that this was a trap,” Mr Nottingham told me.

Indeed it was, although Kenyatta, then prime minister, did not know how to handle the situation for fear of stirring trouble with Britain.

DEPORTATION
Mr Odinga, always courageous, was the only one who could do it and, as he says: 

“I agreed to take responsibility. When the opportunity came, I deported Henderson at the same time as we took deportation action against two Europeans who were making a practice of anti-African talk in hotels and other public places.”

As soon as he made the decision, a campaign of slander was started against Mr Odinga, who said that he fell “victim of manipulation from forces within our country whose tactics... managed with astonishing accuracy, to coincide in intention and effect.

"The strategy seemed to be to make my position so embarrassing to the Prime Minister...”

“The Henderson deportation brought the wrath of the British expatriate circles on my head, as though I had acted independently of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet,” Mr Odinga recalled.

TORTURE
Nottingham was collecting as much evidence as he could to help Mau Mau victims. 

While the UK government had for many years argued that all liabilities for torture by colonial authorities was transferred to the Kenyan Republic upon independence in 1963, and that London could not be held liable for what took place, the emergence of Mr Nottingham to help Mau Mau pursue their case changed the matrix.

In 2011, the High Court in London ruled that the victims had “arguable cases in law” — an issue that forced Foreign Secretary William Hague to open compensation discussions and issue an apology to Mau Mau victims.

It is now said that it is on the strength of the statements by Mr Nottingham, and the discovery of 17,000 pages of Mau Mau papers hidden by the British government in Hanslope Park, that the Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons:

“I would like to make it clear now, and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty’s government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya...

"The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration (and) sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.”

DISSENTERS
Nottingham had arrived in Kenya in 1953, aged 24, and was immediately posted to the theatre of chaos: Nyeri District. 

“Just a few days after I arrived, the veranda door was flung open and an old African man was literally kicked along the floor of my office by one Francis Erskine, who I later learnt was an officer of the Kenya Regiment. 

"I was completely astounded by the way I now saw Erskine treat this old man. It was as if normal British standards simply did not apply because we were far from Britain... that was my introduction to my new job in Kenya,” he wrote in a witness statement filed at the British High Court in 2010.

It was in Mwea that he witnessed the full horror of British atrocities.

“Any detainee that started the Mau Mau moan, a sign of defiance, would be knocked down, a foot placed on his throat and mud would be stuffed into his mouth. If the detainee continued to resist he would be beaten unconscious,” Mr Nottingham recalled.

“So effective was this technique that Governor Baring wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, Allan Lennox-Boyd, asking him to officially authorise it.

"After a slight hesitation, Lennox-Boyd wrote back to Governor Baring authorising its use,” he recalled, citing papers that were hidden in London.

MURDER
By the time Mr Nottingham arrived in Mwea and Othaya, torture of Mau Mau was an established norm, as well as burning women and children in houses.

“The patrols would break down the outside door, hurl a grenade inside and wait for the building to disappear.

"No attempt was made to forewarn the families living there, many of whom were burnt to death... I was absolutely appalled by what I experienced (and) began to seriously question exactly what all this military activity and punitive action was achieving...”

While in Mwea, he had protested to Terrence Gavaghan, who was responsible for rehabilitation, that the violent methods he was using on detainees were illegal.

Troubled, he went to see John Cowan, the Senior Superintendent of Prisons in charge of Mwea.

“I still recall the sight of Cowan rubbing his hands together and saying: ‘I don’t know what is worrying you. It is just like a good rugger scrum.’ Cowan appeared to have no problem with the practice,” he recalled.

PUBLISHER
Later on, it was Mr Nottingham, in the book The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya (co-authored with Carl Rosberg), who would discredit the British discourse on Mau Mau and place the freedom movement as a heroic struggle by Africans to liberate themselves and not as criminal gangs as depicted in British literature. 

It was a perfect revisionist account that questioned the British depiction of Mau Mau.

In independent Kenya, Mr Nottingham always felt sorry for the atrocities that happened and there was little he could do:

“I was armed and shooting at the very people I had come to help. This is not why I had entered the Colonial Service.”

When he was at the East African Publishing House, he helped Gen China write his two books on Mau Mau and also published Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino. 

He would later start his Transafrica Books and help many other writers.

Nottingham spent his last years at Cherry Tree Farm in Redhill, Kiambu, where he was buried.