During the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960, the British colonial government confined an estimated 150,000 Kenyans in a sprawling network of “emergency” detention camps.
None of those held in the camps had been found guilty in a court of law. Instead, they were detained on suspicion of supporting the uprising.
British control over Kenya was effectively declared in 1895. A distinctive feature of colonial rule was the decision to encourage white settlement. These settlers were granted vast tracts of Kenya’s most fertile land and pushed policy in an increasingly harsh and unequal direction.
By the early 1950s, many African Kenyans were facing severe land shortages in the countryside and desperate living conditions in urban areas.
In 1952, this situation erupted into the Mau Mau uprising, a broadly anti-colonial rebellion.
The British government responded with overwhelming force. It declared a state of emergency and suppressed the uprising militarily.
Revelations about the extreme violence employed in some emergency detention camps made the continuation of British rule untenable. Particularly key was the Hola massacre of 1959. Guards beat 11 detainees to death and the colonial government attempted to cover up the crime.
Outrage at these events shattered Britain’s grip on the colony, and Kenya achieved independence in 1963 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta.
A great deal is known about these detention camps. They were sites of neglect and brutal violence. Detainees were forced to go through a so-called rehabilitation system designed to make them renounce their support for Mau Mau.
In practice, they were subjected to brutal compulsory labour, were at risk of assault and lived in unhygienic conditions. Some of those who refused to cooperate ultimately faced systematic, state-sanctioned torture.
I am a historian researching punishment in Kenya, and I have been investigating the deeper history of detention camps. My research shows that this emergency detention system was shaped by an earlier network of “ordinary” detention camps. These were established in 1926 and processed more than 400,000 people before the uprising.
These camps, intended as a milder alternative to prison, evolved into a poorly regulated system characterised by exploitation, overcrowding and weak accountability.
These findings challenge the idea that the detention system of the 1950s was exceptional. Instead, it was rooted in long-standing colonial practices, shaped by economic incentives, administrative gaps and coercive labour systems.
Understanding this deeper history matters because it changes how we view the Mau Mau emergency. It proves that the brutal 1950s detention system didn’t just emerge from nowhere – it was built on a foundation of state violence and disorder that had been normalised for decades.
The roots
Influenced by a draconian-minded European settler minority, the Kenyan colonial government adopted a harsh approach to punishing the local population. Judges frequently imprisoned Africans for “technical” offences lacking criminal intent. These included failing to pay tax and minor violations of coercive labour laws.
By the 1920s, Kenya’s prisons were overcrowded and “technical” offenders inevitably mixed with hardened criminals.
In response, the colonial government introduced detention in 1926 as a supposedly milder alternative for technical offenders who had simply broken administrative rules. In theory, prisons were to be reserved for those who had committed crimes involving moral violation. In practice, however, these distinctions didn’t (or couldn’t) hold.
To visibly separate detention from imprisonment, the colonial government gave day-to-day control of detention camps to district commissioners (the powerful heads of local governments), not the prison department.
However, this separation was incomplete. Detainees were legally classified as prisoners (though they were not informed of this). The prison department retained ultimate authority over the camps.
This overlapping authority produced a gap in accountability, which ultimately proved disastrous.
In 1930, seeking to divert more people from formal prisons, government officials removed almost all sentencing restrictions on detention. Subsequently, the only limitations were that sentences had to be under six months and that those with more than one prior prison conviction were ineligible.
Numbers surged immediately, with more convicted offenders sent to detention than formal prisons almost every year until 1952.
Judges increasingly used detention for serious offences, including manslaughter. A limited criminal records system meant that individuals with prior convictions – sometimes as many as 16 – ended up in detention.
Conversely, the amendment did not stop harsh magistrates from continuing to send significant numbers of minor offenders to prisons.
This blurring of populations, combined with a lack of structural and legal separation, meant detention camps mutated into a parallel prison system, serving a different colonial master, district commissioners, but lacking fundamental distinction.
Detention camp living conditions were atrocious. Most district commissioners delegated almost all duties to Kenyan African “overseers”. Overseers were under-trained. Yet they were expected to be on duty constantly and often had to guard more than 60 detainees, making meaningful supervision impossible.
Camps were generally collections of temporary wattle-and-daub huts. Over time, these decayed but were not replaced, resulting in squalid conditions.
Furthermore, overcrowding was endemic. Food rations were poor and basic facilities were often absent. Sickness rates were significant. Detainees responded by escaping at a rate of more than one a day.
Failed reform
In 1937, a high-level committee condemned the system as dangerous and inefficient. Calls for reform from London also grew.
But nothing changed.
Why?
The primary reason was economic. Detainees were a vital reservoir of free labour for cash-strapped district commissioners. When camps were introduced, local governments’ labour budgets were cut. This made detainee labour crucial for maintaining government stations.
In the late 1930s, penal officials sought to reintroduce stricter eligibility criteria for detention. However, they abandoned this idea as it would add to overcrowding in the prison system.
Trapped by bureaucratic gridlock, underfunding and economic dependency, Kenya’s detention system limped into the 1952 emergency – unreformed.
Ultimately, “ordinary” detention camps persisted until the 1980s, far outliving their emergency counterparts.
The consequences
This history exposes stark continuities between the pre-emergency and Mau Mau penal systems. Furthermore, as they were under the control of district officials and lacked standard prison regulations, existing detention camps could, and did, easily become dumping grounds for Mau Mau suspects in the early months of the emergency. Ordinary detention was both a model and enabling mechanism for emergency detention.
Ian Caistor-Parker receives funding from the UK Economic & Social Research Council
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
