For every case of injustice highlighted by the appeal court,
the settlers could point to another Mau Mau atrocity that enraged
European sensibilities.
Just
two months after the appeal court judgement in the Bruxnor-Randall
case, the settlers had an answer to the bleating from the Bench when the
most disturbing Mau Mau European murder of all took place, an event
that reinforced white opinion that Mau Mau 'was lost in the haunted
wilderness of superstition'. The murder was carried out under the
direction of the infamous General Tanganyika.
Like
many other fighters who had by then been in the forests for nearly two
years, Tanganyika had taken to consulting Kikuyu female prophets for
guidance on the conduct of the campaign. One such prophet, known by the
name Mama Mwangi, instructed that a European should be sacrificed in the
manner of a Kikuyu leader who had died in British custody before the
end of the nineteenth century.
That leader, named Waiyaki, was popularly believed to have been
buried alive by the British. Tanganyika selected a target and deputed a
party under the command of General Kaleba to carry out this ritual act.
The victim they chose was Gray Leakey, himself a Kikuyu-speaker and the
cousin of Louis Leakey, who had acted as a translator in the trial of
Jomo Kenyatta and who was, by 1954, a very active member of the
government's counter-insurgency committees. Kaleba and his small party
of fighters broke into the Leakey farm in North Nyeri on the night of 13
October 1954. Mrs.
Mary Leakey was strangled,
the family's Catholic Kikuyu cook hanged and disembowelled, and Gray
Leakey taken captive. He was led into the forests of Mount Kenya, and
high up on the mountain he was buried alive and upside down in the deep
red soil.
Two years earlier,
Gray Leakey's daughter Agnes had been with David Waruhiu in Switzerland
when he heard of the death of his father, Chief Waruhiu. In one of the
many cruel ironies of this dirty war, David Waruhiu was now the person
given responsibility in the Office of Information for contacting Agnes,
then in North America, to tell her of the deaths of her parents. The
body might never have been found had not the young son of Leakey's cook
followed Kaleba's party onto the mountain, where he witnessed the
strange death of Gray Leakey. A few days after the abduction and murder
the boy led police back to the grave. Gray Leakey was exhumed from his
bleak and murderous resting place and reburied beside his wife Mary in
the Anglican cemetery at Nyeri, just a few paces from the graves of the
Baden Powells, other European residents of Nyeri who had met a more
tranquil end.
The horror of this act stiffend settler resolve in the
face of their critics; and they were soon to be provided with damning
evidence of the dangers of adopting a gentler approach to Mau Mau, as
advocated by some in the judiciary. Troops swarmed over the slopes of
Mount Kenya on the Nyeri side following the Leakey murders, and on 24
October a patrol of the King's African Rifles trapped a small party of
Mau Mau fighters in a cave. Four Mau Mau eventually surrendered, three
men and one woman. The leader among them declared himself as General
Kaleba. In the cave the soldiers found a large quantity of books and
papers, and several items of property from the Leakey house. As was now
usual in the aftermath of any European murder, General Kaleba was
brought speedily to trial, the case coming before Justice de Lestang on
22 November 1954.
There was insufficient
evidence to charge Kaleba with murder, but he had been caught in
possession of a Webly revolver and several rounds of ammunition,
offences that anyway carried a capital charge. The settlers were keen to
see him hang, whatever the charge. But the courtroom proceedings would
reveal another unexpected drama to the utter astonishment of the settler
public. Kaleba told the court that he had in fact previously
surrendered to the government in March 1954.
He
was then sent back into the forest to try to assist in the negotiations
of a general surrender of Mau Mau fighters. How could it be that the
man who had so chillingly and pointlessly murdered Gray Leakey could
have been considered a suitable ambassador to broker a peace settlement
with other Mau Mau generals? If settlers needed any further evidence
either of the government's folly or of Mau Mau's irredeemable
wickedness, then this was surely it..
Histories of the Hanged
David Anderson, 2005
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