KENYA: The Hola Scandal

In Kenya’s sweltering sun one morning last March, husky African warders herded 85 ragged prisoners out of the inner compound at Hola camp, 220 miles east of Nairobi, and into an adjacent field. The prisoners were the last hard-core remnants of Mau Mau terrorism. Each had taken the bloody oaths to kill, each had killed; many were sullen and confused men warped by their savagery. For all of them it was to be another day of digging on an irrigation ditch. Suddenly, as if by prearrangement, dozens of the prisoners fell to the ground, refusing to work. The African guards moved in without hesitation, swinging thick clubs against skulls, spines and limbs. Some of the prisoners made for the fence but were clubbed away; others built “Mau Mau pyramids,” falling atop one another in heaps to avoid the harsh blows. When the guards were done, eleven prisoners lay dying and another 23 needed hospital treatment.

A Lack of Truth. From the start, investigation of the brutal slaughter at Hola seemed strangely halfhearted, often clouded by deceit and outright lies. Day after the incident, an official Nairobi communique said the prisoners had died “after drinking water from a water cart.” When Coroner W. H. Goudie began his own inquiry, he got little assistance from witnesses who testified, including, in his opinion, Hola’s white Camp Commandant Michael Sullivan, whose veracity he frankly doubted. The coroner’s verdict was itself curiously negative: “It is impossible to determine beyond reasonable doubt which injuries on the deceased were caused by justifiable and which by unjustifiable blows,” or “which particular person struck the blows.”

The Cowan Plan. But slowly word of the Hola atrocity has been spreading, and stirring consciences in London. After all, Kenya is a crown colony for which the British are responsible, not an independent state like the Union of South Africa, whose racial practices are beyond Britain’s authority. British Labor M.P.s smelled a first-rate colonial scandal. They dug up and hurled at the Macmillan government the fact that Kenya’s official “Cowan Plan,” named after a colonial prison administrator, decreed that recalcitrant prisoners “be manhandled to the site and forced to carry out the task.”

Obviously embarrassed, the Tories stalled off Labor demands for a judicial inquiry, protesting that the question of prosecution was still being examined by Kenya authorities. Finally Julian Amery, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, stood up in the House to announce: “The Attorney General of Kenya has decided that on the evidence available no charge can be framed against identified individuals in respect of identified illegal force used in the incident.” Angrily, Labor M.P. Barbara Castle jumped to her feet to demand, “Has there been any identity parade of warders? If not, why not?” The British press, with honorable exceptions, has shown little fire about the affair, moving Paul Johnson to write heatedly in the left-wing New Statesman comparing Hola to concentration camps and British people’s apathy to that of Germans under Hitler—only worse, for Germany had the excuse of press censorship to claim ignorance of what was going on. The London Times declared that “it is lawful to use such force as is necessary to prevent escape, but not to compel unwilling men to work,” and concluded that the government-sanctioned Cowan Plan “led directly to the fatal result.”

In Kenya, where officials hoped the whole thing would blow over soon, compensation (between $300 and $600) was promised to families of the victims and the government announced that a commission from Britain would study Kenya’s prison-camp system. Last week authorities let Kenya newspapermen fly into the remote Hola camp for a firsthand look. But they were not allowed to see the one-acre inner enclosure where the toughest of the prisoners remain. Reason: scores of the inmates are now on a hunger strike.