From a British colonial torture camp to a Kenyan high school

By Andrew Wasike

NAIROBI, Kenya (AA) – Students at Mweru High School in Kenya's central province Nyeri are playing football with complete freedom, knowing that this freedom was given to them by their ancestors, who were detained and tortured on the same campus during their fight against the British imperial reign.

It appears to be a conventional public secondary school with the mission of educating young children to become future successful members of their communities. However, a section of the torture cells has been well preserved on the campus to highlight how British colonial detention camps operated.

A large sign can be seen on the walls of one of the structures outside the school, which these students view in order to remember the Kikuyu tribe freedom fighters who resisted the British imperial power that ruled the East African country from 1895 to 1963.

The sign reads: "Mau-Mau torture room, they hated the injustice, they took the oath and went to the forest, they were detained, harassed and tortured, they died in here for our freedom."

This school was one of 50 detention and torture cells used by British colonialists to punish villagers accused of "serious crimes" or members of the Mau Mau nationalist movement from the Kikuyu tribe.

The nationalist movement that was mainly comprised of members of the Kikuyu tribe, the country's largest ethnic group, wanted the white settlers to leave their land, primarily in central Kenya.

The British colonialists responded by forcibly removing African farmers from their fertile lands in central Kenya's highlands and those who resisted were beaten, imprisoned and tortured.

- Oath

Locals swore an oath to defend their lands and communities, which were being killed by British colonialists with different pretexts.

According to Kenyan history, the Mau Mau fighters were united by a secret Kikuyu oath in 1952 and began targeting British colonialists in order to fight back.

Evelyn Baring, the colony's governor from 1952 to 1959, issued a state of emergency and ordered that all suspicious people be detained and sent to the torture camps.

Many surviving Mau Mau fighters remember the atrocities committed against Kenyans by British colonialists.

According to history passed down by those who grew up in colonial times to their children, they were forced to work in the farms next to the snow-capped Mount Kenya in very cold weather.

"My father, who died in 2021, would tell us how they used their bare hands to harvest pyrethrum when they were working on the white settler farms as children, they were mistreated and beaten like animals," Regina Wambugu, the daughter of celebrated hero Wambugu Wa Nyingi, one of the last remaining tribespeople from the colonial era, said.

- Detention camps

Nyingi grew up in such an environment, but the worst treatment he ever had from British colonialists came in 1952 when he was arrested on suspicion of taking the Mau Mau oath and incarcerated in a detention camp.

He told his children about the horrors inflicted on the detainees, and he never forgot about it until his death.

"He was sentenced to eight years in prison. The prisoners' legs were always ringed by rusted chains, which were never removed until death, or the legs never healed," Regina explained.

While in chains, the inmates would be required to work in quarries, carry the stones on their backs to designated sites, and utilize them to construct houses for white settlers and other prison facilities.

"They were subjected to starvation, diseases, and torture, and they lived in horrible conditions," Regina said, adding that "the torture camps are still there today, and you can see them for yourself."

Nyingi's last detention was at Mweru School, where he spent three months in solitary confinement.

More than 70,000 people were held in the camps, according to Kenyan history books, until the guerilla war ended in 1959, three years after Dedan Kimathi, one of its leaders, was captured and executed.

Kenya obtained independence from the British colonial power in 1963, and historians still believe that the Mau Mau's resistance hastened the end of colonial rule in Kenya.

As the world observes Black History Month in February, residents of Nyeri who lost loved ones at the hands of colonialists will never forget the history of Mweru School torture chambers. Thousands of Kenyans died during the colonialist rule across the country.