The Feature
A small gathering of family members stood around an open grave in the English countryside, my father’s mother lying in a casket beside us. It was a summer’s day in the village of Oaksey, near the Cotswolds, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a biblical atmosphere as the skies opened and, with a flash of light, the rain came flooding down. Before the priest gave a eulogy, I read a letter my grandfather had written to my grandmother just before he died.
The letter paints a picture of a gentle, caring husband, who tells his young wife “everything about you is heaven and you are utter perfection,” before wishing her goodnight. As my grandmother’s body was lowered into the grave, it felt like a part of my family’s history was also being buried.
Gorging on canapes a few hours later, I was caught off guard when a relative asked me if I knew that my grandfather was a hero. During the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s, she told me, he had been part of a unit that had infiltrated enemy gangs, apparently sometimes in blackface to camouflage his white skin during military operations. At first, it sounded ridiculous; my grandfather’s memory was largely absent from my childhood. I had heard he was mysterious and that a large part of his life was spent in Kenya. There is a photograph of him and my grandmother, Carolyn, on their wedding day in July 1960. He is tall and broad, with dark eyes and bright teeth glistening behind a wide smile. Half a year after that photo was taken, he would be dead from cancer, just months before my dad was born.
A few years after my grandmother’s funeral in June 2020, I began trawling through archives and libraries, scouring the internet and speaking to relatives to learn more about who my grandfather was. I read about the British colonial government’s response to the uprising of thousands of Kenyans, primarily from the Kikuyu tribe, in the 1950s — the torture, the rapes, the mass detentions. I had studied the British Empire at university but had never really connected my ancestors to this history. Was there a kernel of truth in what my relative had told me? If so, why had it been forgotten?
What really happened during British colonization is often hidden below a sea of misremembering and nostalgia. For my family, part of that historical amnesia is rooted in a personal tragedy: my grandfather’s sudden death.
At first, investigating my grandfather felt strange, like I was betraying someone close to me, even though I knew nothing about him. And then, as I uncovered more of his story and learned how it mirrored some of the brutal colonial history that I learned about from books, a reckoning felt inevitable. When I began writing this story, I felt a huge amount of shame about what I was uncovering, about who my grandfather was. Investigating him felt like an opportunity to draw a line between us, to take control of the story.
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The first thing I learned was his correct name: John Evelyn Grahame Vetch, though everyone called him Tony. His birth record shows he was born in 1923 in London. In the late 1920s and early ’30s, while Tony was still a boy, his family began moving to Kenya. The colonial government enticed settlers to move to the country by offering large parcels of land to farm, forcing existing populations, especially the Kikuyu, off their land and into less fertile areas. It was an opportunity for social mobility for young British men. My great-grandparents set up a coffee farm in the Nyeri district, around 60 miles north of Nairobi.
In the 1940s, Tony served in World War II and then returned to help on the family farm. After the war, thousands of Black Kenyans who had fought for the British became frustrated that their efforts were rewarded not with newfound freedoms but increasingly hostile colonial policies. Growing discontent among the Kikuyu led, in the early 1950s, to the forming of the Mau Mau, a political organization that sought to drive British colonial rule and white settlers from Kenya. The political movement became violent and began causing acts of sabotage, killing people who stood in the way of its fight for land and freedom.
I remember learning snippets of my ancestors’ adventures on the African continent from other relatives. I felt like I came from a long line of explorers, imagining my forefathers striding into unknown lands. At school, I researched the British missionary explorer David Livingstone and found a family tree linking him to my mother at the front of a book on her mother Betsy’s dusty old shelf. At the end of the 19th century, my great-great-great-uncle, Ewart Grogan, walked from Cape Town to Cairo to prove himself to the stepfather of the woman he wanted to marry. Betsy’s father was a cartographer who helped map out the oil fields of Iraq. As a child, my great-grandfather traveled by oxcart through rural Kenya soon after World War I.
The small snippets of the history of the British Empire we were fed as children by older generations in the classroom or the home painted a picture of subtle nostalgia. Most importantly, the British Empire was never as bad as its Belgian or French counterparts, we were told by our elders.
When I was 5 years old, my mother gave me a necklace with an image of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel. I soon chewed the necklace into a crumpled piece of metal, but my yearning for adventure stayed intact. When I was 8, I went to Kenya for the first time and fell in love with the country — its air sweet like mangoes, the earth an orangey-red, like papaya. Every creature and critter was otherworldly and majestic. We met relatives at old country clubs and in remote conservancies.
There is a scene in the 1987 film “White Mischief,” which explores the sex- and drug-fueled lives of settlers living in Kenya in the 1940s, encapsulating the disturbing reality of those times. An actress playing Countess Alice de Janze opens her window to look across a majestic Kenyan savanna and exclaims, in a British colonial drawl: “Oh God. Not another beautiful fucking day.” During Britain’s brutal colonization of Kenya, it was often treated as a simple plaything, a beautiful jewel to be frivolously enjoyed. One of the main characters in “White Mischief” was my grandmother’s godfather, Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, whose real-life murder is central to the plot. This was the Kenya my grandparents grew up in.
It was not until I went to university that I was properly taught about the British Empire, planting the seeds of reckoning. My connection to Kenya started to make me uncomfortable, as if my intergenerational nostalgia was a denial of someone else’s trauma.
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In the mid-20th century, influential segments of British society began questioning the ethicality of imperial expansion. India gained independence in 1947, while guerrilla movements in Malaya and Palestine had shone a light on the frailty of the empire.
In October 1952, while Queen Elizabeth II was only a few months into her reign, the colonial government in Kenya announced a state of emergency and began to fight the Mau Mau uprising, in what would become one of the empire’s bloodiest conflicts.
Two months later, on a farm in Nyeri county, Neville Cooper and his second-in-command, Tony Vetch, were setting up a unit of white settlers and Black Kenyans loyal to the British to fight Mau Mau gangs hiding in the forest. It was early in the conflict and Britain was trying to find ways to fight the Mau Mau on their own turf, on terrain that favored local knowledge. They turned to white Kenyans like my grandfather, who spoke Kikuyu and had an understanding of how to operate in the bush.
Patrols could last for up to 14 days, with units winding their way through the high-altitude bamboo woods and moorlands of the Aberdare Forest and Mount Kenya. Braving the bitter cold at night and the heat during the day, chasing the Mau Mau, or “Mickey Mice,” as regiment soldiers called them, was grueling even for young recruits. Members of the unit have recalled not being allowed to wash, clean their teeth or speak while on operations. At first, Tony’s unit, I Force, included fewer than 20 white settlers, aided by Black African trackers and fighters.
In late September, I spent time in the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi’s central business district. An imposing structure with tall columns and two large stone lions guarding its entrance, the building was opened in 1931 by the colonial governor. Now, cracks stretch across its roof like lightning bolts and water drips from the high ceilings. A few years ago, the basement flooded, destroying archived copies of old newspapers.
I spent a couple of days in the dark basement, hunched over large red books containing hundreds of copies of the East African Standard, a colonialist newspaper, from the 1950s.
In early 1953, my grandfather’s unit appeared frequently in the paper, often cited as a highly effective weapon in Britain’s arsenal. The newspaper refers to one particularly grueling operation on Feb. 3, 1953, when Cooper had been tracking a Mau Mau gang in the Aberdares for days and spotted the enemy moving in the distance and began trailing them. When an aircraft supporting I Force flew overhead, the Mau Mau dropped to the ground. As the plane began circling overhead like a vulture, the gang broke into a run, hiding in a small wooded area. The I Force team ran to the wooded area, creating a cordon around it.
Trapping the gang inside, Cooper’s unit waited for backup while shots were fired at them, hitting one of the team’s water bottles. A unit of reinforcements marched 16 miles in eight hours, making their way through fallen bamboo and thick vegetation, to bolster I Force’s numbers.
With two planes circling above, I Force began killing and capturing the gang inside, as the Mau Mau ran at them with pangas (long bush knives) and shot at the wheel of one of the planes. In total, seven Kikuyu were killed, while 15 were captured, according to the newspaper. The East African Standard hailed the feat as ranking “as one of the finest of sheer persistency and courage since the Emergency began.”
I Force was incorporated into the Kenyan Regiment as I Company in March 1953. In 1954, after Cooper tore some cartilage, my grandfather replaced him as commander. Cooper described his successor as the unit’s indispensable “administrative” brains. “13 Terrorists Die in Ambush by Patrols in Kabete” read one headline in the East African Standard on Oct. 14, 1954. The operation was one the “biggest single successes” in months and a considerable setback for the Mau Mau, the newspaper reported.
The article referred to an operation that took place under Francis Erskine two days earlier, but it omitted something crucial about what happened: White settlers on the operation were wearing disguises intended to make them look like Mau Mau fighters. These disguises included blackface.
A year and some months earlier, Erskine, who was serving under my grandfather, had requested permission to start using Kikuyu who were loyal to the British on operations, disguised as Mau Mau. He developed the technique, drawing in other settlers, and eventually the whole Kenya Regiment was using a version of it.
Referred to as “pseudo-gangs,” it involved luring Mau Mau gangs into meeting in the forest with a fake gang made up of Europeans, loyal Kikuyu and Mau Mau who had been captured and, at times, turned through interrogations that included torture. To blend in with African gang members, the Europeans would darken their exposed skin, using products such as cocoa powder mixed with soot and boot polish. Some went further, with wigs made of black wool; the former Kenya Regiment commander Guy Campbell wrote that some pseudo-gang soldiers used iodine to change the color of the whites of their eyes. At altitudes of up to 13,000 feet, it was cold in the forest and operations took place at night, making their disguises hard to see. It was successful: The regiment used the technique to capture and kill Mau Mau gangs.
While in Kenya, I met Dennis Leete, who fought under Erskine as a young recruit during the uprising. Now in his 90s, Leete recalled how, during one pseudo-gang operation, he pulled out his penis to urinate, causing frustration among his unit because enemy troops could have noticed his genitalia were white.
I met Leete at a golf club a few hours north of Nairobi. As white people mingled next to a manicured lawn, Leete referred to our surroundings as “a little European ghetto,” still totally separate from Black Kenyans. He has lived and worked all over East Africa, first selling agricultural products for the energy giant Shell before getting involved in gold mining in Sudan.
I hoped he could answer a question: How much did my grandfather know about what happened to the Mau Mau who were not killed but were captured by his unit? In Britain’s vast network of camps, prisons and villages used to imprison mainly Kikuyu people, guards and officers loyal to the British conducted brutal acts of violence when interrogating people to induce them to confess to being Mau Mau members.
“I can’t answer your question really, because I carry my scars with me,” Leete told me. He acknowledged that he was aware of the detention camps but, when I asked if he was aware of what took place in them, he replied, “Not to the level that has been exposed. And we’re not sure what that level was because the people now claiming reparations also probably exaggerate what happened.” His answer is shared by others in the old white settler community that remains.
The historian Caroline Elkins has argued that the ubiquity of screenings at the time meant that the local settler community, even those who were not involved with operations, must have been aware of the brutality being committed in their name. My grandfather was a senior military figure working in the most intense fighting areas.
Acts of cruelty conducted by the British and their allies were widespread and are not difficult to learn of nowadays. In the National Archives, a sprawling building in London’s green suburb of Kew, I came across a picture of a Kenyan man, Njuguna Kabutha, with whip marks like lion claws stretching across his back. In another file, there was an account of a man who claimed to have been hung upside down by settlers and had air blown into his anus, a snake tied around his neck and his testicles crushed. Newspaper clippings from late 1954 describe the court martial trial of Leslie Arthur Hughes, a private in the Kenya Regiment, who was accused of assaulting a female detainee called Wambui. In his trial, his commanding officer, my grandfather, gave evidence in support of Hughes, describing him as a skilled interrogator and accusing Wambui of being part of a wider Mau Mau plot to spread disinformation about the Kenya Regiment.
Hughes was accused of lacerating Wambui’s ears by tying her earrings to the side walls and slapping her around. He was also accused of sexually assaulting her with a beer bottle, putting her in a cesspit and then threatening to bury her alive.
“I was astounded when I heard these charges were leveled against [Hughes],” my grandfather said. “I don’t believe any of the allegations are true.”
The court martial board, consisting of five British officers, found Hughes not guilty on all counts. The judge said that the Mau Mau conducted disgusting and obscene oathing ceremonies that perverted their minds. One of the prosecutors acknowledged that there was evidence that the Mau Mau had plans to discredit the Kenya Regiment, but that this did not mean they were behind Hughes’ case. He pointed out that Wambui would not have gone through having her ears lacerated, a “dreadful” mutilation, just to help a Mau Mau conspiracy.
In a letter in July 1954, Tony, then commander of I Company, warned other company commanders of a coordinated effort by the Mau Mau to accuse his company of maltreating prisoners and members of the African population. The historian David Anderson told me that evidence does exist of such a campaign, but that does not mean every accusation was false.
Back in Kenya, on a small plot of land that sits on a slope leading down to a valley filled with banana trees and other luscious green plants, I visited the home of Julius Ndegwa Migwi, whose father Migwi Ndegwa was killed by camp guards loyal to the British. Nyeri is just a few miles away.
“They were buried in a mass grave,” he told me as we sipped on milky tea and nibbled boiled sweet potatoes, explaining how his mothers — his father was polygamous — were not even told that Ndegwa had died. A photograph of his father in a well-cut suit sat high on the wall above us.
At the start of the emergency, Migwi’s father was working selling charcoal in Nairobi. Suspected of being a Mau Mau sympathizer, he was taken to a screening camp. Men in hoods identified him as a Mau Mau and from there he was moved around, at one point forced to do hard labor leveling the ground for what is now Nairobi’s main airport. When he and several others refused to work on digging rice terraces, they were taken to a place called Hola Camp in southeastern Kenya.
While the father toiled in the camps, the women and children in Migwi’s family were taken to villages surrounded by barbed wire and spikes designed to keep the Mau Mau out and sympathizers in. The women were given a short time every day to collect food, firewood and water outside the village before a whistle called them back.
In 1959, the year after Migwi was born, his father and 10 other detainees were clubbed to death by guards at Hola Camp. The massacre was so brutal that it led Enoch Powell, a staunchly right-wing member of the British Parliament, to say, “We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.”
Later in our conversation, Migwi and I clambered down a steep track leading to a waterfall. He pointed to a cave slightly hidden by the falling water. I took off my shoes and crossed the river to look inside. Mau Mau fighters would spend months on end hiding in this dark, wet hole. The walls were less than a yard wide and 10 yards long, but the Mau Mau would cook, eat and sleep here.
My grandfather’s company was operating in this environment too. Sometimes, patrols could last days, with troops sleeping in the forest under a tarpaulin or poncho. But the Mau Mau lived in the forests. And while Mau Mau fighters were armed with rickety homemade guns and pangas, Kenya Regiment soldiers had machine guns and warplanes, complete with bombs.
The Mau Mau used these weapons to commit some horrific acts of violence and killed around 2,000 Kenyans who refused to cooperate or actively supported the British, according to Anderson, the historian. Early in the emergency, a 6-year-old settler and his parents were hacked to death by their servants.
He was one of 32 European settlers killed in Mau Mau attacks. At least 11,000 Mau Mau were killed by the British. The sophistication and brutality of Britain’s operations far outweighed those of their adversaries.
After the cave, Migwi and I got back in the car and drove a few miles to another town. Just beyond it, we joined a rugged red dirt track winding upward. I tried not to wince as my rental vehicle bounced over crater-sized potholes and crawled up near-vertical hills.
We stopped at the edge of the Aberdare Forest, where much of the fighting occurred. Here, my grandfather played a game of cat and mouse with the Mau Mau. Today, locals wind their way through green tea fields, the tall willowy trees of the forest perched above them.
We walked to a statue of Dedan Kimathi, the most prominent Mau Mau leader, who was shot and arrested on the same spot in October 1956. By eliminating the head of the movement, Kimathi’s capture and subsequent hanging all but ended the conflict.
For many Kikuyu, Kimathi remains a symbol of Mau Mau heroism. Migwi grinned as he told me that his father knew him. He was sure the government was planning to tarmac the road and that a hotel was soon to be built on the site to encourage people to visit the statue. We got back in our car to begin a precarious descent back down to the town.
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In 1963, Kenya gained independence from the British. The Mau Mau had played a pivotal role in pushing for change. After independence, a ban on the organization was maintained by the new president, Jomo Kenyatta. He instituted a “forgive and forget” policy, encouraging Kenyans to move on and not to seek retribution against the loyalists who had supported the British and the settlers.
Families like Migwi’s, whose property had been stolen by loyalists during the uprising, were unable to retrieve it as the ownership papers had long been lost. Migwi’s father had had three wives and 14 children. The family was left with one 2-acre plot and little information about Ndegwa’s murder.
As an adult, Migwi went to the National Archives in Nairobi and found documents from an inquiry into the killings. A pathologist’s report described how his father had suffered from a fractured kneecap and forearms while being beaten to death.
In 2013, the British government settled out of court a case brought by a Mau Mau veterans’ group to pay $30 million in costs and compensation to over 5,000 elderly Kenyans who had been tortured during the uprising. In building the case, lawyers worked with historians who had uncovered dozens of files that had been secretly flown out of Nairobi at the end of British colonial rule and hidden in secret locations for half a century, first on the outskirts of London and then in Milton Keynes, about 50 miles away.
It was a watershed moment. The government had acknowledged the Mau Mau’s suffering and went on to release files documenting some of those abuses into the public archives. But Kenyans were left unsatisfied, as only people who could demonstrate they were in British detention when they were abused received compensation. Many felt that the compensation was far lower than it should have been. It also rankled people that the lawyers were paid handsomely.
Migwi and his family received nothing. Every descendant in Kenya that I spoke to had the same issue. “The British government cannot delete history,” Migwi told me. “The family of Migwi Ndegwa will be passing this issue from generation to generation until they hear our voice.”
Today, the Mau Mau play an important role in how Kenyans perceive their fight for independence. As part of the settlement, the British paid for a memorial in the center of the city. But in the national museum in Nairobi, the uprising occupies three small walls containing equipment used by the fighters and some old photographs. “I think definitely, collectively, Kenya could do a much better job at memorialization and also recognition,” Chao Tayiana Maina, a Kenyan historian, told me.
When she was a child in Kenya’s schools, she was taught nothing about the detention camps or the torture, despite the fact some schools in the country sit on the sites of old camps. As if mirroring Britain’s own relationship with history, in Kenya, shame and pain have helped to bury the memory of colonization, leaving the descendants of the Mau Mau at times isolated, shouting into the wind.
But things are shifting. When you look at social media and have conversations with Kenyans about it, there is much more of a reckoning than before, according to Maina. Younger generations, slightly removed from the past, are more able to address it. Now, she wants the British to do the same with their shared history.
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When I dragged my dad to Tony’s grave on the outskirts of London a few years ago, we found an uneven mound with weeds strewing out of it. I had the sense that we were the first visitors in decades. It had taken me several attempts to encourage my father to go. I thought I was doing him a favor. Now I realize perhaps I was doing it for my own curiosity.
Tony never saw the end of the colonial government he fought so hard to protect. In 1960, he traveled to London, knowing he was going to die of cancer. He died on Christmas Eve, while my grandmother was pregnant with my father. She soon went into a spiral. Widowed young, she went on to have two more marriages and would lose a child. For my father and his two sisters, the children of separate fathers, it was a turbulent upbringing.
My dad would grow up never really thinking about his father. He would later mourn the loss of a father, but not his biological one, and not due to death. When he was 18 years old, his stepfather Paddy, who had raised him, sent a letter disowning him. Paddy’s new wife had encouraged him to push my dad and his sister out of their lives as she sought to start her own family. My dad would learn to build up walls around himself and those close to him. For my dad, his survival mechanism was to look to the future, to his children.
“At a certain point there’s a kind of moment when you go, ‘Fuck it, I am on my own, there’s no point in looking backwards and I don’t really care about anything else,’” my dad told me on a recent walk near where I grew up in the English countryside. I thought of Julius, who would grow up doing the opposite, spending his whole life searching for pieces of his father wherever he could.
How fragile can history be? So much of our understanding of it is passed down through the home, through stories that parents tell their children. The irony is that it was the absence of my grandfather from my own childhood that led me to dig up this history.
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On my way out of Nyeri, I decided to stop at my family’s old farm. The location was listed on a 1950s colonial government map that included the locations of settler farms by marking them with the owner’s last name. “Vetch” was tucked away on the right-hand side of one of these maps. Where my family’s house likely once stood is now a school. Children excitedly shouted “mzungu,” meaning white person, when I walked past.
Beyond the school lay coffee fields stretching for acres, eventually sloping down into a red-earth valley. It was so quiet you could hear the wind brushing through the trees. I could see why my ancestors upended their lives to move here; the offer of large parcels of bountiful land from the colonial government must have been alluring. This part of Kenya, like the rest of the country, is also serenely beautiful.
The true colonial Kenya was so often brutal and my grandfather played a role in that. And yet there is a part of me that yearns to be part of Kenya, that finds an unrivaled sense of tranquility in its landscape.
Leaving my family’s old colonial farm, I passed a sign written in bold white letters, as if the present were speaking to the past: “Private Property. Not For Sale. No Trespassing.”