Manyani Detention Camp

Manyani was an enormous site, nearly three miles long by half a mile wide. At the time, this was the largest detention camp outside the Iron Curtain. It was, like most of the camps in the Pipeline, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers and patrolled by armed guards with police dogs. After Operation Anvil, detainees were being moved in batches of a thousand twice a week from the screening camps. J.M Kariuki who was transported from Langata, asserts that they were given no food at any point in the 2-day journey. All their possessions that were not packed into a box were confiscated upon arrival and the detainees became recipients of harsh beatings throughout the process of registration.

The camp was divided into three large cell blocks further divived into numbered Compounds that held detainees according to their perceived threat level. The detainees classified as Black could work their way to grey status through confession, and hard labour. Greys could achieve white status similarly and be transferred to detention centers nearer the reserves from whence they would be eventually released.

The detainees kept a tight order of things and elected Compound leaders who would correspond with the warders and allocate duties6. They were entitled a ration of maize meal (posho), vegetables, cooking fat and meat which was divided among to the compounds. Despite this many detainees were half starved and suffered from malnutrition diseases like Pellagra. They were given a pair of yellow shorts and two thin blankets to sustain their stay there. The sanitation was abysmal and this resulted in a typhoid outbreak that killed 115 people according to official reports.

The harsh European and African warders and officials made life intolerable for the detainees. There were hardly any Kikuyu warders7. They were of mixed ethnicities with many warders being brought in from Tanganyika and Uganda. The detainees attempted to keep a good rapport with the warders and some of them were sympathetic to their cause. J.M Kariuki who was detained twice at Manyani used such warders to post his letters of complaint to the Colonial Government in London or other high-ranking legislators and African welfare groups. As the process of rehabilitation continued in the various holding camps, detainees would be screened and rescreened assessing whether their sympathies had changed. If they had seemingly become less ‘contaminated’, they were moved to work camps closer to their home district wherein they could work their way down the Pipeline. The District Commissioners were not against the idea of having work camps within the districts as this meant that they had control over if and when a detainee could return home. The Treasury and the Ministry of Defence however, had stark differences in their opinions on the Camps. The former was being driven to impoverishment as they had already spared £1 million for Pipeline expansion, and nearly all of it had been exhausted within months. The Ministry of Defence still insisted it needed more Work Camps and to ensure this took place, they resorted to brutal inhuman measures.

From 1954, many labour gangs were moved into empty reserved areas from Manyani and Mackinnon Road where they were expected to build the Work Camps from the ground up. In all these cases, this was a tormenting time for the detainees. In the Mageta Island Camp for instance, the shackled detainees spent days building perimeter trenches and watchtowers, uncoiling barbed wire, and digging isolation pits before their shackles were removed and they were allowed to walk freely within the confines of the new facility. The construction of Embu, Aguthi, Karatina, Thiba, South Yatta and Hola was done in this manner.

In Manyani, J.M Kariuki participated in the construction of the airstrip which in itself, was backbreaking work. They were overseen by the usual African warders and sadistic European officers. Worse still, the Embakasi Airport (which later became the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport) was constructed from scratch by detainee labourers. They were being held in Embakasi Prison8 where conditions were horrible. The construction work on the airport was so rigorous and draining that some detainees would deliberately slash the tips of their fingers to avoid being sent to the runways.