The Manx Freemasons are to many a mysterious bunch. For years they were referred to irreverently by Manx people as ‘the Mau Mau’!
There was always a perception they were up to no good and that they used their position to infiltrate the higher echelons of government and the establishment.
The Freemasons reputedly hold weird rituals which involve dressing up, doing strange things and taking secret blood-curdling oaths etc. You can see why some local wag christened them ‘the Mau Mau’, a name that stuck.
It kindled my interest in the real Mau Mau and I started my research with a book, ‘Mau Mau from Within’ by Karari Njama, which I bought in the late 1960s. It turned out Njama was not a really dangerous bloodthirsty terrorist like the ones portrayed in Pathe cinema newsreels of the 1950s. He was a village school teacher who got tired of English settlers treating him like a dog in his own country.
The real thing (not the Manx Freemasons) was actually titled the ‘Land and Freedom Army’ (LFA) and they fought to liberate their country from the British.
By the turn of the 20th century my literary and video record of the period had expanded prolifically and two of the most seminal works I currently have are Caroline Elkins’ ‘Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya’ and David Anderson’s ‘Histories of the Hanged – Britain’s dirty war in Kenya and the end of Empire’.
Elkins turned received historical academic wisdom on its head, calculating that the security forces slaughtered 130,000-plus Kenyan civilians including children not the ‘mere’ 50,000 that had been a previous estimate. Anderson records that over 1,000 (mainly Kikuyu) were hanged. In fact the Brits had a travelling gallows.
Some of the acts of barbarity committed by the British in Kenya were replicated in Malaya, Aden and other colonies. Some of these service people who died during this period apparently are remembered on memorials at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. It is said to be ‘home to the striking Armed Forces Memorial which commemorates those who have been killed on duty or as a result of terrorism from the end of the Second World War to the present day.’
Read Elkins’ and Anderson’s books and you may contemplate who the real terrorists were!
I had thought that my distaste for the British Empire had been satisfied by reading about their escapades in Ireland circa 1919-21 until I read about the way they had treated people in Kenya.
Does it matter after all these years? Well, I think it does! You should always learn from history and the Manx through their engagement with the UK and their military share responsibility for their bloody and barbarous past.
Back in Mann, our own secret society, the Masons, were forced out of their closet years ago. Although they always had been supporters of charitable initiatives, they started to further soften their image with open days at their hitherto grey and mysterious HQ on Woodbourne Road. They wanted to prove that they were not sinister, they were not trying to infiltrate society and to a certain extent they have achieved their aim.
Paradoxically, the body whose name they acquired as a pejorative, the ‘Mau Mau’, also were eventually rehabilitated. Their last, executed, leader, Dedan Kimathi, has a statue in central Nairobi and a university and streets are named after him.
Recently some veterans of the Land and Freedom Army had their day in the British High Court when they sued the UK government for the crimes committed against them. Compensation is being negotiated.
Dedan Kimathi was the last general of the Land and Freedom Army to be caught by the British. In a photograph taken at the time, although injured, even in captivity he looks defiant. The British sentenced him to death while he was still in a hospital bed and hanged him within weeks of his capture.
Dedan Kamahi loved his country. You know perhaps our version of ‘the Mau Mau’ love theirs!