“The Dregs of the Mau Mau Barrel”: Permanent Exile and the Remaking of Late Colonial Kenya, 1954–61

Abstract

Abstract This article seeks to illustrate the emergence and significance of permanent exile in the latter years of British rule in Kenya. Drawing on concepts of the “state of exception” in the imperial context, the analysis places Kenyan policy into a longer history of penal practice. Exile as a mode of punishment was a permanent fixture in the repertoire of the British Empire as a method of controlling rebellious subjects. In Kenya, it was a tool to ostracize “troublemakers” from their home community, stabilizing the body politic in fractious moments. However, during the State of Emergency declared against the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement, the legal and spatial production of spaces of exception, settlements in the far-flung corners of the colony, reached its apotheosis. Drawing on long histories of colonial banishment, and specific legal precedents shrouded in liberal language, administrators hoped to make Kenya safe for a loyalist ascendancy by excising the “irreconcilables.” Critically, permanent exile was deemed necessary for a section of the population “infected” with Mau Mau ideology. In large exile settlements, rebellious subjects were expected to be remade into pacified workers. Colonial correspondence, as well as the petitions of the displaced, reveal the production of exile during these years as well as its misdiagnosis of the various imaginations of the exiled. “Settlers,” at exile camps like Hola, retained an autonomous vision of “land and freedom,” refusing their forced migration, and eventually precipitating the collapse of the scheme.