Why British colonialists opted to try Kapenguaria six

Kapenguria Six Prisoners. [File, Standard]

The trial of the infamous Kapenguria six was one of the most spectacular events in pre-independent Kenya. The trial of Jomo Kenyatta, Achieng' Oneko, Paul Ngei, Fred Kubai, Kungu Karumba and Bildad Kaggia had the potential to cast a negative light on the British government. Therefore, all loopholes had to be sealed to give the trial as little publicity as possible.

Among the measures the British colonisers took was to move the trial from Nairobi, where media scrutiny would have been unbearable. But the authorities' greatest fear was the Mau Mau, a group that had caused untold suffering to British soldiers and settlers both within the city and in much of central Kenya.

On October 3, 1952, Mrs. A. M. Wright had become Mau Mau's first white murder victim in Thika.

About a week later, the Mau Mau shot and killed Senior Chief Waruhiu, a loyalist, while on his way home from Nairobi.

Waruhiu's murder happened just 10 days after Sir Evelyn Baring arrived in Kenya to take up his role as colonial governor.

Both Baring and Kenyatta attended Waruhiu's funeral but as Caroline Elkins wrote in the book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, the two men, who stood next to each other never exchanged a word but kept "posturing and sizing up the other side".

Days later, Baring declared a State of Emergency and arrested the six.

Baring was convinced that nothing would have prevented the Mau Mau from taking an oath and disrupting the court proceedings were these to be held in the city. Thus, the decision was reached to hold the trial in Kapenguria, then a 'closed' district and where visitors, including Kenyatta's legal team, would require special permission to attend. It would also be almost impossible for Kenyatta's witnesses to make it to the far-flung district for the trial that began on December 3, 1952.

The windswept and bleak landscape was so remote that only a local classroom could do for a courthouse. The location, according to Elkins, meant that "journalists sent to cover the trial never managed to get as far as Kapenguria, and received their reports at second hand", and usually reported from Kitale, 30 kilometres south of Kapenguria.

The British appointed Ransley Thacker, a legal mind who had served as Attorney-General in Fiji before his appointment as High Court judge in Kenya in 1938, to hear the case. All he needed were "special payments" to cover his back. After convicting Kenyatta and his co-accused, Thacker "hustled out of the courthouse into an awaiting armoured car and took the next flight back to London - twenty thousand pounds richer".