contentions, colonial justice was a powerful mechanism establishing new societal
boundaries, discipline, and order to support primarily metropolitan economic and
“civilizing” goals 4 According to Robert Seidman, there were two mandates of
British imperialism, “to benefit England’s economy and to uplift the savage
races.”5
Therefore, the strict colonial policing of the nearly 8.6 million Africans was
designed primarily to control their actions and protect the white settler population
of 53,OOO.6 Under British rule, Kenya was heavily policed. From the period of
1950 through 1962, over 99% of the jails were filled with Africans.7 In the domain
of the colonial courts, the assessors and ultimately the Judge decided on
innocence and guilt; they became the gatekeepers of colonial justice.
Africans that challenged European rule and superiority were labeled, as
we saw during Mau Mau, as criminals, terrorists, and uncivilized. Therefore, for
the British and the rest of the world who followed the perceived horrifying
developments of Mau Mau, the atrocities, barbarism, and savagery of the
movement required extreme and immediate colonial control. A colonial solution
was to establish laws to regain colonial control over the behavior of the Africans.
The criminalization of oathing became a major policing campaign against the
growing Mau Mau movement because it threatened the colonial paradise and
4 See Robert Seidman, “Law and Economic Development in Independent, English-Speaking, Sub-Saharan
Africa,” in Africa and Law, ed. Thomas Hutchison, 3-74 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1968), 15. For example, a mandate OfBritish law was to eradicate slavery and practices of human
sacrifices.
5 Seidman, Law and Economic Development, 15.
6 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 345. The population facts in 1963 (after Independence) were that
there were 53,000 white settlers and 180,000 Asian settlers compared to 8,600,000 indigenous Africans
7 Statistics based on Kenya National Archives, Syracuse Collection, Annual Reports, Machakos, 1950-
1962, Film 2801, Roll 7 & 8.
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