Satan’s Paradise

Elliot Ross

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS - 24 July 2015

Barack Obama’s plane will land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport this evening. He will be welcomed on the runway by Jomo Kenyatta’s son, Uhuru, Kenya’s fourth president. Both men were born in 1961, three years after the Embakasi Airport was opened (it was renamed in 1978). The website of the Kenya Airports Authority has a page about the airport’s history. It says that it was ‘constructed in the mid-1950s’ before going into considerably more detail about its World Bank-financed refit in the 1970s. It doesn’t mention that the airport was built with the forced labour of thousands of men during the Mau Mau uprising that began in the early 1950s.
In Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), Caroline Elkins points out that Britain’s decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy based on mass detention dovetailed with the governor Evelyn Baring’s desire to ‘modernise’ the country through large-scale infrastructure projects as a way of deepening and prolonging British rule:

Colonial officials at [Embakasi] were under enormous pressure to complete the airport, a massive project that had a limitless need for labour, before the end of the Emergency. Camp commandants… seemed to consider it their duty to work the convicts to death. Production pressures combined with the pervasive exterminationist attitude toward Mau Mau to create a uniquely perverse environment.

Elkins says that many detainees referred to Embakasi as ‘Satan’s Paradise’. In his memoir, Mau Mau Detainee (1963), Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, the socialist politician assassinated in 1975, wrote:

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