By Patrick Mathangani

For a long time, Nyeri’s Kangubiri Girls Secondary School was a source of pride for residents, who boasted of its good results in national examinations.

However, some may not know that at the height of the Emergency period in the 1950s, it was one of the forced labour camps where untold atrocities were committed against Mau Mau detainees.

Recently-released colonial-era files reveal the atrocities committed at the Aguthi Works Camp, as it was called then.

Two Mau Mau ‘terrorists’ (handicuffed) arrested in Operation Anvil are being guarded at the Langata Holding Camp in Nairobi in 1954. Photo: File/Standard

One case cited in secret memos between officials offer fresh insights on how detainees underwent gross human rights abuse as punishment for being members of the liberation movement.

Athi River

The incident, in which one detainee died, occurred on September 5, 1958, when 30 inmates were brought in.

Detainees from Nyeri area would be transported there from as far as Manyani and Athi River camps, where they would labour for naught before being released into the community.

Five detainees, among one identified as Kabugi declined to confess was punished to death.

An assistant DO identified as Samuel Githu took them to a football pitch for punishment.

"He filled their shirts with earth and made them carry buckets of earth, weighing some 50lbs on their heads to a dump 100 yards away, Samuel running beside them urging them to confess," reads a memo sent to the Secretary of State Alan Lennox-Boyd, by an unidentified colonial official.

"After a few such trips, Kabugi collapsed. Samuel then kicked him as he lay on the ground."

He later died at the local dispensary.

However, the doctor who conducted a post-mortem examination ruled that the body bore four superficial injuries, "consistent with blows with a stick, which could not have caused more than local discomfort to a healthy person."

Unexplained injuries

The cause of death, he ruled, was a clot in the right lung, which he ruled was not connected to the injuries.

New documents released in the United Kingdom confirm that torture and other abuses of detainees were authorized at the highest levels in the 1950s, during a counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya