THE KENYA CLASP AFRICA GENERAL SERVICE MEDAL AWARDED TO DISTRICT COMMISSIONER PATRICK M. DEMPSTER, KENYA COLONIAL SERVICE (LATE KENYA POLICE), WHO SAW SERVICE WITH THE MERU AFRICAN GUARD DURING THE MAU MAU EMERGENCY.

THE KENYA CLASP AFRICA GENERAL SERVICE MEDAL AWARDED TO DISTRICT COMMISSIONER PATRICK M. DEMPSTER, KENYA COLONIAL SERVICE (LATE KENYA POLICE), WHO SAW SERVICE WITH THE MERU AFRICAN GUARD DURING THE MAU MAU EMERGENCY. Africa General Service Medal 1902-1956, 1 clasp, Kenya (officially impressed: P.M. DEMPSTER). Attractively toned, Extremely Fine, and a rare award to a colonial administrator who saw service with the Meru African Guard during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Medal accompanied by recipients Royal Lifesaving Society Proficiency Medal, bronze (reverse officially engraved: P.M. Dempster April 1951) and Royal Lifesaving Society Proficiency Cross, bronze (reverse officially engraved: P. M. Dempster May 1951), along with Dempsters ribbon breast bar for his Africa General Service Medal.

Patrick M. Dempster’s papers, a detailed series of handing over reports, are in the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, South Parks Road, Oxford (reference GB 0162 MSS.Afr.S.2299).

Patrick Dempster transferred from the Kenya Police to the Kenya Colonial Service in 1954, subsequently serving as District Officer at a variety of Divisions in Kenya 1954-60, including Kilgoris until 1955, Egoji until 1956, Nithi until 1957, Meru until 1958, and Embu until 1960. He was subsequently District Commissioner, Marsabit, Northern Province, until 1962.

Dempster’s papers in the Bodleian Library contain a detailed account of his activities as a District Officer and later as a District Commissioner within the districts that he was then operating in during the period 1954-1962, with extensive notes regarding tribes and tribal affairs, agriculture and trade, liquor licencing, politics, policing, and counter-terrorism operations against the Mau Mau 1952-56, etc. The papers begin with a manuscript note with regard to his first posting “I was the first District Officer to be stationed in Kilgoris and went down there in 1954 to administer the Division. I had no house or office and had to build both.” (Kilgoris is 110 miles west of Narok, itself the headquarters of the District Commissioner for the District that Kilgoris Division lay within).

Included in Dempster’s papers is a copy of “History of the Loyalists – a Tribute to the Tribal Police, African Guards and All the Loyalists of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Tribes who Resisted the Mau-Mau Revolt” (official government publication, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, 1961). Appendix IV of this publication contains a list of the officers of the Provincial Administrations who were closely associated with the operation of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru Guards. Dempster is confirmed as having been seconded for service with the Meru African Guard from 1/1/1956 to 31/12/1956, during the closing stages of the Mau Mau revolt.

The Mau Mau revolt was largely confined to disaffected members of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru tribes of the Central Provinces of Kenya. When the Mau Mau revolt began, in October 1952, large numbers of disaffected natives took to the forests of Kenya, from where they launched terrorist raids. A state of emergency was immediately declared, and the local forces, Kenya Police, Kenya Regiment, King’s African Rifles and a “Home Guard” of some 25,000 loyal Africans, were reinforced by several British regiments. The African Home Guard or “African Guard” units, formed on a tribal basis, were organised and advised in the field by local colonial officials, men like Dempster. Meru province, where Dempster saw service with the Meru African Guard during the emergency, is in north-east Kenya, the south-west portion of the province containing the north-eastern section of the Mount Kenya Forests. From the start the Meru District Council of Elders, the Njuri Ncheke, intent on preserving their traditional powers and land rights, refused to have anything to do with the revolt and openly denounced it. In accordance with tradition, picked members of the Nthaka or warrior class were recruited by their tribal elders to fight against the revolt, forming themselves into the Meru African Guard or Meru Home Guard. During the March-August 1953 Mau Mau offensive the security situation deteriorated somewhat in Meru Province, with the return of 4,000 Meru undesirables, who had been expelled from Nairobi, and who on returning to Meru Province set about undermining the authority of their tribal elders. Initially, security was provided by a small local force, comprising Tribal Police, the Meru African Guard, and a small body of Kenya Police reservists (the latter being European Civil Officers serving in the province who were also police reservists). The Meru African Guard, its members armed only with spears and bows and arrows, faced terrorists armed with automatic weapons. Despite the odds, they managed to hold their ground when the first Mau Mau attacks struck Meru in June of 1953. The security situation in the Province was then stiffened by the arrival of regular police and military forces, who conducted occasional sweeps and helped in putting the Mau Mau on the back foot. During the period August – December 1953 the Meru African Guard increasingly consolidated its position in the Province. The Meru African Guards hold on its home territory continued to strengthen during 1954 and 1955, and by the end of 1955, of the 1,827 known terrorists of Meru origin who had entered the forests in 1952, only 210 were still believed to be at large. During 1955, when the revolt was at its height in Meru, a total of 805 Mau Mau terrorists were killed, captured or surrendered in that Province alone. By late 1956 the Mau Mau revolt had collapsed. The total number of Mau Mau killed by October 1956 amounted to 10,532, of whom 4,576 were killed by Tribal Police or African Guards. On the colonial administration side, the vast majority of casualties sustained in putting down the revolt were African, and of these African casualties, by far the majority were members of African Guard units. During the revolt, the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru African Guards, who had played the leading role in the defeat of Mau Mau, lost a total of 667 men killed in action, whereas the Tribal Police casualties only amounted to some 65 men killed.

From the outset, following the declaration of a State of Emergency in October 1952, the Kenyan colonial authorities were at pains to see that the African Guard units remained autonomous, in what was effectively a civil war over land rights between dispossessed Africans and their tribal superiors (a fact now largely obscured by post-colonial revisionism). The Governor and District Commissioners of the Central Province, Kenya, where most of the fighting took place, agreed at a meeting in November 1952 that, with regard to the African Guards, these groups must not be treated as a government engineered organisation (see Daniel Branch’s Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp 68-69). The African Guard units were, however, advised by District Officers in the field, men like Patrick Dempster, who were in turn answerable to their District Commissioners. As the conflict developed, the African Guards increasingly assumed responsibility for defending their home territory, thereby allowing the police and army to eventually concentrate on military operations in the forests and in Nairobi. In the end, the revolt failed because it lacked the complete support of the African population. At its peak there were some 26,500 men serving in the African Guard units in the Central Province, a figure slightly higher than the number that the Mau Maus forest fighters reached at its peak. The African Guard were also successful because they proved to be skilled and effective counter-terror units, prepared to fight fire with fire, using Mau Mau tactics against the terrorists, and in so doing effectively broke Mau Mau as a fighting force. By the end, many Mau Mau had deserted their former leaders and willingly enlisted in covert guerilla gangs, who were sent into the forests to infiltrate the movement and help track down its leaders, the capture of whom brought the conflict to an end.

The strategy that brought the Emergency to an end was organised by Ian Stuart McWalter Henderson of the Kenya Police, who created fake guerilla bands, mostly composed of former Mau Mau, who infiltrated the Mau Mau gangs hiding out in the forests of Central Kenya and helped to track down their leaders. Henderson’s biggest triumph came in October 1966, when he and his men tracked down Kimathi, the last of the Mau Mau leaders, who had been betrayed by his own followers and was subsequently tracked to his forest hideout and taken prisoner.

Medals to men who saw service with the various African Guard tribal units are extremely rare. No medals were issued to Africans who served with these units, and the only medals awarded to the units went to colonial civil servants like Dempster, who served as advisers to the units (in addition to the British armed forces, the only local units that qualified for the Africa General Service Medal with Kenya clasp were the Kenya Police and Reserve, the Tribal Police and Reserve, the Civil Prisons Service and members of the civil administration).