For every case of injustice highlighted by the appeal court, the settlers could point to another Mau Mau atrocity that enraged European sensibilities

For every case of injustice highlighted by the appeal court, the settlers could point to another Mau Mau atrocity that enraged European sensibilities.

Just two months after the appeal court judgement in the Bruxnor-Randall case, the settlers had an answer to the bleating from the Bench when the most disturbing Mau Mau European murder of all took place, an event that reinforced white opinion that Mau Mau 'was lost in the haunted wilderness of superstition'. The murder was carried out under the direction of the infamous General Tanganyika.

Like many other fighters who had by then been in the forests for nearly two years, Tanganyika had taken to consulting Kikuyu female prophets for guidance on the conduct of the campaign. One such prophet, known by the name Mama Mwangi, instructed that a European should be sacrificed in the manner of a Kikuyu leader who had died in British custody before the end of the nineteenth century.

That leader, named Waiyaki, was popularly believed to have been buried alive by the British. Tanganyika selected a target and deputed a party under the command of General Kaleba to carry out this ritual act. The victim they chose was Gray Leakey, himself a Kikuyu-speaker and the cousin of Louis Leakey, who had acted as a translator in the trial of Jomo Kenyatta and who was, by 1954, a very active member of the government's counter-insurgency committees. Kaleba and his small party of fighters broke into the Leakey farm in North Nyeri on the night of 13 October 1954. Mrs.

Mary Leakey was strangled, the family's Catholic Kikuyu cook hanged and disembowelled, and Gray Leakey taken captive. He was led into the forests of Mount Kenya, and high up on the mountain he was buried alive and upside down in the deep red soil.

Two years earlier, Gray Leakey's daughter Agnes had been with David Waruhiu in Switzerland when he heard of the death of his father, Chief Waruhiu. In one of the many cruel ironies of this dirty war, David Waruhiu was now the person given responsibility in the Office of Information for contacting Agnes, then in North America, to tell her of the deaths of her parents. The body might never have been found had not the young son of Leakey's cook followed Kaleba's party onto the mountain, where he witnessed the strange death of Gray Leakey. A few days after the abduction and murder the boy led police back to the grave. Gray Leakey was exhumed from his bleak and murderous resting place and reburied beside his wife Mary in the Anglican cemetery at Nyeri, just a few paces from the graves of the Baden Powells, other European residents of Nyeri who had met a more tranquil end.

 The horror of this act stiffend settler resolve in the face of their critics; and they were soon to be provided with damning evidence of the dangers of adopting a gentler approach to Mau Mau, as advocated by some in the judiciary. Troops swarmed over the slopes of Mount Kenya on the Nyeri side following the Leakey murders, and on 24 October a patrol of the King's African Rifles trapped a small party of Mau Mau fighters in a cave. Four Mau Mau eventually surrendered, three men and one woman. The leader among them declared himself as General Kaleba. In the cave the soldiers found a large quantity of books and papers, and several items of property from the Leakey house. As was now usual in the aftermath of any European murder, General Kaleba was brought speedily to trial, the case coming before Justice de Lestang on 22 November 1954.

There was insufficient evidence to charge Kaleba with murder, but he had been caught in possession of a Webly revolver and several rounds of ammunition, offences that anyway carried a capital charge. The settlers were keen to see him hang, whatever the charge. But the courtroom proceedings would reveal another unexpected drama to the utter astonishment of the settler public. Kaleba told the court that he had in fact previously surrendered to the government in March 1954.

He was then sent back into the forest to try to assist in the negotiations of a general surrender of Mau Mau fighters. How could it be that the man who had so chillingly and pointlessly murdered Gray Leakey could have been considered a suitable ambassador to broker a peace settlement with other Mau Mau generals? If settlers needed any further evidence either of the government's folly or of Mau Mau's irredeemable wickedness, then this was surely it..

Histories of the Hanged 

David Anderson, 2005

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