Kenya’s colonial detention camps and prison centers were built according to rigid systemic rules that shaped the architecture and layout of any related infrastructure. Everything from storage units to mass cells, isolation cells, utilities and recreational spaces was planned to serve the colonial state and disregard the human dignity of the detainees.

The infrastructural design of Manyani camp, and many others like it across the country, clearly shows how architecture was used as a main tool of dehumanization. Buildings with poor ventilation and scarce sanitary facilities housed almost twice as many detainees as they were meant to. A public health report from Manyani in 1954 stated that cells that were meant for 40 detainees, now had 60. This number likely increased as the emergency continued.

Detention facilities were also divided into compounds for the sake of isolating and controlling how detainees interacted with each other. Detainees were classified (black, gray and white) based on their conduct and their readiness to renounce the Mau Mau and be reformed . They would often be transferred from one compound to another to stop them from creating alliances and strong ties. Here, infrastructural design became

key method of social control that denied detainees the freedom of movement and the ability to gather, communicate and socialize.

The infrastructure of detention centers was inherently anti-black from the start. White and Asian camp officers had better living conditions than their African colleagues. One report mentioned that a tennis court and swimming pool was being built for European leisure activities. Meanwhile detainees were squeezed into overcrowded spaces and facing a typhoid outbreak.

“There were no prisons in Kenya before colonialism… systems of justice were more about recompense and retribution for the offenders… when the British colonial power came, prisons were one of the first things they brought… introducing the idea of punitive incarceration. Prisons in Kenya soon became places of abandonment and rejection by the society… which continues to be the case till today” – Patrick Gathara

To analyze the workings of colonial machinery is to face the ways in which everything was appropriated into colonial vision, landscape and brick and mortar became instruments used to advance colonial oppression. Today the very leftovers of these sites persist to further the colonial agenda and attest to its deliberateness.

In today’s Kenya Prisons Service, it has been noted that the most significant challenges threatening the prison mandate include: overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, overstretched physical facilities, and insufficient professionals qualified to address the health needs in prisoners. This reality is nothing new. In the first year of Manyani camp operating, then as a holding camp for suspected Mau Mau members, these same issues were of a deadly presence.

In 1954, Manyani was built to house 6,000 detainees. Within months, it was reported that 16,000 detainees were being held there. Come May of that year, the camp commandant received a public health report containing concerning details. Prisoner latrine buckets were overflowing. Some were positioned near the camp’s kitchens. The compounds were infested with flies. Recommendations were made to improve these conditions if the camp was to go on to operate at a humane standard.

Overcrowded and packed into tight quarters with poor sanitary conditions, detainees were struck by a major typhoid epidemic. Despite several members of the Kenya government internally

denouncing the conditions in Manyani, Governor Evelyn Baring publicly denied any incidence of typhoid and maintained that the camp sanitation facilities were state-of-the-art, and that detainees had access to fresh water and sufficient medical care.

After news of the typhoid epidemic caused an outcry in the British media and among Labour MPs, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd – following a highly publicized staged tour of Manyani – announced in the House of Commons that the epidemic was in no part a failure of the camp’s facilities or officers, but was due to detainees who had entered the camp already infected with the disease. He reported 63 typhoid-related deaths. Detainee’s tasked to bury the dead reported burying ‘six hundred bodies’.

The terrible condition of healthcare and sanitation in Manyani camp was not unusual among imprisonment centers across the empire; it is still common in prison systems today. Systemic under-resourcing coupled with the prioritization of punitive and carceral frameworks over basic human rights, remains a weaponized form of injustice and anti-blackness today.

The ecology and environment of Manyani detention camp was the most important thing in the selection of its location. Situated inside Kenya’s largest National Park, a place historically known for lions that preyed on humans, and extreme heat and dryness, the colonial rulers used the environment as a weapon against the detainees, separating them from their ancestral lands and throwing them into a harsh and unfamiliar setting.

Facilities were often overcrowded, beyond the intended capacity and the extremely hot seasons made it even more unbearable for inmates. After independence, Manyani camp was shut down and its infrastructure absorbed into the Kenya prison system. Today it remains one of Kenya’s largest and toughest prisons.

In 2023, MBC visited the prison to explore what sites from the former camp still remain today and how they are used within the current prison system. This hut, embedded with the signature colonial barbed wire insignia hanging over the roofs, today shelters more than 10 inmates at a time. The huts were constructed during the colonial era.

One of the guards mentioned that the environment itself punishes anyone who tries to escape, as nmates risk being killed by a wild animal. But lions

and elephants are not the only danger. When it rains, there is also a chance of other deadly animals like scorpions attacking the guards and inmates.

Manyani Maximum Prison covers a large area of land, but only about a third of it actually hosts the inmates. Most of it is empty land. New buildings at the facility are mostly for admin purposes. Part of the empty land holds the remains of the former camp.

Many of the structures were abandoned when the original detention camp was shut down. These ruins have now become part of the natural environment and they remain on the landscape like a scar across the cheek. There have been minimal efforts to preserve them and there are plans to create a museum that could possibly bring some money for the government and jobs for local people.

“Colonial arrest was inescapable and knew no clear territorial or legal boundaries; everyday life, from spirituality to indigenous agricultural practices and cultures, was criminalized as an extension of the ‘civilising’ mission” – Jackline Kemigisa

Manyani shows us how the brutal colonial logics of anti-blackness and violence still impact our systems today and how they are not only damaging to our minds and bodies but also persist in our environments and landscapes as well.

Mau Mau detainees had a significant degree of organized resistance against prison guards at Manyani camp. As a ‘holding’ camp which was overpopulated, with a severe lack of amenities, controlled by largely untrained and ever changing guards, and a site of extreme brutality and interrogation, detainees sought to be as uncooperative as possible.

While this resistance was evident throughout the Emergency, it was the 1957 riot which sparked the most concern for the colonial state. In August of that year, camp warders entered Compound 16 on strict orders to reorganize detainees to suppress the building unrest among the most ‘hard-core’ individuals. When detainees refused to comply, the camp’s Special Riot Team Squad were sent in. In a similar vein, they were met with an organized and coordinated response from the detainees. Two warders were killed. Eight more were badly injured, one of whom was a European Officer. The detainees had made their own weapons, demolishing their huts for material.

It took the prison guards five days to regain control of the camp, but the resistance did not end there. Of the eleven detainees charged with murder, six were found guilty and sentenced to hang. During the trial, the detainees sought any means to disrupt the trial and the courtroom. The 1957 riot did not happen in a vacuum. Detainees had developed a number of methods to remain organized against state power and brutality. One of these methods included the Manyani Times, a secret circulation of newspaper clippings stolen from guards’ offices, as well as rumors and propaganda, designed to compel detainees to battle on.

Detainee resistance in Manyani forms part of a long history of resistance to colonialism, police violence and anti-blackness around the world. By looking at Manyani’s history in the wider context of global trends, we can learn how strategies of cooperation, imagination, innovation and intellectual development have supported black resistance and how they can keep doing so against many challenges.

Of the enabling establishments of coloniality, is the persistence of minimising human life to statistics and thus equating the victims of violence to static lifeless numeric. Manyani, as a site of violence, to-date persists in the use of statistics to erase the humanity of those that this site has jailed, killed and displaced. As established, Manyani’s locale was intentionally designed to displace and ensure those held within its confines are erased and ultimately forgotten.

In these ‘othered’ sites of displacement, basic human life is minimised to a statistic – often the prisoner number. A tool that seeks to establish the immanence of coloniality and insignificance of human life within these epicenters of violence.

Other-ing and the congress of forgetfulness

Outside the city and urban life – taken away from humanity and limiting those who you love and those who love you from seeing you – a mechanism to disrupt the sanity of the prisoner and build in the erasure of ‘the humanity’ from the human. The prisoner with a face and name slowly turns into numerics. Names become oft-forgotten memories even to those within Manyani and the larger colonial machinery and all that remains recognised is the placed numerics.

In these ‘othered’ sites where violence, carcerality, and punitive punishment are the order of the day, the name of the person, their gender, and their identity – however fragile and transitional – becomes a site of invasion and disruption.

For colonialism is established through crude power and the intent to conquer, therefore under these mechanisms of violence, even the prisoner’s name is taken away and he is left bare, with only numerics to prove humanity. Therefore, the psychoanalysis of these ghost towns come back every so often to haunt the Kenyan people.

To date, the British colonial machinery has guarded and denied Kenyans their histories and made them near impossible to access by colonised demographics. From destroying these sites of violence to destroying imperative documentation that proves this violence was met – statistical erasure has become an incessant tool for empire to control and guard, the legitimacy of which is slowly crumbling.

The persistent statistical invisibility guided by this intentional erasure, disrupts the collection of data to establish the size of colonial wreckage, displacement, and horrors. While we look for the human elements to combat this erasure, this erasure builds on disruption of existence – while we seek to remember we are forced to forget.

Manyani, as a site of persistent coloniality, has now been re-established as a Maximum Security Prison – the epistemologies of violence persist – and again, the name is taken away and is replaced by numerics. A continuous blinding of human suffering through the statisticalisation of human life, that ultimately erases the human from the ‘humanity’.