The Micro-dynamics of Violence in Colonial Kenya: A History of the Hayward Case, 1952–1960

Abstract: This article is a micro-history of an episode of torture carried out by a screening team of Home Guard volunteers commanded by a nineteen-year-old British Kenya Police Reserve Officer, Brian Hayward, during the British counterinsurgency campaign against the Mau Mau in Kenya. The content focuses on how and why Brian Hayward and his screening team were made able and became willing to commit torture. Adopting the theoretical framework of Stathis Kalyvas’ Logic of Violence (2006), I will argue that some of these powerful and pragmatic volunteers took advantage of the prevailing situation in Kenya by using violence to fulfil their own interests. I will also consider how the volunteers were transformed into ‘violence workers’ for the British colonial government, whereby their violent actions were also the result of the state-induced violent culture of British Kenya. This article offers a rare window into the dynamics of violence on the ground-level in one of the most violent British counterinsurgency campaigns of the twentieth century.