Continuous Colonial Clouds: Tear gas and the enduring legacies of Empire in Kenya and Hong Kong

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As subtle chills began to descend on Nairobi, Kenya, in July and August of last year the city’s residents begun to notice increasingly persistent bouts of eye pain, whilst others spoke of headaches and increasing mental distress (Lidigu, 2024; Wanjugu, 2024). Many Kenyans became accustomed to a searing red mist that had settled on the city, nestling into the capital’s crevices, and coating the pavements (Muganda, 2024). The cause was a particularly potent form of tear gas, infused with chilli peppers (Otieno, 2024), that had been used extensively by the Kenyan police force in an attempt to silence Kenyans protesting against a government finance bill. The bill was highly controversial, indicating a return to austerity in Kenya along with the introduction of a host of tax measures, with the bill largely pressed on the authorities in Nairobi by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) directive that made future funding contingent on a more fiscally conservative Kenyan economic policy (Obulutsa & Miriri, 2024).

In practice the measures meant raising the cost of basic necessities such as bread, fuel and mobile data in a country already suffering from a cost of living crisis. The response was anger, and on June the 18th 2024 protesters filled the streets of Nairobi calling for the government to withdraw the bill. Intriguingly five years earlier, to the month, on the streets of another former British colonial city, protesters took to the street to demand the withdrawal of a highly contentious bill. In Hong Kong on June the 9th 2019 a million Hongkongers, a seventh of the entire population of the city, marched in opposition to the imposition of a bill that would have legalised extradition to mainland China, sparking fears that pro-democracy protesters in the city could be forced to face charges in Chinese courts that boasted of a ninety-nine per-cent conviction rate (Lim, 2022).

As the protests in both cities drew on political vacuums arose, in Kenya President William Ruto sacked his cabinet in a bid to cling on to power (“President Ruto Dismisses”, 2024) whilst in Hong Kong Chief Executive (the leader of the Hong Kong government) Carrie Lam attempted to resign but saw her offer rejected repeatedly by the central government in Beijing (Sender et al., 2019). As the political vacuums became more pronounced, Kenyans and Hongkongers’ anger grew, their grievances coalescing into broader anti-government protests. Both governments responded in the same way, firing extensive amounts of tear gas at the protesters. This similarity is not, however, coincidental. In exploring both the method of policing, through the use of tear gas, and the structure of the police themselves, clear and enduring colonialities emerge. Where British colonial policing approaches continue to shape the lives of Kenyans and Hongkongers in postcolonial Kenya and Hong Kong.

Built to rule: Colonial policing structures

Writing in 2022 Douglas Kivoi at the Kenyan Institute for Public Policy lamented enduring instances of police brutality and impunity in Kenya, pointing to the ‘legacy of British colonial rule when the role of the police was to protect the interests of the administration – not to serve the interests of the general populace’ (Kivoi, 2022, para.1). Similarly, in Hong Kong, Martin Purbrick a former Royal Hong Kong Police Force officer turned academic, outlined the extent to which the structure of the Hong Kong Police Force had largely remained the same since the 1970s, where the policing approach is underwritten by a paramilitary structure that ‘visibly projects force to the community’ (Purbrick, 2019, p.478). Both policing structures can be tied directly to the suppression of anti-colonial movements that were heavily repressed by the British colonial state, and which relied on the police as both the visible face of the colonial state and the material foundations on which the colonial state’s authority lay, disciplining the protesters with violent and often deadly force.

David Bayley, scholar of the theory of policing argues that the manner in which a society is policed directly reflects the character of its government, where how the police ‘maintain order directly affects the reality of freedom’ (Bayley, 1990, p.5). In the 1950s the colonial government in Kenya sought to focus the priorities of the colonial Kenyan police force on ‘political policing’ (Throup, 1992, p.136) that sought to both undermine and repress an emergent anti-colonial movement in Kenya. Indeed, during the Mau Mau resistance against British colonial rule, the colonial Kenyan police arbitrarily detained seventy-eight thousand Kenyans on suspicion of collusion with the Mau Mau (Throup, 1992, p.148) a situation that led Caroline Elkins (2005) to refer to Kenya as ‘Britain’s Gulag’. Similarly, in Hong Kong in 1967 large-scale anti-colonial protests broke out in the city, inspired by the upheaval taking place in mainland China, and were met with a ‘reign of terror’ (Cooper, 1970, p.9) instilled by a Royal Hong Kong Police Force that saw to preserve the colonial administration, ensuring that the ‘British colonial authorities [could] … quell internal security disturbances’ (Purbrick, 2019, p.478) and preserve the British colony.

Thus, both police forces, with a clear provenance between the post-colonial Kenyan and Hong Kong Police Forces and their colonial forerunners, are defined by a structure whose raison d’etre is the preservation of the state and its government as opposed to a focus on upholding the law and the safety of the population. What was once the preservation of the colonial state structure is now the preservation of the post-colonial state, with little thought given to the peoples of Kenya or Hong Kong themselves.

Tear and Fear: Methods of Control

The absence of a focus on the safety and security of the peoples themselves can be seen in the method employed by the police in both Kenya and Hong Kong to contest the protests, tear gas; an inherently indiscriminate form of disciplinarity that often travels beyond the intended site of deployment (Klein, 2001; Feigenbaum, 2017). Indeed, tear gas was almost omnipresent in Nairobi, with the University of Nairobi raising concerns about the impact on the city’s air quality (Lidigu, 2024) whilst tear gas was fired in fourteen of Hong Kong’s eighteen districts in 2019 (Dapiran, 2020) impacting an estimated eighty-eight percent of Hongkongers (Prasso, 2019).

The far-reaching impact of tear gas is directly tied to its development, as a weapon in the first World War intended to break the solidarity of soldiers in the trenches (Feigenbaum, 2017). Fundamental to its use was the intention to strike fear into those seeking to occupy a particular space, tear gas synthesises asphyxiation in its victims, creating a toxic air that weaponizes the breath ‘against the breathing body’ (Nieuwenhuis, 2016, p.501). The utter fear this evokes can be seen in the responses of Kenyans and Hongkongers first experiencing tear gas, in one account in Kenyan daily Nation a protester comments on the disorientation and fear tear gas instilled ‘I could not see anything, let alone breathe’ (Lidigu, 2024, para.4) whilst Joshua Wong a pro-democracy protester in Hong Kong said of his first experience of tear gas ‘This is it – I’m going to suffocate and die’ (Wong, 2020, p.215).

Use of tear gas as an ‘atmospheric form of governance’ (Nieuwenhuis, 2018, p.80) designed to stoke fear in people occupying a particular space holds clear colonial connotations, indeed tear gas was used extensively by British colonial administrations, who saw it as a potent tool so to ‘suppress [an] insurrectionary populous’ (Adey, 2015, p.58). Tear gas’ colonial use saw it deployed in Palestine (Shoul, 2008), Northern Ireland (Orbons, 2011) and Iraq where future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill celebrated the use of ‘poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’ (Nieuwenhuis, 2018, p.84). Crucially, tear gas and its derivatives have long been considered as inappropriate for policing in mainland Britain, a tradition made explicit by a 2012 Metropolitan Police report that argued its use was not suitable in ‘public order policing situations’ (“CS gas use”, 2012, para.8). However, the UK remains one of the largest exporters of tear gas, benefiting from the continuation of post-colonial policing approaches, particularly to former colonies (“Arms trade: UK”, 2021; Stone, 2020) including Hong Kong (Wintour, 2019) and Kenya (HC Deb, 1999, col.814) with much of the tear gas used in Hong Kong produced by a Hampshire-based company (Batchelor, 2019).

Therefore, there remains clear colonialities in the export of tear gas to former British colonies, where it is used by police forces whose structure and approach is directly tied to the colonial police forces that preceded them. Finally, the methods and tactics employed in Hong Kong in 2019 and Kenya in 2024 in the extensive use of tear gas as a weapon once fundamental to the preservation of the colonial state underscores the disquieting legacies of British colonialism in two very different post-colonial contexts. As such, it is no exaggeration to say that the terror of tear gas faced by Kenyans and Hongkongers is in many ways an injurious inhaled imperial inheritance, a ruinous reminder the diffuse damage of British colonialism and the myriad ways it continues to shape the lives of those in post-colonial contexts.

This blog was emboldened by an opportunity to discuss Kenya’s protests and their development with Kenyan scholars and academics during a SCDTP visit to Mombasa in November 2024.

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