News 2005

Scholars unearth Britain’s dirty war against Mau Mau

Update: 03.03.2005

Saturday February 26, 2005

By William Maclean

Half a century on, research by Oxford historian David Anderson and Caroline Elkins of Harvard University is helping underpin demands by former rebels for reparations from Britain for torture and killings.

The Mau Mau, drawn largely from Kenya’s biggest tribe, the Kikuyu, launched their rebellion against colonial rule in 1952, especially in the "white" highlands favoured by settlers, waging war from the Aberdare and Mount Kenya forests.

According to official figures more than 11,000 rebels were killed, along with up to 100 Europeans and up to 2,000 African loyalists, many from the Kikuyu Home Guard.

Elkins suspects the figure for rebel deaths is a considerable under estimate, resulting from a British cover-up that destroyed or classified much of the official record. "I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead," she writes. She believes the British over the years detained almost the entire Kikuyu population, then estimated at 1.5 million, among them thousands of men who fought for Britain in World War Two. In his book "Histories of the Hanged" Anderson shows that Britain resorted more swiftly to capital punishment and brutal acts than it did in Palestine, Malaya or Cyprus, hanging more than 1,000 Kenyans between 1952 and 1959.

Mau Mau freedom fighters wearing animal skins and armed with long knives in a file picture taken in Kiambu.

From 1952, when a state of emergency was declared, until the end of the war in 1960, tens of thousands of detainees died from exhaustion, disease, hunger and systematic physical brutality, says Elkins’s in her book "Britain’s Gulag".

"Never knew a Kuke had so many brains until we cracked open a few heads," a white settler confided to her in return for anonymity, using a slang word for a member of the Kikuyu tribe.

"You had to knock the evil out of a person," said another interviewee, former detention camp officer John Cowan.

This is not the usual image of Britain’s conduct during the uprising which was taught to British schoolchildren in the 1960s -- that Britain took tough but fair measures to defeat ungrateful African rebels and defend its historic "civilising mission".

The two books provide fresh detail on the abuses Mau Mau veterans want remembered as they prepare to launch a lawsuit against the British government in London later this year.

The veterans, now old or ailing, complain they have been ignored by post-independence Kenyan governments and say recent precedent gives them hope that a suit against Britain may succeed.

Britain has paid £5 million ($9.47 million) in compensation to 1,300 Kenyans since 2002 for injuries caused by munitions said to have been left by its soldiers training in Kenya.

Some Kenyans say many of those claims were bogus and Britain was panicked into making the awards by publicity-savvy lawyers.

But the fresh evidence of British conduct during Mau Mau may deepen anti-British sentiment and help the veterans’ case.

"The veterans are dying out very quickly, so retribution must be as fast as possible," said Kang’ethe Mungai of Kenya’s Release Political Prisoners human rights group.

The British embassy in Kenya says there will be no British comment on the matter until the suit is filed.

Neither independence leader Jomo Kenyatta nor his successor Daniel arap Moi lifted the colonial-era ban on Mau Mau, arguing that venerating them would only stir enmity among non-Kikuyus.

Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu tribe elected head of state in 2002, rescinded the ban in 2003. But the issue remains divisive in Kenya where some fought for Britain as "loyalists" and others for Mau Mau.

A settler-promoted stereotype of Mau Mau as bloodthirsty savages helps explain the public apathy in 1950s Britain about British atrocities in the period, and the lack of anything approaching a national soul-searching in the decades since.

Despite reporting of the brutalities on both sides of the war by Fleet Street, few leaders in Britain’s then opposition Labour Party took up the Mau Mau cause, historians say.

Human rights concerns ran up against the popular understanding of empire, particularly in Africa, "where in the 1950s any discussion of race and social development still inspired 19th century reactions," Elkins said.

The silence at home about Britain’s actions sent a dangerous signal back to the authorities in Kenya, who assumed their policies of torture and detention were endorsed, she said.

SOURCE: Reuters

Revealed: Horrific torture of Mau Mau

03.03.2005

Patrick Mathangani

The heart-rending torture of Mau Mau freedom fighters by British colonialists was relived yesterday at a lecture attended by scores of the liberation heroes.

There were gasps of horror as Prof Caroline Elkins, the author of a new book detailing the suppression of freedom fighters, described brutal torture methods that were used to force the fighters to confess.

Ms Elkins said Britain has so far suppressed information about its brutality to the Mau Mau, and scores of useful files remain secret.

Lawyer Martyn Day, who is helping to file a reparations suit in London, said this suppression of information stood in the way of the case, but he was optimistic it would succeed.

Elkins, a History professor at America’s Harvard University, has authored Britain’s Gulag, which details the suppression of millions of people by the colonial government in the 1950s.

"The settler regarded the Mau Mau as filthy animals, barbarians, bloodthirsty and pigs," she said, while delivering the lecture at the University of Nairobi.

In all the time they tortured, killed and maimed the Mau Mau, the colonialists justified their actions claiming their mission was to civilise savage Africans, she said.

She described one case where people loyal to the colonial government stuffed sand into the bowels of a Mau Mau suspect as a white official urged them on.

In another case, a woman describes how her interrogators emptied a bottle of red-hot pepper into her private parts.

About 1.5 million Kikuyu people were detained without trial and other innocent ones killed as officials claimed there was a war situation in Kenya, yet most of those killed were unarmed.

Contrary to official claims that only 11,000 Mau Mau were killed, said the don, the number could be as high as 100,000.

Meanwhile, Mr Lawrence Karani Ngacha, who claims the UK government has admitted liability in the torture and murder of the freedom fighters, opposed the reparations case, saying all that remained was to force for payment of damages.

He claimed UK High Commissioner Sir Edward Clay admitted liability on December 17, 2003, adding that he had a press cutting to prove it.

However, Day said no one has yet accepted liability, and the UK has vowed to fight the case by any means possible.

"If Ngacha thinks it is so, let him go to the High Commissioner and ask him to accept it in writing. I would like to stand here and say it’s true, but sadly, it is not," Day said.

He added: "We are going to file this case; there’s no point of living in dreams."

Day hit the Kenyan public limelight when he helped members of the Maasai community win a landmark case against the British, whose soldiers left behind explosives at Archers Post. The explosives erupted, killing and maiming members of the local community.

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