Britain's Inhumane Acts

Mau Mau uprising: Bloody history of Kenya conflict

Thousands of Mau Mau suspects were detained in prison camps

Legal action taken against the British government to secure compensation for four Kenyans allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau uprising will cast the spotlight on one of the Empire's bloodiest conflicts.

The uprising is now regarded in Kenya as one of the most significant steps towards a Kenya free from British rule.

The Mau Mau fighters were mainly drawn from Kenya's major ethnic grouping, the Kikuyu.

More than a million strong, by the start of the 1950s the Kikuyu had been increasingly economically marginalised as years of white settler expansion ate away at their land holdings.

Since 1945, nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta of the Kenya African Union (KAU) had been pressing the British government in vain for political rights and land reforms, with valuable holdings in the cooler Highlands to be redistributed to African owners.

But radical activists within the KAU set up a splinter group and organised a more militant kind of nationalism.

By 1952 Kikuyu fighters, along with some Embu and Meru recruits, were attacking political opponents and raiding white settler farms and destroying livestock. Mau Mau supporters took oaths, binding them to their cause.

In October 1952 the British declared a state of emergency and began moving army reinforcements into Kenya.

So began an aggressively fought counter-insurgency, which lasted until 1960 when the state of emergency was ended.
Basically you could get away with murder - it was systematic” says Professor David Anderson Oxford University

The number killed in the uprising is a subject of much controversy. Officially the number of Mau Mau and other rebels killed was 11,000, including 1,090 convicts hanged by the British administration. Just 32 white settlers were killed in the eight years of emergency.

However, unofficial figures suggest a much larger number were killed in the counter-insurgency campaign.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission has said 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the crackdown, and 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions.

David Anderson, professor of African Politics at Oxford University, says he estimates the death toll in the conflict to have been as high as 25,000.

He said: "Everything that could happen did happen. Allegations about beatings and violence were widespread. Basically you could get away with murder. It was systematic."
'Oppressive violence'
The African Home Guard, recruited by the British, used oppressive violence as a means of controlling the population, Prof Anderson suggests.

A claim for compensation was first lodged in 2009

He said: "The British armed the militia, rewarded them, incentivised them, allowing them to pillage property of the nationalists.

"Mau Mau families were subject to pillage by their neighbours. People would simply walk up to the farm and walk away with things."

In addition to search-and-destroy missions against Mau Mau fighter bands operating in the forests, the British also strategically resettled Kikuyu in villages. They also detained some 100,000 Kikuyu without trial, often for periods of between three and seven years.

London law firm Leigh Day & Co lodged a claim in mid-2009 on behalf of five elderly Kenyans. One has died since the case was lodged.
“They [the Mau Mau] were put in camps where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings” Martyn Day Solicitor

The firm says its clients suffered terribly in detention camps or at the hands of British-led soldiers.

Solicitor Martyn Day told the BBC: "They were put in camps where they were subject to severe torture, malnutrition, beatings. The women were sexually assaulted. Two of the men were castrated. The most severe gruesome torture you could imagine.

"A lot of the officers involved were white, they were controlling the violence against these Mau Mau. It wasn't just isolated individual officers. It was systematic. The whole purpose was to break the Mau Mau."

The UK says the claim is not valid because of the amount of time since the abuses were alleged to have happened, and that any liability rested with the Kenyan authorities after independence in 1963.

But Leigh Day & Co says the case is an "opportunity for the British government to come to terms with the past and apologise to the victims and the Kenyan people for this grave historic wrong".

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has backed their case.

The state of emergency lasted for eight years

"In my view, the British government's attempt to pin liability on Kenya for British colonial torture represents an intolerable abdication of responsibility," he said.

"Britain's insistence that international human rights standards should be respected by governments around the world will sound increasingly hollow if the door is shut in the face of these known victims of British torture."

But it is clear that brutal violence was exacted on both sides.

Prof Anderson explains: "There was lots of suffering on the other side too. This was a dirty war. It became a civil war - though that idea remains extremely unpopular in Kenya today."

One example was the Mau Mau raid on the "loyalist" village of Lari, where the majority of the men were away fighting with the British Home Guard. The rebels killed more than 70, mostly women and children.

Tim Simmonds, who joined the Kenyan police reserve as a tracker shortly after settling in Kenya in 1954, says the Mau Mau fighters "went on the rampage", slaughtering thousands of people, leaving him so frightened he slept under his bed for a year.

While deploring the treatment of detainees in the camps, he says he has no regrets about fighting the insurgents in the bush.

"They really got what they deserved. I'm really quite tough on this. If I had the chance again in the same situation, them killing people, would I go out and kill them again as I did? Yes sir I would."

It has long been suggested that the suppression of the Mau Mau was more brutal in nature than the action taken against other colonial uprisings across the British Empire.

Some historians have posited that white settler pressure on the British government and the characterisation of the Mau Mau fighters as the epitome of savagery may have been behind this.

The Kikuyu themselves were split, with "haves" often siding with the British against Mau Mau "have-nots" and many happy to take the confiscated land of their fellow villagers.
Empire 'not deserved'
Prof Anderson notes that one of the things marking the battle against the Mau Mau was the number of hangings, with capital offences extended during the emergency to include "consorting" with Mau Mau.

Some attention was paid to allegations of atrocities at the time, with questions asked in parliament about 11 Africans beaten to death in a British camp at Hola.

Among those who spoke out were the Labour MP Barbara Castle and the Conservative Enoch Powell, now best known for his "rivers of blood" speech.

He suggested at the time that if such killings were to go unpunished Britain did not deserve an empire.

"I would say it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human being and say, 'Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow.'"

Even though the Mau Mau were thoroughly defeated by 1960, the exact reforms that nationalists had been pressing for before the uprising had started and, by 1963, Kenya was independent.

Britain's Conspiracy

18 April 2012 Last updated at 00:00 GM

British colonial files released following legal challenge

By Holly Wallis BBC News

The files reveal how the British punished suspected Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s

Secret files from British colonial rule - once thought lost - have been released by the government, one year after they came to light in a High Court challenge to disclose them.

Some of the papers cover controversial episodes: the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the evacuation of the Chagos Islands, and the Malayan Emergency.

They also reveal efforts to destroy and reclassify sensitive files.

The Foreign Office says it is now releasing "every paper" it can.

But academics say the Foreign Office's "failure" to deliver the archive for decades has created a "legacy of suspicion".

In particular, the first batch of papers reveal:

• Official fears that Nazis - pretending to catch butterflies - were plotting to invade East Africa in 1938
• Detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s
• Secret plans to deport a Greek Cypriot leader to the Seychelles despite launching talks with him to end a violent rebellion in Cyprus in 1955
• Efforts to deport Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territories
• Concerns over the "anti-American and anti-white" tendency of Kenyan students sent to study in the US in 1959 - the same year Barack Obama's Kenyan father enrolled at university in Hawaii

In January 2011 - following a High Court case brought by four Kenyans involved in the Mau Mau rebellion - the government was forced to admit that 8,800 files had been secretly sent to Britain from colonies, prior to their independence.

It said the files had been held "irregularly".

Professor David Anderson, an adviser to the Kenyans in the case and professor of African History at Oxford University, said progress had been made retrieving "the 'lost' British Empire archive", but added there was still a "lurking culture of secrecy" within government.

"The British government did lie about this earlier on... this saga was both a colonial conspiracy and a bureaucratic bungle."

He added that the release of the files would help "clear the air on Britain's imperial past".
'Migrated' files
The 1,200 records being released are the first of six tranches to be made public at the National Archives by November 2013.

They cover the period between the 1930s and 1970s and were physically transferred or "migrated" to the UK.

The archive contains official documents from the former territories of Aden, Anguilla, Bahamas, Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana), British Indian Ocean Territories, Brunei, Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya, Sarawak and the Seychelles.

The archive released on Wednesday details how British colonial officials selected files for secret "migration" back to Britain - using criteria set out in a 1961 memo by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Iain Macleod.
'Burned and destroyed'
They were instructed to keep papers that might embarrass the UK government, other governments, the police, military forces or public servants; might compromise sources of intelligence; or might be used unethically by ministers of successive governments.

Officials in Kenya reclassified access to documents according to the reader's ethnicity and descent in order to restrict material

According to Kenyan ministry of defence files from 1961, administrators devised new classifications, such as "Watch", in order to withhold information from indigenous governments.

Files stamped with a "W" could only be viewed by a "British subject of European descent", while "legacy" files could be passed on to subsequent administrations.

Other new classifications included Personal, Delicate Source, and Guard - which could "not be communicated to the Americans".

The Kenyan files also contain references to material being destroyed.

One memo from April 1961 says: "To obviate a too laborious scrutiny of 'dead' files, emphasis is placed on destruction - a vast amount of paper in the Ministry of Defence secret registry and classified archives could be burnt without loss, and I should be surprised if the same does not apply to the CS's (chief secretary's) Office."

Colonial files from the Malayan administration also point to the destruction of papers - ahead of the country's independence in 1957.

In July 1956, an official writing to the private secretary to the British high commissioner questions what to do with archives relating to the Malayan Emergency - the 1948-1960 conflict with communist insurgents.

Referencing the "List C" papers, he writes: "I have been through them and it would seem that some contain items of historical interest in the event of anyone writing a history of the Emergency or biography of former high commissioners.

"The others should be dealt with in detail, but I have not time to do this. Would you agree to their disposal as suggested against individual files in the list?"

An appendix in the same file indicates that "List C" documents are to be "destroyed".

Researchers who have studied the colonial archive say there is little reference to the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed rubber plantation workers by British troops at Batang Kali in December 1948 - during the Malayan Emergency.
'Long overdue'
Tony Badger, professor of history at Cambridge University - who has been appointed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to review the files - said the government was releasing "every paper" it could, rather than merely "every paper of interest".

However, he added the release was "long overdue".

"Given the failure of the Foreign Office to acknowledge the existence of - and certainly the failure to manage the migrated archive until very recently, you can amply understand the legacy of suspicion amongst journalists and academics about these records", he said.

He estimated that "well under 1% of material" had so far been held back from release.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said the foreign secretary was "pleased" with the release and "committed" to making the colonial archive "available to the general public as soon as possible".

"These files are an important part of our history and by working with the National Archives we are ensuring that they can be accessed by current and future generations."

Britains Dirty Past

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes

Review finds thousands of papers detailing shameful acts were culled, while others were kept secret illegally

Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor

The Guardian, Wednesday 18 April 2012

Hanslope Park, where the Foreign Office kept a secret archive of colonial papers. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.
Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.
The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.
The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.
The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain's late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".
Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army's Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA.
The documents that were not destroyed appear to have been kept secret not only to protect the UK's reputation, but to shield the government from litigation. If the small group of Mau Mau detainees are successful in their legal action, thousands more veterans are expected to follow.
It is a case that is being closely watched by former Eoka guerillas who were detained by the British in 1950s Cyprus, and possibly by many others who were imprisoned and interrogated between 1946 and 1967, as Britain fought a series of rearguard actions across its rapidly dimishing empire.
The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
The papers at Kew depict a period of mounting anxiety amid fears that some of the incriminating watch files might be leaked. Officials were warned that they would be prosecuted if they took any any paperwork home – and some were. As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors' offices, where new safes were installed.
In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as "a thorough purge", was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.
Photograph: The National Archives Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was "a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent" could participate in the purge.
Photograph: The National Archives Painstaking measures were taken to prevent post-independence governments from learning that the watch files had ever existed. One instruction states: "The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed."
When a single watch file was to be removed from a group of legacy files, a "twin file" – or dummy – was to be created to insert in its place. If this was not practicable, the documents were to be removed en masse. There was concern that Macleod's directions should not be divulged – "there is of course the risk of embarrassment should the circular be compromised" – and officials taking part in the purge were even warned to keep their W stamps in a safe place.
Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed. Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain. When documents were burned, "the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up".
Some idea of the scale of the operation and the amount of documents that were erased from history can be gleaned from a handful of instruction documents that survived the purge. In certain circumstances, colonial officials in Kenya were informed, "it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast".
Photograph: The National Archives Documents that survive from Malaya suggest a far more haphazard destruction process, with relatively junior officials being permitted to decide what should be burned and what should be sent to London.
Dr Ed Hampshire, diplomatic and colonial record specialist at the National Archive, said the 1,200 files so far transferred from Hanslope Park represented "gold dust" for historians, with the occasional nugget, rather than a haul that calls for instant reinterpretation of history. However, only one sixth of the secret archive has so far been transferred. The remainder are expected to be at Kew by the end of 2013.