Scholars unearth Britain�s dirty war against Mau Mau
By William Maclean
http://www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=14145
{PHOTO:
http://www.eastandard.net/images/style/nh-mau260205_1.gif
Kenyan colonial police guard detainees in Kiambu in this March 26, 1953 file
photo, showing a typical scene during the Mau Mau uprising against British
rule.}
Studies by two Western historians show colonial Britain used mass detention
without trial, sadistic violence and bent justice far more than previously
believed to suppress the revolt.
"Things got a little out of hand.
"By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears and his eyeball, the right one,
I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out
of him."
This white settler�s confession of his role in torture in Kenya is one of many
atrocities uncovered by new research into Britain�s dirty war against the 1950s
Mau Mau insurgency.
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.
{PHOTO:
http://www.eastandard.net/images/style/nh-mau260205.gif
Mau Mau freedom fighters wearing animal skins and armed with long knives in a
file picture taken in Kiambu.}
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.
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.
�Reuters
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