Heritage

Legacy of British violence in Kenya

hanslope

Soldiers guard Mau Mau fighters behind barbed wires, in October 1952, in the Kikuyu reserve. Mau Mau, members of the Kikuyu ethnic tribe, fought from October 1952 to December 1959 against the British colonial rule in Kenya. PHOTO | AFP

In 1960, the colonial government in Kenya issued a letter to all administrative officers to burn all materials and documents relating to Mau Mau that the incoming African government could use against the British colonial administration.

While much of the documentation was destroyed on site, it is on record that another collection of highly sensitive documents comprising more than 1,500 government files was loaded on a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick on December 3, 1963, nine days before Kenya’s independence, because they could potentially “embarrass Her Majesty’s Government,” a gross understatement of fact!

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As I narrated in my tribute to my late friend John Nottingham, who was serving as a District Commissioner at the time, he defied the circular and collected all such material in his office and handed it to his friend Carl Rosberg, an American academic.

In 1967, Nottingham and Rosberg launched their seminal work The Myth of Mau Mau- Nationalism in Kenya in which they documented the massive cover-up of the atrocities committed by the British during the period.

As was to be expected, the British government suppressed and demonised the publication as the work of a disgruntled civil servant.

It was not until 2013 that it was discovered the Foreign Office had unlawfully hoarded more than a million files of historic documents that should have been declassified and handed over to the National Archives.

The files were kept at a secret archive in Hanslope Park, a high-security government communications centre in Buckinghamshire, north of London, where they occupied miles and miles of shelving.

They were kept from public view in breach of the Public Records Act, which at the time required that all government records become public once they were 30 years old.

The Foreign Office’s realisation that it would eventually need to admit to the existence of such a vast repository came at a time when its lawyers were battling a group of elderly ex-Mau Mau detainees in a British court for human rights abuses, a case, which the British government eventually lost and was obliged to issue a carefully worded apology (avoiding admission of liability), paying a token £ 20 million as compensation for victims of torture and other forms of human rights abuses at the hands of the colonial administration.

The claims arose from the appalling and systematic abuse and torture inflicted on Kenyan people by British colonial officials, and Kenyan “home guards” under British command, detailing the use of castration by burdizzo, systemic beatings, rape, and sexual assault with bottles; all of which were sanctioned at the top levels of the British government in a bid to secure confessions from detainees and perceived sympathisers of the Mau Mau.

It also showed the British government rounded up thousands of civilians in mass detention camps across Kenya and subjected them to terrible mistreatment, culminating in the Hola Massacre in 1959.

During the proceedings, the Foreign Office repeatedly denied the existence of a much smaller secret archive of 8,800 colonial-era records, known as the migrated archive.

It was eventually forced to admit that this record did exist and that its content corroborated the Kenyan’s allegations of widespread acts of murder and torture by the colonial authorities.

As a first step, the Foreign Office gave its colossal record a secret name, the Special Collections.

Later, the justice secretary, Chris Gayling was asked to sign a blanket authorisation that was said to place the files on a 12-month legal footing.

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Finally, a written statement about “public records” by the Foreign Office was quietly issued in the Commons on a Friday afternoon.

The collection was handed over to the UK National Archives (TNA) and opened to the public in 2013.

It is held at TNA under the reference FCO 141.

Although the material is now generally available to the public, there is still a lot of bureaucracy that those who wish to access the records have to contend with.

It is not an easy journey and there is still an air of secrecy and security protocols.

Unfortunately, like cream, the truth always rises to the top!