Kenyan Land and Freedom Army Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi after he was captured by the British in 1956. Kimathi was executed by the colonialists in 1957. The survivors of the war are seeking reparations from the British., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Britain’s head in the sand
August 1, 2013 Opinion & Analysis
Southern Times
Elliot Ross
EVEN after the Mau Mau case the British will never stop kidding themselves about the crimes of Empire Torture comes cheap for the old imperial powers. Just £2 670 was paid out in June to each of the 5 228 elderly Kenyans judged eligible for compensation as the British government finally settled a case it has attempted to block every step of the way (between 2005 and 2011 it insisted that officials had “misplaced” or “forgotten about” a secret archive of 2 000 boxes of files detailing late colonial abuses from all over the world).
With characteristic cynicism, the government briefed journalists that there would be an apology, and then never made one.
Despite prominent reporting of that phantom apology, there has been merely an expression of “regret” from William Hague, and an insistence that “a line be drawn” beneath this awkward national embarrassment.
Unfortunately, at least in the British national consciousness, it looks like that is exactly what is happening.
Our colonial torturers, like those who survived our abuses, are old and dying (like the Scot Ian Henderson CBE, torturer-in-chief in Kenya in the 1950s, later nicknamed the “Butcher of Bahrain”, who died in June).
If a meaningful public reckoning with the crimes of our empire is ever to take place while the last of the perpetrators and the victims are still with us, then it has to happen now.
Yet even in the face of overwhelming documentary and testimonial evidence of the scale and brutality of our imperial sadism, this reckoning is simply not taking place.
Many of us Britain have our heads so stuffed with jingoism that we can’t make any sense of this part of our history, and so choose to ignore it.
We know from our official reports that we roasted people alive.
We know that the salient feature of the way that we tortured was our preference for overtly sexual techniques.
One of the five who brought the case, Jane Muthoni Mara, had bottles filled with boiling water pushed into her vagina (a technique that was not at all uncommon).
Like many of the men awarded compensation, Paolo Nzili and Ndiku Mutua were castrated.
As a society, we have been nowhere near appalled enough by these revelations.
I find myself at a loss to know what it would take for us to properly face up to our past.
Whether in Kenya half-a-century ago or in Iraq this past decade (Baha Mousa’s murder bears striking similarities to the kinds of abuse recorded in the Mau Mau files), we just can’t seem to take our history of torture seriously.
The national frenzy for vacuous expressions of “support” for “Our Boys” — regardless of who they are fighting or how — has created a public sphere in which anything but the most craven deference for the British armed forces is taken as a traitorous slur.
Blair’s wars have somehow deepened and popularised our collective post-colonial melancholia.
We have a national fairytale that Mau Mau was really about the rape of white women and white infants butchered in their beds.
That cover story is proving hard to budge from the popular imagination, and somehow “Mau Mau” remains a shorthand expression describing their brutality, not ours.
The BBC made an excellent documentary, “Kenya: White Terror”, over a decade ago now, and it deserves a prime-time re-run now that the case has been settled (don’t miss the segment from 32 minutes in, where former prison official Trevor Gavaghan silently eyeballs the interviewer when confronted about his abuses).
Cristina Odone’s unpardonable column in the Daily Telegraph (newspaper of middle England, older expatriates, military history enthusiasts and colonial nostalgists, which was also the first to report on the case back in 2005) was typical of the scornful reaction to the compensation claims two years ago.
Odone characterised the claimants as ungrateful natives, merely scrounging from the British as usual, and their lawyers as engaging in a kind of historical ambulance-chasing.
I know a little about the Mau Mau because my parents lived in Kenya just as their reign of terror drew to an end.
Local farmers, black and white, lived in fear for their lives during the 1950s and into 1960: rapes, pillaging, arson and torture were routine.
Although they are now being reinvented as freedom fighters, my parents remember that when the British colonial authorities tried to stamp out the Mau Mau rebellion, many native Kenyans were as grateful as their adoptive compatriots (or evil white imperialists, whichever you prefer) proof that the colonial government, with the explicit support of the Westminster authorities, carried out systematic human rights abuses is yet to surface.
Leigh & Day (the law firm) have spotted what some might feel is a lucrative niche: in our self-hating culture, where the Prime Minister felt he should publicly apologise for the legacy of the British Empire, the “victims” of colonial rule — deserving or not — will have the blessing of public opinion in their fights for compensation.
Any chance of an apology from the Mau Mau?
Odone hasn’t written on the matter since.
Neither has there been a cheep from our dunce of an Education Secretary Michael Gove, who gave the job of overhauling our namby-pamby history curriculum to noted bigot Niall Ferguson, whose ultra-thin skin is of course matched only by his mindless rah-rah enthusiasm for the British Empire.
Our history syllabuses have in fact been in need of reform for a long time — we learn about Nazi Germany and the European theatre of the Second World War ad nauseam, and very little else, which is one reason why young people in Britain are as likely as their grandparents to suffer from our weird national obsession with the Nazis (and therefore with our own role as history’s perennial heroes).
The American media hasn’t paid much attention to the case either (though David Anderson wrote a great column in the New York Times on some of the wider ramifications).
Barack Obama hasn’t said a word, despite journalists like the Guardian’s superb Ian Cobain reporting that Obama’s own grandfather was tortured by the British:
“Among the detainees who suffered severe mistreatment was Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barack Obama.
“According to his widow, British soldiers forced pins into his fingernails and buttocks and squeezed his testicles between metal rods.”
Who knows?
Perhaps President Obama has his own reasons for not wanting to say too much about the torture and extrajudicial killing of “military age males” classed as anti-colonial insurgents.
Never mind that he is himself the beneficiary of decades of black radical struggle in America that took inspiration from the Mau Mau’s fight against the British.
History sometimes seems to move very fast.
Africa is A Country
Confessions of a British terrorist
Here’s the full text of an extraordinary letter by David Larder, the first registered British conscientious objector against colonial warfare, recently published in the Guardian following the settlement of the Mau Mau case:
I doubt if all the secrets of the Kikuyu uprising will ever be known.
Young soldiers were brainwashed into believing they were fighting in Kenya for our glorious empire.
Sixty years ago I was there as a 19-year-old national service officer.
I am delighted that the government has given some token compensation for Kenyans who suffered torture.
I still suffer from memories of the British apartheid system there and numerous instances of arbitrary killing and brutality by British forces, Kenya police and Kenyan African Rifles.
In reality we protected land-grabbing British farmers and enriched UK companies.
Young troops were encouraged to shoot any African on sight in certain areas. Prize money was offered by senior officers for every death.
The brains of one young black lad I shot with no warning (by orders) landed on my chest.
He had no weapons, only a piece of the Bible and part of an English-language primer in his pocket.
Before I burned his body near the farm where he had been working, I was ordered to cut off his hands, which I did, and put them in my ammunition pouches, as we’d run out of fingerprinting kits.
Of course, he was recorded as “a terrorist”.
I was told to shoot down unarmed women in the jungle because they were carrying food to the so-called “Mau Mau” — a word they never called themselves.
The whole of this Kenyan tragedy was predictable.
Although Kenyan black troops had fought for the British in the Second World War, they were rewarded with their land being taken away, no Press or trade union freedom, suppression of political movements and slave-like conditions of work, which I witnessed.
Yes, some black Kenyans did turn on others for not rising up against such indignities.
But many of those who were killed were local chiefs and their supporters, who had co-operated with hugely rich white farmers.
However, the revenge killings by the colonial authorities were totally disproportionate — with bombing raids, burning of villages and the forced movement of thousands of families onto poorer land, in the name of “protection”.
Very few white people were killed by Africans.
But it wasn’t just the black people who suffered. I remember telling my company commander that a young soldier whose medical records showed he was only fit for clerical work should not go on a military exercise.
I was laughed at. He was forced to go. After three hours’ steep climb through jungle, he died in my arms, probably from a heart attack.
Because I remonstrated, I was ordered to take a donkey and carry his body, which kept slipping off, for nearly a week to deposit him at HQ on the other side of the Aberdare mountains. His mother was told he was a hero who’d died on active service.
I was sickened by my experiences. I disobeyed orders and was court-martialled and dismissed from the service. I actually thought I was going to be shot.
Stripped of my uniform, I was told to make my own way home. Then I wrote to Bessie Braddock, the Labour MP, and was put back in my uniform to fly home in a RAF plane.
After campaigning around the country for Kenyan Independence, I received new call-up papers, because I had not finished my national service.
I then decided to stand trial and become the first British man allowed to be registered as a conscientious objector against colonial warfare.
History has proved me right.
With these expressions of “regret” by our Foreign Secretary, I now feel vindicated for being pilloried as a “conchie”.
—Southern Times
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