For half a century the British state said that what happened in Kenya's detention camps in the 1950s was either exaggerated or not its responsibility. Then a handful of elderly Kenyans brought a case in the High Court in London, and a hidden archive was found in a high-security government compound in Buckinghamshire. This is how the Mau Mau story finally reached a British courtroom.
The Mau Mau uprising began in the early 1950s among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru peoples of central Kenya, who had lost much of their best land to white settlers. Its fighters, who called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, attacked settlers and, far more often, Africans who sided with the colonial government. Britain's response, the "Emergency" of 1952 to 1960, was one of the most brutal counter-insurgencies of the end of empire: mass detention without trial, forced resettlement, torture and more than a thousand hangings.
For decades the official British story was one of savage terrorists put down by firm but fair government. That story began to fall apart in the 2000s, thanks to historians' research, to survivors who were still alive, and above all to a legal case brought in London. In June 2013 the British government expressed its "sincere regret" for torture in Kenya and paid £19.9 million to 5,228 survivors. It was the first settlement of its kind for any former colony.
From the early twentieth century, the colonial government of Kenya reserved the cool, fertile highlands around Mount Kenya and the Rift Valley for European settlers. Africans who had farmed there were pushed into overcrowded "reserves" or stayed on as squatters, working settlers' farms for the right to live on what had been their land. By the 1940s land hunger, forced labour, taxes, racial pass laws and the return of African soldiers from the Second World War had created an explosive situation.
Moderate politicians such as Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya African Union pressed for reform through legal means and got nowhere. A more radical, secret movement grew up underneath, bound by oaths. The British called it "Mau Mau", a name whose origin is still disputed. Many of its members preferred the name Kenya Land and Freedom Army, which says what the struggle was about.
On 20 October 1952 Governor Sir Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency. The same night, police and troops arrested Kenyatta and other leaders. Kenyatta was convicted at Kapenguria in 1953 of managing Mau Mau, in a trial widely regarded as rigged, and imprisoned. British army battalions, the King's African Rifles, settler units and a large African "Home Guard" fought the guerrillas in the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya.
The violence went both ways, and it is not honest to pretend otherwise. Mau Mau fighters killed 32 European settler civilians and a much larger number of Africans, especially those seen as loyalists. In the Lari massacre of March 1953, a Mau Mau attack killed dozens of loyalist villagers. But the scale was overwhelmingly on one side. Official British figures counted more than 11,000 Mau Mau killed; other estimates are much higher. More than a thousand Kenyans were hanged under emergency laws, many for offences short of murder.
In April 1954, during Operation Anvil, almost the entire Kikuyu population of Nairobi was rounded up and screened. In the countryside, around a million people were forced into fortified "villages" surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers. Dedan Kimathi, the movement's best-known commander, was captured in October 1956 and hanged on 18 February 1957. By then the military campaign was largely over, but the camps were still full.
The heart of the Emergency was not the forest war but the detention system. Suspects were moved through a "pipeline" of screening centres, works camps and detention camps, intended to make them confess their oaths and renounce the movement. Most were never charged with any crime. Estimates of how many passed through vary widely, from official figures of around 80,000 at any one time to the Kenya Human Rights Commission's estimate of about 160,000. Historians such as Caroline Elkins, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Imperial Reckoning, and David Anderson, in Histories of the Hanged, documented systematic beatings, starvation, sexual violence, castration and killings.
Officials in Nairobi and ministers in London knew more than they admitted. When missionaries, a few colonial officers and some MPs raised the alarm in the 1950s, the government denied it. It took the files and the courts, half a century later, to prove how much was known.
At Hola camp in eastern Kenya, guards were ordered to force "hard-core" detainees to work. On 3 March 1959 they beat them, and eleven men died. The authorities first claimed they had died from drinking contaminated water. When the truth came out, it caused a political storm in London. In the House of Commons, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made one of the most famous speeches of his career, arguing that Britain could not apply one standard of conduct in Africa and another at home. No one was ever prosecuted for the deaths.
Hola marked the beginning of the end. The camps were run down, the Emergency was lifted in January 1960, and Britain accepted that Kenya would become independent under African majority rule. Kenyatta, once called a "leader unto darkness and death" by a colonial governor, became Kenya's first prime minister and then president. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963.
As colonies became independent, British officials carried out what was later called Operation Legacy. Documents that might embarrass Britain or its loyal supporters were either destroyed or secretly shipped home. The Kenya files that were kept went into storage in Britain. From 1994 they sat at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, a high-security government communications site. Kenya asked for its records back more than once over the decades. For years the Foreign Office told researchers and courts that no such files existed.
In 2011, during the Mau Mau litigation, it had to admit that it held about 1,500 Kenya files at Hanslope. It then emerged that the "migrated archives" from 37 former colonies were there too, in a far larger store of documents held in breach of the Public Records Act. The files are now open at The National Archives in Kew, as series FCO 141, and they confirmed much of what the survivors and historians had said.
In 2009 the London law firm Leigh Day, working with the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, brought claims in the High Court on behalf of five elderly Kenyans, among them Paulo Nzili, Wambugu wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara. They described beatings, castration and sexual assault in the camps. The government argued that liability had passed to Kenya at independence and that the claims were too old. In 2011 and again in 2012 the High Court allowed the case to go ahead, in part because the newly found files provided the evidence.
On 6 June 2013 Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons that the government recognised that Kenyans had been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration, and that it sincerely regretted that these abuses had taken place. It agreed a settlement worth £19.9 million, covering 5,228 claimants and legal costs, and paid for a memorial in Nairobi. That averages out at a few thousand pounds per survivor. The government still denied legal liability and said the settlement set no precedent for other claims. Kenyan veterans gathered at the British High Commission in Nairobi to hear the statement read out.
On 12 September 2015 the British-funded memorial was unveiled at Freedom Corner in Nairobi's Uhuru Park, before thousands of veterans. It shows a Mau Mau fighter, with dreadlocks and a homemade rifle, receiving food from a woman, the supporters without whom the fighters could not have survived. A plaque describes it as a symbol of reconciliation. Since 2007 a bronze statue of Dedan Kimathi has also stood on Kimathi Street in central Nairobi. The movement had remained officially banned in Kenya until 2003. Jomo Kenyatta's own governments had not wanted to celebrate it.
Other claims followed and failed. A group claim on behalf of tens of thousands more Kenyans was ruled out of time by the High Court in 2018. In October 2023, during his state visit to Kenya, King Charles III said that the wrongdoings of the past were a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret, and he visited the Kariokor war cemetery and met veterans and relatives. Kenyan human rights groups said that regret was not enough and called for a full apology and reparations, including the return of land.
Britain has no memorial to the victims of the Emergency. The memorial is in Nairobi, paid for by the British government. In Britain, these are the places where this history can be followed:
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The settler colony, the railway, the White Highlands and the road to 1963.
Another argument about how Britain remembers its empire.
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Another long fight to make Britain face what it took.
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