“I don’t think the trial really changes that.”, Susan L Carruthers feels the same about her own criticism of Britain’s Gulag. Maina told Elkins she had been beaten unconscious by Kikuyu collaborating with the British. Veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion are demanding billions of Kenyan shillings in compensation from the British government for war crimes committed against them. Blatant dishonesty, writes David M Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war. “There is ample evidence even in the few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been systematic torture of detainees,” he wrote in July 2011. British soldiers assist police searching for Mau Mau members, Karoibangi, Kenya, 1954. n 6 April 2011, the debate over Caroline Elkins’s work shifted to the Royal Courts of Justice in London. It was a tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups. Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files, encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. But the book polarised scholars. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Following the rebellion, the British government did implement reforms. LONDON — Britain has apologized and agreed to pay compensation to thousands of veterans of the Mau Mau nationalist uprising in Kenya, which was brutally suppressed by the British colonial government in the 1950s. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. He ruled that the claim could move forward. Incidents of violence against prisoners were described as isolated events. Although Mau Mau was effectively crushed by the end of 1956, it was not until the First Lancaster House Conference, in January 1960, that native Kenyan majority rule was established and the period of colonial transition to independence initiated. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. Between 1952 and 1956, the combined Kenyan tribes— united for the first time and calling themselves the Mau Mau—launched a violent guerilla war against the occupying British forces. Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and hyperbolic, Elkins can sound more Central Jersey than Harvard Yard. She drew on them in two more witness statements. What she didn’t know was that the lawsuit would expose a secret: a vast colonial archive that had been hidden for half a century. In prying open that story, Elkins would meet younger Kikuyu who didn’t know their parents or grandparents had been detained; Kikuyu who didn’t know the reason they had been forbidden to play with their neighbour’s children was that the neighbour had been a collaborator who raped their mother. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice. The Mau Mau committed a range of brutal crimes, particularly when they were at their strongest between late 1952 and august 1953. “We’re a different breed. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says. The lawyers were done fighting, but the academics were not. Caroline Elkins with Gitu Wa Kahengeri, secretary general of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, in Nairobi, Kenya, 2013. lkins knew her findings would be explosive. Britain’s Colonial Office had endorsed it. Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising will receive payouts totalling £20m, as the UK expresses regret for the abuses. A cache of papers had come to light that documented Britain’s torture and mistreatment of detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion. His Histories of the Hanged is the best book to appear on the Kenya Emergency so far. The Mau Mau case has fuelled two scholarly debates, one old and one new. Events moved quickly from there. In court, lawyers representing the British government tried to have the Mau Mau case tossed out. The overwhelming majority of the Mau Mau fighters and of their supporters, who formed the “passive wing,” came from the Kikuyu ethnic group in Central Province. Help us sue the British government for torture. Although proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire. For example, three departments had maintained files for each of the reported 80,000 detainees. She met people such as Salome Maina, who had been accused of supplying arms to the Mau Mau. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”. The evidence backing this account comes from Justice McCombe, whose 2011 decision had stressed the substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, a computer-supplies salesman. The Mau Mau uprising had long fascinated scholars. The massacre generated retaliatory attacks by Home Guard, settler, and colonial forces. He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. “This is the moment where literally my footnotes are on trial.”. They argued that Britain could not be held responsible because liability for any colonial abuses had devolved to the Kenyan government upon independence. As colonial Britain unleashed terrible violence in Kenya, Canada strengthened the British military. Elkins’s fieldwork brought to the surface stories repressed by Kenya’s policy of official amnesia. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. After the country gained independence in 1963, its first prime minister and president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, declared repeatedly that Kenyans must “forgive and forget the past”. Back in London, Foreign Office lawyers conceded that the elderly Kenyan claimants had suffered torture during the Mau Mau rebellion. Enter Elkins. During the British Empire’s colonial occupation of Kenya, which began in 1895, a new sense of Kenyan nationalism emerged. “That’s exactly what you would expect of a colonial administration, or any government in particular, including our own,” laughs Wm Roger Louis. After high school, Princeton University recruited her to play soccer, and she considered a career in the sport. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. At least two scholars have noted that these new files corroborated important aspects of the oral testimony in Britain’s Gulag, such as the systematic beating and torture of detainees at specific detention camps. And the story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into controversy. This helped contain the hatred between Kikuyu who joined the Mau Mau revolt and those who fought alongside the British. Thousands of elderly Kenyans, who claim British colonial forces mistreated, raped and tortured them during the Mau Mau Uprising (1951-1960), have launched a £200m damages claim against the UK Government. She classifies fellow scholars as friends or enemies. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator. Britain’s Gulag opens by describing a “murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people” and ends with the suggestion that “between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for”, an estimate derived from Elkins’s analysis of census figures. Sep 29, 2015. Others branded her a self-aggrandising crusader whose overstated findings had relied on sloppy methods and dubious oral testimonies. Mau Mau fighters raped, castrated and beaten in Kenya's uprising against Britain get £14million compensation but no apology. “That’s not how history works.”. The British, declaring a state of emergency in October 1952, proceeded to attack the movement along two tracks. But for years clues had existed that Britain had also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to be left in the hands of successor governments. She stumbled on to files about an all-female Mau Mau detention camp called Kamiti, kindling her curiosity. The evidence was insufficient. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees. That fight took place in a system of detention camps. Why do so few people know about the atrocities of empire? Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages. Elkins was also accused of sensationalism, a charge that figured prominently in a fierce debate over her mortality figures. The largely ignored suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the psychological warfare employed by the British Government paint a bleak picture for Theresa May’s current Brexit negotiations in a “fake news” world.. When Elkins interviewed Kikuyu in their remote homes, they whispered. Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. Carruthers, a professor of history at Rutgers University at Newark, had cast doubt on Elkins’s self-dramatisation: her account of naively embarking on a journey of personal discovery, only to see the scales drop from her eyes. The Harvard historian Caroline Elkins stirred controversy with her work on the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. By George Monbiot. The British destroyed documents in Kenya – scholars knew that. Historians have documented atrocities on both sides in the Mau Mau conflict, which developed into a civil war as the colonialists recruited local … To secure a permanent position, she needed to make progress on her second book. But that thesis crumbled as Elkins dug into her research. Then a British court, which had every reason to sympathise with those critics, gave her the fair hearing academia never did. LONDON — Britain has apologized and agreed to pay compensation to thousands of veterans of the Mau Mau nationalist uprising in Kenya, which was brutally suppressed by the British colonial government in the 1950s. Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you. The claimants marching beside her were just like the people she had interviewed in Kenya. What is remarkable is that they survived at all. The facility occupies a 1970s-era concrete building beside a pond in Kew, in south-west London. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. In 1947, Cyril Radcliffe was tasked with drawing the border between India and the newly created state of Pakistan over the course of a single lunch. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. Mau Mau forest armies were largely broken by 1957 and in 1960 the emergency was declared over. Officially the number of Mau Mau and other rebels killed was 11,000, including 1,090 convicts hanged by the British administration. “There’s only so much ostracism one can plausibly claim if you won a Pulitzer and you became a full professor at Harvard – and this on the strength of the book that supposedly also made you outcast and vilified by all and sundry,” she says. Colonial authorities portrayed Mau Mau as a descent into savagery, turning its fighters into “the face of international terrorism in the 1950s”, as one scholar puts it. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. “I was supposed to be working on this next book,” she says. On 6 April 2011, the debate over Caroline Elkins’s work shifted to the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Crimes against humanity are not part of a civilising mission. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population - mainly women and children - and detained them in camps, which were overcrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. One of the alleged Mau Mau leaders, Jomo Kenyatta, became the first president of the new nation. The British government had claimed that so much time had passed since the Mau Mau campaign, it was no longer possible to reach a judgement on the accusations against it. “I knew I was right.”. You want to destroy the documents that can be incriminating.”, Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. The old one is about Caroline Elkins. The British government argued that any legal responsibility for the Mau Mau case had passed on to the Kenyan government along with independence, and that a … Abu Ghraib. But why aren't the Mau Mau butchers also in the dock? This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies. The files could easily have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without publicity. We’re a little tougher. One morning this spring, I accompanied Elkins as she visited the National Archives to look at those files. “Basically, I read document after document after document that proved the book to be correct,” Elkins says. Mr Hague also announced plans to support the construction of a … The old one is about Caroline Elkins. Jane Muthoni Mara, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Paulo Muoka Nzili celebrate the outcome of the Mau Mau veterans’ case at the high court, October 2012. he second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. The Legacy files could be passed on to Kenya. “They were simply told that no such collection of Kenyan documents existed, and that the British had removed nothing that they were not entitled to take with them in December 1963,” Anderson writes. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence. Elkins’s research had made the suit possible. The second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. Officially the number of Mau Mau and other rebels killed was 11,000, including 1,090 convicts hanged by the British administration. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure. To the historian and her allies, a single word summarises what happened in the High Court: vindication. If the Mau Mau litigants are successful (victory achieved) in their legal action, thousands more victims of British colonial crimes could very well follow suit. Each would receive about £3,800. Such acts have included the summary executions of prisoners of war and unarmed shipwreck survivors, the use of excessive force during the interrogation of POWs and enemy combatants , and the use of violence against civilian non … See more ideas about kenya, african history, history. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. The issue of archival erasure figures prominently in Elkins’s next book, a history of violence at the end of the British empire whose case studies will include Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Palestine and Northern Ireland. Mau Mau militants were guilty of numerous atrocities. Elkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. That “spoke directly to claims that, if you took out the oral evidence” in Britain’s Gulag, “the whole thing fell apart”, Elkins says. Mau Mau Atrocities. By 1957, the Mau Mau resistance had been effectively brought under control with the … “Good God,” she thought. General China, captured in January, was to write to the other terrorist leaders and suggest that nothing further could be gained from the conflict and that they should surrender to British troops waiting in the Aberdare foothills. The files within would be a reminder to historians of just how far a government would go to sanitise its past. Mau Mau Atrocities. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. Five of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire, Armed Afrikaners on the veldt near Ladysmith during the second Boer War, circa 1900, A young visitor looks at a painting depicting the Amritsar Massare at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, British lawyer and law lord Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe (1899 - 1977) at the Colonial Office, London, July 1956, Mau Mau suspects at one of the prison camps in 1953, {{#verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}} {{^verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}}, 5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire, Britons suffer 'historical amnesia' over empire, says author, overcrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations, the situation quickly descended into violence, Find Getaway Deals up to 15% off with this Booking.com discount, Debenhams discount code for 15% off selected luxury beauty products, Exclusive Ideal World promo code: 20% saving on fitness, Receive a £2 AliExpress promo code with the official App, Argos promo: 20% off selected LEGO toys this Easter. Mau Mau suspects being led away for questioning by police (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images) Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images, Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire, elp us sue the British government for torture. When she failed to provide information, she said, they raped her using a bottle filled with pepper and water. We always knew about the Mau Mau atrocities, of course: assiduously retailed to the British public by the authorities in Kenya through the Colonial Office, and … Lari Massacre. Its loyalists advocated violent resistance to British domination of the country. Then came Bagram. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. We were looked on as … The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s was a murky part of the British military's past. The British foreign secretary admitted last Thursday (06/06/2013) that: ... " on behalf of Her… By Tony Rennell for MailOnline Updated: 04:13 EST, 12 April 2011 95 View comments Partitioning of India. Why do so few people know about the atrocities of empire? YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, while 21 per cent regretted it happened. Maybe it was luck. But she eventually gained their trust. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. It could pave the way for … It was the Mau Mau, not colonial officers like me, who terrorised ordinary Kenyans. A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Approximately 74 people were killed and about 50 wounded. There was also representation in the movement from the Embu, Kamba, and Meru ethnic groups. In preparation, Elkins had distilled her book into a 78-page witness statement. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. The Mau Mau movement of Kenya was a nationalist armed peasant revolt against the British colonial state, its policies, and its local supporters. Felicitous timing helped. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. British lawyer and law lord Cyril Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe (1899 - 1977) … Jan 29, 2019 - Explore Mukuyu's board "Mau-mau" on Pinterest. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure. In 2011, four elderly Kenyans brought a celebrated legal case against the British government. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. The British were guilty of terrible atrocities during the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. This was a motif of articles on Elkins in the popular press. The Mau Mau case has fuelled two scholarly debates, one old and one new. The Mau Mau uprising which occurred in Kenya in the 1950s and 60s was plagued with violence. But among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”, He called Elkins “astonishingly disingenuous” for saying her project began as an attempt to show the success of Britain’s liberal reforms.