The British must not rewrite the history of the Mau Mau revolt

Mau Mau suspects in Nairobi, 1952. Brutality against Kenyans outraged 
the British as much as it did the AfricansPicture: Getty Images

By Tim Stanley7:51PM BST 06 Jun 2013        Our role as the colonial power in the 1950s uprising in Kenya was shameful, but not deserving of compensation

The Government has announced that Kenyans abused by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s will receive compensation totalling £20 million, and that it regrets the “suffering and injustice”. Be of no doubt: these people went through terrible things. Wambuga Wa Nyingi, a former detainee at the bloody camp Hola, who says he was not a Mau Mau fighter, claims that he was “battered on the back of my head and around my neck repeatedly with a club”. His unconscious body was mistaken for a corpse and dumped in a room with 11 murdered men. Mr Nyingi slept among the dead for two days before he was discovered.

But before we express regret or say sorry for anything, we have to make sure that we entirely understand what we’re talking about. In the case of the Mau Mau uprising, only one side of the story tends to be told – a story that serves a particular political purpose. It’s the tale of an evil imperial power that used internment and torture to keep hold of a beautiful African colony that only ever wanted to be free. It is a fantasy version of history.

The Mau Mau was a terrorist organisation, dominated by Kenya’s major ethnic grouping, the Kikuyu. Kikuyu extremists were furious about what they saw as the theft of their land by white settlers, so they launched a war from the jungle against the colonial authorities. Crucially, like many terrorist groups they enforced discipline by declaring that anyone who was not with them was against them – which meant they also declared war on the vast majority of moderate Africans who did not share their demands. Something that began as a nationalist uprising quickly turned into an ethnic civil war.

Arguably the most famous victims of the Mau Mau were the white settler Ruck family, who lived in the Rift Valley just north of Nairobi. In January 1953, Mau Mau fighters stormed their remote farm house, and hacked to death Roger and Esmee Ruck and their six-year-old son, Michael. The images of bloodied teddy bears and broken toy trains strewn across Michael’s bedroom floor inflamed British opinion. But the murder of a white settler family was actually very rare during the uprising: the Mau Mau preferred to kill Africans. In total, they murdered at least 1,800 fellow Kikuyus and Africans from other tribes, compared with just 200 British soldiers and 32 European settlers. African women and children were frequent targets.

One story that communicates the full horror of this war is the Lari massacre of March 1953. Lari was an area populated by Kikuyu who had refused to take the Mau Mau oath and so were regarded as traitors. The Mau Mau descended upon the community like something from hell. Some were slashed to death, some burned alive in their huts; many were maimed for life. Pregnant women were disembowelled, children were murdered. The massacre claimed 120 lives and bitter memories of the event still divide the Lari area today. It is one of many reasons why post-independence Kenya refused to recognise Mau Mau claims on ancestral lands and banned it as an organisation.

This state-sanctioned silence lasted until the 21st century, when a change in ruling parties permitted those Kenyans who so wished to commemorate the Mau Mau. Thereafter, its name has become something of a political totem. As in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, reviving the “horrors” of British rule has become a favourite tactic of populists seeking a demon to attack or to blame for failed policies.

Yet the British were not simply monsters. Their handling of the crisis was hastily improvised, often mistaken, and put power into the hands of sadists. More than 100,000 Kikuyu were interrogated for presumed sympathies with the Mau Mau and “processed” through brutal labour camps. At the Hola camp, victims were allegedly castrated and burned alive. Newly released documents confirm historians’ worst fears: the British knew this was going on and chose to turn a blind eye to it.

But this was not part of a systematic campaign of brutality against Kenyans. On the contrary, the British tried to win over popular support by pushing for land reform, creating trade unions and setting a timetable for independence. Hola disgusted the British just as much as it did the Africans: in Parliament, an outraged Enoch Powell told the House that the British “cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards”. After an inquiry, the camp was closed down.

Nevertheless, had Britain failed to be tough, had it run for the hills at the first massacre of settlers or moderate Africans, it might have left behind either a savage civil war or an evil dictatorship. It is right that people mistreated by governments should have the opportunity to seek apology and redress. But we have to avoid two pitfalls. The first is that the British tendency to feel guilty even when we are innocent compels us to surrender to almost every claim on the public’s heart or wallet. It is, for example, bizarre that British civilian prisoners of the Japanese during the Second World War have tried to sue Britain for compensation rather than Japan.

The second concern is that we assist in the rewriting of history to suit a political purpose. Britain has done many bad things in its past and there’s nothing wrong with regretting that. But the narrative of history doesn’t always divide into good vs evil, oppressor vs oppressed. Sometimes it’s far more complicated than that, and we should avoid a tendency to rush to place or accept blame. The Mau Mau uprising is not a simplistic morality tale: it’s the story of one democracy ineptly managing the emergence of another.