British government admits colonial brutality in Kenya

After 48 years of secrecy, hidden colonial files depicting horrific accounts of brutality at the hands of British authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion were finally revealed.


The British rounded up thousands of Kenyans during the uprising.

According to a memo written by a British foreign office official, 1,500 sensitive government files were loaded onto a plane just nine days before Kenya attained independence, The Times reported. The files "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government, might embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others," the memo read.

And now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with dogged obstructionism, claims it cannot be held accountable for events done during a "different age" in the colonial era. But Britain purposely kept the files secret in the past because the UK government was ashamed of the atrocities carried out then, under the colonial administration, just as they are today.

Given the horrific accounts, it is no wonder the UK foreign office preferred to conceal the records. "It was a nasty, brutish war in which arrogance, racism and sheer bloody-mindedness drove the British to behave badly. Very badly," said Oxford History Professor David Anderson, who had originally realized the files were missing and sought their retrieval.



Although the British conducted counter-insurgency measures elsewhere, the Kenya case stands out for its intensity, with around 100,000 people detained without trial and 1,090 hanged for alleged 'terrorist offenses', Anderson said.

The documents procurement was also helped after four Kenyan survivors of British detention camps sued the Foreign and Commonwealth Office last year for alleged torture, even castration, during the colonial government’s attempts to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.



This may be the main reason why Britain kept the files hidden. The case filed by the four Kenyan survivors is not a class action suit and they have not sued for damages.

Nevertheless, the British foreign office may fear such token compensation for these four could unleash a flood of further claims by hundreds of former Mau Mau war veterans still alive in Kenya. Lord Howell of Guildford, the minister of state in the foreign office, told the British press that the foreign office holds 8,000 files from 37 former British administrations.

Source: Africa Review

 

According to the Guardian, four elderly Kenyans who claim they were variously whipped, beaten, sexually abused and castrated while detained by the colonial government in the 1950s are suing for compensation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/07/kenyans-mau-mau-compensation-case

The survivors of the emergency regime of detention camps were "screened" - or violently interrogated - in order to extract confessions. One claimant, the court was told, witnessed the clubbing to death of 11 prison inmates. The British governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was said to have been present at beatings.

The judge, Mr Justice McCombe, heard Mutua and Nzili had been castrated, Nyingi was beaten unconscious at Hola prison in 1959, at which 11 men were clubbed to death and Mara had been subjected to appalling sexual abuse.

http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/DN...mpire+/-/957860/1141948/-/fvcxt5/-/index.html

The statement of claim drawn up by the law firm of Leigh Day and Company, which represents the four Kenyans, says that detainees were subjected to "sodomy, the insertion of sand into men's anuses and the insertion of glass bottles filled with hot liquid into women's vaginas". In many cases detainees died.

 

Obama's grandfather 'tortured by the British' during Mau Mau rebellion

Barack Obama's grandfather was imprisoned for two years and tortured by white British soldiers during Kenya's bloody fight for independence, his family have said. Hussein Onyango Obama, the U.S. President-Elect's paternal grandfather, worked as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He became involved in Kenya's independence movement, which spiralled into a terrifying uprising by guerilla fighters known by the mysterious name 'Mau Mau'.

Hussein Onyango was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high security prison as the British struggled to quell one of Africa's bloodiest and most desperate rebellions against colonial rule.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor...ortured-British-Kenyas-Mau-Mau-rebellion.html

 

Some used the excuse of Obama replacing the Churchill bust at the White House because of his grandfather.