Vol. 75/No. 18      May 9, 2011

Britain ruled Kenya from 1895 until the country won independence in 1963. The British settled by stealing land from Kikuyu, Masai, and other ethnic groups. They forced people into “reserves” akin to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa and enforced their laws—much in the same way as the white supremacists in Pretoria—through an identity pass system.

Encouraged by anticolonial struggles in India and elsewhere, a movement for “land and freedom” began to grow among the Kikuyu people after World War II. In 1952 independence fighters, named the “Mau Mau” by the imperialists, launched a guerrilla struggle against British rule. For two years 20,000 men and women fought the British Empire from the woods armed with homemade weapons.

Official UK figures put the death toll in the eight-year British offensive that followed at 11,000, including 1,090 hanged by the colonial administration. The Kenya Human Rights Commission says 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured, or maimed and 160,000 held in detention camps.

In their lawsuit, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, and Jane Muthoni Mara, all in their 70s and 80s, detail the abuse they received from British troops. Mutua and Nzili were castrated. Mutua was left to die but was rescued by independence fighters. Nzili was tortured by a method similar to water-boarding. Nyingi was beaten unconscious during the 1959 Hola camp massacre where 11 were clubbed to death. Mara described how she was sexually abused.

Government lawyers want the case dismissed. In a combination of imperial arrogance and legal sophistry, they argue that with the declaration of independence in 1963 all responsibilities of the colonial government were passed over to the new, independent Kenyan government.

As the case has unfolded the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been forced to admit to the existence of hundreds of boxes of documents smuggled out of Kenya on the eve of independence. One of these is a 1956 letter in which Provincial Commissioner C.M. Johnson asks Kenya’s attorney general to prevent the prosecution of abuses because otherwise, he said, “each and every one of us, from the Governor downwards, may be in danger of removal from public service.”

Britain’s crimes in Kenya were not reported in the capitalist press at the time. But the Dec. 19, 1955, Militant reported: “One of the bloodiest and most barbaric massacres in history is taking place in Kenya—and, contrary to the picture painted by the U.S. press, the savagery is being committed by the ‘civilized’ British imperialists and not by the Kikuyu people, who, rather, are the victims.”  
 
 
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