There are some who would like empire to be on trial, but what matters now is that the British government accepts responsibility
Three frail, elderly men and one woman will this morning continue their high court fight for compensation for the pain and suffering they suffered in detention camps during the Mau Mau uprising. They should be allowed to return home before the week is out with the heartfelt apologies of the government ringing in their ears. For the past 60 years Westminster has tried to evade its responsibility for the events of the Kenya emergency. It is time to stop wriggling and come clean.
So much easier said than done, of course. For there is something peculiarly chilling about the way colonial officials behaved, most notoriously but not only in Kenya, within a decade of the liberation of the concentration camps and the return of thousands of emaciated British prisoners of war from the Pacific. One courageous judge in Nairobi explicitly drew the parallel: Kenya's Belsen, he called one camp.
The uprising by a secret sect, the Mau Mau – impoverished Kikuyu demanding the return of their fertile lands – led to the deaths of maybe 20,000 men and women, many after torture and internment. Thousands more died in the violence that tore apart Kikuyu families on opposing sides of the dispute.
With the tacit consent of ministers at Westminster, a British administration in colonial Kenya chose to behave as if Africans had no human rights. Rattled by a handful of murderous attacks on planters, they tried to face down the rebels using the empire's default setting of brutality. Castration, sodomy, rape and beatings were everyday weapons in its unremitting defence of the rights of the white settlers. So much, so sadly familiar. But what is clear from the cursory scrutiny that historians, led by Oxford's David Anderson, have so far made of literally thousands of documents whose existence has only just been revealed, is that there was no doubt in the perpetrators' minds of how their actions would appear to posterity: among the itemised beatings and torture are repeated references to the risk of being caught. They knew their actions were indefensible. The government is not challenging the claims. Rather, it is seeking to find a legal pretext to avoid responsibility.
There are some who would like the empire itself to be on trial. But what matters most now is that the British government accepts responsibility. Without an apology, there is an enduring sense of complicity in the immoral actions of a racist administration that wantonly trashed a fundamental code. It reads across to other wars, in other countries and other continents. It legitimises the actions of other governments. And the longer its lawyers wrangle in the courts, the more shame it brings.