"Imperial reckoning" - The untold story of Britain's gulag in Kenya

Deaths of Kenyan Kikuyu during the late 1950's at the hands of the British colonial government numbered 100,000 or more .(The official total given was 11,000) They were part of or sympathetic to the Mau Mau resistance movement to recover Kikuyu land taken by British settlers. In camps in the `Pipeline' and in villages contained by barbed wire, men women and children were tortured humiliated starved and killed at the hands of police and troops and their `loyalist' Kikuyu allies.
The resultant division among the Kikuyu between Mau Mau supporters and government loyalists was and remains deep. The Mau Mau, although they lost the war, so discredited the British and the settlers by their resistance that within 4 years of having to admit defeat, (circa 1959) they saw Jomo Kenyatta, a loyalist at heart, sworn in as first president of an independent Kenya.(1963)
The British saw very late that they had to give over political independence to retain land and economic advantages. They handed over to those who had been loyal. They were richly rewarded with land and positions, while ex- Mau Mau got no compensation or even credit for their role. Indeed the extent of their suffering has never been officialy admitted by the Brtish or Kenyan governments, nor has any effort at reconciliation or compensation ever been attempted.
The last page of the book (which follows) is an extremely poignant comment from a Kikuyu woman, saying that forgiveness or reconciliation cannot come until the extent of the suffering is known and can be talked about openly and mourned by the children of the sufferers. This book is a major step in the direction of making it known.
p.355,6.
"How is it possible to evaluate the impact that this war had on the hundreds of thousands of men and women who were detained in the camps and villages of British colonial Kenya? There is no record of how many people died as a result of torture, hard labor, sexual abuse, malnutrition, and starvation. If the British did keep records of these deaths, they were destroyed long ago.

We can make an informed evaluation of the official statistic eleven thousand Mau Mau killed by reviewing the historical evidence we now know. Former detainees and villagers recall thousands dying; others remember being assigned to burial parties that disposed of hundreds of corpses in any given day; missionaries wrote of widespread famine. Kenya's medical officers described deaths from contagious diseases and malnutrition. There were countless letters written by detainees during the Emergency, describing tortures and deaths; and there were the independent findings by people like Arthur Young, his assistant, Duncan McPherson, and Barbara Castle - all of which revealed unspeakable brutalities and murders.

There are also the recollections of Asian advocates, men like Fit de Souza, who remember representing thousands of detainees, none of whom they ever saw again. "By the end I would say there were several hundred thousand killed," de Souza later reflected. "One hundred easily though more like two to three hundred thousand. All these people just never came back when it was over."2
Of course, we will never know exactly how many Kikuyu died during the last years of British colonial rule in Kenya. But does this matter? The impact of the detention camps and villages go well beyond statistics. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have quietly lived with the damage - physical, psychological, and economic - that was inflicted upon them.
They were not without their advocates in Kenyatta's new government - MPs like Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, and J. M. Kariuki who demanded the detainees be remembered and who insisted they be given compensation or at least consideration for their contributions and losses during the Mau Mau struggle. But over time these protagonists for the Mau Mau past were either pushed aside or, in the case of J.M. Kariuki, assassinated. For Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel T. arap Moi, Mau Mau was to remain buried - it was a moment in Kenya's past that would divide more than it would unite.
To this day there has never been any form of official reconciliation in Kenya. There are no monuments for Mau Mau; children are not taught about this part of their nation's past in school; few speak about it in the privacy of their own homes; and, with the exception of the relatives of the Hola massacre victims, there has never been any kind of financial consideration given to those who lost family members in the camps and villages or property to the local loyalists. Some men and women lost the use of their limbs, others their minds, as a result of the years they spent behind the wire, though neither the former colonial government nor the new independent government did anything to help them piece their lives back together.

Insofar as there has been any successful social rebuilding, the burden has been shouldered by local Christian churches. But they too have insisted that bygones remain bygones. If you ask former Mau Mau adherents today if they get along with their loyalist neighbors, the response is generally the same as Mary Mbote's. "We are Christians, and I do not hate them,' she told me. When I probed a bit further, she expressed a sentiment shared by many other former villagers and detainees. "I hate them; I hate them for what they did to us," she said. "We all hate them and will not speak to them if we see them outside of church. We even refuse to go to their funerals, which is against the church; but they didn't go to the funerals of our husbands and children and parents when they killed them. Aye, I despise them." She then paused before continuing. "You know," she finally said to me, "this will only change when everyone knows what happened to us. Maybe then there will be some peace once our people are able to mourn in public and our children will know how hard we fought and how much we lost to make Kenya free for them."