Kenya and the UK: grappling with the past
Charles III recently undertook a state visit to Kenya and went further than ever before in regretting colonial excesses: but we all have to have a grip on history
It must be odd for the king, now approaching his 75th birthday, to be doing “new” things. He spent 70 years as an apprentice, a whole lifetime, waiting for an opportunity which would be his so long as he survived. However, Charles III’s recent state visit to Kenya was his first trip to a Commonwealth country as monarch and head of the organisation.
Kenya matters to Britain. It was there in 1952 that Princess Elizabeth, on her way to Australia and New Zealand, heard the news that her father George VI had died and she was now queen. Her private secretary, Martin Charteris, eventually asked the princess what regnal name she would take. With a calm practicality which would become so familiar, she told him “My own, of course.”
Next month, Kenya will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its independence. It is to mark this impending milestone that the king is visiting the country where his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, resplendent in naval whites, represented the departing colonial power at the ceremony for independence on 12 December 1963. (Supposedly, as the Union flag was lowered, Philip leaned across to the prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta, and joked “It’s not too late to change your mind.”)
Kenya matters to Britain now as much as it ever has. Rishi Sunak is half-Kenyan: his father Yashvir was born and raised in Nairobi, moving to the United Kingdom in the 1960s. Ramdas Sunak, the prime minister’s grandfather, born in the Punjab, was a senior official for the colonial government; evidence has recently come to light, however, that he also helped to train Kenyans in guerrilla tactics in the run-up to the Mau Mau rebellion.
The Kenyan Emergency of 1952-60 goes to the heart of why the king’s state visit was so important and so sensitive. The insurgency known as Mau Mau began as violent disputes over land, and, although it certainly pitted Kenyan guerrillas against the British colonial authorities, it was not quite as simple as an anti-colonialist uprising.
In 1952, a Kikuyu chief who co-operated with the colonial government, Waruhiu wa Kung’u, was murdered, supposedly by rebels. This act of violence gave the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, a casus belli for which he’d been look for some weeks, if not months, and he declared a state of emergency. Over the next four years, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, Mau Mau’s official name, fought a determined but violent campaign which provoked a fierce, sometimes savage, reaction by the British: the emergency ended in 1960 when the government began the transition to independence, but tens of thousands of Kenyans had been killed, and the British had committed numerous human rights abuses, most infamously the beating to death of 11 detainees at Hola Camp in 1959.
The rebellion was a particularly bloody affair. I say this not as a matter of apportioning blame but merely so that we understand the place it had and has in the consciousness of those on all sides. Because the insurgents lacked any heavy weapons, relying often on machetes, their attacks, usually under cover of darkness, were swift and brutal, not least by necessity. And they were capable of grotesque excesses: in March 1953, a group of rebels attacked a settlement at Lari, herding men, women and children into huts which they then set ablaze, hacking with machetes at any who tried to escape. 97 Kenyans, some members of the Kikuyu Home Guard but mostly their families and relatives, were murdered.
The authorities of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya were not playing softball either. The state of emergency meant that civil liberties were suspended, and hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were put in detention camps where the treatment was often savage, as it would prove at Hola in March 1959. The colonial authorities also made extensive use of torture against Mau Mau prisoners: simple beating, sexual assault, slicing off ears, boring or burning holes in eardrums, stabbing out eyes and castration were all recorded. The levels of violence on all sides was astonishing.
Five Mau Mau alleged victims of especially horrific torture, two of whom had been castrated, presented themselves as a test claim in the High Court in London in 2009. The British government argued that Kenya, not the UK, was the colony’s legal successor, then that too long a period of time had elapsed since the events; unsuccessful in court, the Foreign Office pledged £19.9 million in compensation to 5,228 victims in 2013. The foreign secretary, William Hague, told Parliament that the government “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place”.
A larger class action for 44,000 Kenyans was brought in 2016, although Hague had described the 2013 deal as “full and final settlement”. The High Court dismissed the claim in 2018 because a fair trial would be impossible at such a distance of time. But victims are getting older and dying.
The ongoing issue of financial compensation is a microcosm of the wider footprint of Mau Mau on relations between the UK and Kenya. The British often like to congratulate ourselves on the pragmatic and relatively peaceful way we eventually departed from our former colonies, and there were places in which this was true, but Kenya was not one of them. Mau Mau drenched the last 11 years of British rule ion the blood of those on all sides.
Addressing a banquet during his state visit last month, the king said “we must… acknowledge the most painful times of our long and complex relationship”. It seems downbeat, understated, even trite, but the speech will have been the product of painstaking calculation and innumerable drafts.
The wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret. There were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans… there can be no excuse.
Some had hoped the king might issue an explicit apology. Even so, he went a lot further than the UK government has previously. Being realistic, this is a legal as well as a moral issue, and if words are used unguardedly, they can be used in pursuit of other legal claims. That is why William Hague, announcing the offer of financial settlement ten years ago, reiterated to the House of Commons “We continue to deny liability on behalf of the Government and British taxpayers today for the actions of the colonial administration in respect of the claims.”.
While this is not the end of the matter, if the two countries are to make further progress, Britain has to be sensitive about the events of the colonial era, and that includes understanding what actually happened. It was shocking to hear Channel 4 News’s Ayshah Tull, covering the visit, refer breezily to members of “the Mau Mau tribe”, as if the emergency had been indigenous Kenyans on one side and the colonial authorities on the other.
Mau Mau is not a tribe: it was a nickname given to the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and largely rejected by those to whom it was applied. Most of the guerrillas were Kikuyu, Meru and Embu; colonial authority was imposed not just by white Kenyan settlers and British troops, but also by Kenyans and Ugandans of the Kenya Regiment. There was a particularly sharp divide within the Kikuyu between those sympathetic to Mau Mau and those who accepted the writ of the colonial government.
Moreover, Mau Mau remained controversial within the Kenyan political establishment for decades after independence. In 1952, Jomo Kenyatta, then leader of the Kenyan African Union, had told an audience of 30,000 “Mau Mau has spoiled the country. Let Mau Mau perish forever. All people should search for Mau Mau and kill it.” (Kenyatta was an LSE graduate and, somewhat quirkily, bapised into the Church of Scotland, as was his fellow post-independence leader, Hastings Banda, president of Malawi.) Although the colonial-era ban on Mau Mau was eventually lifted in 2003, the group still sits uneasily in the independence narrative.
This is stuff we have a duty to get right. Justifiably, every official utterance of the British government on Mau Mau is placed under the most intense scrutiny. The UK has to maintain a delicate balance of sensitivity, contrition and realpolitik: in a climate in which there are calls for apologies and compensations for many actions in the colonial past, of which slavery remains the weightiest, the UK is never speaking in a vacuum. There is a human instinct to apologise fully, without reservation, generously: but official policy has consequences and language must be careful and measured.
Britain should aspire to count Kenya a close partner and ally. It is one of only four African countries named in the government’s Integrated Review, it has the third-largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria and South Africa, and it is a significant financial hub, with the continent’s fourth biggest securities exchange. Until the pandemic, GDP growth was strong, at around six per cent per annum, and Kenya is home to a large population of highly educated young professionals, especially literate in technology and innovation. The government of Kenya has an ambitious strategy called Vision 2030 which aims to make the country “a newly industrializing, middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in a clean and secure environment”.
Kenya has been a member of the Commonwealth since independence, which means Britain has an established and enduring relationship. But Britain will always have to conduct itself in the shadow of colonialism, especially in Kenya where the last few years before independence were marred by state-sponsored violence. Almost as damaging as ignoring that particular elephant is a patronising caricature of the decolonising process as ‘downtrodden indigenous people vs backward-looking Colonel Blimps’.
If Britain expects Kenya to understand why it must approach statements of regret and remorse carefully, the very least the British can do is understand the nuances of our last 15 years administering Kenya. The story of the road to independence in 1963 belongs to the Kenyans, not to the departing colonial power. Together, both countries need to put themselves on the same page so that the period of British rule is an acknowledged experience rather than a long shadow.