KENYA: Victims of British brutality and torture allowed to go to court
In the June issue of Proletarian,
issue 48, (The Kenya Papers) it was reported that four elderly Kenyans seeking
justice and recompense for the torture they suffered at the hands of the
British in the 1950s have helped uncover hidden evidence of the brutality of
British rule across all its ‘dominions.’ The evidence was in the form of
colonial papers brought to Britain before Kenyan independence, of which the
government originally denied the existence but which were uncovered after
historian, Professor David Anderson, expert witness for the litigants in the
case against the British Crown, gave evidence of having seen the papers at
Hanslope and provided various details about them.
Unfortunately the most
damning evidence of British torture and murder had been destroyed, with only
relatively low level information sent back to Britain – but that may be more
than enough to prove the case for the three Kenyans who are still proceeding
with their cases (one has withdrawn his claim).
The article told the tale of
rampant thievery of land, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, extreme
torture and murder on an enormous scale by British troops and colonial
militias. Kenyans, especially from the Kikuyu tribe who had held the best
land, were the main targets of British atrocities although other tribes were
also treated with bestial disregard. That the Kikuyu, organised into the Land
and Freedom Army, fought back against being expelled from their lands brought
the British colonial regime to bloody frenzy.
Many ‘historians’ and
apologists for the British racist rulers of Kenya often refer to the worst
‘excesses’ of Britain’s forces as being a response to horrible ‘Mau Mau’ (as
the British dubbed the patriots of the Land and Freedom Army) ‘atrocities’ or
at ‘best’ they claim that ‘both sides were as bad as each other’. The Proletarian
article rubbishes these unproven claims and points out facts such as Governor
Evelyn Baring’s dispatch, for the purpose of slaughtering freedom fighters, to
the forests of “Lincoln bombers to carry out a programme of
indiscriminate carpet-bombing. Between June 1953 and October 1955 the RAF
conducted over 900 sorties and dropped nearly 6m bombs. Lack of time and a dearth
of reliable intelligence meant bombing was rather haphazard, but many people
living in the forests had been killed or wounded by air attack by June 1954.”
He did this careless of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people
being killed in the forests were among the thousands of innocent refugees who
had sought refuge there form British barbarities.
Governor Baring wasn’t
satisfied with that amount of murder and mutilation and the next phase of his “backlash
consisted in rounding up even more Kenyans, stealing their land and livestock
as he did it, and forcing ever more people into concentration camps and work
camps, where mass ‘screenings’ took place. Violent interrogations and torture
(including “most drastic” beatings, solitary confinement, starvation,
castration, whipping, burning, rape, sodomy, and forceful insertion of objects
into orifices) were used to extract information and confessions. Those
suspected of being Mau Mau, or who had had confessions beaten out of them,
could be hanged. More than a thousand Kenyans were executed on the basis of
this ‘evidence’.”
As far as equality in
violence goes the figures tell the story: of the 50,000 deaths that can be
attributed to the ‘emergency’, more than half were from disease and
malnutrition in the many vast concentration camps that the colonial rulers
called ‘villages’. At least half of those who died in that way were children
under the age of 10.
Of those who didn’t die of
disease or malnutrition, the British probably killed in excess of 20,000 ‘Mau
Mau’ or suspected ‘Mau Mau’. For their part, the liberation fighters killed
fewer than 2,000 Kenyans, overwhelmingly agents of the British government,
while 32 Europeans and 26 Asians were also killed. If this is any kind of
‘parity’, the lives of Kenyans are shown to be worth very little against the
lives of Europeans in the minds of those in charge of the ‘outposts’ of the British Empire.
An article in the Morning
Star (MS) on 7 October 2012 entitled ‘Historic Court win for Empire
torture victims’ by Paddy McGuffin tells how Wambugu Wa Nyingi, Jane
Muthoni Mara and Paulo Muoka Nzili have at long last won the right to sue the
British government for their suffering after the British Governments lawyers,
who have been twisting and turning trying to deny any British liability for the
horrors suffered by Kenyans during British rule lost this last argument as
well.
Amazingly, the British
government’s first response to the legal moves by the surviving Kenyan victims
to sue for compensation was to claim that the Kenyan government, as the
successor through independence to the colonial administration, should be sued
as they were now responsible. Even a British bourgeois judge could see how
ludicrous that was and dismissed the British government’s objection to the case
being heard. The next argument of the lawyers representing HM Government
seeking to get the case disallowed was to claim that too much time had elapsed
to get a ‘fair trial’ as most of the individuals accused were long since dead
and could not defend themselves.
That Morning Star edition
of 7 October also mentioned this in its editorial which finished with the
words; “Our government which feels free to pontificate to other states on
human rights abuses, is resorting to procedural nitpicking in order to sweep
these crimes under the carpet. It is immaterial whether the individuals who
gave the orders, who held sway in Britain’s colonies and who covered up these
and similar atrocities, are alive or dead. Their actions were fully in line
with the iron fist of British colonialism revealed from the days of slavery,
the 19th century scramble for Africa and the desperate bloody effort to hold on
to empire’s ill-gotten gains.
“The names of individuals
matter less than honest acknowledgement of the scale of human suffering visited
on a third of the world so that a tiny social elite could become very rich,
with crumbs from the rich men’s table finding their way to an aristocracy of
labour to secure its collaboration with the ruling class.….”
There is nothing in this
quote we would argue with but we would ask the Morning Star and the CPB
whose programme the MS follows, if you now understand that British imperialism
plundered much of the world and that the crumbs of this plunder was used to buy
the “aristocracy of labour” to collaborate with the ruling class just
who do you think that “aristocracy of labour” is? If, as we do,
you think it is to be found in the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy
that is Labour controlled, why do you continue to try to spread illusions that
the Labour Party is somehow ‘better’ than other bourgeois parties?
We wish these three elderly
Kenyans every success (although the government could well find other reasons to
try get the case dismissed) and we declare our hope that the peoples who
suffered under British rule follow them to highlight to the world just what it
means to be occupied under British Rule.