By The Editors

The British are often lauded for their counterinsurgency methods, which supposedly adhered to international law and applied minimum force necessary. But a revealing study by Huw Bennett of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, one of Britain’s most violent decolonization wars, questions the accuracy of this view. While its restrained policies prevented the campaign from degenerating into genocide, the British also tolerated mass detentions, rape, indiscriminate killing, and torture.

I think it’s safe to say that most people, in Britain and elsewhere, have never really heard of the Mau Mau ‘Emergency.’ Give us the short version.
In Kenya, the population expanded rapidly after the Second World War. A growing class of disaffected urban workers found it increasingly hard to get work and to have their political aspirations met by the moderate, loyalist leaders in their society. The Mau Mau rebellion was an uprising within the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru tribes, the Kikuyu being the largest of 42 tribes in Kenya. The military part of the movement drew on the expertise of Kenyans who had fought for the British Army during WWII. A major source of the conflict was land hunger: 42,000 Europeans dominated the White Highlands, the very best agricultural land in the country, only allowing Africans to live there as impoverished tenant farmers, known as squatters. Many Kikuyu felt the land had been stolen from their tribe, a crime exacerbated by the dwindling availability of fertile land elsewhere in the country. It was an anti-colonial revolt, a civil war within the Kikuyu tribe, and a civil war between the Kikuyu and other tribes. Violence initially flared in 1950 and was associated with a growing pattern of arson attacks on loyalist and European settler properties. The attacks then escalated into murders.

What were some of the techniques used by Britain to counter the Mau Mau?
The authorities used a combination of sticks and carrots to deprive the Mau Mau of popular support and destroy their fighting formations. Around a million people were forcibly moved into villages, based on the practice in Malaya, to protect them from Mau Mau intimidation and to enhance surveillance. Camps were either punitive, where suspected Mau Mau supporters were subjected to a hard existence that included forced labor, or reward, where loyalists were given new schools, work permits, and other benefits. Several different propaganda campaigns were also carried out. The most coercive technique was probably the use of the death penalty; over 1,000 Kenyans were executed, and many without access to a fair trial. In addition, torture was used systematically, to terrorize the population and to produce intelligence.

We need to accept the idea…that democracies are just as capable of war crimes as other regime types. Of course we would like to believe in our own moral superiority, and that torture is only carried out by dictatorships. This is simply not true.

Just seven years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe, we have a situation where British troops were interring thousands of Kenyans. This episode was kept very quiet by both the UK and Kenyan governments. Others, such as Caroline Elkins, have used the word “genocide” to describe the Mau Mau emergency. Do you think that’s an accurate term to apply?
No. In international law, genocide is defined as the intention to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. At the height of the campaign, the British deployed three brigades of infantry, heavy artillery and both strategic and tactical airpower, in addition to mobilizing tens of thousands more in the Police Reserve and the Home Guard militia units. Had elimination of the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru tribes been an objective, then the government possessed the military power to kill millions. It did not. Elkins claims there was genocide because she exaggerates the death toll without evidence, for emotive, rhetorical reasons. The best statistical analysis, by a professional demographer, has estimated the conflict resulted in 24,000 deaths. What the British did was employ a strategy of terror, to frighten people into supporting the government rather than the Mau Mau. This involved the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, widespread beatings and torture, forced population movement and mass detention without trial. But we need to distinguish between what political scientist James Gow calls a strategy of war crimes, and genocide.

This episode led to a landmark legal case in which Mau Mau veterans, for the first time ever for a former colonial people, were allowed by British courts to sue the British government. You were named an ‘expert witness’ for the defense case. What was that like, in terms of the process itself and as a historian? It’s not often a historian is called to the stand to testify.
The case was settled out of court in June 2013, when 5,228 elderly Kenyans were awarded compensation by the British government for the torture they suffered during the Emergency. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, issued a formal apology to them. I advised the lawyers on the historical dimensions of the conflict, with a focus on the role of the British Army. During the process a secret archive was uncovered, called the Hanslope Archive, which included about 20,000 files on 38 different territories in the British Empire. I read those files relevant to the army and wrote a number of expert reports, which influenced the case and were cited by the judge in his rulings. As a result of the case, the vast majority of these files have been released for anyone to read at the National Archives in Kew. A number of commentators criticized the trial for applying today’s standards to the past. It is incredibly important to note that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, and that the terrible crimes committed by the state in Kenya in the 1950s were illegal at the time, under British and colonial law. So the argument that these historical cases are invalid is based on a misconception.

In the early Cold War, Britain was conducting a heavy-handed counterinsurgency in Kenya, and America was becoming involved in Indochina. If more had been known at the time by Western publics about these “small wars,” do you think the Cold War narrative may be different?
Probably not. In the Kenya case, and elsewhere during the demise of the British Empire, it is clear that the government went to great lengths to conceal the truth about how armed conflicts were being fought. In addition, people were generally less inclined to ask probing questions about the abuse of state power, with a few notable exceptions. Society was more deferential than now, and trust in government was higher. Journalists sympathized with the military, and were not overly aggressive in their investigative methods. Parliamentarians were wary of criticizing the armed forces too much, lest they be branded unpatriotic. The human rights revolution was in its early stages, and international courts and law firms had little impact on how armies behaved. Finally, the Americans and the British conducted extensive propaganda operations throughout the Cold War, on a global scale. Convincing people of the inherent goodness of the democracies was at the heart of this endeavor, and any evidence of brutality by the home side needed to be suppressed in the national interest.

Many in Britain—average Britons and academics both—tend to wag their finger at America for its actions in Indochina and later in Iraq at Abu Ghraib. It seems to have entered the popular imagination, for example from books and films such as The Quiet American, that Britain doesn’t do things like that. But it seems that it does. It was just more successful at keeping them quiet. Is that fair, and what does it mean for this idea?

We need to accept the idea, argued forcefully by Alexander Downes in his book Targeting Civilians in War, that democracies are just as capable of atrocities and war crimes as other regime types. Of course we would like to believe in our own moral superiority, and that torture is only carried out by dictatorships. This is simply not true. I would argue that armed forces and security services come to adopt brutal policies when they believe they are strategically essential. Soldiers and statesmen convince themselves that the ends justify the means. The next assumption we need to explore is the belief that if only the general public understood what was going on, they would stop it. When we look at the popular reaction to the trial of Sergeant Blackman (“Marine A”) for murdering an Afghan insurgent in 2011, it is clear that a substantial number of people believe the military should be allowed to use harsh measures in war. Above all, it must be remembered that there are both moral and pragmatic reasons for acting within the law, and even though the British may have succeeded in covering up abuses in the short term, they were uncovered eventually.

Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency
by Huw Bennett
Cambridge University Press, 317 pages, $85

[Photo: Kenyan Army Commander Lt. Gen. Njuki Mwaniki tours U.S. AFRICOM HQ, 2011 (Source: Flickr Commons)]

Huw Bennett is a Lecturer in International Politics and Intelligence Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. He previously taught at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College at King’s College, London. From 2011-2013, he served as an expert witness in a lawsuit against the British government by victims of the Mau Mau Emergency.