Episode 267: Black Magic Panic & the Mau Mau Rebellion
Around 70 years ago, a deadly counter-insurgency was carried out by the British colonial occupiers of Kenya to quell the Mau Mau Rebellion. The operation involved political propaganda stoking a panic about the freedom fighters' use of black magic — a "horror story" written by colonizers to justify their own brutal actions. Annie Kelly explores this fascinating historical moment.
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Music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to the 267th chapter of the QAA podcast, the Mau Mau Rebellion episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Welcome, cherished listener, to yet another QAA episode helmed by your wise and benevolent UK correspondent, Annie Kelly.
The crowd goes wild!
Yes, thank you, Julian.
That was what I was picturing when I wrote that line.
Just people lined up outside the imaginary podcast studio going, we're gonna go nuts in here!
This episode is going to be a little different from the usual fair I serve you.
Ordinarily, I'm bringing you stories and events from the current day, usually generating from the contemporary UK conspiracy scene.
This episode, by contrast, looks at events from around 70 years ago, mostly taking place in Kenya, when it was still a colony in the last days of the British Empire.
It's a story about conspiracies, colonialism, and, a topic that I think many QAA listeners will be familiar with, how rumours of dark rituals and black magic are used as political propaganda.
Now, as my co-hosts will know, if you publicly critique conspiracy theories One of the most common criticisms you'll receive in turn is that you're promoting a culture of ignorance or naivety about the dastardly crimes that governments are capable of.
Admittedly, the most common way this criticism is phrased is by accusing us all of being secretly funded by the CIA.
Which isn't true, by the way.
Although it's very funny to imagine our poor handler having to explain to his boss at Langley why dishing out cash for Jake's stories is totally worth it in the long run.
It's a hard sell.
But that's not to say that there isn't a worthwhile point buried in there all the same, and it's one that I do believe everyone who works in this space should be mindful of.
We do, after all, know that powerful actors like States have an obvious interest in maintaining their own power, and that they will sometimes work outside the law to do so, a process that usually, although not necessarily, involves obscuring their own activities from the public view.
It's my belief that if you're going to make criticisms of some of the lurid fantasies that QAnon influencers and anti-vaccine fearmongers come up with, then you should also be clear-eyed about what actual state crimes and cover-ups look like, if only because it helps you better distinguish between legitimate allegations about abuses of power and the absurd claims made by demagogues looking to shore up their own.
I first stumbled across this bit of history when I came across a recent obituary.
I wish I could say it in a newspaper and sound like a proper adult, but it was of course on social media.
The obituary was for General Sir Frank Edward Kitson, who died on the 2nd of January this year, aged 97 years old.
Now, I'm not much of a military buff, but I'd come across Kitson before, funnily enough in my research for this very podcast.
Back in 2021, I wrote a couple of episodes called The Northern Irish Satanic Panic, which were about allegations made by a whistleblower called Colin Wallace that, among other things, British Army intelligence had stoked rumours of satanic rituals in 1970s Belfast as a way to undermine public solidarity with paramilitary organisations during the civil unrest known as the Troubles.
Frank Kitson was an operational commander in Belfast from 1970-1972, and a relatively famous one in military circles, due to the book he published in 1971 called Low Intensity Operations, Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping.
This was Kitson's personal theory of practical strategies for undermining insurgent movements, drawing on his experience with nationalist uprisings in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s.
And it would become deeply influential as a British military manual during the Troubles.
In the same conflict, Kitson himself would become an extremely controversial figure.
Notably, one of the battalions under his command, 1 Para, was nicknamed Kitson's Private Army.
It was this unit which would be responsible for the killing and wounding of a large number of unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry in 1972, in an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
Ah, which I know from the U2 song, correct?
Yep, yep, that's referencing the same event.
It's insane that such a crazy amount of violence can be attributed to Kitson's Private Army, which sounds like a children's Bruce Willis movie about a military dad who has to become a nanny or something.
Yeah, I mean, having read quite a few of Kitson's, like, books by now, it's kind of interesting the sort of how, the way he writes is kind of very sort of like boy's own adventure story.
Do you know, kind of, how I traveled to the heart of darkness and things like that?
And then, yeah, it kind of was all a bit like fun and thrilling.
And then you sort of read the actual events that occurred around it as well.
It's like if the Hardy Boys, you know, uncovered an abandoned boxcar and then like, I don't know, like murdered the, you know, unhoused people that were living inside of it.
I'm amazed that Jake, when not able to make a reference to an actual movie, will make up a movie with Bruce Willis as a nanny that could have some relation to the episode.
Couldn't you see that?
Couldn't you see that it's a movie?
Kitson's Private Army coming this summer.
Starring Bruce Willis.
It would have the kid from Kindergarten Cop.
What's his name?
God, the boys have a penis, girls have a vagina kid.
I met him once.
Okay.
No!
Stop it!
This is a case of this is not that and also this doesn't even exist.
As I was reading about Kitson's past, it occurred to me that while I knew a lot about the General's involvement in the Troubles, I didn't really know anything about the other event that kept cropping up in his obituaries, the anti-colonial uprising in Kenya known as the Mau Mau Rebellion.
This was despite several of his obituary writers, as well as Kitson himself, noting that this had been where he first practised his skills in counterinsurgency.
I began to research the Mau Mau myself, first reading Kitson's book about his experiences fighting them in Kenya, gangs and countergangs, which yeah, as we were talking about made the whole thing sound like a thrilling boyzone adventure story, and then more recent academic work and news stories which painted a very different picture.
The historian of modern African history, John Lonsdale, has described the Mau Mau Rebellion as the horror story of Britain's empire.
That's a tough one to pull off, because it seems like the empire is a bit of a horror story in and of itself, but to be like, this one's even worse than the other ones.
Yeah, I guess kind of what he meant is that it's like the horror story which like, I guess the imperialists tell themselves?
Oh, right.
I see what he means now.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, you're right that there are plenty of horror stories in the British Empire.
But I guess this is the uprising that scares the imperialists, so to speak.
Surveying the British sources from the time, the uprising read like a dreadful combination of black magic, dark tribal rituals, and horrific violence of the kind that more civilised cultures could scarcely dream of.
As I read more widely though, I learned there was a second dimension to this story, one of colonial brutality and what looked an awful lot like a state cover-up, the extent of which was only officially acknowledged by the British government in 2013.
Now, as always when I do these history episodes for QAA, there's a lot of historical and political context going on here that I'll need to leave out for the sake of time.
The story of the British Empire in Africa is a long and inglorious one, but for the purposes of this episode, we're just going to focus in on one very specific area of Kenya, back when it was ruled by the British.
When considering how to best utilise the land, one part of the country which was of particular desirability to settler and commercial interests was an area in the central uplands called, ironically enough, the White Highlands.
This part of the country was particularly attractive to settlers because of its cooler climate, supposedly more suitable for the European temperament, but also for agriculture.
The problem, as is so often the case for would-be colonial pioneers setting out to cultivate virgin soil, was the people who'd been living on and cultivating it for quite some time already.
As it happened, a combination of famine, disease and shifting agricultural patterns on behalf of the indigenous landowners meant that during the first wave of European settlement in 1902, much of the land in the White Highlands was both sparsely inhabited and cheaply bought.
According to the geographer Derwent Whittlesey, at least some of this exchange was done by deception.
Many of the original landowners who belonged to the Gikuyu ethnic group, he wrote, were either led or allowed to believe that the British were only renting the land rather than purchasing the freehold altogether.
Then, a law called the Crown Lands Ordinance Act legislated that land grants in the White Highlands could only be sold to white Europeans.
This essentially foreclosed on the possibility of return completely, by ensuring that there was no way for the Kikuyu people to purchase back the land some of them may not even have been aware they had sold in the first place.
In 1926, the British consolidated this further by partitioning separate land reserves for different indigenous ethnic groups, known as tribal reserves.
While they did this, they naturally vastly expanded the scope of the White Highlands at the same time.
Many of the Kikuyu had, understandably, never been particularly satisfied with this state of affairs.
But as their population increased year by year, the land that had been generously apportioned for them by their colonial masters became increasingly inadequate.
In as simple terms as possible, there were too many people trying to subsist on far too little land.
They first attempted to remedy this through the courts.
Chief Koinange, a conservative known for his allegiance to the British, Headed an official delegation to London in 1931, where he outlined the desperate situation and demanded a more equitable redistribution of the land.
The British government granted an official inquiry into the situation.
After three years of waiting, the report was released and was a bitter disappointment to many Gikuyu.
The Land Commission confirmed existing European rights to much of the land and only gave back as compensation lands that were much lower fertility, harder to access, and crucially, according to the historian David Anderson, only a tiny fraction of what had been lost.
As he puts it in his acclaimed book, Histories of the Hanged, The Land Commission Report effectively extinguished all African claims to lands occupied by whites.
It was the stone upon which moderate African politics was broken.
Koinonge's response captured the deep sense of loss and betrayal.
The Chief had held great hopes that the Commission would bring a fair settlement to Gikuyu grievances over land.
If Europeans thought the Commission had settled the land question once and for all, for the Gikuyu, the real struggle over the land had only just begun.
Militant nationalism was conceived in Gikuyu reaction to the report.
Opposition to the Land Commission's findings fed militancy all the more over the next 20 years as the pressures upon land within the Gikuyu Reserve became greater and the settler stranglehold on the political economy of the colony tightened.
There was also like a very ugly thing at the time where they were basically doing like phrenology and, uh, you know, body structure analysis on the Kikuyu to determine that they were the superior race and kind of the valid inheritors of that country.
Yeah.
Extremely strange.
The British just came and they were like, well, these guys look more noble to us.
They are the noble ones.
Yeah.
They were like taller and thinner and just looked different than the other ethnic groups in the country.
So very cool stuff.
By the 1940s, the situation had become desperate.
Although the increased demand for production during the Second World War had made many white farmers very prosperous, that wealth had hardly trickled down.
In fact, quite the opposite.
Meagre subsistence and overcrowded tribal reserves meant that many younger Kuiu men had moved away from their homes and families, either to become tenant labourers on white-owned farms known as squatters Or as menial employees in the swelling city of Nairobi.
Both positions which were open to exploitation and abuse by an increasingly wealthy, white settler caste.
Localised disputes began to increase between squatters and white farmers, sometimes erupting in violence, but this mostly remained sporadic.
That changed in an area known as Olengoroni.
It was here that a large group of Gikuyu squatters had been resettled after having been forcibly evicted, and where they began to develop a fully organised resistance against British government intervention in their lives.
Some of the leaders had contact with urban trade unions, and in order to forge greater solidarity amongst themselves, they reformed the Gikuyu tradition of oathing.
Now, oathing as a practice is going to be pretty essential to this story, so it's important to spell it out in detail here.
Oathing was a ritualised pledge traditionally publicly undertaken by Gikuyu men in times of war or some other crisis in which they affirmed their solidarity to one another in anticipation of upcoming hardship.
In Elangoroni, the oath was transformed in three ways.
First, it added a clause of explicitly resisting colonial rule for quote, land and freedom.
Secondly, it was expanded to be administered to not just men, but women and children too.
And thirdly, it was done in secret, so as not to arouse white suspicion.
From that area, it spread rapidly, as both politicians and organisers battling poor wages, threatened evictions, and general exploitation began to realise its utility in building a mass movement.
Although this wave of oathing was initially conducted under the radar, the sheer scale of the practice soon meant it caught government attention.
In 1950, Kenya's African Affairs Department made a note that... Secret meetings were being held in which an illegal oath, accompanied by an appropriately horrid ritual, was being administered to initiates, binding them to treat all government servants as enemies, to disobey government orders, and eventually to evict all Europeans from the country.
It's not clear how the emergent anti-colonial guerrilla forces that eventually formed out of this movement came to be called Mau Mau.
I've seen it suggested that it was an anglicisation of Muhumu, a group of urban militants based in Nairobi who were politically influential on the growing movement.
Many Mau Mau veterans have pointed out that they never use the term for themselves, and prefer to go by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or KLFA.
Since this episode is focused specifically on how the British authorities portrayed these fighters, I'm going to use Mau Mau because it's the term the majority of these primary sources use, but it's worth noting that even this was probably a settler invention.
Well, whatever we're calling them, I'm really rude for these guys.
I really hope this ends in just an absolute colonial slaughter.
If this was a movie starring Mel Gibson somehow, if they made this in the 90s, Mel Gibson would somehow be the lead.
So you're positing a black Mel Gibson?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If they made this in the 90s, they would find a way.
Mel Gibson would rewrite it to be like, well actually they were white, see?
But the better kind.
Oh my god, dude!
Mel Gibson might actually do that, actually.
You know, that's not too far outside the realm.
Yes!
Travis, thank you!
I've seen Apocalypto.
I did not get good vibes from, you know, settler attitudes from that movie.
No, I'm really excited that we're, like, not even that far of the way through the episode and Jake's already come up with two truly deranged movies out of this.
Yeah, made up!
I'm really excited to see where this goes.
You know, create the world you want to live in.
I think there is an alternative universe in which Mel Gibson made a white Mao Mao rebellion movie.
I'm sure that's true.
Create the movies you want to see.
As what became known as the Mao Mao Oath spread, so too did violence of the kind that couldn't simply be ignored by the colonial administration as petty intra-ethnic conflict.
Although many at the time were keen to cast the Mao Mao uprising as some kind of race war focused on eliminating all whites, this was very far from the truth.
Only 32 European civilians died over the course of the entire conflict.
In fact, as David Anderton has commented, during that time more died in road traffic accidents than through Mau Mau violence.
But similarly, it's important not to get too simplistic and assume that just because the Mau Mau fought for self-governance, they automatically had the support of all their fellow countrymen.
There were many Gikuyu who, either out of fear or for economic, religious or political reasons, supported British rule and refused to take the oath.
They became known as Loyalists.
Since the Mau Mau were an insurgent group with both a heavy reliance on local support and a desperate need to keep their activities secret, the refusal of loyalists and subsequent threat of betrayal was increasingly met with violence.
Bodies began to appear, some of which had been mutilated.
Here's Willoughby Thompson, a district officer for the Colonial Service, talking to a Channel 4 documentary crew about his first clue that all was not well in this corner of the Empire.
I was on safari.
I was in my tent.
And just about dawn there was a clamour and someone rushed in and said, Buona Buona, come, the preacher at the church has been murdered.
And I went, it was only a short distance, and lo and behold the preacher had been cut up with a machete.
And they'd also killed a goat, taken the sexual organs of the goat and draped it upon the crucifix on the altar of this church.
Very nasty business indeed.
That was the very first death that I saw.
And then more and more came along.
Some of the missionaries started to get a bit uneasy, and the chiefs also started to get uneasy, and they said, do you know, a few people have disappeared, and so-and-so was murdered the other night.
And we got more and more reports of deaths.
And then, when we tried to make general inquiries for the first time, we got a slowing down in information.
The first high-profile victim of the Mau Mau was a well-known, wealthy Gikuyu loyalist, Chief Waruhu, who was assassinated in his car in October 1952.
Six days later, the colonial administration in Kenya requested permission from the colonial office to declare a state of emergency.
...meaning the arrival of extra British troops in Kenya to restore order.
The exotic menace of Mau Mau, alongside the romantic colonial picture of the White Highlands and sprawling Kenyan jungle, made an intoxicating combination for the British press.
Troops are in the streets of Nairobi.
Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor, salutes the men of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who have flown in to help clear his colony of the Mau Mau menace, which has struck fear into Kenya's very heart.
Nairobi police have been supplemented by hundreds of civilians, many of them women, to help round up the Mau Mau bandits.
Radio-controlled cars with armoured vehicles are used to carry out the army's plans for bringing in all suspects.
More than three and a half thousand have been arrested already.
All have to be carefully checked by police security men, for in such a decisive swoop as this, it is all too easy for the innocent to suffer.
The objective of this secret society is to drive all white men out of Kenya.
Not only fanatics fill the ranks of the Mau Mau, many have joined from fear.
Day after day, hour after hour, lorries bearing police and troops drive away from the capital and head for the country.
Along twisting roads, they travel deeper, ever deeper into the heart of the African jungle.
For here, many of the Mau Mau are hiding.
Overhead, aircraft join in the search.
All who carry the mark of the Mau Mau must be hunted out so that peace may come to this troubled colony.
Jesus.
Wow.
Must be hunted out.
So fucking awesome that like, uh, the words hunted out and peace are so close together in this, uh, you know, in this news broadcast.
Yeah, also the amazing editing choice of being like, this is where the Mau Mau are hiding and there's just like actual animals crossing the road.
Yeah, I liked the bit where it talked about 3,000 people being arrested and it's like, don't worry, we're screening very carefully.
We would never do anything to an innocent.
I love in this video, the British, you know, show up and it's like, oh, well, the Nerd Patrol has arrived in their large, stupid hats, off to do something, you know, shitty, I'm sure.
Yeah, they definitely have funny hats.
Just look like a bunch of losers, but just like big tanks, like rolling off into like the brush.
Like, oh, I mean, colonialism has never been so, you know, easily spotted.
Yeah.
I don't know if the British military still make use of those hats or if they, maybe they got bullied too many times by, by people like Jake.
Maybe that just kind of got consigned to the dustbin of history.
It's like, I bet there'll be like somebody in our listeners who is like really into military uniforms and will know the answer to this.
They're kind of like those hats where it's like the Napoleon hat, but it's like sideways, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I did when I was probably about 14 or 15 years old.
I went on a family vacation to Europe and we went, we visited the Tower of London and we got the tour, you know, by the beef eaters.
And at the end you're supposed to very sort of surreptitiously kind of tip them.
It's like.
It's part of the thing you tip the tour guide but it's like you're supposed to make it very kind of you know under the radar and I was so nervous walking up to the guy to give him the handful of change that I had that I knocked his hand and I knocked all of the coins out of his hand.
So he and I were both on the ground picking them up together.
Humiliating for everybody, but probably mostly for him.
I then was executed at the Tower of London.
This is when you find out that Jake has stumbled his way into being a good anti-colonialist.
This is your M. Night Reveal that I've been dead all along.
Did you also whisper, here's your blood money, you fucking cunt.
No, I was like, I'm afraid of all these crows.
There's so many.
There are large birds here.
And the ghosts of however many executed nobles.
I don't know.
Yeah, that is a power move they've got up their sleeve.
They can set all of those crows on you at any moment.
Those crows are smart too.
Just learn their moveset, Jake.
You can beat them.
I'm pretty sure you're describing Bloodborne.
I've never been good at fighting games.
The Mau Mau soon proved that they were better organised and more well concealed than just a gaggle of primitive forest fighters.
Frank Kitson, the recently disused military intelligence officer I spoke about before, describes the movement in his account of the counter-insurgency as One thing that Kitson said he found particularly frustrating about the Mau Mau was how, due to the movement's emphasis on secrecy and underground networks, there was very little degree of central authority.
The initial British strategy in the emergency, rounding up the people they presumed to be the ringleaders, conducting show trials and sending them into prison or exile, failed dramatically to curb either Mau Mau recruitment or the attacks.
Hmm.
One could almost say that it helped them recruit?
I mean, was this their first counterinsurgency?
Yeah.
And it's kind of like a bit of, kind of quite shocking, I guess, ignorance in that they're kind of just like rounding up people who they just kind of presume to be troublemakers.
They're just sort of like, oh, you, you've been given, you know, speeches and stuff like that.
And actually a lot of these guys had really nothing to do with Mao Mao and even like could criticize Mao Mao and things like that.
They were kind of more sort of moderate politicians and things like that.
But it was kind of just an attitude of just like, oh, we'll just we'll just get these
ones who've been drawing attention and then that should be the end of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Make an example of the most visible ones.
Very smart when you're dealing with people who, you know, kind of have defined themselves
through their ability to run this thing underground.
Yeah, exactly.
Like so many anti-colonial resistance movements, the Mao Mao were more sophisticated both in their methods and their politics than their opponents initially gave them credit for.
But they could act brutally too, something which the British seized upon for propaganda purposes.
In particular, two Mao Mao attacks would become widely publicised across the empire, alongside gruesome descriptions and even post-mortem photographs of the deceased splashed across the newspapers, all intended to contrast white civilisation with native savagery.
The first of these was the Ruck family murders in January 1953, where a white settler couple, their six-year-old child and a servant were all killed with machetes.
The second was the Lari Massacre, which took place in March the same year, at a village known to contain several prominent Kukuyu loyalists, who were members of the Home Guard, a government-backed paramilitary set up during the early days of the emergency.
When many of these men had been lured away from the village by reports of a body having been found a few miles away, the militants attacked.
locking their families in their homes and setting them alight, before waiting outside and killing anyone who managed to escape.
The death toll is still disputed for reasons that we'll go into, but it is undeniable that the vast majority of those killed were women, children and the elderly.
Once again, the British did not hesitate to widely publicise the terrible details.
Each day at King George's Hospital, many Kikuyu come to give their blood to aid the wounded.
And they do this with the knowledge that the Mau Mau have vowed to kill all who help the white people in any way.
Close by one of the wards, I came across a tiny baby.
Both her parents had been murdered.
Nurses told me that for one old lady, there was little hope of recovery.
Upon the children too, the Mau Mau had laid its evil mark.
The lucky ones, I wonder.
No, there was no pity in my heart.
If these were the murderers, then I, like all in Kenya, would expect swift justice.
Too long has this proud and faithful land suffered from the Mau Mau's crusade of evil.
Justice must and will be done.
Incredible.
Yeah.
I wonder what happened before the Mau Mau.
No evil, I guess.
We'll just chill good times with the white dudes in charge.
That's so, they love to do this, right?
Where it's like, after years of brutality, they rise up and they dare to be brutal as well?
Oh, what evil arises from this fair and noble land?
Can you imagine if today's news broadcast had this kind of soundtrack to them?
Yeah, we need to bring it back.
At least it would be easier to identify propaganda.
It would be like, Donald Trump tripped and fell today as he ascended the stairs of an Ohio Dairy Queen.
I don't think that would quite be it, but it would be like, the disgusting and awful Palestinian resistance has risen up in a once peaceful land of Israel to resist the fine...
Yeah, see mine was like, mine was, you know, funny and probably not true.
Yours was, you know, more accurate and more sad.
American bombs built in this wonderful factory in Ohio are being dropped on some of the most evil children and women you've ever seen.
What historians have pointed out was far less widely publicised than the Larry Massacre was the immediate extrajudicial reprisals that took place in response, some on the very same night.
According to David Anderson, What happened between 10pm and dawn the next morning is not easy to describe precisely, for we have no detailed independent record of events, and there was never any official inquiry into the aftermath of the Larry attacks.
We cannot therefore say with any certainty who did what to whom over the next few hours.
All the same, there is no doubt that a second massacre took place at Lorry that night.
It was perpetrated by the Home Guard, later joined by other elements of security services who took revenge on any persons in the location they could lay their hands on whom they suspected of Mao Mao sympathies.
There was anger, chaos, and confusion.
And there were beatings, shootings, and cold-blooded killings.
The only contemporary European account of the Second Massacre, provided by the Irish lawyer Peter Evans, estimated the combined total dead from both massacres at more than 400.
I bring this up not to excuse any violence as better or worse than the other, or because I think two wrongs make a right, but because I think this kind of omission, confusion and obscurity in the official story is crucial to how the myth of the Mau Mau was constructed in relation to the empire they were fighting.
It's worth remembering that all this took place in the 1950s, when many former colonies had already gained their independence, and the naturalness of British rule over faraway countries was no longer simply taken for granted by a growing number of the British public.
Empires were having to justify themselves to an increasingly sceptical populace, and an easy way to do that was to demonise the resistance by emphasising their violence and brutality.
Meanwhile, acts of barbarism conducted by the British, white settlers and their supporters was often either ignored entirely or simply relegated to a couple of neutral-sounding lines at the end of a dry news report.
Nonetheless, the terror that the Mau Mau inspired in white settler Kenyans, particularly farmers who lived in remote homesteads in the countryside, was very real.
This interview clip from the Channel 4 documentary, with one man who was a teenager at the time of the uprising, captures the way the movement had grown into something of a colonial horror story in the white Kenyan imagination.
Several of the murders which took place in isolated European homes took place in the evening.
When the staff brought your soup in, they would have to come into the house through the back door, and therefore this was the time when often the Mama would choose to come in behind them, having intimidated them, or sometimes they might have even been sympathetic to the movement, and then they would come in and attack while the people were sitting having dinner.
You didn't really know who you could trust, and so right from an early age of 14, I had to carry a gun when I went out on the farm.
When things were particularly tense, I actually had to go with two armed men with me.
It really does not make you more sympathetic when he's like, when our servants came in to give us dinner, that's when they would bring in the bad ones that they were sometimes sympathetic to for some reason.
you all the time.
It really does not make you more sympathetic when he's like, "When our servants came in
to give us dinner, that's when they would bring in the bad ones that they were sometimes
sympathetic to for some reason."
And then he's like, "Sometimes when I went out on the farm, I had to bring my gun with
me."
And there's a black and white shot of him with no tools in his hand pointing to the
ground as two black men with their tools are like, "Okay, I guess we're going to dig there."
Fucking awesome.
We were living in fear.
Yeah, he was like, I was so terrified.
Every time I left the house, I had two giant armed guards with me.
Yeah, I was reading and it seems like some of these homesteads literally just sort of became like fortified.
Like they kind of actually had this real sort of siege mentality of kind of creating this fort right around your home, your farm, where they just sort of became just like completely militarized.
And yeah, it's kind of crazy.
In particular, the ritual aspect of oathing would become a point of horrified fascination.
As John Lonsdale pointed out, from a cross-cultural perspective, the Mau Mau Oath was no different than the way many Western Christians might swear on a Bible.
But, in the 1950s press covering the uprising, Descriptions of the oaths made sensational reading.
It was reliably reported that initiates swore allegiance while swallowing a stew of mutton or goat, vegetables and cereals, sprinkled with soil, marinated in goat's blood, watched by uprooted sheep's eyes transfixed on thorns.
But that was just the beginning of horror.
For it was reported, possibly less reliably in some respects, that oaths became more ghastly as the war dragged on and insurgents despaired.
Many writers left the details unsaid and readers' imaginations free to range in fascinated self-disgust.
That's what happens every time you say masturbation in public.
God sends you a text message.
God texts me, he's like, don't do it again.
scarcely bear to think of as less than complete. If it was enough to say that
they included quote "masturbation in public, the drinking of menstrual blood"
fuck excuse me. That's what happens every time you say masturbation in public. God sends you a text message.
God texts me, he's like "don't do it again. Whatever you do, don't do that thing you did that one day."
Julian!
Julian!
Remember that thing we talked about you not doing?
Ding!
If it was enough to say that they included quote, masturbation in public, the drinking of menstrual blood, unnatural acts with animals, and even the penis of dead men, then even a dirty mind must shrink from exploring further.
This reminds me so much of the way that 19th century conspiracists talked about Freemasonry.
Because they always talked about, it's like, well, when they swore the oath, and then in order to get higher Freemasonry, to get higher and higher degrees, they must do more and more horrible things.
And they always speak, the conspiracists always speak in these vague terms of what the Freemasons must do in these lodges in order to get themselves deeper and
deeper and deeper into Freemasonry. But it's always assumed, you know, to the
reader that it must be some sort of unimaginable body horror in order to be part
of this secret club.
That's so true, Travis. And like this, this quote from the historian is so true
as well, and all of the primary sources I read about the Mau Mau Oath, it was
actually like really hard to find out what it really involved because so much
of it is just kind of this escalating, "Oh, it's so horrible, it's so horrible, I
can't even describe it to you, my gentle, dear reader." It involves, you know, and
then it will kind of be something, something gory, something grisly, and it's
But I won't give you any further details to spare your mind, you know?
And it's kind of such an interesting psychological trick.
Well, yeah, it's like the monster in a horror movie who's always a little bit outside of the vision because, you know, it allows basically the audience to allow their own imagination run wild about how horrible it must actually be.
Yeah, the movies are always better when you only see kind of a glimpse of the dead man's penis.
You know, once they show the whole thing, the horror sort of kind of gets sucked out of it.
Sucked out of it, huh?
I probably should have used a better phrase, but... Too late.
Oh, well!
The breathless coverage of the Mau Mau Oath wasn't just about emphasising native depravity, however.
It also played a key part in delegitimising the militants' political arguments for the return of lands and a new era of self-governance, by suggesting that the practice of oathing had, in essence, put them under some kind of spell or trance, rendering them entirely irrational, pliable and violent.
One of the most important people in constructing this understanding of the Mau Mau was Dr. J.C.
Carruthers, a pioneer in a burgeoning field known as ethno-psychiatry, which examined the way that culture and ethnicity impacted supposedly universal psychological conditions.
Extremely loud tuba sound after ethno-psychiatry.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those disciplines, which I think a bit like anthropology and stuff like that, all have these quite unknowable origins, but it's actually kind of quite interesting in some senses and how, you know, what we think of as kind of mental illnesses is different in different cultures.
But yeah, not this guy.
This guy is part of the unknowable origins, I would say.
Yeah.
I mean, again, my mind turns to the 19th century.
I mean, some of the earliest psychologists in the United States, they tried to classify the desire for slaves to be free as a kind of mental disease.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I would say that this is very much in that tradition.
Carruthers in particular was fond of arguing that just as every individual human went through psychological stages of development as they matured, so too did ethnic groups which could be marked against a standard of progress.
This standard was, inevitably, the white European.
Carruthers was commissioned by the Kenyan colonial administration to produce an ethno-psychiatric report into the psychological origins of the Mau Mau rebellion.
He advanced what was, for the time, considered to be a respectable liberal argument.
He took great care to rebuke any kind of idea that there were intrinsic differences in intelligence between the races, or that the Kikuyu were impossible to civilise.
He also chastised white settlers for, on the one hand, introducing indigenous Kenyans to Christianity, which emphasised brotherhood and equality, and on the other, breaking that promise by establishing a society built on a rigid racial hierarchy.
And nonetheless, Carruthers was not so progressive as to prescribe an immediate end to colonial rule.
He, in fact, concluded that the cause of Mau Mau discontent was down to Kuku Yumen having been subject to a civilisational progress that was too much, too fast for their minds to bear.
It has become only too clear that when European influence impinges on the African, his whole cultural machinery is apt to collapse quite quickly.
So he grows up as before without building up a personally integrated and critical approach to life.
And in addition, he lacks the sense of personal security that previously derived from the secure and positive convictions of his elders.
His, quote, magic modes of thought persist, but his old constraints and faiths are lost.
The Mao Mao Oath, Carruthers argued, took advantage of this confused and disoriented state of mind among Gokuyu men and women, and fashioned it into a weapon to be used by the movement's cunning and ruthless leaders.
Although he described the Oath as peculiarly obscene and bestial, comparing it to practices from medieval European witchcraft, He differed from many fellow Europeans at the time who viewed it as an extreme example of primitive tribal superstition.
In fact, he argued, oathing was an ingenious and perhaps even literally hypnotic invention.
The broad outlines of these oaths were conceived by highly sophisticated persons.
It is possible that an element of hypnosis enters into the effects of the oath.
An element in which the subject's conscious will is rather in abeyance, and which he automatically obeys the orders of his leaders.
The principles of hypnosis are still far from fully understood, but it is clear that the heightening and constricting of awareness and attention to the spoken word of one who has a high prestige value for the subject is a major feature.
Moreover, the effect is usually achieved by monotonous repetition, and groups are hypnotized much more easily than individuals.
This Mau Mau oath contains the essential ingredients for hypnosis.
It therefore seems most likely that hypnosis plays a part in these assemblies, and that the suggestions and commands imparted there may govern the subject's thinking and behavior afterwards in varying degrees.
Jeff Bezos describing Amazon union workers.
He's like, it looks a lot like hypnosis, which we don't know very much about, and therefore it must be.
Yeah, I mean, it's just like such a funny feature of, I guess, a powerful group is trying to understand their resistors.
And it's just sort of like, you know, could it be that they have a legitimate complaint?
No, they must be literally under a wizard's spell.
It's like the Principal Skinner Simpsons meme.
Yeah.
It's like, am I just slaughtering all of these innocent people for decades?
No, it's the locals who are hypnotized.
The Gikuyu are like, boo-urns!
Another white expert who had become very influential in the colonial government's response to the Mau Mau Rebellion was Louis Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist and archaeologist.
Leakey's parents were Christian missionaries who had settled in Kenya, and he had grown up alongside Gikuyu people, forming close friendships and becoming fluent in their language.
Leakey shared Carruthers' understanding of the Mau Mau oath as having a psychologically transformative effect on those who took it, but he did not think the situation was totally hopeless.
Based on his own experiences with Gokuyu ritual practices, he suggested that the corrosive effects of the oath could be mostly undone via a process of confession and rebirth.
If a captured Mau Mau adherent admitted to having taken the oath, they could then be subject to a traditional Gokuyu cleansing ceremony, which would remove much of the mental contamination, and soon they would be fit to rejoin polite society once again.
Both Carruthers and Leakey saw themselves as offering a more nuanced, liberal approach to the Mau Mau problem than the impassioned majority of white settler society.
And in truth, they were.
Many white settlers took a brutally exterminationist point of view over the uprising, viewing anyone who had taken the oath as corrupted beyond repair and mass executions as the only cure.
Even moderates like the journalist Elspeth Huxley publicly doubted whether the Mau Mau fighter could ever be truly redeemed.
The Oath Taker is forced deliberately to flout the very deepest of his tribal taboos or take actions which plunge him into so bottomless a pit of degradation that there can be no cleansing, no climbing back into the community of decent men.
He is damned forever in his own eyes and therefore desperate, hopeless, irreclaimable.
What a weapon of psychological warfare!
Courses in civics, training in carpentry.
Can they reclaim these self-condemned people?
Jesus Christ.
I mean, again, this echoes so much the way that people were fantasizing what was going on in the Masonic Lodges.
Hmm.
But perhaps ironically, with their insistent focus on redemption and rehabilitation for the Mau Mau, the liberal approach to the uprising would end up leading to some of its worst human rights abuses.
In April 1954, in an attempt to cut off Mau Mau guerrilla forces in the forest from their allies in the country's capital, Nairobi, British forces launched Operation Anvil.
This involved effectively deporting the city's entire Gikuyu population, about 50,000 people, and relocating them either to reserves, villages or detention camps.
Where an individual ended up depended on a process called screening, in which their personal political sympathies or involvement with the Mau Mau were sorted into three categories.
These categories were white, meaning either totally loyal to the British or too young or too elderly to be considered a serious threat, grey, meaning a passive Mao Mao sympathiser, or black, meaning a potential terrorist.
Glad that they picked the spectrum of white to black for this.
I know, there's so much of that in this story, where it's just like, did you not even consider that this might look a bit bad?
Oi oi oi.
The first category, the loyal whites, were either released back to Nairobi, transferred to native reserves, or British-created villages.
Greys were either sent to villages or work camps, which, although not explicitly designed to be punitive, soon became so through overcrowding and poor sanitation.
Blacks were either sent to be prosecuted if there was evidence of them having committed a crime, but mostly were sent without trial to detention camps to be ran through a rehabilitative system called the pipeline.
One such detention camp for suspects believed to be the most hardcore Mao Mao adherents was called Manyani.
Originally built to hold around 6,000 prisoners, records show that at its peak, the camp was stuffed with 16,000.
In these overcrowded and under-sanitised conditions, disease was inevitable, and an epidemic of typhoid broke out in May 1954, killing hundreds of internees and finally leading to a camp-wide quarantine in September of the same year.
Documents unearthed by the historian Caroline Elkins show that the colonial government was not only aware of both the scale and cause of the problem, but but actively lied to the press about it while it was going
on.
Publicly, official press releases from the colonial government
maintained that the camp had state-of-the-art sanitation facilities, fresh water, and proper medical care.
Nearly every internal assessment of the camp emphasized the opposite, with one memorandum clearly
stating, quote, "The camp was not completely finished
when the detainees went in, and some of the sanitary arrangements were incomplete."
This was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the government covering up clear human
rights abuses in the camps.
It was critical to the pipeline rehabilitative system that suspects would be given regular chances to confess.
According to the historian Hugh Bennett, it was understood by those who set up this system that...
These forced confessions sought to purge the infected mind and usher in a psychologically renewed life.
For the police, Home Guard and Army, screening meant a form of mass interrogation.
The questioning encompassed both political loyalties, Mao Mao or pro-government, and knowledge about gangs in the area.
So in practice, there was substantial overlap between screening and interrogation.
The supposed anthropological and psychological experts' emphasis on the need for cleansing and renewal led many of those in charge of the overcrowded camps to understand their job as involving extracting a confession, by whatever means necessary.
Elkins, who for her book called Britain's Gulag the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, conducted hundreds of interviews with Kenyans who had lived through the emergency.
She found consistent testimony of abuse at the hands of military and detention offices in order to obtain information and the all-important confession of the Mau Mau oath.
This was euphemistically described by Governor Evelyn Baring to the Colonial Office as a rough and ready form of interrogation.
But the techniques described by survivors are plainly torture.
The interviews in her book contain graphic descriptions of whipping, sexual violence and mutilation, including several cases of castration.
Now, I recognise that this is pretty hard-going material, but it is important, I think, to talk about this plainly in order to establish two points.
The first of these is the way that violence and brutality can be used by governments, firstly as a way to demonise their resistors into a group so beyond the pale that you can justify doing almost anything to them, and then later as a supposedly civilising, corrective tool against that very same group.
The second reason I think this kind of violence is important to discuss is that it gives us a perspective on what government cover-ups actually look like, and how they can at least partially fail.
One such example happened towards the end of the emergency in 1959, in an detention camp known as Hola.
Like Magnani, this was a site reserved for detainees considered to be the most hardcore and uncooperative.
Increasingly at this late stage, detainees were beginning to form an organised resistance to the work orders imposed on them, arguing that they were political prisoners and could not be forced to do manual labour.
John Cohen, the senior superintendent for prisoners in Kenya from 1957 to 1963, drafted up a rapport which suggested using force to remedy the problem.
In an interview conducted in the 1990s, he reflects on his reasoning.
I envisaged a possibility that the detainees wouldn't immediately prove amenable to work, and that if they didn't, They should be, in the phrase, manhandled to the site of work and forced to carry out the task.
We thought that compelling force might have to be used.
We might have to make them.
But they weren't being violent, were they?
They were simply refusing to work?
No, they weren't being violent, but they were being very insolent and...
Their whole demeanor was one of sort of insolence and arrogance, and no one was going to do anything with them at all.
Wow.
How dare they be insolent when you have imprisoned them and forced them to work after torturing them?
I know, it's kind of an amazing interview, that whole section of the documentary where they just interview this guy because he's just so kind of completely brazen.
Do you know?
He's just sort of like about, yeah, kind of the abuses that went on in the prisons while he was the superintendent.
I think at one point he says something like, he's like, oh, I never saw anybody with injuries worse than a boxer might get in the ring.
And you're just like, wow, it's kind of incredible how like open you're being about this.
Yeah, just completely still empire-pilled.
Hmm.
On the 3rd of March, 88 HOLA detainees were marched out to a nearby farm and ordered to work.
One of the prisoners, a man named John Maynard Kahehu, described what happened next.
We were taken about 400 meters to the farm.
There were spades and hoes and we were told to start digging ditches.
We refused to do this work.
We were fighting for our freedom.
We were not slaves.
There were 200 guards.
170 stood around us with machine guns.
30 guards were inside the trench with us.
The white man in charge blew his whistle and the guards started to beat us.
All I could see was dust from the ground.
They beat us from 8 o'clock to 1130.
They were beating us like dogs.
They were out of control, hitting everyone.
I was covered by other bodies, just my arms and legs exposed.
I was very lucky to survive, but the others were still being beaten.
There was no escape for them.
They were being hit and kicked from all sides.
By the end of the attack, 11 detainees were dead and the survivors had sustained serious permanent injuries.
Willoughby Thompson, the District Officer for the Colonial Service that we heard from earlier in the episode, described arriving at Hola in the immediate aftermath.
He understood straight away, he said, that the situation had the potential to be political dynamite.
It's worth remembering that by now, the Mau Mau Rebellion had been in the British consciousness for about seven years, and the initial propaganda strategies of broadcasting their violence to shock the public were wearing thin, particularly as the government had clearly gained the upper hand, and the roving bands of guerrilla fighters were now few and far between.
What's more, resistance back in Britain had been growing.
Former military and colonial administration workers like David Lada and Eileen Fletcher had left Kenya and become whistleblowers, giving eyewitness accounts of the extrajudicial violence they had seen enacted on those merely accused of having Mau Mau sympathies.
Labour MPs like Fennah Brockway and Barbara Castle were dogged in pointing out the government's hypocrisy in using examples of Mau Mau brutality to justify their own brutal and sometimes indiscriminate suppression of the movement.
As one such article from a 1950s anti-colonial journal read, Colonial powers must remember that these so-called, quote, backwards races have human rights.
People cannot be suppressed indefinitely by armed force.
England's anxieties about the methods of suppression of Mau Mau can only be allayed by a full judicial inquiry.
If the colonial secretary and the Kenya government are wise, they will agree to this.
Otherwise, people will continue to ask, as they are asking, what is being kept hidden in Kenya?
A hasty and clumsily executed cover-up of the massacre at Holacamp began immediately.
Three senior officers were summoned to the camp and informed that the death and injuries had followed the detainees drinking from a potentially contaminated water cart.
It was not considered a particularly believable story, as evidenced by this interview with a press officer in the government at the time.
During March 1959, I received a telephone call from an official at Government House alerting me that a draft press release was on its way to my office for urgent distribution to the media.
I found the release to be a bold announcement that 11 Mau Mau detainees had died after drinking water.
I suspected at once that there was something very fishy about the story.
After pondering over it for a little, I rang Government House asking for more details to enlarge on this extraordinary announcement.
I soon became aware there was acute embarrassment over this affair at a very high level.
The prison officials I managed to contact tried their best to convince me that in a very hot climate, people who drank water if exhausted by hard work could possibly die.
At this point, I dug my heels in and said I wouldn't be responsible for putting out what I believe to be a half-truth, if not an outright falsehood.
After this, I was excluded from any further dealings with that press release, but the Chief Press Officer issued that controversial release to the world's press.
Yeah, I kind of love this interview because it's just, I don't know, just sort of like somebody whose job is part of being the cover-up machine just being like, come on guys, that's too ridiculous.
Yeah, really.
It's like, listen, put some art into your propaganda on cover-ups.
This is sloppy.
They died because of drinking water?
Yeah.
Whom among us has never been beaten to death by water in a trench?
Unsurprisingly, the attempted cover story failed.
Not only was the excuse given for the detained men's death ridiculous to nearly everyone who heard it, but as Willoughby Thompson recalls, the logistics of disposing of the bodies without anyone noticing that they had clearly been subject to extraordinary violence were beyond the capabilities of the administration.
The corpses had to be got rid of.
We had to fly them out in a plane from our dirt airstrip.
They had to be flown to Malindi, which was the nearest place where, again, it's all publicity, you see.
The news had got out.
Corpses were being flown in from Mhola where they'd been beaten up.
As the horrors of Holo were gradually exposed in the press, the already shaky legitimacy of British rule in Kenya, and the use of detention camps in particular, began to crumble.
The camps were quickly shut down and detainees released.
In an even more conciliatory move, Kenyan nationalist politicians and activists who'd been imprisoned at the start of the emergency, often on trumped-up charges, began to have their sentences commuted.
Most powerfully of all, the previously dominant settler minority were forced into making serious democratic concessions.
In 1960, it was announced that the next year's general elections would be the first in Kenya to be held under universal suffrage.
This meant that although it would be a couple of years until the country officially gained independence, the writing was very much on the wall for British rule in Kenya.
In the general elections of February 1961, the Kenya African National Union, a pro-independence political party, won a plurality of seats.
The colonial administration, aware it was in its last days, began to plan ahead.
Documents and records that might prove inconvenient to Her Majesty's government if they fell into the wrong hands, either started being destroyed or spirited back to London.
This didn't go unnoticed.
In September 1961, The Guardian ran an article reporting that many classified documents compiled during the emergency had been destroyed.
When the story was picked up by the East African Standard, the report quoted Tom Neill, the Administrative Secretary in the Chief Secretary's office, as saying that, There was no intrinsic or historical value in the documents destroyed.
In any case, copies of all documents would survive in London where they would be subject to the 50-year publication rule.
Kenyan archivists and officials, as well as historians who have made use of British archives in their research on the Mau Mau uprising, have confirmed that that was not, in fact, the case.
Twice in 1974 and 1981, Kenya's chief archivist dispatched officials to London to request access to any documents that had been migrated to Britain during the transition.
They were, according to David Anderson, systematically and deliberately misled in their meetings with British officials.
The gaps remained well into the modern day, as Elkins writes in the prologue for her book,
"After years of combing through what remains in the official archives,
I discovered that there was a pattern to Britain's cleansing of the records.
Any ministry or department that dealt with the unsavoury side of detention was pretty
well emptied of its files, whereas those that ostensibly addressed detainee reform
or Britain's civilising mission were left fairly intact.
This was hardly accidental."
At a minimum, Elkins maintained, there should have been 240,000 files for the 80,000 people
that were recorded as having been detained throughout the emergency.
In her research, she could only find 100.
Okay.
That's- Right.
Oh my god!
We're looking for 239,900 files.
Right.
Oh my god!
We're looking for 239,900 files.
So essentially they create their own little secret society to cover up actual horrifying brutality.
Yeah.
Yeah, isn't that so often the way?
When you're just sort of like, oh, there's this horrific kind of secret society going on underground.
The only way we can defeat them is by acting just as violently and keeping our own activities just as secret.
Yeah, exactly.
Their little secret oath ritual was the burning of the files.
And then cucumber sandwiches and tea.
A turning point came when a group of now-elderly Kenyans, assisted by the UK law firm Leyday, began to build a case to sue the British government in 2002.
All had been detained in the infamous camps during the uprising, and all claimed to have undergone torture during their time there.
The testimonies are, in a word, horrific.
One man, Paolo Zilli, said he'd been castrated with pliers at a detention camp.
Two of the women had been sexually assaulted with bottles, and one, Naomi Zula Kimwele, was separated from her children, who she never saw again.
Despite the horrors they endured, the claimants began their legal battle in 2009 by delivering an open letter to the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in which they emphasised their commitment to reconciliation.
In this clip from an Al Jazeera documentary called Kenya's Mau Mau The Last Battle, a spokesman for the Mau Mau Veterans Association reads it aloud.
This letter was addressed to the Prime Minister.
Dear Mr Brown, He who is defeated with unjust force will always come back.
He who is dealt with justly will never come back.
We are Kenyans in our 70s and 80s who have traveled to London from our rural villages to tell the world of torture we lived through at the hands of the British colonial regime.
We represent the forgotten people of Kenya, whose story has finally emerged, and whose cry for justice has become too deeply felt to remain unheard.
We ask you, Mr. Brown, to consider our case because we are now friends.
We are no longer enemies, and we would like to invite you to visit Kenya.
Wow.
Um, yeah.
communities and families who were so affected by the brutality of those times.
Wow, yeah, I mean. Yeah, it's really moving.
Both Elkins and Anderson, whose research this episode is indebted to, drafted expert witness statements to the court.
It would be Anderson's statement directly referring to the missing documents that would lead the judge presiding over the case to order the British government to both locate and release the long-lost files.
As Anderson recalled, I knew which flight they had left Kenya on, when and where they had arrived at Gatwick, who met the plane.
The judge more or less threatened to hold the government in contempt unless they were released.
In 2011, the lost documents were recovered in a basement in Hanslope Park, a building in Buckinghamshire, owned by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
What they revealed was damning.
Far from the violence having been the result of just a few bad apples in the form of overzealous guards or officers, the papers showed that officials at the very top of government were aware of the atrocities going on in the camps.
Worse than that, they had sanctioned it.
In one report delivered first to the Governor of Kenya and then passed on to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the country's Attorney General, Eric Rethif Jones, details extreme abuses of detainees in the detention camps and then gives instructions on how far camp guards should be legally permitted to go.
He wrote, Great!
"Serious injury must be avoided. Kicking with boots or shoes should not be permitted.
Vulnerable parts of the body should not be struck, particularly the spleen, liver and kidneys.
Accordingly, any blows should be confined to the upper part of the body and should avoid
any area below the chest, front or back." Great, kick them right!
In the report, Griffith Jones agrees to draft new legislation sanctioning beatings under these limits,
so long as it's kept out of the public eye.
One incriminating line would become emblematic of the scale of this cover-up.
Stressing the need for secrecy, Griffith-Jones had written, "If, therefore, we are going to sin,
we must sin quietly."
Ugh. There it is.
Faced with such damning evidence, the British government's legal team
attempted defensive arguments based largely on legal technicalities.
Their first, which I can only describe as cheeky, argued that historic responsibility lay with the Kenyan government rather than the British.
This was not just rejected by the High Court, but actually described as dishonourable by the judge.
In October 2012, the court similarly rejected the argument that too much time had passed for the trial to be a fair one.
In mid-2013, the government agreed to pay $19.9 million in compensation to 5,000 claimants who had undergone abuse and torture during the rebellion.
They also committed to funding the construction of a monument to the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya.
Finally, a government minister, William Hague, gave an official statement in parliament, acknowledging the extent of the human rights abuses and the British government's culpability for the very first time.
The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture, and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.
The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya's progress towards independence.
Torture and ill-treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn.
In an article titled, Constructing the Colonial Myth of Mao Mao, the historian of British imperialism, Dane Kennedy, argues that the uprising happened at a crucial turning point in the European understanding of colonialism and empire.
Old narratives about inherent racial superiority were becoming passé, but the empire had been so lucrative and made Britain so powerful, it was hardly rational to give it up without a fight.
The way the Mau Mau were portrayed by their powerful opponents in the press and government then said less about the resistance fighters themselves and much more about British anxieties about their own right to rule in places like Kenya.
It was necessary to emphasise the savagery and irrationality of the Mau Mau fighters.
But also to stress that they were in many ways victims of forces beyond their control.
Either the rapid tide of civilizational progress that their tribal sensibilities couldn't possibly hope to understand, or the almost supernatural power of ritualised oathing that so revolted and fascinated the White Observer.
This construction of Mau Mau allowed the powerful institutions in charge of Kenya to concede that yes, the colonial economic model needed updates, The creation of these convenient folk devils had a real human cost.
One of the most alarming things I found in my research is that we may never actually know how many Kenyan people died as a result of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign conducted in their country.
It's a figure that remains fiercely contested by historians and will probably continue to be so, given the still incomplete body of records from that time.
Conservative estimates put the number at 25,000.
One expert demographer argued in the Journal of African Affairs that going from census data, the number of excess deaths of the Kikuyu population during that time was somewhere closer to 50,000.
This, to me, seems to be how real conspiracies work.
Half secretly, but half out in the open too.
The most shocking abuses might be deliberately covered up, but those active decisions to conceal the truth are often helped along by a more ambient culture of indifference, at least among the powerful.
Some lives are simply characterised as less valuable and certainly less deserving of investigation than others.
If there's one thing I find really remarkable about that court case, it's the courage and determination of those 5,000 survivors in not allowing that to be the end of the story.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
