Mau Mau Uncovers Hidden Colonial Files

By Vusi Moloi © 2011

The British Foreign Office was dealt a hard blow after an earthshaking discovery that it was illegally hiding some 2000 boxes of colonial records despite the fact that these records were meant to be part of the public domain. An estimated 8800 colonial files, kept under wraps by the British authorities, will soon see the light of day thanks to the new legal offensive from the unconquerable, unbought, unsold and highly revered Mau Mau of Kenya.

More than 60 years since they took the first steps in fighting the English establishment head-on, these Kenyan African revolutionaries are still agitating for change in modern times in a case that poses an impressive threat to the English establishment. The Mau Mau mean serious business because early this year they stormed the British Embassy in Nairobi demanding 105 trillion shillings in compensation for torture, dispossession, rape and murder when Britain ruled Kenya during the colonial era.

The Mau Mau veterans have launched a legal battle to be compensated along with their families for the torture and pain they suffered under one of the most violent administrations of the British Empire. A British High Court will hear the reparation case on Thursday. Armed with one of the best human rights lawyers in England with a track record of historic victories against the British Governement, the Mau Mau have enlisted the eagle-eyed services of Leigh Day.

President Barack Obama’s grandfather, Onyango Obama, is one of the victims of torture and state terrorism carried out under the British colonial rule in the 1950s and 60s. President Obama writes about this painful part of his family history in his memoirs Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance which he launched before his historic bid to become the President of the United States. Some have even suggested that President Obama harboured some degree of bitterness towards the English for the torture of his grandfather a charge President Obama has consistently denied.

The Mau Mau Genesis

The Mau Mau began an armed struggled against the intransigent British system in 1950 with lots of members drawn from the Kikuyu people. The Mau Mau used a secret and powerful African code for each of their members in the fullfilment of their mission-critical task of liberating Kenya from the swipping clutches of the English colonial system. They fought with irrevocable determination to emancipate their country which they achieved when Kenya became independent in 1963 under the iconic Jomo Kenyatta more than thirty years before South Africa could taste its own freedom.

The political liberation did not come cheap as the tree of freedom could only be watered with blood. The Kenyan Human Rights Commission reports that more than 90,000 Kenyans were executed, maimed or tortured by the British authorities while another 160,000 were interned under cruel and inhuman conditions. In comparison, the official British figures report 20,000 Mau Mau fighters killed in combat, about 1000 supporters hanged and another 70,000 Kikuyu members of the civilian population subjected to internment. No apology or reparations have ever been tendered to the Kenyan survivors and their families. Kenyan Human Rights Commission is supporting the Mau Mau in this case and has collected signatures from human rights organizations and individuals like South Africa's legend Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

This must not come as a surprise because the English prefer to ignore the truth and bury their head in the sand than to face it head-on. This is due to an apparent English philosophy, which regards the non-English as an expendable commodity. The British claim 300 British soldiers who died in gun battles with the Mau Mau fighters although this number is higher according to the Kenyans I have spoken to.

Voodoo Mystery

The historical records, which cover more than thirty British colonies, in Africa, Middle East, Asia and the Caribbean have remained the best-kept secret of England for many decades. It’s a voodoo mystery as to why these documents have been kept hush hush and away from the public domain. As soon as Kenya declared independence, the British administrators made a clean sweep in removing all records associated with their brutal rule in Kenya. This practice also took place in other colonized countries like South Africa.

Official Policy of Information Hiding and Falsification

The official policy of information hiding or falsification of history is a unique feature of the English establishment and their colonial descendants continue to live in denial of the atrocities inflicted upon the African natives to this day. This makes it nearly impossible to achieve closure when a denialist philosophy is the order of the day. As a matter of fact, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has told everybody that the British Government had no liability with regards to the bleak events that took place between 1952 and 1960 in Kenya. Obviously, this surviving cache of historical data was supposed to be inaccessible or wiped out of existence but somehow it got stashed away only to be rediscovered in our lifetime. These are the interesting times because history is unfolding right in front of our eyes. It is a judicial judge who ordered the examination of all historical records for purposes of dealing with the legal claimant case of the Mau Mau veterans and their surviving families.

Today we know about the existence of these documents due to the surviving members of the anti-colonial fighters still in the forefront of the great struggle to emancipate the sacred land of their foremothers and forefathers nearly fifty years after independence from British colonial rule. The resurgent Mau Mau have risen from the dark shadows of death to launch an ambitious case of reparations against the British Government by specifically naming the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as defendants in the lawsuit. Other liberation movements like the African National Congress of South Africa must take a page from the Mau Mau.

One of the Wikieleaks cables has reported that the new generation of the ANC lacked a sense of history and was more interested in self-interest than appreciating the scrutiny of history. Hopefully this Mau Mau case will inspire many ANC members to take an interest in history because this is the only way we can retrace our steps in order to arrive at the correct destination otherwise we are like aimless people dancing around on the dance floor without any strategic plan to really take us anywhere.

Scripted Statements and Denialism

For their part, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has dished out scripted statements of denial of responsibility in Kenya. Instead of announcing an unconditional release of all the colonial files, the Minister of the British Foreign Office Lord Howell of Guildford told the House of Commons "The intention is to make as much of this material as possible available to the wider public". He added, "This work will begin shortly but given the size of the archive the process may take some years to complete." It would appear that the FCO is intending to release a sanitized version of the files so that the real truth can never be known.

It must be understood that the FCO had previously denied any existence of colonial files pertaining to the Mau Mau and it was only after Mau Mau’s lawyers had presented an undeniable material evidence in court that the FCO was compelled by the judge to go get those files. These 300 Mau Mau files uncovered thousands of other colonial records pertaining to many countries to a total of 8800 files contained in 2000 boxes as already mentioned.

Nonetheless, the FCO still denies liability in the case of the Mau Mau. They invoke some voodoo statement, which says that if the English occupy, rob and rape your foremothers and forefathers, brutalize them and disinherit them of the land, and impound, burn alive or cull their cattle, then all those legal and moral liabilities associated with colonial conquest become the responsibility of the new government by succession and England can no longer be held liable.

One Mau Mau lawyer Dan Leader of Leigh Day & Co made an interesting rebuttal when he declared, "Every leading historical expert on the Kenya Emergency has filed statements in support of the victims. To seek to pin the liability for British torture onto the Kenyan government is an appalling stance for the government to take and one which we hope the judge will reject."

The former Prime Minister Tony Blair also reneged on legal responsibilities (treachery of the highest order) towards the African country of Zimbabwe when he wrote (see my article Why The West Is Not Influential in Zimbabwe) to Zimbabwe, through one of his Ministers, that England did not intend to honour the contractual agreements between England and Zimbabwe in spite of those treaty agreements being signed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on behalf of England. This is like saying if material evidence cannot be wished away then it eventually goes away if officially denied.

South Africa Must Demand Colonial Records

South Africa must take an interest in this case because there is likely to be Zulu boxes there too. This will help to cast light on the thousands of Black Africans who were interned and left to die in the British concentration camps between 1899 and 1902 in one of South Africa’s well hidden holocausts. Those Black mothers who died in these camps with their children have not been given a proper burial and many were buried in unmarked mass graves in the Free State and Gauteng provinces where the largest British concentration camps existed.

Perhaps these colonial papers can shed much needed light on the matter so that there can be some closure and resolution in order to move on with our lives as a people of the rainbow nation. In the article Black involvement in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 published in the Military History Journal of October 1999, Nosipho Nkuna writes about the Black Africans in these cruel concentration camps.

Celebrated Hero of the Mau Mau

The celebrated heroic figure of the Mau Mau armed rebellion Dedan Kimathi was captured in 1957 (having served seven years in the armed struggle against British rule) and sentenced to death by execution while still bleeding from his fresh injuries sustained in a shootout with British troops. The Chief Justice Sir Kenneth O’Connor sentenced Kimathi to die by hanging while the man was still wincing from his gaping wounds at his hospital bed. It’s one thing to clash with a man on the battlefield but is quite another story to subject him to such extreme indignity even when he is wounded lying in a hospital bed. As if this is not bad enough, the body of Kimathi has never been found to this day as we write these lines.

The strange thing about the judge is that he was not even an English native but an Irishman whose ancestors had been brutalized in the same if not worse fashion by the English establishment he now swore allegiance to. It’s hard to believe that someone whose ancestors were captured, chained, raped, beaten and caused to die under some of the most atrocious conditions would not be moved by another human being whose only crime was that of fighting for the emancipation of his people. In a number of articles like Political Contempt – Senator McCain and Senator Obama Debate 2 I write about the intersecting historical questions of the Irish people and the African descendants.

Today Kimathi enjoys the status of ancestral reverence in Kenya and his adored statue in Nairobi is a fitting tribute to an immortal legend in the great fight against colonial conquest by the English establishment. There is also a University named after him Kimathi University College of Technology.

The Mau Mau apparently established on August 12, 1950 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta (according to some historical accounts) and was later arrested and kept in one of the British prison camps in Kenya, which British officialdom preferred to call “Administrative Camps”.

However, Jomo Kenyatta never acknowledged his leadership or membership of the Mau Mau and it remains an open question as to whether he really was involved in the formation of the Mau Mau. Interestingly, Kenyatta never even unbanned Mau Mau during his rule and the movement only became unbanned after more than 50 years in August 2003. Notwithstanding, Kenyatta was an intellectual heavyweight. He studied economics at Moscow University in the USSR. He was able to pursue these advanced studies as a result of financial support from another African legend of Trinidad and Tobacco, the great George Padmore.

Kenyatta worked hard to bury the past and unite Kenya. Could there be parallels here with South Africa where the indigenous history of the African natives is suppressed in favour of official Eurocentric history that is till being taught through the lenses of colonial descendants who continue to occupy and exploit the lands of the African ancestors? More than three quarters of the food producing land is still controlled by colonial descendants who seem pleased with the status quo as it stands right now and the African natives seem powerless in doing anything about it. One thing is certain and that is the patience of the people is not endless. When another rebellion erupts in South Africa, it will become unstoppable.

As previously mentioned, the discovery of the colonial documents have implications for many countries. Following is the list of countries, colonies and protectorates affected by these files:

1. Aden (and protectorates)
2. Anguilla (Birthplace of the Rastafarian bible)
3. Bahamas
4. Basutoland (Lesotho)
5. Bechuanaland (Botswana)
6. British Indian Ocean Territory
7. Brunei
8. Cameroons
9. Ceylon
10. Cyprus
11. Fiji
12. Gambia
13. Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony
14. Gold Coast (Ghana)
15. Jamaica (Home of the Rastafarian movement)
16. Kenya (Mau Mau Country)
17. Malaya
18. Malta
19. Mauritius
20. New Hebrides
21. Nigeria
22. Northern Rhodesia (Zambia)
23. Nyasaland (Malawi)
24. Palestine (Occupied by Israel)
25. Sarawak
26. Seychelles
27. Sierra Leone
28. Singapore
29. Solomon Islands
30. Swaziland
31. Tanganyika (Tanzania)
32. Trinidad and Tobago
33. Turks and Caicos
34. Uganda
35. West Indies Federation
36. Western Pacific High Commission
37. Zanzibar (Tanzania)