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Cold Files 007: The War That Was Never Filed. Kenya, 1952 to 1960
The Last Flight Out
On 3 December 1963, nine days before Kenya became independent, three wooden packing crates were loaded onto a British United Airways flight out of Nairobi bound for Gatwick. Inside were roughly 1,500 files belonging to the colonial government of Kenya. The historian David Anderson reconstructed that flight from a surviving packing list and published it in the History Workshop Journal in 2015.
For the next forty eight years no British government put that archive on the public record. Its existence leaked out only in fragments: a minister told the Commons in 1971 that Kenya's pre-independence Executive Council papers had been returned to this country, and a few researchers saw Lesotho files at Hanslope Park in 2003. As late as 2006, asked directly for documents about the suppression of Mau Mau, the Foreign Office replied that everything it held had already gone to the National Archives.
That is why this file is hard to write. Every argument about what Britain did in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 runs into the same wall: the men who ran the Emergency removed the record of it on their way out, and they wrote down instructions explaining how.
The night of 20 October 1952
Sir Evelyn Baring had been Governor three weeks when he declared a State of Emergency on 20 October 1952. That night the administration launched Operation Jock Scott and arrested around 180 alleged Mau Mau leaders, among them Jomo Kenyatta, convicted at Kapenguria the following April. Dedan Kimathi and Stanley Mathenge were not caught. They went into the forests.
It followed the assassination of Senior Chief Waruhiu wa Kung'u, shot at point-blank range in his car outside Nairobi in early October, on the 7th or the 9th depending on the source. Chief Nderi of Nyeri was hacked to death on 22 October, two days after the round up. Both men were African, both were colonial appointees, and both deaths were used to justify what came next.
What came next was not, mostly, a war against an army. It was a war against a population.
On the night of 25 to 26 March 1953, Mau Mau fighters attacked the loyalist settlement of Lari, burning huts with families inside them. Anderson puts the dead at approximately 74. In the days afterwards, security forces and loyalist Home Guard killed a far larger number in reprisal, a figure Caroline Elkins puts at approximately 400. For the first Lari, 309 people were prosecuted and 71 hanged. For the second, nobody was tried. Anderson's framing, that Lari was two massacres and only one entered the record, is the key to the whole Emergency.
The Pipeline
The detention system had a name, and historians did not invent it. Thomas Askwith, Kenya's Commissioner for Community Development and Rehabilitation, designed it in 1953 and called it the Pipeline. He graded detainees white, grey or black. Whites were cooperative and could go home. Greys were oathed but compliant and went to works camps. Blacks were the hard core, held indefinitely. What moved a man between grades was not evidence. It was whether camp staff judged him willing to confess his oath. Askwith had drawn up a rehabilitation scheme. What got built on it was something else.
From April 1957 at the Mwea camps, District Officer Terence Gavaghan ran what the administration called the dilution technique. Small batches came in from Manyani, stripped, heads shaved, re-uniformed and coerced until they renounced the oath. Resistant batches were diluted among compliant ones so they could be broken. Roughly 200 men a week passed through five camps.
Manyani was built for 6,000. Within months of opening in 1954 it held around 16,000. A typhoid outbreak there produced 63 officially reported deaths. Detainees on burial duty said they buried about six hundred bodies.
Outside the camps was the other half of the system. Within eighteen months from June 1954, 1,050,899 Kikuyu were moved into 804 fortified villages of some 230,000 huts, ringed with ditches and spikes. That is where most of the dying happened.
Detainee labour dug the Mwea and Hola irrigation schemes and built Embakasi airport, now Jomo Kenyatta International.
Why nobody agrees on the number
The official figure for insurgents killed is 11,503, a body count from military returns carried into the 1960 Corfield Report. Against it sit 32 European civilians killed, 95 British military dead, and 1,819 African civilians officially recorded as killed by Mau Mau.
The number that matters most is rarely quoted. Between 1952 and 1958 the colonial courts hanged 1,090 men for Emergency offences, a figure Anderson built from Supreme Court and Special Emergency Assize records. At no other time or place in the British Empire was capital punishment dispensed so aggressively.
Beyond that the estimates diverge violently. Anderson puts Mau Mau dead at higher than 20,000, close to double the official count. Elkins, comparing the 1948 and 1962 censuses, wrote that between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu were unaccounted for. Her book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and was attacked hard, not least by Bethwell Ogot, the dean of Kenyan historians, who accused her of assembling a kind of case for the prosecution.
Two of those numbers compete directly. The demographer John Blacker, in African Affairs in 2007, answered Elkins on her own terms: same question, reworked demography, a figure of perhaps 50,000, more than half of them children under ten, most dying of hunger and disease rather than direct killing. He argued her census comparison had ignored changes in tribal classification and differences in coverage. The demographers have largely gone with him.
Anderson's 20,000 measures something else again: people killed by the security forces, built from military and court records, and it sits inside Blacker's total rather than against it. The question that cannot be settled is not which number is right. It is how many of those 50,000 died because of what was done to them. The documents that would answer it went into the crates.
Hola, 3 March 1959
On 11 February 1959 a Senior Superintendent of Prisons named Cowan drew up a plan for detainees at Hola camp who refused to work. Its cardinal feature, read into Hansard later that year, was that such men would be manhandled to the site of work and forced to carry out the task. Sir Frank Soskice told the Commons that was a carte blanche to use whatever force might prove necessary.
Cowan had envisaged 66 men. On 3 March the number marched out was 85, taken together rather than in batches. Warders beat them with clubs when they refused to dig.
Ten detainees were clubbed to death. An eleventh died later of his injuries. Twenty two were admitted to the camp hospital, and later accounts put the number left with serious permanent injuries at seventy seven.
The colonial statement, carried in the East African Standard on 5 March, said the men had died after drinking water from a cart used by the whole working party. Post mortems had already found deaths from lung congestion or from shock and haemorrhage following multiple bruises. Files released in 2012 show the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, settling privately on the water line while knowing the autopsies had found injuries that might have been caused by violence.
The lie broke in the Commons on 16 June 1959, and again in the overnight debate of 27 July, when Enoch Powell, then a backbencher, spoke against his own government: We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.
Nobody was prosecuted for Hola. Lennox-Boyd was replaced by Iain Macleod that October. The Emergency was lifted in January 1960.
Operation Legacy
By May 1961, under Macleod, the withholding instructions were standardised. Governors were told to hold back any record that might embarrass Her Majesty's Government, embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others, compromise intelligence sources, or be used unethically by ministers in the successor government. Files marked for removal were called watch files and stamped with a red W.
The concealment was explicit. As Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor reported in the Guardian on 18 April 2012, the instruction read that the legacy files must leave no reference to watch material, and that the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed.
Destruction had specifications. Papers were to be incinerated with the waste reduced to ash and the ashes broken up. Alternatively they were to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast. No trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain.
Eyewitness accounts of the burning are thinner than the instructions. The historian Mandy Banton notes that for Kenya the information is surprisingly sparse. The clearest contemporaneous line comes from North Borneo in July 1963, where an official wrote: What's burnt won't be missed.
One concession is owed. Scholars including Banton and Anthony Badger argue the hidden-archive story has been overdrawn, since the National Archives already held thousands of Kenya files. That is true, and it makes what follows worse, not better.
The memo
In June 1957 Eric Griffith-Jones, Attorney General of Kenya, wrote to Baring advising how the beating of detainees could be brought inside the law. The document specifies that vulnerable parts of the body should not be struck, particularly the spleen, liver or kidneys, and that those administering force remain collected, balanced and dispassionate.
It also contains the line: if we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.
A copy had sat in the National Archives since the 1980s, released under the thirty year rule. Almost nobody looked at it. It took a lawsuit by five elderly Kenyans, and a second copy coming out of Hanslope Park, before anyone read it out loud.
Hanslope Park
The claim was brought in 2009 with support from the Kenya Human Rights Commission. The five test claimants were Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, Jane Muthoni Mara and Susan Ngondi. Their allegations included castration, sexual torture, and in Nyingi's case being beaten unconscious at Hola and left among the dead.
In April 2011, under pressure from the case, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office admitted it held an archive it had never declared. Around 8,800 files from 37 former colonies had been in government storage for fifty years, at a repository in Hayes until 1994 and then at Hanslope Park, the FCO's secure communications facility in Buckinghamshire. They filled some 200 metres of shelving. Kenya's share arrived in 294 boxes.
Anthony Cary, a former high commissioner asked to explain how this happened, reported in February 2011 that it was a failure of management rather than a conspiracy. He quoted an internal comment from 1995: 2000 boxes of files gathering dust, some of great interest, which cannot be seen by researchers in case the cat is let out of the bag.
Mr Justice McCombe refused to strike the case out in July 2011 and ruled in October 2012 that a fair trial remained possible. At that hearing only 40 per cent of the Hanslope material had been inspected.
On 6 June 2013 the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, told the Commons that the British Government recognise that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration, and sincerely regret that these abuses took place. The settlement covered 5,228 claimants, settlement sum and gross costs together totalling £19.9 million. Britain continued to deny liability.
What the destruction achieved
In January 2015 a Foreign Office minister told Parliament the department had found just under 170,000 further legacy files, all overdue for review under the Public Records Act.
Then came the second case. Kimathi and others v FCO was a group action with more than 40,000 claimants. On 2 August 2018 Mr Justice Stewart dismissed the first test claim. What is clear, he wrote, is that there is a great deal which is not clear. Apart from what we have, it is unknown what was destroyed in Kenya, what was returned to the UK, what remains in Kenya or has been lost or destroyed there. The passage of time, he found, had made it effectively impossible for the defendant to investigate the core allegations at all.
Forty thousand claimants lost, in a British court, in 2018, because the evidence no longer existed. Thirteen boxes of top secret Kenya files were still unaccounted for when Anderson wrote in 2015.
The men who loaded those crates in December 1963 were not covering their tracks for a decade. They were doing it for good. Sixty two years on, the official figure is 11,503, the serious estimates run from 20,000 to 300,000, and the reason that range is that wide is that the people who could have narrowed it wrote down how to burn the evidence, and then burned it.
Sin quietly, the Attorney General wrote. They did.
NEXT FILE: Warsaw, August 1944. Sixty three days, a city demolished on a written order, and a Red Army that halted on the far bank of the Vistula.
Sources consulted
David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 2005
David Anderson, Guilty Secrets, History Workshop Journal, 2015
Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag, 2005
John Blacker, The demography of Mau Mau, African Affairs, 2007
Mandy Banton, Operation Legacy, JICH, 2017
Anthony Cary, The Migrated Archives: What Went Wrong, 2011
F. D. Corfield, Historical Survey of Mau Mau, HMSO, 1960
Hansard, HC Deb 16 June and 27 July 1959, and 6 June 2013
Mutua v FCO [2011] EWHC 1913 and [2012] EWHC 2678
Kimathi v FCO [2018] EWHC 2066 (QB)
Cobain, Bowcott and Norton-Taylor, the Guardian, 18 April 2012
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