On Christmas Day 1952, the great and good of colonial Kenya were treated to a performance by Frank Sinatra in Government House, Nairobi.
Presiding over this glamorous event were the governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, and his wife Mary, a woman so aristocratic that, on boarding the ship bound for Africa, she mistook the welcoming admiral for a porter and handed him her handbag.
In the audience that night were Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, in Africa to film Mogambo, and a cross-section of Kenya’s ruling class clad in evening dress. There were no Africans, apart from staff.
From the colonial vantage point, everything was as it should be: white hunters were still slaughtering the wild fauna, Happy Valley was louche and contented and the white men sipping pink gins in the Muthaiga Country Club sat beneath a map that was still, in large part, British imperial pink. The new Queen had acceded to the throne a few months earlier, while staying at Treetops Hotel in Kenya.
But in retrospect, the Sinatra concert was the high-water mark of empire in Kenya. For while Ol’ Blue Eyes (then just 37) crooned, the Mau Mau rebellion had already ignited: a violent rebellion that would be met with brutal repression, ripping the country apart, killing thousands, and eventually leading to Kenyan independence. As a colony, Kenya was facing the final curtain. Treetops was burnt to the ground by Mau Mau fighters in 1954.
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For decades afterwards, the reality of the Mau Mau was rarely discussed. The events were unspeakable and therefore, being British, we preferred not to speak of them. That has now changed.
This week the King visited Kenya, his first visit as monarch to a former colony, where he expressed “deepest regret” for what he called the “abhorrent and unjustifiable” acts of violence committed against Kenyans during the country’s independence struggle. The King was immediately attacked for voicing “regret”, but no “apology”.
What’s in a word? In this story, everything. Charles chose his carefully: we can grieve for the past, mourn the actions of our forebears, address them truthfully, but we can only apologise for what we have done ourselves. Words were used as weapons during the Mau Mau insurgency. To Kenya’s white settlers, the uprising was the work of a savage and depraved tribal cult, a barbaric assault on civilised values. London condemned it as a terrorist campaign and a threat to legitimate British colonial authority.
It was put down with ferocity. About 90,000 Kenyans were killed or maimed and 160,000 detained, with some subjected to torture.
Many Kenyans saw the Mau Mau uprising differently, as a battle for political self-government, an intergenerational feud, a conflict over land rights and a Kikuyu tribal rebellion. Most of the violence was perpetrated by Africans against Africans, under orders from their British overlords. More white people were killed in traffic accidents in Kenya than by the Mau Mau.
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The very word Mau Mau was subject to multiple, conflicting interpretations. No one knows for certain what it meant: a battle cry, a code word, a secret word game played by Kikuyu boys before the circumcision ritual, or a term of abuse coined by the British and then adopted by the rebels. It may be an anagram of “Uma Uma”, meaning “Get out! Get out!”
The British cloaked the draconian response to the Mau Mau in euphemism, a raft of weasel words to disguise what was happening. Systematic interrogation, torture and detention were described as “screening”, “dilution”, “processing” and “rehabilitation”. This was an “emergency” (temporary and soluble) rather than open insurrection or civil war. Enoch Powell was one of the few to demand that British authorities were held to account: “We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.”
Six decades later, through a combination of scholarship, legal action and journalistic investigation, Britain began to find a language to talk about the unspeakable: this newspaper played a significant part in that process.
In 2009, four elderly survivors from the Kenyan camps brought a lawsuit against the government, claiming grievous maltreatment. Foreign Office lawyers argued that all responsibilities of the colonial government had devolved to the Kenyan government, and insisted that the events were too far in the past for a fair hearing.
Two years later, The Times revealed that in the months leading up to independence in 1963, British officials had weeded out documents that “might embarrass HMG” and shipped them to Britain. These were stashed in the secret Foreign Office archive at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire.
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In the wake of that revelation, the foreign secretary William Hague ordered the release of all files relating to colonial Kenya, as well as similar documents extracted from 37 other former British colonies and territories.
The files made for grim reading. More than 100,000 Kenyans, many with no connection to the revolt, were “processed” through concentration camps, where they were subjected to sustained abuse, including beatings, rapes, killings and even castration. Senior officials knew what was going on: “If we are to sin, we must sin quietly,” said Eric Griffiths-Jones, the attorney-general of the Kenyan colonial government.
Britain could no longer maintain the fiction that the violence in response to the Mau Mau rebellion had been proportionate and just. In 2013, the government agreed to pay an out-of-court settlement of £20 million to more than 5,000 survivors of the detention camps.
The war of words continues over the Mau Mau, with extreme language on both sides, but it is now an honest debate, conducted in terms that do not seek to obfuscate and deny. The King’s expression of regret would have baffled and enraged the audience at Frank Sinatra’s Christmas concert, but today we should applaud it.
Regrets, we’ve had a few. But 71 years after his mother inherited the throne in colonial Kenya, King Charles has done it his way. And rather well.
