Britains blood-soaked secret massacre
The brutal suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during the 1950s is little known by comparison, not least because Britain has sought to cover-up the atrocities by destroying documents.
Despite the efforts to erase possibly the most bloody chapter of colonial history, evidence has been painstakingly pieced together and may be aired in the High Court next month.
Hundreds of thousands were killed in a place the high-living Eton and Oxbridge aristocracy liked to call “White Man’s Country.”
Concentration camps were used to imprison men of the Kikuyu tribe who were seeking to reclaim stolen land, such as the Happy Valley , immortalised in Hollywood movie White Mischief starring Greta Scacchi.
bonfire
Women and children were effectively imprisoned in villages surrounded by armed guards. Many people who were not killed by the bullet instead perished of hunger or disease.
Bonfires of documentation were lit across the old British East Africa Protectorate on the eve of independence in 1963, and some surviving files are still stamped “secret” fifty years later.
But for people like Mucheke Kioru, now 75 years old, his memories of what happened remain as vivid today as it was then. For him, and many other Kenyans, the pain still burns as fiercely as those bonfires, and the British governments’ refusal to say “sorry” merely rubs salt into wounds that, historically speaking, are still fresh.
