Kenyan Mau Mau veterans to sue UK

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

Veterans of Kenya's independence struggle are launching a compensation claim against the UK for alleged atrocities by the British army.

Lawyers for Mau Mau veterans said they had documented 40 cases of torture - including castration - sexual abuse and unlawful detention.

A spokesman for the veterans said in Nairobi they were confident of success.

The UK government has said the claim is invalid because of the time that had lapsed since the alleged abuses.

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8043442.stm

[bertman]

1. I remember reading a number of books and articles about the Mau Mau revolt that

contained some horrible stories of the Mau Mau's commiting horrific atrocities on innocent men, women, and children. Maybe they think those atrocities have been forgotten.

I'm sure the British were as bad as they were, but this seems like the classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

[dipsydoodle]

2. I've never been quite sure

whether the accusations against the Mau mau were propaganda or not. :shrug:

There may also have been the a similar situation to Iraq where innocents were affected.

[Nihil]

3. Some of them were certainly not propaganda.

I know someone who was over there at that time and can vouch for the
fact that there *were* horrific attacks on perfectly innocent civilians.

I have no doubt that, as always, the press and the establishment will
have taken the underlying truth and blasted it far & wide to "justify"
some of the reprisals.

There is also the fact that some of the reprisal attacks were carried out
by survivors & relatives of victims of the Mau Mau and there were more than
a few "blind eyes" turned by the authorities. Two wrongs don't make a right
but that is rarely understood by people in that situation.

Be that as it may, we're talking 50-57 years here so the British government
response is actually correct (for a change).

:shrug:

[TheCentepedeShoes]

5. I was quite young in the early

50's but I later read Robert Ruark's fictional Something of Value.

[mojowork_n]

4. Historical background

This is from an online encyclopedia:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Mau_Mau_Uprising

For several decades prior to the eruption of conflict, the occupation of land by European settlers was an increasingly bitter point of contention. Most of the land appropriated was in the central highlands of Kenya, which had a cool climate compared to the rest of the country and was inhabited primarily by the Kikuyu tribe. By 1948, 1.25 million Kikuyu were restricted to 2000 square miles (5,200 km²), while 30,000 settlers occupied 12,000 square miles (31,000 km²). The most desirable agricultural land was almost entirely in the hands of settlers.

During the course of the colonial period, European colonizers allowed about 120,000 Kikuyu to farm a patch of land on European farms in exchange for their labour. They were, in effect, tenant farmers who had no actual rights to the land they worked, but had previously called home. Between 1936 and 1946, settlers steadily demanded more days of labour, while further restricting Kikuyu access to the land. It has been estimated that the real income of Kikuyu squatters fell by 30% to 40% during this period and fell even more sharply during the late 1940s. This effort by settlers, which was essentially an attempt to turn the tenant farmers into agricultural labourers, exacerbated the Kikuyus' bitter hatred of the white settlers. The Kikuyu later formed the core of the highland uprising.

As a result of the poor situation in the highlands, thousands of Kikuyu migrated into cities in search of work, contributing to the doubling of Nairobi's population between 1938 and 1952. At the same time, there was a small, but growing, class of Kikuyu landowners who consolidated Kikuyu lands and forged strong ties with the colonial administration, leading to an economic rift within the Kikuyu. By 1953, almost half of all Kikuyus had no land claims at all. The results were worsening poverty, starvation, unemployment and overpopulation. The economic bifurcation of the Kikuyu set the stage for what was essentially a civil war within the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau Revolt.

......

The official number of European settlers killed was 32.

The official number of Kenyans killed was estimated at 11,503 by British sources, but David Anderson places the actual number at higher than 20,000. Professor Caroline Elkins, whose study of the revolt Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, claims it is probably at least as high as 70,000 but more realistically it's in the hundreds of thousands.". However, Elkins' methodology for arriving at her conclusions has been subject to considerable criticism from a letter-writer in the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, David Elstein. Elstein contends that Professor Elkins' figures are derived from an idiosyncratic reading of census figures and a tendentious interpretation of the fortified village scheme. More recently, the demographer John Blacker, in an article in African Affairs, has estimated the total number of African deaths at around 50,000; half were children under 10.

I had a friend who was in the British Army at the time. He served in Kenya. His unit's task was to surround arbitrarily targeted villages, before they were bombed by the RAF, then shoot anyone trying to run away. The Kikuyu had very few weapons, other than spears and panga's, a sort of machete.

....I don't know if this is the same lawsuit, or an earlier one, but there's another story about a lawsuit, here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/13/kenya.foreignpolicy

[bertman]

6. Thanks for the info, mojowork_n. As usual, us white folks ain't lookin so good in the

colonialism business.

[mojowork_n]

8. Um, to tell you the truth,

...I'm not sure I'd lay all the blame on "colonialism" -- it might demean a few too many of the colonials, people who came into Africa for any number of reasons.

Colonialism is just another word for business-as-usual, what happens when there's a profit niche to be mined, somewhere, that offers a very few people an opportunity to make an enormously large pile of loot.

Like in Kenya, who would it have been, that sold all the real estate to the newcomers, and had the pull and influence to see to it that the locals were all herded into smaller and smaller parcels of land? If the locals had had any cash, they might have gotten first dibs.

Just like in this country, people arrived from all parts of the planet, but the locals -- Native Americans -- weren't part of the economy. When the Cherokee in Georgia were successful in making some of the accomodatations required for economic advancement, they had it all taken away from them only at the very highest levels of government. President Andrew Jackson defied a Supreme Court order to have their land taken away from them, when gold was discovered in Cherokee territory. Bigotry, racism, ignorance, or greed, or whatever you want to call it, none of it might have mattered if the Supreme Court ruling had been allowed to stand.

I'm afraid that our own government -- heck, most all governments everywhere -- still work like that.
As the Harvard economist who was on the Charlie Rose program said last night, there are all sorts of agencies and regulations for manufacturers of toasters, to protect the consumer, so that every fifth toaster offered for sale isn't a potential fire hazard. But there are very few oversight mechanisms for the manufacturers of money. Or as Dick Durbin said, 'the banks own this country,' or something like that, when his Senate bill to provide individual homeowners an opportunity (a "last chance") to avoid foreclosure, was defeated by the bank lobby. (With the knowing complicity of all of the Republicans in the Senate, and 13 of the Democrats.) As that Harvard economist said, 'there's no lobby on Capital Hill for ordinary citizens.' Our voting power as citizens is supposed to provide some protection, but in the de-regulated media (thanks, President Clinton, for that Telecommunication Act of 1996), voting power is outweighed by the spending power that pays for the media voices. Including all the nonsense on right-wing, All-GOP-All-The-Time AM radio.

...Sorry, I also watched the excellent documentary about Wounded Knee last night on PBS. Some of the Frontline documentaries, and Bill Moyers, and Tavis Smiley and Charlie Rose are examples of decent, public-interest programming, but what can you say about any of the major news operations when Deutsche Welle, or the BBC, or Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, are so much better?

[trof]

7. A friend was there during her teens.

Her dad was a planter.
Leaving for school one morning she found her family's dog beheaded and nailed to their gate.

Same lady (Dutch) spent her childhood years in a Japanese prison camp in what is now Indonesia.

Needless to say, she is an amazing woman.

[bertman]

9. beheading a dog is a shitty thing to do, but it certainly doesn't rise to the level of

horror described in the posts above.

Indeed, your friend sounds like she has seen her share of the world's worst episodes. I hope she lives a tranquil, protected life now.

[trof]

10. She gave me a Japanese WWII Army/Navy flag.

She took it from the prison camp when the war ended and they were liberated.

[mojowork_n]

11. Numbers and statistics don't always give you a good yardstick

...Especially when the intent or purpose is to provide a club for whacking your opponent, or knocking over the "straw man" you've created to represent a contrary point of view. (Recalling that line about 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.')

I had a talk this afternoon with my friend, who'd been sent to Kenya as a 19 year old member of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders ("thin red line") regiment, under the command of Lt. Colonel Robert "Mad Mitch" Mitchell.

He strongly doubted that casualty total of 32, among European civilians, saying he'd seen at least that many, himself. Groups of 5 or 6, per farm, with all their household servants, who usually came from India. (Maybe those Worthy Oriental Gentlemen weren't listed on colonial body lists, in the 1950's.)

He said his unit had been responsible for the massacre of the inhabitants ("male or female, old or young, able-bodied or crippled") of 8 villages. ("Eight villages, with an average population of 500 or so in each, that's 4,000 right there.") "B-level" intelligence had suggested the possibility that someone in each of the villages "might" have been a supporter of the uprising. So after the RAF dropped napalm, one of the most decorated regiments in the history of the British Army was tasked with 'putting any remaining survivors out of their misery.' He still wakes up at night, from time to time, with the memory of the screams, and the rancid and pungent olfactory assaults.

On the other hand, he said that his other memory of the central highlands plateau of Kenya, at the time, was that it was a sort of colonial fantasyland. A little warmer in climate but otherwise the farms and lovely, rolling meadows made you think you were in the Cotswolds, the Shakespeare country of the West Midlands. Only the appearance of the colonials themselves; ruddy, freckle-faced, in pith helmets, betrayed the actual locale.

That world's certainly gone forever. Fifty-some years later, if there's anything to that whole Truth and Reconciliation concept, it might help speed up the process for there to be a little more common understanding on all sides. Less tension and fear and mistrust from everybody. Drop the sharp elbows and relax those shoulders.

...Talk.

Otherwise, there's nothing to stop the cycle from repeating, over and over and over again. Endless repetition of the same old story... "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

I've never met anyone from Kenya, I don't think, but I have a friend from next door in Uganda, and some more from Kenya's neighbor to the north, Ethiopia. What I can tell you is that I’d hate for anyone to use the term “Mau-Mau” in their presence, or to describe them. It was a name made up by the British, not a term that any of the members of the uprising ever applied to themselves.

There was undoubtedly plenty of barbarism to go around, on all sides; it probably isn’t necessary to perpetuate it.

.....Forgive the affected, magniloquent borrowing from Shakespeare but my old buddy’s actually related, on his mother’s side, to one of the oldest clans in Scotland, the Macduff’s. Possibly a descendant of some person who may have been the foundation for the character who slays the ambitious usurper, Macbeth, at the end of the play.

Setting aside ambition would also seem to be something a reasonable person might want to do, in advancing the Truth and Reconciliation process. This "bunch of tubes," to borrow former Senator Ted Stevens' phrase to describe the internet, might even be something that also helps it along. As each brief candle, blogging away at his or her keyboard, passes on a cleaner flame or spark, to the next person.

.......More light, less smoke.

[mojowork_n]

12. PS

I'm a little surprised but I suppose not *that* suprised that the Wikipedia history of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyll_and_Sutherland_Highlanders

makes absolutely no mention of any members of the unit ever having been in Kenya.

The other online encyclopedia that I quoted from in an earlier post is a completely new resource for me. I just ran across it for the first time when I was searching Kenya results. I'm not sure how accurate it is, or how the editing/correction/concensus process works there.