Kenya: The King Regrets
John M. Lonsdale (born 1937) is a British Africanist and historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Modern African History at the Centre of African Studies in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Trinity College there. As a schoolboy, he spent three summer holidays during 1953-1956 in Kenya where his father had just taken a job. He read history at Cambridge during 1958-1964. In 1956 he started national service as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles. His first teaching job was in Dar es Salaam in 1964. Lonsdale studied the modern history of Kenya extensively and won the Outstanding African Studies Award of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom in 2006. He has written quite immensely and continues to add to this lore of African literature. I confess to being a fan of this great man,
When in Nairobi for his first state visit to a
Commonwealth country, King Charles III expressed regret for brutalities
committed seventy years ago, when Kenya’s British rulers fought to suppress the
‘Mau Mau’ uprising. Some say he should have gone further and apologised. There
are two points at issue here, one moral, the other historical. The first calls
for our judgment. Is it morally tenable to apologise for the sins alleged of an
earlier generation? If that is ever justifiable, surely in this case the king
could take on that responsibility? Were not those past crimes committed in the
service of his late mother, the queen? Yes, but one can still hesitate to blame
the present for the past.
But there can be no hesitation about the history. British
forces, including Africans under British command, did commit harsh, often
atrocious and illegal, acts when defeating ‘Mau Mau’. The king’s apparently
genuine expression of personal regret was fully justified.
The king will have spoken on the advice of Downing Street. Ten
years ago the Conservative government paid £20m out of court in reparations
after ‘Mau Mau’ veterans demanded recompense for the torture they had endured.
The foreign secretary added his official regrets. Today’s same Tory government,
if under a prime minister several times removed, may well have advised that,
since Britain had already been forced to own up and make amends, the king need
now do no more than add his own regrets.
Did Kenya’s government also offer guidance? The British could
not have fought their counter-insurgency war without the help of the
grandparents of today’s Kenyan citizens—who served as police, prison warders,
or in the King’s African Rifles. Would President Ruto want the king to
apologise on their behalf, for being under British orders? ‘Mau Mau’s’ memory
divides Kenyans. It recruited almost exclusively from one of the country’s many
ethnic peoples, the Kikuyu, about 20 per cent of Kenya’s population. Many non-Kikuyu
believe it was as much a tribal as a nationalist uprising. Kikuyu themselves
remember the ‘Emergency’ as an intimately cruel civil war, won by those who
fought with rather than against the British. Some Kikuyu, those who opposed
‘Mau Mau’, have done well out of Kenya’s
independence; others, ‘Mau Mau’s’ children,
feel unjustly forgotten. Was Ruto’s concern for these divisive memories the
reason why King Charles met ‘Mau Mau’ veterans only in private?
What else might the two governments have wanted the king to
forget? Imperial history as a whole was clearly out of bounds. It would not do
for the king to enter that other ‘memory war’, simmering in Britain as well as
in former colonies, over the empire’s contradictory record of brutality and
benefit. Nor did the king recall, as well he might, Kenya’s own seventy years
of colonial rule. Few other white settler colonies excited so much British
criticism at the time.
Indeed, in 1942 Harold Macmillan, then a minister in the
Colonial Office, even wondered if Britain might do well to repatriate Kenya’s
tiny but vociferously privileged settler minority. It would, he thought, be
less expensive than the alternative: a future inter-racial war. It is certainly
hard to imagine a ‘Mau Mau’ uprising without the losses that Africans suffered
in land, human dignity, and racial equity as a result of white settlement. But
British Kenyans, children of the few settlers who ‘remained’, constitute
another of Kenya’s ethnic groups. The king could scarcely apologise for their
presence.
So King Charles referred only to Kenya’s eight-year
‘Emergency’, one of the wars of imperial succession that in some places made
retreat from empire bloodier than its acquisition. Counter-insurgency policy
was itself violent, fertile ground for displays of personal anger, revenge, or
panic. The colonial regime knowingly employed collective punishment and mass
detention without trial, while hanging a thousand and more ‘Mau Mau’ fighters.
Crucially, the privations of enforced villagisation probably caused more Kikuyu
deaths than combat, especially among mothers and children. While white racial
contempt was responsible for dreadful savageries, the insurgents themselves
invited horrified disgust with oathing rituals easily called obscene and grisly
murders of unarmed opponents, most of them fellow Kikuyu. The most
consequential British crime was cowardice in high places. The governor dared
not punish his security forces, British or African, for their criminal actions,
inherent as they are in all guerilla wars. He had to appease them instead. An
official amnesty declared in 1955 pardoned crimes on both sides. This assured
the continued loyalty of the Kikuyu ‘Home Guards’ who did more than British
regiments to defeat ‘Mau Mau’. It was to these so-called ‘loyalists’ and their
electoral allies that the British devolved sovereign power at Independence in
1963. There was much for which King Charles could never apologise.
John Lonsdale
Trinity College, Cambridge
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