For elderly Kenyans variously beaten, castrated and detained in Britain's gulag, there can be no adequate compensation
For a long time the denial was total, with even archival staff told that the damning files about Kenya belonged to somebody other than the Foreign Office. After the papers were finally dragged into the daylight, Whitehall accepted that the racially tinged barbarism they documented was a very bad business. It continued to fight litigation, however, because of supposed fears about the impossibility of a fair case, half a century on from the Mau Mau revolt. Last year, a judge dismissed this concern, pointing to "voluminous" evidence dutifully logged by a regime that ruled with the filing cabinet as well as the iron rod. A last-ditch Foreign Office attempt to bat the issue remained in play, but now the government seems ready to shift from fighting to folding, by moving to settle with victims of British abuse.
For elderly Kenyans who were variously beaten, castrated and detained in "Britain's gulag", there can be no adequate compensation for a trauma that may have shaped a lifetime, but a payment coupled to a frank confession might help draw a line, the process post-apartheid South Africa called truth and reconciliation. For the surviving victims, this is, surely, the least that justice demands.
But is there any broader purpose in stirring up the distant past? The case against securing apologies from people without personal culpability after hauling long-dead officials over the coals is not hard to make, but it is blind to the chains that link present and past. Britain's place in the world was established through imperialism, and although that place is not what it was, that same history explains why the average citizen in London still enjoys privileges and opportunities completely unknown to the average citizen in Nairobi. The first I in ICI was for imperial, testament to the role that sales to the colonies played in the building of British industry; the flow of funds around an empire on which the sun never set made sterling a reserve currency and London a world financial centre. Go further back, and the UK's proud claim to be "a trading nation" was established with consignments of the bloodstained crops of cotton and sugar, to say nothing of the human cargo that went with them.
All this, of course, goes way beyond Kenya, which was only colonised the best part of a century after trading in slaves was abolished. The point is merely that it is attendant on countries that have prospered through brute power to be honest and reflective about this. Britain may have run its empire on looser reins than some, and certainly jettisoned it more quickly. It did not, however, do so without a nasty fight in several places. The Mau Mau case is important because it reminds us of this – and of how reliably the impulse to assert national authority beyond national borders slips from the arrogant to the violent.