How the British were forced to reveal secret files on torture of Kenyan resistance fighters
The British government denied the files existed for decades. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
As the colonial forces were preparing to leave Kenya, in the days leading up to its independence from Britain in 1963, they were given one last order.
Before they left, they took with them crates upon crates of files; the contents of which painted a gruesome picture of the violence and torture they'd inflicted on Kenya's resistance movement, the Mau Mau.
For decades afterwards, the British government denied the files existed and hid them from the world.
But as a result of the determination of Mau Mau survivors, the truth was eventually forced out.
"They're trying to control a narrative, they're trying to control a perception of how they're seen," Kenyan historian Chao Tayiana said.
"There was torture, there was violence and this took place on a mass scale."
An uprising becomes war
The Mau Mau resistance movement was decades in the making.
After the British colonised Kenya in the 1890s, bitterness toward them grew as the colonial force oppressed the Kenyan people.
"The Mau Mau is a reaction … the British weren't here to help Kenyans, they were here, essentially, to exploit and to take what they could," journalist Patrick Gathara, who spent years looking into the Mau Mau's history, said.
Journalist Patrick Gathara says the British were trying to erase this part of their history. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
As Gathara described, thousands of Kenyans had their farming land taken from them and were instead "conscripted for labour".
"There's a lot of resentment there … that conjunction leads to this uprising," he told ABC iview's Stuff The British Stole.
"You start hearing of violence happening, people being killed, and then that becomes now [known as] the Mau Mau war."
The British called it "the emergency". For years in the 1950s, people flocked to the Mau Mau cause, attacking white settlers and fighting — often guerilla-style — against the English and for the freedom of Kenya.
The Mau Mau were outlawed by the British, and members who were caught were sent to detention camps. Many Kenyans not associated with the Mau Mau were also detained.
Chao Tayiana is a Kenyan historian who focuses on uncovering the legacy of British colonialism. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
"Over the course of the state of emergency, between 1952 and around 1960, women, children, elderly people, young adult men, many of them are put in detention camps," Tayiana, whose research focuses on the legacy of colonisation, said.
"We are looking at an approximate 100 camps across the country.
"It is estimated that close to 160,000 people have been taken through this pipeline of camps, moved from one place to another over the course of eight years."
One of those camps was called the Aguthi Works Camp in central Kenya. There, one example of torture was detainees being held in rooms that were flooded with water, making it impossible to sit down or sleep.
Loading...Estimates vary but by the end of the conflict tens of thousands of Kenyans had been killed.
Given the number of people detained in these camps by the British, you might assume there would be records about their administration and staff decision-making.
As researcher David Anderson discovered, though, it was the exact opposite.
In his research on the Mau Mau, Dr David Anderson noticed there was a gap in the British records. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
Files smuggled out of Kenya
Dr Anderson began researching the Mau Mau uprising in the 1990s and said he was drawn into the archives to look for more information about the war.
"When you're working in an archive, you're seeing these long lists with numbered files, so when files are missing from a list, the fact there are gaps is really obvious," he said.
"We started noticing there were no files at all about the administration of the detention camps in Kenya."
Intrigued and confused, Dr Anderson and his research colleagues dug deeper.
They were told the British had destroyed documents in the years leading up to Kenya's independence in 1963.
"People told me about bonfires outside district offices, about secretaries stuffing documents into braziers," he said.
But it seemed not all were sent up in smoke.
David Anderson has been researching the Mau Mau for decades. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
"We actually found a document that suggested documents had been moved out of Kenya to London," he said.
That document was a simple packing slip from 1962 that traced the journey of a number of crates of files from Nairobi to Gatwick Airport in England.
After that, the trail went cold.
That was, until 2003.
British government loses court battle
More than 50 years after the Mau Mau was banned, in 2003 the Kenyan government lifted the rule initially imposed by the British.
A few years later, a group of Mau Mau veterans successfully sued the British government for compensation for the torture they experienced during the conflict.
Their action forced the British government to admit its colonial administration in Kenya had abused detainees and apologise.
It also forced it to reveal something else.
Working with Dr Anderson, the veterans' legal team convinced a judge that the British government had to reveal the missing documents.
"The foreign office, after spending the previous 15 years not able to find these documents, suddenly discovered them," Dr Anderson said.
He described what lay within the pages as everything from "the trivial to the horrifying".
Some listed accusations against staff at the camps which included murder, assault, rape and grievous bodily harm.
"This describes how torture is being done. It's quite a catastrophic picture, really," Dr Anderson said.
But the revelations did not end there.
The files included a seemingly innocuous hand-drawn diagram of a map of the room in which the documents had been held. On it were the names of several other former colonies.
The British had not just been hiding what they did in Kenya, but what happened in other countries as well.
"We had accidentally stumbled upon not just the Kenya material, but everything that had come back from the other colonies," Dr Anderson said.
Dr Anderson found a diagram like this that appeared to show a floor plan. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
While it was a confronting picture for Dr Anderson and other researchers, it also was vital in proving what survivors' had reported for years.
Validating survivors' experiences
As Dr Anderson pointed out, before the documents were found: "There was still some debate about whether acts of torture and brutality and atrocity were a matter of policy, or whether they were just the bad behaviour of few individuals."
"With these documents, that argument can no longer be sustained," he said.
"It's obvious that officials are aware of what is happening, they know deaths are happening, they know why the deaths in the camps are happening, yet they persist with their policy, and they justify it."
This high school was once one of the detention camps run by the British. (ABC/Wildbear/Cream/Wooden Horse)
Patrick Gathara agreed, and said while the British government's actions were an attempt at erasing history, the discovery of the files meant that was slowly being reversed.
"It is a denial of history," Patrick Gathara said.
"The discovery of the archives was able to show that these guys weren't making up stuff about camps, about the brutality that went on through it.
"By providing that documentary evidence, people are able to now start digging into this as real history, not just the ramblings of a few Africans somewhere."
Stream the new season of Stuff The British Stole on ABC iview now or watch it on ABC TV tonight at 8pm.