A Reconsideration Of The Management Of British Decolonisation In The Secondary Literature

To what extent does the new historiography on the Mau Mau insurgency require a wider reconsideration of the way in which the management of British decolonisation has been portrayed in the secondary literature?

There are difficulties in summarising such a varied field of study as British decolonisation, but an essential trend may be identified. As more colonial records are released, more oral testimonies and witness statements are analysed, and more demographic and statistical analysis is undertaken, increasingly pluralistic and critical assessments of the management of decolonisation have been put forward. The portrayal of the management of British decolonisation has been a reflection of the relative ease with which it was accomplished. The depiction of the British Empire as dedicated to the civil rule of law and the military use of minimum force is the most pervasive one in the secondary literature. Ian Watt, an influential figure in the Colonial Office, wrote in 1960 ".we should add that the UK is ill-equipped by tradition or experience to attempt to teach any regime how to conduct itself in an authoritarian way." Three key areas of recent Mau Mau historiography will be discussed here; the archival records released at Hanslope Park, the work of Caroline Elkins and David Anderson, and the ongoing debate on the doctrine of minimum force in Small Wars and Insurgencies. This essay draws upon these to suggest that the mistreatment of the Kikuyu population and its subsequent concealment was a deliberate policy initiated at the highest levels of government and this requires a reconsideration of the management of decolonisation.

Two key works in the new investigation of the Mau Mau are Elkins' 2005 book Imperial Reckoning and Anderson's Histories of the Hanged. Both are based upon hundreds of eye-witness accounts, the correspondence of colonial officials and members of the security services, and official colonial records. In Imperial Reckoning, Elkins presents an extremely critical view of the colonial authorities and the practices and procedures implemented during detention and 'screening' (interrogation). These include the use of 'compelling force' (torture), known as the dilution or 'Mwea' technique, forced labour, summary execution, and population transferal. Anderson demonstrates how the lack of funding, the pressure from military and civil administration, and the attitudes of the local settler and judicial community towards Kikuyu all conspired to create a legal system which virtually guaranteed conviction of suspects, often for life-terms of hard labour or execution.

To provide the legislative and regulatory framework that allowed these activities to continue, members of the Government, the Army, the security services, and the judiciary actively conspired to create legal loopholes, re-assign or conceal involved personnel, and obstruct independent inquiry and media coverage of the insurgency. Correspondence from the Governor Sir Eveyln Baring, the Attorney General Eric Griffiths-Jones, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies Alan Lennox-Boyd all reveal the extent to which the human rights abuses in Kenya were encouraged by the administration. Democratic oversight was deliberately circumvented by internal inquiries, choreographed tours of internment camps, and by the evasion of Lennox-Boyd during Parliamentary questions. The careful wording of the Emergency regulations, such as Regulation 17 of the Emergency (Detained Persons) Regulations, allowed for sweeping powers of detention and interrogation in contradiction of both domestic and international law. These regulations, which were created for the implementation of specific practices against the Mau Mau, would become policies which were then followed by colonial officials around the world against anti-colonial agitation. That the colonial leadership directly supported the perpetrators of such abuses demonstrates the prevalent culture of pragmatic repression and concealment of violence. All together then, this body of work suggests that, in contrast to the orthodox literature, the British colonial governments actively engaged in authoritarian practices and therefore demands reconsideration of its portrayal.

Further new Mau Mau historiography consists of the Hanslope Park files. These papers were released to the High Court in the 2011 case, which was brought against the British Government on behalf of four Kenyans who suffered abuses under the colonial authorities. They consist of correspondence between the British Government and the colonial administration, as well as the internal correspondence of the colonial administration and the minutes of meetings at every level of government. They prove the complicity in legislative and regulatory cover up of illegal practises in detention camps. They make plain reference to the use of torture, murder, and population removal as tools of repression, and are more concerned with the concealment and legal justification of them than with the investigation and stopping of such practices. Many of the documents contain reference to forced labour, and openly admit to the illegality of the practice with the Attorney General writing; 'If, therefore, we are to sin we must sin quietly'. According to Anderson, the FCO has ignored requests for access to some 40 files under the heading of 'Collective Punishments'. The reason for non-disclosure of these documents is clear; they are sure to contain evidence of further abuses against innocent people who could not be classified as combatants. While over a third of the documents refer to the Mau Mau insurgency, others relate to almost all colonial conflicts from the 20th century. The Hanslope Park files also include secret papers from 37 other ex-colonial territories including Cyprus, Rhodesia, Aden, Palestine, Uganda, Nigeria, Malaya and Ghana. This wealth of new evidence, which is only slowly being processed, has been a direct result of the investigation into the history of the Mau Mau insurgency. The centralised nature of the FCO means that these records, as well as those that may come to light in the future, contain crucial evidence that points to the general management of British decolonisation.

Another aspect of historiography on the Mau Mau that applies to the wider study of British decolonisation is the use of the doctrine of 'minimum force' by British military forces. Huw Bennett, in The Other Side of the COIN, argues that the reality was that minimum force was used whenever 'exemplary force' was considered to be inappropriate, and that it was not applied consistently. When applying this to wider British decolonisation however, Bennett's use of 'army' when referring to purely local security forces involved in atrocities is seen as imprecise and misleading. Rod Thornton draws upon ample evidence to support the conclusion that the British Army, as distinct from the local Kenyan security forces, was in fact seen throughout the Emergency as superior in terms of discipline and the prevention of excesses by other arms of the colonial authorities. Thornton claims that the 'weak command and control system' as well as the difference between operational and strategic control, show that despite the overall military command the security forces operated separately and with little military oversight. There are several problems with this theory. Although the extent of co-operation between the varying departments is subject to debate, it is unlikely that military units were unaware of the actions of other forces. Thornton identifies many of the British Army personnel as conscri pts who might be expected to write critically of the use of brutality and exemplary force, and the lack of this as evidence that atrocities were rare. It is more likely that, instead of simply not seeing atrocities, these men worked in such a climate of institutionalised violence that abuses were not considered note-worthy. The next is that, in consideration of the new evidence released, I would suggest the formulation of a de-centralized command and control system was far from an administrative error; it was a deliberate policy of non-accountability designed to protect the Army and the administration. If the doctrine of minimum force had little impact on the actions of the British security or military forces in Kenya, then there is a need for a reconsideration of the behaviour of British forces elsewhere.

T. M. Mockaitis asserts that modern perspectives on imperialism and violence shape the negativity of revisionist literature. While this is certainly true to an extent, the concealment of activities in Kenya show that even for contemporaries they were shocking. He later argues that the Mau Mau insurgency was 'atypical' and not representative of wider British colonial management, noting the logical difficulties of widening an individual conflict into a general depiction of the management of decolonisation. However the techniques, personnel, and practices used during the Emergency were the same as those in other contemporary colonial conflicts. The use of population transfer and the 'Pipeline' process of political re-education were borrowed from the successful counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya, and the use of exile for political agitators was also repeated around the colonies. As an example of personnel transfer, Terence Gavaghan, the deviser of the 'Mwea technique' of violent screening, worked for the both the FCO and the UN in decolonisation conflicts throughout Africa. As stated by Huggins et al., to view 'violence workers' as "[acting on] dispositional-individual factors is wrong: they must first be located within a structural-normative pattern of behaviour that is first conditioned and then legitimised, regulated and legislated by the state for which they worked.' Many of these violence workers would continue their work for authoritarian governments around the world. The Mau Mau insurgency has aided in the revelation of Britain's exportation of the machinery of repression, which sits uncomfortably with the traditional historiography of British decolonisation. It is hard to place Ian Watt's assertion of British inexperience of repression in light of the evidence of such activities during the Kenyan Emergency.

The new historiography on the Mau Mau shows that violence, abuse of law, and the abandonment of minimum force were not the actions of a minority during an exceptional struggle. They were instead part of a wider landscape of repression utilised to break anti-colonial activists and fighters across the colonial and postcolonial world. The new evidence represents not just a new direction in the study of the Mau Mau conflict, but also a new approach to the study of the doctrines of insurgency warfare, the attitudes of colonial authorities to their subjects, and the active cover-ups of human rights abuse throughout the period. Academic investigation into the Kenyan Emergency has caused a serious reconsideration of the management of British decolonisation, and will continue to create a more complex and darker view of Britain's colonial past.