Re: [Marxism] Mau Mau veterans sue Britain for torture

["Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxx>]

> Mau Mau veterans sue Britain for torture 
> 
> http://www.smh.com.au/world/mau-mau-veterans-sue-britain-for-torture-20090625-cy81.html
> 



Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in 
Kenya is the standard work about the British reaction to the Mau-Mau uprising.

Book review from RCP(USA):
(full text at: http://revcom.us/a/116/kenya-en.html )

"... Caroline Elkinsâs Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britainâs 
Gulag in Kenya (New York: Owl Books, 2005), a searing exposure of how the 
British colonialists brutally suppressed the Mau Mau uprising of Kenyaâs 
Kikuyu people in the 1950sâsuppression that involved truly barbarous and 
savage acts of torture, physical mutilation including castration and painful 
vaginal injuries, famine and disease, along with psychological torture designed 
to break the spirit while working on destroying the body.
(...)
The British eight-year campaign against the Kikuyu uprising involved two 
prongs. One was a military offensive against the rebels, who had taken to the 
mountain forests and fought a guerrilla war from there. It took over two years 
and 20,000 British troops, supported by the British air force, to subdue the 
insurrectionists, who fought largely with only homemade weapons against 
Britainâs vastly superior firepower. And even then, the insurgents may have 
held out even longer if not for Kikuyu who assisted the British. For such 
âmeritorious service,â these Kikuyu, who became known as loyalists, were 
handsomely rewarded materially and in other ways.

The other prong of the campaign, which lasted well after the insurgents had 
been defeated in the forests, was aimed at the much larger âcivilian army,â 
some 1.5 million Kikuyu who were said to have taken the Mau Mau oath to fight 
for land and freedom until death. (...)
âIâve come to believe,â Elkins says, âthat during the Mau Mau war 
British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that portrayed a 
perverse colonial logic: only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population 
of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomizing its men, 
women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilizing 
mission reinstated.â

What the Kikuyu suffered and endured at the hands of the British colonialists 
and loyalists in the detainee and labor camps and enclosed villages constitutes 
a significant portion of Elkinsâs book. From the beginning there were the 
âscreenings,â the colonialistsâ preferred term for ruthless torture, 
designed to get information from a Mau Mau suspect and persuade him or her to 
confess Mau Mau affiliation. Methods of âpersuasionâ involved beatings, 
electric shock, cigarette burns and fire, and âbottles (often broken), gun 
barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs...thrust up menâs rectums and 
womenâs vaginas,â Elkins writes.

A detainee had to confess if he or she wanted to be released. âThe purpose of 
detention,â Elkins says, âwas not necessarily to keep the Mau Mau suspects 
alive but to force them to confess through a punishing routine of forced labor 
and brutality. In terms of productivity this pattern ultimately revealed an 
inherent contradiction. A tension emerged between the need for ever greater 
supplies of labor, without which it would be impossible to continue the 
colonyâs infrastructure development, and the competing impulse to punish, 
debilitate, and even exterminate the Kikuyu population. Exhausting labor 
routines, beatings, torture, food deprivation, all used to force confession, 
could and often did render detainees incapable of working.â (...)"





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