Empire: World History - 46. The Mau Mau, the court case, and the hidden documents

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

The Mau Mau emergency began in 1952. Over the next eight years, the British abused thousands of Kenyans; detaining them, torturing them, murdering them. Yet, when Caroline Elkins published her book detailing this in 2005, she was slated for a lack of documentary evidence. Now, one court case and one incredible discovery later, she has been proved totally right. Join William and Anita as they are joined by Caroline Elkins to tell the story in this very special bonus episode of Empire. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptu.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnh. And me, William Turunple. Is that your attempt at bringing a half-assed pause back into the proceedings, is it? I thought we'd dealt with that. Quite a good pause that one.

You've done better. You've done better. Anyway, listen to it, we're very privileged. We have a very special guest here today who brings together so many threads of what we've been talking about in this series. And actually asks the question, what was Empire all about? And was it as bad as some people say? I mean, I think you can kind of boil it down because we are in the middle of something

of a war zone, particularly in Britain, about, you know, the, you know, the, battleground is people who don't want you to talk about it at all and people who want to dig up things from the past and put it front and center on the table. And I think anywhere in the world, people want to think well of their ancestors. You don't grow up imagining that your ancestors were monsters. And there is a long process of education which hasn't yet taken place in Britain about what empire means that to rule another people in any period of history means the use of violence, oppression, and the British did this as much as any other empire in history. Anyway, we have an incredibly special guest, as I said.

You'll know her name if you listen to the news or read any newspapers, and you might be scratching your head as to why. But if I say the name Caroline Elkin to you, it will definitely resonate for those of you who are interested in imperial history. Not only is she a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. She's a professor at Harvard University. But the reason you will have heard of her is because she gave special evidence at the Mao Mao trial. Now, William, this was seismic.

This was game-changing. And your experience with the British government, their evasions, hiding evidence, and the pressure put on you to basically drop your case and shut up, in a sense confirmed all your worst opinions about the people you were writing about. And how there was more than an accidental lack of evidence that there was a serious story which was being actively covered up. Shall we, shall we go right back at the beginning, Caroline, do you mind? Because there's some people who will, maybe they will have heard Mao Mao Rebellion, but they won't be able to pin it to what it actually was. So take us right back to what this situation was all about.

Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. I mean, such fun, getting to nerd off about empire. people actually want to hear about all this. And, you know, look, I think if we go back so often, people hear the word Mao-Mao-Mow and they sort of recoil and they remember their grandmother, perhaps, or somebody of an older generation, Mao, the most horrible, savage thing that never happened. And, you know, let's unpack that a little bit, right? Because the 1950s, the Mao-Mao uprising was an uprising largely by the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, against British colonial rule. And it was both an anti-colonial uprising and it had civil dimensions as well.

and the way in which they, you know, murdered and attacked Europeans and other Africans was bloody. There was no doubt about it. But at the end of the day, 32 Europeans in total died in this. It lasted from 1952 to 1960. Many will say it accelerated independence when it started. The idea was that, you know, they were going to still be in Kenya for another generation, if not more. But in response to this rebellion, the British, there was sort of two-pronged. One, there were gorillas in the forest, and they sent the military out to track them down.

And that was more or less taken care of by 1954-ish or so. But then there was another aspect, the civilian dimension of the war. And all members of Mao took an oath, pledging themselves to the movement itself, right? And there were seven gradations of oath. And it was estimated about 90% of the one and a half million Kikuyu took that oath. And what I was interested in was were those people, This is what was considered to be the civilian war that the government waged against Kikuyu, known as the hearts and mind. And in order to break them and then to sort of get them to confess their oaths and real, you know, sort of realign themselves with empire, pledge themselves.

And they literally would have to see sing, saying God save the queen and all the stuff. They set up a whole series of detention camps and detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population. That's what I was interested in writing about. Caroline, take us back one stage even before that. Second war is over and Kenya is almost a white settler colony. You have large areas of land

being given over to British people to farm, even as the British are leaving India and Pakistan and what will be Bangladesh. And the whole imperial administration is packing up. You have an online movement. You have a post-colonial world

beginning to emerge in South Asia. But that's not happening in Africa. In fact, there's even a shift towards Africa and that colonialism in a sense is beginning again. Yeah. I mean, absolutely, William. They're doubling down in Africa, right?

This is where imperial resurgence is happening. They're going to rebuild Britain off the back of empire, and it's going to happen in places like Kenya. So you have Africans who have fought in World War II, thinking they're going to come home, believing in the Atlantic Charter than the rest, and come to find out not only is life not getting better, it's getting worse.

And it's an absolute pressure cooker. It was, you know, to mix metaphors, you're just waiting for a match to be dropped into this, ready to explode. And there's an economic imperative. for this because you've got to remember that Britain was brassic, it broke, you know, after the world needed money. So this was a solution to filling that post-war gap in the coffers. Yeah, oh, entirely. Financial crapper, right? And look, everybody had, there's this idea that somehow

after World War II, there's this gradual evolution to decolonization, not at all. This is one of the most violent periods of colonial rule, often known as the second colonial occupation and Kenya was a shining example. It happens elsewhere, but if we stick with Kenya, this is a place, as I said, where they are just doubling down on colonial rule and really squeezing African labor for all they can, obviously for export crops. Why is Kenya important, specifically Kenya? Why is that an area that is the center of British concerns? Why are the more white people there than there are saying in Ghana? Yeah, I think there are two things to that, right? First, they had decided much, much earlier on, earlier in the 20th century, that it was going to be settlers who were

going to make this land productive, right? And Ghana, they chose to use peasant production, right? Whereas here they use, they use settlers. Quite controversially, actually, they were terrible, by the way, there were terrible farmers until World War II, just horrible. But post-war II, getting back to the point that was just made about the economy, they are pumping money with the Colonial Development Welfare Act into the colonies. Kenya is not alone. And that money is being used. to ramp up exports. And, of course, everybody looks at the export numbers, never forget the game, the long game that they're playing on the economy and empire is all about monetary policy.

They are basically screwing these colonies by having a lock on the way in which monetary policy is being manipulated in the Sterling Zone. And it's a genius move, by the way. It works quite effectively until these colonies start rebelli. And again, just to give a bit of context, the Queen has just been on honeymoon. Oh, yes, tree top. So the famous tree tops thing hearing about her father dying. She hears she's queen.

Yep, she goes up the tree of princess and comes down a queen, right? The famous in 1952. And of course, that's just before the start of this Mao-Mao-Mao state of emergency. Right. So when you say, so look, now going forward again to the point that we started, so the British are faced now with a Kikuyu population that's had enough. They've said, right, that's enough. We've seen other countries now shake off British rule.

We'd quite like a bit of that as well. You said that they were rounded up. Do we know numbers of how many were rounded up and put into these camps? Yeah, you know, look, if you take the answer, it's a great question. The British have always reported that it was approximately 70 to 80,000 that were detained. Now, way back when I started this work, you know, you kept seeing that this is a daily average figure. And remember, this figure had been used by historians, eminent historians, over and over again. Think about it.

What's in a daily average figure? Well, what it doesn't tell you is how many went into the camps in any given day and how many went out. So you have to figure out the intake and release rates. And once you figure that out, you figure out that the number is about two to four times the amount in the detention camps. But those camps were mostly for men. And they thought the British that the most strident adherents of Mao were the women. And in fact, they created what were barbed wire villages, emergency villages, 24-hour guard, forced labor, starvation tactic. These were all detention camps in name.

So if you put together the number of women and children in these villages and the number of men in the camps, you find out that it wasn't 70 to 80,000. It was nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million that were detained either in detention camp or an emergency barbed wire village. And where in Kenya is this? I mean, people who have seen films like white mischief and so on are familiar with through Happy Valley. Where are we doing? And holiday makers today may have gone to Lamu. Give us a bit of geography. Yes.

So the Kikuyu, they lived in reserves, right? So when we think about the, you know, the British would, when the colonization first happened, they would sequester different ethnic groups into a reserve. So if you go north from Nairobi up towards Mount Kenya, that's where the Kikuyu reserves are. That's where we have these emergency villages. Kikuyu actually don't live in villages. They live in scattered homestead. So they would round everybody up, burn all their properties and then put them into these barbed wire village.

The detention camps, getting back to if you're a holiday maker in Lammu, you know how hot it is on Lamu in February and, you know, just the stench of the humidity, these detention camps, some of the worse are along the coast, and they're dotted all over the country. There's about 100 of them in total. And people are being moved from camp to camp depending upon how cooperative they are. They had some camps more severe, others less severe. So, I mean, this is so reminiscent of Kitchener in South Africa, creating camps, raising place, scorched earth. And then, I mean, why did they think that that was okay? I mean, was there no pushback in Britain?

Was this known about? How many people actually knew that this was going on? What's the reporting like at the time? Yeah, I mean, first of all, brilliant point. This is not the first time, and we can have a longer conversation, starts at the turn of the century in South Africa. They move these systems of confinement all over the empire,

even in India and Malaysia. Look, back at home, one of the things that's as an historian that you're so struck by are the way in which information is able to flow out of Kenya. You have plenty of people on the left, people who we might be familiar with, Barbara Castle, Fenner-Brockway, on the floor of parliament. You have people in the missionaries who are writing back home and protesting.

And what is so stunning is the degree to which the British government has decades of experience of avoiding any kind of culpability. It's a one-off. It's a bad apple that something happened. It's a monstrous event. It's a monstrous event. But it is never anything more than that. And the genius of this, if you think about it, they pull that off for eight years.

But just clarify this. I mean, is the other investigative journalists. I mean, this is, you know, only 10 years before Vietnam. And it's also after the, it's after the Second World War where journalists went into the field and dangerous places where they shouldn't have and couldn't really have gone before. Other nodes from, you know, Don McCullins out there taking black and white, grail photographs of horrible things going on. Why was this not better known at home? Yeah, first of all, there was plenty of information at home for your average Britain to know something was off here. But remember, it's always, the response is not just that this is a one-off, but it's a how dare it.

British soldiers would never do something like this. When you say something like that, we haven't even said, actually. We haven't even gotten into what that is. What were the things? Horrific forms of torture. In a million years, I have to tell you, when I was doing the research for this, I, it's very difficult. I'm not the only person who's done work on colonial violence. I did many, many interviews, several hundred of those who had been detained, victims of colonial torture,

castrations, mutilation of genitals, sodomy with broken bottles, vermin, rats, dismembering of body parts, tying people to the back of jeeps and pulling off, putting wires onto their testicles and turning the batteries on to... Who was doing this? I mean, they seemed so... combination of British military, colonial officers, colonial police officers, settlers who had been seconded into the colonial service in order to try to suppress the movement, other Africans who were also brought into the detention camp system. But this was being directed from the top. This was not a bunch of bad apples. And remember, I think one of the things that's very important is that this is systematized violence. This is not just haphazard. There are a lot of

and reasons for this. There are, when I kind of raised the point of the oath before, because it truly was a belief and it was sort of put forward by Louis Leakey, who is their local sort of ethnographic guru, that the way to break Mao Mao is they had to confess their oath, right? And once they had confessed their oath, they'd be in this liminal state, and then they would be reintroduced to British civilization. This is Leakey who found the early bones of Lucy and these early hominids. Yep. He was born and raised in Kenya. He spoke, Flora and Kikuyu, had been raised amongst Kikuyu. And so, but, you know, at the same time, there was a struggle around this insofar as, you know, the first gradation of the oath. And each one thereafter, it would always end with, if I reveal this oath to anyone, may this oath kill me. So there was a belief, a supernatural belief, that a guy would strike down someone if they confessed the oath. So there's a struggle around the confession of this oath. And to this day, if, of course, course, you couldn't get out of a detention camp, but when I was interviewing people,

they would say, you know, I actually, I never confessed. And to this day, they won't admit to the fact that they had actually broken this oath. And what was the, in a sense, the purpose of the torture? Was it to cause people to confess their oath? Was it to extract information? Was it punishment? Or was it a combination of all those? All the above. All of the above. And look, I think the, there is a logic to it. One is around the confessions I just laid out. Certainly one is around punishment. One is just, I mean, you know, you just have people who are just sadists as well, a combination of all of it. And also, you know, the normative frame in this has had always been in Kenya that you knock the, the quote unquote natives around. It had always had issues around this consistently.

But the other narrative that also went out at the time, and some people, you know, to this day will say, look, actually the Kikuyu were dangerous and trying to kill the white people. They were setting about with machetes. They were out for, blood, you know, that whole bloodlust argument. Now, what was the various merits when you went to investigate this of those accusations? Yeah, look, I think, you know, I think bottom line, headaligned, 32 Europeans died in total, in total. You know, we're never going to get a handle on the death figure. There's a lot of controversy around that. But what we can certainly say is that thousands perished. People were tortured. They lost their land. The response, the draconian response on the part

of the British, right? And in some ways, almost a moral power. Right. You have, you know, always remember the European settlers were a tiny minority relative. And there was always just fear of the night of the long knives, right, that they were coming after because of course they were, they were living on Kikuyu land. They were, they were exploiting their labor. So the jigger was going to be up at some point. Forgive my ignorance. I mean, I write about India, not about Africa. Who are these people out there? Are they, are they colonials who moved from elsewhere or are they new arrivals from Britain? Or have they been there for generations and like the French in Algeria? put down roots and now resisting a freedom struggle. Yeah, you know, some come out at the, they decide sort of early part of the 20th century, the British do, that they are going to render Kenya profit. Remember, all colonies had to be fiscally self-sufficient. They claim Kenya, they have no idea how to make this place fiscally self-sufficient.

They decide they're going to have European farmers and they're brought in, much like Zimbabwe or Rhodesia and South Africa. And they come in waves at different points in time. Some are settlers coming from the UK. some are coming from other parts of greater Britain. And you arrive and the government gives you land? You arrive and the government gives you land. Anywhere from, you know, small plots to Delamere,

who's got, you know, hundreds of thousands of others. Delimer being the guy who, in white mischief. Precisely. Yeah. Precisely. Same Lord Delamere. And, you know, it was come out to God's country, you know, free, you know, cheap land, free labor, et cetera, et cetera.

And as I mentioned before, they come out, they're terrible farmers. They're horrible. And so what ends up happening is many of the Africans end up staying on their land and basically sharecropping sky. And that changes and accelerates going to, you know, back after World War II. And there's just sort of a train wreck waiting to happen. And after decolonization in South Asia, do you get people moving from India to Africa? Or is this a different bunch?

Yeah, you have some. A few. There's certainly in migrations. We certainly are seeing some coming from different parts of the empire. Many from South Africa, many from the Rhodesia is coming up as well. And from other parts of, if you will, sort of white settler areas within the empire. Now, when you were writing your book about this, it has two separate names, doesn't it? In America, it is Imperial Reckoning.

That's right. And in Britain, it's the British Gulag. Yeah, Britain's Gulag. When you wrote your book, you had relied on your own research. You'd gone out there, you'd done extensive interviews, and you'd come back. Because this is within living memory. Of course. This is not 1857 in the Indian mutiny.

This is... But what you didn't have and what I suppose you were attacked for, because you, I mean, just describe what the reception was to that book. because it's hard to hear. So what did people say? It was, I like to say, critical acclaim with the emphasis on the critical. You know, it was, it was, it was scathing. And, you know, I was a pretty young historian at the time.

And I think I naively thought I was going to get some pushback. It was just, in lack of better terms, just a shitstorm. I mean, it was horrible. And, I mean, it was prior to all the social media. I mean, today it would have been, it would have been completely rid of my career. I mean, it would have been unbearable. But it would have been unbearable. But it was.

was it came from the obvious sources on the right. But even on the left, where, you know, it was 2005, the Iraq war is going on. And basically, many people took this book and said, you know, this book is about Kenya in 1950, but it's really about Iraq now. And it really touched a nerve, particularly since you've got Tony Blair and Bush cozying up. And it just came in. And Neil Ferguson's just published a book saying Empire's Wonderful. Oh, fabulous.

Right? Yeah. No, exactly. And so it was, it was a big bestseller. huge bestseller. Then he had the whole documentary series and the rest of it. And there had been obviously other books that had questioned empire. But this book was very kind of in your face. I wrote it in a particular way and for a particular reason. Yeah. And I mean, I went over some of the criticism that you had at the time. And one of the mainstays of criticism, where are the documents?

Where is your proof? Where is your evidence? Did you try and get documents? And what was that experience? Yeah. You know, look, and the critique, it's a great question because the critique came in many different forms. And one of which was, this was all based on oral history. If you take out the oral history, and I had one historian at the time, at a big event, launch event said, you know, Africans make up stories. Basically, they're all liars. And if you take all this out, the entire argument falls apart. It's fiction. Now, of course, I would love to have those four or five years that I spent in the archives back again. And, you know, in fact, yes, there was a huge amount of oral testimony in the book. But there's a massive scaffolding of documents. And of course, at the time,

we knew through basically sort of oral tradition, world of mouth with archivists, that many the documents were missing, if you will, in the Kenyan National Archives and also in the UK. And did you start to realize that there was a weeding out? When did that dawn on you? Actually, I know there's something that should be here. You've all had that experience of going into an archive and the stuff isn't available. But you don't assume in a sense that it's a, you assume that the archive is lost it. You don't assume that there's a systematic removal of documents.

from the archives. It's a great question. My sequencing was I did most of my research in the UK first and then in Kenya. In the National Archives? In the National Archive, Rhodes House, a lot of time at Rhodes House. In Oxford. In Oxford, yes, thank you. And in the public, what was that in the public record office, now the National Archive,

there would be missing, there would be sort of moments where things would be missing, right? You'd sort of be trailing along in evidence. And you sort of, to your point, you're like, oh, God, in Kenya, you could drive a truck. literally through gaps in the archive. The entire police department was gone. The entire Ministry of Interior. There should have been, there should have been three different,

I'll give an example, three different ministries that should have had an individual file on each detainee. Let's even go back to the numbers and say, okay, we agree it was only 70 to 80,000. We know that's wrong. But we'll just say for that.

So you should have had about 200, 210,000 individual files on detainees. There's a couple hundred. I use archives to here. And what often happens is I go to an index. and the index is there and you call something up and they say it's not available or it's lost. Were there indexes or not even indexes? No, not even indexes.

I mean, they were just gone. And then you start asking at that point, the archivist, the head archivist who was in Kenya, had been the archivist. He took over around the time of independence and he would be the first, say, they were never transferred to us. We never had them. And of course, we're all familiar. Anyone who does this kind of work, you're familiar with the runaround. They're all held in Britain. No, they're all held in Delhi.

they're all held it. And you're sort of doing this crazy ping pong of existence. So just then going back to the book comes out, you're being criticized by people are saying, look, your documents, where you're evidence, not for want of trying. And then, how many years afterwards did everything change? And we're going to take a break in a minute,

but we just ought to say, how many years was it when you stood there and thought, I was right? So what year did the legal case happen? So the legal case, it was filed in 2009. So four years after your book had come out? Four years after the book, it settles four years later in 2013, and around 2011, everything changes. Join us after the break to find out how everything changes.

Welcome back. So we left you on a little bit of a cliff edge. We're here with Caroline Elkin, who has us just eating out of the palm of her hand, quite frankly. So just before the break, we were talking about all of these things that you had written down through all history, which people were trying to discredit. You were looking for some factual underpinning. You knew there was stuff missing, but you just couldn't prove it. And then law, the good old system of law and governance, and we'll come back to why that's kind of ironic and important as well in a moment. But it starts kicking in it. It is this legal

firm called Lee Day, which decides it's going to represent some of the Kikuyu survivors who gave that testimony that they were tortured. And this is independent of your book and you. This happens of its own momentum. Completely independent. And in fact, how it all came about is Martin Day, who's one of the lead, obviously, attorneys in Lee Day, was in Kenya on a completely separate issue related to,

there were rape cases by the British military up in the northern part of the country. And the BBC had come across some of my very, very early work and did a documentary called Kenya White. terror. And Martin and his associate had seen it, and it was arranged for us to meet. And that's how sort of we came together. And he was interested and he said, you know, look, let's stay, basically let's stay in touch. And I didn't think much about it and kind of went on my way. And then Imperial Reckoning comes out. And I get the phone call from Lee Day saying, we want to talk to you. And we want to talk to you. And not only do we want to talk to you, but we want to really get a

sense of, to your point, you know, how much because in the court, if they were to file something, in the court, you have to have documentary evidence, right? You couldn't introduce my oral testimony. So there was a skeleton of documentary evidence that I had within the book. Sorry, probe that one. Why would your oral testimony not have been accepted in court? Because it was not taken under legal process. You could not cross-examine. You can't cross-examine it. And also there is, there is a standard of evidence, which, you know, chain of evidence, all of these things, those criteria would not have been men. But there is a marvelous thing in British. law, which is discovery, isn't there?

It's a beautiful thing, isn't it? It's an extraordinary. So those of you who don't watch American procedural dramas as much as I do. I watch one order all the time. That's what prepared me for this case, by the way. The good wife, I can do an A level in it. But this idea of discovery is that you can challenge the other side and say, we want, it's habeas corpus for paperwork. We want your papers.

And if you say, I don't have the papers, and it subsequently comes out that you did have the papers, you are in a whole heap of trouble. You are in a huge heap of trouble. So when is this introduced? Does it like the Freedom of Information? Would you like me to go to the Bodleon? Google.

Yes, the Bodleon online. You carry on chatting a moment. You say, I mean, it's pretty much. I mean, the rules of proceed. I mean, this has been there for a while, right? I mean, in so far as discovery, and it's something that, you know, sort of, you know, joking aside, we as historians really need to recognize

that it was with the weight of the court behind the case. case and behind documents that we had even the opportunity to push the British government beyond their usual, no, so sorry, we have nothing response. If you try to file something under FOI, freedom of information, 95% of the time you get a, yeah, no, sorry. Or yes, we have it, but you can't have it because it's not, you know, natural security or whatever the case may be. This is different. And I think, you know, what we find in this case is that it's filed in 2009, we file all sorts of stuff. I am expert witness in the case. I had to write all kinds of statements for the court itself. And then I get a phone call about two years or so in, uh, from Lee day, a wonderful barrister

named Dan Leader who was on point for the case who said the most extraordinary thing has happened. The British government has admitted to the fact that it has found or discovered, and air quotes, discovered 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files. Look at his face. 300 boxes, a previously underscode file, held in the bowels of Handscope Park, which is where they keep their MI5 and MI6 files. Which is in Northumberland, right? Northland is known as the Spook Central.

Right. And wait for it for a program on Empire. Next to these files were 8,000 other files from 36 other colonies. Similarly, all of these files from now 37 colonies were packed up and spirited away and brought back to Britain at the time of decolonization. and held under lock and key until the time and the filing of this case and the demand for document discovery. How far do these documents go back? Far.

You know, some, you know, I haven't been, I personally am looking for more recent stuff on colonial violence in them, but they span a whole range of things. And look, you know, they make no mistake. One of the things that you should remember is that we as, that is as expert witness, and I was joined by two other historians about a year or two into the case, we had the court behind us because once these are discovered, the British government says, and even the court says, wait, you can't just have them. We have to review them, the British government, the name defendant is the foreign and

Commonwealth office for both relevancy to the case. We defendants are going to decide whether it's relevant to you and national security. And so began this war, this sort of kind of, you know, this kind of low level war because we would look at this and say, because we did have a hand list and say, well, you know, the file that says, I don't know, I'm going to make this up, torture and detention camps, I believe that would be relevant. And they would say, oh, no, no, not relevant. And so we would be, so began this back and forth

through the court of demanding releases of files. It was really a process. How did you get the hand list? I mean, that must be the crucial moment and a very thrilling moment for you. It was. There were actually three separate handlists created at different points.

Some were typed, some were handwritten, and they, too, were dribbled out. And I have to really emphasize this important within this moment where there was no way I could have done this on my own. I put together a research team of students, at Harvard. There are six of us, six of them and myself. We had this huge war room. They worked 24-7. In my head, you are surrounded by madness. You're surrounded by pins in walls and post-it notes.

And is that what your life looked like? Yeah, entirely. I mean, if you looked at it, it was, you know, the walls were full of stuff. We were creating databases and spreadsheets and, you know, and it was, you'd sort of be up there. And it was when you stepped back off this wall and you looked at it that you could see the picture of what was these files. And what was so stunning to me was just file after file after file, proving Imperial Reckoning correct. And just to be clear about this, these are files that were originally filed for the colonial administration in Kenya, were held by the police department or the military in Kenya, and then actively removed to hide evidence? Precisely. And let's be very clear on this. They at the

time, so Kenya, they decolonized in 1963. The process, and Kenya was not alone, but this is the first place we get real insight into this. The process of document destruction or removal begin several years prior to decolonization. This was not a haphazard process. They were as systematized in the destruction of removal of documents as they were in the torture and violence committed against bodies in Kenya. Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. So now you said destruction, and this is something that haunts me because as someone who's gone through a lot of these rather extraordinary things called the IPI files, which is Indian police intelligence files, you've come across massive gaps and then you sort of try and trace back and it just says file missing, far missing.

And my whole thing is, God, do they still exist? Are they still, you know, are they in this vault somewhere? Or as some have suggested, there was a great deal of bombfires going on on exit. Is it likely to be a lot of stuff there from India? or is it post-India? It's post-India, but let's connect these two, right? Because in the Kenya case, what is so important to the question about files is that for the first time, and we can talk about it why they do this, there's a reason they do this, we get dumped on

of documents documenting the document destruction. So for the first time, we get the documents that show the intricate nature. I mean, they had lockboxes and strong rooms and they had a W that they would hand. Each file had to be gone through by hand where they would stamp those that would stay in Kenya, those that would be removed and brought back to Britain, and then those that were going to be destroyed. By destroyed me burned, shredded and burned. And then they couldn't do it fast enough, so they started dumping them into the Indian Ocean. And I was able to construct based on the files that they estimated they had destroyed three and a half tons of documents.

They also created what was an emergency destruction plan. Do you know how long it would take if you burn 24-7, how long it would take to get rid of those files? I do know. Almost a year. That's how many files were talking about. That's why they started dumping them. And I'm surprised at this,

partly because I spent a lot of time documenting similar stuff in mid-19th century, India. And one of the things that always struck me was that how weird it was that this stuff was there still. You could just go to the British Library, the old Indiarovist archives. You could drive. up stuff about the army of retribution in 1857 or a different army of retribution 1842.

Even up to 1940, you know, 1940 and 1947 you can pick up files which say top secret on them not to be read by, and you can find those. They are archived. And my impression is as a period of story in working in 18th and 19th century India is that, you know, things are missing. But overall, I'm getting the stuff I need to write the story. And rather amazingly, you know, there are miles from it. There's supposed, I don't know whether it's an urban myth, but they say there's 30, miles of Indian material underneath the British Library.

And there aren't systematic absences. Why is it that you don't know about them? No, because I'm looking at exactly the stuff. I'm looking at the way that the Indian mutiny is suppressed. I'm looking at the end. I'm getting the material. See, I mean, what drives me mad is that I don't know what's not there. That's the thing.

I don't know. You know, I only know those hand indexes. You don't have those. So you don't know what else could be there. But it's an interesting, if I'm right. and the stuff is basically intact in 19th century India. What changes. What has changed between them and...

Very interesting question. In 1960s or 1950s. I think that's a really important question. And one of the things I can tell you from my own, it's because I... My recent book is called Legacy of Violence, and I'm very interested in Kenya not being an exception. And it was clear that I dropped into this moment of time,

and I'm just raising this for a reason because suddenly, as a result of this case, the documents become a thread in this new book. and we see the beginnings, or at least I do, with 1947 and Red Fort. And they are terrible at destroying. I mean, as I just laid out, it's not, it's actually, you have to be very deliberate and intentional about what you're doing. So Hugh Toy is here.

He had been chasing bows and the rest of it, and he's in charge along with some others from MI5 of burning documents at the Red Fort and elsewhere. In 1947. In 1947, there are fears back in London that, Independence Day ceremonies are being interrupted by the smog of the burning documents. They then move on to from their document destruction continues. And just prior to Kenya, we have Malaya, the bigger Malaya in emergency. Where again, there's an insurgency.

Insurgency, same kind of processes, same kind of extremely brutal. And they become much better. They're learning as they go about how to destroy this volume of evidence, what they want to send home. In the case of Molaya, they actually take them from Kuala Lumpur down to Singapore, and from there they have a special incinerator where they're burning them there. They have Kenya and we can move on. They do the same thing in Cyprus, et cetera, et cetera. And they just get better at as they go along.

Okay. I question. So there are going to be people who are going to be listening to this saying, you know what, this is just what happens when countries or armies withdraw. They destroy their paperwork because it mustn't fall into the wrong hands. And it is, it happens all over the world. It happens today. It would happen. Probably happened in Bagram last year in Afghanistan. Yeah, indeed. And you sometimes, when a news crew goes in, you will see the departing army,

whether even Ukrainian or Russian, there will be a flaw full of shredded paper. So, you know, Carolyn, one thing that we have omitted saying... In fact, we know that it did happen. And I have friends who were in Afghanistan last year, and the last two or three days of the British embassy in Kabul was exactly this burning stuff. Well, I know. And I think there's footage as well. like going in and there's just paper and machines unplugged and so on. But we've missed out a really important bit of this because the vindication of your work happens now. So we kind of missed the denouement.

We went off on documents because William and I are hungry for paperwork. That's why it's just greedy, greedy from us. But at the end of this, when you have finally got your hands on the paperwork that you suspected existed, but you had no idea in such volumes, 300 boxes of evidence. And you're fighting. You're fighting with those very people that you're actually against who have the chance to say, no, not relevant, not relevant. But you win.

I mean, we should say the case against those British colonial officers was one. Tell us what happened that day when that verdict came in and did you expect it? Yes. I have to say when I said yes to being expert witness in the case. Martin was very clear that they couldn't do the case without me. And I felt very strongly that, you know, it's more responsibility on our part as historians to offer our evidence. But I didn't ask them sort of, you know, what are our chances? I only asked that about a year. And they're like, oh, yeah, nobody in the legal profession thinks we've got much of a shot here. But I knew we were right. And this evidence comes out. And it just was overwhelming. I mean, it just was... Give it an example of the sort of thing which you didn't get for moral testimony, but which turned up in the doctor's... documentation. Yeah, well, I think it was what I found interesting, and we can have, you know, we can get in a long conversation with this, I'm a pretty good historian, but I'm not that good.

In other words, there was nothing that we got that was new in terms of telling us anything. They had, my own view, this case was filed in 2009. They fess up finally in two years later that these documents were, they existed. I think they were calling between 2009 and 2011. I actually, don't think we got everything. That would be my, because nobody is that good as an historian. You know, everything that we got was just more and more confirmation. But the most important thing was, and I did have documents in Imperial Reckoning, but what this is giving us are hundreds and hundreds of pages of confirming tortures, confirming murders, confirming, and who was doing it. Names. It was either names or it was more importantly, it was the, you know, we were able to

demonstrate that people in the employ of the, the British colonial government. And that was crucial to the case. When you get this sort of thing on a movie, you know, the lot of these documents turn up with black, with black lines drawn out of the, were you getting,

no redacts. No redactions too. There was, you know, there were a few bits of, what they would do is they would hold back entire, entire documents.

And as a result of winning the case, how many, how many people were still alive who were being represented and what did they get out of the, out of the verdict? Yeah, it was initially, um,

it started with a test case, five claimants as a test case, five of what they believe to be the strongest case. And remember, this is a tort claim. This is like a big personal injury case. This is failure of duty of care, a whole range of things that they're being charged with. So it's not the Kenyan claimants against, or it's not the Kenyan government against the British government. It's these claimants themselves.

Once it's clear that the case is going to settle, what happens is the verdict comes in. It comes in as a written approved judgment by the judge. Where were you? I was in my office in. It was three months after the, there was a series of hearings, a big strikeout hearing, that we got the verdict. And it was stunning. What did you do? Did you get a phone call?

I got a phone call. Remember, it wasn't a verdict that the British, what happened is the British government tried to get out of this case by two legal technicalities. One was state succession. What they said is that actually, we don't know if this happened or not, but wrong venue. All not legal liability. That's not us. Kenya, you should be suing in Kenya because they transferred them. The second was statute of limitations.

This is a tort claim. Three years, we needed the judge to waive 50 years that had passed to let the case go forward. And he did, and it was very unusual. That's the verdict that we got back. And we knew that if he waived statute of limitations, though the evidence at this point was overwhelming. Overwhelming. And so just on the last point, there were about 5,500 who were finally brought into the settlement.

It was a 20 million pound sterling. payout. There was an official monument built by the British government to the victims of colonial torture in Nairobi. And I think most importantly, what the claimants consistently wanted was acknowledgement that they hadn't lied. That they hadn't

lied. And the British government had to offer, the best way you get of an apology is an offer of sincere regret. But it was stunning. I have to tell you after, you know, sitting there and seeing all this happen. And I was actually in Nairobi. It was William Haye who read that

settlement into the record of parliament. I got to choose to be in London or in Nairobi. I was with all the claimants in Nairobi. I will never experience anything like that in my life. There was guttural tears crying screams of joy because the same statement was read by the British Highcom in in Nairobi. It was a moment that I don't think anybody could ever have imagined what happened. And 20 million as well. So this is underpinned by financial settlement. I mean there's there's almost nothing more in law that you can give other than this apology and financial recompense isn't, you know, that's as good as it can get. Yeah, I mean it was both a moral and a material acknowledgement of of enormous suffering. Yeah. And I think this question that's

often, though, this point that's often thrown around about dignity and the ability I, you know, if we go all the way back to, I mean, I was just a kid, right? 98, 99 when I was doing all these interviews and you know, everybody often and all the critiques that came in, why, one of which was, oh, I paid these people for their interview. They asked me for nothing. But let me ask you, they asked me for one thing, though. One thing. What do you think it was?

Tell my story. Tell my story. I want to make sure the world knows what happened to me. And that never leaves you. This you say it was a personal injury case. I mean, to compare this, for example, with the sort of things that went on in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland, you get the Bloody Sunday inquiry. It's a long government-run inquiry into their own sins.

and it's conducted by lawyers, but done very well and very professionally. Is there any sense that there's any, from the British side, proactive heart searching following this? You know, I can't speak for those in government. What I can say is that the judge, it was a bench trial. And he was considered right of center, was visibly moved in this case. And what was the most striking was when, in the second striking, strikeout hearing for statute of limitations was the first time that the claimants themselves testified.

In their own voices. In their own voices. And telling horrific stories of torture. And there was obviously translator. And it was at that point that the British government, the first claimant gets up, tells their story. You could hear a pin drop and you could see the judge just visibly, emotionally upset by this. and the QC for the FCO gets up and says we don't contest this happened.

And the FCA is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And for each of the claimants that testified after each one. And this gets back to the point that I made earlier about why do they give us the documents documenting the document destruction? Handed it all to us. I was thrilled as a story. So why did they? Well, let's put these two together, right? Because they admit this happened.

but the question becomes on the judge waiving statute limitations from three years to 50 plus was that the British government had to be ensured that it could have a fair trial, which meant they had to have people, witnesses, and most important, they had to have documentation. And what they said was this, that even though we had memos coming from London, giving orders to destroy, they said, no, no, no, no, no. Those memos might have come, but those colonial officers in Kenya, who are acting in right of Kenya, not in right of Britain, they went overboard.

They destroyed more than they should have. And oh, by the way, thank you, Professor Elkins. You put together this beautiful evidence on document destruction. But why are you saying, so why are you saying they're like that? Because some people will say, this is exactly the thing that separates the British from other empires, in that there was governance, there is rule of law,

there is a sense, okay, it took a long time and you had to fight for it but a sense of fairness and paying up eventually. Why do you say it like that as if... Two things. I'd love to comment on the rule of law. Let's stick with it in the courtroom for now, right? In the courtroom, what they're saying is that actually, you can't, thanks to all this work that Elkins did for us,

you can't waive statute of limitations because we can't have a fair trial. These renegade officers off in Kenya, sure we told them to get rid of some things, but they went three and a half tons. We never told them to get rid of them. So is the document that says get rid of three and a half tons. So that was their argument. They're not saying this didn't happen. They're saying we can't have a fair trial because of all the stuff that was got rid of. Rule of Law. That was part of the British Government's defense. This was Rule of Law. We filed a lot. There's nothing illegal here. I write about this in the new book. It's something I call legalized lawlessness. What they end up doing is that if there's an act that's committed that's illegal, there's no law in the book permitting it. What they end up doing is they write new codes to say, actually, that's legal. And so suddenly you have 149 pages of emergency regulations.

Retrospective? Oftentimes, yes. Right? I mean, think about what happens here at Amritsar. I mean, the martial laws declare. I mean, they do it retrospectively. This happens over and over and over again. Let me just, again, just bring you back to where we are right now, where we have historians

who will, you know, will say, okay, you know what, it is the decency of the country that eventually the right thing happened. And it is a regrettable thing. But, you know, actually in the frame of things, which are there ever? empire has ever willingly given recompense for the behaviours. And, you know, we weren't as bad as other empires and colonies. And you know what? It's never easy to go in and take over a country. You know, difficult things happen. You know, there's, you know, there are people even now listening to this. So we can say, it's partisan so negative about the British Empire. British Empire compared

to other empires, not so bad. Compare us to the Belgians. You know the arguments. The wretched French. Let's not forget the British French. Let's not. Never forget the The bet you're right. The retro, look, and I think this is also, and forgive me, it's a little personal, right? Because they came to the table kicking and screaming.

This was not a, oh, mea culpa, you got us. This was, if we go back to 2005 where we started our conversation, where I was just hammered. I made up stories. This is fiction. This never happened. Africans are liars.

You name it. Unfortunately, that is all we've got time for. I know a lot of you are going to want to get in touch on this one. William, remind us what, what is the email address for people who want to get in touch? EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. Thank you so much, Caroline Elkin, for your time, for your expertise. We'll be back again, but until then. Once we've recovered from this. Well, the thing is, I think both of us are getting a ticket to Northumberland. We're in those archives. Oh my goodness, can you imagine? So yes, until then, it's goodbye from me.

And goodbye for me.