During the 1950s, Britain fought in Kenya against the Mau Mau, a movement fighting for independence from colonial rule. The movement was brutally suppressed through the use of extensive detention camps and systemic violence. Although successive British governments have tried to distance themselves from the violence that unfolded, the documentary, which airs on Channel 4 on Sunday at 10pm castration – but took steps to suppress the evidence. The documentary, titled A Very British Way of Torture, brings together many of the worst abuses committed by British colonial forces through survivor accounts and expert analysis from a team of British and Kenyan historians. It also delves into a file that remained hidden for more than 50 years at a facility used by MI5 and MI6. Among the new evidence is a previously secret letter from Kenya police commissioner Arthur Young which reveals the truth behind his resignation. Young, who previously worked for the Metropolitan police, was sent to Kenya to investigate alleged abuses. Young quickly began to uncover cases of human rights abuses that involved colonial officers either committing the alleged violence or trying to cover it up. Young presented these cases to Kenya’s ministry of legal affairs and the attorney general, but the investigations were ultimately blocked. He then resigned in a scathing letter criticizing management in Kenya and the UK for preventing him from doing his job. His resignation letter was kept out of the public record and a soft version was published instead. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. British troops stop a man in Kenya in 1953. Photo: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive “This shows the wider process by which the British government, along with the colonial administration, tried to prevent people from finding out what people in the police knew was going on and knew was wrong,” said Niels Boender, a historian from the University of Warwick currently researching for the Imperial War Museum, who helped research and feature in the documentary. “You often hear people say in Britain that it was acceptable by the standards of the time. And I think documents like this really show that, no, people at the time knew that was wrong as well. It was a specific effort by people in the government and by people in the colonial state to conspire to keep it out of the public record. This finding of the documentary is very important,” he added. The documentary also reveals new details about the governor’s complaints commission, a shadowy body in the Kenyan government that the film shows was one of the main mechanisms for cracking down on allegations of torture. Boender describes the documentary as “impressive” in its exposure of the violence that occurred under the British Empire. He believes there is a disconnect between the research and conversations taking place between historians about empire and the current public debate. “You find the conversation stuck, which I think is 50 years in the past. On a public level, the debate is ‘was the empire good?’, while we do have a fair bit of debate about how bad it was and in what ways it was bad. The whole discussion is on a different level,” he said. “There’s really only a very small group of historians who make this kind of ‘remember the railways’ argument, but they have a completely disproportionate power in the public imagination. “Documentaries like this can change the balance.”
