sid guttridge wrote:Hi statemachine,
Technically all the Mau-Mau baggage was signed away at independence and falls within the jurisdiction of the successor Kenyan Government.
Has the Kenyan Government pursued any internal cases against either African security force members or Mau-Mau members?
If it has, then I can see no objection to pursuing implicated Britons as well.
There is a major problem in that a recent book (entitled something like "Britain's Gulag") closes with vague and unsubstantiated allegations that the Mau-Mau death toll was as high as 100,000. This has heightened the public profile of the issue.
Another complicating factor was that there were two recent court cases in which Kenyan women alleged rape by British forces on exercise and other Kenyans alleged injury from unexploded ordinance after exercises were over. These were provoked by a couple of compensation hand outs that drew attention to HMG as a milch-cow and resulted in hundreds of apparently false claims.
Cheers,
Sid.
Part of the deal to obtain their independance was indeed to agree to an amnesty for all the crimes committed against the Kenyan people.
I doubt that any of the Kikiyu oath-takers were prosecuted for their crimes against fellow Kenyans and British colonialists.
Caroline Elkins is a Harvard historian.The allegations are not vague and unsubstantiated.This work won the Pulitzer prize in 2006 for general non-fiction.
The vast majority of these deaths did not come from the ranks of the forest fighters.Members of the general population,and those in the concentration camps suffered on an immense scale.
The name of the book is Imperial Reckoning.
The British wash their hands with the finest soap.