Acceptable Levels? The Use and Threat of Violence in Central Africa, 1953–64

Abstract

Monographs by Caroline Elkins and David Anderson on British policy in the campaign against the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, both published in 2005, served to focus scholarly attention on the role of extreme force in sustaining colonial rule, and to puncture the commonly held notion that the transfer of power in the British Empire was a largely peaceful process.¹ They have been followed by more recent studies that have shed light on some of the darker corners of British policy in Kenya.² The idea that there was a brutal and largely hidden history of British decolonization received a powerful boost in 2011 by the revelation that the British government had withheld thousands of files on late-colonial policy relating not only to Kenya but to scores of other British territories. These so-called migrated archives were generated by the local colonial administrations and removed to the UK at independence, where they were secretly stored, latterly at offices in Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire.³ The British government admitted to their existence during a case brought against it in the High Court in London by a group of elderly former Mau Mau detainees who were claiming they had been brutally treated while in custody⁴ The year 2011 also saw the publication of a number of high-profile historical studies that served as a further reminder the British Empire was sustained by the ruthless deployment of violence, and that its end was accompanied by vicious counter-insurgency campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus.⁵