Chris McGreal: Britain's shameful legacy ... 50 years after putting down the Mau Mau rebellion
It has been 50 years and there is much to remember. But what still stands out from his time in the camps is a tall white man in shorts with a swagger stick. "When we first arrived we didn't know who he was, but we quickly knew he was in charge," says Espon Makanga. "All the other whites and the black guards waited for him to speak, and when he gave the order that is when it began. After that it never really stopped. I came to hate that man. I can never forgive him."
Makanga, now 78, had already endured more than two years as a prisoner of the British when the colonial authorities sent him to Kandongu camp in Kenya in 1957. He describes life in the earlier camps as a routine of tortures, beatings and typhoid that claimed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.
But Kandongu was designed to be the toughest stop on what British officials described as the "pipeline" of camps intended to break down the "hard core" of Kenyans supporting the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule, which began in 1952. Hard core did not mean the worst killers, merely the most defiant.
The camp enforced a regimen known as the "dilution technique". It was designed by three white colonial officials, one of them the officer whom Makanga spotted as being in charge when he first arrived at Kandongu, and whom he and the other inmates came to fear. They had various nicknames for that officer, but it was only in time that they discovered he was really called Terence Gavaghan. "He was a tall man with a thin face and we soon discovered his camp was about nothing more than being beaten and tortured. They beat us from the day we arrived, with sticks, with their fists, kicking us with their boots. They beat us to make us work. They beat us to force us to confess our Mau Mau oath. After a year I couldn't take it any longer. Gavaghan had won," he says.
Makanga was just one of the estimated 150,000 Kenyans held in British prison camps for up to seven years during what was known as the Kenya Emergency, a rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya. Today, he is among a group of 10 survivors, all in their 70s and 80s, who took the first legal step in London this week towards suing the British government for what they say was officially sanctioned torture and other human rights abuses.
Some of the former prisoners describe rape and sexual abuse of women; others say they survived camps where inmates were flogged, worked to death, murdered in cold blood or starved. They want compensation but also an apology for what they describe as a system of organised brutality unmatched anywhere else in the waning years of the British empire. Even in the 1950s, the camps were described as "Kenya's gulags" and likened by officials to Nazi slave labour camps.
The camps were justified, in British eyes, by the Mau Mau's butchering of 32 white settlers and African chiefs loyal to the crown early in the rebellion. The Mau Mau were dominated by the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, and were largely driven by bitterness at the loss of land to the white settlers. But the struggle also divided the tribe, and the Mau Mau ultimately killed far more fellow Kikuyu than whites, with massacres such as the killing of 120 men, women and children at Lari in March 1953. In Britain the Mau Mau were portrayed as representing the re-emergence of a primitive bloodlust that the twin benefits of colonisation - Christianity and civilisation - were intended to eradicate. But the British soon proved they could be as brutal as their enemies....
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Makanga, now 78, had already endured more than two years as a prisoner of the British when the colonial authorities sent him to Kandongu camp in Kenya in 1957. He describes life in the earlier camps as a routine of tortures, beatings and typhoid that claimed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.
But Kandongu was designed to be the toughest stop on what British officials described as the "pipeline" of camps intended to break down the "hard core" of Kenyans supporting the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule, which began in 1952. Hard core did not mean the worst killers, merely the most defiant.
The camp enforced a regimen known as the "dilution technique". It was designed by three white colonial officials, one of them the officer whom Makanga spotted as being in charge when he first arrived at Kandongu, and whom he and the other inmates came to fear. They had various nicknames for that officer, but it was only in time that they discovered he was really called Terence Gavaghan. "He was a tall man with a thin face and we soon discovered his camp was about nothing more than being beaten and tortured. They beat us from the day we arrived, with sticks, with their fists, kicking us with their boots. They beat us to make us work. They beat us to force us to confess our Mau Mau oath. After a year I couldn't take it any longer. Gavaghan had won," he says.
Makanga was just one of the estimated 150,000 Kenyans held in British prison camps for up to seven years during what was known as the Kenya Emergency, a rebellion against colonial rule in Kenya. Today, he is among a group of 10 survivors, all in their 70s and 80s, who took the first legal step in London this week towards suing the British government for what they say was officially sanctioned torture and other human rights abuses.
Some of the former prisoners describe rape and sexual abuse of women; others say they survived camps where inmates were flogged, worked to death, murdered in cold blood or starved. They want compensation but also an apology for what they describe as a system of organised brutality unmatched anywhere else in the waning years of the British empire. Even in the 1950s, the camps were described as "Kenya's gulags" and likened by officials to Nazi slave labour camps.
The camps were justified, in British eyes, by the Mau Mau's butchering of 32 white settlers and African chiefs loyal to the crown early in the rebellion. The Mau Mau were dominated by the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, and were largely driven by bitterness at the loss of land to the white settlers. But the struggle also divided the tribe, and the Mau Mau ultimately killed far more fellow Kikuyu than whites, with massacres such as the killing of 120 men, women and children at Lari in March 1953. In Britain the Mau Mau were portrayed as representing the re-emergence of a primitive bloodlust that the twin benefits of colonisation - Christianity and civilisation - were intended to eradicate. But the British soon proved they could be as brutal as their enemies....