Paying for the Sins of our Colonial Past? Kenya’s War Crimes

A Public Lecture by David M Anderson, Professor in African History, University of Warwick, and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow

Since 2011, the government of the United Kingdom has been prosecuted in the British courts in cases relating to human rights crimes committed in former British colonies during the twentieth century. The most prominent of these cases, a prosecution brought by alleged victims of torture from the Mau Mau rebellion in 1950s Kenya, brought the first legal admission of torture by the British government in 2012, and resulted in an out-of-court settlement to more than 5,000 victims. Other cases relating to the Mau Mau rebellion have also come to court, but have not been successfully prosecuted. A case brought by torture victims from Cyprus who had been members of the EOKA nationalist movement in the 1950s, also resulted in successful prosecution, with victims again being awarded compensation. A further case, relating to the murder of civilians in colonial Malaya, in 1948, is currently in process. The British parliament has now legislated to try to hamper future cases of this kind being heard, but this continues to be vigorously contested. In Britain, such cases are closely connected to accusations of crimes committed by the military in Northern Ireland during the civil disturbances there, and this impinges upon perceptions of the colonial cases. This presentation will set these prosecutions in an historical context, and explain by what methods, means and processes such cases have been able to be heard before the British courts. It will be shown that this has been a fragile legal opportunity, that the state is now anxious to foreclose: but it will also be argued that these cases have had an impact on public understandings of colonial wars and how they should be viewed.

David M. Anderson is Professor of African History, in the Global History & Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. He is also an International Faculty Professor at the University of Cologne, Senior Research Associate at Stellenbosch University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was for 12 years editor of the Journal of African History, was founding editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and is Editor of the Cambridge University Press African Studies Series. He has published over 100 academic articles and journalism features on the history and politics of eastern Africa, along with 17 authored and edited books. He is best known for his research and writing on the history of the Mau Mau rebellion in 1950s Kenya. His authoritative study, Histories of the Hanged (2005), is supplemented by over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on the British counter-insurgency. He has made several documentary films about the Mau Mau war, including the Channel 4/Al Jazeera production A Very British Way of Torture, and he features in the recent ABC series of The Stuff the British Stole. Anderson was responsible for the revelation of the Hanslope Disclosure in 2011, when he was an Expert Witness in the prosecution of the British government for alleged tortures committed in Kenya during the 1950s. His research focuses on histories of colonial violence.

Professor Anderson is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, collaborating with Professor Richard Vokes in the UWA School of Social Sciences.