United Kingdom could face more Mau Mau suits

Harvard University Professor of History and African American Studies Caroline Elkins speaks at Karatina University in Nyeri County during an international conference on the Mau Mau and other liberation movements. The conference has attracted 85 experts and over 200 participants. [PHOTO: LYDIA NYAWIRA/STANDARD]

By WAINAINA NDUNG’U

Karatina, Nyeri county : The British government could be looking at a sea of litigation over human rights violations during the last days of its colonial empire.

American historian Prof Caroline Elkins, who wrote a book titled Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, told an international conference on liberation movements at Karatina University that 7,000 boxes of previously unknown documents from 36 former colonies of Britain might be the powder keg that will trigger the litigation.

Prof Elkins, whose book is credited with helping the Mau Mau make a breakthrough in their case against the British Government, said the 7,000 boxes of colonial documents which were found hidden at Ellis Park have already triggered lawsuits from Malaysia, Cyprus and Palestine.

“The documents have proved that the British Government carried out a systematic campaign of violence against liberation movements in most of its 36 former colonies in the world, including Kenya,” said Prof Elkins, a professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Although the Mau Mau case was the first reparations case against the British in its courts, Prof Elkins told the conference that it would definitely not be the last because it had persuaded likely victims spread all over the world to pursue justice.

She added that the original work plan to defeat the Mau Mau litigation by the British involved an admission that massive colonial records about the liberation struggle had been destroyed prior to independence and therefore there was no substantial evidence to prove that violence had been employed against the liberation movement.

HISTORIANS PUT OFF

“For the last 50 years, the strategy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was to put off historians seeking to explore this field. The answer was always that documents related to that era had been destroyed by departing colonial officers,” said Prof Elkins.

Giving her personal experience in trying to document the Mau Mau cause, Elkins said searching for the evidence even after the discovery of Ellis Park archives was like searching for a pin in a haystack.

Apparently, the 300 boxes from Kenya were mixed up with 7,000 from other  former colonies and when they were eventually found, her research team had to scour through 20,000 pages of documents within a year.