20 December 1900 On 20 December 1900, General Lord Kitchener issued a propaganda proclamation in which he promised South African Boer insurgents, who surrendered voluntarily, that they would be allowed to live in government run camps along with their families ‘until such time as the guerrilla warfare now being carried on will admit of their…
20 October 1952 Today in 1952, Kenya’s governor, Evelyn Baring, signed a state of emergency. In the early hours of the following morning, in an operation code-named Jock Scott, 106 Kenyan civil rights leaders and individuals suspected of being overly sympathetic to an anti-British rebellion, known as the Mau Mau uprising, were arrested. Most of…
16 June 1959 Today in 1959, the Labour MP Barbara Castle read out a letter in parliament she had received from the former assistant commissioner of police in Kenya, Duncan MacPherson. He had attempted to clear up some of the human rights abuses committed by colonial police and prison guards ‘until in despair, disgust and…
24 April 1954 On 24 April 1954, British troops, under orders from General Sir George Erskine, started to round up thousands of Africans living in Nairobi and deport them to concentration camps. The operation was part of a deliberate policy of apartheid and collective punishment aimed at crushing the nationalist Mau Mau insurgency. Military vehicles…
24 January 1901 By January 1901, British troops had been engaged for over a year in a prolonged military campaign in South Africa to quell an insurgency by elusive Boer rebels who were demanding greater independence. General Lord Kitchener, who had taken over command of British forces in South Africa in November 1900, was ruthlessly…
10 January 1949 On 10 January 1949, Emergency regulation 17D authorised the British High Commissioner for Malaya to use mass detentions and deportations, including even entire villages, towns or rural districts, where elements among the population were suspected of supporting the communist insurgents, who were fighting to end British rule.1 Â It was immediately acknowledged even…
10 January 1900 On 10 January 1900, Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener arrived in Cape Town as the new Chief in Staff of an army of some 200,000 men. The task he had been given was to crush attempts by the descendants of Dutch settlers to form their own Boer homeland in South Africa, independent…
LORD MILNER ON HIGH DEATH RATE IN BRITISH CONCENTRATION CAMPS [ 4 December 1901 ] Lord Milner, Britain’s High Commissioner for Southern Africa, was charged with sorting out the concentration camps for civilian detainees during the Second South African Boer War, after the scandal of their inhumane conditions had been exposed in the press. In…
BRITAIN REACTS TO ANTI-GERMAN RIOTS BY DETAINING GERMAN CIVILIANS [ 13 May 1915 ] During the First World War, the British government deliberately played on widespread anti-German and anti-Austrian sentiments. On 13 May 1915, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, aching to receive accolades from a xenophobic press, informed parliament that all German and Austrian civilians living…
