23 December 1954 Duncan McPherson, Assistant Commissioner of Kenya’s colonial police, was a rare exception to the norm of complete British indifference to the suffering of ordinary Kenyans. Britain was then engaged in a brutal campaign to crush the Mau Mau insurgency, which aimed to bring an end to colonial rule. Thousands were detained in…
10 December 1953 On 10 December 1953, in a letter to the War Office, General George Erskine, commanding British forces in Kenya, admitted that he was aware that the police and army in the colony frequently resorted to summary executions and torture against suspect Mau Mau insurgents. ‘There is no doubt’, he confessed to Whitehall…
7 December 1908 On 7 December 1908, Colonel Seely, Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, was asked questions in the House of Commons about Hubert Silberrad, Deputy Commissioner at Nyeri in British East Africa (Kenya). Silberrad had been suspended for five months, three months on full pay and two months on three quarters. This…
3 December 1963 On 3 December 1963, just nine days prior to Kenya being granted independence, hundreds of files of documents were packed into four large wooden packing crates and loaded onto a British United Airways flight to London’s Gatwick Airport. They related to the administration of the colony during the brutal crushing of the…
26 November 1952 On 26 November 1952, Dr. Cyril Garbett, the Archbishop of York, speaking in the House of Lords, backed the British government’s use of collective punishment against villages and often entire districts deemed to be ‘uncooperative’ with Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign to crush the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion. During the next four years the…
25 November 1952 Today in 1952, Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya, issued new emergency measures designed to widen the conditions for the imposition of collective punishment in areas considered sympathetic to the anti-British Mau Mau insurgency. The pro-Empire Daily Express reported the same day that ‘Africans in the Thomson’s Falls District, where Commander Jock Meiklejohn…
18 November 1953 On 18 November 1953, the RAF commenced a massive carpet bombing operation against Mau Mau insurgents opposed to British rule in Kenya. Code-named Operation Mushroom, and deploying enormous quad engine Lincoln heavy bombers, the campaign was to see 900 sorties over the next two years dropping six million bombs, weighing 50,000 tons,…
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…
14 June 1953 At around 6 pm on 14 June 1953, Captain Gerald Griffiths began to interrogate two forestry workers suspected of taking up arms against British rule in Kenya. Earlier that day, as Griffiths had been leading a company of the King’s African Rifles into the Chuka region of Kenya to flush out Mau…
