King Charles III will travel this week to Kenya, his first visit to a Commonwealth country as Britain’s monarch. There, according to Buckingham Palace, he will “acknowledge the more painful aspects of the UK and Kenya’s shared history, including the Emergency (1952-60) … [taking] time during the visit to deepen his understanding of the wrongs suffered in this period by the people of Kenya”.
It appears the British monarch is in need of a history lesson. A little over a decade ago William Hague, who was foreign secretary, delivered a speech to the House of Commons, heralding a rupture in Britain’s narrative of imperial exceptionalism.
“I would like to make clear now and for the first time on behalf of Her Majesty’s government that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya,” Hague said. “The British government recognise that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” he continued. “The British government sincerely regret that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence. Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity, which we unreservedly condemn.”
Hague’s admissions were the first of their kind, foisted upon Her Majesty’s government by five elderly Kenyans. In the spring of 2009 they had filed a suit against the then Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), alleging systematic torture and abuse at the hands of British colonial agents in the detention camps and villages built during the Mau Mau emergency. Based upon revisionist history, including my own book, Britain’s Gulag, and the legal ingenuity of the law firm Leigh Day and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the case was filed in London’s high court.
Media coverage was widespread. Headlines splashed daily revelations, including, after the claimants’ repeated demands for document disclosure, the British government’s “discovery” of 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files at Hanslope Park, the fortress-like warehouse for top-secret government files. Efforts to cover up British crimes did not end there. Colonial officials, taking orders from London, had destroyed three-and-a-half tons of documents on the eve of Britain’s exit from Kenya in 1963.
Still, the forensic work of the claimants’ legal and historical team yielded a mountain of damning evidence. The FCO, which initially vowed to fight the case to the bitter end, settled in June 2013, admitting for the first time in British history to the use of torture in its empire, paying out nearly £20m in damages and legal costs to 5,228 individuals who joined in the class action negotiation, and committing to build a memorial in Nairobi to commemorate “the victims of torture and ill treatment during the colonial era”.
For King Charles III to speak of the “painful aspects” of Kenya and Britain’s shared history is antediluvian relative to the decade-old admission of “torture” and the government’s “regret” for the “abuses” that “marred Kenya’s progress towards independence”.
Since Buckingham Palace is framing the monarch’s visit as one that “will celebrate the close links between the British and Kenyan people”, the king needs a rescripting of his position on Kenya’s past, and his role in present-day repair. Some informed advice could be useful.
First, King Charles III, you need to stop choking on those two words, “I apologise”. Just cough them up. They will probably trigger all sorts of liability issues for you and your government, but at last count, the monarchy is worth over £20bn, so you could give several quid – some of which were stolen from, or earned on the backs of, colonised peoples – to the British taxpayer to cover this.
Given the monarchy’s close attachment to symbolism, there’s no better place for your first formal apology for colonial crimes than Kenya. It’s there that your mother acceded to the throne in February 1952, and where, just a year later, her picture, in full regalia, hung in the detention camps where thousands of Africans were tortured, often while being forced to sing God Save the Queen.
Next, there’s the issue of the modern honours system introduced by your great-grandfather, King George V, celebrating civilian and military service. Today, as in yesteryear, these medals bear the motto “For God and the Empire”, the two wellsprings of your monarchical power.
In the case of Kenya, your mother bestowed honours upon war criminals. Among them was Terence Gavaghan, the architect of the “dilution technique”, or systematised violence used to “break” detainees. He was made an MBE, as was John Cowan, his lieutenant, for his role in crafting the “Cowan plan”, which led to the beating to death of 11 detainees. What better time than your upcoming visit to Kenya to announce that you are rescinding these medals?
While royal affirmations of empire’s nefarious agents were long part of Britain’s modus operandi so, too, was developmentalist language masquerading as benign reform. Your forebears referred to colonial subjects as “children”, toddling behind Britain. Successive monarchs obscured, through decades of reassuring rituals, acts of omission and moth-eaten familial fictions, the systemic racism and extreme violence upon which Britain’s imperial power, and their own, depended. At the time of decolonisation, it was said empire’s “children”, thanks to Britain’s benevolent civilising hand, had “grown up”, taking their place in the Commonwealth of Nations.
The language of fictive kinship needs to stop. It’s a hard habit to break, but the time is long past for you to speak of Britain’s “unique history” of empire, which has now transformed into a “family of nations”.
Global demands for a British colonial reckoning suggest you need to abandon your paternalistic ways, apologise, and offer repair for the colonial crimes committed in your family’s name. The alternative will only hasten the monarchy’s demise.
• Caroline Elkins is a professor at Harvard University and the author of Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
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