They used to say the sun never set on the British Empire because God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark. And when darkness fell on the empire after the Second World War, that was proven unsettlingly true. While politicians in the post-war period spoke of a “wind of change” blowing gently through the forelocks of the colonial governors as African and Asian nations gained their independence, the end of empire was a far more violent affair, as Nicholas Rankin powerfully evokes in his new book Trapped In History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me.
Rankin, a BBC journalist, witnessed the collapse of the British Empire in east Africa through a child’s eyes. In 1954, when he was four, his family moved from drab Sheffield to an idyllic house in the “White Highlands” of Kenya after his father got a job there working as an estate manager for the colonial settlers. They arrived just as the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule was at full tilt.
