Aletho News

How Britain covered up a brutal Kenya massacre

By Will Stone | Morning Star | November 30, 2012

Never before seen files on Britain’s cruel colonial grip on Kenya have revealed a desperate attempt to cover up the massacre of unarmed prisoners during the Mau Mau uprising.

Eleven prisoners at the Hola detention camp were brutally clubbed to death and dozens more injured by prison wardens on March 3 1959 after they refused to work.

One of three elderly Kenyans, who last month won a High Court ruling to sue the British government for damages over torture, claims he was beaten unconscious during the incident.

Despite the overwhelming evidence nobody has ever been prosecuted.

Shockingly, the previously secret documents show that British colonial officials refused to identify individuals involved and attempted to blame the deaths on the prisoners “drinking too much water.”

The prison camp was one of many built during the uprising in which suspected rebels were detained by British colonial forces, often in dire conditions.

Shortly before the Hola deaths, a plan had been drawn up by colonial authorities allowing prison staff to use force to make detainees work if they refused, the Foreign Office files released by the National Ar­chives show.

Prison officer Walter Coutts told the inquest into the Hola deaths that the detainees either “willed themselves to death or had died because they drank too much water.”

But a colonial official’s assistant, Kenyan Johannes Ezekiel, said he saw camp commandant Michael Sullivan moving between groups of prison warders, and could “see perfectly well what was going on.”

Mr Ezekiel’s comments were discounted by attorney-general Eric Griffith-Jones, who was in charge of criminal prosecutions, as he was “strongly suspected” to have links with Kenyan nationalist opposition politician Tom Mboya.

After post-mortem examinations revealed the deaths were caused by violence, the commissioner of prisons, who authorised the plan to use force, claimed that he had warned there were risks.

To make matters worse the attorney-general caused uproar in Britain after announcing that no charges could be brought against any individuals.

He said in a secret letter to the Kenyan chief secretary: “No evidence was available to establish whether any, and, if so, what, injuries had been inflicted by the beating in question or on whom.”

The Hola deaths signalled the beginning of the end of Britain’s clampdown on the Mau Mau uprising as colonial authorities began to close prison camps around Kenya in the following years.

Kenya declared independence from Britain just over four years after the Hola deaths, on December 12 1963.

Separate government files, also released for the first time today, show that colonial officials in Cyprus had considered producing adventure comic books and running an essay competition in the 1950s as part of a propaganda bid to stop youngsters rebelling against British rule.

Cyprus won independence from Britain in 1960.

December 1, 2012 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | British Empire, Government of the United Kingdom, Hola massacre, Kenya, Mau Mau Uprising, Tom Mboya, Walter Coutts