11 – Churchill forcibly evicted thousands of Kenyans and put them into concentration camps

“This course [detention without trial and forced labour] had been recommended despite the fact that it was thought to involve a technical breach of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 and the Convention on Human Rights adopted by the Council of Europe”

As we have discovered, Churchill presided over a campaign of civilian bombing in the Middle East that foreshadowed what would follow in the Second World War. In that case, it was trying something out before the war and then using it to devastating effect in a larger conflict, whereas in the case of Kenya, it was taking something that had been seen in the war and then reapplying it in the colonies. One would think that, having seen the horrors of a brutal imperialist project and the logical conclusion of racist beliefs, he might have ameliorated his views on imperialism and race. Not for a second.

Churchill was deposed immediately after the Second World War and replaced by Clement Atlee, a Labour Prime Minister, but soon returned to power in 1951. Britain had spent the immediate post-war period messily splitting the Raj into India and Pakistan (and fermenting sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims) as well as attempting to squash a rebellion in Malaysia, and in 1952, a further uprising started in the hugely profitable colony of Kenya.

As ever, the British imperial project wasn’t particularly concerned about the people of wherever they were colonising, and instead about just how much wealth they could wring out of it. In the case of Kenya, that wealth lay in the fertile soil and the bountiful crops that could be grown in it. The Deputy Governor of Kenya wrote to London in 1945 saying: “The principal item in the natural resources of Kenya is the land, and in this term we include the colony’s mineral resources. It seems to us that our major objective must clearly be the preservation and the wise use of this most important asset.”

An earlier report, in the 1920s had described Kenya as having “some of the richest agricultural soils in the world, mostly in districts where the elevation and climate make it possible for Europeans to reside permanently,” and recommended that thousands of settlers be given land to farm. Thus, some 7 million acres had been forcefully taken from locals and given over to white settler farmers, with the natives then forced to work the land as labourers for their white masters.

When the Mau Mau, as the local forces were called, rose up against the British, a state of emergency was declared in 1952 and some 150,000 people forcibly moved into concentration camps. Rape was a common weapon, while suspected rebels were tortured with electricity. Others were summarily executed. Churchill presided over all of this. The story of the Mau Mau Uprising was suppressed for decades and only in recent years was documentation found that told the whole story of the brutal treatment of Kenyans.

An editorial in The Guardian in 2011 on the Mau Mau Uprising, shortly after a group of Kenyans who had lived through the horrors of British rule had sued the British Government for compensation, read: There is something peculiarly chilling about the way colonial officials behaved, most notoriously but not only in Kenya, within a decade of the liberation of the concentration camps and the return of thousands of emaciated British prisoners of war from the Pacific. One courageous judge in Nairobi explicitly drew the parallel: Kenya’s Belsen, he called one camp.”

In this piece, we have spoken extensively of Churchill’s disdain for basically anyone who was not white and British – but he was also no big fan of plenty of other British people too. In fact, he wasn’t above turning the troops on his own people when he saw fit.