46. The Mau Mau, the court case, and the hidden documents

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to MPa Club at www.mpa.org.uk.com Hello and welcome to MPa with me and Eta Arnand. And me, William Turumbo. Is that your attempt at bringing a half-ass pause back into the proceedings? Is it? I thought we'd dealt with that. What a good pause, that was a good. You've done better. You've done better. Anyway, listen to this. We're very privileged. We have a very special guest here today who brings together so many threads of what we've been talking about in this series and actually asks the question, what was MPa all about? And was it as bad as some people say? I mean, I think you can kind of boil it down because we are in the middle of something of a war zone, particularly in Britain, about the battleground as people who don't want you to talk about it at all and people who want to dig up things from the past and put it front and center on the table. I think, you know, anywhere in the world, people want to think well of their ancestors. You don't grow up imagining that your ancestors were monsters. And there is a long process of education which hasn't yet taken place in Britain about what MPa means, to rule another people in any period of history. Means the use of violence, oppression, and the British did this as much as any other MPa in history. Anyway, we have an incredibly special guest, as I said. You all know her name. If you listen to the news or read any newspapers and you might be scratching your head as to why. But if I say they're named Caroline Elkin to you, it will definitely resonate for those of you who are interested in imperial history. Not only is she a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, she's a professor at Harvard University, but the reason you will have heard of her is because she gave special evidence at the Malmau trial. Now, William, this was seismic, this was game changing. And your experience with the British government, their evasions, hiding evidence and the pressure put on you to basically drop your case and shut up in a sense, confirmed all your worst opinions about the people you were writing about, and how there was more than an accidental lack of evidence that there was a serious story which was being actively covered up. Shall we go right back to the beginning, Caroline? Do you mind? Because there's some people who will, maybe they will have heard Malmau rebellion, but they won't be able to pin it to what it actually was. So take us right back to what this situation is all about. Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. I mean, such fun. Getting to nerd off about Empire, people actually want to hear about all this. And you know, look, I think we go back so often, people hear the word Malmau and they sort of recoil and they remember their grandmother, perhaps, or somebody of an older generation, Malmau, the most horrible, savage thing that never happened. And you know, let's unpack that a little bit, right? Because the 1950s, the Malmau uprising wasn't uprising largely by the Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya against British colonial rule. And it was both an anti-colonial uprising and it had civil dimensions as well. And the way in which they murdered and attacked Europeans and other Africans was bloody. There was no doubt about it. But at the end of the day, 32 Europeans in total died in this. It lasted from 1952 to 1960. Many will say it accelerated independence when it started. The idea was that, you know, they were going to still be in Kenya for another generation, if not more. But in response to this rebellion, the British, it was sort of too prompt. One, there were gorillas in the forest and they sent the military out to track them down. And that was a moral, less taken care of by 1954 or so. But then there was another aspect, the civilian dimension of the war, and all members of Malmau took an oath, pledging themselves to the movement itself, right? And there were seven gradations of oath. And it was estimated about 90% of the one and a half million Kikuyu took that oath. And what I was interested in was, were those people, this what was considered to be the civilian war that the government waged against Kikuyu, noticed the hearts in mind. And in order to break them and then to sort of get them to confess their oaths and real, you know, sort of realign themselves with empire, pledge themselves and they literally would have to see, sing God save the Queen and all the stuff. They set up a whole series of detention camps and detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population. That's what I was interested in running about. Carolyn, take us back one stage even before that. Second war is over. And Kenya is almost a white settler colony. You have large areas of land being given over to British people to farm. And there's British are leaving India and Pakistan and what will be Bangladesh and a whole imperial administration is packing up that you have the non-line movement. You have a post-colonial well beginning to emerge in South Asia, but that's not happening in Africa. In fact, there's even a shift towards Africa and the colonialism in a sense is beginning again. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. They're doubling down in Africa, right? This is where imperial resurgence is happening. They're going to rebuild Britain off the back of empire and it's going to happen in places like Kenya. So you have Africans who are fought in World War II thinking they're going to come home, believing in the Atlantic chart of the rest and come to find out not only is life not getting better, it's getting worse. And it's an absolute pressure cooker. It was, you know, to mix metaphors, you're just waiting for a match to be dropped into this, ready to explode. And there's an economic imperative for this because you've got to remember that Britain was brassy. It broke. You know, after the war needed money. So this was a solution to filling that post-war gap in the coffers. Yeah, oh, entirely financial crapper, right? And look, everybody, there's this idea that somehow after World War II, there's this gradual evolution to decolonization, not at all. This is one of the most violent periods of colonial rule, often known as the second colonial occupation. And Kenya was a shining example. This happens elsewhere, but if we stick with Kenya, this is a place, as I said, where they are just doubling down on colonial and really squeezing African labor for all they can, obviously for export crops. Why is Kenya important, specifically Kenya? Why is that an area that is the, the center of British concerns? Why the more white people there than there are saying in Ghana or more? Yeah, I think there are two things to that, right? First, they had decided much, much earlier on, earlier in the 20th century that it was going to be settlers who were going to make this, this land productive, right? And Ghana, they chose to use peasant production, right? Whereas here they use, they use settlers quite controversially actually. They were terrible, by the way, they were terrible farmers until World War II, just, just horrible. But post World War II, getting back to the point that was just made about the economy, they are pumping money with the Colonial Development World Fair Act into the colonies. Kenya is not alone. And that money is being used to ramp up exports. And of course, some of everybody looks at the export numbers, never forget that the game, the long game that they're playing on the economy and empires, all about monetary policy. They are basically screwing these colonies by having unlock on the way in which monetary policy is being manipulated in the Stirling Zone. And it's a genius move, by the way. It works quite effectively until these colonies start rebelling. And again, just to give a bit of context, the Queen has just been on Honeymoon. Oh, yes, Tree Top. So the thing is Tree Top's thing, hearing about that guy. Yeah, she's Queen. Yep, she goes up to the Tree of Princess and comes down to Queen, right, the famous in 1952. And of course, that's just before the start of this Mal-Mal state of emergency. Right. So when you say, so now going forward again to the point that we started. So the British have faced now with a Kikuyu population that's had enough. They said, right, that's enough. We've seen other countries now shake off British rule. We'd quite like a bit of that as well. We said that they were rounded up. Do we know numbers of how many were rounded up and put into these camps? Yeah, you know, look, if you take the answer, great question. The British have always reported that it was approximately 70 to 80,000 that were detained. Now way back when when I started this work, you kept seeing that this is a daily average figure. And remember, this figure had been used by historians, eminent historians, over and over and over again. Think about it. What's in a daily average figure? Well, what it doesn't tell you is how many went into the camps in any given day and how many went out. So you have to figure out the intake and release rates. And once you figure that out, you figure out that the number is about two to four times the amount in the detention camps. But those camps were mostly for men. And they thought the British that the most strident adherents of Mal-Mal were the women. And in fact, they created what were barbed wire villages, emergency villages, 24 hour guard, forced labor, starvation tactic, these were all detention camps in name. So if you put together the number of women and children in these villages and the number of men in the camps, you find out that it wasn't 70 to 80,000, it was nearly the entire crew population of 1.5 million that were detained, either in detention camp or in an emergency barbed wire village. And where in Kenya is this? People who have seen films like White Mistiffs and so on, are familiar with sort of happy valley. Where are we doing? And holiday makers today may have gone to Lamu, give us a bit of geography. Yes. The Kikuyu thing lived in reserves. So when we think about the British, when the colonization of force happened, they would sequester different ethnic groups into reserves. So if you go north from Nairobi up towards Mount Kenya, that's where the Kikuyu reserves are. That's where we have these emergency villages. Kikuyu actually don't live in villages. They live in scattered homesets. So they would round everybody up, burn all their properties, and then put them into these barbed wire village. The detention camps, getting back to if you were a holiday maker in Lamu, you know how hot it is on Lamu in February. And you know, just the stench of the humidity. These detention camps, some of the worst are on the coast, and they're dotted all over the country. There's about a hundred of them in total. And people are being moved from camp to camp, depending upon how cooperative they are. They had some camps more severe, others less severe. So I mean, this is so reminiscent of Kichna in South Africa, creating camps, brazing play scorched earth, and then I mean, why did they think that that was okay? And when they pushed back and Britain was this known about how many people actually knew that this was going on? So what's the reporting like at the time? Yeah. I mean, first of all, brilliant point. This is not the first time. And we can have a longer conversation starts at the turn of the century in South Africa. They move these systems of confinement all over the empire, even in India and Malaysia. Look, back at home, one of the things that's as an historian that you're so struck by are the way in which information is able to flow out of Kenya. You have plenty of people on the left, people who we might be familiar with. Barbara Castle, Fender Brockway, on the four parliament, you have people in the missionaries who are writing back home and protesting. And what is so stunning is the degree to which the British government has decades of experience of avoiding any kind of culpability. It's a one off. It's a bad apple that something happens. It's a monstrous event. You know, it is but it's never anything more than that. And the genius of this, if you think about it, they pull that off for eight years. But just clarify this. I mean, is the other investigative journalist? I mean, this is, you know, only ten years ago. Is this a parent of journalism? And it's also after the Second World War, where journalists went into the field in dangerous places where they shouldn't have and couldn't really have gone before. Other known, some, you know, Don McAllen's out there taking blocks of my photographs of horrible things going on. Why was this not better known at home? Yeah, first of all, it was, there was, there was plenty of information at home for your average Britain to know something was off here. But remember, it's always the response is not just that this is a one off, but it's a, how dear British soldiers would never do something like this. When you say something like that, well, we haven't even said that. We haven't even gotten into what that is. What were the things? Horrific forms of torture. And a million years, I have to tell you when I was doing the research for this, I, it's very difficult. I'm not the only person who's done work on colonial violence. I did many, many interviews, several hundred of, of those who had been detained victims of colonial torture, castrations, mutilation of genitals, salami with broken bottles, vermin, rats, dismembering of body parts, time people to the back of, of jeeps and pulling off, putting wires on to their testicles and turning the batteries on to, combination of British military, colonial officers, colonial police officers, settlers who had been seconded into the colonial service in order to try to suppress the movement. Other Africans who were, who were also brought into the, into the detention camp system. But this was being directed from the top. This was not a bunch of bad apples. And remember, I think one of the things that's, that's very important, is that this is systematized violence. This is not just haphazard. There are logics and reasons for this. There are, when I, I sort of raised a point of the oath before, because it truly was a belief, and it was sort of put forward by Lewis Leakey, who was their local sort of ethnographic guru, that the way to break Malmau is they had to confess their oath, right? And once they had confessed their oath, they'd be in this limital state, and then they would be reintroduced to British civilisation. This is Leakey who found the early hominids, he was born and raised in Kenya. He spoke foreign kikuyu, he'd been raised amongst the kikuyu. And so, but you know, at the same time, there was a struggle around this in so far as, you know, the first gradation of the oath, and each one thereafter, it would always end with, if I reveal this oath to anyone, may this oath kill me. So there was a belief, a supernatural belief, that a guy would strike down someone if they confessed the oath. So there's a struggle around the confession of this oath. And to this day, of course, you couldn't get out of detention camp, you didn't confess the oath. But when I was interviewing people, they would say, you know, I actually, I never confessed. And to this day, they won't admit to the fact that they had actually broken this oath. And what was the, in a sense, the purpose of the torture, was it to cause people to confess their oath, was it to extract information, was it punishment, or was it a combination of all those? All the above. All the above. And look, I think the, there is a logic to it. One is around the confessions I just laid out, certainly one is around punishment. I mean, you know, you just had people who would just say this as well, a combination of all of it. And also, you know, the normative frame in this has always been in Kenya, that you knocked the, the chrono, quote, natives around, it had always had issues around this consistently. But the, but the other narrative that also went out of the time, and some people, really, to this day, will say, look, actually, the Kikuyu were dangerous in trying to kill the white people. They weren't setting about with machetes. They were, they were out for blood, you know, the whole bloodlust argument. Now, what, what was the, the, the, the, the various merits when you went to investigate those, of those accusations? Yeah. Look, I think, you know, I think the bottom line headline is 32 European died in total. In total, you know, we're never going to get a handle on the death figure. There's a lot of controversy around that. But what we can certainly say is that thousands perished, people were tortured. They lost their land, the response, the draconian response on the part of the British, right? And in some ways, almost a moral panic, right? You have, you know, always remember the European settlers were a tiny minority relative. And there was always a sphere of the night of the long knives, right? That they were going to, you know, coming after because, of course, they were, they were living on, on Kikuyu land. They were, they were exploiting their labor. So the jig was going to be up at some point. Hmm. Forgive my ignorance. I, I'm right about India, not about Africa, who, who are these people out there? Are they, are they colonialists who've moved from elsewhere or are they new arrivals for Britain? No, have they been there for generations and like the French and Algeria, put down roots and now resisting a freedom struggle? Yeah. You know, some come out at the, they decide sort of early part of the 20th century, the British do, that they are going to render Kenya proper. Remember, all colonies had to be physically self-sufficient. They claim Kenya, they have no idea how to make this place physically self-sufficient. They decide they're going to have foreign European farmers and they're brought in much likes in Bob Bay or Rhodesia in South Africa. And they come in waves at different points in time, summer settlers coming from the UK, summer coming from other parts of Greater Britain. And then you arrive and the government gives you land or what? You arrive and the government gives you land anywhere from, you know, small plots to Delamere, who's got, you know, hundreds of thousands of people. Delamere being the, the guy who, in white mischief, who precisely, precisely, same word Delamere. And you know, it was come out to God's country, you know, free, you know, cheap land, free labor, et cetera, et cetera. And as I mentioned before, they come out the terrible farmers. They're horrible. And so what ends up happening is many of the Africans end up staying on the land and basically share cropping. That's right. And that changes and it summaries going to, you know, back after World War II. And there's just sort of a train wreck waiting to happen. And after decolonization in South Asia, do you get people moving from India to Africa? Or is this a different bunch? Yeah, you have, you have some, a few, there's certainly in migrations, we certainly are seeing some coming from different parts of, different parts of the empire. Many from South Africa, many from the Rhodesia is coming up as well. And from, from other parts of the few, sort of white settler areas within the empire. Now you, when you were writing your book about this, it has, it has two separate names, doesn't it? In America, it is Imperial reckoning. That's right. And in Britain, it's the British Gulag. Yeah. British Gulag. Britain's Gulag. When you wrote your book, you had relied on your own research. You'd gone out there, you'd done extensive interviews and you'd come back. Because this is within living memories. Of course. It's not 1857 and then did mutiny. And this is, yeah. But what, what you didn't have and what I suppose you were attacked for because you, you, you, I mean, just describe what the reception was to that book because it's hard to hear. Yeah. And what did people say? It was, I like to say, critical acclaim with the emphasis on the critical. You know, it was, it was, it was scathing. And you know, I was a pretty young historian at the time. And I think I naively thought I was going to get some pushback. It was just like about a term, it's just a shit storm. I mean, it was horrible. And I mean, it was prior to all the social media. I mean, today it would have been, it would have been, it would have been compared to my career. I mean, it would have been unbearable. But it was, it came from the obvious sources on the right. But even on the left where, you know, it's 2005, the rock war is going on. And basically many people took this book and said, you know, this book is about Kenya in 1912, but it's really about a rock now. And it really touched your nerve, particularly since you've got Tony Blair and, and, and Bush co-zing up. And it just came in. I'm Neil Ferguson. It's just published a book saying empire is wonderful. Oh, fabulous. And it's time to bring it back. Right. Yeah. Now, exactly. And so it was, um, it was a, it was a, it was a huge best sell. And then he had the whole documentary series and the rest of it. And there had been obviously other books that had questioned empire. But this book was very kind of in your face. I was, I wrote it in a particular way and for a particular reason. Yeah. And I, I mean, I went over some of the criticism that you had at the time. And one of the main things of the question, where are the documents? Where is your proof? Where is your evidence? Did you try and get documents? And what was that experience? Yeah. You know, look in the critique, um, it's a great question because the critique came in many different forms. And one of which was, this was all based on oral history. If you take it out, or the oral history, and I had one historian at the time at a big event, a launch event said, you know, Africans make up stories, basically, they're all liars. And if you take all of this out, the entire argument falls apart. It's fiction. Now, of course, I would love to have those four or five years that I spent in the archives back again. And, you know, in fact, yes, there was a huge amount of oral testimony in the book, but there is a massive scaffolding of documents. And of course, at the time, we knew through basically sort of oral tradition, the world of mouth with archivists that many of the documents were missing, if you will, in the Kenny National Archives. And also in the UK, did you start to realize that there was a weeding out? When did that, when that dawn on you, that actually, I know there's something that should be here. That experience is going into an archive and the stuff isn't available, but you don't assume, in a sense, that it's a, you assume that the archive is lost, and you don't assume that there's a systematic removal of documents from the, from the archives. It's a great question. My sequencing was, I did most of my research in the UK first, and then in Kenya. In the, in the National Archives? Yeah, in the National Archives, in the National Archives, a lot of time at Root Tows, in Oxford, yes, thank you. And in the public, what was that in the public record office now, the National Archive? There were, there would be missing, there would be sort of moments where things would be missing, right? You'd sort of be trailing along an evidence. And you'd sort of do your point. You're like, oh, God. In Kenya, you could drive a truck, literally through gaps in the archive, the entire police department was going. The entire Ministry of Interior, there should have been, there should have been three different, I give you an example, three different ministries that should have had an individual file on each detainee. Let's even go back to the numbers and say, okay, we agree it was only 70 to 80,000. We know that's wrong. We'll just say for the, so you should have had about 200, 210,000 individual files on detainees. There's a couple hundred. But I, I use archives to here and, and what often happens is I go to an index and the index is there, and you call something up and they say it's not available or it's lost. Were there indexes or not even indexes? No, not even indexes. I mean, they were just gone. And then you start asking about that point, the archivist, the head archivist who is in Kenya, had been the archivist. He took over at around the time of independence. And he would be the first to say, they never, they were never transferred to us. We never had them. And of course, we're all familiar, anyone who does this kind of work, you're familiar with the runaround. It's, they're all held in Britain. No, they're all held in Delhi. Yeah, they're all held in. And you do, you're sort of doing this crazy ping pong of existence. So just then going back to the book comes out, you're being criticised by people are saying, "Oh, your documents, wait, it's not for once of trying." And then how many years afterwards did everything change? And we're going to take a break in a minute, but we were just all to say, how many years was it when you stood there and thought, I was right? So what year did the legal case happen? So the legal case, it was filed in 2009. So four years after your book had come out? Four years after the book, it settles four years later in 2013 and around 2011, everything changes. Join us after the break to find out how everything changes. Welcome back. So we left you on a little bit of a cliff edge, we're here with Caroline Elkin who has us just eating up to the palm of her hand quite frankly. So just before the break, we were talking about all of these things that you had written down through all history, which people were trying to discredit. You were looking for some factual underpinning. You knew there was stuff missing, but you just couldn't prove it. And then law, the good old system of law and governance, and we'll come back to why that's kind of ironic and important as well in a moment. But it starts kicking in. It is this legal firm called Lee Day, which decides it's going to represent some of the Kikuyu survivors who gave that testimony that they were tortured, right? And this is independent of your book and you, this happens on it, of its own momentum. Completely independent. And in fact, how it all came about is Martin Day, who's one of the lead, obviously attorneys in Lee Day, was in Kenya on a completely separate issue related to, there were rape cases by the British military up in the northern part of the country. And the BBC had come across some of my very, very early work and did a documentary called Kenya White Terror. And Martin and his associate had seen it and it was a range for us to meet. And that's how sort of we came together. And he was interested and he said, you know, look, let's stay, basically, let's stay in touch. And I didn't think much about it and kind of went on my way and then Imperial reckoning comes out and I get the phone call from Lee Day saying, we want to talk to you. And we want to talk to you and not only do we want to talk to you, but we want to really get a sense of to your point, you know, how much because in the court, if there were to file something in the court, you have to have documentary evidence, right? You couldn't introduce my oral testimony. So there was, there was a skeleton of documentary evidence. Sorry, probe that one. Why would your oral testimony not have been accepted? Because it was not taken under legal process, you could not cross examine it. You could cross examine it. And also that there is, there is a standard of evidence with your chain of evidence. All of these things, those, those criteria would not have been manned. But there is a marvelous thing in British law, which is discovery, isn't there? It's a beautiful thing. It is an extraordinary pattern. So those of you who don't know what American procedural drivers as much as I do. I'm going to talk all the time. That's what prepared me for this case, by the way, you know, the good wife, I can do an A level in it. But you know, this idea of discovery is that you can challenge the other side and say, we want, it's, it's habeas corpus for paperwork. We want your papers. And if you say, I don't have the papers and it subsequently comes out that you did have the papers, you are in a whole heap of trouble. You are in a huge heap of trouble. So when is this introduced? Does it like the freedom of information? Would you like me to go to the bottle in? I'm like, I should like, I should like it. Google. Yes, the bottle in online. You can't, I'm chatting with them. I mean, rules are for sale. I mean, this has been there for a while, right? I mean, and so far as discovery, it's something that, you know, sort of joking aside, we as historians really need to recognize that it was with the weight of the court behind the case and behind documents that we had even the opportunity to push the British government beyond their usual no, so sorry, we have nothing response. And if you try to file something under FLI, freedom of information, 95% of the time you get a, yeah, no, sorry, or yes, we have it, but you can't have it because it's not, you know, natural security, whatever the case may be. This is different. And I think, you know, what we find in this case is that it's file in 2009, file all sorts of, I am expert witness in the case. I had to write all kinds of statements for the court itself. And then I get a phone call about two years or so in a frumley day, a wonderful barricader named Dan Leader, who was on point for the case, who said the most extraordinary thing has happened. The British government has admitted to the fact that it has found or discovered in air quotes discovered 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files, look at his face, 300 boxes of previously undisclosed file held in the bowels of Hanskloat Park, which is where they keep their MI5 and MI6 files. Which is in Northumberland, right? Northumberland known as the Spook Central. Right. And wait for it for a program on empire next to these files were 8,000 other files from 36 other counties. Similarly, all these files from now 37 counties were packed up and spirited away and brought back to Britain at the time of decolonization and held under lock and key until the time and the filing of this case and the demand for document discovery. How far do these documents go back? Far. You know, some, you know, I haven't been, I personally am looking for more recent stuff on colonial violence in them, but they span a whole range of things and look, you know, they make no mistake that one of the things that you should remember is that we as, that is an expert witness and I was joined by two other historians about a year or two into the case. We had the court behind us because once these are discovered, the British government says and even the court says, wait, you can't just have them. We have to review them, the British government, the defendant, the name defendants, the foreign Commonwealth office for both relevancy to the case. We defender it alongside whether it's relevant to you and national security. And so began this war to sort of kind of, you know, this, this kind of low level war because we will look at this and say because we did have a handless and say, well, you know, the file that says, I don't know, I'm going to make this up, torture and detention camps. I believe that would be relevant and there would say, oh, no, no, not relevant. And so we would be so began this back and forth through the court of demanding releases of files. It was really a process. How did you get the handless? I mean, that must be a crucial moment and a very thrilling moment for you. It was. There were actually three separate handless created at different points. Some were typed, some were handwritten and they, they two were dribbled out and I have to really emphasize this important within this moment where there was no way I could have done this on my own. We put together a research team of students at Harvard, there are six of us, six of them and myself in the huge war room. In my head, you are surrounded by madness, you're surrounded by pins and walls and posted notes. Does that way your life looked like? Yeah, entirely. I mean, if you looked at it, it was, you know, the walls were full of stuff. We were creating databases and spreadsheets and, you know, and it was, you sort of be up there and it was when you stepped back off this wall and you looked at it that you could see the picture of what was in these files and what was so stunning to me was just file after file after file proving imperial reckoning correct. And just to be clear about this, these are files that were originally filed for the Colonial Administration in Kenya were held by the police department or the military in Kenya and then actively removed to high-devidance or precisely and let's be very clear on this. They at the time, so Kenya, they decolonized in 1963. The process, and Kenya was not alone, but this is the first place we get real insight into this. The process of document destruction removal begins several years prior to decolonization. This was not a haphazard process. They were a systematized in the destruction removal of documents as they were in the torture and violence committed against bodies in Kenya. Okay, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You said destruction and this is something that haunts me because as someone who's gone through a lot of these rather extraordinary things called the IPI files, which is Indian police intelligence files, you've come across massive gaps and then you sort of try and trace back and it's just as far missing, far missing and my whole thing is God, do they still exist? Are they still, you know, are they in this vault somewhere or as some have suggested there was a great deal of bomb fires going on on. Is there a lot of stuff there from India or is it post-India? It's post-India. But let's connect these two, right, because in the Kenya case, what is so important to the question about files is that for the first time, and we can talk about it, why they do this. There's a reason they do this. We get dumped on of documents documenting the document destruction. So for the first time, we get the documents that show the intricate nature. I mean, they had unlock boxes in strong rooms and they had a W that they would hand. Each file had to be gone through by hand where they would stamp those that would stay in Kenya, those that would be removed and brought back to Britain, and then those were that were going to be destroyed. And by the streaming, burn and then they couldn't do it fast enough so they started dumping them into the Indian Ocean. And I was able to construct based on the files that they estimated, they had destroyed three and a half tons of documents. They also created what was an emergency destruction plan. Do you know how long it would take if you burned 24/7, how long it would take to get rid of those files? I do know. Almost a year. That's how many files were talking. That's why they started dumping them. And I'm surprised at this partly because I spent a lot of time documenting similar stuff in mid-19th century India. One of the things that always struck me was that how weird it was that this stuff was there still. You could go to the Pradesh Library, the University of Star Wars. You could drag up stuff about the army of retribution in 85% or different army of retribution in 40%. I mean, even up to 1940, you know, in 1947 you can pick up files which say top secret on them not to be read. But you can find those. They are. And my impression as a imperial historian working in 18th and 19th century India is that things are missing. But overall, I'm getting the stuff I need to write the story and rather amazingly, you know, there are miles with this, suppose I didn't, whether it's an urban myth, but they'd say there's 35 miles of Indian material underneath the Pradesh Library and there aren't systematic absences. Well, why is it that they aren't that you don't know about them? No, because I'm looking at exactly this stuff. I'm looking at the way that the individual is suppressed. I'm looking at them. And I'm getting the material. I mean, what drives me mad is that I don't know what's not there. That's the thing. I don't know. You know, I only know those hand indexes. You don't have those. So you don't know what else could be there. But it's an interesting, if I'm right and the stuff is basically intact in 19th century India. What changes? What has changed between that and that? That's an interesting question. Yeah. In the 1960s or early '50s. I think that's a really important question. And one of the things I can tell you from my answer, because my recent book is called Legacy of Violence. And I'm very interested in Kenya not being an exception. And I had, it was clear that I dropped into this moment of time and I was just raising this for a reason because suddenly, as a result of this case, the documents become a thread in this new book. And we see the beginnings, or at least I do, with 1947 and read for it. And they are terrible at destroying. I mean, as I just laid out, it's not, it's actually, you have to be very deliberate and intentional about what you're doing. So here, Toy is here. He had been chasing bows in the rest of it and he's in charge of all of some others from MI5 of burning documents at the Red Fort and elsewhere. In 1947. In 1947, there are fears back in London that independent state ceremonies are being interrupted by the smog of the burning documents. They then move on to, from their documents' destruction and continues. And just prior to Kenya, we have Malaya, the big Malaya in emergency. Where again, there's an insurgency and a kind of suppression. Insurgency, same kind of processes, same kind of extremely brutal and they become much better. They're learning as they go about how to destroy this volume of evidence, what they want to send home. In the case of Malaya, they actually take them from Kuala Lumpur down to Singapore. And from there, they have a special incinerator where they're burning them there. They have Kenya and we can move on. They do the same thing at Cyprus, et cetera, et cetera. And they just get better at it as they go on. OK, I question. So there are going to be people who are going to be listening to this saying, you know what, this is just what happens when countries or armies withdraw. They destroy their paperwork because it mustn't fall into the wrong hands. And it happens all over the world. It happens today. It would happen. We happened in Bagram last year. Indeed. Indeed. And you sometimes when a news crew goes in, you will see the departing army, whether even Ukraine or Russia, there will be a floor full of shredded paper. So one thing that we have admitted saying, if we know that it did happen, and I have friends who were in Afghanistan last year. And the last two or three days of the British embassy in Kabul was exactly this burning stuff. Well, I know. I think there's footage as well of going in and there's just paper and machines unplugged and so on. But we've missed out a really important pit of this because the vindication of your work happens now. We kind of missed the new one. We went off on documents because William and I are hungry for paperwork. That's why it's just greedy, greedy from us. At the end of this, when you have finally got your hands on the paperwork that you suspected existed, but you had no idea in such volumes, 300 boxes of evidence and you're fighting, you're fighting with those very people that you're actually against who have the chance to say not relevant, not relevant. But you win. I mean, we should say, the case against those British colonial officers was won. Tell us what happened that day when that verdict came in and did you expect it? Yes. I have to say when I said yes to being expert witness in the case, Martin was very clear that they couldn't do the case without me and I felt very strongly that, you know, it's more responsibility on our partisan historians to offer our evidence. But I didn't ask them, you know, what are our chances? I only asked them a year and they're like, oh, yeah, nobody in the legal profession thinks we've got much of a shot here. But I knew we were right and this evidence comes out and it just was overwhelming. I mean, it just was… You did an example of the sort of thing which you didn't get for moral testimony, but which turned up in the documentation. Yeah. Well, I think it was when I found interesting and we can have, you know, we can get in a long conversation with this, I'm pretty good with his story, but I'm not that good. In other words, there was nothing that we got that was new. In terms of telling us anything, they had my own view. This case was filed in 2009. They fessed up finally in two years later that these documents were… they existed. I think they were calling between 2009 and 2011. I actually don't think we got everything. That would be my… Because nobody is that good as an Australian. You know, everything that we got, which is more and more confirmation, but the most important thing was… And I did have documents in Imperial Reckoning, but what this is giving us are hundreds and hundreds of pages of confirming tortures, confirming murders, confirming… And who was doing it, right? And it was… Names. It was either names or it was more importantly, it was… You know, we were able to demonstrate that with people in the employ of the British colonial government. And that was crucial to the case. And then you get this sort of thing on a movie. You know, all these documents tell out with black and white and white and it's drawn out of the… Were you getting… No, we're dicks. No, we were dicks. No, we were dicks. No, we were dicks. No, there was… There were a few bits of… What they were doing is they were to hold back entire… entire documents. Okay. And as a result of winning the case, how many people were still alive who were being represented? And what did they get out of the verdict? You know, it was initially… it started with a test case, five claimants as a test case, five of the str… what they believed to be the strongest case. And remember, this is a tort claim. This is like a big personal injury case. This is failure of duty of care, a whole range of things that they're being tried to… So it's not the Kenyan claimants against… or it's not the Kenyan government against the British government. It's these claimants themselves. Once it's clear that the case is going to settle, what happens is the verdict comes in. It comes in as a written approved judgment by the judge. Where are you? It was in my office in… it was three months after the… there was a series of hearings, a big strikeout hearing, that we got the verdict. And it was stunning. I mean, it was stunning. What did you do? Did you get a phone call? I mean, just… I got a phone call. Remember, it wasn't a verdict that the British… what happened is the British government tried to get out of this case by two legal technicalities. One was state succession. What they said is that, actually, we don't know if this happened or not, but wrong venue. Kenyan should be suing Kenyan because it transferred them. The second was statute of limitations. This is a tort claim. Three years, we needed the judge to weigh 50 years that had passed to let the case go forward. And he did know very unusual. That's the verdict that we got back. And we knew that if he waived statute of limitations, the evidence at this point was overwhelming. Overwhelming. And so, just on the last point, there were about 5,500 who were finally brought into the settlement. It was a 20 million pound sterling payout. There was an official monument built by the British government to the victims of colonial torture in Nairobi. And I think most importantly, what the claimants consistently wanted was acknowledgement that they hadn't lied. That they hadn't lied. And the British government had to offer the best we could get of an apology is an offer of sincere regret. It was stunning. I have to tell you after sitting there and seeing all this happening. I was actually in Nairobi. It was William Hague who read that settlement into the record of Parliament. I got to choose to be in London or in Nairobi. I was with all the claimants in Nairobi. I've never experienced anything like that in my life. There was guttural tears crying screams of joy because the same state was read by the British high-com in Nairobi. It was a moment that I don't think anybody could ever have imagined what happened. And 20 million as well, so this is underpinned by financial settlement. There's almost nothing more in law that you can give, rather than this apology and financial recompense. I mean, it was both a war and a material acknowledgement of enormous suffering. And I think this question that's often thrown around about dignity and the ability of, you know, if we go all the way back to, I mean, I was just a kid, 98, 99 and I was doing all these interviews and, you know, everybody, often and all the critiques that came in, one of which was, oh, I paid these people to further interview. They asked me for nothing. But let me ask you. They asked me for one thing, though. One thing. What do you think it was? Tell my story. Tell my story. Tell my story. I want to make sure the world knows what happened to me. And that never leaves you. And this, you say, it was a personal injury case, other, I mean, to compare this, for example, with the sort of things that went on in Northern Ireland, in Northern Ireland, you get the bloody Sunday inquiry. It's a long government rung inquiry into their own sins and it's conducted by lawyers, but done very well and very professionally. Is there any sense that any, any, from the British side, proactive, heart-searching following this? I can't speak for those, what I can say is that the, the judge, it was a bench trial. And he was considered right of center, was visibly moved in this case. And what was the most striking was when, in the second strike outhearing, four statue limitations, was the first time that the claimants themselves testified in their own voices, in their own voices. And telling horrific stories of torture, and there was obviously, translator, and it was that, that point that the British government, the first claiming gets up, tells their story. You could hear a pin drop and you could see the judge just visibly, emotionally upset by this. And the QC for the FCO gets up and says, we don't contest this happened. And the FCA is the foreign colonic office, and for each of the claimants that testified, we often say each one. And this gets back to the point that I made earlier about, why did they give us the documents, documenting the document destruction? Handed it all to us. I was thrilled, that's a story. So why did they? Well, let's, let's put these two together, right? Because they admit this happened. But the question becomes on the judge waving statue limitations from three years, the 50 plus, was that the British government had to be insured that it could have a fair trial. Which meant they had to have people witnesses. And most important, they had to have documentation. And what they said was this, that even though we had memos coming from London, giving orders to destroy, they said, no, no, no, no, no, those memos might have come, but those colonial officers in Kenya, who were acting in right of Kenya, not in right of Britain, they went overboard. So they destroyed more than they should have. And oh, by the way, thank you, professor Elke. You put together this beautiful evidence on direct destruction. Why are you saying, so why are you saying they're like that, because some people will say, this is exactly the thing that separates the British from other empires, in that there was governance, there is rule of law, there is a sense, okay, it took a long time and you had to fight for a bit of sense of fairness and paying up eventually. Why do you say it like that, as if two things, I love to comment on the rule of law, let's stick with it in the courtroom for now, right, yeah, in the courtroom. What they're saying is that actually you can't, thanks to all this work that Elkins did for us, you can't waive statute of limitations because we can't have a fair trial. These renegade officers often Kenya, sure we told them to get rid of some things, but they went three and a half tons, we never told them to get rid of this, show us the document that says get rid of three and a half tons. So that was their argument. They're not saying this didn't happen, they're saying we can't have a fair trial because of all the stuff that was got rid of, rule of law. That was part of the British government's defense. This was rule of law, we follow the law, there's nothing illegal here. I write about this in the new book, it's something I call legalized lawlessness. What they end up doing is that if there's an act that's committed that's illegal, there's no law in the book permitting it, what they end up doing is they write new codes to say actually that's legal. And so suddenly you have 149 pages of emergency regulations, quite just bags of it. And sometimes yes, right, I mean think about what happens here at Amateur, I mean the martial law is to quite, I mean they do it retrospectively, this happens over and over and over again. Let me just again just bring you back to where we are right now, where we have historians who will say okay, you know what, it is the decency of the country that eventually the right thing happened and it is a regrettable thing, but actually in the frame of things which other empire has ever willingly given recompense for the behaviors. And you know we went as bad as other empires and colleagues and you know what it's never easy to go in and take over a country, you know, difficult things happen. You know that there's, you know, there are people even now listening to this who can say part of that so negative about the British Empire, British Empire compared to other empires not so bad, compare us to the Belgium's comparison. You know the arguments. The wretched French, let's not forget the language, never forget the wretched French. Okay. Okay. Look, and I think this is also, and forgive me it's a little personal right, because they came to the table kicking and screaming. This was not, oh, Mayacolpa, you got us. This was, if we go back to 2005 where we started our conversation where I was just hammered. I made up stories, this is fiction, this never happened, Africans are on liars. You name it. Unfortunately, that is all that we've got time for. I know a lot of you are going to want to get in touch on this one. William, remind us what, what is the email address for people who want to get in touch? EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. Thank you so much. Caroline, I can, for your time, for your expertise, we'll be back again, but until then, once we've recovered from it. Well, the thing is, I think both of us are getting a ticket to Northumberland. Oh my goodness. Can you imagine? So, yes, until then, it's goodbye from me. And goodbye from me.