I’ve been busy over the last week reading this book for review. (I really do read, thoroughly, the books I’m sent!) Here’s the latest draft. – Now, hopefully, to get back to proper blogging, in between hospital appointments.

Nicholas Rankin, Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me. Faber, November 2023; 560pp, illust., £25.

Reviewed by Bernard Porter.

Kenya is now generally acknowledged to represent the worst of all the criminal enterprises that helped form the British empire in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and especially in the 1950s, when the colony underwent an ‘Emergency’ – others would call it a war – that was so unrivalled in its savagery that afterwards the British government sought to spirit away most of the official documentation on it to a highly secret archive in Buckinghamshire. (It was a legal case instituted by former African victims in the 2010s that prised it open eventually.) The government at the time, and a public opinion informed by the right-wing press, attributed the whole affair to the innate barbarism of an African organisation known as Mau Mau, whose atrocities both shocked and thrilled readers brought up on popular imperialist and ‘Western’ novels and films. These were genuine. Mau Mau administered dark ‘oaths’ reinforced by bloody rituals, and slaughtered – often ghoulishly – men, women and children, both white and native (if they were seen as ‘collaborators’, or simply refused the oaths). White settlers lived in terror of these monsters, who at any moment could emerge from the forests, dressed in animal skins and paint, to slay them in their beds. Apparently the Mau Mau could ‘smell their victims out’ from two miles away. ‘Only’ twenty-odd settlers were murdered in this way, as against thousands of Africans shot and hanged in reprisal; but the shock was well-founded. It was even worse when the movement was suspected – as most protest movements were in this paranoid age – as being Soviet backed.

The other way of regarding Mau Mau was as an extreme and deplorable but nonetheless understandable response to the equally undoubted crimes of the white colonists; first of all in stealing their best lands from the Africans, and then in subjecting them to appallingly racist treatment as servants and hired hands on their farms. Racism in Kenya appears to have been worse than in most other British colonies, and certainly worse than in Britain itself, possibly because of the distinctive social class – and public school education – of so many of the whites who went out there. (Both Eton and Winchester, for example, crop up in this account. Not may Etonians went to other colonies.) The social lives of these reprobates has become familiar to us through films such as The Happy Valley (1986) and White Mischief (1987). This was the society that the four year-old Nicholas Rankin’s family joined in 1954, at the height of the ‘Emergency’, staying on until 1963, when Uhuru (freedom) was finally won; and the family returned ‘home’, with Nicholas enrolled at his own public school (Shrewsbury).

The Kenya Emergency has virtually a library devoted to it now, most of it focussing on the repression meted out to Mau Mau detainees in the ‘camps’, which the American historian Caroline Elkins has characterised as Britain’s Gulag (2005). Strictly speaking they were ‘concentration camps’; but that term conjures up unfair comparisons today. Nonetheless the Kenya camps were pretty vile, inflicting the most horrendous tortures on detainees, up to and including castrating men and inserting hot eggs into women’s vaginas – you can see why they hid the evidence; which will always sully the historical reputation of British colonialism. This is despite the principled opposition of many on the Left and liberal-Conservative sides of British metropolitan politics, as well as of a few of the more decent settlers; and the generous acknowledgement much later from one ex-inmate, Wambugu wa Nyingi, of the ‘many good things’ that ‘the British’ had also done. (I wonder whether many Palestinians, to cite a superficial modern parallel, would say the same of their Israeli colonists.)

Rankin’s book is an invaluable addition to this library, written as it is from the unusual perspective of a lad planted down in this privileged white community, and accepting its assumptions and racial prejudices initially – and also Shrewsbury’s – as young boys are almost bound to do; but managing to free himself from them in later life. ‘I am sorry’, he writes near the end, that ‘I was part of the torture all around us’. To do him justice he didn’t see the worst of it, sheltered as he was in his English home (apart from the Kikuyu servants), and at his very English-style prep school; but he got to know about it later, and as a result took the trouble to research the prior history of colonial Kenya. That helped him – and now his readers – to put the Emergency in context, and makes up a good third of this book. He also has some sad reflections on the later history of independent Kenya, betrayed, he thinks, by Jomo Kenyatta, whose dreams for a social-democratic post-colonial nation – clearly modelled on contemporary Britain, where he studied and won his PhD – turned to dust.

Rankin also has some interesting things to say about racism generally, including in Britain (this all happened in Enoch Powell’s time), which his Kenyan experience has convinced him has more to do with power, and the fear of its loss, than with ‘race’ per se. He muses on this towards the end; after a section on an imagined encounter with a puff-adder.

‘I have built this book, a papier-mâché memory palace, partly out of what I remember of my own small part of the worldwide British Empire. But in the end, I find snakes coiled inside the house of paper. It is not the snake of racism, but the bigger snake of a hunger for power. Enjoying power over somebody else, fearing to lose it, and then going further, is the path to terror and torture. Terror and torture were widespread in Mau Mau Kenya on both sides, and they lived inside me too.’

Hopefully writing this semi-autobiographical, semi-historical, semi-political and immensely readable account of his colonial boyhood, has helped to exorcise these demons.