AFRICA AS A COUNTRY
Torture comes cheap for the old imperial powers.
Just £2,670 was paid out this month to each of the 5,228 elderly Kenyans judged eligible for compensation as the British government finally settled a case it has attempted to block every step of the way (between 2005 and 2011 it insisted that officials had “misplaced” or “forgotten about” a secret archive of 2,000 boxes of files detailing late colonial abuses from all over the world). With characteristic cynicism, the government briefed journalists that there would be an apology, and then never made one.
Despite prominent reporting of that phantom apology, there has been merely an expression of “regret” from William Hague, and an insistence that “a line be drawn” beneath this awkward national embarrassment. Unfortunately, at least in the British national consciousness, it looks like that is exactly what is happening.
Our colonial torturers, like those who survived our abuses, are old and dying (like the Scot Ian Henderson CBE, torturer-in-chief in Kenya in the 1950s, later nicknamed the “Butcher of Bahrain”, who died this month). If a meaningful public reckoning with the crimes of our empire is ever to take place while the last of the perpetrators and the victims are still with us, then it has to happen now. Yet even in the face of overwhelming documentary and testimonial evidence of the scale and brutality of our imperial sadism, this reckoning is simply not taking place. Many of us Britain have our heads so stuffed with jingoism that we can’t make any sense of this part of our history, and so choose to ignore it.
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