Britain covered up ‘Nazi-style’ slaughter of Mau Mau inmates

ATTEMPTS by British colonial authorities to cover up the killings of 11 prisoners during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya have been laid bare in previously 
secret government documents.

No-one has ever been prosecuted for the deaths even though evidence showed the 
detainees at Hola detention camp were clubbed to death by prison warders after they 
refused to work.

But attempts by British officials to blame their deaths on “drinking too much water” rather than violence, and refusals to identify individuals involved, were revealed in the cache.

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 in March 1959.

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, the Foreign Office files released by the National Archives showed.

Serious concerns about the clampdown were raised as far back as 1953, the second year of the uprising, when the then solicitor general described reported abuses as “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia”, according to one of the secret documents.

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