Why Care about the Violence of the Past? Addressing Collective Responsibility in British Debates about Colonial Violence during the Mau Mau Insurgency

After years of absence from Britain’s public conversation, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya (1952-9) returned to make headlines in the 2000s. The publication of two heavily mediatised books by historians David Anderson and Caroline Elkins sought to incite a public reckoning with, or at the very least public outrage over the violence of British colonial authorities. Between 2010 and 2013, the two historians became pivotal actors in a lawsuit against the British Crown that resulted in limited financial reparations and a governmental apology issued by the then Foreign Secretary William Hague. Nonetheless, the resolution of what could be regarded as the ‘Mau Mau memory debate’ remained contradictory in nature. While its material consequences were substantial, they did not lead to any public ‘reckoning’.
Based on oral history interview, publications and the popular press, this chapter will follow the debate about British colonial violence in Kenya as it unfolded from 2005 to 2013. It will examine the strategies used by historians, journalists and other public actors to appeal to public emotions and articulate the importance of remembering colonial violence in postcolonial Britain. It demonstrates that despite Anderson’s many attempts to steer the debate to a discussion of collective responsibility, the conversation constantly returned to the balance-sheet approach of assessing history through notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The chapter thus argues that British historians and public actors operated within an understanding of history that did not have space for addressing the nuts and bolts of memory politics. In this context, public actors did not have the discursive tools to appeal to a collective sense of responsibility when addressing the violence of the past, and indeed in most cases did not see the point in articulating such an appeal in the first place.