Empire of Violence (6) Conclusion

Several things stand out about the ugly truths described in Legacy of Violence.

• While its colonial officers and agents were engaging in evil practices, the British public believed they were engaged in a civilising mission, raising up the backward people of the world.

  Britain imagined herself a uniquely imperial nation, the standard-bearer among peers, the purveyor of the world’s greatest civilising mission, delivering Pan Britannica’s civilizing rule of law that would transform “native children” who were not ready to take their place in the modern world (p.585).

• The atrocities were not a mistake or limited to a few bad people gone rogue. The British government deliberately circulated its officers around from one hotspot to another. They would use the methods developed in one place more intensively in the next place they were sent to bring under control. Practices got worse as time progressed, because the most ruthless officers were sent to another colony where troubles had broken.

• News of the atrocities always leaked back to Britain. Complaints would lead to a formal inquiry of some type. The committee or commission would hear evidence of terrible incidents, but would always decide that the behaviour was reasonable given the circumstances. When it became obvious that the actions of those accused of crimes had been approved and encouraged by officials and ministers at the highest level, the violence and terror would be covered up. This happened again and again throughout the history of the empire.

• The senior colonial officers who were responsible for managing the worst atrocities and perpetrating the worst violence were often rewarded with honours when they returned to Britain.

Empire of Violence (5) Kenya

During the Second World War many Kenyans had helped support the British war effort. When they returned home at the end of the war, there was no land available for them, because the best land had been taken by British settlers, who grew coffee to earn US dollars for the empire.

Across Britain's imperial expanse, another kind of systematic destruction was unfolding in Kenya’s one hundred detention camps. A state of emergency had been declared in October 1952, the crisis had been five years in the making (p.543).

Kenya with its European settler population and policies of land appropriation as well as harsh labour and colour bar laws, was awash in inequities. The 1.5 million Kikuyu who comprised around 20 percent of the colony's population were the hardest hit. Europeans lived on much of their appropriated land. These settlers grew coffee and tea—lucrative cash crops that only white farmers could legally produce—while the Kikuyu toiled under harsh master and servants laws, a hangover from Britain's Victorian era domestic labour laws, which criminalised labour offences.

I can remember the local newspapers being horrified by the group that were referred to as the Mau Maus, but it was really just a freedom movement seeking independence and land reform.

It was the rational response of rural people seeking to understand the enormous socioeconomic and political changes taking place around them while attempting to respond collectively to new and unjust realities. Mau Mau’s overarching objective was land and freedom...

Mau Mau antipathy targeted not only the colony’s European population but also the colonial-appointed African chiefs and their followers who became known broadly as “loyalists”. In the context of the incipient war, the government defined a “loyalist” as someone who actively fought on its side against Mau Mau and who, in turn, received a “loyalist certificate” ensuring franchise rights in local elections as well as economic privileges like trading licenses and preferred access to land. Many loyalists accumulated wealth and power at the expense of the broader Kikuyi community.

The emergency descended into another of the empire’s reprisal and counter reprisal cycles (p.548).

White supremacy had long manifested itself in Kenya through various kinds of rough settler justice, which included public floggings, beating deaths and summary executions. Most whites in Kenya placed Africans at the very bottom of humanity’s hierarchy, but the emergence inflamed the empire’s racism. Settlers and colonial administrators described Mau Mau as “vermin”, “animals” and “barbarians” (p.548).

The political power of Kenya’s twenty-nine thousand European settlers had been institutionalised for decades. The colony’s constitution was orientated around their interests, which were further ensured through their disproportionate number of seats on Kenya’s legislative council (p.549).

The all-out civilian assault began with sweeping arrests and detentions without trial combined with forced removal of Kikuyus who remained in the White Highlands. Colonial officials packed thousands into railcars and lorries and shipped them back to the reserves. In the spring of 1953, the volume of internally displaced people was staggering. In a few months, the government moved over one hundred thousand Kikuyus via transit camps. Many languished with inadequate sanitation, clean water, and rations as officials figured out how to squeeze them back into the over-crowded reserves (p.552).

White and Black agents of empire perpetrated horrific crimes in defence of British rule in Kenya. They used electric shocks and hooked suspects up to car batteries. They tied suspects to vehicle bumpers with just enough rope to drag them to death. They employed burning cigarettes, fire and hot coals. They thrust bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, sticks, and hot eggs up men’s rectums and into women’s vaginas. They crushed bones and teeth; sliced off fingers or their tips; castrated men with specially designed instruments or by beating a suspect’s testicle “till the scrotum burst” according to Anglican Church officials. Some used a kiboko or rhino whip, for beating; others used clubs, fists, and truncheons.

“Bucket fatigue” was a routine practice, as were various forms of human excrement torture. Mau Mau suspects and detainees were forced to clean nightsoil buckets barehanded and run for hours around a compound holding a full night soil bucket aloft, which then spilled over, encrusting the person holding it with faeces and urine (p.556).

In May 1954, Kenya was well on its way to creating the largest archipelago of detention and prison camps in the history of Britain’s empire.

Some never made it to prison. Emergency courts sent 1090 Africans to the gallows, surpassing the number of state executions for any other single conflict in the empires history.

All male detainees officially entered the Pipeline through enormous holding camps. The camp populations quickly exceeded their combined capacity of twenty thousand. White officers shouted “Beat them” to camp guards, who liberally helped themselves to the detainees’ possessions. They forced each detainee to strip down and march through a cattle dip of disinfectant, where several drowned. To those who survived, colonial officials issued diaphanous schoolboy uniforms (p.559).

In June 1954, with the Pipeline pushed beyond capacity, the War council decided to introduce a resettlement policy. The Kikuyu population was subject to collective punishments and fines as well as forced labour and other ongoing detention camp policies and practices. The Kenya government called it villagisation. Its officials forced the Kikuyu, who traditionally lived in scattered homesteads, into 804 villages that consisted of 230,000 huts.

Villagisation took less than eighteen months. During that time, Kenyan officials forcibly relocated 1,040,899 Kikuyus within the reserves and corralled an unrecorded number of squatters into private detention centres, located on Europeans estates, where Kenya’s settlers and security forces surveilled, punished and exacted labour from Kikuyu squatters using methods similar to those being deployed in the new Kikuyu reservation villages. Whereas the labour lines war less tightly controlled, barbed wire, spiked trenches , and twenty-four-hour guards surrounded the “emergency villages” that saw little formal rehabilitation on offer (p.562).

The villages became detention camps in all but name. When their numbers were combined with the estimated 140,000 to 230,000 detainees who passed through Pipeline, the British government had managed by the end of 1955 to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population—a feat that was unprecedented in the empire save for the Chinese population in Malaya.

Life in the Kikuyu reserves became unbearable. One person remembered, “we had not been given any warning beforehand that our houses were going to be burned. No one in the whole ridge knew that we were to move. The police just came one day and drove everyone out of their homes, while the home guards burned the houses right behind us... Everything, even our clothes were burned down... During the move I got separated from my children, and I could not trace them. During the whole night I could hear a lot of shooting and screaming. I cried the whole night, knowing that my children were gone (p.564).

Empire of Violence (4) Malaya

Following the end of World War 2, problems emerged in the Federation of Malaya. I remember these troubles, but we were only told one side of the story, and we never heard about the terrible atrocities committed by the British government. Chinese people had migrated to Malay for more than a hundred years. When the Japanese overran Malaya many Chinese went into the jungle and fought a guerrilla war against them.

Legacy of Violence explains that when the war ended, the Chinese who had fought against the Japanese found there was no land available for them. The best land had been turned into rubber plantations. The British sold rubber grown in Malaya to the United States to earn desperately needed dollars. Then plantation owners wanted cheap labour, whereas the Chinese squatted on land near the edge of the jungle.

In 1948, while Britain suffered from an overall $1.8 billion deficit. Malaya bought in $170 million, followed by the Gold Coast at $47.5 million, the Gambia at $24.5 million and Ceylon at $23 million. Malaya was the empire’s cash cow, and worker protest and local communal violence threatened it (p.468).

The British changed citizenship rules to penalize the Chinese by setting the bar incredibly high for them.

A non-Malay had to have lived in the Federation for fifteen years, with both parents born in the Federation... The vast majority of those born in any of the nine Malay states were considered “aliens”. In contemporary terms, they were stateless (p.468).

At the start of the emergency, looking to arrest and detain the Federation’s Communist leadership and any local leader who defied Britain’s attempt to control the political economic future of the region, security forces launched Operation Frustration, a clamp-down on all forms of democratic activity. It effectively decapitated political organizations, except for the United Malays National Organisation...

The British government at home reckoned there were between 2,200 and 6,100 armed insurgents in the jungles. Britain’s mission was to destroy them and guarantee that “the economic life of the country continues.” Such a move, according to British external reports, “entails the protection of the rubber and tin industries, and the personnel employed by them... But with the police force grossly under strength and military reinforcements delayed, the situation deteriorated rapidly (p.472).

From the start of the emergency in June 1948, destroying Chinese villages was a go-to punitive measure. Paramilitary forces stepped up their work sending fifty or more to detention camps daily, quickly exceeding their six-thousand person capacity until the detainees were deported to China clearing the way for more. Entire villages were collectively arrested and detained for the smallest infractions (p.495).

The British government relentlessly tightened its coercive legislation.

Approximately 25 thousand people were deported. Transit camps soon overflowed from the mass purges (p.498).

At Ipoh Camp, among the worst, thirteen hundred detainers resorted to hunger strikes and rioting, demanding the release of all female detainees and better camp conditions. In some instances guards “lost their heads” and opened fire with live ammunition; in other cases, the situation, according to the deputy commissioner of Malaya’s criminal investigation department “was now worse than that experienced under the Jap regime.

Another repatriate told how interrogators tied ropes to one finger of each of his hands as well as to one toe on each of his feet. The British torturers then hoisted him to the ceiling, after which they let go the ropes. They then starved him for several days.

Another was sent to a dark cell where integrators “inserted 2 inch pins under his finger nails and burned these pins with fire”.

Guards “took off the clothes of female prisoners and pricked their breasts with pins” (p. 501).

They launched the British Empires’ largest forced migration since the era of trade in enslaved people. Five-hundred seventy three thousand people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Chinese, were relocated into 480 settlements it was not only the scale of the forced migration but also its speed that created massive bureaucratic challenges and hardships.

They created “labour lines”, which were effectively resettlement areas and a labour pool for the Federations’ dollar producing industries, much as the resettlement camps were sources of “casual labour” for the Federations’ estate owners. In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers in the “labour lines” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million (p.505).

The government did not warn villages of their impending removals. The first thing was suddenly at dawn, all of the police, all of the soldiers came in and surrounded the village. It was pretty terrifying. The rapid-paced operation meant villagers often fathered few possessions before they were loaded into trucks awaiting their transfer to resettlement camps. Families were separated in the confusion and villages dispersed (p.506).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

Occasionally government barracks were hastily erected for habitation though temporary shelter often consisted of little more than a lean-to. Local officials expected refugees to build their own permanent dwellings with whatever materials they had bought with them, or with items they purchased using the government “upheaval allowance”.

The government had burned their crops and confiscated some of their livestock during the forced removals, yet in the resettlement areas, “the huts were squeezed tight together and there was no room for poultry runs, no room for pigsties, not room for vegetable plots. There were few clinics or schools during the early 1950s (p.507).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

The government did find funds, however, to ensure a twenty-four hour regime of control, surveillance, and discipline. During the early months of the operation, officials needed 770 tons of barbed wire to secure the resettlement areas. This was hardly surprising since a seven-and a-half-foot double apron fence surrounded most villages. While electricity was often non-existent in the refugees’ makeshift dwellings, multiple watchtowers with spotlights eventually dotted the resettlement edges, fanning out from the police post located in the areas’ centre.

Federation officials painted a number on each household door and listed alongside it the names, ages and occupations of those who lived inside. The government strictly controlled the villager’s movements with dusk-to-dawn curfews within the settlements’ gates. Guards monitored these gates and lined up men and women in gender–divided queues for throrough searches every time villagers entered or exited the barbed-wire compound.

In some areas, colonial officials introduced twenty-two-hour house lockdowns as a form of collective punishment for “non-cooperation”. They also introduced food control. Rubber tappers who worked in the estates by day recalled the resettlement years as ones of semi starvation. The resettlement areas became one of the many sites for screening, or interrogation, further exacerbating a problem festering since the emergencies in the spring of 1948 (p.508).

Torturing of prisoners was common place in Malaya.

This was all happening, while the British were helping conduct war crimes trials against Germans who had worked in concentration camps in Europe. The hypocrisy is stark.

Empire of Violence (3) India

A revolt occurred in India in 1857. Some of the British Empire's actions are described in Legacy of Violence.

Large swathes of the region remained uncontrollable for over a year, and only suppression restored colonial order. British forces tied suspected Indian rebels to the mouths of canons, lit the fuse and blew them to pieces. They levelled villages and towns as their murderous campaigns against the local population spread (p.54).

When two local leaders were arrested in India in April 1919, mass protests occurred in Amritsar. British colonial troops opened fire and killed twenty-five people. Indian protesters retaliated by looting and burning shops and cutting telegraph and telephone wires and damaging railway tracks. When thousands of protesters gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, the British governor announced that all meetings and procession were forbidden. With two armored cars and fifty riflemen, he went to the park (with only one exit) where fifteen thousand unarmed civilians were gathered.

Without warning, he commanded his men to fire. Within ten minutes they discharged about 1650 rounds and left nearly four hundred dead. At least twelve hundred civilians lay wounded in the blood-soaked earth, where they remained as the soldiers retreated, making no attempt to assist those survived the massacre.

The violence was the start of several days of widespread British-led reprisals. With no recording of evidence and limited cross–examination, a martial law commission tried 852 suspects, convicted 581, sentenced to death 108, and sentenced to “transportation for life” or banishment to a remote penal facility, another 264. By the time massive public protest led to reintroduction of the right to appeal, eighteen men had already been publicly hanged.

Collective punishments unfolded through the region. Raj agents confiscated personal property for the troops, cut off electricity and water supplies, expelled students from schools via a quota system, and prevented peasants at gun point from harvesting their crops. Public floggings, a routine punishment in India, skyrocketed.

Raj forces flogged an entire wedding party for being part of an illegal gathering and throughout the region they physically and mentally coerced Indian eyewitnesses into giving false evidence that exonerate European repression.

Security forces compelled men and women to skip, touch their noses to the ground, and recite poetry; they literally whitewashed local peasants; and they made men undertake the work of untouchables, which according to the Hindu population considered a religious pollution… Security forces made persons who failed to salute lick their officers’ boots as punishment (p. 132).

This behaviour cannot be justified as by saying it was a different age. These events happened at the same time as the British government was introducing humanitarian social reforms in England. So they did know better.

Empire of Violence (2) Boer War

During the South African war (1899 to 1902),

The British introduced a new blockhouse strategy that combined with barbed-wire fences, divided the massive interior into smaller areas. A scorched earthy policy systemically burned crops and dumped salt to prevent future cultivation. Thirty thousand prisoners of war were deported to remote corners of the empire. British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African labourers.

British forces herded into camps more than one hundred thousand Afrikaners who died at alarming rates. Malnutrition, starvation, and outbreaks of endemic diseases wiped out approximately thirty thousand, the disproportionate number of whom were children… The establishment of British concentration camps in South Africa represent the first time a single ethnic group had been targeted en masse for detention and deportation (p.86).

The conditions in the sixty-four black concentration camps were worse than in those of the Afrikaners. Emaciated and disease-ridden Blacks undertook forced labour for reduced rations, and their death rates climbed to over ten percent of camp populations (p.90).

Empire of Violence (1)

I have just read Legacy of Violence: a History of the British Empire by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins. I think that it is one of the most disturbing books that I have ever read.

When I was in primary school during the 1950s, we had a picture of the queen on the wall and here were taught about the glories of the British Empire, which had more recently become the British Commonwealth. In our school atlases the parts of the world which had been controlled by Britain were coloured red. We marvelled at the scope of its influence.

We were taught the narrative that the British were the best colonizers, because they had brought civilization, freedom from superstition, true religion, Christianity, education and economic development to the nations they conquered. We were taught that we were privileged to be part of this great endeavour.

I have read enough history since those days to realize that this narrative was not true. I came to realise many British leaders were morally flawed and many of their practices were harmful, but I had not realized the fall extent of the harm done to the people colonised. Elkins uses information from various archives to demonstrate the full horror of the way that the British treated the people in the colonies that it controlled.

The worst feature of what happened is that throughout the era, the British trumpeted the goodness of what they were doing in their colonies. Unlike other imperial countries that did terrible things, they claimed that they were bringing education and civilization to people that were not ready for it. They claimed to be ruling "children", so they needed to use violence to establish “moral force” from time to time.

The British government loves to stand in judgment on the human rights records of other nations, particularly those that they do not like. Once you understand their own history, it is clear that they have no moral ground to stand on. What they did, and what they continued to do right up into the 1960s, was far worse than anything done in the countries like Iran and China that the British grandstand against today. This is a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.

If the British people understood what their leaders had done down through the years (and covered up) they would be hugely embarrassed. They would want their leaders to hide, rather than judge other nations. The following posts will give examples from the book.

The well-known philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1861 advocated for a narrative of human development that was intimately bound with Britain’s civilizing mission.

Britain, having already climbed the arduous civilizing scale, sat secure in their position atop the hierarchy of civilisations and in their role as self appointed shepherds of reform. In contrast, he endowed the non-Europeans of the empire with child-like qualities and juxtaposed them with the progressive images of the British. Like children, non western populations were not yet ready for liberty (p.50).

Before Mill wrote these words, Britain had declared martial war in Ireland (1798 and 1848) Barbados (1805 and 1816) Ceylon (1817 and 1848) Demerara (1823) Jamaica (1823-1824) Cape Colony7 1835, 1846 1850-53) And Canada (1837-38). This legalised extraordinary acts of coercion and suspension of due process (p.51).

Jamaica is just one small example of the violent legacy. Disputes about justice caused clashes between blacks and whites in Jamaica in 1864. According to the official report,

439 Blacks died, many summarily executed, one thousand dwellings were burned, no fewer than six hundred Blacks were flogged. At first an ordinary cat was used for flogging, but afterwards, for the punishment of men, wires were twisted around the cords, and the different tails so contracted were knotted (p.58).