(A version of this article was published by the Daily Telegraph on 7 December 2025)
Tucked into an 8-minute section of the third episode of his 3-part documentary series, “Empire”, David Olusoga’s account of the Mau Mau Emergency in colonial Kenya in the 1950s is not just deeply skewed and error-strewn, but – by the end – unintentionally hilarious. A supposed authority on the official archives, Dr Riley Linebaugh, is interviewed whilst she wears a pair of blue plastic gloves – presumably to avoid damaging the file she is handling.
It is actually a file I have consulted myself – using my bare hands! Indeed, I and hundreds of other scholars and students have handled this and thousands of similar files in the reading rooms at Kew’s National Archive, without a blue glove in sight. Dr Linebaugh was careful not to violate the document, but she and Olusoga instead violated the trust of the the audience in the BBC’s presentation of British History.
The errors flow thick and fast, almost from the start. We are told that months after Princess Elizabeth visited Kenya (whilst there, her father died, and she became Queen), the Mau Mau rebellion broke out, with the aim of recovering lost Kikuyu lands, and ending colonial rule. In fact, the uprising had begun more than three years earlier, in the Kikuyu heartland of Central Province – the Kikuyu constituted 20% of Kenya’s population.
Map of colonial Kenya (1953–59) showing Central/Rift battlefronts
Mau Mau was a name attached to what the rebels themselves called the Land and Freedom Army (the derivation of “Mau Mau” is unknown). Olusoga tells us that it was “the killing of white settlers in Kenya which shocked the British into action”, namely, declaring a State of Emergency, calling in battalions of soldiers and bomber squadrons to help deal with the rebels.
This is all completely untrue. No settlers had been killed. Indeed, for a self-styled anti-colonial movement, Mau Mau seemed surprisingly indifferent to Kenya’s 40,000 European settlers. In the entire 7-year Emergency, just 32 lost their lives: fewer than were killed in traffic accidents.
The vast majority of Mau Mau’s victims were fellow Kikuyu: thousands of men, women and children, strangled, shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, and beaten or chopped to death. Those targeted were the ones who refused to swear oaths of loyalty to Mau Mau and its leadership: they and their families faced threats of violence and eventually execution. The same fate awaited those who witnessed mass oathing ceremonies and informed the authorities.
The origins of the Emergency were in effect a civil war within the Kikuyu tribe, as landless young men rebelled against traditional age-based hierarchies, and against Chiefs and Headmen who were prospering under British rule. The anti-colonialist rhetoric was there, but could only be put into action once Mau Mau had gained full control of Kenya’s largest tribe: that never happened.
Olusoga correctly states that most of the fatalities in the Mau Mau rebellion were Africans: Kikuyu, to be precise. What he fails to mention was that the great majority of them were killed by Mau Mau, mostly before the actual declaration of the Emergency.
It was the increased pace of these murders – 59 in just a few months, culminating in the brazen assassination of Senior Chief Waruhiu on the outskirts of Nairobi – which triggered the Emergency, announced by the new Governor of the colony, Sir Evelyn Baring, just days after his arrival there. His predecessor, Sir Philip Mitchell, had spent years ignoring the rising tide of alarm emanating from Central Province, where barely 200 police and administrators vainly tried to control a population of 750,000. As Mitchell later admitted, his blinkered response had cost thousands of lives.
Once the Emergency was declared, the Kikuyu resisting Mau Mau (“loyalists” for want of a better term) were allocated rifles and were better able to defend themselves, forming a Home Guard. They and their families became particular Mau Mau targets, but eventually gained the upper hand. As many as 60% of the 10,000 Mau Mau fighters killed in the shooting war were accounted for by the Home Guard (Dr Linebaugh, in her published research, exaggerates the total, and goes on to say they were all “murdered”).
Olusoga then casually announces that “hundreds of thousands” were “imprisoned”. Even if we assume that “imprisoned” was a slip of the tongue for “detained”, Olusoga’s claim has no basis in reality. Detailed end of-month figures for the total of convicts and detainees, and for numbers of detainees released (the average period in detention was four months) were published throughout the Emergency.
There were never more than 20,000 in prison or 55,000 in detention. Allowing for releases and new arrivals, 78,000 detainees were reported as passing through the camps by the time they were closed. As end-of-month figures do not reflect intra-month movements, a reasonable estimate could be as many as 100,000 (though this might involve fewer than 100,000 individuals if we allow for those who were detained more than once).
As well as these inaccuracies, Olusoga offers no context. Detention – however deplorable we might find it today – was a feature of colonial judicial systems long before Mau Mau. Before the Emergency, detainee numbers might be as high as 20,000 in Kenya,and throughout the Emergency there were always more non-Mau Mau detention camps than Mau Mau ones.
For years after Mau Mau had been defeated militarily, in 1954, the unresolved issue of the camp- where conditions were often poor and treatment of detainees often brutal – was a running sore. Even so, the claims made in “Empire” are startling: indeed, not really credible. A historian interviewed at Mweru school – reportedly a re-purposed detention camp – told Olusoga that Mweru, like every camp, had had a swimming pool for those in command. We were not actually shown it, and none of the many accounts of the camp system has ever mentioned such. There was certainly no swimming pool at the key Mwea group of camps.
Moreover, we were told Meru had a gallows, where Mau Mau detainees, after conviction, were secretly hanged in the middle of the night, and their bodies buried in hidden graves.The historian David Anderson has written a 400-page book entitled “Histories of the Hanged”, in which he exhaustively analyses the full list of the 1,090 men hanged after being convicted of designated Mau Mau crimes – primarily murder. Even though capital punishment had long been a feature of the Kenyan legal system, and executions for non-Mau Mau crimes continued throughout the Emergency, that total was – as Olusoga rightly says – much higher than in any other British colony at the time. It is certainly shocking.
Yet there was a formal legal structure of court trials (however questionable in some cases) underpinning the process. A quarter of those convicted of murder were actually acquitted on appeal, or had their death sentences commuted to imprisonment. Hangings took place at either Nairobi prison or Gathigiriri detention camp, with the bodies normally buried in the grounds of Kamiti prison. There is no mention of a gallows at Mweru or any other detention camp, let alone of hangings in the middle of the night, or secret graves.
It is the story of hidden graves – a familiar Mau Mau myth – which is the biggest giveaway in this dubious tale. Despite the availabilty of modern techniques such as aerial photography, somehow the graves retain their secrets seven decades later. Channel Four recently broadcast a programme in which the son of one of the victims of the Hola massacre in 1959 claimed his father’s body, along with those of the other victims, was buried in mass grave. This was one of a series of lies he told, and which Channel Four failed to check before transmission. All the bodies were in fact returned to their families.
Actually, bodies have re-appeared. Many were exhumed towards the end of the Emergency, to check the truthfulness of admissions made by Mau Mau detainees hoping that confession would grant them a ticket home (it usually did). At one point, 450 bodies, with the ropes still around their necks, were found: Mau Mau had its own “courts”, with conviction swiftly followed by execution. This number of bodies with such a distinctive cause of death was surprising: anecdotal evidence is that most Mau Mau victims were disposed of in rivers, or ravines, or deep latrines – or were left to be consumed by wild animals.
Towards the end of the section, Olusoga references the killing of eleven detainees at Hola detention camp (not mentioning that it was beating with batons by poorly supervised African guards that caused the deaths). He then claims that this led to the rapid closure of the detention camps. He is not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong.
Settlers’ Irrigation Scheme at Hola Camp, Commandant Thompson, extreme right, looks on as visiting journalists and prisoners stand attentive in 1959.
By March 1959, nearly all the camps had already closed, and fewer than 2,000 detainees – deemed by the authorities the hardest of the hard core – were still in custody. It was the attempted consolidation of those remaining hundreds which was the precursor to the Hola disaster, as the administration for the first time attempted to force inmates there to work by digging irrigation ditches. (Hola was adjacent to an irrigation scheme at the Tana River).
The planned operation was deeply flawed. There were far too many detainees, many of whom had actually volunteered for the work, and were paid for it, with the result that the process was spread over far too large an area (two football pitches in length).
Unanticipated staff shortages meant that there was almost no European supervision, and the askaris – who regarded the detainees with a mixture of hatred and contempt – believed their instructions allowed them to punish any resistance with baton blows. Only when two detainees collapsed and quickly died was the entire operation halted, and the surviving detainees driven the two miles back to the camp. Subsequently, nine more men died in the camp hospital, as a result of shock caused by persistent beating.
Also shocked was the UK Parliament and government. Mau Mau by this time had faded away as an issue in Kenya, but the Hola massacre led to wholesale changes: after a swift and damning public inquest, the camp commandant and senior colonial officials were sacked or forced to retire, the Governor was replaced and a new Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, immediately embarked on the task of delivering independence to Kenya.
That process, too, is misrepresented by Olusoga. He is told by the blue-gloved Dr Linebaugh that the prospect of independence triggered mass destruction of colonial government documents, with a view to concealing what had really happened during the Mau Mau uprising.
Document culling and re-classification certainly happened. As one senior official said at the time, “no sensible person would expect the transition to independence to be unaccompanied by the destruction or removal of documents”. Inevitably, Special Branch intelligence reports, which could have re-kindled the now dormant hostilities within the Kikuyu, had to be destroyed. Less inevitably, but understandably, documents which might embarrass British or allied governments were also targeted.
Yet a surprising volume of material survived, not least because the Colonial Office was determined that a reasonably full account of Britain’s rule in Kenya should be preserved, in case a future post-independence government put forward a false version. This delicate balancing act was enlarged by a commitment from the administration to preserve as much material from the early years, as far back as 1895, thanks to lobbying from two long-serving Africa hands, Dick Cashmore and Margery Perham.
The expanded secrecy classification system was undoubtedly complex, sometimes laughably so: senior officials could not always be certain whether all the people being copied on a communication were entitled to know about all its contents. But the system had only brief transitional significance. Virtually every one of the thousands of documents held at The National Archive (TNA) is available to the public.
Indeed, far from “keeping secret the evidence of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya”, as Dr Linebaugh inexplicably asserts, we have not only Frank Corfield’s official report on the origins of Mau Mau (published in 1960 despite Macleod’s apparent attempt to suppress it) but also annual reports on the numbers of detainees and prisoners, incorporating extensive data analysis, published and sold to the public by His Majesty’s Stationery Office.
On top of this, in the archives we have vivid reports on the attempts at rehabilitation of detainees, as well as a blow by blow account of the crucial debate within the colonial administration over the legality of the use of force to induce detainees at the Mwea camps to work. We can read the bitter complaints circulated by the system’s internal critics, as well as the immediate responses and subsequent action; fascinatingly, the listing of recipients, carefully curated, tells us volumes about the politics of the civil service.
Dr Linebaugh talks at length about the “migrated archives”: the documents flown back to the UK shortly before Kenyan independence. These indeed have an odd history. To begin with, they were stored at a depository in Hayes, West London, awaiting transfer to TNA. But the officials at Kew repeatedly declined to accept them, claiming they were largely duplicates of material already in their system – a response which had some justification, not least because of the propensity of civil servants to circulate more than a dozen copies of a report around the various departments.
The junior staff at Hayes lacked the skill to catalogue everything being stored (which was not restricted to Kenya documents). Few scholars consulted this archive, and by the time the lease at Hayes had run out many decades later, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (successor to the Colonial Office), had to work out what to do.
Most of the archivist staff had retired, and – with Kew still resistant – the “migrated archives” migrated once more, to an FCO facility called Hanslope Park, there to sit undisturbed until a civil lawsuit, launched by a collection of Mau Mau seeking compensation from the British government for alleged ill-treatment in the detention camps, triggered a departmental search. Finally, an FCO official, Edward Inglett, located the thousands of files, which were belatedly made available to the litigants.
As it happens, there was nothing particularly revelatory in the documents, but their existence had been flatly and repeatedly denied, and the judge in the case made clear his displeasure at the apparent (even if entirely inadvertent) deceit. Foreign Secretary William Hague quickly offered a generous settlement and apology so as to avoid further embarrassment.
That the Hanslope Park affair has now assumed mythic status amongst Mau Mau supporters and revisionist historians flies in the face of the facts: that so much in Olusoga’s account of this period is misconceived or flatly wrong is what should really concern us.
It is not just the errors, but the omissions. Olusoga fails to tell his audience about Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta. As the most prominent Kikuyu of his generation, Kenyatta was widely assumed by the British to have a leadership role in Mau Mau (some level of involvement may well have been advisable for him, given the casualty rate amongst Mau Mau’s opponents). Kenyatta was arrested soon after the Emergency was declared, tried (on very dubious evidence), convicted of helping organise Mau Mau, and imprisoned in a remote corner of Kenya for eight years.
On release – as part of the drive towards independence – he made clear his criticisms of Mau Mau. On becoming President, he denounced them as “hooligans”, and proscribed the organisation – just as the colonial government had done, but this time the ban lasted for 40 years. But why spoil a good story by telling viewers what actually happened?
All the facts set out in this critique can be found in the afterword to my 2019 book “Mau Mau Interrogator”. Most can also be found in two recent articles in “The Critc”, re-published by History Reclaimed. The way Olusoga presents this history should give the BBC pause when considering further commissions. It might also want to reconsider its association with the Open University which ostensibly collaborated in this production.
But most dismaying of all is the airbrushing from their own history of the thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of Mau Mau victims, other than the handful of Europeans Olusoga chooses to mention: a particularly distasteful example of what might be called neo-colonialism.
David Elstein read History at Cambridge, was producer of the 1970s television documentary series, The World at War, and had a long career in broadcasting including as chief executive of the new Channel 5, launched in 1997.
