In the British and Kenyan archives, meanwhile, Elkins encountered another oddity. Many documents relating to the detention camps were either absent or still classified as confidential 50 years after the war. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. For example, three departments had maintained files for each of the reported 80,000 detainees. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. She found a few hundred.
But some important records escaped the purges. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. Stamped “secret”, it revealed a system for breaking recalcitrant detainees by isolating them, torturing them and forcing them to work. This was called the “dilution technique”. Britain’s Colonial Office had endorsed it. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice. Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire
Is he trying to remember where he left his wallet?
ReplyDeleteWhy would he ever need his wallet Mogabee?
DeleteIs that Pop Mogul Simon Cowell sitting behind the portly sweating gentleman?
ReplyDeleteI thought it looked vaguely like him.
DeleteThey probably deserve each other.
Fat cat, right enough.
ReplyDeleteOr just actually, erm....fat!
DeleteIt could've been another, slightly longer, word beginning with c, and ending in t; but as this is a family friendly site...
DeleteOr that certainly.
Delete:0)
tris
ReplyDeleteYou must and all the nats read this
Great Britain as ever waves the rules
and human rights .
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau
The long read
In the British and Kenyan archives, meanwhile, Elkins encountered another oddity. Many documents relating to the detention camps were either absent or still classified as confidential 50 years after the war. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. For example, three departments had maintained files for each of the reported 80,000 detainees. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. She found a few hundred.
But some important records escaped the purges. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. Stamped “secret”, it revealed a system for breaking recalcitrant detainees by isolating them, torturing them and forcing them to work. This was called the “dilution technique”. Britain’s Colonial Office had endorsed it. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice.
Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire
As evil in its way as the Soviet empire, about which I learned a lot more in Budapest this week.
DeleteI guess probably all empires are.
Butter wouldn't melt though, huh?