Sixty years ago this month, the Union Flag came down in Kenya for the last time. A 250,000-strong crowd in Nairobi’s Uhuru stadium would, after two minutes, roar their approval as Kenya’s new black, green, red and white flag took its place. On its way up the pole, however, the Kenyan flag was momentarily stuck. As Nicholas Rankin relates, the then-Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip – representing Elizabeth II – “leaned across to [new prime minister Jomo] Kenyatta, smiling. ‘Do you want to change your mind?’”
There can’t be many British Kenyans still around from those days, but Rankin is one of them. He was a teenager when Kenya won its freedom, and his family returned to England soon afterwards; yet part of him always remained mentally in east Africa. After a career working for the World Service, he sat down to write a memoir of his time there, trying to make sense of a childhood dominated by the civil war associated with the words “Mau Mau”.
Kenya has spawned more British colonial memoirs than any other part of Africa, but the majority are dull and clumsily written. Trapped in History stands head and shoulders above the pack. Anybody with an interest in Kenya will want to read it; students of the Empire should as well. The book is only tangentially about Rankin and his family: it’s mostly a quiet history of the British presence in Kenya, followed by a gripping account of the Mau Mau years, when Kikuyu guerrilla fighters rose up against the colonial administration, and a state of emergency was declared that lasted from 1952 until 1960.
For the Mau Mau – formally known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army – land was among the main issues. The taxes on the big European-owned farms in the highlands paid for schools and hospitals; the Mau Mau wanted to see those farms broken up into untaxable smallholdings, so that everyone could have a patch of ground to call their own. There would be no meeting of minds. Terrible things were done by both sides, before the Mau Mau eventually admitted defeat. They claimed later that they had hastened Kenya’s independence, but the colony was the last of Britain’s three east African territories to be set free. The guerrillas were bitterly resisted not only by the British, but also by thousands of peaceful Africans who wanted nothing to do with violence. Under the new governments of Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, the Mau Mau movement was outlawed for the next 40 years.
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