The Guardian reports today that some of the former Kenyan Mau Mau insurgents are going to sue the British government for abuse they received during the 1950s rebellion:

An ageing group of former Mau Mau insurgents will launch a legal action in Britain next week accusing the army and colonial authorities of torturing or illegally killing thousands of Kenyans during the rebellion for independence 50 years ago.

Lawyers acting for Mau Mau veterans say they will serve notice on the Foreign Office of an intent to seek compensation for human rights abuses for a group of about 10 Kenyans, seen as a test case.

This sort of thing always intrigues me when compared to modern times as now, obviously, Kenya is independent and Britain is aware that its colonial past has created enormous problems for the world. So what once was considered just a way of dealing with a problem in the colonies is now a horrific reminder of just how wrong governments can be. (Echoes of Pres. Bush's ridiculous comma comment are filling my head right now.)

There is an interesting literary twist to this case though:

Lawyers for the claimants are likely to call as a witness the American academic Caroline Elkins, whose acclaimed book Britain's Gulag estimates that up to 100,000 Kenyans died of torture, abuse and neglect in the British camps.

Elkins, an Asst Prof of history at Harvard, never planned to write the kind of book she ended up producing, but the facts kept leading her in circles until she started looking at them in a shocking way. This is from an interview she did with Harvard Magazine:

What began as a military operation turned into an eight-year campaign of terror against Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. British soldiers herded nearly one million of them into detention camps and "emergency villages," where they endured forced labor, starvation, torture, and disease. At least 100,000 died. When the British left Kenya in 1963, they destroyed all official files relating to their crimes. The Kikuyu story was effectively buried until assistant professor of history Caroline Elkins provided a thorough historical documentation of the capital crimes in her new book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.

Elkins didn't set out to uncover British war atrocities. Based on her early research in the official archives, she planned to write a history of the success of Britain's "civilizing mission" -- including civics courses and home-craft classes -- in the detention camps of Kenya during the Mau Mau conflict. But private archives and interviews with former colonial officers produced material that didn't match the official account. "It wasn't adding up," she says. "Then, I turned it upside-down and suddenly it all made sense."

Of course the British are saying it has been too long and also, bizarrely, are trying to pass the buck onto the Kenyan government:

A spokeswoman for the British high commission in Nairobi, Charley Williams, said the government would contest the lawsuit. "If and when legal proceedings are brought forward we would defend them vigorously on two grounds. First, all claims and responsibilities pass to the Kenyan government on independence, and second, after 50 years or so it would be impossible for there to be a fair trial of the issues," she said.

Governments need to learn to clean up their mess, no matter how much time has gone by. Maybe if they realize there is a big picture to consider - a longer picture - then they will think twice before acting rashly. (A girl can dream, right?)

Elkins has her own thoughts on why this case is so important:

When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke last summer, Elkins was completing the final chapter of her book. She found the parallels unnerving. The excuses for torture given by American officials closely resembled those that British prime minister Harold Macmillan and his colonial secretary gave in 1959 when they were confronted with the 11 beating deaths. "Whether it's Britain's 'civilizing mission' or America's 'freedom and democracy,'" she says, "the dark side of Western imperialism and the official wisdom behind it have not changed much in the last 50 years."