Mau Mau Interrogator

Unique personal memoir by A man responsible for interrogation and release of seventy thousand detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion Kenya in the 1950s, with an Introduction and Afterword by David Elstein. A riveting account of the struggle for independence in Kenya in the late 50s and early 60s. f First, an account by Ken Lees, a brow-beaten civil servant doing his best by those for whom he had responsibility in the lead up to independence, namely those who been detained because they were either terrorists, that is Mau Mau, or freedom fighters, that is the Mau Mau. Was being a member of the Kikuyu tribe a crime, or was it the oaths they were forced to take by their elders which made them criminals? And who killed whom? The colonial governors, or the Kikuyu themselves? Lees became convinced that most of the detainees had been wrongly imprisoned, and /or worked to death, but certainly were not guilty of the crimes dumped on them by the British Government. Second comes David Elstein's lengthy 'Afterword' (actually longer than Lees's own Memoir), a skillful analysis of the appalling behavior of the British establishment, politicians and judges alike, who buried their collective heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge that wrong had been committed, not only as a result of colonial rule (Kenya was, after all, an artificial construct by some clueless civil servant in London who simply drew lines on a map and said let's call that territory Kenya, but also by tribe fighting tribe for hegemony in the new, about-to- be wonder state. And when it was clear later that lies were being told - by politicians and journalists and American so-called 'scholars' who often simply invented facts and figures to justify their spurious theories - the law in the British High Court intervened in response to those Kenyans who belatedly sought compensation for their treatment at the hand of the British, ignored evidence, preferred myth to reality and generally went along with the notion that the British had possibly behaved 'badly' in one of their former colonies. Elstein tells a quite different story, which in fact is more shameful than any group of jumped-up students blathering on about Britain's 'shameful, racist, imperialist past'. This is a thoughtful, detailed analysis of what probably really happened, told eloquently and persuasively. It's a must-read for anyone interested to get to the truth of what actually happened in Kenya before independence.