Mau Mau case enters crucial stage

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Mau Mau War Veterans Association (MMWVA) spokesperson Gitu wa Kahengeri (right) flanked by deputy national secretary Grace Nyambura (left) speaking to the press at Kenya Human Rights Commission offices in Nairobi on July 7, 2012 ahead of a hearing of their case in London between July 16 and July 27, 2012. BILLY MUTAI 

By AGGREY MUTAMBO amutambo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Friday, July 13  2012 at  08:36

A case in which Mau Mau veterans are seeking compensation from the British Government over alleged torture during the struggle for independence enters a crucial stage next week.

The veterans are expected to give evidence from Monday in the UK.

The case, by survivors of the infamous detention camps operated by the colonialists in the 1950s and 60s, will go on for 11 days in which Kenya’s freedom fighters will seek to prove that they were tortured.

In the argument brought to the court last year, Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua, Paulo Muoka Nzili, and Wambugu Wa Nyingi argued that they, with others, were herded to detention camps for opposing the colonial government.

Last year, the British Government argued that their claims are time-barred and should be struck out. It also stated that since it had left Kenya, that all liabilities were transferred to the Kenyan Government after independence in 1963.

But Mr Justice McCombe ruled that the elderly Kenyans had an “arguable” case to present before the court.

“There is ample evidence even in the few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been systematic torture of detainees during the Emergency.

“The materials evidencing the continuing abuses in the detention camps in subsequent years are substantial, as is the evidence of the knowledge of both governments that they were happening,” he ruled in July last year.

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Mr Mutua and Mr Nzili told the court they had been castrated while Mr Nyingi told of being beaten unconscious at Hola prison in 1959, where 11 men were clubbed to death.

The claimants say they represent the wider community of hundreds of elderly Kenyans who survived the brutality, including castrations, beatings and sexual assault at the hands of British officials.

President Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was among those who were allegedly detained and abused at the time of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonial administration.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Kenya Government have pushed for the case that now enters a crucial stage.

KHRC has hired the Leigh Day and Co law firm to represent the three. Kenya supports the case especially since it argues that it should not inherit the burden of compensation that squarely lies before the British.

According to the Kenyans' lawyer Martyn Day, this is an exceptional case in which the Judge should exercise his discretion to allow the claims to proceed.

“The British Government has thrown everything at these claims in an effort to derail them on technicalities. The Court has already disapproved of these tactics and found that there is ample evidence to support the claims. We are confident that justice will be done,” he said in a statement on Thursday.

Last year, it was uncovered that the British Government had tried to hide important documents about the Emergency as a way of reducing the viability of the case.

Prof David Anderson, a British researcher on Kenya’s colonial history and author of Histories of the Hanged, a book on detention camps, discovered 17,000 files on the then Kenya colony that had either been concealed or ‘lost.’

He is one of the three academicians on the Kenya Emergency, who have put in lengthy statements to support the torture claims.

The hearing will have full access to the ‘Hanslope archive’ of secret documents which had been sent back to the UK upon independence. The archive has never been made public.