Case by Mau Mau against Britain Monday

A case in which four Kenyans have sued the British government over human rights violations during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion resumes on Monday at the High Court in London.

The full extent of British brutality during the Mau Mau rebellion more than 50 years ago is expected to be revealed during the trial.

Already, there are government reports documenting “systematic” torture, starvation and even the burning alive of detainees.

According to the Guardian, four elderly Kenyans who claim they were variously whipped, beaten, sexually abused and castrated while detained by the colonial government in the 1950s are suing for compensation. (READ: Mau Mau victims seek compensation from UK for alleged torture)

The survivors of the emergency regime of detention camps were “screened” — or violently interrogated — in order to extract confessions.

One claimant, the court was told, witnessed the clubbing to death of 11 prison inmates. The British governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, was said to have been present at beatings.

The landmark hearing, expected to last several weeks, will highlight atrocities and attitudes that may rewrite the history of British colonial rule in Africa.

Boxes of previously undisclosed documents, stored by the Foreign Office, have been unearthed during research into the claims.

They record the methods employed to defeat the rebellion and government awareness of abuses.

While not denying that torture occurred, the Foreign Office insists the UK retains no residual liability, deploying a range of constitutional precedents, including reference to declaration of martial law in Jamaica in 1860, to block damages.

Robert Jay QC, for the Foreign Office, opened the hearing last Thursday with an application that the claims should be struck out.

Mr Jay told a packed courtroom in London that he did not seek to diminish the appalling acts committed in detention camps between 1952 and 1961, but said the claim that the UK was liable for compensation was “built on inference” and ended in a “cul-de-sac”.

The FCO argues legal responsibility was shifted to the Kenya republic at independence in 1963 or else simply ceased to exist.

The test case claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, who are in their 70s and 80s, have flown 4,000 miles from their rural homes for the trial. It will also consider whether the claim was brought outside the legal time limit.

The judge, Mr Justice McCombe, heard Mutua and Nzili had been castrated, Nyingi was beaten unconscious at Hola prison in 1959, at which 11 men were clubbed to death and Mara had been subjected to appalling sexual abuse.

The statement of claim drawn up by the law firm of Leigh Day and Company, which represents the four Kenyans, says that detainees were subjected to “sodomy, the insertion of sand into men’s anuses and the insertion of glass bottles filled with hot liquid into women’s vaginas”. In many cases detainees died.

The claimants’ solicitor Martyn Day, said earlier that the case was “not about reopening old wounds”... It is about individuals who are alive and who have endured terrible suffering because of the policies of a previous British government.

They want recognition and redress in the form of a welfare fund. “It is incumbent on the government to treat such people with the respect and dignity they deserve,” he said.

Former UK high commissioner to Kenya Edward Clay was at the court as was John Nottingham, a DO in the colonial era who resigned to protest the abuses and is a witness.