British imperialism in Kenya has a lot to answer for

I have read Murithi Mutiga's exchanges with RA Massie-Bloomfield with avid interest and I am staggered that someone would suggest that Kenyans should look at the period of British imperialism in Kenya with fondness or gratitude. We cannot suggest that Kenya go back to what it was before the white man brought Christianity and nationhood to Africa; the wheel of history has turned too far for there to be any reversal. But for anyone to suggest that the British did what they did with the best of intention is to be willfully blind.

When the British turned Kenya into a colony in 1921, they should have expected that Kenyans would play by the same rules that the colonial administration wished to impose o Kenyans. The immediate results of the declaration of colonial status were the Harry Thuku-led land agitations of the 1920s that would not die down until the British had been forced to grant Kenya self-rule in 1963. Operation Anvil and the declaration of a state of emergency revealed the colonial government for what it was - an administration unwilling to admit that it was racist to the core. 

No one who appreciates the importance of democracy can deny that what the British engaged in between 1952 and 1959 was authoritarian and akin to the much maligned Apartheid system in South Africa or the Stalinist dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Mr Massie-Bloomfield would probably deny that the concentrations camps favoured by Nazi Germany were the direct descendants of similar tactics employed by the British, especially during the Boer Wars of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. 

The British continue to deny that gross human rights violations, which had the imprimatur of official sanction, were committed against the valiant warriors of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Just as in the case of the Chagosians' claims against the British government that have been kept alive for close to three decades, the British government continues to deny the validity of the surviving Mau Mau fighters against the British government, and Mr Massie-Bloomfield continues to hanker for a golden age that was golden only for the white man in a black man's country. His is not an isolated condition; it is shared by the politicians in Whitehall and the thousands of white Britons who continue to believe that their mission to civilise and Christianise the African continent was a mission directed straight from On High.

The bitter legacies of British colonial rule are manifest today in the distorted land policies pursued by successive governments and the state of our political progress over forty-five years after Independence. While we may welcome criticism that seeks to ensure a more equitable nation, we must not allow ourselves to be talked down to by men and women who wold wish to deny the past. Successive British High Commissioners have seen fit to lay down what is and what is not right with the governance of Kenya forgetting that if it had not been for successive colonial policies pursued by their government, we would not be in the boat that we find ourselves in today.

Before anyone can profer advise about how we should go about resolving the myriad conflicts that confront us today, one must accept, without reservation, that the British colonial experiment did not acquit itself honourably or admirably, and that in its final decade, it did more to set back the wheel of democracy than the successive repressions of the Kenyatta and Moi governments.