ABSTRACT
Accusations of abuse and torture in the counter-insurgency campaign against Mau Mau rebels in Kenya were widely publicised during the 1950s. The typical British response was to issue official denials, and when prosecutions did arise the perpetrators were characterised as pathological, their behaviour presented as isolated and exceptional. New evidence found in the British colonial 'Migrated Archive' for Kenya now confirms that the practice of torture and abuse was widespread, amounting to a systematic pattern of state policy. This article rejects dispositional and individual explanations of British torture in Kenya and instead examines the violence in temporal and structural terms, showing how the toleration of violence at an early stage of the Emergency led to its institutionalisation in Kenya's detention camps at a later stage. The article offers evidence from the screening process in the first phase of the counter-insurgency campaign, and from the 'dilution technique' applied in the detention camps after 1956 in the final phase of the war to illustrate the argument. The concluding discussion explores the dilemmas confronting Kenya's colonial violence workers and their political masters as they struggled to present torture as lying within the 'rule of law'.
