Between 1952 and 1960, Britain fought a vicious war in Kenya against the Mau Mau – a movement fighting for Kenyan independence from colonial rule. It was an exceptionally bloody conflict, with atrocities committed on both sides. For decades, however, many of the worst abuses carried out by British colonial forces have been kept hidden.

Piecing together survivor testimonies and expert analysis from a team of British and Kenyan historians, this film sheds new light on shocking new evidence. Telling a complete story of how Britain was involved in a regime of systematic torture – including accounts of murders, rapes and forced castrations.

The documentary contains a series of revelations:

• In 2013, then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, expressed regret that ‘Kenyans were subject to torture’, yet insisted the liability must lie solely with the ‘colonial administration’, not the British government itself. Yet we reveal how former Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd (who reported directly to Cabinet), had oversight of the ‘Governor’s Complaints Committee’ – a shadowy body in the Kenyan administration that the film shows was one of the chief mechanisms for suppressing allegations of torture.
• A previously secret letter from the Commissioner of Police for Kenya, Arthur Young, reveals the truth behind his resignation and describes how the Kenyan administration explicitly blocked his attempts to expose rapes, murders and acts of torture carried out by colonial forces.
• In 2001, former prison camp administrator, Terence Gavaghan, took part in a now notorious TV interview in which he alleged that ‘not one’ person died in his camp under his leadership. In our film, not only do eyewitness accounts from Mau Mau survivors claim Gavaghan carried out multiple abuses, but we highlight new documents that suggest he knew at the time he was involved in the active torturing of prisoners, which sometimes led to their death.
• The British policy of torture reaches its endgame in the Hola massacre – an atrocity in which 11 detainees were beaten to death in the Hola prison camp. While a contemporary inquiry suggested the atrocity was a one-off, we show that instead it was the inevitable consequence of a deliberate policy of legalised violence.

Our film also questions the established narrative of the end of the British empire. In his famous ‘wind of change’ speech in 1960, Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, framed decolonisation as the product of a newfound respect for ‘African national consciousness’. Yet the exposure of British torture in Kenya suggests that this paternalistic explanation – Britain ‘letting its children go’ voluntarily – is a misrepresentation. In Kenya, at least, Britain only left after a prolonged period of systematic violence that – once exposed – ultimately undermined the moral legitimacy on which it based its rule.

This may well also be the last time we hear from some of the voices of the surviving Mau Mau war veterans. Finally, we can show how some of their testimony about the British use of torture, for so long disputed by the authorities, is in fact true.