Submitted to Law & History Review, 18 April 2013 .028 TITLE PAGE The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime: Evidence from the Mau Mau Rebellion, Kenya 1952-60 DAVID M. ANDERSON & JULIANNE WEIS Mailing address: David M. Anderson, Department of History, Humanities Building, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL Telephone: +44 2476 150991 Email: d.m.anderson@warwick.ac.uk Acknowledgements David M. Anderson is Professor of African History in the University of Warwick <d.m.anderson@warwick.ac.uk>. Julianne Weis is a doctoral candidate at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, and a member of University College, Oxford <julianne.weis@history.ox.ac.uk>. The research reported here was initially conducted in preparation for the limitations hearing in the Mau Mau compensation case, heard before the High Court (Queens Bench) in London during July 2012. We also thank Aidan Russell and Patrycja Stys for assistance with the data collection, and Dan Leader, Zoe Marks, Huw Bennett and Jocelyn Alexander for comments and advice. 1  Abstract The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime: Evidence from the Mau Mau Rebellion, Kenya 1952-60 Over the past two decades detailed research on contemporary cases of sexual violence in wartime has revealed that the prevalence of rape varies enormously from one conflict to another, and even between groups fighting in the same war. Attempts to investigate historical cases in a similar manner have been limited by the availability of verifiable evidence. This essay draws upon newly discovered documentary evidence of sexual crimes from Kenya’s Mau Mau conflict of the 1950s, a case for which rape had only previously been recorded in victim testimony. Though this documentary evidence remains partial and fragmentary, it is apparent that sexual crimes were widely reported during the British counter-insurgency in Kenya, but that there was a reluctance to prosecute such cases even when abundant evidence was available. The British colonial authorities sought to deflect cases of sexual crime and to dismiss the evidence of victims. This reflected prevailing British attitudes toward sexual crimes at the time, but was reinforced in Kenya by the rebel status and racial identity of the victims. 2  The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime: Evidence from the Mau Mau Rebellion, Kenya 1952-60 In July 2012, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning human rights abuses, including torture and rapes, allegedly carried out by British colonialists in Kenya, during the Mau Mau counter-insurgency of the 1950s.1 Amongst the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court that day was a Kikuyu woman, Jane Mara, whose testimony related the sexual abuses she suffered. Jane was only 15 years of age, in 1954, when she was accused of being a Mau Mau sympathizer, and along with other villagers she was taken for interrogation. The experience Jane Mara recounts was horrific. Beaten repeatedly by her inquisitors, she was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart, while another guard forced a glass bottle into her vagina, using the sole of his boot to direct the bottle deeply into her. The pain was excruciating, and Jane realized the bottle had been heated. When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the three other young women were subjected to the same misery.2 This was the first time that such a story of sexual crimes in the counter-insurgency against the Mau Mau rebels had been laid before a British court, but for Kenyans the detail of these claims was all too familiar. In 1998, the publication of political activist Wambui Waiyaki Otieno’s memoirs had caused a stir with her admission of her brutal multiple rape at the hands of a British police officer in a detention camp in 1960. A prominent public figure in Kenya, Otieno’s candor was all the more remarkable for the fact that the rape had resulted in her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter.3 Otieno’s experience echoed earlier accounts from the 1950s. In his biographical account of the rebellion, Mau Mau forest fighter Karari Njama poignantly recalled his 3 return to his home in Nyeri after the war only to find that his wife had been raped by a member of the local African militia (the Kikuyu Home Guard), and had borne an illegitimate child.4 This trope was even taken up by the distinguished Kenya fictional writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose rebel hero in A Grain of Wheat, Gikonyo, returns home in similar circumstances.5 More recently, from 2002 onwards, the collection by the Kenya Human Rights Commission of testimony on colonial abuses brought to light a growing catalogue of rape accusations, similar accounts being highlighted in Caroline Elkins’ monograph on the story of the British detention camps in Kenya. Published in 2005, this book quoted from the oral testimonies of several Kikuyu women who related their experience of rapes and other sexual assaults while in the custody of security personnel, including events very similar to those described by Jane Mara.6 This article presents newly discovered documentary evidence from Kenya in the 1950s that corroborates and enlarges upon these legal and oral testimonies and memoirs. Accusations of rapes and sexual assaults by state security personnel are littered through the substantial body of new archival material that has been released as a consequence of the Mau Mau compensation case mounted in the High Court in London. Known collectively as the Hanslope Disclosure, and covering 36 other former British colonies as well as Kenya,7 this body of material (nearly 9,000 files in all) includes approximately 500 files dealing with the administration of the Kenyan rebellion. A significant number of these files relate specifically to the investigation and prosecution of allegations against the security forces between 1953 and 1959, including cases of rape and sexual crimes.8 This documentary evidence is powerful and important precisely because it relates to specific cases where investigations – and sometimes prosecutions - were 4 initiated at the time. The existence of these cases may at first appear surprising. Legal attitudes to rape in colonial Kenya in the 1950s were generally unsympathetic to prosecution, as they were also in Britain at this time.9 While examining these papers for the information they can give us on the character and extent of sexual crimes, we must also ask how it was that such cases were brought to the attention of legal officers at all? As we shall see, the colonial state sought to escape court hearings wherever possible by denying or deflecting evidence, generally preferring to avoid legal remedies. For the colonial authorities, rape was a “difficult” charge. Among victims, too, this new archival evidence suggests reluctance on the part of Africans to seek formal prosecution – this being reinforced by the circumstances of the conflict in which the victims were usually stigmatised as supporters of the rebels, while the perpetrators were servants of the government. The evidence on these cases thus provides a unique insight as to the way that rape in an anti-colonial war was treated in the 1950s, and adds to the small but growing body of literature that addresses the question of sexual crimes prosecutions during wartime. The main part of this essay presents the new body of documentary evidence on rape in 1950s Kenya, giving the background to the Mau Mau rebellion and the British counter-insurgency and discussing specific cases for which investigations were initiated. To analyse the cases we will look primarily at investigations against three branches of the colonial security services - the military, the African Home Guard, and the police. The concluding part of the essay then discusses the wider historical literature on rape in wartime, to illustrate that few historical cases before 1990 have been examined in any depth and to identify what might be distinctive and valuable about the Kenyan experience. 5  NEW EVIDENCE ON RAPE IN WARTIME KENYA The counter-insurgency mounted against Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels was the most savagely fought of Britain’s wars of decolonisation after 1945.10 Between October 1952 and the ending of the State of Emergency, in January 1960, unofficial estimates suggest that rebel casualties were between 20,000 and 30,000.11 At the peak of the war, in 1955, more than 70,000 Africans were held in British prisons and detention camps, the vast majority being incarcerated without charges having been brought against them. The rebellion was concentrated amongst the 1 million Kikuyu- speakers of Kenya’s Central Province and Mount Kenya region. The British counter- insurgency was a ‘dirty war,’ in which the civilian Kikuyu population, identified as the ‘passive wing’ of the rebellion, was subjected to oppressive scrutiny by the colonial state. Draconian laws gave the police and other security services wide discretionary powers to detain and interrogate suspects – a process known in Kenya by the euphemism of “screening”. This led to reports of random and widespread violence against civilians, including sexual assaults, from the very earliest months of the conflict.12 British Army regiments were deployed to Kenya from the beginning of the Emergency, operating alongside the King’s African Rifles, a regiment with African rank-and-file and British officers. These military units were primarily responsibility for chasing down the rebel bands in the forests and mountains, but they also acted in aid of the civil authorities in the settled areas of Central Province and elsewhere.13 A third military formation, the Kenya Regiment, made up of 300 or so recruits from the European white settler community, played a prominent role in intelligence gathering and in the command of African auxiliary forces that were primarily engaged in civil security.14 Law and order among the civilian population was the domain of the Kenya 6 Police, heavily augmented by several auxiliary forces, most notably the Kenya Police Reserve, greatly expanded during the Emergency to 2000 full-time officers and 4800 part-timers, and the Tribal Police, recruited and controlled by African Chiefs and Headmen and operating mainly in the rural areas.15 Finally, Kikuyu “loyal” to the government were in the early months of 1953 formed into a militia known as the Home Guard, colloquially referred to as “Loyalists”. This militia grew to a force of 25,600 by March 1954, more than matching the rebel armies.16 British strategy pushed the Home Guard into the forefront of the counter-insurgency, pitting Kikuyu rebel against Kikuyu “Loyalist”. Home Guard also prosecuted the war against the “passive wing” of Mau Mau among the wider civilian population, punishing the rebels and their supporters alike.17 The substantial body of new archival material, the Hanslope Disclosure, contains many detailed and previously unknown allegations of rapes and sexual assaults made against the British security services in Kenya. In May 1953, for example, complaints were made regarding the ‘many abuses of the Home Guard,’ including rapes of women, while conducting screening in the Londiani Division of the Rift Valley Province. The official response acknowledged that abuses had taken place, but failed to address the specific allegation of rapes. At the same time, the complainant – a preacher with the local Moral Rearmament Movement in the district – was privately informed that among the Africans who had told him about these events were some who were suspected of Mau Mau activities. This was to become a familiar pattern, with accusations of rape being dismissed and represented as malicious efforts to undermine African staff within the colonial administration. The Londiani complaint was amongst a larger body of similar allegations that resulted in an internal investigation into the conduct of the Home Guard in the screening camps, 7 and the issuing of instructions to keep tighter control over screening teams. But rapes were not formally investigated.18 In another report, from January1955, two women were assaulted in the Home Guard camp at Makadara, in Nairobi, objects being inserted into their vaginas in an act of torture and humiliation. These assaults were perpetrated by a group of Kikuyu women, then living with Home Guard at the camp. Investigators described the assailants as “prostitutes”, who had “thrown their lot in with the government.” Information supplied by these women had been used in security operations, and this accounted for their presence under the “protection” of the Home Guard. This case came to court, the assailants being convicted by the local magistrate. Evidence produced at this hearing showed that Chief Kioko, commander of the Home Guard at Madakara, was well aware of the sexual abuse of female Mau Mau suspects, and that this was a common practice at Madakara. After this incident Chief Kioko was transferred from Madakara to rural Meru, and given the rank of Sgt Major in a new Home Guard unit.19 A third example comes from early 1956, when two women alleged they had been raped at a labour camp in Machakos District, by the African Headman in command of the camp. Initial investigations revealed that other Home Guard and Tribal Police had also raped young girls at the camp. Yet, despite acknowledging “that the headman took full advantage of the sexual opportunities that his position and the detention of a number of girls presented him with”, colonial officials elected not to prosecute because of difficulties establishing the “question of consent”.20 The accused men claimed that the women had consented, or denied the assaults. With contradictory accounts, a lack of medical evidence, and no other witnesses willing to give evidence, the prospects for conviction were slim. 8 These examples are typical of many references to such cases in the Hanslope Disclosure that begin to illustrate the range of issues raised by rape allegations. But a more coherent picture can be obtained from closer examination of the cases that were formally reported to the Chief Secretary’s Complaints Co-ordinating Committee (CSCCC). The papers of this Committee are amongst the most important sources revealed in the Hanslope Disclosure. It was initially set up in mid-January 1954, as a “Watch Committee” to “receive complaints of ill-treatment by members of the Security Forces and to direct such complaints to the appropriate authorities.”21 The minutes of the first seven meetings are missing from the record, but from 26 April 1954 until the disbandment of the Committee in November 1959 we have a full record of the cases reported.22 However, this by no means represents a complete record of all accusations made against the security forces – only those that had first been formally notified to the Criminal Investigations Department (C.I.D.) then came to the CSCCC.23 In many instances, rape allegations were not the reason for the initial C.I.D. investigations, but only emerged as enquiries drew together a more complete picture of the circumstances of an incident. The Deputy Public Prosecutor and Under- Secretary of Defence both attended the CSCCC. The minutes were widely circulated, copies going to all senior officials in Nairobi, including the Governor and other members of the War Council, senior legal officials, and ministers. Copies of the minutes also came back to London, for the attention of the Secretary of State for the Colonies.24 The CSCCC papers now available to us record 56 separate sexual crimes, spanning 1954 to 1959, for which details are provided.25 All were perpetrated by employees of the colonial administration or members of the security forces: 23 cases involved members of the Kenya Police, another three cases relating to the Kenya 9 Police Reserve and three to officers of the Prison Service; Tribal Police were accused in six cases, and Home Guard in ten cases. Military units, the British Army, the King’s African Rifles and the Kenya Regiment featured in nine of the cases. The incidence of reported cases shows a decline toward the end of the period – all but 3 cases occurring between 1954 and 1957. In terms of outcomes, we know that from the 56 investigations only 29 cases were prosecuted, and that in 24 cases it was decided there was insufficient evidence to merit prosecution. In three cases the records are incomplete and we do not know the outcome. While prosecution rates varied considerably across the services, it is striking that all cases involving Home Guard came to court and that these cases also had the highest likelihood of conviction. Any interpretation of sentencing patterns from the CSCCC papers is complicated by a highly significant change in the sexual offences legislation that was introduced during the Emergency. Back in 1926, white settler anxieties about the threat posed to white women in Kenya from sexual assault by black males led the colonial Governor to introduce legislation making rape a capital offence, meaning that such cases could only be heard before the Supreme Court.26 The penal sanctions then put in place were still in force at the beginning of the Kenyan Emergency in 1952: Article 133 of the Kenya Penal Code asserted that “any person who commits the offence of rape is liable to be punished with death or with imprisonment for life, with or without corporal punishment,” while Article 134 extended the liability of life imprisonment to those found guilty of attempted rape.27 This position was altered in the midst of the Emergency, when, in November 1955, rape was removed from the list of capital offences and its punishment reduced in severity. Thereafter, rape allegations could be heard before a magistrate in a lower court, applying a much lower tariff of penalties to those convicted. British colonial perceptions of the 10 prevailing attitudes of the African community toward rape justified this decision: it was argued that for Africans rape was not a serious offence, and that the existence of social remedies meant that it could be safely removed from the list of capital offences without any likely impact on its prevalence.28 This was, in fact, a highly contentious assertion, and it may well be that colonial legal officers who promoted this change did so primarily to remove these “difficult” cases from the Supreme Court roster at a time when Kenya’s judicial system as hard pressed to cope with the extremely high number of capital cases arising as a consequence of the wide extension of the death penalty made under the Emergency regulations.29 Of the 17 rape cases in which convictions recorded by the CSCCC, in nine cases the sentences were handed down before this change. These cases heard before the end of 1956 were certainly not prosecuted with the full force of the law, and the change in legislation might be seen to reflect the reluctance of the Supreme Court judges to hand down harsh sentences for rape in the context of wartime. The reduction in the rate of conviction from 1956 also perhaps suggests that magistrates, too, were unwilling to tackle such cases with vigour. Throughout the Emergency years, the sentencing of Africans by British judges and magistrates almost certainly reflected their belief that rape was not held to be serious offence by Kenya’s indigenous peoples - a matter to which we shall return at the end of this essay. The case investigation and prosecution figures collated from the papers of the CSCCC are summarised in Table 1. Let us now consider in greater detail the wider context of the rape allegations reflected in these figures from the CSCCC papers for three categories of security services – the military, the Kikuyu Home Guard, and the police. [INSERT TABLE 1 HERE] 11 Rape allegations against the military The military had the most complex attitude to the investigation of rape cases. In the early phase of the Emergency, from October 1952 through to December 1953, abuses by the security forces were widespread. Kikuyu women fleeing into Nairobi in November 1952, to avoid the flare up of conflict in the rural areas, told the first stories of rape and assault by police officers and the military.30 By March 1953, intelligence reports candidly admitted that soldiers were involved in “inevitable pilfering and molesting of women” in operations against the civilian population.31 When General Erskine arrived in Kenya in June 1953 to take command of the military he was shocked by this ill-discipline, and issued a warning to his soldiers that allegations made against them “would be properly investigated”.32 This turned out to be a hollow claim: Erskine’s principal aim was to protect the reputation of the Army, and while that did imply preventing abuses it also involved minimizing the adverse publicity such cases attracted and the negative effects they had upon service morale. Erskine therefore secured an agreement from the Attorney General that cases involving soldiers would be heard before military courts, and would not go before civilian magistrates.33 The extent to which the military then pursued those investigations would not be subject to scrutiny, other than the process of cases being reported to the CSCCC. Military reluctance to open up rape allegations to criminal investigation was vividly seen in the MacLean inquiry into the conduct of the British Army in Kenya, held in closed sessions in Nairobi during December 1953. The terms of reference of this inquiry were restricted to the period of Erskine’s command, meaning that Lieutenant-General Sir Kenneth MacLean was barred from investigating any reported 12 incident that took place before July 1953. Soldiers giving evidence to MacLean had to be repeatedly reminded of this general restriction. Moreover, the MacLean inquiry refused to pursue the mentions of rape that were made in evidence, even telling one witness “That is not the sort of thing we are concerned with.”34 Despite the fact that the Army Act categorized rape as a serious offence, bracketing it alongside murder and manslaughter, a senior officer in the military police told the MacLean inquiry that in Kenya the Army treated rape as “a minor crime”, in the same category as theft. Whenever rape was committed alongside other offences, it was usual for the rape charges to be ignored, especially if those other offences were deemed more serious. This was most glaring in the notorious case at Chuka in June 1953, when rapes by African soldiers of the King’s African Rifles and their two British officers led to a confrontation with villagers in which 27 Kikuyu were killed. Compensation was paid to the families of the deceased, but no public mention was made of the rapes and the military took active steps to suppress information about the event being released.35 These features of the handling of rape allegations by the military explain why so few were referred to the CSCCC – only nine cases being reported over a six-year period. The majority of these cases, six in all, arose in 1954, four being allegations of gang rape by African soldiers of the King’s African Rifles. These gang rape cases all followed a similar pattern of investigation, each being reported first through the C.I.D. and passed on to the military authorities, who then showed a remarkable reluctance to proceed. Repeated requests from the CSCCC for reports on investigations were ignored, or excuses offered. These investigations lay with the military without resolution for periods greater than six months, and in one case for more than a year. In all four gang rape cases, military investigators ultimately 13 declared that there was insufficient evidence to identify the culprits and so the cases were all dropped without judicial action.36 But a fifth case of gang rape, also from 1954, was handled very differently. This concerned three British soldiers of the Royal Engineers, who were prosecuted by Courts Martial and convicted - each being sentenced to 6 years imprisonment.37 These were the harshest sentences handed down to any person convicted of rape during the Kenyan Emergency, and, in marked contrast to the delays in the four King’s African Rifles gang rape cases, only eight weeks elapsed between the notification of this case and the sentencing of the convicts. Evidently, the Army could move swiftly enough when it wanted to. The remaining military rape case from 1954 was an allegation against an individual soldier of the Kenya Regiment, a white settler. This case was also rapidly processed, there being only 4 weeks between the notification of the case and the Court Martial hearing, at which the soldier was acquitted. The archive documents do not offer us an explanation for the differences in processing the four King’s African Rifles cases and the two concerning British accused from 1954, but there is an obvious racial distinction: those cases involving white soldiers were hurried through the military courts, while those involving black African soldiers were the subject of delay, prevarication, and ultimately deflection. The reason for this almost certainly lies in the contrast between the prevailing attitudes of the locally-recruited King’s African Rifles, whose commanders dismissed rape as a trivial offence, while General Erskine sought to protect the British Army regiments from further reputational damage by ensuring that such cases involving British soldiers were “properly investigated”. It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that the pattern of prosecutions had a racial aspect: rape allegations made 14 against African rank-and-file were processed in a different way than those made against white soldiers of all ranks because different standards of behavior were applied by the military. This view is borne out by the remaining three cases involving military personnel, spanning 1955 to 1957. The first, from May 1955, saw a soldier of the Royal Engineers accused of sexual assault against a child at the town of Thika. Again, this case against a British soldier was rapidly investigated over a period of five weeks and the decision taken not to prosecute because of contradictory evidence. One month later an officer of the Kenya Regiment was committed for Court Martial after another very speedy investigation. He was convicted of indecent assault and discharged with ignominy after 6 months military detention. In the final military case recorded by the Complaints Co-ordinating Committee, from January 1957, an African private from the King’s African Rifles was convicted of the attempted rape of a civilian woman as she was leaving the Langata military camp. This case, having occurred in a non-operational context and in civil jurisdiction, went before the magistrate’s court in Nairobi, where the convict received a custodial sentence of 12 months. Remarkably, this is the only case recorded of the conviction for rape or sexual assault of an African in the military during Kenya’s Emergency. Rape allegations against Kikuyu Home Guard (militia) Home Guard feature prominently in accusations of sexual abuses in oral testimonies and memoirs on the Kenya Emergency, though they were very rarely prosecuted. They fitted the classic pattern described by Raphaelle Branche, in her study of rape in the Algerian war of the 1950s, as having ‘opportunity’ for sexual crimes, but also enjoying a kind of impunity.38 In the first phase of the war, over 1953 15 and 1954, ‘screening’ (interrogation) of civilians, including many women suspects, was conducted by Home Guard, and then, from 1955, they dominated the implementation of the villagisation programme.39 Resettlement in these newly constructed villages brought enhanced security to the rural area and put the Home Guard formally in charge of the entire Kikuyu population – but a population whose gender balance was hugely distorted by the conditions of the Emergency. In the one village studied in depth at the time, Kabare, the population numbered 1,360, but included only 176 adult males.40 In the villagisation process, therefore, the wives and other female relatives of known Mau Mau activists were especially vulnerable. According to Daniel Branch, “abuses committed by the Home Guards were widespread in the villages.”41 In 1954, one district officer candidly admitted the Kikuyu militia under his charge were “genuine out and out thugs, and are probably guilty of far more than is reported.”42 The abduction and sexual assault of women were amongst the crimes of which they were regularly accused. As a senior Police officer conceded in December 1954, the Home Guard had come to possess “the power of life and death.” “Bribery and corruption” were “rife”, he continued, and “acts of murder, rape, arson, robbery and extortion” had been “directed against the local population.”43 Rape cases recorded by the CSCCC in which the accused were members of the colonial administration, including Home Guard, came under civil jurisdiction so were not subject to Courts Martial. The administrative procedures adopted for processing these civil cases allowed considerable scope for delay, deflection and even the suppression of investigations. Inordinate delays in gathering evidence were common, and even where criminal investigations had been fully carried out by the police the CSCCC was empowered to ask that a further “preliminary investigation” (PI) be 16 conducted in order to establish whether there was a case to answer. A PI might be conducted by a Resident Magistrate if one were available, but in most locations where offences took place the only persons holding magisterial powers were those European administrative officers of the rank of District Officer and District Commissioner. This conflation of legal and administrative roles was a critical element in the conduct of such investigations. European officers placed in charge of Home Guard posts, many of whom were on service with the military (notably the Kenya Regiment), were also given the rank of District Officer and so held the powers of a magistrate, even though they were unlikely to have had any training in this capacity.44 In practice, therefore, PIs were frequently conducted by colleagues of the accused, or even by their commanding officers: for example, the District Officer commanding a Home Guard post might oversee the PI into an accusation against his own Home Guard militiamen. While some members of the colonial administration reported offences and cooperated in these investigations, the prevailing view was that such prosecutions were harmful to the morale of the security services and undermined the counter-insurgency campaign, especially amongst African auxiliaries.45 Not surprisingly, then, in many cases the delays and lack of clear evidence adduced by the PI appeared to have been more helpful to the accused than to the prosecution. In rape cases listed by the CSCCC, PI investigators frequently claimed that witnesses could not be found, that statements gathered were contradictory and therefore unlikely to support conviction, that culprits could not be satisfactorily identified, or that they could not obtain medical evidence to support the allegations. Any one of these failings might be held as a suitable reason to dismiss the case without going to court. In the worst cases, there were proven examples of malicious interference with PIs, 17 and of perjury committed by witnesses to protect the accused from prosecution and conviction.46 The influence that district administrators held over PIs made it more difficult for rape cases to be brought against Kikuyu Home Guard than any other arm of the security services. Among the 56 rape cases reported in the papers of the CSCCC, only ten concern allegations against Kikuyu Home Guard. Political considerations also played a significant role in determining how these cases were handled, and may partly explain why so few appear in the minutes of the Committee. An amnesty brought into force by decree of the Governor, Evelyn Baring, in January 1955, halted enquiries into allegations made against members of the colonial administration that were then under investigation.47 Cases against Home Guard recorded by the CSCCC therefore exclude any from 1954, a year in which the battle between Home Guard and Mau Mau supporters in the Central Province was at its peak and when we might have expected a bulge in allegations of all kinds of abuse. Instead, the cases mentioned by the CSCCC cluster in a less active period, between March 1955 and the early months of 1957, when Home Guard numbers are being reduced and greater discipline is being brought to bear on the militia. Political influence can also be seen in the outcome of prosecutions of Home Guard. In two cases from early 1955, in the months just following the amnesty and during a period when the colonial authorities were especially keen to be seen to act against such offences, those convicted were sentenced to five and six years imprisonment respectively, both with hard labour. Other than the gang rape case against the three British soldiers of the Royal Engineers, these two convictions carried the harshest sentences of any rape cases during the Emergency.48 18  It is also significant that in five of the ten cases listed against Home Guard the accused were Headmen. These African officials, appointed under Chiefs in order to manage the affairs of locations and sub-locations, were crucial actors in the battle against the Mau Mau passive wing, giving leadership to loyalist communities and acting as commanders of Home Guard units. Although there were many notable cases of proven abuse by these Headmen,49 government officials feared that Mau Mau supporters deliberately targeted such men, and that allegations made against them might be malicious. It was therefore usual for British colonial officials to “rally round” any Headman accused of abuse, and in such cases the colonial government paid for their legal defence – something that Attorney General Eric Griffiths-Jones argued against but failed to prevent.50 The pursuit of allegations against African Headmen may therefore have reflected the determination of Mau Mau’s passive wing to expose the abuses of such people, but the fact that all five of these allegations came to court suggests that district officials had been unable, or unwilling, to mobilise to thwart the charges. Victims of rape at the hands of Home Guard may therefore have faced many obstacles in bringing case to official notice, as well as having many reasons to keep silent. For the most part, Home Guard operated amongst their own community, and any assailant would be likely to be known to their victim. What we know about other abuses carried out in Home Guard posts, such as beatings and extortion, strongly suggests that these actions were perceived as punishments to be deservedly inflicted upon rebels and their supporters. For the vast majority of victims, there could have seemed little point in pursuing legal remedies in these circumstances. Rapists amongst Home Guard may have behaved opportunistically in regard to the wives, daughters and sisters of known Mau Mau activists, but they were also inflicting punishment upon an 19 intimate enemy and at the same time marking the exclusion of that person and their family from the accepted norms of Kikuyu social life: Mau Mau were outcasts who forfeited their property and their rights. Even when punishment was opportunistic, it was also strategic.51 It is also possible that the Kikuyu families of the victims of rape at the hands of Kikuyu Home Guard may have viewed social remedies as a preferred alternative to legal procedures. In her work on rape in twentieth century African conflicts, Meredith Turshen contends that rape is most often seen as an economic rather than a moral matter and that its settlement usually requires compensatory payments to the wider family of the victim.52 Though Brett Shadle has provided compelling evidence from another part of Kenya, Gusiiland, to indicate that this was not invariably true even within colonial Kenya,53 the balance of evidence for the Kikuyu areas supports Turshen’s interpretation. Historian Tabitha Kanogo describes rape and other forms of sexual assault as having known and well understood social remedies within Kikuyu society, imposed through community sanction against those who infringed the accepted norms.54 Claire Robertson also concludes that rape was considered above all a violation of property among Kikuyu in colonial times.55 As Kanogo explains, when a rape occurred “it was the clan that was perceived to be the aggrieved party to be appeased, for the woman had no individual standing in the matter, cultural or legal.”56 Though this began to change with the expansion of colonial justice networks, especially from the 1940s onwards, by the 1950s social remedies, in the form of a tariff of compensation payable by those culpable to the family of the victim, still remained open to any Kikuyu. The existence of accepted social remedies in cases of rape may have deterred victims from seeking legal redress through the courts, but the breakdown of social 20 order that the Emergency brought to the Kikuyu areas surely made it unlikely that such sanctions could be enforced, least of all if the victims of the abuse were perceived to be rebels and therefore outcasts. This is not a matter to which the archival documents speak, but it is clearly an issue that other research might address in deepening our understanding of the response to rape and other sexual crimes in colonial central Kenya. Rape allegations against police The majority of rape cases recorded by the CSCCC concerned allegations against the various branches of the police – 23 cases against the Kenya Police, three cases against Kenya Police Reservists, and six cases against Tribal Police. With the exception of the Tribal Police, who were normally recruited and worked in their home areas, under the control of the local African Chief, the police in 1950s Kenya were strangers to the communities whom they worked amongst. The Emergency had seen a dramatic and rapid increase in the presence of the Kenya Police in the Kikuyu areas of Central Province. On the eve of the rebellion, in October 1952, there had been only four police stations in all of the Kikuyu areas. Fifteen months later, by the end of 1953, there were over 60 police stations here, every location having at least one police post and many having two. Over this same period, 3,200 additional Africans were recruited into the Kenya Police, but as it was considered ‘too risky to attempt to recruit Kikuyu’ these reinforcements were all drawn from other ethnic groups. By December 1953, of 9,850 Africans in the Kenya Police only 178 were Kikuyu.57 For the Kikuyu population, the Kenya Police therefore appeared as an alien army of occupation - militarized, heavily armed and based in newly constructed fortified posts dotted throughout the countryside. A commission set up to look at the 21 impact of the rapid expansion of the force commented in 1953, that the Kenya Police had been trained ‘to act as squads of men operating in hostile surroundings where their first instinct is to use their rifles’.58 By design, this was a very intrusive and aggressive kind of policing, sculpted to the purposes of wartime Kenya. The character of the rape cases brought against the police is remarkably consistent. Nearly all these alleged assaults occurred within a police station, or in police vehicles, the women having been apprehended on some minor offence or on suspicion. The majority of the allegations concerned rape by two or three police officers together – 12 of the 26 cases concerning Kenya Police and Kenya Police Reserve had a lone assailant, 14 having multiple perpetrators. In only two cases with a single assailant was a conviction achieved, these cases most often being thrown out at the PI because of contradictory evidence and the lack of independent witnesses. The circumstances of police work during the Emergency created many opportunities for the sexual abuse of women, groups of police often having custody of single females in places of confinement and without other witnesses present. The allegation of a Kikuyu woman, arrested in the Eastlands area of Nairobi in April 1957 and taken to the police station in the industrial area, is typical of these cases. She was questioned and then detained in a cell overnight, whereupon the one police officer on night duty at the station entered her cell and forcibly raped her. Without medical evidence to substantiate her claims, and with no other witnesses to the offence, in the face of the police constable’s outright denials the PI found there to be “insufficient evidence” to merit a trial. The CSCCC therefore approved that the case be dismissed. Many cases from the rural areas were similar. A woman taken in for questioning by two police constables near Gathithi village in Nyeri district, for example, alleged that she was raped in the back of the police Landrover before being returned to her home. 22 Despite picking out one of her assailants in an identification parade, the case was dismissed because of the lack of corroboratory evidence. In the one allegation brought against two European police officers, accused of raping two Kikuyu women whilst they were in custody at Githuro Police Station in October 1956, the case came to trial and the accused were acquitted. Beyond this one case involving white officers, there is no record of the ethnicity of the police officers against whom rape allegations were made, but the low numbers of Kikuyu in the Kenya Police indicates that the accused men were likely to be strangers to the local Kikuyu communities. Kikuyu victims had no obvious means to seek a social remedy for rape committed by persons of another ethnicity, so a formal complaint aimed at the colonial courts was more likely against an assailant from the police force than it was in the case of rape by a member of the Kikuyu Home Guard. The ‘stranger’ factor may then explain the larger number of formal legal allegations recorded against police, but other trends are more clearly apparent in the sample of cases we have from the CSCCC. Of the 32 allegations brought against members of the three police services, 16 (50%) were dismissed without coming to trial, nine resulted in convictions, there were 6 acquittals and one accused was sent for trial but declared insane. The tactics of delay and deflection described for military and Home Guard allegations were also evident in these cases. From such a small sample it is difficult to draw general conclusions, but it must be noted that over time a smaller proportion of rape allegations against police came before the courts – of the 14 allegations recorded for 1955 and 1956, eleven went to trial, while from 1957 to 1959 only three out of 14 alleged assaults were prosecuted. The same temporal shift is evident in convictions: From January 1956 to November 1959 the CSCCC recorded 16 cases against Kenya Police and Kenya Police Reserve, only one of which resulted 23 in a conviction. The ten cases recorded up to December 1955 saw six convictions. There seems therefore to have been a greater reluctance to prosecute over time, and a significant reduction in convictions and sentencing, even allowing for the change to the law on rape introduced in December 1955. These trends appear to reflect the ebb and flow of the war itself. As was the case with accusations against Home Guard, several cases against police officers from 1954 were set aside following the Governor’s amnesty of January 1955. But whereas Home Guard numbers declined after mid-1955, and we see a reduction in cases involving them, the heavy Kenya Police presence in the Kikuyu areas remained steady through to the end of 1959. While allegations against Home Guard fall away from 1956, those against the police continue unabated. Similarly, we see a determination to enforce stronger discipline on the police following the amnesty of January 1955, with six cases out of the seven allegations made that year coming to trial and all ending in conviction. This year also sees the heaviest sentencing – as was also the case with Home Guard cases. Decisions to prosecute, and even the behaviour of the courts in handing down sentences in rape cases, were therefore strongly influence but by the political fluctuations of the conflict. DISCUSSION - RAPE IN WARTIME After many years of turning a blind eye to sexual crimes in wartime, over the past decade historians have rediscovered the prevalence and significance of rape as a weapon of war. This reawakening has owed much to the shift in international law that has seen mechanisms developed in international courts for the prosecution of rape as a specific war crime,59 particularly in response to the use of sexual assaults in the 24 Balkans wars of the 1990s,60 and in the Rwanda genocide and the Congo wars that it gave rise to from 1994.61 Half a century earlier, at the end of World War II, there had been a similar awareness of rape in wartime, but an apparent reluctance to prosecute for sexual crimes. In April 1946, when the International Military Tribunal for the Far East documented the infamous “Rape of Nanking” of December 1937, estimating that some 20,000 women had been the victims of systematic military rapes by the Japanese army, the senior officers held responsible were charged for a generality of alleged acts “carried out in violation of recognized customs and conventions of war . . .[including] mass murder, rape, . . . and other barbaric cruelties,” and not for specific sexual crimes.62 The 1949 Geneva Convention was also explicit in enumerating rape as a distinct violation, Article 27 stating that women are “protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault,”63 but this was seldom treated discretely by lawyers in prosecuting war crimes over the following years until the 1990s. The reluctance to prosecute rape in Kenya in the 1950s was not, then, because of a lack of awareness of the significance of rape in wartime. As Susan Brownmiller’s reminds us in her powerful commentary on the instrumental character of rape in the Pakistan army’s invasion of Bangladesh in 1971, where an estimated 300,000 civilian women were raped by soldiers,64 contemporary evidence on rape in conflicts from the twentieth century is not difficult to come by: very often, we have known about it at the time. In September 1945, Time Magazine had candidly told its readers that in the Allied assault on Berlin “Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping … we too are considered an army of rapists.”65 Such “awkward’ facts were largely ignored after 1945, despite the gradual emergence 25 of a plethora of biographies and memoirs of victims and participants who described their experience of sexual crimes at the hands of one or other army in Europe during the 1940s.66 The same was true in Kenya in the years following the end of the Emergency in 1960. Returning to testimonies about sexual crimes in wartime in more recent years, and combining them with documentary evidence from wartime archives, historians have now begun to compile a startling account of the full extent and character of rape in modern wartime. The story from the final phase of World War II in Europe has been especially grisly. We now have detailed studies of the prosecutions of Wehrmacht officers for sexual offences, including rapes, and harrowing accounts of the systematic rape of Jewish women before their murders.67 The atrocious behaviour of the German army and their allies against the ‘lesser races’ on the eastern front has long been understood, but the archives have revealed a chilling story of the systematic manner in which rape was used as a reprisal punishment by the Russian army as they advanced on Berlin.68 The sexual crimes of the Allied armies on the Western front have also now been examined in depth, most notably in criminologist J. Robert Lilly’s forensic account of the prosecutions of some of those responsible for the rapes of an estimated 14,000 civilian women by members of the US Army in Western Europe between 1942 and 1945.69 In all of these conflicts there was some element of contemporaneous investigation and prosecution of rape cases, but, as in Kenya, this was often highly selective and partial. Prosecutions also tended to reflect racial and status sensibilities. Wehrmacht prosecutions were most obviously determined by such factors, but Lilly’s account of the racial pattern of prosecutions and sentencing of rapists within the US Army indicates the black soldiers were more likely to feel the full force of the law 26 than their white counterparts, and that rapes of German women were less likely to be prosecuted than those of women of Allied nationalities. While the evidence from Kenya indicates that the colonial authorities largely sought to avoid the prosecution of rape cases, and that they tended to view rape as an inevitable and largely inconsequential effect of the conflict, the military nonetheless pursued white soldiers more than black …… HERE HERE HERE HERE ……. Rape accusations involving Europeans were treated differently than those involving Africans, and there is the implication in these archival materials that many colonial officials thought rape amongst Africans to be a matter that did not merit their serious investigation. This assertion is supported by the dismissal of so many cases and the moderate sentences that were handed down to those few who were convicted of rapes. Only when the political circumstances of the war dictated it did the colonial state show greater willingness to prosecute and did sentences become harsher – most notably in the months following the Governor’s amnesty of January 1955. Race mattered, then, but not perhaps in the most obvious way where the British Army was concerned. We cannot know whether there were many cases of rape perpetrated by white security services personnel that are not recorded in these archives, but we have seen a clear racial distinction in the way that the military treated cases involving British soldiers as compared to African soldiers. Higher standards of behaviour were demanded of British soldiers and so prosecutions were mounted through Courts Martial, while allegations against soldiers of the King’s African Rifles were deflected and court hearings avoided. This reflected a common and long-held assumption among the British in Kenya that Africans did not consider rape a serious crime, a view that was reiterated by senior judges in Kenya during the 1950s.70 27 America seems to have suffered from a peculiarly deep amnesia when it comes to rapes by the US Army, as the example of the Vietnam war further indicates. Gina Weaver’s 2010 monograph, Ideologies of Forgetting, is the first detailed examination of rape in the Vietnam war.71 Alarmed by America silence over these sexual crimes, Weaver located ‘volumes of testimony’ on ‘America’s dirty secret’, including the ‘horrific and detailed accounts of sexual violence’ from US Army veterans recorded in the Winter Soldier Investigation of January 1971 and logged on the Congressional record later that year. 72 As journalist and historian Nick Turse has observed, America has known these things all along: so why, then, has it taken 40 years for them to be written about and discussed?73 This silence extends beyond the USA and the Vietnam War and into the other wars of decolonization between 1945 and 1970, where counter-insurgencies were fought against guerrilla rebels by French, British, Portuguese and Dutch armies.74 The place of sexual crimes in these wars of has yet to be scrutinized, although a beginning has been made for Algeria. Here Raphaelle Branche has gathered the limited evidence available from French archive sources. In the Algerian war of the 1950s, rape was not a systematic element of French counter-insurgency, she argues, but was nonetheless a regular occurrence.75 Describing rape as ‘opportunistic’, Branche goes on the elaborate the many contexts in which such ‘opportunities’ were presented – especially in respect of female suspects taken in for questioning, or arrested and held in detention. When instances of rape came to the attention of the French authorities, they generally took little interest, treating the rape of an Algerian woman as an immaterial event. Status and race were thus determinant factors in this European response, and this has of course limited the ‘visibility’ of rape in the archive. 28  Branche’s findings are drawn from what she admits to be a very fragmentary and limited body of sources, key documents dealing with prosecutions in Algeria, and with specific notorious cases reported at the time, having been withheld by the French authorities.76 The recent release of archival documentation from Kenya, brought to public notice by the human rights claims now going through the British courts arising from the Mau Mau rebellion, has revealed new evidence on the British counter- insurgency there that allows a closer analysis of rape than has been possible in the Algerian case. Known collectively as the Hanslope Disclosure, and covering 36 other former British colonies as well as Kenya,77 this body of material (nearly 9,000 files in all) includes approximately 500 files on the administration of colonial Kenya during the 1950s. A significant number of these files relate specifically to the investigation and prosecution of allegations against the security forces between 1953 and 1959, including cases of rape and sexual crimes.78 CONCLUDING PARAS, TIE UP ALGERIA FINDINGS WITH KENYA CASES AND MAKE POINTS RE>  OPPORTUNISTIC RAPE (NOT SYSTEMIC)  RELUCTANCE OF STATE TO HEAR CASES  IMPORTANCE OF RACE AND RANK ADDITIONAL TEXT >>>>>>> 29 The fact of rape in Kenya’s rebellion of the 1950s is undeniable, but even the cases revealed through the Hanslope Disclosure and listed in the minutes of the Complaints Co-ordinating Committee can give us no understanding of its true extent or impact. We can, however, learn something about the reaction of the colonial state to rape accusations against the security forces. To what extent, then, did the conditions of war change attitudes to rape and its prosecution in 1950s Kenya? In their studies of the apparent epidemic of rape in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the 1990s, Baaz and Stern have discussed the ways in which a wide-scale desensitization from violence creates a sense of wartime impunity. They assert that the roots of wartime rape lie in peacetime: it is the complex entanglement of social orders and rules broken down by mass instability and violence that can lead to a spread of rape in times of conflict.79 This argument has resonance with the Kenyan case, particularly in relation to the role of the Home Guard and the police – both forces through which the colonial state conscripted large numbers of civilians into acts of combat and violence, then seeing the need to “protect” them from prosecutions for abuses in order to preserve their morale and maintain the capacity of the state to govern. The glaring paradox of the Kenya case is that rapes should have been prosecuted at all during the Mau Mau rebellion. Would it not have been easier for colonial officials simply to ensure that all such cases were prevented from coming to court? The practices reported by the Complaints Co-ordinating Committee indicate that some investigations and prosecutions were indeed obstructed, but it is important to remember that the colonial government in Nairobi was held to account by the British parliament and that it was largely in response to pressures and questions from that quarter that led the administration in Kenya to take greater care in monitoring 30 those cases of complaint that were raised against security personnel. Seen in this context, attenots to manipulate the outcome of allegations so as to limit the damage to the security services is not surprising, and echoes British behaviour in regard to prosecutions in other conflicts. Arujunan Narayanan’s study of minor war crimes hearings in Malaya and Singapore in 1946-47, for example, highlights the perceived bias of British-led tribunals, doling out light punishment to perpetrators of both sexual and other forms of violence against Asian victims, while issuing heavy sentences in cases where there were Anglo victims. 80 And L. Robert Lilly’s study of GI rapes in Western Europe between 1942 and 1945 also reveals the importance of race and status in the outcome of prosecutions: a disproportionate number of black GIs were prosecuted by the US military courts, and the received relatively harsher sentences than did white soldiers when convicted.81 31 32 1 Judgment, Mr Justice McCombe, High Court of Justice (Queens Bench), Case HQ09X02666, Ndiku Mutua et al v The Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 5 October 2012. 2 Summarized from David M. Anderson, “Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 39 (2011), 699- 716. Copies of the full claimant statements presented to the Court and are available on the Leigh Day website: www.leighday.co.uk. 3 Wambui Waiyaki Otieno, Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 81-90. 4 Karari Njama and Donald L. Barnett, Mau Mau from Within (London: MacGibbon & Kee Ltd, 1966), 128. 5 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1972), 132. 6 Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 220-1 and 226-7 for sexual torture within detention camps and prisons; 244-5, 257 and 269-71 for rape by Kikuyu Home Guard; and 247-8, 252, 254 and 256-7 for rape by other arms of the security services, including the British Army. 7 Tony Badger, Mandy Banton, Will ???? 8 Amongst the most important files relating to sexual crimes are Hanslope Disclosure [HD] SEC 5 Box 226, HD CAB 19/4 Vol I, HD CAB 19/4 Vol II, HD AA 45/55/2A, and HD AA 45/26/2A Vol I. These files are now in the process of being released at The National Archive, Kew, under the category ‘Migrated Archives’. 9 Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago Press, 2007); Nesta H. Wells, “Sexual offences as seen by a woman police surgeon”, British Medical Journal, 6 December 1958, 1404-1408, for patterns of offending and prosecution in Manchester between 1927 and 1954. 10 David M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London & New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, WW Norton, 2005); Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The best textbook account is Wunyabari Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 11 John Blacker, “The demography of Mau Mau: fertility and mortality in Kenya in the 1950s – a demographers view,” African Affairs 106 (2007), 205-27. The official figures are to be found at Colony & Protectorate of Kenya, The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey (Corfield Report) (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1960), appendix H. 12 David M. Anderson, “British abuse and torture in Kenya's counter-insurgency, 1952–1960”, Small Wars & Insurgencies 23 (2012), 700-719 13 Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 8-29; Huw Bennett, “Soldiers in the court room: he British Army’s part in the Kenya Emergency under the legal spotlight,” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 39 (2011), 717-30. 14 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 85 15 Anthony Clayton, Counter-insurgency in Kenya, 1952-60 (Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers, 1976), 3-13, 42-52; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 85. 16 Figures collated from Kenya National Archive, Nairobi [KNA], file MAA/7/761. 17 Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counter-insurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Daniel Branch, ‘The enemy within: loyalists and the war against Mau Mau in Kenya’, Journal of African History 48 (2007), 291-316. 18 HD SEC 5 Box 226, correspondence between May 1953 and September 1954. 19 HD AA 45-55-2A, A.C. Small (District Commissioner, Nairobi) to Officer in charge, Nairobi Extra- Provincial District, 27 January 1955, and related correspondence. 20 HD AA 45/55/2/5A 21 HD CAB 19/4 vol I, f62, Lt Col Bevan to Cabinet Office, London, 17 December 1954. 22 The committee met bi-weekly until January 1955, then monthly until March 1958, and then irregularly until November 1959. The papers are in HD CAB 19/4 vols I and II. See also Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 123-4. 23 All serious cases, including murders and sexual assaults, were supposed to be formally notified to the police, and would then be passed to C.I.D. But we know from the resignation of the Commissioner of Police, Arthur Young, in December 1954, that this requirement was not being enforced, and that administration officers were in some instances obstructing C.I.D. enquiries. See Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, ???-???, and from the Hanslope Disclosure, HD ????????. 24 The circulation list for the papers appears at the end of each set of minutes. 25 These are listed sequentially in the minutes of meetings as cases are reported: see HD CAB 19/4/ vols I and II. Aside from the 56 cases recorded in the minutes, two other cases for which there is no further evidence are listed in HD AA 45/55/2A, vol I, folios 1-5, Governor Evelyn Baring to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 2 February 1956. 26 David M. Anderson, ‘ Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 27 Laws of Kenya 1948, Penal Code Chapter XV, pp. 218-219. 28 Kenya Gazette; Kenya Hansard [CHECK DETAILS]; Shadle, ‘Rape in the courts of Gusiiland’, African Studies Review 51, no. 2 (September 2008), 27-50.?? 29 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, ?? 30 HD ADM 35/2/11/1/5A, ‘Political Intelligence Report – November 1952, Nairobi District, 4 December 1952’ 31 HD ADM 35/2/11/3/1A, ‘Laikipia Special Intelligence Report, 15 March 1953’. 32 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 259. For the full text of Erskine’s statement, see TNA CO 822/474. 33 The point is made by Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 206, drawing upon HD CO 968/424, War Office to Rogers (Colonial Office), 12 September 1953. 34 TNA WO 32/31720, MacLean Court of Inquiry Proceedings, 316. 35 Refs to CHUKA 36 HD CAB 19/4 Vol I, minutes of meetings of CSCCC, between 26 July 1954 and September 1955. 37 HD CAB 19/4 Vol I, minutes of CSCCC, from 6 September to 6 November. 38 Branche, “Des Viols Pendant”, 126 39 M.P.K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country: A Study in Government Policy (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1967); Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, reports many abuses in the villagisation programme. See also Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, 107-116. 40 KNA DC/EBU/9/1, G. Sluiter, ‘A study of Kabare Village in the Embu District’, May 1956. 41 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, 109-110. 42 KNA DC/KBU/2/1, DO Gatundu, ‘Gatundu District Handing Over Report’, 6 September 1954, 11. 43 HD AA 45-55-2-2A, K.P. Hadingham (Asst Commissioner of Police, Nyeri) to Provincial Commissioner, Central Province, 14 December 1954. 44 HD ????? fro discussion of the problems this generated. 45 Anderson, ‘Torture’; Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 210-11 46 Ref to Richmond and other interference …. 47 Amnesty ….. 48 HD CAB 19/4 vols I and II 49 Ruthagathi is the most infamous example, Anderson, Histories of the Hanged ….. 50 Griffiths-Jones opposing legal defence….. 51 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau 52 Meredith Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape: An Analysis of Systematic Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women During Armed Conflict in Africa,” in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, ed. C. O. N. Moser and F. C. Clark (London: Zed Books, 2001), 55–68. 53 Brett Shadle, “Rape in the Courts of Gusiiland, Kenya, 1940s-1960s,” African Studies Review 51, no. 2 (September 2008): .” 54 Tabitha Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1950 (Oxford; James Currey, 2005), 55-64. 55 Claire Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890- 1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 56 Kanogo, African Womanhood, 55. 57 David Throup, ‘Crime, politics and the police in colonial Kenya, 1939-63’, in David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917- 65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 141 58 S.J. Baker and W.A. Muller, Report of the Kenya Police Commission, 1953 (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1953), 6-7. 59 Jocelyn Campanaro, “Women, war and international law: the historical treatment of gender-based war crimes,” Geo. LJ 89 (2000), 2557-79, and M. Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Laws of War (Edison: transaction Publishers, 1999). See also, Neil Mitchell, Agents of Atrocity: Leaders, Followers, and the Violations of Human Rights during Civil War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); A. Hoover Green, “Statistical evidence of sexual violence in international court settings,” in Morten Bergsmo, Alf Butenschon Skre & Elisabeth J. Wood (eds), Understanding and Proving International Sex Crimes (Oslo: Torkel Opsahl Academic Epublisher, 2012), 294-314. 60 T. A. Salzman, “Rape camps as a means of ethnic cleansing: religious, cultural, and ethical responses to rape victims in the former Yugoslavia,” Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998), 348-78; Human Rights Watch, Bosnia-Hercegovinia, “A Closed, Dark Place”: Past and Present Human Rights Abuses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998); Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovinia and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 61 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwanda Genocide and its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996); Human Rights Watch, Soldiers Who Rape, Commanders Who Condone: Sexual Violence and Military Reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009); Maria Baaz & Maria Stern, The Complexity of Violence: a Critical Analysis of Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2010); Maria Baaz and Maria Stern, “Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC),” (DRC),” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2009): 495–518 International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009), 495-518; C. Bijleveld, A. Morssinkhof & A. Smeulers, “Counting the countless: rape victimization during the Rwanda genocide,” International Criminal Justice Review 19 (2009), 208-224. Sierra Leone has also become an important case - see Zoe Marks, “Sexual violence in the Sierra Leone civil war: ‘virgination’, rape and marriage,” African Affairs in press (2013); and Dara K. Cohen, “Explaining sexual violence during civil war,” unpublished doctoral thesis, Stanford University, 2010. 62 Campanaro, “Women, War, and International Law," 2563. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1997); Karen Parker and Jennifer F Chew, "Compensation for Japans' World War II War-Rape Victims," Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 17 (1993), 497-549, discuss the delay in recognition for these victims. On Japanese institutionalised prostitution, see Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women (New York: Columbia University Press, expanded 2nd edition, 2002); George L. Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1997). 63 Darren Anne Nebesar, “Gender-Based Violence as a Weapon of War,” University of California Davis Journal of International Law and Policy 4, no. 2 (1998), 160. 64 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975): 14. For the deeper complexities of the Bangladeshi case, see Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘Denunciatory practices and the constitutive role of collaboration in the Bangladesh War’, in Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy and the Ethics of State-building, eds Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2009), 48-67. 65 Time Magazine, 17 September 1945, quoted in L. Robert Lilly, Taken By Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xxiii. 66 For an excellent introduction to such sources for World War II in Europe, see Jeffrey Burds, “Sexual violence in Europe in World War II, 1939-1945,” Politics & Society 37 (2009), 35-73. 67 Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt: Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militargerichten 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2004); Birgit Beck, “Rape: the military trials of sexual crimes committed by soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939-44,” in Karen Hagemann & Stefanie Schuler- Springorum, Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany (New York & Oxford; Berg, 2002); Birgit Beck, “Sexual violence and its prosecution: Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht,” in Roger Clickering (ed), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Patricia Szobar, “Telling sexual stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: race defilement in Germany, 1933-1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (2002), 131-63. 68 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945- 1949 (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1995); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). German sources are extensively used by Wendy Jo Gerjejanssen, “Victims, heroes, survivors: sexual violence on the eastern front during World War II,” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Minnesota, 2004). 69 J. Robert Lilly, Taken By Force, passim. See also: Atina Grossmann, “A question of silence: the rape of German women by occupation soldiers,” in Robert Moeller (ed), West Germany Under Reconstruction: Politics, Society and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 33-52; Perry Biddiscombe, “Dangerous liaisons: the anti-fraternization movement in the US occupied zones of Germany and Austria, 1945-48,” Journal of Social History 34 (2001), 611-47. 70 Brett Shadle, “Rape in the Courts of Gusiiland”, 33 71 Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) 72 Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting, quotes at xii, xiv, and 5. For the Winter Soldier Investigation Testimony, go to http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.htm1. 73 Nick Turse, ‘Rape was rampant during the Vietnam war. why doesn’t US history remember this?’, Mother Jones, 19 March 2013 (accessed at http://www.motherjones.com , 21 March 2013). See also his revisionist history, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York; Metropolitan Books, 2013). 74 For the most insightful surveys, see David French The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945- 1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Martin Evans; Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2012); Portugal; Dutch…. 75 Raphaëlle Branche, “Des Viols Pendant La Guerre d’Algérie,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue D’histoire 75, no. 3 (2002), 123-32. 76 Branche, “Des Viols Pendant”, 126-7; Jean-Clement Martin, “Violences sexuelles, etude des archives, pratiques del’histoire”, Annales HSS, 3 (1996), 643-61. 77 Tony Badger, Mandy Banton, Will ???? 78 Amongst the most important files relating to sexual crimes are Hanslope Disclosure [HD] SEC 5 Box 226, HD CAB 19/4 Vol I, HD CAB 19/4 Vol II, HD AA 45/55/2A, and HD AA 45/26/2A Vol I. These files are now in the process of being released at The National Archive, Kew, under the category ‘Migrated Archives’. 79 Maria Baaz and Maria Stern, “Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC),” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2009): 495–518.Baaz and Stern, 80 Arujunan Narayanan, "Second World War Japanese Atrocities and British Minor War Crimes Trials: the Issue of Fair Trial in Four Selected British Minor War Crimes Trials in Malaya and Singapore in 1946-1947," PhD Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2003. 81 Lilly, Taken by Force