The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
At home with the Mau Mau
In his magnificent memoir of childhood in British Kenya, Nicholas Rankin dwells on the violence of the civil war – and asks whether he’s guilty himself
TRAPPED IN HISTORY: KENYA, MAU MAU AND ME by Nicholas Rankin
576pp, Faber, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99
Sixty years ago this month, the Union Flag came down in Kenya for the last time. On its way up the pole moments later, the Kenyan flag was momentarily stuck. Prince Philip – representing Elizabeth II – “leaned across to [new prime minister Jomo] Kenyatta, smiling. ‘Do you want to change your mind?’”
There can’t be many British Kenyans still around from those days, but Nicholas Rankin, who relates this tale, is one. He was a teenager when Kenya won its freedom, and his family returned to England soon afterwards; yet part of him always remained mentally in east Africa.
Kenya has spawned more British colonial memoirs than any other part of Africa, but the majority are dull and clumsily written. Trapped in History stands head and shoulders above the pack. The book is only tangentially about Rankin and his family: it’s mostly a quiet history of the British presence in Kenya, followed by a gripping account of the Mau Mau years, when guerrilla fighters (dominated by Kikuyu) rose up against the colonial administration, and a state of emergency was declared that lasted from 1952 until 1960.
For the Mau Mau – formally known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army – land was among the main issues. The taxes on the big European-owned farms in the highlands paid for schools and hospitals; the Mau Mau wanted to see those farms broken up so that everyone could have a patch of ground to call their own. Terrible things were done by both sides, before the Mau Mau admitted defeat. Under the new governments of Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, they
were banned for the next 40 years.
That is the background against which Rankin tells his story. Like many British people in Kenya, he is in two minds about what happened. Rankin himself grew up supporting the British against the atrocities committed by the Mau Mau. Yet in later life, he began to think again. Should he feel colonial guilt about what had happened, as many now profess? And if so, how much?
He occasionally goes into too much detail about his childhood, but he’s highly adept at making real human beings of those involved. He provides an entertaining picture, for instance, of a delegation of African Kenyans in culture-shock as
they saw London traffic and Underground escalators for the first time – a shock shared by white colonial children making the same journey.
A footnote. Among the Mau Mau fighters who emerged from hideouts to join Kenya’s independence celebrations was a group of chancers who’d played no part. They had, Rankin relates, slipped into the forest for a few weeks, in order to reappear as heroes in due course. Today, the numbers of claimants appear to be growing, as pressure is put on the British government to continue offering compensation. This situation should be handled with care if those with true grievances are not to be dispossessed.