Colonial Office (United Kingdom)

The Colonial Office was the department of the UK government responsible for the administration of Britain’s overseas colonies from the early nineteenth century until 1966, when its functions were absorbed into the Commonwealth Office (later merged into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). Among the territories it governed was colonial Kenya, where the Office directed the government’s response to the 1952–1960 Mau Mau uprising, known officially as the Kenya Emergency.

Role in Documented Cases

The Colonial Office’s administration of Kenya during the Emergency is examined in this archive’s file on Mau Mau Detention and Torture. Colonial authorities detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu suspected of supporting the insurgency in a network of camps that came to be known as “the Pipeline.” Drawing on archival and testimonial evidence, historians Caroline Elkins and David Anderson documented systematic beatings, forced labor, and, in numerous cases, torture and killings within these camps, carried out or permitted by colonial officials and settler-recruited security forces.

Accountability

Between 2009 and 2013, a group of elderly Kenyan claimants brought Mutua and Others v Foreign and Commonwealth Office before the UK High Court. Disclosure in that case revealed the existence of the “migrated archives” — thousands of colonial-era files that had been secretly removed from Kenya and other colonies at the time of independence and held, undisclosed, at a Foreign Office facility rather than transferred to the National Archives as required by law. In June 2013, Foreign Secretary William Hague announced a settlement of £19.9 million to 5,228 claimants and stated the government’s “sincere regret” that Kenyans had suffered torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The settlement and statement stopped short of a full legal admission of systemic liability, and no individual official was prosecuted for the abuses documented in the case.

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