The British colonial administration in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 operated a network of detention camps so vast and so deliberately brutal that a Harvard historian described the system as a Kenyan gulag, and the governor who designed it was subsequently knighted by the British Crown.
Sir Evelyn Baring, appointed Governor of Kenya in 1952, constructed the detention pipeline that would eventually process an estimated 1.5 million Kikuyu people through a tiered system of camps, enclosed villages, and labor sites organized around a psychological breaking program that colonial administrators called the dilution technique. The technique, designed by Terence Gavaghan and authorized at gubernatorial level, involved systematic beating, forced labor, and sexual humiliation applied in escalating intensity until detainees signed loyalty oaths renouncing the Mau Mau movement. Administrators who designed and implemented it wrote about its mechanics in internal memoranda with the clinical detachment of people documenting an administrative procedure rather than a torture program.
The camp at Hola became the site of the system's most documented single atrocity in March 1959, when British colonial officers ordered the beating of 88 detainees who had refused to perform forced labor. Eleven men were beaten to death. The colonial administration's initial response was to claim the men had died from drinking contaminated water, a fabrication that collapsed when a camp officer reported the truth to investigators. The Hola massacre reached the British Parliament and generated the most significant metropolitan debate about Kenya's detention system during the entire emergency period, yet produced no criminal prosecution of any officer involved.
Caroline Elkins, whose 2005 work Britain's Gulag drew on survivor testimony and partially declassified colonial records, estimated the death toll inside the detention system at potentially over 100,000 people. The British government disputed her figures while simultaneously working through legal channels between 2011 and 2013 to prevent the release of colonial documents that its own lawyers described internally as potentially embarrassing. Those documents, known as the migrated archive, revealed that colonial officials had systematically destroyed records before Kenyan independence, burning files that documented the detention system's operational details. Britain paid 19.9 million pounds in compensation to 5,228 survivors in 2013 without admitting legal liability.
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