Sir, – Messrs McGarry O’Reilly’s “Terence Gavaghan An Appreciation” (November 7th) continues to present the white settlers’ story on the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion and Mr Gavaghan’s role in it. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, by Harvard historian Caroline Elkins (in particular pages 318-330), provides a more reliable account of Terence Gavaghan’s role in implementing the so-called “dilution” phase of the brutal suppression of the Kikuyu, when he was responsible directly for the organised beating and abuse of large numbers of Kikuyu detainees.
Glosses, evasions and even downright misrepresentation in ordinary obituaries can be dismissed as merely good manners provided there’s no ill consequences and we all know the truth, anyway. That’s not the case here.
What actually happened in the so-called Mau Mau Emergency is not widely known and many, many Kikuyu people now in old age will remain wronged until it is. The British governments of Churchill and Macmillan and their colonial appointees in the Kenyan Administration such as Governor Baring told the British electorate and the world a tissue of lies to conceal the scale, level and brutal, barbarous nature of the repression and illegal killings and got away successfully with it. The cover-up has continued virtually to the present day. The total numbers of Kikuyu variously killed, detained, tortured or abused and neglected in British camps still isn’t known for sure. Much documentation from the period “disappeared”. A genuinely ignorant British public could only react with bemusement when five elderly Kenyans appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2009 seeking compensation for alleged torture and horrific assaults by the colonial and imperialist authorities at the time.
The Kikuyu and Irish experiences of British imperialism and colonialism share such astonishing similarities that one would have expected anyone Irish to have felt sympathy for the plight of Kikuyu struggling to regain their land and freedom. Not true.
Gavaghan may have made a deal of his claim to Irishness but appeared to relish his role as oppressor. Unfortunately, amongst the Irish in Kenya he was not alone. Had he been a Serbian or a Croat, etc, during the last 20 years, it’s likely he would have found himself before the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague but as Messrs McGarry O’Reilly are happy to relate, he went on to prestigious appointments in the UN.
I, for one, do not wish to share the common name of Irishman with him. My sympathies lie entirely with the Kikuyu and the Mau Mau veterans long denied justice and acknowledgment of the justice of their struggle. – Yours, etc,